WARNING: Spoilers follow.
“The Price of Inspiration” has always been one of my favourite stories, not just for the premise, but for how the whole story began. Read on to find out.
Inception
Not many people know this, but I am not the only writer in my family. Both my siblings write stories. My brother writes fantasy, and we have tried several times to collaborate—never finished, but started often enough.
Years ago while holidaying at the beach, we decided to write a story together. We had no outline, but we wanted it to be funny. Admittedly, we gave a half-hearted effort. It was just a way to pass time and enjoy a good laugh.
We started out with a main character, whom we called “The Guy”. This also became the title of the story, because we didn’t want to stretch our creative prowess too much while on holiday. We wrote two or three pages of “The Guy” and thoroughly enjoyed it. It started by following a whacky dude as he struggled to kill a spider at the behest of his wife. We laughed a lot at The Guy’s awkward behaviour.
Nevertheless, we got distracted by something—it was probably food, but I can’t remember for sure—and put the story aside. We didn’t return to it. Our holiday ended, and we resumed our normal lives.
Fast Forward
Years later, I was (and still am) a small-time published author, and I remembered “The Guy”. I have a goal to try my hand at a variety of speculative fiction subgenres, and I saw “The Guy” as a perfect opportunity to attempt a portal fantasy story. First, though, I had to ask my brother’s permission to take the story and mould it according to my own creative vision. Thankfully, he said yes!
Development
The original draft was a measly five hundred words, but it was a good start. Much of the opening scene in “The Price of Inspiration” was kept from the original “The Guy” manuscript. It was funny and set the story’s style, as well as a rule for the characterisation of the protagonist. When we started writing “The Guy”, my brother and I had no idea who our protagonist really was or what he would do after he killed the spider. So I used his behaviour as a plot device—something was a little off about him, and now I had a reason for it. You see, my protagonist was one of two protagonists, and yet the two protagonists were the same person, but unique in their own way. Confused? I’m being deliberately ambiguous.
Metanarrative
Writers have this wonderful ability to continually dream up stories. I will never not have a story to tell. In fact, I probably have enough story ideas already to keep me going for a decades. I often wonder what it would be like to casually hop into the worlds I create. Not that I need the inspiration, but I think it would be cool. And, as it happens, “The Price of Inspiration” evolved into a metanarrative—a story about someone writing a story and what they do for inspiration. The main(?) character unashamedly uses an alternate world as source material for his book.
The Ending
I won’t spoil the ending for you, but I will say that I’m quite proud of the little twist I weaved into it.
Read the Story
If you want to read “The Price of Inspiration”, you can purchase Issue #2 of Etherea Magazine. This is a new Australian magazine with a with a great mission of supporting local speculative fiction authors.