Inspiration or Lack Thereof: Part 1
What inspires you to write? More specifically, what inspired your story?
I’ll be honest—I had to look long and hard for inspiration for mine. After spending all of my school years writing essays, poems, and short stories, I really wanted to write a novel someday. In college, one odd professor gave us an assignment to write our own obituary. Mine (of course!) started out: “New York Times Best-Selling Author Jane …” I know. Dream big, right? But I had no clue what those best-selling books would be about. Fast-forward about 15 years. I had just quit teaching to stay home with my kids, was about to have a new baby, and I thought: Hey! This is the perfect time to start writing that novel! (I’ll discuss how silly and naive that thought was later). As it happened, this was smack in the middle of the Harry Potter and Twilight craze, so I figured I wanted to stay away from wizards and vampires, but I really loved the concept of mythical beings. Plus, one of the last things I did as a teacher was a novel unit with Tuck Everlasting—one of my all-time favorites. I was intrigued by the idea that immortality on earth wouldn’t be all it’s cracked up to be, so I headed down the Google rabbit hole in search of an immortal mythical being I could adopt.
Angels/demons? Nah. Greek gods? They’ve been done. So much. But wait—this is true of the Olympians, but what about the lesser known ones? And—this was my burning question—if they’re immortal, what might they be up to these days?
That’s when I stumbled on Thanatos, Greek god of Death. His twin brother is Hypnos, god of Sleep. And then there are a busload of other siblings: Doom, Strife, Discord, Fate, Deceit, Murder, Scorn, and more. Can you just imagine the family dysfunction here?? Total story fodder.
Enter Zach Smith, AKA Thanatos, the once-but-now-not-so-much formidable, former Greek god of death, and my MC (main character). He likes to think he’s still intimidating, but I kinda love him.
So, how was it with you? Where did your idea come from? I’d love to hear about it!