Hey everyone! Here we are again with another stand-alone post. This one will be less advice and more just some fun information. I love taking time after a long series to write some fun posts and I hope that this one is interesting. So, without further ado…
Things that Inspired My Current Novel
When writing a book, authors are constantly inspired by the world around them. This can mean that often times writers will write something and not know what the original source of inspiration was. This also happens to me often as a writer. Sometimes I will simply absorb stuff from books, films, and life experiences around me and one day they will simply emerge from my subconscious as a fully formed book idea, so seamlessly blended together that I can no longer tell what came from where.
Because of this, this post was very difficult to write. I had to sit for a while and just think about what themes and messages that were present in my story and think about anything that might have inspired the story. Some of the things were easier to pinpoint and others were a little more difficult, but I managed to narrow it down to a few things that really inspired my story.
The very first inspiration for my story was a short sentence summary that I adopted from an abandoned plots forum. I used to mine forums like that for hours to find just the right piece of plot that I needed to inspire an idea. I adopted a lot of plot ideas that later became short stories or books. The sentence was, “Once there were Gods. They made Man. They supported Man. Man no longer needed the Gods. The Gods became abandoned. Then the Gods became the enemy. Now only nine remain.” I’ve moved my main plot away just a little from this story summary, but it still fits mostly into this idea.
Although this is one of the things that was using up space in my brain when I came up with the book idea it was just one part of the whole. I also have always enjoyed looking at Fantasy concept art made by hundreds of amazing and talented artists. I went through a phase of looking at art by several artists that was intended to depict ‘the world years after a war with giants’ and as I looked at that art, I began to wonder what the aftermath of a war with the Gods might look like.
Another thing that influenced my story was a short story that I wrote. I took an astronomy class in University. It was one of the general credits I was required to take. One of the final project options for the class was to take an image of stars that the teacher provided, trace out images that you saw and create some sort of mythological story that could be used to explain the constellation you saw, much like the stories of constellations that exist in folklore all over the world.
I took this project and wrote a story about the God of the Sun and his lover the God of Glory. A wyvern wanted to control the power of the sun and so he killed the God of the Sun and ate his soul and then proceeded to attempt to eat the sun. His lover, the God of Glory killed the wyvern, getting injured in the process, and returned the God of the Sun’s soul and the sun back to their rightful position. I originally wrote this story as a constellation and as a way to explain eclipses. The God of Glory from the story is used in my book.
There were also two concepts I wanted to explore in this story and one of them was grief from an outside perspective. I have read plenty of stories where grief is explored from the perspective of the person who has lost someone. I wanted to explore grief from the perspective of those who either didn’t know the person who was lost or the person who had lost someone. To do this, I had to create an event of grief before the main story started and a story from the perspective of the remaining Gods after a war with humanity was the perfect setting for that.
The second concept that I wanted to explore with this story was the idea of conflict with your own beliefs. How people would act in a situation where something they have always believed with their whole soul to be true might not be true. Or coming across information that made someone realize that what they believed or were told was not correct. I actually was inspired to write on this theme/concept by the Divinity series by Toasty Glow on YouTube. The story their videos told was deeply inspiring to me and I was extremely interested in exploring a similar concept surrounding grief, struggling with your beliefs, and love that they did in their series.
There are a lot of other little things here and there that inspired certain scenes or characters or little bits of world building, but these are the main things that I felt like really influenced the way my story ended up developing. I’m still working on this current novel, but I am very excited for it.
Pinpointing what inspired a story can be very difficult, but I think every writer, when writing their book, should take some time to discover what the inspiration was. If you ever get stuck while writing your novel, this list can be helpful. It can give you something to look back at and think, ‘That’s what I was trying to say! Let me change this.’ It also gives you a place to push off of and change the story if you feel like something doesn’t fit anymore.
That’s all I have for this week’s post. I hope it was a fun and insightful post. Let me know what you think. What inspired your current work? What kind of messages do you want to share in your current work? Next week will be the last stand-alone post before the hiatus and will also include the announcement of the next series. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me on social media at the links below. And remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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