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Inspiration

Martin_

Adventure Seeker
This is something I just started to think about. All fan fics are inspired by the show but it's usually not the only thing. Writers get inspiration from everywhere and for different reasons. So this is for those of you that would like to share your thought on hey the came to be.
For example:
My fan fic (which currently barely counts as one so far) was inspire by the pokemon movie showing lucario but what inspired me to start writing it was a series of books that I finished reading that was centered around an alternate world war.

Anyone care to share?

(Sorry if I'm violating any rules here but I haven't gotten to reading them yet...)
 

Kutie Pie

"It is my destiny."
I think you're okay. You're just asking where we get our inspiration.

Well, I mainly get it from everyday life. Sometimes, just opening a book or listening to music makes a plotbunny pop up. But for my particular story, it came to be from a picture I drew sometime last year. Then came the idea of wanting to write a story that dealt with pure love (because honestly, stories like that are hard to find) and help bring a little "refresh" in the romance genre.

Honestly, however, how this story came to be the way it is today escapes me. There are times I am writing, and all of a sudden, I read it over and go "What in the world did I just write?" because of symbolisms I'm oblivious to. I've convinced myself I'm not actually "writing" it out, it's being put into my head and I just type it out.

And since then, I'd get inspiration from reviews and just by sitting in church or class and learning something that would end up working well with a certain scenario I'm on. Honestly, I knew I was a good writer, but I figured it would have taken me many, many years to come up with a plot this complex and so deep. Because really, what 18-year-old would come up with something like this? It's rather incredible.

But yeah, that's my inspiration. Everyone gets theirs from other places, we're all unique that way.

EDIT: Yay, finally a rank up ^^! It's pretty...
 

Dragonfree

Just me
Morphic was inspired by an article in a science magazine about gene splicing in animals. The Quest for the Legends was inspired by the first trainer fic I ever read. Needless to say, their respective plots don't have anything to do with the inspirations; those were just the basic seeds that made me go "hm, writing a Pokémorph/trainer fic might be fun."
 

RoflLuxRay

Pokemon Physiologist
Well...

Inspiration comes from everywhere, it can come from looking out your window at a breathtaking mountain or something you ran across today. I believe inspiration is everywhere, you just have to take it.

As for myself, on my fic Kyle Miller's Life and Warfare, I took the inspiration from my passion for Police novels and modern Mexican drug dealing, spiced up with Pokemon rangers and a romantic touch. It can even come from watching a movie and saying: I like that idea, how can i transform it into my own version of it??

Well, inspiration is quite a large subject... And that's my small grain of sand
 

GalacticMagmortar

Aspiring Author
I got the inspiration for 'Silverti - Unity is Golden' from the storyline from Pokemon Black and White. It's simply the best storyline in Pokemon right now, besides PMD.

I have also been inspired by friends and books series like the Pendragon Series.

Well, that wasn't much, but okay. :D
 

JX Valentine

Ever-Discordant
Science, art, and alcohol. As with all things in life.

QFT.

Seriously, though, yeah. Kutie Pie pretty much sums up the basic information sources I've got. A lot of the times, it's just from everyday life. I listen to music, I read something, I go for a walk, and suddenly, it just hits me. And I play with it in my mind a little bit and tease out this or that, and there's an insta-story right there.

Many times, though, I tend to get inspiration from either things I watch or the music I listen to. AEM, for example? Spawn of way too many B-rated sci-fi films and fueled by lots of symphonic metal and Elfen Lied. I've got another fic that I've yet to finish, meanwhile, that was inspired by this song. Things like that, basically, where I just sit down, watch something, and then something just randomly clicks out of nowhere for me.

Obligatory PSA: Do not use alcohol for inspiration, kids. You will regret it in the morning. I should add this to my author's profile or something.
 

Ysavvryl

Pokedex Researcher
Anything and everything is inspiration to me. It kind of has to be that way for Pokedex One-Shots to keep unique stories going at this point. I read a lot, observe a lot, listen a lot (especially to other people gossiping!)... and then I start making connections in my head. It also helps to look at a standard idea, break it into its key components, and see how many of those you can change or alter to make something new of something old. Like Six Spirit was made that way derived from normal journey-fics.

Oh yes, and the Pokedex flavor text bits are a huge inspiration to me in all fics for this fandom.
 

FlamingRuby

The magic of Pokemon
I too believe anything can be inspiration.

For example, Episodes 12 and 13 of Magic of a Melody were inspired by the first two episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist with a little Suikoden Tierkreis thrown in (although I had to heavy tweak it to make it fit in a world without firearms or technology)

I've had whole songs inspire chapters/drabble, but in addition to anime, Disney stuff, (the Healing Incantation from Tangled appears in Episode 14) Looney Tunes, and other fandoms are inspiration goldmines

I also think about what isn't shown or explained on the show (for example, Brock is a master storyteller in my imagined Pokeworld because I figured he might know how to spin a good yarn with all those kids in the house. He also plays a mean acoustic guitar in homage to his classic VA)
 
Inspiration comes very randomly for me. For example, I had to do a short story for a subject, and I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do. On a commute going home, I saw someone pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair, which then gave me the idea of making a story revolving around the view of "walking" to a teenage boy in a wheelchair.

For Stars, I believe it was a combination of watching a marathon of "Avatar: The Last Airbender" and someone giving me this link. I also think it was because I wanted to do a journey-fic [even though it's far from being one]. XD

So, yeah, it comes from pretty much anywhere. The odd thing about it is that it comes anytime as well - even in the times where it's the last thing you need. =P
 

chanseychansey77

Elite Trainer
When I want inspiration, I just do something that requires no thought whatsoever to do. Like jumping on my trampoline or bouncing my giant exercise ball against the wall. The ideas flow forth as I think of what I have as of then.
 

Alliance

Re-Arrival
I tend to get my inspiration from books I read (Especially lately)
But, as the others had said, inspiration comes from a multitude of places. For example, I watched Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds and, then and there, began contemplating a story following a similar storyline. Sometimes you can get inspiration from the strangest of places. It just depends wether you really "see" what you are seeing, and have the imagination to buld thing around the history, storyline or image of what you see.
And sometimes you get TOLD to do a story by your teachers with a particular idea. THAT is also a form of inspiration. Just more.... forced.
 

bobandbill

Winning Smile
Staff member
Super Mod
All fan fics are inspired by the show but it's usually not the only thing
Not so - none of my stories are inspired by the show. ;p

I suppose for my main fic it was the Pokemon Colosseum game and Miror B's salsa music. XD However I only started my fic in the first place because....I was bored and wanted to try something different to the scripts I had been writing at the time. =p As for scenes and parts and so forth...it really varies. Music, or reading/watching something else, or just musings on a bus/train, or late nights with soft drink. And I suppose reviews can make someone feel like writing as well, heh. XD
 

Breezy

Well-Known Member
Yeah, most of my stories were inspired more by the games than the show. ;P

I'm pretty much with everyone that inspiration for a story just randomly hits me even though I'm not really trying to think of a story idea. I know "Lull" happened in the middle of the night when I was trying to sleep and my love for really scrambled up narratives. I was in the middle of reading Libra by Don DeLillo, and his style for writing Oswald's chapters is pretty awesome IMO and I thought it would be neat to try and adapt that sort of narrative into my story. HLBMA is pretty much the entire game and my love for Hoennshipping, haha. The Lost Chronicles of Johto ... I don't even know how I came up with that concept other than I knew that Jimmy/Marina/Silver weren't really written about when I first started writing it.

Then one-shots is a whole other department. Click was inspired by a prompt, though I had stored in my mind about writing from a perspective of a little kid, and the prompt and that idea worked together perfectly. And Then There's Lucas was game-inspired.
 

Bay

YEAHHHHHHH
Like everyone else, inspiration for my stories/scenes/plot points are all over the place. However, some are more weirder than others for me. Nothing, Everything was inspired from a mixture of The Da Vinci Code and the plates featured in the Pokemon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum games. Heart of the Sea was inspired after I was reading Ernest Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea during a field trip to two universities (I read the whole book, LOL). One of my one shots, She Just Smiles, was actually inspired from the anime Chobit, Another one shot of mine, Take Fifty Five! was inspired from watching a segment on a celebrity news show that I didn't care too much about. So yeah, I think those are the main inspirations that stuck me as crazy the most, haha.
 

kingferret53

A duel well fought..
My inspiration comes literally from everywhere. Different periods of times, 'what ifs', books, music, movies, theories, reality, fiction, magic, Chronicles of Narnia, war, the 7 deadly sins and 7 holy virtues...hell, even a soda can cause inspiration. I am currently writing over ten books and a pokemon fanfiction and I am not going to lie. It is hard to keep them from sounding alike and to keep the stories moving. I am currently not even past page one on any of them.
 

Rediamond

Middle of nowhere
Well, I'm sort of lucky that I'm just forever rewriting the same story until I'm happy with it, and it's good enough to actually be a source of pride to deal with depression, instead of fueling it. Regardless, I can just take the basc story from the last one and add some minor details. The main storyline of the first draft was inspired by a long-standing theory that the Pokemon world was a military dictatorship, and the protagonst was actually conducting a revolution. Yeah, I don't think when I talk. I can get myself into some pretty wierd arguments. Like that. Anyways, I found out that people actually wrote stories to go with Nuzlocke runs, so I decided to try my hand at it. A month later, I realized it was too rushed (6x faster than Flames was set to go), so I decided to rewrite it, and took a lot of inspiration from books of various sorts, but never borrowing too much inspiration from anything to avoid compromising originality. When that failed, a month later I found Serebii, and used a particularly interesting theory on the Pokemon World I had developed for inspiration on one new story line. Also, I'd mentioned being horribly depressed. I had episodes of that in Early February and late March that I used for inspiration for the depressing scenes that, coincidentally, occured at the same time. At some points, I will write parts of the chapter at different times, just whenever my mood allows me to properly convey emotion from the chapter.

So I guess I use the same sources of inspiration as most people, but I will use my mood as inspiration, if it would help the scene.
 

SilentMemento

Lone Wolf
I write dark stories, and I get my inspiration from real life events, video games, and (to a certain extent) my own life.

For example, I got the inspiration to write my current fic (Revenant) from a combination of a video game that I loved (Dead Space), and a thought about writing from the point-of-view of a person who had completely fallen into darkness.
 

D. Scott

Well-Known Member
Honest to goodness truth is, I have no idea. I've never really thought on the subject: except on two stories. Sinnoh Stories was inspired by watching the second Harry Potter film. How? No idea. But I saw it, picked up my laptop and started to write.

Best Laid Plans, in its original run on ffnet, was inspired by a playthrough of Crystal and just sheer old boredom.

Everything else, once again, has been completely and totally random, spur of the moment things. I write like that. *shrug*
 

Azurne

~ ♥ ~
I get a lot of my inspiration from music; for example The Birthday Massacre's Midnight was the inspiration for one of my role-play characters - a warlock with a split personality. I also have an original fiction called Shadeshift that I work on every now and then, and while I don't remember the original inspiration for it I do listen to this quite a bit to keep the atmosphere in my writing. I get a lot of my ideas when it's playing. ;p

Other than that, I find I feel more comfortable and more idea-receptive when I'm completely tucked away in the mountains or surrounded by forest. Scenic walks/hikes are almost guaranteed to inspire something when I'm out, so I always end up looking like the real nerd on the trail with a pen and notepad, hehe.
 
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