Steal Inspiration From the Strangest Places
My writing is rarely inspired by reading other writers. Here's why.
In any given year, I’ll read at least a hundred books. I still like the feel of a physical book in my hands. I love the smell of paper. I have thousands of books in storage and I cart around a few hundred in this strange, peripatetic lifestyle I lead.
But this year, I’ve read two books. I haven’t read two books in one year since possibly the womb. Yet, I’ve learned not to force it, not to question it, because there’s always a reason for cleaving and receding. And there’s also the comfort that books are like the lover who sets up shop on your couch and refuses to leave. My books will be there when they need me.
Instead, I watch films and scour art books. At this point, I can say I’ve watched every single true crime episode made in the past decade. My tastes have always veered toward the macabre because it’s what’s familiar. When I was a teenager, I’d watch The Shining when I couldn’t sleep. Now, I often wake in the middle of the night and it’s the lull of horror stories narrated on YouTube that eases me back into slumber.
Many “normal” (I’m loathed to use that word because what is normal, really—but maybe I’ll say people who have suffered from severe trauma, mental illness, abuse) people don’t get it. They flee from that which is dark while I run toward it. But it’s in the dark, the deep dark, where I find my words again. And those words turn into sentences into paragraphs and on it goes.
Lately, I’m revisiting many old horror film favorites and adding in new ones. In one sitting, I watched I Stand Alone (France), The Sadness (Taiwan), Livid (France), Satan’s Slaves (Indonesia) and A Wounded Fawn (U.S.)
Go with me on this for a second.
I have a particular type of horror I prefer to watch. I’ve seen slashers, paranormals, and procedurals and all that jazz, and while they’re cute for a night curled up on the couch, they’re far from artistically satisfying. I know where the story goes. Rarely, do I feel anything.
For me to respond to a horror film or a piece of art (and my tastes run into the surreal), you have to put my heart on pause. The journey has to start in a familiar place and end somewhere utterly foreign. The visuals and how they’re constructed and presented—along with the narrative, and of course, great performances—is where the art lies.
Sound familiar?
You need a confluence of factors to make a story work because every story has been told, the magic is in the retelling. As writers, you not only have to string a good sentence together, but you have to make the reader feel something (even if it’s anger, rage, or disgust), and make them invested. They have to visualize the story while they’re reading it. And finally, the arrangement of words needs to symphonic. The voice has to be singular and the rhythm has to flow.
Sometimes reading can be a distraction or an impediment. Like there is no one way to write, there is no singular source for that spark. You just have to learn how to be surgical, an editor who’s able to pick out what strikes you about something and how you can translate that something into the form that speaks to you. Learning comes from practice and repetition. People forever want a simple formula, application, or hack, but to find your space as a a writer ChatGPT4 isn’t Jesus—it won’t save.
And part of it requires being observant, which is tricky in a world where we’re subsumed with information. Over the past few years I’ve become disciplined about how much information I let into my life. I’m a gatekeeper for my own sanity and I set aside space for curiosity. For asking myself—what do you like about the thing? Why do you like the thing? What about it moves you? How is the thing made? And is there a way I can massage and manipulate the thing to something of my own?
When I watched The Sadness (which is disturbing and gruesome, but is brilliant thematically—read the reviews) I’m constantly reminded of using Trojan Horse techniques in writing where, on the surface, the story is about one thing, but its execution beguiles you, makes you realize it’s about many things. And the beauty is that depending on who encounters the art what the story is about means something completely different.
I’ve been publishing professionally for decades and I still need to come back to basics—is my story one note? Am I forcing an agenda on the story, or do I create characters that take the story in unexpected places where the layers feel natural?
While watching I Stand Alone (for which one fuckwit “friend,” reported my IG post as harmful and pulled the let’s trigger social media to send a “a friend is concerned you may need help message,” which prompted me to remove every single follower from IG because many people are shit). But, digression.
While watching the film, I was in awe of how a filmmaker managed to make a repugnant man’s interior point-of-view interesting enough to hold me for 90 minutes.
Did I think the main character of the film was a vile human being? Of course, I did. Was I reminded of the importance of point-of-view in writing, and how interiority can reveal more than what a scene suggests? Absolutely, habibi. Because how someone acts in a scene interacting with people while there’s an interior POV running not only gives you insight into the character but also tells you more about the character than they themselves know based on how other characters play off them in the scene, etc.
I was reminded of how key interior vs. exterior spaces are for a character.
Finally, watching A Wounded Fawn was an intellectual delight—one rarely ignited in American horror. The setup of grounding a serial killer’s (whose misogyny is off the charts) latest prey with the myth of The Wrath of Erinyes and the Furies, who are the goddess of wrath and justice (this is an insightful take on the film, with spoilers). Setting aside the on-the-nose feminist takes, rarely do I see Greek mythology and art infused so seamlessly into a story that, without it, veers toward every other serial killer flick.
But this film was deliberate and different in how they used female artists to undermine a man’s insecurity. The film opens with a quote from Surrealist artist and writer, Leonora Carrington: “I suddenly became aware that I was mortal and touchable and that I could be destroyed.” While she’s referring to her treatment in asylums in the 1930s and 40s, the quote in context of the film we’re about to watch revisits the pain and torture Carrington depicts, but in a remote cabin outside of New York.
It took me decades to find my voice and style and be bombastic and confident about it. And part of that style is creating air on the page by imbuing my work with other forms of art, when relevant. It could be in the form of movie quotes, song lyrics, newspaper clippings, poetry and art references, historical context—you name it. I didn’t get there overnight.
In fact, a spark ignited in my 20s when I was in graduate school and I first read Don Delillo’s White Noise. While everyone was prattling on about the plot, I was thinking: that’s so cool how he seamlessly wove in radio reports and television voice-overs in the narrative and how that inclusion rendered another layer of meaning. For me, it’s a reminder that while I may create a specific world for my characters, they still exist in the confines of the real world where we’re surrounded by visuals, sounds, texts, smells, textures, what have you. It can be revelatory for not only the character by making them unique, but it adds another layer of context and connection for the reader.
I spotted that in my 20s and thought it was cool. I played around with it in my first book with not much success and it was just practice and having an ear (I read all my word aloud) to know when it started to work and feel authentic rather than insufferable.
For me, storytelling is a tapestry, a beautiful arranged mess of things, and it’s my job to bring all the mess together.
After I finished the film, I wasn’t necessarily running to the computer to start a story, but something is festering, which I know to be a good thing. And it’s now that curiosity takes over—hmm, let me learn about Leonora Carrington. Let me revisit some of the Greek myths. Maybe there’s something in there that will be the seed for what’s next.
Many people don’t know this but early drafts of my second book were heavily influenced by Goya’s Black Paintings and Caravaggio’s art. Both depicted the terror I wanted to convey in the story, and in particular with Goya’s Saturn, a terror I sought to depict between a parent and child.
In the end, being observant and curious can take you to the unexpected. And the work is absorption, self-reflection, analysis, and practice. So while I have studied other writers in how the construct their stories and all the technical bits, my inspiration lies outside of the written word.
TL;DR: OPEN YOUR EYES.
This is really lovely -- I keep trying to include pop culture and other art forms in my writing, but it's very hard to make it work. My profs keep telling me that I can't use any song lyrics because of copyright, and I'm like, welll..... there goes talking about high school.
Another brain teaser! It astonished me how you take stories apart into elements I never knew existed. Brava!
Hugs and love,
Linda