[dragonking555]

We all have our different stories and ideas but where do they come from? What things in your life have you drawn inspiration from to help form your story?



Personally I take mine from real people I meet. Some cool, some quirky, and some just jerks but each with their own idea of how the world works. These people many times become the basis for characters in my stories. I also draw from previous ideas popularly expressed before but I enjoy putting new and unique spins on them.


Where do inspirations come from for the rest of you and what are some strange ones?

[Spinner]

Oh man.

My inspirations are pretty wide. Its not so much that I choose to be influenced by some of this stuff--more that I actually notice it when I write. My storytelling style in general is influenced heavily, heavily by Hayo Miyazaki, and my imagery in Lanternfly is influenced by Nathanial Hawthorne, Opeth's "Damnation" album and Kamelot's "Epica" album. My Cloudnigh stuff is influenced by Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card and Sherman Alexi's Ten Little Indians, as well as Dark Tranquillity's "Damage Done" album and Brave New World by Huxley. My characters and themes come predominantly from life experience. My entire book Shadower is based on the speculation of what life would have been like if I hadn't been adopted. Lanternfly draws heavily from childhood experiences.

Some general influence are a few unknown artists who do absolutely brilliant work: endling@deviantart (Sean Healy), fallout161@deviantart (Matt Page), and Fred Gallagher, who writes and draws Megatokyo. I also grew up reading Calvin and Hobbes, which is another inescapable one.

Ben

[Buddhist]

What kind of inspiration are we talking about here? Inspiration for how we write and what we write, or inspiration for the ideas that we get?

[Malus Rune]

My inspirations come from all over the place.

Being someone who likes to write quite philosophical based works, a lot of my inspirations come from debastes I'm having with friends or enemies online; characters or plots are designed to explore the concepts I'm debating over- characters and plots before have been used to explore the predicted effects of issues such as revenge, torture and religious dogma, all of which I am highly opposed to.

With regards to worlds and stuff, unlike a lot of the people here, I'm not really a High Fantasy writer. Most of my stories are set on Earth; fantastical elements usually centre more on outside plots to destroy this Earth rather then plots to destroy other worlds. When I do need to describe an alien environment- say, to describe the world that said plotters are coming from- my inspiration can come from anywhere. A lot of my ideas for such environments comes from video games, because they're probably the best form of media with which to really get into the environment you're exploring, as you're actually exploring it rather then watching it. Halo 3, even though it was a pretty bland game, for instance, always interested me because I really like the look of Forerunner Architecture and adapted the basic design to one of my race's cities.

On creatures, they're usually inspired by real animals, but not in the "head of an ox, feet of a lion" way. It's more like- shall we say- re-skinning the creature. So if I see a cool picture of a wolf about to pounce, I might give it scales instead of fur, shorten its snout, give it horns, give it a stinging tail, et cetera, and make it into a Demon- but still use its way of standing, moving and stuff. That's often where the power of the animal seems to lie.

Other times, inspiration comes from looking at a place and thinking not so much about what's there, but what's not there, what could be added. On a holiday to Wales last year, for instance, we walked along a cliff edge, and I saw this really cool rock formation hanging off the cliff edge; a sort of lip of rock with terraces shaped into it, with the sea spray roaring past that, when it got to its highest, was just inches below. I thought that if you magnified that by a few thousand times, added houses and roads, it would make a really cool sorta on-the-edge-ish city. Another time, I was in the bathroom drinking from the tap, and I randomly open my water-filled mouth and look in the mirror, seeing a pool of water collecting in my mouth. If I were to make my mouth much larger and put it as a rock formation, it would make a quite cool waterlogged cave.

Other times inspiration just comes from things I would find exciting. For instance, I've always been fascinated by the prospect of what life would be like if humans were extremely tiny; where a field of grass was a forest, and we could build our houses along the underside of leaves. So I created for my most recent mythos a race of creatures which were similar in personality to humans, but were smaller then ants.

It can also come from music, as with Ben. Names, in particular, I have a habit of getting from songs- Melinda and Selene are the most common of these (from the Still Life concept album by Opeth and "My Selene" by Sonata Arctica, respectively)- but there are other aspects as well. Being a fan of metal the songs I listen to are often quite dark and very vivid, and that puts ideas into my head. I remember I was listening to the Slayer song, Death is Yours, your Veins have Dried, and that put in my head all these fantasies of what would life look like through the eyes of a Sadist. The quite bleak writing style of one of my favourite bands, Opeth, is a big influence as well; usually in terms of the concepts- usually involving terrible scenarios stemming from love or friendship.

Like a lot of writers, I base characters off people I know quite a lot (for instance, in my current story, "Bane", main character Alex is based off my friend Sean- quite quiet, intellectual, moral, uncomfortable in large crowds but lighthearted in smaller ones- the character Bane is based off my friend Ben- has a degree of morality, but is very ruthless and his moral line changes- and the character Father Rembly is based off my grandfather- just extremely open and friendly, although very opinionated- although not all of the characters are based off real people; the character Selene is based off Newt in Aliens ). Appearance wise, I'll often base characters off people I admire.

And sometimes, I get inspired to write about Characters and Concepts by completely random things. This story I'm working on at the moment, Bane, explores partially the concept of the seconds in which you made a bad decision; the exact moments where you call it wrong. Even if for every other second of your life, you think it's a bad idea, it just takes one second of wavering to make it irreversible. This was inspired when I was at camp, and a girl asked me out. I didn't want to go out with her, not because I didn't like her, but because I wanted to spend time with the other friends I had made. But while I was thinking about it, for maybe ten seconds, I was supportive of it, and if she'd asked me in those ten seconds if I'd made up my mind, I'd have gone out with her and not spent as much time with my friends. It just made me feel weird to think of that.

Sorry, quite a long and rambly post there

[Buddhist]

Well, speaking of inspiration, I just got totally inspired to fix up my main dark fantasy mythos (Apocrypha) by reading the Warhammer 40k article on TV Tropes.

HOLY @#!$, I just came up with a brand new backstory. YAY! And I really like it too.

Hopefully it's original.

HOLY F@#! MARK 2: I just tied 3 of my mythoi together! YES!

This post has been edited by Caligrus Morn: 28 August 2009 - 08:10 PM

[dragonking555]

What kind of inspiration are we talking about here? Inspiration for how we write and what we write, or inspiration for the ideas that we get?

Any kind.

[Regitnui]

My inspiration comes from nearly everywhere. I can only really trace two great influences, and those were on characters. A few locations got inspired by the Lowveld (where i live) and the Drakensberg. THat's about it actually...

Other times inspiration just comes from things I would find exciting. For instance, I've always been fascinated by the prospect of what life would be like if humans were extremely tiny; where a field of grass was a forest, and we could build our houses along the underside of leaves. So I created for my most recent mythos a race of creatures which were similar in personality to humans, but were smaller then ants.

Do a google search for Abatwa. They're a little like what you describe, and could be a brilliant source of inspiration.

---,-'-@

[potter573]

Different things may inspire me. Sometime it can be song, other times an incident that I witnessed or it may be from book I read. It can be anything.

Different things influence a person in his writing. Specific pieces of writing are usually a combination of many inspirations the writer may have had.

[garfield]

In my case, I think a more fitting question would be 'where don't you get your inspiration from?'

[dragon_god]

My story is a bit different than most IC fan-fictions around here. Yeah, it's easy to say that the main story is based off of the IC, but when you go deeper into my story, you find that, basically, everything you read was never talked about. It's all just off the top of my head basically. That's the beauty to writing a prequel from a character that's-never-really-mentioned's point of view.

I got inspired to do Uprising right after I finished reading about Galbatorix killing Oromis in Brisingr and I thought to myself, "Why does Shruikan continue to serve, how did he get that way, and what happened to make him turn into the bada$$ that he supposedly is now?" Answering the 3 main questions as to "What, why, and how" is the main focus of my story.

I based the main characters' personalities off of myself and my girlfriend (Shruikan and Seraphine), and a lot of the ideas from that dragon-to-dragon relationship really focuses on real problems that couples face at one time or another in their life such as arguments, abuse (in one form or another), having good and bad days (which everybody has), and learning to rely on each other in times of adversity. It's very much like a human relationship but from a dragon's perspective.

[Fusaichi Pegasus]

Anyone who has read my stories (not many people here have) will have noticed a large number of Roman and Gallic names. I'm obsessed with Roman history, as I take Latin in school.

Also, I'm building one of the cultures in my book to be a sort of Roman group. Some of the philosophy that I'm trying to build in my book is based on debates that I've had with other people I know in real life.

[Ultima Valenhart]

I've always had a fascination with the concept of Good and Evil (whether it really exists) and Shadow's Lair was born from ideas I had surrounding that. The main idea being what would happen if people with strong moral beliefs were thrown into a world where the concept of Good vs Evil does not exist. Then I threw another one of my strange fascinations ontop of that; The Seven Deadly Sins.

Another source of inspiration for Shadow's Lair came from paying attention to how people truely feel about people they know/the place they live/etc and how dark some of those true feelings really are. If you really listen to what someone is saying (and not just to what you want/expect to hear) it can be quite frightening.

With Loofah and H'Airbrush the inspiration has come from too many sources to name with the main one being modern fantasy cultures and how ridiculous they have become. On the other hand, the characters are very similar to people I grew up with in small aspects, and I must thank them for that inspiration!

My main inspiration for deciding to try my hand at writing came from studying English at school and being good at it. The idea actually came from one of my teachers who enjoyed the short stories and poems I'd write in class, so, thanks muchly to Richard Pitt!

[Mr. Trouble]

My inspiration comes from an indifferent world. The dog with three legs. The one-armed drummer from Def Leppard. The ninety pound man. Generally anything fragile, with the odds against it. These emotions tend to be overwhelming.

[Lwyllae]

Mine comes too (particulary) from other people. And the rest comes from that, what happens to myself and my own experience, like when I'm ill, then character in my story is ill and so on. But some ideas just pop into my mind, like wow where did that came?

This post has been edited by Lwyllae: 08 September 2009 - 11:49 AM

[Behave Yourself]

My inspirations comes from all over the place.

Music. Lupe Fiasco's "Instrumentals" and "Little Weapon", for example, helped to inspire some of Revelations, and the main scene that 'popped into my head' for the story was from The Mundane and the Magic by Dark Tranquility (Thank you God/Ben for getting me into DT).

For Fragments, the inspiration was a song by Avril Lavigne, "Nobody's Home". The first line of the story is also the first line from the song, though; I need to change that.

Stories (Books and television). I've found when I analyze my stories, they are in some abstract way similar to something I have enjoyed reading or watching.

Religion. A ton of my stories are based around Christianity and God, although usually not in a 'good' way. Hell, in Revelations, Christians are shown as self-important murderers who see non-Christians as animals.

Past obsessions or things that fascinate me. For example, I've always been fascinated by the idea of a world where everybody - or a massive amount of people, anyway - had superpowers, so a lot of my stories function as that (to date, Paranormal and Revelations).

So yeah, you can get inspiration from pretty much anywhere.

James