What is your way for deriving inspiration for short stories?
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
by Brian Dooling 13 years ago
when/if you write short stories or even novels (like im attempting!) how do you come up with your character names? do you use people from your life or do you let the character develop before giving them a name? I have a few thousand words written for a story and just can't think of good character...
by Aniket Lawand 7 years ago
I want to publish short stories how do I go about it?
by Joseph Franklin Dunkin Jr 12 years ago
Let's support our own efforts by reading each other's short stories, then leaving a comment at the bottom of the hub (pro or con). I have three stories posted at jfrankdunkin.hubpages.com. They are, "The Baroness of Haut De Cagnes", "Recess, the Podium Light", and...
by BrillzLife by Param Arora 15 years ago
I like reading fiction but is it a popular category to write?? I am Not Sure?
by Nicoli Clause 13 years ago
My question is how do you write a story? I have been interested in writing a story that I can continue on a weekly or even daily basis (Hubs). Now, I have difficulty knowing what I want to do. For example how did J.K. Rowling think about starting Harry Potter? More so than that, how did she come up...
by Simone Haruko Smith 14 years ago
If you got this week's newsletter, you'll see I mentioned three new podcasts we'e doing. One, which has yet to make its debut, is called the Fascinating Fiction podcast, and will consist of readings of short fiction stories on HubPages (both by Hubbers who are willing to record mp3s and...
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