It’s common for new writers to ask veterans where they get their ideas. There are a million answers to this question and also no answer. Every writer has a different process because we are each observe and are inspired by different things. In a post on CrimeReads, Lara Thompson discusses how she got her ideas…for murder.
“As writers we are told to write what we know, to mine our own emotional experience so that our characters might rise up off the page and cling to the reader as full-bodied, living, breathing souls,” Thompson says. “But what happens when we haven’t experienced something, when we have no idea what it might be like to murder someone or to suffer the most violent of deaths?”
Thompson uses films, photographs, books, paintings, architecture, and other people for inspiration. The elements that inspired her novel One Night, New York were
- Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932). “When murder and mayhem look this fun, it’s no wonder the film was banned in five states as well as a number of cities including New York, Seattle and Chicago (where the film is set),” says Thompson. “It’s the craziness that gets me every time I watch it – the unadulterated horrifying fun of it all.”
- Their First Murder (photograph by Weegee). “The photograph is arresting and unsettling and somehow manages to visualize one of the most obvious, yet lesser-discussed, aspects of murder – the distasteful fact that many of us are fascinated, if not excited by it,” Thompson explains. “Humans are transfixed by the very thing that they are most terrified of and this single image manages to embody this sensation in all its uncomfortable, magnetic violence.” You can see the photo here.
- Perfume (Patrick Suskind). “Perfume is one of the few books that has continued to surprise and repulse me since I first read it two decades ago,” Thompson says. “I am still awed by its capacity to evoke the horror and the stench and the delicious, disgusting, derangement of murder.”
- Automat and Nighthawks (Edward Hopper). Edward Hopper’s New York diner series “aches with isolation and yearning, with lonely individuals in almost empty cafes thinking, dreaming, possibly scheming,” Thompson writes. “The images are ripe for verdant imaginations to fill in the gaps around the edges, to wonder about who these people are, to insert backstories and desires and motives. Wild minds thrive amidst their contemplative desolation.” Nighthawks and Automat can be viewed online.
- The Empire State building. “I still struggle to believe something so high (1,250ft) was built between 1930 and 1931, at the start of the Great Depression, when a home entertainment box called a television had only recently been mass produced,” Thompson says.”But for all the hope that the building suggests, it has also been marked by death.”
