~Inspiration~

Inspiration. 

It can be such a simple yet complex thing. Without it, I wouldn't be able to write a word. With it, I can craft entire worlds, stories, characters...

Sometimes I can stew on a story idea for weeks, slowly gathering more and more information and twisting that into inspiration. That’s how it happened with the first novel I wrote. One idea morphed into another and morphed into another until I had to sit down and write. But other times, inspiration can come split second, like the novel I’m working on right now. 

And so here is my story about how deleting my notes app sparked inspiration for an entire novel: 

My notes app is very important to me. Any time I’m on the road and I’ve (disastrously) forgotten my notebook, I use my notes app. It was filled with little quotes, ideas, sections of books, poems, passwords, the list goes on and on. And it wasn’t backed up. 

One day, I noticed that my phone had two notes apps, exactly the same. Certainly it didn’t make sense to have two, so I just deleted one. It seemed simple in my mind, delete one and keep the other. But that’s not how it works on my phone. You delete one, you delete both. 

Not panicking, I went to my app store and re-downloaded it, happy that I finally had just one notes app. When I opened it up, I saw an empty folder, an empty page and an empty history. 

Everything was gone.

All of my notes completely vanished.

Quickly calling my older sister who is more techy than I am, it was concluded that I hadn’t backed up my notes to my phone and so deleting had deleted everything.

Looking back, I was a tad dramatic :) Maybe it doesn’t sound that bad when you’re reading this, but I had so many important notes on there.

Some notes were the sole inspiration and explanation for plot holes and plot twists for my books in the future. Some were poems that I wrote on trips, and I was just waiting for the right moment to insert them into one of my books. Some were scenes for future novels, pivotal moments that I would’ve otherwise forgotten if I hadn’t put them into my notes app. And of course, those passwords were all deleted.

And so, feeling a bit devastated, I did the only thing that felt right to do. 

I forgot it all. 

I didn’t even try to remember what was all in my app, I just blocked everything out. Perhaps it wasn’t the greatest idea, but in my mind, it made perfect sense. If I couldn’t remember what I had written there, I couldn’t be sad about losing it. 

This was a very (very) minor problem in my life. Deleting my notes app didn’t have any dire consequences. But it got me thinking.

If someone lost something very dear to them, what would happen if they pushed away all the memories instead of feeling the pain? It’s not a good coping mechanism, I know that. But sometimes people don’t cope with things the right way. 

What would happen to someone who coped with loss in this way? Trying everything to forget it lest they feel the excruciating pain of such loss?

From deleting my notes app to suddenly deeper ponderings, my main character, Zara, was born. 1945, France, and a woman who lost everything she held dear. A woman who took a journey across the ocean trying desperately to leave behind everything she had lost while hauling the pain of regret and shame along with her. Writing it, I got to journey with her and see what it would be like using that coping method. And it’s exhausting. And almost impossible. But that’s not for me to fix, through the book, she has to figure that out herself.

And so that is my fascination with how the simplest of things can spark an entire story. As a writer, life is an exciting journey of experiences and from those experiences, inspiration. Once I'd gotten my inspiration from my notes app crashing, and after (of course) some Pinteresting, a whole new novel idea was born.

And the only thing I could do next was start to write.