The Inspiration

When I think of inspiration, the mid-80’s and Chicago plop into my head (if you want to listen, then check out here: Chicago – You’re the Inspiration (Official Music Video) – YouTube)

But today, I do not want to talk about music.  I want to talk about my inspiration when I write my stories.  And for that, I need to give you a little about my history.

From 2015 to 2017, I lived in Abu Dhabi.  Working by day, in the evenings I had started to write on my first full-length novel, New Life Cottage.  Round about the same time, a new writing group emerged, and I joined the Abu Dhabi Writers’ Workshop at their second or third meeting.  Wednesday evenings, we met on the second floor of a popular Café, and our leader, Janet Olearski shared with us some writing-related teaching and then handed us prompts.  There usually were five or six of them: they were words she had picked up from the newspapers, in books, or lines that had just come to her.  We had forty-five minutes to write in companionable silence on one or all of the prompts or on any other ongoing work, and afterwards we were allowed to read what we had written – if we wanted to do so.

There was no pressure.  There was no need to have a finished piece.  Criticism was constructive – if you had nothing nice to say, you did not say it at all.  The group was all about promoting the skills of the individual, it was all about fun and the pleasure of being together and talk about what was important to us: writing!

There were a bunch of us that, work allowing, would be there every week, and others came and went as their interest carried them.  (If you are interested in some of our output, you might want to check out the book of short stories Janet edited for us:  The Write Stuff: Short Stories )

This is my first inspiration – several of my stories were written from prompts; some of these are yet to be posted in the blog (for example, The Food Thief, The Mask, Pest Control).

The stories involving Evi B. are inspired by stories my Grandmother told (The First Death of Evi B., The Kattel).  Grandma will turn 100 later in 2024, still lives mostly on her own with support from outside and has worked till she got sick at 92.  She is an amazing woman and I doubt that I will be as long lasting as her, but that is a different story entirely.

Apart from that, I am inspired by the everyday.  In most of my stories, there is a mundane element or something that has happened to me.  I find it hard to write about characters or situations that do not connect to me – I always say that I have little imagination.  I have to feel at home inside my characters and their thinking for my writing to work.

And sometimes, it is something I see or read, that inspires a story.  Take Lucky for instance.  Here in Germany, there is a location-based crime series.  Most famously on Sunday nights at 20:15, it always starts with a set of eyes.  See those intense eyes and you know it is another ‘Tatort’ (Tatort | Alle Videos und die neuesten Folgen | ARD Mediathek for the list of videos; apologies if outside of Germany you cannot access these).

Shortly after I returned to Germany in 2017, there was one particular ‘Tatort’ (Tatort means crime scene, by the way) that made me dream up Lucky.  In the show, a man is released from jail where he spent his punishment after killing his wife.  A young woman who volunteered for a group re-socialising violent criminals after their released back into society gets killed and the man becomes a suspect.  The Detective interviews him and asks about his relationships with women.  The man replies something like ‘think about it; remember what I was in jail for.  Do you think, women line up to date me?’  I do not remember who murdered that young woman.  But that statement stayed with me.  There also is a saying in Germany, every pot has its lid, meaning that there is someone for everyone.  In which case, that man needed to just look for his best-fit lid.  What if he got together with a woman that also had killed?  At this point, Lucky was borne!

So, basically, just being alive and looking about inspires me to write.  It is as easy or as difficult as that!