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What inspired your current novel?

I was just curious of what the inspiration was for everyone's pieces. What gave you the idea to write it? For me, I happened to be looking at a picture of My Chemical Romance and it all too off from there.
 
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Ireth

Myth Weaver
My current WIP, involving Celtic and Norse mythology, is an adaptation of one arc of an ongoing text-based RP between myself and a friend. The MC was a villain in the roleplay, but over the course of the plot he started on the path toward hero-hood, and I realized I loved his development so much I wanted to turn it into a novel and share it with the world. :D
 
In high school health class, I had to watch a video where a smarmy jerk said not to use drugs because you should act like you're the hero of your own movie, and John Wayne wouldn't take heroin before taking an enemy hill, would he?* That got me thinking, what would it actually mean to act like the hero of your own movie? What might you miss if you live your life as a movie instead of as a life?

At the time, I didn't think too much about it. I didn't know anyone who used Twitter or Foursquare, and I wasn't really interacting with Facebook and Myspace. It was when I got older that I began to recognize how many people in my age group did in fact see themselves as the heroes of their own movies, and saw everyone else as the supporting cast that would cheer on their effortless rise to success. The dominant narrative of my generation seems to be "me, me, me"--so I thought, why not write a story about you, you, you? It's a story about werewolves and superheroes and magical girls, but if you dig down to the very core of it, it's about the stories people build around themselves, and what happens when the stories don't come true.

* I'd love to track this video down again, since it was so deliciously bad. I know the guy WASN'T Joe Rogen, and I know he did a lot of voices that were supposed to be funny but just sounded irritating.
 

AstralCat

Scribe
Nine years ago, when I was a weird little kid with a sketch pad and a lot of dumb ideas, I made up a story for fun. It was about a pair of sisters and their talking cat sidekick who fight an evil queen and her batlike minions.

Well... To say the least, this story's changed a lot over the years. But I still have the original doodles and badly written drabbles that it all started with.
 
Hi,

I've just sent Guinea Pig off for editing, and its basically the story of a man who unwittingly gets injected with angelic DNA in a mad science experiment and of course starts to transform.

Naturally it draws on themes I've thought about a lot, such as angels and genetic engineering. But where the story became an actual novel instead of just a few interesting scenes, was when I considered Frankenstein. It always struck me that Victor's goal in creating Adam, was madness. He wasn't really building a new race - a superior race, and it should have been obvious to him from the moment he started sewing body parts together. But genetic engineering allows for Victor's claimed goal to be believable - and to actually create a new superior race. And lets face it, shouldn't a new super race have wings?!

Cheers, Greg.
 

GeekDavid

Auror
Believe it or not, I actually don't know where this inspiration came from... the idea just came to me one evening.
 

teacup

Auror
For me, I thought up one scene from the story (the ending) and began writing book 1 to work towards it. So I have no idea what, if anything, inspired the actual story.

However, I do know that I have a few aspects of the story inspired by Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood and some places inspired by Final Fantasy IX.
 

ndmellen

Minstrel
Honestly? An episode of "Supernatural" titled "Something Wicked This Way Comes." The idea hit me like a lightning bolt and with in minutes I'd pulled out a notebook to start jotting down ideas and sketches.

Boom. Two years and 250,000 words later, "The Black Directive" is on its fourth and final draft.
 

Scribble

Archmage
This is a weird mix:

The 1979 movie The Warriors

A social psychology course

The Hobbit movie (I was disappointed, I felt I could do better than Jackson in characterizing orcs, goblins, and trolls :p)

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Re-reading The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, it's painting with words.
 

yachtcaptcolby

Minstrel
Eight years ago, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to stay in the city after graduating college. I started writing a story about moving back to a small town. Two chapters in, I gave up - probably because I made arrangements to stay in the city and wasn't stressed out about it anymore.

I revisited it a few years later and fell in love with those first two chapters. It needed more of a hook, though, some kind of supernatural story. So I worked in the idea that no one in town could die and it was the main character's fault. I had been reading Iain M. Banks's Culture novels and was struck by how strangely many of his characters acted - advanced technology had rendered real death essentially obsolete, and the removal of the fear of such took away everyone's inhibitions. I wanted to play with that myself.

Then I realized I could tie it all into my previous self-published novel and it spiraled out of control from there.
 

buyjupiter

Maester
For the story set in Egypt, the events of the last decade. It should be an interesting blend of an outsider to Egyptian culture writing about an outsider in Egypt (the main character is Sudanese). It'll probably be horrible, but the concept intrigues me. I'm playing around with ideas about what makes a single person "insane" vs a society that is insane, and how this society comes back from the kind of chaos political instability brings.
 

Guy

Inkling
My two flagship characters started out as Dungeons and Dragons characters I made back when I was in high school (1980s). They both advanced to such a high level that there wasn't any point in playing them anymore. One is a warrior (or fighter in D&D parlance). As an experiment, I once put her up against three war deities. She defeated two of them. I thought that was pretty good for a mortal. I stopped playing them but they stayed in my head. Then one day a commercial for laundry detergent set off a reaction in my head that became a scene for my first book, and I gradually built up an entire novel around that scene. I once saw a writer - I can't remember who - describe the process as like an oyster creating a pearl - a grain of sand gets in there, and irritant it can't get rid of, so it builds up a pearl around the grain to get some relief. I can't think of a better way of putting it.
 
Hi,

Glad I'm in good company for weird inspirations. The weirdest one I've got was my first book Thief which started out as two completely different books. The first one started with a scene in my head from some movie or another. A jewel thief dangling on a wire as he travels between two buildings with his loot, and for some reason when I was thinking about it and especially about everything that could go wrong, the idea of hanging there thirty stories up and an angel comes flapping by sort of captured my thinking. The second book was inspired by a scene from a movie, Date with an Angel, in which the angel is bathing in a pool and being spied upon by our smitten hero. And then somewhere along the way those two different half written books unexpectedly became one.

Cheers, Greg.
 

A. E. Lowan

Forum Mom
Leadership
Our world is so large, so developed, and has been worked on for so many years that there have been many, many inspirations that have contributed to it - books, movies, even a K-pop video. But the very, very beginning was a sketch of a pretty young woman with white hair, and before I was done I knew she was a wizard, and her name was Winter, and she was the last of her line.
 

shangrila

Inkling
What inspired my story was a what if question; what if a Spartan lost his shield but still returned from battle? The old saying goes something like return with your shield or on it, so what if one of them did neither. It's evolved since then, now having this particular question more a part of the backstory than the actual narrative, but that's still how it all started.
 

TrustMeImRudy

Troubadour
Always loved mythology, read it since I was a kid with an insatiable appetite. Then I started playing Elder Scrolls, whatever, nice games, story's always kind of weak, but interesting background. I wanted to see where the gods came from so i looked it up.

WOW, the background lore makes real mythology look like childs play [helps that this one was consistently made, but still was purposely made with the kind of is this true or is this that real world mythology would have]. Decided I wanted my own world with myths of different people that intersect and change one another.

Hence my Mythic Cycles.
 

Ireth

Myth Weaver
Low Road came about after a statement from my mom ("You should write a story about a Scottish vampire... named Olan!") merged with a question of mine ("What would vampires in a non-Christian setting be like?") Thus I made my vampires, the sumairach fala, "children" of the Celtic goddess Morrighan.

Winter's Queen has a long and convoluted history. At its earliest beginnings it was the story of a young schoolteacher who is turned into a werewolf, and goes out seeking a cure. She is then kidnapped by pirates, and rescued by a mysterious masked man who is searching for his kidnapped daughter (the daughter is NOT the werewolf lady, jsyk). I started wondering about the daughter, who was apparently trapped in Faerie, and gradually the werewolves and pirates vanished from the story altogether. The story became one of a human girl kidnapped by an evil Fae prince, and her father and uncle's quest to get her back before midwinter, when she'd be married to the prince and trapped there for eternity.

Summer's Pawn, the sequel to WQ, has a much simpler idea: "What'll happen to the heroes once the events of Winter's Queen come back to bite them in the arse?"
 

Sheilawisz

Queen of Titania
Moderator
Seven years ago, one day I was watching History Channel when they announced a new documentary about the Black Death that devastated Europe and other parts of the world between 1347 and 1350.

The Black Death has always been one of my darkest obsessions, so I decided that I could not miss the new documentary about it. I watched it that night, and even though at first they were not talking about anything that I did not know already, soon they touched the story of King Edward III of England...

The English King wanted to create an alliance with Castile, and so his fifteen-year old daughter Princess Joan was to depart in order to marry the Castilian heir and one day become Queen of Castile.

I was totally fascinated by the story of the Princess that sailed away in her travel to a far off land, soon falling victim to the Plague and then disappearing mysteriously from the world... I had to know everything about Joan, and from that moment I started to research like crazy and to imagine a story about her in my mind.

I started to write Joan of England in 2007 and today it's a finished Fantasy trilogy that I absolutely love =)
 
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