“What inspired you to write this book?”
“Where did you get the idea for that?”
“Where can I get inspiration so that I can write something great?”
These are all common questions I’ve heard eager audience members ask professional authors during book events. Most of the time, I see the authors breathe a small sigh in response, look up at the ceiling, blink rapidly, and go into a well-rehearsed monologue about how that’s difficult to say.
I also think it’s difficult to say. Indeed, it can be difficult even to define “inspiration,” never mind identify exactly where it comes from.
It’s tricky because inspiration is both a macro and micro thing. It’s macro in the sense that the material it took to write a book often encompasses the entirety of a writer’s life up until the point of finishing the book, and what you’re reading is actually a series of snapshots as well as long periods of time that composed the author’s very existence. But it’s also a micro thing because there are a few precise sources to which an author can point and say, “Yeah, this thing was really cool (or sad, or traumatic, or enlightening), and what I felt from that led me to write this.”
For those aspiring to write a book, I’m sorry that I can’t give you a better description of inspiration. I’m sure you want to know the inspiration behind a work because you, too, want to put your best foot forward, and you’re simply looking for resources to help you to do that. But the thing is, there is no one, solid resource for inspiration. There is no one, simple answer. Inspiration is something that is different for each individual because each individual is different. Inspiration is an extremely personalized tool and, as such, is not something someone else can necessarily hand you.
Let’s take my book, for example. Just the simple question of “What inspired you to write this book?” can take paragraphs to answer. I can definitely point to the singular moment when I first conceived the idea that would eventually grow into my duology. It was all the way back in 2014. I'd been drawing a fan comic of Attack on Titan, and because I was also super into Frank Miller's Sin City at the time, I was trying to be all edgy and draw everything in black and white with splashes of color. (Yes, I was - as they say - a real noob.) After hours and hours of drawing, I finally got up from my desk, totally sick and tired of black and white, and dragged my feet toward the kitchen. And, as I was passing from the bedroom into the kitchen, during that intersection of transitioning from one room to another, an image struck my brain like lightning out of a clear blue sky.
It was an image of a young, Korean American man around my age (early to mid 20s back then), riding a monster that often appears in my recurring nightmares, and all around the two of them was an explosion of other surreal objects and images that I often see in my dreams.
And everything was in color. Bright and beautiful color.
It was an incredibly inspiring image, especially because the vivid colors contrasted so sharply with the monochrome palette of not only my fan comic but my life back then. I thought to myself, "I need to draw that!" But deep down, even then, I knew that there was a story in that image and that such a brilliant vision couldn’t simply be drawn once and be called “done,” especially when I wasn’t that great of a visual artist to begin with. I already sensed that there were pages of material to be made out of this. It had to be written down. I’d always wanted to write a great book, and this was the great idea that would help me achieve that dream.
So, what was the inspiration behind my books? Well, I guess that moment played a huge part in the books’ creation and so, can be called “inspiration.” But what led to that vision to begin with? What was the inspiration behind that inspiration? After all, not all aspiring writers can just lounge around all day or walk back and forth between the bedroom and kitchen, hoping that lightning will strike.
Well, we have to zoom out to answer that question. One of the reasons that image came into existence is probably because I’ve had vivid dreams ever since I was a small child. I’ve had terrifying nightmares in which I’m eaten alive by huge monsters, shot to death, running away from mass genocides against Asian Americans, listening to a severed head on a platter speak to me, trapped in a room with thousands of large ants crawling all over the furniture in streams of straight and swirling lines, staring at a skull with living eyes that begin to rot before red roses bloom from their sockets….
I’ve had countless episodes of night terrors. I’d wake up gasping or shouting or weeping in bed. I’m grateful to have my husband now, who often comforts me after an episode. I remember how lonely I felt before, when I’d have to curl up and try to tell myself that none of it was real.
Sleep paralysis. I’ve often felt my body freeze up, half awake and half asleep, and watched as ghosts slid in and out of my peripheral vision. Some of the scarier ones would come fully into view as well. One stared down at me with a pitch black face that had no features. I remember the touch of another as it grabbed my ankle and pulled me under the covers as I screamed. I woke up breathing hard.
Insomnia. During my darker years, when life was truly oppressive, I’d sit up late into the night, unwilling and afraid to sleep because everything I was dealing with in waking was hard enough. I did not want to sleep and enter the world of nightmares, where I’d see such frightening things on top of it all. I’d refuse to sleep even when the exhaustion became physical and my body would ache just from being so tired and sleep-deprived. I knew no rest back then.
And if you read my books, you’ll see that all of the above points to some of the more obvious aspects of my books. The world I created, for example, is a very surreal, dream-like one and can be entered only via sleep. There are monsters running amok throughout the world - and yes, some of the monsters you’ll meet in the pages of my books are monsters that I have “really met” in my dreams. Many of the landscapes are also taken directly from my dreams or are loosely based on where I’ve been while sleeping.
There are a lot of subtle aspects of my book that derive from my dreams too, though. The whole concept of changing landscapes in the world, there being different “planes” that characters travel through, and many monsters being shape-shifters are directly derived from the fact that when I dream, things shift and change abruptly. I’ll be talking to someone then turn around and suddenly, I’m in a different dream all together. I, myself, will be one person then a few moments later, I’ll take on an entirely different form, sometimes human, sometimes not, even though I’m still me. There’s also a whole lot of desperation and running around frantically in my books, which capture the feel of most of my nightmares, in which I’m often fleeing for my life.
But where do all these dreams come from, and why did I choose the ones that I did for my books? Well … I dunno. I just kind of chose the ones that I thought were cool or memorable and had fun with it. And who knows where the dreams themselves come from?
Well, I’m sure most of my dreams are simply my imagination echoing the terrors I’ve experienced in real life. My nightmares, in a way, are surreal translations of those terrible, real-life experiences. And from that perspective, my dream life is nothing compared to the real, corporeal life that not only created those dreams but also the greater themes of family, friendship, compassion, and discernment that compose the core of my books. Everything from the broken home I grew up in; the years of hardships and loneliness I endured as I strove to get into a good college and afterward, navigate a white-collar world despite being from a broken, blue-collar family; the lack of money and sometimes food I experienced as a young adult; bullying and harassment I experienced in the workplace; an abusive relationship; the love I found when I met my husband; the friends who helped me pick up the pieces of my life … all of it formed the pillars of my books.
And that’s only for the central, overarching parts of my book. We’ll open a whole new can of worms if you want me to go into the inspiration behind specific scenes or characters. And then there’s all the stuff that I drew from when creating both overarching and specific aspects that I wasn’t even aware of drawing from when I was writing. The subconscious really is a powerful thing, and part of creativity involves entering a state of flow (as I mentioned in my previous post), where anything can happen. The lifetime of exposure to different movies, books, manga/anime, paintings, music…. There are so many different origin points for so many different parts of my book that in the end, it really is impossible to say what, exactly, inspired my work.
I’ve often thought that creating a book is kind of like having a child. This kid is clearly mine and shares many similarities with me. I know how I created this kid. And I know this kid better than anyone else. But at the same time, this kid does a bunch of stuff that’s so unpredictable. I don’t know where on earth he got some of this stuff from. Sure, I created this kid and can tell you things about him that no one else could possibly know. But he is also his own, living breathing being who has a mind of his own and secrets that I’ll never know of. And even though I created this kid, there was so much stuff that all had to align and went into the conception of this one, precious life, all of which I had no real control over and don’t even comprehend on a detailed, blow-by-blow microscopic level. The conception and creation of your child is a wondrous, almost miraculous, thing. Its life is something you know so well and yet, is also so unpredictable and unknowable.
Such is the writing of a book. A book is purposeful and created. You know your own book so well. You can talk about how you created it, how it was inspired. But at the same time, you don’t know a single thing about it or how on earth it even really got here. And it acts out in ways that you sure as heck never intended, for better or for worse.
So, what was the inspiration behind my books? Does it really matter when much, if not all, of that inspiration is not of much use to any aspiring writer? Not everyone has vivid nightmares like I do, and even if they do, they might not want to write entire books based on them. Plus, if you try to write something similar to what I wrote, you’ll simply be written off as a copycat. (Innovation is part of creating success, after all.) And there are so many different points of inspiration, some - if not most - that the creator isn’t even aware of, that to name them all would be to kill the cat indeed.
However, there is one solid piece of advice I can give regarding where to find your own inspiration. The only inspiration you can really take away from other authors is to see how they were brave enough to like what they like, dislike what they dislike, think about it, and funnel it all through their imagination and into a story.
I knew I really wanted to write a book. So, I took things (like dreams) that were both a point of pain as well as fascination to me (and no one else, but who cares about that!) and created a story out of them. Ask yourself what you like and what you don’t like. Can you, at least a little, explain why? Are you sure about it? More importantly, are you excited about it? You don’t have to necessarily be excited in a happy way. You could be drawing from the scarier parts of life or the things you can’t talk about but want to express. That’s where your inspiration lies. That’s the soil from which you will create and grow something marvelous.
It takes soul-searching. It takes guts. And it takes a plunge. You can’t have everything aligned perfectly before you start. People often talk about inspiration like it’s that one thing they need to get rich quick, and sure, there are a good amount of easy, even instantaneous things about inspiration. But you still have to be brave. You have to want it and leap into what you want to explore, and in so doing, you will dive into parts of your mind and heart that you didn’t know was the home to such luminous creatures and terrifying monsters.
And therein lies inspiration.
