Inspiration is a weird topic which we can dwell on far too much, especially in the abstract. “Where do you get your ideas” is something of an infamous question amongst authors, and the answer is usually unhelpfully vague, amounting to “the sum total of my life experiences.” That’s true as far as it goes, and sometimes it’s the only reasonable response for long-term works incorporating disparate elements over a protracted gestation. However, other stories are more directly inspired or have more proximal sources, no matter how we might try to disguise it. Inspiration by great works comes to mind, but I find I am often most inspired by what is executed poorly, not by the peaks of craft and art.
Don’t get me wrong: great works of any kind, but especially examples of the types of stories I like to tell, can be inspiring. Tolkien set a standard for the fantasy genre to which authors continue to aspire. Other works which inspire me to improve my craft, to which I look and think that one day I should like to write as well as that, include Lymond Chronicles, The Dragon Waiting, and more. Most of the time, though, such works inspire me in the abstract, not with specific story ideas. Failure, though, can be a bountiful source of more concrete inspiration, like all the times I see an interesting idea and think I could execute it better or that I would like to see it done differently. Perhaps it is because I feel I have something more to contribute than I do to what is already a masterpiece.
Take, for example, a movie my wife and I recently watched. It managed to be disappointing despite going into it with few expectations, good or ill. At every turn it seemed the writers took the most banal, obvious course. The characters were flat and rather stupid, making obvious errors and not really doing anything but fulfilling the contrived plot. There were several interesting ideas it could have explored, but it ignored all of them, invoked deus-ex-machina solutions, and made nonsensical assumptions. We only finished it because we were tired and didn’t feel like finding something else to watch.
Unlike the art you keep thinking about because of how great it is, I kept thinking about this particular movie because of how bad it is. I wanted it to be done better. The next thing I know, I’m filling notebook pages with a very rough draft of a short story trying to implement some of what I would have liked to see explored, although changed to different characters and context, of course. And, since I’m me, I incorporated another idea I wanted to explore from my recent reading of Parallel Lives.
Perhaps it’s a kind of arrogance that prompts me to look at something like that movie and think I can do it better, but I think of it more like frustration. It’s not that I think my own execution would be perfect or even excellent, but I do have a vision for what could be. That same sense of vision, and frustration with the suboptimal, motivates me in my engineering, my woodworking, and my other hobbies. It’s even why I find estate sales and auctions a bit painful, as I see beautiful furniture in need of a bit of restoration, or damaged machines I could repair, and I despair at the thought they will be trashed or unappreciated, though I have not the time, money, or space to execute my vision for all of them.
This may be another symptom of my peculiar brain, but if you are searching for inspiration you could do worse than looking for what interests you, but for which you can conceive of a better, or simply a different, vision.
