Fantasy Authors: Find Inspiration Everywhere
Where do writers find inspiration? Especially fantasy authors? For some, writing a book is listening to a wild tale being spun by some part of your mind and frantically forcing your hands to jot it down. Others methodically plot out each chapter, and even each scene within a chapter, so that the actual writing of the story is little more than drafting prose to connect the ideas of an outline.
But where do these ideas come from? What’s the inspiration?
I thought of these questions after a trip to New York City earlier this year. I like traveling because it jolts me out of my routine. In a new environment, my mind wanders. Or I guess I allow it to wander more and think about different things. I ask questions that don’t normally occur to me in the course of everyday life.
In NYC, I took advantage of what the city has to offer, especially when it came to new experiences. And one of those experiences was a visit to the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Anybody who knows me knows that I am the furthest thing from a fashion icon. My knowledge of fashion largely comes from two places: watching three or four seasons of Project Runway and overhearing the occasional fashion reel playing on my wife’s phone.
If you get the chance, the museum is fantastic (and free). Just look at the photo atop this post. Are those not the most badass shoes you’ve ever seen? They are Ceryneian Hind shoes by artist Masaya Kushino, inspired by a large female deer from Greek mythology, according to the little plaque in the museum (the antlers on the shoes are resin, not from a real animal). To me, these shoes look like they would be worn by a dark queen in a fantasy novel that I would crawl over glass to read.
Aside from museums, walking up and down the streets of New York City is an experience in and of itself. If you want to know what it would be like to walk into a major city in a fantasy realm full of people from all over the world, saunter down the streets of NYC. It is a rich experience of smells, sights, and sounds. Food carts carry Middle Eastern cuisine on one side of the street and Latin American delicacies on the other. Families speak every language on the planet, not to mention accents from typical New Yorker to southern drawls to midwestern nice. And looking around, it is easy to see art deco skyscrapers butting up against gothic-inspired churches across the street from a modern glass-paned office building. If that isn’t inspiration for fantasy cities, I don’t know what would be!
For bibliophiles, forget the lions at the main branch of the New York Public Library. Instead, head over to the Jefferson Market Library (425 Avenue of the Americas). The Victorian Gothic structure, originally built as a courthouse, looks like a church. Huge stained glass windows (by English glass artist Charles Booth) give the space a divine, almost spiritual, atmosphere dedicated books, literature, and reading. It is like walking around a temple dedicated to the writers we grew up adoring — those who inspired us to create worlds and characters that speak to the next generation of writers.
I normally write from the couch in my living room. Sometimes on my back porch. But the last time I was in New York, I lugged my laptop around the city and wrote in a few different places. It was incredible. Inspiration was everywhere. It was a joy to immerse my senses in places full of beauty, diversity, and energy.
