10/27/2024
Inspiration
This is number eighty-five in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“WHERE DO YOU GET IDEAS? I just have no inspiration!”
I’ve published seventy fiction books to date. I’ve never completely run out of ideas. But much better authors than I have attempted to answer or not answer the question regarding where ideas come from.
Ursula K. LeGuin once wrote: “It is different in every writer, and in many of us it is different every time.” –Dancing at the Edge of the World.
Neil Gaiman in a Q&A following his 2011 Interview at the Wheeler Center said, “For me, inspiration comes from a bunch of places: desperation, deadlines… A lot of times ideas will turn up when you’re doing something else. And, most of all, ideas come from confluence — they come from two things flowing together.”
In an interview at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, host Paul Holdengraber asked Director David Lynch where ideas come from. Lynch was far more vague: “An idea comes — and you see it, and you hear it, and you know it…”
Musician-songwriter Leonard Cohen in Song-Writers on Song-Writing had a great answer to the question: “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.”
Of course, my own answer to the question is “All of the above.” I find ideas absolutely everywhere.
When I was searching for an idea for Nathan Everett’s November novel in 2007, inspiration came in the form of a five-year-old girl at a health club. I’d finished my workout and was waiting for my wife and daughter to emerge. That day, I was wearing a sweatshirt with a very stylized greyhound graphic, in honor of Valsora, our rescued greyhound. The little girl in the lobby was fascinated by the graphic and continually pointed at it.
“This is a greyhound dog,” I said. “They are very nice dogs and I own one.”
The little girl’s face fell.
“Oh. I thought it was a dragon,” she said.
Inspiration hit me square in the face. How about if I wrote a story about a hapless dragonslayer who didn’t know what a dragon looked like, where it lived, or how to slay it? Like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, my dragonslayer would constantly mistake a duck, a melon farmer’s bag, a tinker’s cart, and others for a dragon, always excusing himself from the damage he did by saying, “I thought it was a dragon.”
Who would make a good dragonslayer? The only one most people have heard of by name is St. George. I won’t write about the saint, but it’s possible that if people saw the name Steven abbreviated Stn. George, they would mistake Steven for Saint.
Thus, the initial concept for Steven George and The Dragon was born.
At that point, I needed a story to go with the concept. Inspiration is never enough. It needs to be followed with the work of actually writing the book. I’ll talk about that next week.
Steven George and The Dragon and the sequel, Steven George and the Terror, are available as a set or individual eBooks on Bookapy.
Inspiration for stories has come from many sources, not all as glamorous as being mistaken for a dragon. In 2013, I was working with a committee organizing the entries into the PNWA Writer’s Competition. We were talking about how people had a difficult time deciding what genre they were writing in, and often mashing two or more together.
As a joke, I said, “Next year I think I’ll write an Erotic Paranormal Romance Western Adventure.” The words were no sooner spoken than the idea sprang full grown from the head of Zeus. It would be the story of a contemporary teenage cowboy who travels back in time to become his own ancestor and solve a 20th century mystery with information from the past.
It was not the first time I was hit by inspiration. Sometimes it was intentional.
I’d gone through a particularly dark period of my life and the response of my readers at SOL had pulled me out of the depression, encouraging me to keep writing. I decided I wanted to write something especially for those readers and assembled a list of characteristics they seemed to like. Things other than just sex. I found they wanted a long story—I am still getting comments regarding some of my stories not being long enough. They wanted a strong, heroic lead, but he needed to be an underdog of sorts. He needed to have a gift—preferably some kind of artistry—and some athletic ability. He would have multiple girlfriends who all loved each other as much as they loved him. And he must be willing to lay his life on the line to protect them.
Easy. I had all the elements, but no story.
I was driving along the Gulf of Mexico in Alabama listening to 60s and 70s music, as I often did, when I heard the 1975 hit by Smokie play: “Living Next Door to Alice.” My hearing was already starting to fail by that time of my life and I often misunderstood lyrics anyway, but I heard the title “Living Next Door to Heaven.”
Thus, was born my longest work to date at ten volumes and over two million words. The story was my top downloaded and top scoring story on SOL, thanks to those same readers who had buoyed me up when I’d been depressed.
Inspiration is all around us. It is nearly time for me to start my next November novel. I’ve been looking for a subject or title. I happen to like mythology, especially where I can add my own twist. I’ve done it with the book Pygmalion Revisited and The Props Master Series. I even made a list of myths that I’d like to address at one point or another. Prometheus, Cupid and Psyche, The Golden Fleece, Persephone and Hades, to name a few.
As I was looking at that list recently, I came across the Myth of Sisyphus. Interestingly, Albert Camus wrote an essay about the myth and his existentialist assessment that hope led to despair, which led to suicide. It is only when people realize the absurdity of life that they are content to live, go to work, follow the same routine, accomplish the same amount, and commute home to the same life, day after day, that they are freed from the hopelessness of living. It is simply an absurdity.
And thus, the idea for my November novel this year was born. I will be writing about a reincarnation of Sisyphus, interpreting his rock as being daily life in an absurd world. Oddly enough, happy about it.
You can follow the development of the story with daily posts in the month of November by becoming a Sausage Grinder Patron of Devon Layne. And I will continue regular posts until the story is finished, should I not reach the end by November 30. Yes, there will be sex in the story, but the story of Sisyphus is not about the sex. It boldly declares: Life is not a punishment; it is the reward.
Next week, my blog post will be about what goes on after the inspiration has hit. That’s when the real work begins and the “Perspiration.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
