What Inspires Your Writing?

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

I’ve been working on posts for my blog tour for Beleaguered that starts next week and realized that in two of them I wrote about inspiration:  what book/s got me hooked on romance (and ultimately inspired me to write romance) and what inspired me to write Time Enough to Love, of which Beleaguered is the final installment. Its easy to pinpoint what sort of things inspire me to write and there is quite a variety.

A lot of times music has inspired specific stories.  The most blatant instance is my erotic novella 7 Days of Seduction.  The moment I heard and deciphered the lyrics of Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night,” I knew I had to write a story about a girl who got so wasted at a party she couldn’t remember what happened to her the night before.  The song suggests things that the girl notices the next morning–such as pink flamingos in pool, a guy passed out on a barbeque, and a memory of a ménage a trois.  I incorporated all of these things into my novella, and had a blast writing it.

My current WIP, To Woo A Wicked Widow, was also inspired by music:  The Weather Girls’ “It’s Raining Men.”  I started wondering what would be the equivalent of “raining men” in the Regency period for women.  Men had their clubs where they congregated, but women weren’t allowed in them.  So I thought my women should form a club of their own and because widows had a little more leeway with their behavior at this time, I made them widows of the Battle of Waterloo, where thousands of men were killed on one day.  So all these women were made widows at the same time and would come out of mourning at the same time, ready to make The Widow’s Club a “let’s get a little action” type of club.

I’ve also been inspired by television programs.  A History Channel episode on the Bubonic Plague gave me the plot for Time Enough to Love.

While riding on a Metro train in Washington, DC, a chance thought that the best conflict for a woman going on a deserted island fantasy vacation would be to find her ex-husband there sparked my erotic romantic comedy Almost Perfect.

Other books have inspired my stories as well.  Mary Balogh’s  A Precious Jewel, sparked the third book in my House of Pleasure series, Only A Mistress Will Do, now a WIP.  In Ms. Balogh’s book her heroine has become a working member of a brothel and there was one sentence about her first week as a prostitute being something she refused to think about.  That one sentence made we want to know what those circumstances would be like for a lady of good family to be reduced to prostitution and what would happen in her first encounter with a customer.

So there are some of the things that have inspired my writing.  What inspires yours?

Filed under: Craft