Earlier this year, PBW introduced me to Poets & Writers Magazine. I subscribed, and have received two copies so far, and have devoured both. I think genre writers can get a lot of inspiration looking outside of their writers orgs and genre specific cons, but we tend to know those best so forget there’s a big wide world out there to fuel our creativity.
The January / February issue has an article about writing a first novel, and the sidebar list, Nine Ways to Begin Writing really caught @cuppacafe’s eye. I recognize a few of them in my own work as being the impetus for getting the story going. My examples below aren’t as in depth or thought provoking as those in the magazine article, but I’ve got cookies to bake and gifts to wrap and a case of sciatica that won’t let me sit and wax esoteric. The treadmill is calling . . .
1) A line
This one is easy. “Call me.” I read that line in a Glamour Magazine article circa 1993ish, and used it as the jumping off point for writing CALL ME. Not an exciting line, but totally Temptation!
2) A list
I don’t think I’ve done this one, but after 40 titles it’s kinda hard to remember everything I have! Susan Wiggs did it in PASSING THROUGH PARADISE to open several chapters and it was great fun. Listmaking was part of her heroine’s character, so which came first, the chicken or the egg, is something only she would know!
3) A title
I’ve got one, but I’m not going to share it as it’s a story I’m working on and I need to keep it safe. *g* I’m the worst when it comes to titles, and the majority of mine have been my editor’s choice and chosen after the fact. This one is a working title that is so perfect it hurts. Now to cross fingers that the story turns out as brilliantly as I see it.
4) A character
Ezra Moore. He showed up (thanks to a brainstorming session with @cuppacafe) in THE SAMMS AGENDA and just would not get out of my head. I brought him back for a cameo in the four stories that followed before giving him his own happily ever after.
5) A situation
A CNN news story I printed and saved of modern day pirates attacking ships in the China Sea was the inspiration for INDISCREET – this in 2003, long before the Maersk Alabama.
6) An event
FOUR MEN & A LADY centered around a fifteenth high school reunion, and allowed me to revisit what I loved so much about the movie FOUR FRIENDS but to give everyone hope when I did – and eventually their own stories!
7) An image
Maybe not this particular image, but any of Jennifer Garner as Sydney Bristow in costume. I loved the outrageousness of her character’s situations and ate up the unbelievable plots. What’s so strange is that though my whole Smithson Group series was inspired by Alias, I never wrote female spies or villains!
8) A subject
Yeah, I’ve got one of these. Tabloid journalism and how the vultures will not let go. I used that in KISS AND TELL to show the impact on both a victim and a perpetrator.
9) An oddity
Did you know there’s a spring fed pool in the desert of West Texas where you can scuba dive – and where fish nibble at you while you swim?
Anyone have others to share?
