One thing I love about writing is how inspiration can come from so many different places. I love looking over a mostly-done manuscript and remembering where little bits of it originated. It’s like looking at one of those intricate crazy-quilts composed if a bit of velvet here, a button there, a snippet of floral brocade there, all stitched together with bright embroidery.
In Fortune’s Folly, for example, there are a pair of bluebirds who belong to a woman who may-or-may-not be a wicked witch. Those bluebirds came to me at several years before I even wrote the book. I was in graduate school on Long Island, I think, wandering through the woods behind my apartment (I was pretty unhappy in grad school and prone to wandering in the woods, which were lovely and tangled and deep-feeling, with an inexplicable grove of bamboo(!) in the center that stayed quite green even in the winter). I passed by a bunch of bittersweet, with its brilliant orange berries and golden husks and thought how cool a plant it was, both in appearance and in name. I had recently seen some bluebirds and somehow the two ideas merged and turned into a pair of bluebirds named Sweetbeak and Bitterwings. So I scribbled it in my notebook and mostly forgot about it. And then one day while I was working on the first draft of Fortune’s Folly they suddenly flew back into my mind and chirped at me as if to say, ‘Finally, this is where we belong’.
And so it goes. I keep collecting the sparkly bits, the emotionally resonant moments, the names and images, and hope that one day they’ll all find a home.
The reason I’m writing this right now is that today was the first time I found a character that I know belongs in some future book. I even know which one! I was at the Farmer’s Market after work, shopping for bread and green beans and tomatoes when I saw a group of musicians playing over between two tents. An older man was playing guitar, and two women were fiddling. It was a familiar Irish tune, though I can’t remember the name. One of the women was older, a professional. The other looked like a teen. I think the best one line description of her I can make is that she looked like a character from a Charles de Lint novel (I loved The Blue Girl so that’s a compliment from me). She had a dark bob, streaked with greenish-blue highlights. She wore a skinny retro Bob Marley T-shirt, lavender fishnets, combat boots, black wristlets, and one of the funkiest skirts I’ve ever seen. It seemed to be made out of a bunch of multi-colored ties, sewn together but falling free in a fringe at knee-length. Over this was a sort of overskirt/apron of denim (I think) with embroidered designs in bright colors. Flowers, I think. I don’t think my description does it justice, but
alas, I did not have my camera. Perhaps it was for the best, as I wouldn’t want to alarm the poor girl by lurking around taking pictures of her cool outfit.
But anyways, this fiddler could have stepped right out of one of my unwritten books (the ghost-pirate-Maine-fiddler-romance-mystery). It was a little unnerving. Though not so unnerving as if the ghost-pirate had appeared at my local market.
So I’ve dutifully written down notes and tried to record the inspiration. The fiddler’s book is still waiting for a few more pieces to click into place, but it’s inching closer to being ready to write.
Anyone else have an unexpected inspiration that ended up in one of your own stories?
