Inspiration

A lot of people who hear that I am writing a book ask me where my inspiration came from? First off, I think that this is two questions in one.

Where did my inspiration to write a book come from?

I had always wanted to write a book, but I never did as a product of laziness, and the fact that even if I wrote it I would not have any means to publish it for public consumption. I figured that as cool as it would be to write a book I would still want people to read it, and if they couldn't I viewed it as a waste of time.

We live in an age of technology, and now we have the means to buy a book, and have it delivered instantly without having to leave the comfort of our favorite reading corner. I am of course talking about eReaders, namely the Kindle. Amazon, much like Apple offers with iTunes or their App Store, offers authors a way to electronically publish their own books and keep 35%-70% of the royalties. When I finish my book I intend to publish it for between $.99 - $2.99 on all eReader formats.

Where did the inspiration for my story come from?

I think that this is a slightly more complicated question. I look at inspiration as the sum of everything you have experienced in life. This creates a large pool of creative basis for you to draw on. I think that there are two main ways to draw an idea from this pool.

First, you can simply focus on a topic that you find very interesting, and come up with a single thought. This thought will function as the seed that you grow in to your story.

The other method is to sleep, and let your sub-conscious create stories for you in the form of dreams. If you have a particularly interesting or entertaining dream, you can use it as the seed for your story.

For my story I thought of a cool theme for the story, and I also thought about the ending, and I built from there. I thought about a cool way to start the book, and have taken it one chapter at a time since.

For my brother's book he told me that he had a dream, and a particular line in that dream served as the basis which he grew his story from.

Everyone's experiences are different, and I think that's why even if you told 30 people to write a book about an alien that was raised as a human only one of them would write Superman.