What is your way for deriving inspiration for short stories?

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   midget38posted 11 years ago

   What is your way for deriving inspiration for short stories?

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   Call me Jonposted 11 years ago

   I find my dreams to be much more ambitious than my active imagination.  So I keep a dreambook and try to jot down as many as I can before they fade back into dreamland.

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      midget38posted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Someone once said that we should take note of the little inspirations that hits us. Jot it down as soon as it comes! Thanks for coming by!

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   RichieMogwaiposted 11 years ago

   My inspiration for writing  my first short story, The New Monalisa was Leonardo da Vinci and Vincent van Gogh. When I wrote about a struggling contemporary painter who lost his eyesight at the height of his career, I was drawing a comparison between my character and my favorite painter of Starry Starry Night fame.

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      midget38posted 11 years agoin reply to this

      We are inspired by great figures in history all the time! Thanks, Richie!

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   dahoglundposted 11 years ago

   This is not easy to answer because my mind seems to lead me in strange directions at times. Sometimes I will run into an incident when I am reading Then make up a character to out in the situation. Lately I make it up as I go along, probably not the best way of doing it. Other times  a character  type comes to mind and then put the character in a situation. Sometimes they are spin offs from non-fiction hubs I have written, such as a hub I wrote about Dalmatian dogs. Dalmations are somewhat prone to deafness That lead me to having a deaf boy and a deaf dog in a western story setting. It worked pretty well until and advocate for the deaf did not like my portrayal of the deaf boy.

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      4elementsposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      What I do is think about what I would like to write then go from there. For example my favorite holiday is Halloween so a lot of my stories have to do with ghosts, vamps, zombies etc.. Take what you like and use it for your stories. Blessings

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      midget38posted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks Don and 4 elements!! A little sad to hear about your experience...but I suppose we've to give credit for their expertise if they work in those fields. Thanks for sharing, both of you!

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   austinhealyposted 11 years ago

   Every short story I write is a mixture of different things : observation of real life facts and people, personal experience, research, and imagination. There is also what I call "the spark". The spark is that particular moment when it all comes together as an idea for a story, and it's always a very intersting time. Once I have the big picture of a story, I start writing it. In many occasions, I get side-tracked and the final story is sometimes quite far from what I intended it to be in the first place. On rare occurences, I will have a dream that can be turned into a story.

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      midget38posted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Spoken like an artist. The process can really be fun! Though waiting for that spark to come can be so difficult. Thanks for coming by!

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   dcollins3posted 11 years ago

   A lot of my ideas come to me in dreams. I can remember very few times in my life where I didn't have a dream that seemed like it lasted hours or even days. I'm very rarely myself in my dreams either which helps me think like the character I'm writing about.

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