On Inspiration: How To Find Your Story

This post is adapted from the presentation I give when I speak at schools. I added this topic to my presentation after I started receiving a good many emails from students telling me they wanted to write a story, but had trouble coming up with an idea that was fresh and interesting.

If you're a writer just starting out, that can be really tough. I know it was for me. It took me years to separate my ideas from the books I read, to move into a place where my inspiration became original and personal, instead of just me recycling the stories and characters I read about. This isn't a bad thing--this imitation of other writers. It's how we learn, and I believe most writers start off that way.

For example, my first novel (which I wrote at age 13, when I was in the height of this story-stealing phase) actually started out as fan fiction of the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. When I realized I couldn't really a call a story my own when I was basically copying another writer's world, I changed the species of my characters from squirrels to humans, and thought that in doing so I had broken free into new original territory. I hadn't. In fact, when I thrust that poorly written and decidedly horrid manuscript onto some of my friends after I'd finished it, begging them for feedback, more than one handed it back saying, "You know, you write a lot like Brian Jacques. Ever hear of him?" Palm to the face. Palm. To. The. Face. Apparently, changing the species of my cast wasn't enough to qualify me for  true originality. But I would learn.

So anyway, all this to say, I've come a long way from that sad, beloved first novel in terms of ideas and inspiration and finding my own unique voice. If you're a young or newly developing writer, here are some ways you can begin to do that too, and places where you might draw your inspiration. Then, armed like Benjamin Franklin out to catch a lightning bolt, you can set out to catch your story.

Four Places Where Inspiration Might Strike

1

What interests you?

It's pretty basic, but it's so important. You have to love your story material. You have to be passionate not only about the characters and the plot, but about the world, the settings, the props, the activities. 

I sometimes miss this as I'm writing. For example, I need my character (oh, let's call her Kate) to have a little more backstory to her. I want her to play some sport at school, perhaps. My natural inclination is to  make my characters different from me (I don't know why) so I'd likely assign her to something like basketball or lacrosse, two sports about which I know nothing. Now, I could take the time to learn, to research these things--and that's good. That's fine. You can totally do that. Writing should stretch you and bring you to new places, learning new information. But if I stop and just think for a minute, I'll realize that making Kate a soccer player will be a much stronger move. I'm a soccer player. I adore soccer. I'm one of those scream-at-the-television kind of soccer fans. So when I plop Kate down on the soccer pitch, I suddenly feel more passionate about her character, because I can relate to her passion for The Beautiful Game. I learn things about her I didn't know before--that she's highly competitive, that maybe she loses her head a bit in the heat of the game, that she's fiercely loyal to her teammates. And I know these things because when I think about soccer, I feel them myself or have known teammates who were like this. When I think about lacrosse or basketball, I feel nothing. Blah. Whatever. 

By simply going in the direction of what interests me, I find so much more emotion, experience, and passion to draw from as I write, whether it's something as small as adding another hobby to my character's repertoire or coming up with a completely new, big story idea.

I mean, look how passionate soccer players are. Awesome.

2 

The Magic Question

I borrow this phrase from the theatre, though I think it might originally come from psychology or something. Whatever. Anyway, it's simply this: 

"What if _________?" 

I love this. It's so open, so filled with possibility. What if the world weren't actually made of rock and dirt, but it's actually some giant sleeping creature that starts to wake up? What if when you take a photograph you're actually creating a new alternate reality that begins inside that picture? What if my long-lost grandmother suddenly appeared and told me I was the princess of a tiny, wealthy kingdom in Europe? Oh, wait... You get the idea. 

The key is to hold nothing back. Let it all spill out--the silly ideas, the impossible ideas, the ideas that will never go anywhere. This can be done as a kind of exercise in creativity. You have to be willing to sound a bit ridiculous, a little crazy. But there are no truly bad ideas or stupid ideas--they're just ideas. They're not even stories yet. But they could be--somewhere in the dozens and dozens of What if? questions you pour out, there just might be a golden ticket to story inspiration.

an untrained eye / Foter.com / CC BY-NC

3 
What terrifies you?

What's your greatest fear? What's that one subject you always avoid because it makes your blood turn cold and your chest constrict and your skin crawl? Is it the dark? It is spiders? Is it the thought of being alone in a strange place? 

Use your fears to bring real tension to your story. If you write about something you are afraid of, it will be much easier and more organic to translate that fear into your writing. 

For example, one of my fears is death, and especially of losing someone I love. This is a fear I drew on in writing ORIGIN; it's a topic Pia contemplates to some depth. I relate to her through her fear of losing her loved ones more than anything else, because I understand it. 

Building real, personal fears into your story not only makes it relatable to you, but probably to a lot of your readers as well. I'd say most of our fears are pretty commonly held by the majority of people--death, darkness, loneliness, etc. Fear makes your characters human. It makes them vulnerable, gives them that all-important Achilles heel. Once you know their deepest fear, you can exploit it--twist the knife in the heart, so to speak. Pry into their fear and force them to face it in a dramatic way.

*Zephyrance - don't wake me up. / Foter.com / CC BY-ND

4

History, Science, Art

The world is burning with untold stories. As writers, our primary concern is seeking out those stories and telling them. Sometimes inspiration doesn't necessarily begin with us, as in the previous points. Sometimes, it comes from outside--from a painting, a poem, a news story, a stranger sitting on a park bench. 

Mary Oliver said, "I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the power of observing." Exposing yourself to art, to history, science, nature, whatever, can be a great way to find a story. The key here is to always be alert.

Keep the Magic Question always in your pocket. No, scratch that. Don't keep it in your pocket--wear it like a pair of glasses, through which you're always seeing the story stuff of the world. Look at history this way--What if Abraham Lincoln were really a vampire slayer? Look at science. What if, ten years from now, invisibility technology becomes viable? And art. One of my favorites! (Hence my massive Pinterest collection). Photography, painting, sculptures, gosh--did you know they've got whole museums packed with the stuff? Good art not only comes from good inspiration--it's also becomes inspiring to others. And there's bookoos of it out there, so you've got no excuse, really, to not be inspired--especially if, like the good little writer you are, you're wearing your MQ glasses.

Mini-Lesson: How To Be An Author

1. READ. Read everything. In your genre, outside your genre, fiction, non-fiction, classics, short stories, poetry, magazines, journals, history, science, the bottoms of tissue boxes and the back of your shampoo bottle. This is how you acquire new words and new ideas. This is how you know what's been done before and what works. This is how you learn what good writing is (or isn't, as the case may be). Lose yourself in libraries. Find new sections in the bookstore. Fall in love with books and reading and words and stories. Like this little guy:

2.WRITE. Write every day. Prose, poetry, diary, blogs, it all counts, and it's all important. Write badly. Write without using any punctuation marks. Use words you've never used before. Get funky with your thesaurus. You have to find your voice, your writing identity, your unique literary thumbprint. Explore with words and challenge yourself in impossible ways. Do NaNoWriMo. Join online writing guilds. Go to conferences and take classes. Write for yourself and for others and above all else, for gosh sakes, don't stop and don't give up. And if at all possible, write on a steampunk typewriter computer like this one, because COOL:

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3. LIVE. (this especially to all you introverts like me!) Don't let your only experience of the world be vicarious. Go outside, meet new people, go to strange places, eat weird foods, do crazy and daring things. Go outside your comfort zone. Challenge yourself. Have adventures. The most important thing you will bring to your writing is your own personality, experiences, and emotions. Don't borrow all of that from books, moves, TV, etc. Get out and find your own!

4. BE QUIRKY. Be yourself! (see #3)

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5. GET INVOLVED. Find other writers, either in person or online, and especially ones who are at the same stage as you are. Share your frustrations, your triumphs, your risks, and your failures. Connect with other writers because then you will know that you are not alone and that success is possible. When you have a bad day, when you're paper mache-ing bowls out of your rejection letters and you hate every word you ever put on paper, these are the people who will listen to you, hurt with you, encourage you, then pick you up off the floor, dust you off, and push you back in line. To write is to be intensely vulnerable. It's you pasting the tenderest parts of your identity to the wall and then letting any passing stranger chuck a tomato at them. You're going to need a wingman or two. You're going to need to know that you are not alone and that you are strong enough to take a few hits. Surround yourself with the ones who make you stronger. Surround yourself with the honest ones, the kind ones, the ones you'll be there for just as they are there for you.

Be like the Doctor. Always take a companion. Hugs take two--even virtual ones!

Breathless Tour Recap & Giveaway

Last week I had the amazing opportunity to tour seven cities with three rockstar Penguin authors: Marie Lu (Legend), Brenna Yovanoff (Paper Valentine), and Andrea Cremer (Nightshade series). Here's a quick photo recap of what went down with the West Coast Breathless Reads tour--and at the end, you'll have a chance to win one of three prize packs about which I am very excited because they are supremely epic and unique and I'm still considering not giving any of them away and just keeping them for myself because that is just how supremely epic they are.


So we started in Los Angeles. Here we are at the Grove Barnes & Noble. It was like, three stories tall and pretty much as epic as a bookstore gets. We got to ride on a lot of escalators. I am a big fan of escalators because, well, stairs. Also, this store posted our tour as the Breathless Domination Tour and I mean COME ON PPL THAT ROCKS so Penguin, if you're listening and you're considering tweaking the title of the tour any time soon... well, just sayin', here's a kickin' idea for you. 

(left to right: Marie, Me, Brenna, Andrea)

I was pretty stoked about the LA event because I got to see my uncle, who lives there, and who I don't get to see very often. He drove me around Beverly Hills and we looked for movie stars, but we didn't find any. Oh well.

So then the next day we drove up to LaVerne, CA for an event at Mrs. Nelson's Book Shop. I was really excited about this because I'd met a lot of the Mrs. Nelson's staff at a SCIBA dinner on the Queen Mary a few months before, and heard a lot of great things about this adorable and personable bookstore. Speaking of the staff at Mrs. Nelson's, here they are:

Us authors being authorly:

The next day was San Francisco, at A Great Good Place for Books. The store was packed full of people, which was pretty awesome, and also we got to meet Andrea's brother, wife, and extraordinarily adorable niece.

Speaking of Andrea...

I'm getting out of chronological order here, but just go with it. So before we went to A Great Good Place we went to the Las Lomas High School, and were hosted by the school book club which contained some of the most enthusiastic readers I've ever met. Seriously. These kids had us walking ten inches of the ground by the time we left, so we're pretty much enamored with them.

Andrea and I geeked out over the library copies of our books, because they had actual library card inserts--you know, the kind where you can pull out the card and see what other kids have been reading the book before you, and their check-out/check-in dates so you can see how long it took them to read it and compare your own speed (oh wait... maybe I was the only kid who did that...) Anyway, it was pretty sweet and so we took pix.

The next day was Portland day. I'm a huge fan of Portland because it rains a lot there and I'm the kind of person who enjoys sitting around staring out rainy windows contemplating things because it makes me feel deep and artistic and anyway, that's beside the point because what I really want to tell you about is that

A) the awesome hotel we were at put copies of our books in our rooms for us to sign, so they could add it to the hotel library which was stocked entirely with books by authors who had stayed there (I mean how much schnazzier can you get?)

And also I found this waiting for me. Because you see, I married this guy and he's sort of like the sweetest, best, most awesome guy ever because he had Valentine roses delivered to my room since, you know,  we were on opposite sides of the continent which was kind of a bummer considering it was V-Day and all. 

Anyway, I like him a lot.

Also in Portland I got to see my other uncle, and my aunt, who took me out for droolworthy Portland Lebanese food. 

Next up was Boulder, CO, on Valentine's Day. Several super awesome things happened this day. First, it snowed. This is a significant detail if, like me, you are from the South where it snows properly maybe once a decade.

Other notable moments: the amazing readers who braved the snow to come to the event at the Boulder Bookstore. And the delicious Latin restaurant we went to afterwards with the fabulous Kristin Nelson, who is Marie's agent and who also gave us V-Day chocolates, so three enthusiastic cheers for Kristin! Thanks, lady! 

So then there was Austin, TX, a city I've become quite a fan of recently, ever since the epic epicness that is the Austin Teen Book Festival. Anyway, we had the pleasure of going to the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders and it is every bit as awesome as its name (due in part to the fact we were welcomed by their marquee) (it says "Reading leaves us breathless):

There are several reasons why this stop was so memorable:

1. We each got to sit in the "author chair" and then sign our names.  There were some pretty kickin' names on that chair, let me tell you. This chair has seen many a rockstar's derriere. 

2. And then there was the school's totally mind-blowing obsession with Doctor Who. The moment I saw their life-size TARDIS cutout I basically was in love. When I saw their life-size cutout of David Tennant I was ready to propose marriage. Problem was, so was Marie. Well, all of us, really. Whovians FTW! I think we would have tried sneaking DT onto the rest of the tour with us, except maybe the librarian would have sent her life-size cutout Daleks after us to get him back (I don't know if they actually had life-size cutout Daleks but after what I had seen thus far, I wouldn't have put it past them.) Also, I just happened to be wearing my You never forget your first Doctor shirt that day so, you know, can you say DESTINY??

Hands off, Marie! He's MINE!

 

*vworp, vworp*

Our final stop was in Salt Lake City, UT, where we were joined by the inimitable Ally Condie (Matched) for our last panel at the Barnes & Noble in Orem. With standing room only, this event was a perfect conclusion to the Breathless tour.

( also pictured: Jessica H. from Cracking the Cover blog) 

 All in all, I have never been so honored to be part of such an inspiring group of talented authors, and it was a joy and privilege to learn from Brenna, Andrea, Marie, and Ally as the week progressed. I was so humbled by the amazing response we had from readers, teacher, librarians, and booksellers all over the western United States, and extend a mighty THANK YOU to everyone who attended and made these events possible! And a huge THANK YOU to Penguin Teen's matchless publicists, Elizabeth Zajac in particular, for putting together this tour and making every stop so memorable for all involved!

Read on! Stay Breathless!

Breathless Tour Fun Facts:

1. Both Marie Lu and I wrote Redwall fanfic as teenagers and we both subbed failed high fantasy manuscripts before Legend and Origin.

2. Brenna Yovanoff's first drafts look like giant MadLibs because she leaves blank spaces when she can't think of the perfect word to put in a sentence.

3. Andrea Cremer began writing when a horse crushed her foot and she was laid up on a couch all summer as a teenager.

4. Both Brenna and I played varsity soccer in high school and college; and we both rock at it.

5. Marie still dreams of being a fighter pilot and is currently on a quest to do a ride-along with the Blue Angels' No. 7 pilot, despite the Navy not returning her phone calls.

6. Both Andrea and I are fiercely proud of our Scottish heritage; my clan fought for her famous ancestor Robert the Bruce in the Scottish War for Independence (*cue bagpipes).

~~and now for the giveaway portion of this program~~

To celebrate the success of the Breathless Tour, I'm giving away three prize packs! You have to enter each giveaway separately! Entering one will not automatically enter you for all of them. 

The Prizes:

1. Pia's Library

In Origin, Pia's reading material is severely limited by the scientists. But what if she had access to any one of the amazing bookstores we visited on tour? What reads would she pick first? The Breathless ones, of course! This prize pack consists of PRODIGY and LEGEND by Marie Lu, THE REPLACEMENT by Brenna Yovanoff, and an ARC of SHADES OF EARTH by Beth Revis.

2. Alai's Spots

In researching for the creation of Alai, Pia's pet jaguar in Origin, I learned so much about the dire situation surrounding the big cats of the world. Not just jaguars, but lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs--almost every species of big cat is in danger of deforestation, poaching, illegal pet trade, and dwindling numbers. Each item in this prize pack goes toward supporting causes to save the big cats, in particular, the "Cause an Uproar" project run by National Geographic, which is dedicated to the preservation and nurture of big cats all over the planet. This prize pack contains the NatGeo DVD program In Search of the Jaguar, a "Cause an Uproar" wrap bracelet, and a one-year subscription to National Geographic.

3. Eio's Jungle

Jewelry and accessories plays a large part in Origin, from Eio's jaguar necklace to Pia's bird pendant to Uncle Antonio's snakeskin belt. This prize pack contains two unique jewelry pieces inspired by the Amazon rainforest: a pair of vintage, enamel-leaf earrings and an orchid necklace with pearl and amethyst accents, representative of the deadly but beautiful elysia orchid which gives Pia her immortality. Also included is a signed hardcover copy of Origin!

To Enter the giveaways

complete the forms below!

Remember: each prize pack is its own giveaway; you may enter for all three packages but to do so you must enter on all three forms!

Three unique winners will be decided at random. The more entries you complete, the higher your chances of winning. Contest ends on Sunday, March 3 and winners will be notified by email. If you are a winner and do not reply to your email within fourteen days your prize will be forfeit. 

Open to USA and CANADA only!

Questions? Ask them in the comments!

Enter here for:

*Pia's Library*

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Enter here for:

*Alai's Spots*

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Enter here for:

*Eio's Jungle*

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Austin Teen Book Festival

Howdy, y'all!

I spent the last few days in the Lone Star State at the Austin Teen Book Festival. And y'all, it was amazing! I got to rock out my cowgirl boots and meet some inspiring people. First off was a totally unforgettable keynote speech from the indomitable Libba Bray, followed by a day of panels, hobnobbing, signing, eating, laughing, and lots and lots and lots of books! So, yeah, pretty much the whole experience was dreamy.

And look at this! THIS IS A COOKIE WITH MY BOOK ON IT.

As tasty as it looks, I'm going to resist temptation and instead use it as a Christmas ornament because I mean honestly LOOK AT HOW AWESOME IT IS. I don't know what ingenious Texan is responsible for this cookie BUT BASICALLY I WANT TO HUG THEIR NECK.

Basically, before this weekend, I knew only three things about Texas:

1. The Alamo

2. Jenny Lawson is the world's most amazing blogger

3.That Geico commercial

And, as the Gecko says, everything in Texas just seems bigger. And after ordering a country fried steak and getting this monster I am a one hundred per cent believer!

One of my favorite parts of going to book festivals is meeting authors I admire, because no matter how many books I write, I will always be a reader at heart and authors are my rockstars! Here are some of the incredible storytellers I met this weekend.

Marissa Meyer, author of Cinder and Scarlet

   

Will Richter, author of Dark Eyes

Leigh Bardugo, author of Shadow and Bone

Rae Carson, author of Girl of Fire and Thorns and The Crown of Embers

These are just a few of the supercool people I met! Saturday night a bunch of us went out for dinner and had a great time swapping stories and enjoying scrumptious Tex-Mex cuisine.

On Sunday, Jessica Lee Anderson, Joy Preble, Kresley Cole, Will Richter and I had the privilege of speaking at the Book Spot in nearby Round Rock. Julie and Will, the shop owners, were so friendly and book savvy--I am so happy to have met them and been part of their event!

And I met Jayme, a girl after my own heart--we even play the same position in soccer! 

Austin is a fascinating and fun city and I'm so glad I got to see a little of it. I learned something about myself on this trip--that I love Texas and can't wait to go back! =)