Sources of Inspiration
By Holly Bargo
I’ve long asserted that ideas are cheap and plentiful and have a folder full of partial manuscripts to prove it. Each of the files within that folder began as an idea that just wouldn’t leave my mind until I wrote it down. Each began with good intentions--and we know what paves the road to hell. However, somewhere along the way--sometimes not more than a few pages in--those ideas faltered. I couldn’t sustain them.
I published Rowan in 2014. I was employed full-time in a soul-sucking job I loathed. After work, I did the wife-and-mother thing. Let’s just say that my life didn’t leave me a whole lot of time for idle amusement like writing. Rowan took me two years to write. I don’t remember where the story premise came from. I do recall sending it to a friend of a friend who was kind enough to serve as an informed beta reader and taking encouragement and direction from her feedback. It was probably my first genuine experience as an indie author.
I remember as I wrote Rowan that other characters inserted themselves into the story. Those characters, Cassia and Willow, demanded I write their stories. And so a trilogy, the Tree of Life series, was born.
Rowan isn’t perfect by any means, either as a manuscript or as a character. Among all the heroines appearing in my books (over 20 titles published since 2014), she’s the one most like me in personality. Perhaps for that reason, her story remains my favorite.
Ideas for other books spring from diverse sources: some begin with a question of “What if?” Others arise from idle daydreaming. The Falcon of Imenotash was sparked by a movie: I disliked the movie’s ending and my imagination immediately went to work on a new story that touched upon some of the themes in the movie. I challenge you to identify the movie that generated that spark. Russian Gold, Russian Dawn, and Russian Pride all came into being because some enthusiastic fans asked for stories featuring the protagonists who appeared as secondary characters in Russian Lullaby.
Inspiration comes from many sources. Ideas are cheap and plentiful, we pluck them from the air. Whether we can carry an idea to its natural fruition is another matter entirely.
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