Hey kids! I don't have a story to post yet, but I thought I'd try something new. In the same spirit of Landon's "inspiration" thread, I thought it might be good just to swap ideas about the writing process as well.
Where do you get ideas for characters?
As for me, music helps get me in the zone sometimes, and if a song has thoughtful lyrics, I often find myself expanding the songwriter's thought and developing it into a character or a plot point. Generally speaking, the mood means more than the literal words, but I find lyrics stimulate my thoughts better than just music. For example, when I was thinking about a story in which someone decides to leave his society, which doesn't want to leave its generation ship, a couple of songs by Arcade Fire got me into the "disaffected rebel" mood (No Cars Go and Windowsill in particular) to which I still go back when I'm trying to evoke that character.
I also get a lot from philosophical or ethical questions, often from the news. "If I were those guys, what would I think?" The story I'm working on right now, about changing pathological behaviors in violent convicts, was inspired by a neuroscientist who, while being interviewed, stated that his goal was essentially to prove that there is no such thing as a soul by manipulating the brain's moral functioning. "That's an interesting fellow," I thought, and I developed a whole story around a scientist being able to do just that.
What do you do to think of character ideas? What other media influences your writing process?
