Inspiration

Inspiration. What inspires an artist? I think the question is as old as art itself, and I can only answer for myself, obviously.

What inspires me? Everything – it can be the smallest thing, a bit of a news story, or a fragment of a documentary, or something a museum’s guide says. Or just a fight between parents. Everything can be the catalyst for inspiration.

But inspiration is nothing if you can’t act on it. Inspiration is nothing if you can’t find the story. Why is something happening? Why do people act the way they are? “Why” is probably the most important word in a storyteller’s toolbox. Why are we here? Why did person A act the way they did?

It’s easy to blame the plot. “Person A acts this way because this will move the plot along.” That’s the easy way, the lazy way, the boring way. People are more complex than that, and even though I instinctively gravitate towards the anti-hero, the underdog, it took me years to understand the reason why, and to scratch the surface of why people act the way they do.

Historic events interest me, not because of the history alone, but because it reveals people. Did Julius Caesar have another choice? Why did he conquer Gaul? Why did Richard Plantagenet rebel against his father, King Henry II? When you understand people’s history, how they were raised, who their parents were, what they believed to be true, you begin to understand that people are the heart of every story, true or fictional. Does that mean every story is noteworthy? Nah, but every person, even if they don’t realize it, is the protagonist of their own story.

I liken the situation to a pond. How did we get to this situation? Why is it this way and not another? These questions determine everything. If you introduce chain armor, for instance, you must realize that there’s definitely someone who has been working on a way to penetrate this armor. Cause and effect, it’s always the same. Something happens and other things happen as a reaction to that initial event.

A situation can be a precarious balance of power between numerous countries vying for supremacy. The stage is set, alliances formed . . . and then you toss a pebble in the pond.

Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand being shot in Sarajevo is one such pebble. The storyteller observes the ripples said assassination caused. How did the powers react? Where did they react first, and why? The situation was complex to begin with. In fact, every situation worth a story is complicated, has to be complicated.

Why? Because if the play Romeo and Juliet were about two kids living alone in two houses on the prairie, a few yards away from one another, there would be no family drama, no Mercutio, no Capulets, no clan rivalry, just two people living alone on the prairie. What a fucking boring story that would make. Willy Shakespeare would have wiped his ass with such a weak story, and flushed it away with his excrement. “Two people living alone in two houses separated by a few yards of prairie” screams boring. The pond is nothing more than a film of water on asphalt that doesn’t even cause aquaplaning.

For a story worth telling, I need more.

If I had to tell a love story, I’d have to add warring factions, intrigue, drama. I would have to turn the film of water into a pond. Because a pebble tossed into a flimsy film of water atop asphalt is fucking pointless. No ripple, no movement, just a pebble bouncing off the ground. Snore-fest 2024. Who are the people falling in love?

Granted, I’d rather eat my toenails than write a love story as primary plot. Even as secondary plot it’s boring. Tertiary plot, maybe, but even then, writing about two people meeting and falling in love, and then becoming a couple. That’s pretty predictable.

I don’t like predictable. If you look at Hollywood, predictable is their stock in trade. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, problems arise, they overcome the problems, and end up happy. The end. Boring.

Shakespeare knew that too, so he tossed in two feuding families . . . Oooh complication! Now things get interesting! But the feud overshadows everything, just as in real life. A French woman falling in love with a German, at the onset of WW I; that has potential. Would they still be able to meet? Do they write to each other when he is inevitably drafted to fight at Verdun? How can their love survive all the horrors? They’re on opposite sides, she might see the damage German gas attacks do to French soldiers. All of a sudden, what could have been a sweet (and bloody boring) love story morphs into something else. Imagine the German boyfriend suffering from shellshock, would she even recognize him? Would she be able to help him? Would she want to help him? Could she even help him? At the time, psychology was in its infancy, so curing anyone of PTSD was kind of impossible.

All of a sudden what was a very flimsy film of water on asphalt has become a loch of unknown depth. Now, we’ve got a story! And this is where things get interesting, at least for me. I’d hunker down and research the fuck out of World War I, Verdun specifically. I’d immerse myself in the madness of the battlefields of Belgium and France. It would try to understand the mindset of the people back then. Then I’d look into shellshock, how it was treated, if at all, and try to research what “love” could do to alleviate some of the problems.

In a romance novel, things would be peachy at the end, because it’s never about realism but love. And love conquers all, right? Including shellshock, horrible disfigurements, mutilations, and trauma no one should endure or witness. In a romance novel, the couple would find each other after the armistice of 1918, and fall into each others arms, and they’d live happy ever after.

In reality, she might be overwhelmed by the conflicting and contradicting emotions. He would wake up screaming in the middle of the night, thinking he was back in the trenches, not knowing he was in the marital bed, sleeping next to the woman he loves. The strain on such a relationship is unfathomable, it’s tragic, it’s human.

But it’s a story worth exploring. But it’s not material for easy reading.

Not that I tackle any simple problems and stories either.

So what inspires me? Everything. Give me a pond and a pebble to lob in so I can watch the ripples, where they intersect bump into obstacles. The messy stuff that is life.

Is world-building story in itself? Read “Man in the High Castle.” In a word, no. As interesting as the idea of the Axis powers winning WW II, it’s the equivalent of the meteor wiping out the dinosaurs. The Nazis are pure, unadulterated evil, and their methods would have strangled every bit of resistance out of the conquered. (The French resistance only worked because Britain supplied them with weapons, agents, and targets that were vital to the war effort.  Without any means of outside support, against a vicious enemy, resistance would have been an exercise in futility.) Now, Dick obviously knew that, for he introduces the alternate reality to his Nazi-infested alternate reality, which is our reality. But even that does little to further a flaccid plot. Dick was good in creating spectacular concepts and worlds, but his stories were meh. (At least the ones I’ve read.) Sometimes the worlds we come up with are amazing, but finding a worthwhile story is hard, if not impossible.

Still, it all comes back to the pebble in the pond.