Inspirations
Aug. 26th, 2002 12:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
resonantOnce upon a time, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
giglet did me a favor, and I promised to write her any story she requested. She said, "Do you get good inspirations from songs?" and I blithely told her, "Oh, almost all my stories are inspired by songs."
And then I actually started thinking about it ... what really did inspire most of my stories? And I realized that I was wrong about the songs. This is what the actual breakdown looked like. (I'm not counting my Sentinel stories pre-"Tender" because, er, frankly I don't want to draw any attention to them.)
Conversations: 10
• "Juncture" --julad gave me a first-line challenge.
• "American Way" -- Bone made the comment, in an LoC, that maybe Fraser would like to be Ray. So immediately I started thinking of ways to let him.
• "Reel" -- Someone on some list or other said, "Fraser can't dance." I was sure he could, if I could just identify the right kind of dancing.
• "Tilt" -- For some reason I was talking to anne about how Ray would look playing pinball.
• "A Fine and Private Place" -- I was talking with anne about how early someone could get Fraser and Ray together.
• "Reference" -- I challenged Nestra and Shrift to write a library story, and then I decided to write one myself. I have kind of a thing about library stories.
• "Nuance" --liviapenn's idea. I just glommed onto it.
• "In the Dark" (the tagless shack story) -- I was having a conversation with anne and Livia about tagless stories, which I like a lot better than most people do. One of them said, "But the taglessness usually seems to be there for no reason at all," which is certainly true. So we started talking about good reasons why a story would be tagless. Because it was reported from the point of view of a voyeur who could hear but not see. Because it was an audio recording made by a security device. Or because it took place during a blackout.
• The shack challenge also inspired two non-shack stories: "Housekeeping" (which is basically a shack that grew up to be a three-bedroom house) and "Left" (which was what was left over in my head after I'd finished writing a shack for Ray and Ray).
Music: 3
• "The Teeth of the Hydra" -- T.Rex, "Bang a Gong."
• "Broadway Hotel" -- Al Stewart, "Broadway Hotel."
• "Adorned" -- Third Eye Blind, "Never Let You Go," specifically the spoken stuff at the end: "That girl is like a sunburn."
(Strangely, "Tilt" really was not inspired by "Pinball Wizard.")
Poetry: 3
• "Loving North" -- Kathleen Raine, "To My Mountain."
• "Origin" -- Walt Whitman, "Leaves of Grass."
• "A Fine and Private Place" -- Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress." (Well, actually, the story came out of a conversation with anne, but the poem was the reason I put the first kiss inside the crypt.)
"Fixing" other people's stories: 2
I don't mean I read a bad story and want to make it good; I mean I read a sad story and want to make it happy. I do this a lot. I once spun a whole scenario in my head to give a happy ending to Livia's "Prelude to Winter." If I remember correctly, it involved Ray kidnapping Fraser, taking him off to a cabin someplace, taking his clothes away from him, and refusing to give them back to him for the entire weekend.
I usually don't intend to actually write the "happy ending." It's just a fantasy. But sometimes I end up with something that looks like a real narrative, and then I just go with it.
• "Amends" started out as a fantasy to happy up a totally heartbreaking DS story. I think it was one of Te's.
• "Transfigurations," the HP story I'm working on now, started out as a fantasy to happify one of Shalott's lovely, sad Harry/Draco stories.
Other:
Everybody who's read the story notes knows that "Waking" came from a New Age catalog, "Tender" came out of the dictionary, and "Too Sweet" came from a recipe. If I went back through all my chat logs, I could probably figure out where "Sixteenth of June" and "A Modest Proposal" came from. As for "Thirteen Christmas Traditions," it was written in my pre-chat days, and I have no idea where it started.
(And sooner or later I really will finish a song-based DS story for Giglet.)
giglet did me a favor, and I promised to write her any story she requested. She said, "Do you get good inspirations from songs?" and I blithely told her, "Oh, almost all my stories are inspired by songs." And then I actually started thinking about it ... what really did inspire most of my stories? And I realized that I was wrong about the songs. This is what the actual breakdown looked like. (I'm not counting my Sentinel stories pre-"Tender" because, er, frankly I don't want to draw any attention to them.)
Conversations: 10
• "Juncture" --
julad gave me a first-line challenge.• "American Way" -- Bone made the comment, in an LoC, that maybe Fraser would like to be Ray. So immediately I started thinking of ways to let him.
• "Reel" -- Someone on some list or other said, "Fraser can't dance." I was sure he could, if I could just identify the right kind of dancing.
• "Tilt" -- For some reason I was talking to anne about how Ray would look playing pinball.
• "A Fine and Private Place" -- I was talking with anne about how early someone could get Fraser and Ray together.
• "Reference" -- I challenged Nestra and Shrift to write a library story, and then I decided to write one myself. I have kind of a thing about library stories.
• "Nuance" --
liviapenn's idea. I just glommed onto it.• "In the Dark" (the tagless shack story) -- I was having a conversation with anne and Livia about tagless stories, which I like a lot better than most people do. One of them said, "But the taglessness usually seems to be there for no reason at all," which is certainly true. So we started talking about good reasons why a story would be tagless. Because it was reported from the point of view of a voyeur who could hear but not see. Because it was an audio recording made by a security device. Or because it took place during a blackout.
• The shack challenge also inspired two non-shack stories: "Housekeeping" (which is basically a shack that grew up to be a three-bedroom house) and "Left" (which was what was left over in my head after I'd finished writing a shack for Ray and Ray).
Music: 3
• "The Teeth of the Hydra" -- T.Rex, "Bang a Gong."
• "Broadway Hotel" -- Al Stewart, "Broadway Hotel."
• "Adorned" -- Third Eye Blind, "Never Let You Go," specifically the spoken stuff at the end: "That girl is like a sunburn."
(Strangely, "Tilt" really was not inspired by "Pinball Wizard.")
Poetry: 3
• "Loving North" -- Kathleen Raine, "To My Mountain."
• "Origin" -- Walt Whitman, "Leaves of Grass."
• "A Fine and Private Place" -- Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress." (Well, actually, the story came out of a conversation with anne, but the poem was the reason I put the first kiss inside the crypt.)
"Fixing" other people's stories: 2
I don't mean I read a bad story and want to make it good; I mean I read a sad story and want to make it happy. I do this a lot. I once spun a whole scenario in my head to give a happy ending to Livia's "Prelude to Winter." If I remember correctly, it involved Ray kidnapping Fraser, taking him off to a cabin someplace, taking his clothes away from him, and refusing to give them back to him for the entire weekend.
I usually don't intend to actually write the "happy ending." It's just a fantasy. But sometimes I end up with something that looks like a real narrative, and then I just go with it.
• "Amends" started out as a fantasy to happy up a totally heartbreaking DS story. I think it was one of Te's.
• "Transfigurations," the HP story I'm working on now, started out as a fantasy to happify one of Shalott's lovely, sad Harry/Draco stories.
Other:
Everybody who's read the story notes knows that "Waking" came from a New Age catalog, "Tender" came out of the dictionary, and "Too Sweet" came from a recipe. If I went back through all my chat logs, I could probably figure out where "Sixteenth of June" and "A Modest Proposal" came from. As for "Thirteen Christmas Traditions," it was written in my pre-chat days, and I have no idea where it started.
(And sooner or later I really will finish a song-based DS story for Giglet.)