Lani's Inspiration
By Lani Diane Rich
© 2005 Lani Diane Rich All Rights reserved
I think the question authors get asked the most - aside from "Can you write the story of my life?" to which the answer is typically some variation on "No"- is "Where do you get your ideas?" The most common answer runs along the lines of "Target." And it's not that authors mean to be flippant, it's just that it's the closest we can get to a real answer.
Aside from the real answer. Which for most of us is, "Beats the heck out of me."
Ideas come from everywhere. We see them, we smell them, we feel them, we hear them. And sometimes they just literally drop out of nowhere. In my first book, TIME OFF FOR GOOD BEHAVIOR, my main character suffers a head injury and as a result hears phantom music she can't identify. Where did I get that idea? Big shrug. I don't know anyone who hears phantom music... or at least no one who has admitted it to me. It just settled on me while I was writing, and I ran with it. In my second book, MAYBE BABY, I write about different people all chasing after the same rare parrot. The idea started with an image that popped into my head of someone keeping an ostrich on a New York city penthouse terrace. I have no idea where that came from. Possibly I was eating too much spicy food.
I don't know if this happens to other people. I've been me my whole life, so I don't know what it's like to not have these things just pop in my head. I can't imagine what it would be like to go through life without these little worlds twirling around upstairs, distracting me from everything, making me forget what I went into the kitchen for once I get there. So, the specific ideas just come from the ether. They're like little ladybugs that just choose to land on you, and you carry them around for a while until you're ready to let them fly away and land on someone else.
But inspiration... now that's a different story. What inspires me are the stories other people tell, in all forms. Books. Movies. Television shows. Commercials. My friend who tells me the funny story about what happened at the bank that morning. The function, the form, the purpose of story itself is what inspires me.
Think about it. The moment humans evolved to the point where every non-sleeping moment didn't need to be dedicated directly to survival, what did they do? Painted stories on the walls of their caves. They created oral traditions and mythology and it wasn't just entertainment. It was about something, about life and its meaning.