#kmalexander

Inspiration comes in all forms and shapes, and it comes at you like a sudden slap to the face from who knows where, or at least it does for me. This brings me to My5, a project put together by one of my favorite authors, @kmalexander to spread the word about other participating author’s 5 main sources of inspiration for their writing.

My project 30 Second Fantasy needed at least 365 different sources of inspiration, but there were some that spun off multiple stories or at least provided the groundwork for starting a different story every day. Without further ado, here are My5 things that inspired me the most while writing 30 Second Fantasy.

Tabletop RPGs

I have been playing tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder for nearly ten years now, and they are a surging wellspring to catch inspiration from. The settings are varied: I’ve evaded a fang-toothed monster on a space station, solved mysteries in Lovecraftian 1920, and even fought an animated character on the deck of a plywood pirate ship set from a Saturday morning cartoon. You can go anywhere and do anything in an RPG with only your mind’s imagination as your limit. As broad and deep as the settings can get, I pull most of my inspiration out of RPGs from the characters played by other people.

Writing characters is hard, and writing characters that people actually feel sympathetic with is extremely difficult. Every now and again, someone will do something odd, say... A paladin killing a priest after promising to help him and then burning their body on the spot, and that leaves the whole table mouth-agape. The things that seem so ridiculously out of character, but suddenly make sense when the person can explain their true motivation like... the priest's vampire son would have killed him anyway, and killing the priest now ended the priest’s suffering while starving the vampire. It’s the little things like that which really make characters shine, and tabletop RPGs are full of them.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong is one of my favorite cities in the world, and I have been so incredibly lucky to get a job that lets me travel there a few times every year. There’s nowhere else on Earth like Hong Kong (which is a little biased, considering I haven’t been everywhere on Earth to compare). Everything about it seems contradictory and opposed. You’ll see towering skyscrapers that have skyscraper-sized holes in them (seriously, look up The Arch) and a 10-minute bus ride away you’ll find a lush park with nary a building in sight. Hong Kong also has a pretty wide wealth disparity, with some buildings ranging from $5000 to $10000 per square foot with floors owned by a single person or company, and then you get places like Chungking Mansion and the Kowloon Walled City (demolished) with multiple families living in a single room.

These opposing features serve as fantastic jumping-off points for generating story lines. The city itself could be the setting for dozens of urban fantasy novels with each novel seeming like it took place in a distinct world. Despite being only 426 square miles, Hong Kong packs a punch strong enough to knock out thousands of authors with inspiration.

The Lies of Locke Lamora

A quick note: I took the picture above while I was in Florence, Italy, not a preview shot of a Lies of Locke Lamora movie (and what I would give for one of those).

The Lies of Locke Lamora is one of my favorite on-going fantasy series. The cast of characters is deep and incredibly interesting. Thieves, psychotic mages, gangsters, the list goes on and on, and all of them feel like fully-fleshed out people that really pull at your heartstrings when they bite the dust. Not a spoiler, people die in this series, it’s what makes the stories run with their stakes bare for all to see.

Then there’s the setting, which can best be described as an almost-steampunk version of renaissance Venice. When I read the series, I got the same kind of at-home feeling that I felt when Harry first started to explore Hogwarts: a feeling I’ve been trying my hardest to replicate in my works whenever possible.

While I try not to borrow too much from The Lies of Locke Lamora and the rest of the Gentleman Bastards series, it does creep into my writing, but that’s only because I aspire to write something as good as this series.

Product development

What you see in the image above, is a quick sketch of one of my greatest inventions, the world’s first connected banana. It has Bluetooth, a fitness tracker, micro transactions, and is even Amazon Echo-ready. All jokes aside, my day job is to develop products (albeit slightly more serious than the connected banana), and of course inspiration from work sneaks into my writing.

Problems pop up all the time when a product is developed, and by all the time, I mean, every hour, on the hour to the point where a dozen or so emails explaining how there’s a problem that needs to be fixed immediately is a typical day at work. As frustrating as that is in real life, it’s a bit cathartic to put characters in my stories through the same stuff.

Marketing

And finally, the last major influence on my writing is marketing. Marketing goes hand-in-hand with product development, so I get a good bit of it at work (although not being in a customer-facing position, I get shielded from the brunt of it), but the ads out in the wild and how the ads are supposed to affect you are prime inspiration breeding grounds.

The final product of an ad, either the graphic design or visual effects in a commercial, can be so ridiculous that they transcend whatever is normal and logical. This ridiculousness makes for great starting points in stories and plots.

Marketing appeals, like bandwagon, fear, etc.. also serve as phenomenal character motivations. There’s something instinctual about them, and they’ve been used for centuries to get people to buy stuff. Naturally, this extends to stories and getting characters to do things that don’t create that ‘out of character’ feeling.

Inspiration for writing will vary from person to person, and is always worth talking about. Here are a few more authors who are participating in the My5 project with posts on what inspires their writing. You should check them out and see if you can find any new ways to get inspired for your work, or for what to read next.

K. M.'s #My5: The Bell Forging Cycle

Laurie's #My5: My Five Writing Influences

Mike's: #My5: The Verdant Revival

I was challenged by @ericlangeauthor to answer a few questions on my writing process. If you’d like me to elaborate on how I work, feel free to ask me a question. I’m always happy to go into details. _________________________________________________________________

Is there a snack you like to eat while writing?

Not really. I’ll usually have something to drink, coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, beer, scotch, or a martini at night.

What time of day do you usually write?

Evenings are my jam. I’m a designer by day, and I hate waking up early, so I spend a majority of my time writing after I get home until some time late in the night. Also the weekend, always the weekend, like... most of the weekend.

Where do you write?

I have a home office that is my writing space. I posted about it on my blog in 2013. I should do another update; it’s been three years and things have changed. I've tried the whole public writing thing. You know, coffee shops, people, crowds, yeah. I discovered it’s not for me.

How often do you write a new novel?

Right now it’s once a year. Though I usually have several things going on at a time. Right now I’m finalizing my revisions for my current project, writing another manuscript, and working on a novella. So I keep busy.

Do you listen to music while you write?

Yeah, but I cannot listen to music with lyrics. For me, it’s usually ambient (generally dark/industrial) or classical, sometimes folk depending on my mood and the project I’m working on.

What’s your writing utensil? Paper or laptop?

Laptop mainly, but I do have a notebook I keep handy.

Do you have a special pre-writing ritual?

I’m very visual, so I usually flip through mood boards I’ve set up on Pinterest. Sometimes I listen to music that is inspiring me at the time. Now, this is different from the music I listen to as I write; I put together playlists of my inspiration music for my readers. So far I have three available:

The Tunes Were Right was the songs that inspired The Stars Were Right.

Old Broken Playlist was the songs that inspired Old Broken Road.

Red Litten Tracks is the playlist for my latest book, Red Litten World.

What do you do to get into the writing mood?

I read. I read a lot, and it always inspires me to create. Usually, it’s genre (skewing towards horror or something dark), often indie, sometimes it’s something mainstream. This year, after a challenge from a friend, I am trying to read more classics. Right now I’m in the middle of Stoker’s Dracula, Dicken’s Great Expectations, and I’ve been slowly reading Jorge Luis Borges’ amazing collection of short stories: Labyrinths.

What do you always have near the place you write?

Usually research material, Wikipedia is great, but it can only get you so far. Also, my notebook - I take a lot of handwritten notes as I write. They can be weird, everything from sketches, checklists, to strange math equations. (That sounds a lot fancier than it is. Usually, it's pretty basic stuff.)

Do you have a reward system for word counts?

Yeah, when I finish a novel I have a glass from a bottle of Lagavulin 16 (my favorite scotch) and a cigar. No rewards for me until that first draft is done.

Is there anything else about your writing process your readers don’t know?

I’m pretty vocal about my process, but I’m always happy to answer any questions. Historically I tended to outline, though I have noticed with recent work that has started to change. I never edit until I finish the first draft. My wife, Kari-Lise, gets to read those first drafts and suffers along good-naturedly. (My grammar and spelling are always atrocious.) But completing ideas and telling a good story are both more important to me early on then writing perfect prose. Mistakes get fixed in subsequent rewrites, editing, and during copy editing.