Where do you get inspiration for your writing?

Dragons, fantasy, anarchism, and muscular women with large breasts. Also hot elf men, in any media.

Anime, manga and Videogames (main Jrpgs)
My favorite stories that I feel have been the best characters and writing that I've felt are what shaped my decisions of making a story.

Notably Hunter x Hunter and Bleach do inspired me a lot for my main story. But it has soul and even references from tons of things I've seen.

Dark Souls games have shaped me a lot as well!

Inspiration.

When I read, I get a sort of movie running in my head. So for me, writing is the reverse process. I daydream a scene I like, which is of course a little movie in my head. When I sit down to write what I've been imagining, I'm just typing out describing the little movie in my head. But that's just how I write. The inspiration can be anything. The *strangest* inspiration ever? Okay, here goes. I'm a classical music composer (another hobby) and when I'm working on a track, some image will *pop* into my head. Once that happens, that imaghe is now locked in and never changes. I compose towards that image, if it makes any sense.

So anyways, the image was this wide muscular guy. In armor, on an armored horse. The music was heavy and epic sounding, so he was this big heavy guy. Like, Conan the Barbarian sort of warrior. Another part of it, made me think of horses charging and galloping. So, that music image was this guy in armor was charging a line of enemy and just driving through them. Another track was more delicate and intricate, but after that first epic hero guy, what was this. I saw somehow women in armor, tall ones, fencing. The men in their culture were like brutes with swords. They had been taught to *fence* with the footwork and everything by a master swordsman. A slow, sweet track sounded like a love theme, so one of the women fencers, was his love interest.

When I was done with the five track demo, I listened to it for hours on repeat. I started writing to it. I wrote the entire thing,m to that 5 track demo on constant repeat. I mean, I'm not aware of any other novel that has its own soundtrack, LMAO.

that was my coolest inspiration ever. So I can tell about my worst inspiration ever, its only fair. On some website we have a little authors thread. The guys there are kind of brutal, but whatever. There's nothing to them except RR and I wasn't on it, I was on MQ. I wasn't a web novel fan, I'm on WN sites just because I need somewhere to be until I can get *something* going to get noticed and convert to amazon KU. They keep beating it into me and others head. :

"Dude. Keep doing your trad pub attempts, but you'll never get any readers like that. You *got* to write on meta, dude. You *got* to write tropes that are hot. You don't do that? You will *never* get noticed on WN sites."

and the only "trope" I could get my head around, was Isekai. (I can't imagine doing the video game stats novel thing) But for such a *shit* inspiration, I mean get real. what can I write, that people read. Oh, here I'll try this one. But I got into the story and I'm actually enjoying the work on it now, which surprised me. I'm basically trying to find ways to put "what I do" into a "webnovel format". And isekai was the first one I could get anywhere with it. My aim (hope?) is that not being an expert on WN tropes would maybe let me me original. Who knows.

My smut and fetish erotica I made some of that, but there's no inspiration to it. Other than characters and some kind of plot, you just pick a fetish and go erotica. my "trad pub" novels are the ones I spent the most time on, really. But that's using existing characters I now know intimately. Each book had something that would make the next one so there's less inspiration and more perspiration involved there.

A long time ago, I was watching a documentary on alien abductions. I was struck by the idea. This isn't aliens. Carl Sagan himself was interviewed in the documentary and he himself said. When you look at these abductions? I find it stgrange that the things done to these people, is the kinds of things humans do to other humans they capture in captivity. And that got me off and writing a story. It was humans doing the abductions. SO how do they do it, why are they doing it. Blah blah.

Inspiration can come from anywhere, or it can be forced or derivative. some of my *best* novels, were just me trying existing characters out as a writing exercise. can I do this? I'll writer a chapter and see if I can do this. Then I couldn't quit, the damn plot wrote itself. Then some that I *tried* the hardest, even I don;t like them as much. You never can tell, and myu inspiration is all over the map.

For me inspiration comes from music. Not even a specific kind. I can just put on a song and it'll just trigger visualization.

Frustration. I found myself getting annoyed at how characters in some of my favorite stories behaved. Then I thought about how I wanted these characters to behave, and that became an MC.

RadicalMongoose13 said:

For me inspiration comes from music. Not even a specific kind. I can just put on a song and it'll just trigger visualization.

Click to expand...

definitely. Any song I like triggers a sort of video of images in my mind, and it definitely sticks. its to the point that when sometimes i finally saw the video i didn't know existed, it kind of ruined it for me. that wasn't how I saw the song in my head. I know thats silly, but you prolly know what I mean.

TinaMigarlo said:

definitely. Any song I like triggers a sort of video of images in my mind, and it definitely sticks. its to the point that when sometimes i finally saw the video i didn't know existed, it kind of ruined it for me. that wasn't how I saw the song in my head. I know thats silly, but you prolly know what I mean.

Click to expand...

Absolutely! I know to some people that might sound silly, but take for instance the song "My Goddess" by The Exies. I can't hear that song without picturing my Second Age story. ?

This may be random, but I get most of my ideas when I'm taking a dump or when I'm just walking with my head fixated on the ground. Because only at these times does my brain go to its own world and I just start imagining random things whoch weirdly inspires me to make a story out of it. Sometimes it's just some series I watch or read, and I think about how else it could get better. For example, I was getting a lot of recommendations on watching 10 Dance (haven't watched it yet), but the concept is basically about 2 men dancing, and I thought,,,yk how about like in the show it's like a couple dance thing, what if it was an aerial act or something?

What if it were a guy who was going to perform his biggest show ever, and his aerial act partner died that day? He goes to perform anyway but that's when the male lead comes...

Anyway I could start writing a novel on this right now, and I plan to but yeah, that's how I get inspired. It clicks and happens randomly. You could give me any topic and I'll twist it to something lmao

I also get inspired from listening to epic OSTs like those from Nick Pheonix, Gregory Tan and my favorite Two Steps From Hell. The musics just start creating a whole scene on my head when I listen to it so that inspires me a lot. This is especially helpful when I'm writing fight scenes.

I draw inspiration from other novels I have read, or games that I've played. As long as you make it your own, I don't see a problem drawing inspiration from others!

I'll be minding my own business and suddenly my Muse who I have since visualized so I can give a face to my tormentor will just run in and slap me in the face with a fish of ideas and run off giggling "have fun with that, loser!"

So I don't get inspiration, inspiration gets me when I least expect it.

when I'm actually trying to build off an idea I get hit with most of that is just working through the logic and emotions and thinking about what the characters would feel. For instance recently there was a talk about God and the character was reflecting on how they disliked a prayer they were given and they deemed it to patriarchal but their friend asked them to reflect on it and they realized it was something different that was bothering them. And so forth and so forth following the character logic.

Tales of Eternia was my very first influence on writing original fiction.

Worthy39 said:

Specifically, do you take any inspiration from other stories or fiction? These days, it's almost impossible for a story to have zero inspiration or influence from another one with how many there are, and that's not a bad thing in my opinion. Personally, I took a bit of inspiration from Bleach in creating the system for one type of magic, but other than that I didn't take any inspiration from other fiction that I can think of off the top of my head.

Click to expand...

From everything: the stuff I read, watch, play, and experience even.

That's why, whenever I'm in my writing 'break,' I go around looking for inspo. Sometimes, when it doesn't work, I re-read my finished stories, and out comes my new idea, just like yesterday. Re-read my OyasumiSe7en drafts, and now, I have a new plan on writing/executing my 3rd volume for Oyasumi.