Digging Up Inspiration From the Past

Writers -- where do you get your inspiration?

This is not an easy question for most of us to answer because the sources of our inspiration is ever-changing.  From the people we meet, to the places we visit, to the things we read.  Inspiration, like the ancient Muses, lives and breathes around us constantly.

Because of the stories I'm drawn to writing, one of my sources of inspiration is the news section on Archaeology.org.  Most weekdays, someone on staff there lists snippets from current news items related to archaeology.  These headlines are collected from across the world and through thousands of years of human history, even including early human ancestors.

I've not only gained whole story ideas from reading these discoveries, but more often gained valuable bits of world-building detail to help flesh out stories that I'm already working on.  And these stories don't have to be historical.

For example, someone writing a paranormal romance may be very intrigued to read this article on a recently reported Medieval English skeleton with metal spikes driven through its shoulders, heart, and ankles -- a form of burial not only for suspected vampires but for social deviants.  I could imagine a young, unusual heroine running afoul of her society not only because of her paranormal abilities but because of her non-conformist practices and beliefs.

Or maybe you would be inspired to write a story of a man's quest to find the cave inhabited by a Native American woman which inspired another great story -- The Island of the Blue Dolphins.  Does he have some sort of psychic connection with the woman from another time period?  Would his discovery pave the way for a time-traveling romance? Or perhaps, could he be a descendant?

Or maybe you could envision a contemporary romantic comedy where an eccentric Civil War collector, in cleaning his house, has to call in the bomb squad to remove some of his collection.

I could envision a whole new archaeologist-style adventure series based on the re-opening of an ancient site (Karkemish) on the Turkish-Syrian border, one littered with mines, where Lawrence of Arabia once excavated.

Maybe you'd like to write a medieval drama of a nunnery run afoul of the church due to reports of bearing children and lesbian conduct.  It might be fun to create a Modern Family sort of soap opera with this unusual, historical setting.

What about a story of a youth in ancient Rome who suffered from gigantism, causing him to be at least a foot taller than all his friends.  Was he revered as a Titan-like being?  Or did he endure jeers from his friends?

Or perhaps one could craft a historical murder mystery out of two skeletons -- a 19-year-old woman and an older man -- found at the bottom of a Neolithic well in Israel's Jezreel Valley.  Were they killed together, having been discovered in an illicit romance?  Or could it have been an ancient murder-suicide?

I picked up another cool bit, but can't reveal that one here.  Keeping it for myself. :-)

Writers continuously draw from bits of evidence such as these and then let their minds go wild with questions that build their worlds and their stories.  But having real evidence to back up a story makes it that much more fascinating and the world building more lifelike.



So, writers -- where DO you get your inspiration?  And would any of these tidbits that I find fascinating inspire you as well?

Attaining the Impossible

NaNoWriMo Day 8 Tips from Harry Potter

Kiki Hamilton, the fabulous author of The Faerie Ring, posted an awesome quote on her blog yesterday:

It's one trick to manifest exactly what you want.
It's another to bring about something even better.
Leave the door open,
       The Universe

It stuck with me all day and really got me thinking.  To me, this quote speaks of enlarging our possibilities, of opening the door to imagination, of believing in serendipity.

As writers of fiction, we are doubly cursed, or blessed if I'm going to learn from the above.  Not only must we attain what seems impossible in our own lives, which surely characterizes publishing in today's market, but we must create characters who succeed beyond the ordinary in every story that we write.

That's one reason why I think so many of us find JK Rowling's story so inspiring.  She attained the impossible not only in her life, but also in her creation.  And she did it both times in a manner uniquely her own.  She opened doors no one thought possible to go through.

While her welfare mom makes it big story is definitely inspiring, and certainly shows a woman who succeeded beyond the ordinary through utilizing her imagination to the best of her ability, what I'd like to focus on here is how she challenged Harry to attain the impossible in his defeat of the darkest wizard of his day.

Harry did NOT kill Voldemort.

Contrary to how most writers will execute their triumphant climax of hero defeating arch-villain, Harry did not cast a killing spell that ended Voldemort's life.  What killed Voldy was his own rebounding killing curse which he shot because he did not understand what this 17-year-old kid had learned.

And that's the beauty of Jo's spin.  There is the difference of how opening the door of imagination attained the impossible for her character.

Here was a kid, a boy who was never the best in his class, who did not have the happiest, most secure home life, who did not start off with the most impressive magical abilities, but who through no fault of his own was thrown into a course of action where he must kill or be killed.  Harry accepted that he must meet and defeat a wizard renown for his potent skill and merciless dark magic.  Not only that, this wizard had managed to attain the most powerful killing stick in the world.

And yet, in the end, Harry did not meet the Dark Lord as an equal.  Harry met him as a superior, in his own terms, playing the game in a way others had discouraged.  And that was not to cast a killing curse, but merely to disarm.  Because Harry had learned through the course of his intensely tortured and personal journey the meaning of loyalty, love, and choice.  He had won the loyalty not only of the Wand of Destiny, but of all his friends and companions at Hogwarts who fought by his side.  Harry had learned to harness the power of love to not only forgive the man he'd believed had lived to torment him, Snape, but to offer Tom Riddle in his last breathing moments the opportunity to find remorse and live.  And Harry had accepted his choice to not only walk into the Dark Forest and offer his life so that all those he loved, and even those he didn't even know, would live -- but to choose in that final confrontation to cast a spell to disarm the evil rather than kill the man.

Harry attained the impossible.  And JK Rowling, Harry's creative goddess, provided her young readers a powerful lesson in choice and creating their own destiny.

But for us writers, she has also gifted us with wonderful examples.  She had no idea when she was living on the dole in Edinburgh as a young mother spinning out her story that she could not contain, that she would attain the impossible in her own life.  But she persevered, she stuck to her dreams, she committed to a young orphan that she believed in, and with hard work and growing skill, and a touch of serendipitous luck from the universe, she cast a spell that disarmed the world.

The goals we attain may not play out along the massive scale of a Rowling or a Potter, but that doesn't mean they will not be as equally powerful in our own lives.  As long as we keep working toward what we most value...and as long as we open the door to the impossible along the way.

As you're working toward your final climax in your novel this month, take time to consider...Is your character attaining the impossible?  How challenging have you made his goals?  How difficult have you created her opposition?  And in the end, have both you and your hero left the door open for an opportunity, a choice, you never thought possible?

Every Child In Our World Will Know His Name

Day #2 - NaNoWriMo Tips from Harry Potter:

"These people will never understand him! He'll be famous--a legend--I wouldn't be surprised if today was known as Harry Potter Day in the future--there will be books written about Harry--every child in our world will know his name!"

When JK Rowling put pen to paper to craft McGonagall's words in the very first chapter of Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone, she had no idea how prophetic they would become. Now millions of people around the globe know the name Harry Potter and, indeed, celebrate Potter Day both on July 31 and October 31.

But once, just like many of us, Jo was an unknown, unpublished writer who had no idea if her story would even sell, much less become a world-wide publishing phenomenon. As she said herself when asked if she'd known how successful her series would one day be, "I'd have to have been insane to have imagined this."  And that was in the year 2000!

Somewhere out there in NaNo land, one of us may very well be writing a story that one day will become a well-beloved story where millions of people will know our name.  Or, at least several thousand.

Could it be you?

And even if such lofty goals are not in our sights or even in our hearts, by putting our own pens to paper or fingers to keyboard for this month of November (and after), we can at least discover for ourselves and our friends the delightful figments within our own imagination.

What are your loftiest goals?  In your wildest dreams, what do you hope for your story?  And in your more modest expectations, will you be happy having discovered and shared your inner world with any sized audience?


Quote from JK Rowling taken from a CBC interview in October 2000.

On the Benefit of Failure

Happy beginning of NaNoWriMo!

In order to keep me focused on completing National Novel Writing Month this year, and to keep this blog going while I do so, I've decided to do something a wee bit different with Harry Potter for Writers during the month of November.  Instead of my normal long (and sporadic) in-depth analyses, I'm going to post very short excerpts from Harry Potter or quotes from JK Rowling that makes one succinct but strong point to serve as inspiration for those of us doing NaNo.  The trick is, I'm going to post these daily.

The tips may be craft related, examples of good writing from the series, or quotes that give insight into JK Rowling's writing process.  Anything goes, but I'll keep them short and pointed so that we can gain the encouragement but hurry back into our stories.

First up, and this may seem a bit odd, but I want to focus on failure.  Not all of us will complete NaNo, and that's ok.  Many of us may also be frustrated by where we are in our writing journeys, worried that we haven't yet gotten that agent, editor, multi-book contract, NYT listing....

But I want you to listen first to some of my favorite words from JK Rowling, and they actually do not come from a Harry Potter book, but from her commencement address at Harvard in 2008 (bolded highlights are my addition):

I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one...So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies...

I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

Rowling's story, both in Harry and in life, is truly inspirational.  Especially to writers.  If you have not yet, you should read her whole address as she also speaks powerfully of imagination.

As we begin this fresh month of NaNoWriMo, let us not be afraid to fail, but afraid of never having tried.  And remember that the length is not as important as the content.

Find me on NaNo at SPSipal.

Are you doing NaNo?  If so, what story are you writing?

And thanks to Martina @4KidLit for the title of this series!