B&A: What is the story behind your story?

Lots of things inspire my story. First and foremost, I'm writing what is unavailable in the epic and high fantasy genres. I'm writing what I want to read. I'm trying to take the prescribed "Tolkien" fantasy beyond what it's become because fantasy is too broad to try limiting to one type of story structure.

News also inspires me. I read an article about a black family in my area whose son was shot dead and the police did nothing to solve the homicide because of their race. Or how another family whose siblings hate each other, didn't tell the hated sibling that their parent died. So that sibling missed the funeral, didn't get to say good bye and was completely excluded. Or how another family adopted a foreign child and ended up shipping him back to his country with nothing more than a sign taped to his shirt b/c the kid was psychologically unstable. etc.

History and nature inspire me mostly in terms of world building. You wouldn't *believe* the stories behind some of the historical structures around the world. These stories are so touching I've cried. So I incorporate similar aspects of these things into my own stories. And since I'm trying to make my fantasy world completely unique and unlike anything done before in high fantasy, I mix and match aspects of nature in ways that are unexpected/impossible on Earth.

All the themes I address are those that I want to shout at people on a daily basis. I drop my daughter off at school, for instance, and hold the door for all of these parents and their kids. Not ONE of them thanked me. Or how this snooty "mother" kept pinching her daughter's side and telling her to stop complaining when her daughter said her new shoes hurt her feet. The mother cared more about appearance (nice named-brand shoes), over her child's comfort. This **** gets me going. I have a lot to say and the themes in my stories reflect this. I intentionally write allegories to point fingers at the jerk offs in our world who behave in these ways.

Sorry so verbose...as usual *sighs* lol.

Well, for my newest story, I was inspired by tv. Normally tv inspires me anyways. But this one is different.

I was watching Terra Nova on Tv, and even though it wasn't that great of a show, I still saw the potential in it. And then I decided that writing a novel with dinosaurs would be so cool, and something so unlike anything I've ever done before. So then I launched into all this planning with all these different characters, and it was going to take place in the jungle with dinosaurs. Then I continued the planning process and rewrote outlines. Then I started, and wrote a terrible beginning I ended up scrapping.

And now I've got the idea down. And the funny thing is, dinosaurs aren't even a part of it anymore. So the thing that really inspired this novel, doesn't even exist in the novel anymore.

It does still, however, take place in the jungle, but the idea is almost completely different from the original inspired idea.

Definitely Naruto, when I was still a fan :P

The big demon, the peculiar eyes, the great power erupting from your body when the demon is present. Pretty epic to a thirteen year old, enticing her to do just the same!

Of course, four years one, it's barely anything like Naruto but the elements above are still there^

I also wanted to show that just because someone's your biological mother, doesn't make them your mother if they don't act like one - a friend at school had trouble with her mother, and people didn't like her father taking care of the children because they still had it in their heads that only their real mother could do it! Well, I'm writing Maiyah to tell them they're wrong!

Hmmm.. there are also some elements of Avatar: the Last Airbender. With the whole element-manipulating and spirit-world thing.

The spirit cycle concept in my story comes from the reincarnation theory in Hinduism. When people die, they are reborn as something/someone else.

Also, physics. Real-life physics inspired the way my magical system works!

Plus, historical events, international relations and real figures in history have inspired some of my characters (e.g. Moroth and Teddy Roosevelt), and so has real-world cultures inspired the races and languages that appear in Ore in my story.

The song Europa has pushed me to work harder on my international relations of Ore and current-event-inspired events that drift in and out of my story and manipulate the background :3

And the Hobbit x) It drove me to putting dragons in my story :D

EDIT: also one or two elements of Disney's Treasure Planet and Teen Titans are in there, too.

All the rest is my imagination and story-development, of course :D

When I was twelve or thirteen, I was going through a rough time. I've always been fond of islands and tropical places, so one day I found myself thinking "What if I sailed away to an uncharted island and never came back?" The more I thought about it the more I liked the idea, so I started playing around with it, adding other elements, creating characters, making it into more of a fantasy story. I've played around with this idea for about six years now, always improving it and adding to it. It's my greatest adventure, my fondest daydream. Finally, after years and years of creating a story out of that question, I started writing it. I've been working on it for about a year now, and I only have two chapters written. See, I spent so long imagining the world that I've spent a year almost completely on world building, character profiling, and creating the language, and I'm still not done! I love world building though, so I've enjoyed it.

I was walking home from my bus stop and I saw a garbage truck. My city was recently introduced to a new garbage pick-up system, so the truck seemed pretty high-tech to me. Also, I was reminded of how the old garbage trucks would have people on the back and they'd hop off to get to open garbage cans. The fact that their feet didn't touch the ground when on the back of the truck interested me. The new trucks have no one on the back, I believe. So I fiddled with the idea of not touching the ground and that's how a lot of my story came about.

Some of it was inspired by an imaginary character I came up last year or so. My family was going to a restaurant and I was feeling a bit down. To force myself to laugh, I started talking about my friend "Zorro". My family knows I'm silly like that :P My little brother kept questioning who Zorro was and how I met him. I was all, "Uhhhh. I saved him from drowning in the [insert gibberish here] river. And now our souls are bonded because he owes me." I took that concept and played around with it. It ended up changing a lot.

The last element that majorly inspired me was an anime. I enjoyed how it gave you a look at a lot of the characters, not just the main one.

I have a ton of themes for my story. A few of them are denial, trust, and the importance of family.

Interesting question!!

I'm kinda working on two novels right now, one which I'm finished and am in the process of editing and partial rewriting, and one I've just begun! So I'll briefly go over both, since this question seems like a fun one!

My first one is based off of a collaboration of different things. First there's the movie "Let Me In," which affected me very deeply for reasons I'm not entirely sure. The love between my two characters is based off of the story in "Let Me In," but thankfully took on a life of its own so it's not too much like the movie after a point, haha! Then there's a few real life events which really got me going. They were at my school. One was where a reasonably good friend of mine kinda had a mental breakdown, and was out in front of the school screaming, wanting to fight, getting pissed off. Another was of a girl I know who went into one of the bathrooms during class, and was gone most of the time. Someone found her there, crying and barely able to walk. These turned out to be basically normal happenings, one involving girl problems, another involving a problem with medicine, but they became a basis for my story, haha!

The other is based off of three prominent things. One is the song "Alone with the Sea," by Hurt. A very unheard of band, but absolutely amazing, and that song really struck a chord with me, so part of my story is based off of those lyrics. Another inspiration was the movie "The Village," the idea of an isolated small community. And the third thing is a concept I've always thought would make an amazing ghost/horror story: where the main character, rather than be the typical character, is someone who is half insane, someone who knows horror in his life and who is a writer, and therefore isn't actually afraid of the things which are happening to him.

Those are basically it! Fun question!

Cheers!

Mainly inspired by how if I interact with a character when I day dream it effects thier story line when I dream at night. which can have a drastic effect on what happens next. Like sometimes they die and I can't for the life of me interact with them anymore because they are dead unfortunatelly. :(

Also video games are a big trigger and so are people's life stories. Music, art and exploring new places.

I'm trying to convey a message about life, many messages about family, greed, friendship, and the idea that life was not a coincidence

Okay. I'm going to talk about one of my side projects, because it is a lot more fun than the novel I am currently editing. (If you really would like to know more about my more serious writing pursuits, this link will take you there: http://kathrynwhiteauthor.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/... )

So now for the fun answer.

A couple of years ago, when I was between projects, I was idly flicking through B&A when I saw a question by the very lovely JLT (regulars to this page will know who that is) giving writers a possible title for a story and asking if they could come up with a plot. One of the titles that JLT suggested was "Perched Outside in the Rain". I quite liked the title and came up with an idea for a short story about a young woman who was sitting on the steps of a pub in the rain. A shadowy figure begins to talk to her, and offers her comfort when she tells him about her abusive boyfriend. Over the course of the conversation she begins to develop feelings for him. It was not until they both eventually step into the light that she discovers that he is her neighbour, who she has always been terrified of, due to the number of scars and tattoos that cover his body. I eventually expanded the story to become a novella, retitled it Outside in the Rain, which had a moral that people may not always be what they appear at face value and sent it away to a publisher. Unsurprisingly, it was rejected. Anyway, as I'm deep in the editing stages of my current manuscript, I decided to pull this one out and work on it whenever I felt like writing instead of editing. Just as a small side project. The plot has expanded somewhat and I'm really pushing the whole "people are not what they may seem" bit.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. In many places the writing is very simple and I doubt that it would make a commercially successful book. On the other hand, it might be fun to post it free on Smashwords or the Amazon Kindle Store.

My birthday is December 30th 1991, two days premature of the day I was meant to be born on, January 1st 1992. And all my life I have sort of stopped, taken a beat and considered this, wondering how my life would have been different if I hadn't have chosen to come out when I did, but rather just two days later. I would have had a totally different circle of friends, different classes, different memories, different boyfriends. And everyone else I've ever affected would have been changed too simply by the lack of me being there to influence them. It gets me thinking about fate and my place in the world, like would two people have still gotten married if I hadn't introduced them? How much would they have changed, what's the range of my influence? What would people be talking about without me here to amuse them? And then bigger questions like would they miss me? Would their lives feel emptier, would they sense the lack of something even though they didn't have me to miss in the first place? The enormity of the weight of that moment hits me occasionally, and I have these musings, and this was the inspiration for my book. My book is a YA science fiction about a girl who lives in the world until upon her untimely death finds herself ripped from the world and stuck into an alternate earth where the only difference is that she was never born, and now she's walking around as a total stranger to everyone she knew. She feels like she is in a dream, that what's going on around her isn't real, so she's not afraid to act recklessly, becoming whoever she wants in the process. She discovers what it is that causes things like this to happen, not to mention the weird consequences of it, and is trying everything to return to her old life.

My interest in my own birthday isn't what made me come up with this story, to explore the possibilities in full or whatever, but when I did come up with the idea, because of my own soft spot, I just couldn't not write it.

@Cody Hey, that song's kind of... great :) Not sure what made me search it, but thanks! I love it!

@Kathryn: That's just great :D I'm really glad that inspired you to write a novella, thanks! *buzzes with happiness*

Hey

For my personal novel, 'Rupert McLong's Extraordinary Dying Wishes', I kid you not, I was inspired by 'Rupert the Bear'. It was just the name Rupert that I thought would make a good character, he's wacky, weird, cheery - his personality alone gave me the theme of friendship. He's dying, and has to go back to his past to rectify mistakes before he leaves - it's about finding happiness and the true meaning of relationships.

I'm also going to be soon working on the second draft of Anwen Knight and the Trolls, which was inspired by B&A (Beautiful Nightmare, Lily White, trolls and other users to be more specific), and it's about a young girl who leaves her tribe to fight the trolls on her own as everyone else is fleeing away and on the way makes an unlikely friendship with a beautiful by lost siren, Lilith White, and just a bit of fun with the Waki siblings (Lyra, Luthien, Chlover and Kelly!). I guess the message is: trolls never win!

Lovely question :)

~ JLT