Smyser Inkblot #1: Sources of Inspiration

What better way to celebrate my debut novel release than to also begin my Inkblot blog #1?

I worked on The Chestmaker for… a while. I have notes about an “artisan pirate” story dating back to 2017, so around nine years from start to publication. I was inspired by many other nautical franchises and stories. Sea of Thieves, One Piece, Pirates of the Caribbean, Treasure Island… I can’t exactly pinpoint one major influence. However, I can say I began actually writing it as an experiment of sorts.

It started during my time getting a teaching degree; this was sometime around 2020. At some point, in the middle of the Covid pandemic, an assignment gave me an idea. This idea was a creative writing exercise to write the same story told in two different genres: pirate fantasy and space opera. The former used those notes that I had laying around and became The Chestmaker, and the latter became something I have tentatively titled Celestial Bonfire. Both would be traveling adventures where the characters can experience different cultures or dangerous monsters and use their expertise to help along the way. I wrote a scene of each to test it out, and got a positive reaction from others in the class. At first it was going to be two novellas in one book, but as The Chestmaker story was revised, I realized how much more I needed to flesh out the world and characters. Thus, my seafaring story grew past the point of novella, and so too will the space opera if I ever get around to finishing it. But my point is that the inspiration for two books came from developing a creative writing lesson plan in school.

You never know when inspiration is going to strike as an author. For some people it’s nonstop. Some need a distraction like chores. And for others, it is itself a chore—the unenviable task of filling a dried up well. But there is one thing I believe is a great spring of inspiration that not many people tap into on purpose.

School.

Learning.

Discovery.

Seems simple enough, right?

When I first went to community college in 2012, I was unsure where exactly my life was going. I had given up on many plans for the future. And in the midst of it all, I discovered the classes I thought I would like (art and music) were my least favorite, and my most favorite were the ones I thought would be most challenging (astronomy and biology). And here’s my reasoning: both of those classes taught me things I could use in my writing. More specifically, my worldbuilding. As an aspiring fantasy and science fiction writer, understanding how planetary and geological and evolutionary systems worked fueled the inspiration for a book series I planned. So many things I learned were piped straight into crafting this series. If it didn’t fit in there, I wrote it down for later. Eventually those books got stuck in editing purgatory. But I still carry on that knowledge and those ideas to this day.

Learning new things fuels us, because our fiction is based on reality. Your fictional society needs political and economic systems even if you don’t outright specify what it is, so maybe read up on what Anarchism really looks like. Maybe learning a new language will show you how to develop a con-lang. Psychology and sociology could help you get into the minds of characters. Or when a fan says, “It’s not realistic that this happened in your book,” you can go ahead and point to the historical inspiration where that exact thing happened because people have always been both dumb and smart in baffling ways. The Chestmaker was developed through much research on nautical terminology, pirate history, and parts of a ship. I didn’t use all of it, and made up a fair bit to be more fantastical, but the research served as a basis. Trying not to spoil things, I also was inspired by villeinage in feudal systems, golden Antarctic scale worm, tontines, anarchism, sea animals, and various cultures and currencies.

So learn something new! Or refresh yourself on the old. Be random about it. Learn something exciting and something boring. Something cultural and something scientific. It just might help you if you’re stuck in a rut. Go down the rabbit hole. You never know what you’re going to take away from it. Learn about bugs. About weather. Sumo wrestling. Quantum physics. The Colorado Coalfield War. Become a bar trivia ringer! Anything you learn can be the seed for a new idea. Whether that seed is the basis for a whole story or just another piece of the puzzle doesn’t matter. As long as you keep learning long after your proper schooling has ended.

Thanks for reading. The Chestmaker is available now.

JL Smyser