Young Writers Society

Omigosh...

The Sphere and the Singer (I'm not currently working on this, but it is one of my favorite "inspiration" stories.) was influenced by a dream I had that involved me trying to save a family of Beatrix Potter bunnies from a bubble of lava in the middle of a Mardi Gras celebration and there was this nameless boy who helped me out. (What can I say? I have weird dreams.) Needless to say, the story line changed a great deal from my dream to actually putting it on paper, but there it was.

I'm really not sure what influenced Ocean of Tears. I just feel as though I have been writing it forever and it has gone through so many changes that I'm really not sure what inspired me to write it anymore. I guess the closest thing I can think of (and this is really only what influenced one of the characters, not the story line) is The Lost Years of Merlin series by T.A. Barron. It helped shape the character of Tobin, but he came in after I had already started writing OoT, so I don't really remember what spawned it at all. Which is sad, since this is my most serious project at the moment and when it is published (*crosses fingers*) I won't have the exciting story with which to dazzle aspiring writers.

My currently unnamed sci-fi/noir project was just influenced by my love of "May/December" romances. I just wanted to write a story where the guy is older than the girl by a bit and thus this convoluted story took shape slowly.

Mutts was inspired by a dream I had (not quite as weird as the other) involving me and a man I hated because of his species (he wasn't human) stuck in a godforsaken wasteland. I wrote two short excerpts based on this idea before I finally stole it and modified it to fit the '100 fic challenge' I found, inserting some werewolf themes.

My Beauty and the Beast retelling (also nameless currently) was inspired by *dun dun* Beauty and the Beast! I love the movie and it is my absolute favorite fairy tale.

Wow, I'm working on a lot of things right now. I need to get back on track with this writing thing. Curse you, Writer's Block!

~GryphonFledgling

My grandma passed away and when and on the way to the funeral, I wondered what it would be like to drive a hearse so I thought up Theodore and then I recycled Joey (Josephine) from an abandoned story and ta-da! I had a weird romance.

Ann Brashares. Seriously.

I read her debut Adult novel, The Last Summer (of You & Me), and I absolutely fell in love with her characters and her dialogue and the setting and her writing style all over again. It's amazinggg. So I tried to imitate her writing style, and I went on a series of epiphanies, and here I am with my own current novel piece. I sort of gave up on trying to mimic her, but I admire the lady as much as I do Sarah Dessen. They are both my inspirations and almost my reasons for writing.

To be honest, the novel I'm working on at the moment started off with the ending. I mean, I had the idea for the end, and I figured it would be a cool thing to write about.

And then I worked backwards, thinking about how this ending could have come about, and working out the plot that way. Once I had a vague idea of it, I made a plan - an entire notepad of bullet points - which I am now trying to get through.

As to what inspired me... I think it could have been the punk-rock music I listened to at the time, and my interests. Those have totally changed now, though.

There was a plot bunny that demanded me to write the current Twilight fic that I'm writing now (those dang bunnies are so persuasive >.<)

I am currently writting a drama piece called Stand Strong. I was looking through the contest forums and there was a certain contest that the creator wanted you to write a story based off of a picture. There was a picture of an abandoned orphanage. It hit me that that's what I wanted to write about so i looked on google and printed off a bunch of pictures of abandoned orphanages and pictures from inside an abandoned orphanage.

I had this weird dream about a princess on a horse riding to her castle and it was a bright and blurry, like in movies when people dream. There wasn't a plot to it, but when I woke up I wanted to write about the characters. I saw this fist sized crystal on the top of the fireplace and knew my book was going to be called The Blue Crystal. I made up this weird name, Ellima and then started to write. My old version was written on blank paper with my handwriting going up and down the page XD. The story is completly different now, but that's what influenced me.

How I ended up here after a few tries I stopped trying to make books of dragons and great big wizards I just understood that it was not my thing. I loved history and I soon got an idea by watching my friends then one Swedish lesson the idea turned into a plan and a name for the main character. The main character's friend got some of my friends attributes and thus I started writing my book the mansion, about a man who lives with a gnome.

I was on a trip to Italy, in which I came up with the fantastic scenery for my novel. After the inspiration from the beautiful landscape around me, the characters just seemed to create themselves. So my new novel was born.

The story I'm currently writing came to me in Literature. We were discussing Picasso, and a student suggested that he started his cubist period because the paintings were easier to do, faster to draw. This was, of course, a really dumb thing to say because... Well, it's Picasso. And that's what the teacher said. But then I started thinking that nobody could really know for sure that it wasn't true. So, thinking about Borges doing made up biographies for Nazis, I decided to write a story about Picasso and the creation of his famous cubist painting, as a result of lots of prostitute sex, a failed romance, a hangover, and wanting to get out of the whorehouse room he's staying at quickly.

My recent piece Heart and Soul was inspired by the song and Sam's wonderful contest. Basically, its about a girl whose sister died a long time ago and to cope with his pain, her father drinks which leads to him abusing her. Soon my MC is encountered by an Angel who helps her through her problems.

Right now I'm writing a story called You Are My Sunshine for Suzanne's contest. It was inspired by the song and its about a boy whose guitar is his God. At a time of political controversies he must pick between death or love.

I was already really crazy about this other plot for this story (which I eventually dropped out of after numerous rewrites) at the time when I thought of it, but I remember it just popped up after trying to think of something to do for an April poetry excerise. It was about this kid that falls asleep one day, the monarch of a kingdom and a collection of royal subjects whom he describes throughout the poem. It turns out he's stuck in this giant snowstorm of light, and Wallace: Duke of Shadows, a manifestation of the person he hates , saves him and as a result, wakes him from his dream.

Then I just took the idea of someone creating a world of their own inside their mind, and made it so the main character was knocked into a coma after being overstressed with lonliness. It still didn't seem that interesting to me, though, mostly because it felt like there was nothing as complex as my other plot I could get out of it. Then, I got this sudden brainstorm one night and thought of an extrodinary plot device to get the inspiration flowing: someone transferring themselves from the outside world and into the fantasy world of Blank, an unusual coma victim. It all pretty much went uphill from there.

I came up with City of the Veen...just by opening a WordPad file and writing random stuff into it. It soon evolved into something I figured I could work into an actual novel series, and I ran with it.

Funnily enough, that's the same way I came up with The Zenith Cycle--I just started writing a story in a WordPad file. Note that the WordPad previously contained the beginnings of a story and was named "Zen"...hence the inspiration for the name (Zenith, however, is pronounced ZEE-nith, not ZEN-ith). It was originally simple the idea for the first novel, Zenith, but I began writing a story involving Alexander (the protag of the second novel) in a different file that I hadn't intended to be part of the Zenith continuity, but then for some reason I can't remember I had a character from Zenith show up in that story, so that's where the idea of the epic truly began to blossom.

The idea for "Curseworker Juan" came from a novel I ultimately scrapped. I started writing it in a notebook (even though I hate handwriting my stories), because I was in China and I was bored. The story that emerged was a very bizarre one centered around the Winter family, in which Juan was a "male escort", to put it PC-ly, and the main character Stephen's younger brother Harold. The actual idea for "Curseworker Juan", a story more Juan and fantasy centered, came to me while I was showering (don't ask, but somehow I come up with a LOT of ideas while in the shower, when I'm not singing).

This short story I wrote called My Sister's Heaven was influenced in the strangest of ways. I wanted to enter this short story contest and was having trouble coming up with an idea. I asked my sister for one but she wouldn't help me so I went into my room and turned my ITunes on shuffle. *Take note here, my sister's music is on my computer*. This song by the Cheetah Girls came on and even though I didn't know the lyrics, something about it when it said "we are sisters. we stand together. for better worse whatever even though we don't look the same" really struck me. So I decided to write the story which has to do with a sister feeling responsible for the other's death. A bit morbid, but it is definitley my favorite story that I've written.

For The Watcher my sister, again, told me to write her a magic book, so I sat down and the idea just blossomed right out of my pen. It was sheer awesomeness.

For The Color of a Heart I started it when I was really angery at my parents for not letting me go out with my friends. It turned into this intense romance, that I have officially rewritten three times because I hated the storyline of the first two drafts (too much of my angst against my parents). This has definitley been the hardest to write though because although I know exactly what I'm going to write for it (the ending, all the random plot twists) I keep hitting writers block. Urgh.

For Serene Chaose I was trying to write a mystery on my computer when this fantasy idea came to me and I had to go with it.

Pretty much songs and random ideas inspire me

For my story, which I am going to change the title, it would have to be my faith in god and my personal want to be strong and stand up to those around me. In truth, it's starting to rub off on me.