Inspiration
What inspires you?
What inspires me?
The picture above exudes a sci-fi vibe. In my opinion, at least. It reminds me of Dune, of fremen preparing to mount a sandworm. In reality, the figures are preparing to leap off Black Rock into the tropical waters of the Pacific. Black Rock is a location in Maui.
I was an amateur photographer before I took up writing in earnest. I remember reading a book by Joseph Campbell while in college and watching Jamie Moyer's multipart interview with him. One concept Campell mentioned sparked my interest. To paraphrase, it is often difficult in Japan to discern where the human-made landscape ends and nature begins. This idea fascinated me and still does to this day. I explored it in photography by often including human elements, usually humans, in my landscape photographs.
Part or Apart
On a pragmatic level, including people in landscapes allows me to photograph popular locations without fretting about those pesky humans ruining the image. Honestly, I think the photo above would be a pretty but mostly blah sunset without the silhouetted lovers in the surf.
Existentially, including people in landscapes made me wonder how close we are to nature. Are we part of nature? Or, are we apart from it? I have never satisfactorily answered such lofty questions. Luckily, I've always been more interested in photographing the natural beauty around us all.
Putting People in the Landscape Creates a Story
Throw people into a nature scene, and suddenly, you have a story. A nothing-special sunset becomes a love story. A hunk of rock overlooking the ocean morphs into warriors preparing an ambush on a distant, science-fiction planet. Or, in the case of the image above, the surf transforms into a boy fighting to survive a god's wrath. One thing is for sure, the camera is deceiving. The reality of the picture above is that my son is enjoying himself immensely on a crowded beach in surf that doesn't even come to his knees.
But the photographer's deception is not the point. The point is the stories we tell upon seeing the image. That's the point of the inspiration.
Write What You Know
I believe in the often given writing advice to write what you know. This can be interpreted in multiple ways. For many, it's write from your experience or your truth. This makes a certain amount of sense. It's far easier to write a story about the refugee experience if you've literally lived it. On the other hand, it is the writer's job to walk in their characters' shoes. The truth of this interpretation depends on what kind of story you're writing. If the yarn is about the quintessential refugee experience, that could be best told by a refugee. However, if your story is an action-adventure about a soldier of fortune who happened to be a refugee as a child, plying her trade in the jungles of South East Asia, the author, having firsthand experience of the refugee experience, probably isn't as important.
Another interpretation of writing what you know is to include details about locations or activities that you, as the author, have expertise. This is a little bit different than, say, being an immigant. I've visited the Hawaiian islands, so I think I can describe the landscape with a certain level of authenticity that adds, I hope, verisimilitude to The Wrath of Monsters, a young adult urban fantasy with magic, dragons, and other fantastical elements.
I've also used this technique with my characters. Allison Lee, the protagonist in The Wrath of Monsters and the other three novels in The Allison Lee Chronicles (the fourth and final volume is forthcoming), is a photographer. I did this because I figured it would be easy to sprinkle details about photography into the story that would be accurate and contribute to a sense of reality in a fantastical yarn. For example, Allison shoots basketball games for her school's online publication. I've never photographed a basketball game, but I have photographed a plethora of youth soccer games. So I can authoritatively describe the challenges of photographing youth sports.
Conclusion
While writing this, I've returned to the mantra that inspiration is all around us. It's a matter of using those little germs of inspiration to weave a tapestry that might become a sprawling tale worth telling.
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