Mine often come when unrelated things - ideas, pictures, phrases or bits of plot from my reading or viewing - come together in a new way in my mind, sometimes after having floated around in my head for years.
(For example, my story 'The 4-step Weight-Loss Plan' combined a circular from WeightWatchers, a TV advert set in a kitchen with a fridge-freezer, and an old magazine cartoon about a secretary being made to get files from the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, so her boss could enjoy looking at her bottom).
I begin to visualise the scene in my imagination, adding detail, and working out what must happen in the story to reach that scene, and what happens afterward to make a satisfying ending.
Then I begin to actually write it down, which can lead to further changes. Sometimes the original scene or plot idea I started with gets changed or deleted, and other ideas get added in. Eventually, after a lot of 'tweaking', revision, and leaving it for a few days or a week before re-reading, to see if it still sounds like a good story, I consider it finished.
Of course a lot of 'inspirations' never get that far - they turn out not to be such good ideas, or quickly become boring, or I can't work out how to set the scene, or come up with a good ending, so they get discarded, or at least go back into the melting-pot until some future inspiration comes along...! |