Inspiration

[lizwilliams]

This may be of interest. They interview a number of writers as well as other creative types:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1728929,00.html

My own inspiration almost always comes in the form of an initial image. For the next novel proposal, it was an image of a woman in a sort of camel-train (only without camels) crossing a freezing desert. From this, I've worked outward until I now have some idea of what happens in the rest of the story.

Comments

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

My own inspiration almost always comes in the form of an initial image

Well said. Likewise. Sometimes a visual image, sometimes embedded in a turn of phrase, but an image.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

Yes, sometimes it's just a sentence. In no way normative - I know people who say it always starts with character for them, or a concept. I am quite visual when I write, so it's no surprise that images are the first to arrive.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I too start with pictures. :)

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

And you are very visual too! (cf your lovely drawings).

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

They are a necessary part of my writing process. So necessary in fact that when my website is down (as it is now) it's hard for me to keep track of some of the stories...! I use my own image search engine to remember secondary characters, plot lines I was planning but haven't inserted yet and permutations of existing plots that I wanted to get to but haven't yet. :P

I could go through the actual sketchbooks, but with +100 of them at 100 pages each... having the digital storehouse is much easier.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

This reminded me irresistibly - but in a good way! - of Ursula LeGuin's remark about the imitial spark of The Left Hand of Darkness - she had an image of two figures:

they were small figures, remote, in a tremendous waste landscape of ice and snow. They were pulling a sledge or something over the ice, hauling together. That is all I saw. I didnít know who they were. I didn't even know what sex they were (I must say I was surprised when I found out).