IWSG May Blog Hop – Inspiration

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Where does my inspiration come from? Here’s a few places:

  1. Music.

Music is by far my biggest muse. It’s so influential to me it gets a mention in my author bio. When I say I obsess over out of control playlists, I’m not kidding. I even have a scale of measurement for how strong, long, or writable a story is based on playlist length. Short playlist = no idea. About 50 songs = decent idea! 100 or more = we have a novel buds! Then there’s epic playlists exceeding that number, like my moth novellas, my Alice in Wonderland retelling, Masks series, and Pyotr book, the latter of which is, no joke, over 500 songs. This is incredibly appropriate to be the longest playlist by far, and I anticipate Pyotr to be a duology with both books exceeding 90k words.

  1. Media.

Other books, TV, movies, anime, video games. Sometimes a tiny thread of inspiration begins from something very small, a what if, an interesting line, a favorite character. I’m one to draw parallels to the media I’m consuming at the time I’m working on a WIP. Some of my biggest inspirational media have been: Persona 5, The Ancient Magus’ Bride, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, and Twilight. I’m big on retellings, and have several retellings drafted or on the WIP docket, so classic books are also a big inspiration, as well as an easy source of ideas for Easter eggs and other tidbits to include in the story.

  1. Research on hyperfixations.

Research informs and inspires a great deal of my writing and world building. For example, I love moths and cryptids, so when I’m researching potential stories, everything from animal habits and environment to cryptids traits and lore can influence the traits and character names and settings of my stories. The first bits of inspiration for my Contemporary Cryptids series came from the idea that there are different types of moths, therefore there could be different types of mothpeople. From there, looking into the mating habits of moths inspired the idea of a moth mating festival/rave/party.

There are so many little Easter eggs I doubt any one person could point out every single one!

I think this is one of my favorite things about writing, how it all comes together from little bits to make its own unique thing full of dimension!

What are your sources of inspiration? Anything different from me? I’d love to know! Drop a comment or come interact with me on social media, @AmaraJLynn.

Check out the rest of the participants in the blog hop here!

13 thoughts on “IWSG May Blog Hop – Inspiration”

  1. Welcome to the IWSG! I love how you determine the viability of a story by the length of a playlist. That’s fantastic! I didn’t even think of music as an inspiration honestly. I think sometimes I get inspiration from a specific song, but for the most part I can’t listen to anything but instrumental music while I’m writing. Being a musician, you’d think it’d be a main source of inspiration for me!

    I definitely pull from other media as well. I don’t read a lot so a lot of my ideas about how to write a story come from “how would this look as a movie?” Which may or may not be a good idea, but here we are.

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  2. 🙂 Another musically inspired author here. However, I don’t take it quite as far. It was interesting to see your scale on the number of songs and the writability of the story. Sometimes I can’t find music to encapsulate the character or story, and that always worries me. I’ll push through it though.

    And yes on hyper fixations! Little things get under my skin and become the basis for ideas all the time.
    Here’s a link to my IWSG post today: https://www.charitybradford-riverford.com/post/finding-my-voice-again-may-iwsg

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  4. Welcome to the IWSG, Amara Lynn! You have such a pretty website, and when I saw your photo, you reminded me so much of my niece Lisa. I learned something new from you, the word cryptid. What a fun genre to write in! I’ve actually written a short story on a cryptid (It still needs a lot of work). I just didn’t know it. I am fascinated with selkies, and my short story features them. Kudos to you if you can write a short story in 50 songs. I am much slower than that. I have out of control photographs, probably 130,000 plus. I often take photos for a story I’m writing or might write. Music is a big inspiration for me as well. I haven’t designed playlists as such, but YouTube music has me figured out. I am addicted to music. Wishing you lots of fun and learning as you write.

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  5. Welcome to IWSG, Amara. I’m with you, music is vital to my writing journey. I listened to Dire Straits while I wrote Kiss of the Assassin. I listened to Jann Arden while writing Matowak. I can’t imagine writing without music. Happy IWSG Day. Hope you enjoy yourself. IWSG has a lot to offer. Namaste.

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  8. Your post is an inspiration for me! How do you get inspired by music? It was wonderful reading about your stories depending on the length of the playlists. That’s unique.
    Welcome to IWSG. It’s my first time posting here, too.

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