Inspiration

 

What inspires you to write?

Writing is a passion, something that we do because we want to tell a story, whether true or fictional our goal is to see words on pages. But the part that always interests me is where other people get the inspiration for these words. Whether you are writing about something you know very well or something so far out there that you would need to be Stephen Hawkins to really try and understand, where does the motivation for the story come from.

We all like to think of ourselves as original thinkers, so nobody wants to say I was reading this book and I thought I could do it better, that wouldn't be very original at all and in fact quite morally ambiguous, so if you had to justify the reasoning behind your book ideas what would you say?

My first book '8 Simple Steps to Business Development' appeared due to the company I was building at the time had just went through a really good period of growth and I wanted to share the experience of what I had done and it seemed like a good topic for my first attempt at writing a book.

When I say that 8 Simple steps was my first attempt at writing a book, that's not technically true, I had tried for years to write a book and told myself I couldn't. About thirteen years ago I tried to write a Sci-Fi novel, the inspiration came from some random questions in my mind, why had we never been back to the moon? Why had we failed to investigate Mars properly? What really happened with Apollo 13? I admit I probably have a lot of conspiracy theories for a number of things in my head, but this gave me an idea, the prospect that the US Military had orchestrated Apollo 13's disaster to discourage further trips to the Moon, the Beagle missions to Mars were deliberately sabotaged to stop us seeing what was there. Why? Because the US Military were conducting secret deep space missions from there. This set-up the premise for an exciting space adventure, however I kept stopping and starting the story, constantly changing the beginning so never really getting to the juicy part, until a couple of years ago I started to concentrate on it, now that I knew I could write a book and that became my current novel 'Retaliation'.

Inspiration can come from anywhere, I was looking to design an online course for Udemy so I created a book of the subject matter first, then that would give me the framework for the course, a novel I am writing currently came out of a ferry trip I took about 8 years ago, a future planned novel came out of a performance I watched on TV. I have no set formula for my inspiration, literally any circumstance which befalls me has the potential to kick start a book.

I love the creative process and I love to create concepts and ideas from unlikely sources, but what do you do? Are you quite disciplined, research popular topics, stick to what you know or go as outlandish as you can? Please let me know in the comments below.

Written by Martin Wallace