Where do you get your ideas?
As an author, it’s the question I’m asked most. I wish the answer were more interesting and less straightforward, but story inspirations can come from anywhere: a snippet of conversation overheard at the airport; the latest news headline; a distant memory from childhood. But here’s the thing: any observation can be inspiration, but only if you’re in the right headspace to be inspired.
Think about what it means to inspire. The Oxford Dictionary says it’s to ‘fill (someone) with the urge or ability to do or feel something, especially to do something creative’. To be inspired isn’t to be handed a ready-to-write story. Inspiration may begin with something external (the news article, the eavesdropped conversation), but the process from there is internal. You can’t just observe something and process it at face value.
The story comes when you take that idea and play with it. Ask, why is this interesting to me? What if this happens next? Or if this were to happen instead? It requires thinking about how events might impact the lives of the people who inhabit the story. To wonder how those people might respond and the ways those decisions might ripple toward other consequences. In short, inspiration requires a free and open mind. It requires creativity. The magic happens in a part of the brain that is completely different from the routines of daily life.
I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been staring at my screen, fingers perched above my keyboard, struggling to figure out the next scene, only to find the answer once I walk away. I’ve had breakthroughs come to me in the shower, while driving my car on a boring highway, or lying on the gym floor pretending to exercise. It’s fitting that another definition that Oxford provides for inspire is to ‘breath in air; inhale’.
The photo across my Facebook page was taken at Maundays Bay, my laptop open on a chaise lounge, the island of Saint Martin in the distance across bright turquoise water. My husband and I have been coming to Anguilla since 2008 and visit three to five times a year.
We have made close friends on island and think of Anguilla as our home away from home. But I almost always keep a writing schedule on what others would call ‘vacation’. I’ve grown accustomed to fellow hotel guests telling me that life is too short to work so hard. My response? ‘If you knew how many days a year I spend on this island, you’d say life is too short to have a job you can’t do at the beach’.
Anguilla, more than any other place is the world, is my spot to breathe – the air, the breeze, the warmth of the sun, the smells of salt and sea. This wonderful island, with its pristine beaches, turquoise waters and such unbelievably warm and friendly people, feels like entering a completely different world than my usual life in New York. It quiets the parts of my brain that need to shut the heck up to make room for that thing we call inspiration.
Travelling to Anguilla isn’t just about finding the space to breathe into my creativity. It reminds me how fortunate I am to have a life as a storyteller. How blessed I am to be able to create entire worlds for readers to lose themselves in – indeed, to breathe into – as they enjoy their own time to be imaginative.
As I subtly try to scope out what all the other hotel guests are reading, I am grateful that people still read and that books are still an important part of our collective experiences. And absolutely nothing feels as good as spotting one of my own novels in a smiling vacationer’s hands.
