I feel like I’m the only person in the Blogosphere
not incorporating this IWSG post with the letter B in the A-Z challenge. Best wishes to all of you intrepid folks participating. As for me, well, I’m in a “resting stage” with my
current project and conventional wisdom dictates I get busy with something new. To date, I haven’t come up with anything
noteworthy, but I know from experience, inspiration comes from weird places.
Take my, first ever, get to the end of a first draft and stop
novel. It started as a result of a “scene storming” exercise. I wrote a few hundred words, and then just
for giggles decided to see if I could keep going until I got to the end. Turns out I could. I just didn’t know how to fix the mess
afterwards. This is how that one
started:
By the time the real estate broker’s car came to a full stop by the “For Sale” sign in front of 52 South Main Street, Shelby Richmond had mentally unpacked her boxes, made the beds and scrubbed the kitchen floor.
The second book I wrote…this one gets full credit because I revised
it seventeen times, wrote a synopsis, a query letter and submitted it to
agents, started with a sentence that rolled through my mind one night, during
that fog point between awake and asleep.
I forced myself to get up and write it on a scrap of paper—which I stuck
by my computer, until the story it related to took shape in my brain months
later. That one started like this:
The queen of the 1974 Tarrant County Honeydew Festival abdicated the throne forty-eight hours after her coronation.
The third project—the one I’m currently resting, was
triggered by an illustration accompanying an essay in Yankee Magazine about a damaged apple tree.
Marnie St. Marie knew she hadn’t taken a drink for three weeks, but when she saw the boy in her ailing apple tree, she wondered.
So today, I sit, sniffing out inspiration like a dog. Where will it come from? A story on the news? Action I see on the street? A picture? A tweet? I don’t know.
But I woke up this morning with this blurb rolling around in my head.
By the time Winnie Parker reached the derelict Walker estate, the rock she’d been kicking the whole way felt like an old friend. Which is why, when it took an odd bounce and scuttled under the wrought-iron gate, she had to reach in to retrieve it.
Hmm. I think I’ll
chew on that for a while.
Where does your inspiration come from?
