Where does artistic inspiration come from?

There’s one theory on this for writers. Writers either draw inspiration from their inner worlds, or from the world around them.

Why not both at the same time?

For my story, Sueños, which was published here in the journal Empyrean, I used my own experience, and the outside world, to create this story.

First, what’s it about? 

Dylan is a young soldier stationed in El Paso who has to drive across Texas for (…spoiler…)  the funeral of his brother. Along the way his pickup truck breaks down and he’s forced to detour to the small town of Sueños, where he’s brought to a strange house for the birthday party of an unnaturally alluring woman named Veronica. There, he’s given a tempting choice: abandon his grief forever. But, of course, there is a price.

So where did the external inspiration come from?

Some years ago a friend loaned me a book of essays by a Mexican writer named Juan Villoro. Essays aren’t my typical thing, but his were great. One in particular stood out, his recollection of him as a young soldier. While going home one weekend, he gets sidetracked and ends up at a strange party where he meets a beautiful girl. It’s a story of idealized love captured in a moment of time, a story of endless possibility without the messiness of reality.

The story captivated me. I HAD to do something with it. Revisit it. Rework it. Repurpose it. I saw in it  something hidden, something darker. Something supernatural, so I set about re-interpreting it through that lens. In the arts this is called interpolation, where an artist takes an existing work and fashions it into something new and different. Music does this a lot. If I was profiting off this story surely I’d be giving Señor Villoro a chunk of my earnings, but alas, zero divided by anything equals zero. (Don’t go into writing for the money.)

In terms of my interpretation, I added layers of menace and danger along with hints of vampirism. Who doesn’t love a good vampire tale? But I also chose to not be heavy handed.

What about my internal inspiration?

Ten years ago my father was killed in a plane crash. He piloted a small plane that failed upon take-off. Ironically, before he died I wrote a story available here about a guy who was left rich and rudderless after his parents died in a small plane crash. Obviously the worry was there in my mind before my father actually died. After his death I knew of course that this event would surface in my writing, but I never intentionally set out to write about it.

There was one strange thing that happened when my father died, and this is what I chose to focus on. At the time I was working in Manhattan. My mother gave me the call. I made it home to Jersey City and then got in my car to drive the 40 minutes to my parents house. On that drive it still wasn’t real to me. It was just a phone call. There was this great gulf of distance between me and the death, and my thinking was, as long as I am not at their house, it isn’t real. It didn’t even happen! I told myself that maybe I’d had some kind of psychotic break and made it all up (even though I knew that wasn’t true.) That distance gave me distance, which was exactly what I needed at the time.

It was all real, of course. Afterward came the usual stuff associated with a death in the family, the wakes and funeral mass and burial and the visitors and the paperwork and the concerns about the future and all of that. But for a 40-minute drive, none of it was real. I was living in a zone outside of time and life. That’s what I wanted to write about, that blessed denial you know isn’t true and won’t last. That’s where Dylan exists in Sueños, in a land of dreams, and whether he chooses to wake up or not, there will be a price. As one of my characters tells him, there’s always a price.

So my advice for writers out there is to study great writing and storytelling. Learn from it. Read, please. And don’t feel like you have to excavate the tragedies in your life, but don’t keep them buried either.