It is that time of the month again! Come join us insecure writers as we forge a path towards our dreams. The main point of the group is to connect, reassure, and support your author journey, no matter what it looks like. We meet on the first Wednesday of every month. Come on in!

The co-hosts we should offer our thanks to for June are Victoria Marie Lees, Sarah Foster, Natalie Aguirre, and C. Lee McKenzie! Go check in on their comment sections and add something if you feel so inspired.

And speaking of inspiration: this month’s question prompt is: Do most of your story ideas come from one place (the news, dreams, etc.) or do they hit from all over the place?

This is a tricky question, because my story inspirations come from everywhere and nowhere, from one specific place and then again from all the places, at one moment in time and all at once.

Did that help? Didn’t think so.

Look, let’s be brutally honest here. Authors, as a whole, live in a half-unreal world ALL THE TIME. Fictional people fill our brains with conversations. Interesting, exciting scenes play out behind our closed eyelids whenever we get the slightest bit bored. Fantasy worlds and concepts capture our imagination. We hear voices we’ve made up ourselves, create conflicts out of perfectly ordinary situations, try to pin down the inaudible and the intangible into something solid. And this happens sleeping or awake. Reality is, for all intents and purposes, optional for us. In the midst of all this noise, pinpointing the exact genesis of a story idea or the specific birth of one character is like grasping one tiny pebble from a rushing torrent of ideas.

Oh look, YET ANOTHER story idea popping its little head up

Basically, being a writer means there are plots and ideas and half-formed notions in the back of your mind for literal YEARS and it all combines with current ideas and interests into this constantly-bubbling soup. Inspiration Idea Soup. It definitely burns your fingers when you try to fish out one specific idea nugget.

In the middle of writing a story, I’ll take a creativity break and start another story (just a little drabble, short fiction . . . oh no now it’s 19K words and growing), and that’s without considering the fifteen other scribbled ideas waiting their turns impatiently in my notebooks, trying to shove their way in the front of my brainspace when I need it for the first story I just took a little break from. But where did they all come to pester me from? Well, all over.

My most recent superhero series came from a ‘favorite tropes’ discussion I’d had with other bookworms on Instagram. Enemies to Lovers, of course, came up as one of the top contenders. Everyone loves a good spatting antagonists to hopelessly besotted plotline. For some reason superheroes leapt to mind. Probably I had just recently watched the final Avengers movie, that was a 2019 thing right? Several years before this I read (and ADORED) the novella Superior, by Jessica Lack  and I think that novella added to the idea soup. Also I love the movies Megamind and Deadpool, and writing a protagonist in those veins has always tempted me.

Anyway, all of that mushed together and got me thinking . . . what if? What if two enemies in a superhero universe fell in love? The idea caught me hard and I started plotting it out. Who are the antagonists in a superhero universe? The villains. Even better, a supervillain. Having a superhero fall for a supervillain seemed too obvious, plus I’m fairly sure it’s been done already (?) So . . . what about a sidekick. Oooh, yes, a sidekick. Obviously, to be the loyal partner and not the main event, my sidekick would be considered kinda weak. Not too “super”. But, of course, narrative expectation told me the sidekick had hidden depths and more power than the big name heroes would like to admit. That gives me both a mystery to slowly unfold, and a motive. And my supervillain would definitely have a tragic past, because plausible morally-grey character motivation. Every time I reached the next plot point, I asked myself what comes next? What makes my supervillain A Bad Guy, but not too bad? What power could my sidekick have which seems harmless at first glance, but is actually pretty threatening? What would attract a supervillain to a sidekick, and vice versa? Coming up with fun hero and villain names was a bonus, and I also got to throw in kissing on a Ferris wheel ride, murderous nanobots, secret identities, public naughty behavior, mother issues, kidnapping, and a ton of sneaky callbacks to superhero movies.

And then, of course, I created side characters. And spent a lot of time thinking about those side characters. Which led to more “what if?” questions. I wrote a scene with some peril for my supervillain and sidekick caused by an oceanic superhero messing up their cute date at the pier. Making the superhero have oceanic powers was pretty spur of the moment, I just needed to place my main characters in danger and force them to work together to solve it. But oops, now I have a superhero with oceanic powers and my little hamster wheel of inspiration is going. What if he fought a really cool villain, one who was scary looking and dark and powerful? Like Ursula, if she actually was down to bite people and not just sing snarky songs in a smoky voice. Where did that villain come from? How did she end up half octopus and half human? If she’s part ocean creature, she must love the ocean. Right? And of course our superhero loves the ocean, given his powers. If that’s the case and they have something so fundamental to their identities and powers in common . . . why are these two fighting at all?

And that’s how writing a book goes, at least for me. It’s a bit like . . . tossing stepping stones into a river boiling with ideas. Each stone brings me closer to crossing. Sometimes I have to haul a stone out and begin again, and I generally have to use dynamite to blast a bunch of stones for the climax, but eventually I do get to the other side.

Does this method seem familiar? Or sound completely nuts? What stepping stones do you use? Tell me about your process.