Where does Inspiration Come From?

A question that is often asked of us is, Where did you get the inspiration for The Bottle Conjuror?

            Jack London once said, "You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." That may be, but that’s not how it happened for us. The idea came from Jack, my cousin and co-author. I had never heard of the Bottle Conjuror nor had Jack; he had discovered it completely by accident.     

            “I was on the Internet, looking for an idea for a ghost story, when I stumbled across an article about the 18th century Cock Lane murder in England,” Jack says. “A husband was suspected by his second wife of murdering his first wife. Apparently, the ghost of the first wife visited the second one and told her how she had been murdered.

            “There was a trial, and the prosecution went to the bedroom where the ghost had appeared and using a medium, attempted to contact the ghost for her testimony. The article contained an illustration from a contemporary newspaper depicting the séance in the bedroom. On the wall hung a painting labeled “The Bottle Conjuror,” showing a man putting himself into a wine bottle.”

The painting aroused Jack’s curiosity so, he searched for the bottle conjuror on the Internet, which eventually led him to the real story of the Bottle Conjuror hoax in London in 1749. The hoax was so infamous in its time that references to it, as in the painting hanging in the supposedly haunted bedroom (it wasn’t), became a shorthand for any hoax or fraud.

When Jack excitedly told me about the Bottle Conjuror, I knew he had hit on something big, a story that had faded into the dustbin of history, but one that was just too good not to revive.

            The amazing thing about our project—a trilogy—is that the original story with its parade of fascinating historical characters fired our imaginations and allowed us to branch out in new directions with fictional characters and their stories. That one minor historical event inspired worlds of new stories for us.

            A writer’s inspiration can come from many sources: books; movies; radio and podcasts; travel; nature; personal observations and conversations; almost anywhere. The key thing is for a writer to be receptive, to keep an open and objective mind about . . . well, everything.

            It helps to keep journals, too, or at least to jot down notes. I have a journal in which I record anything that strikes my interest: moon shadows streaming in through my bedroom window, a whispered conversation on a bus, a man on a unicycle. I’ll write a few quick lines, not attempting a story but merely trying to capture the essence of the event, and then put the journal away. Later, and that could be anywhere from a few days to a few years, I’ll leaf through the journal and see what, if anything, catches my eye.

            Even if you decide not to keep a journal, at the very least keep a curious and open mind and be receptive to whatever the universe wants to reveal to you. Albert Einstein once said that he did not want to live in a universe in which there was no magic. He knew there was magic and that if he was patient, it would inspire him.

            And if that failed, he could always borrow Jack London’s club.

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Where do you find your inspiration?