Today it is my pleasure to welcome Trent to my blog.
Here’s Trent’s take on inspiration. It’s fascinating …. I’m a dreamer too – I expect a lot of writers are – enjoy!
OK, I’ll admit it, I’m a dreamer. Not just any old dreamer, but a daydreamer. More than that, a daydreamer with an insatiable appetite to learn all there is to know about the world around me.
Typically, when we think of a daydream, we imagine someone dreaming about what they’d do if they won the Lotto, or found the perfect person as a mate, or made a great scientific discovery, or got a huge promotion, or… you get the point: people think of daydreams as improbable fantasies about the dreamer’s future.
Not me. (At least not always )
What if this legend is actually true, or if there is a basis in fact for that myth? What if, just beyond that latest scientific discovery that was recently announced, there is a deeper, more disturbing truth? What if I could see what you are thinking?
What if magic is real?
I am constantly on the move. I don’t have a Fitbit because I’m not concerned about the number of steps I do. Walking with people who do 10,000 a day, I know I do far more, at least if I include running.
There is something about walking that makes the creative juices flow. When I was in school and hit an impossible problem, I would just go take a walk and my subconscious would answer it. When I’ve researched some new discovery, or some ancient one that I recently decided to study, a walk makes me think about the topic. Thinking, of course, as I said above, leads to daydreaming.
And I’m a dreamer. A daydreamer.
Do all of my ideas for stories come this way, from a long walk? Of course not. I really enjoy prompts and typically write two flash fiction pieces a week. I think of doing the prompts as exercising my story writing muscles. Beyond the prompts, sometimes a complete storyline just appears in my head out of nowhere. And once I even had the idea for a book from a (real, night) dream (The Halley Branch, which will be the next book I publish). But typically, a longer, more involved work will be written in a series of walks.
A good example of that would be my book The Fireborn. It was born by just the type of daydreaming on a walk described above. I was thinking of history and myth and suddenly something gelled. I had a perfect storyline. As these ideas grew deeper and deeper, I realized I had a book on my hands, not just a short story. Over the next month, before I wrote a single word on “paper” (or electrons), I wrote the entire book in my head. Every time I’d leave the house, I’d pick up on The Fireborn just where I left off. Sure, I changed quite a bit once I started actually dictating it to myself and writing it out, but all of the main ideas were there.
In my opinion, anything and everything can be the source of inspiration for a daydreamer. There is nothing too large or too small. A word, a phrase, a photo or a drawing can often bring out an idea. Sometimes it’s a song, or even just a sound.
I started this blog almost four years ago mostly as a place to promote The Fireborn (I know, it took long enough for me to break down and publish it). Since then I have posted almost 500 works of fiction, from 100-word micro-stories to 8,000-word short stories. I have put up three serialized novels and am working on a fourth. They were all written because I am a dreamer. A daydreamer.
You can catch some of these dreams in my book of short stories Seasons of Imagination. And, of course, there is the longer daydream that I recently put out, The Fireborn.
I hope you enjoy my little daydreams!
Continue reading AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS: INSPIRATION – Trent P. McDonald
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M J Mallon YA Author and Poet 