Inspiration

Where do you find inspiration? When you're working on something creative, be it a story, a painting, a piece of music, whatever - where do you draw your creativity? I have to say that since the inception of The Paladin the form of the story, the characters, and the world has morphed and changed so much that it wouldn't be recognizable to a younger Matias. I can still recall some of the ideas that percolated in my brain when I first started on the path to here. 

I'm not going to give away plot points, but suffice it to say that my work has changed a lot and I owe that to great sources of inspiration around me. One of the biggest places I get inspiration is from my music. I have playlists that sit through, letting my characters move around to the music, seeing where it takes them. Entire characters have been born through songs, but in general, I tend to get plot points. A character dies in this way. These two characters fight off  a certain type of monster. A magically imbued device is discovered and activated. Whatever it is, I usually see the incident first, then fill in the characters next, finishing with figuring out where in the story it falls.

Probably my favorite books of all time are Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. They get misrepresented quite frequently in media and often regarded as simply nonsense, but they help me a lot with my story. You see, the biggest thing about the Alice books is that despite the apparent insanity of the world, everything there still operates on a kind of logic. I find that lacking in a lot of modern media that attempts to portray absurdity. Random for the sake of randomness is lazy and misses the point. The Alice books have a set logic, a set of rules that their world operates by, and they adhere to them.

Why do I bring this up? I'm writing a novel that includes monster hunters, demons, ghost, vampires, werewolves, nosferatu, fairies, and non-Euclidean geometry; I have to make sure that there's an underlying logic to it all. Suspension of disbelief is a fragile thing. I can buy that Kirk and Spock are two different species from opposite ends of the galaxy who's people are somehow sexually compatible (Spock's half human!) but if Spock's blood is green in one episode and purple in the next, I need a reason. Fail to address it and you've pulled me out of the moment.

So.. there's my ramble for the day. I draw the inspiration to write and continue writing my stories from a lot of different places. What about you? What inspires you? Feel free to let me know down in the comments!

​Don't forget to be awesome!