My “inspirations” come in pictures. I ‘see’ a scene. This is when the story opens up for me. Maybe because the first artistic thing I ever did was photography.
I had gone to photograph San Marco and the Rialto and ended up seeing homeless already out at that unGodly hour, some passed out drunk, some, like this gentleman, barefooted, wearing a suit, sober and at his place of business at 6:45 in the morning.
Later the image morphed into a woman, and finally I made her an addict. At the time I took this picture there was no conscious thought that this was relevant to the story I was writing. Just a feeling that it was important.
Final version:
The old woman wakes up to a pinched nerve in her back. A large, round moon bathes everything in its bleached light. She sits up and listens to the background hum of the city. Beyond the confines of the park the night traffic makes a shuffling sound like rats scurrying. Illicit couples are casing the nooks of the park for a few minutes of bliss, one shadow blending into another…
And so it goes, until….
She taps her fingernail on the syringe, and something flickers in her eyes. She inspects the bruised veins, searching for a suitable spot.
When she is high she has a vision, and this—the vision my vision has—was the character that brought everything together. I had my antagonist and my love-interest in one heroin-fueled vision of another vision. And she (the vision) was not a little ripple. She was a tsunami that demanded her own landscape but when she appeared and I thought of her backstory it brought everything else together.
So I threw away circa 200 pages and started over.
—Contax. Zeiss 50mm 1.4.