Recently, a friend asked me on Instagram of all places how I came up with what I write about–along with a few other questions about what’s changed between the time I started writing and now. My answer to the first question is very much the same as the answer that other writers tend to give: often, it starts with “what if” or “I wonder” or being inspired by something I’ve seen or read, both fiction and non-fiction. As a writer, you let your imagination take flight as you ask questions and let the dots connect themselves.
Writers have many influences, and some of them we don’t always talk about. For me, many of mine are things like history research I’ve done, random articles I’ve read on many subjects, and–this being the one I don’t always talk about–the television shows I watched as a teenager and young adult. Not all of them were great, most of them were genre dramas, and many of them I still love despite their flaws. In some ways I can credit my mother for my love of genre fiction–she’s the one who introduced me to shows like Star Trek and the X-Files (she was a casual fan of both before I ever stumbled into them) and both of my parents nurtured my voracious reading habit from an early age. That’s the other secret to successful writers–not only do we basically maintain a file of potential ideas that we’ve gathered over the years (whether written down or mentally), but we also read. We read a lot.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, reading both helps.
As a writer, you have to give yourself permission to be inspired by anything–from what I understand, it’s the same with being an artist. That’s what I’ve done for years and I like to think I’ve gotten better at it as time’s gone on.
I suppose all of you will be the judge of that.
