If I’m being completely honest, what inspired my novel was a fan fiction that I wrote last fall for the My Hero Academia fandom. I fell completely in love with the series, watched it several times, and immersed myself into reading and writing fan fiction. Once I was nearly done writing my first story (BakuDeku forever), I found inspiration and thought it would make a great original novel.
That’s the short of it. I wanted to recreate my fan fiction but with original characters, like E.L. James and 50 Shades of Grey, which was a Twilight fan fiction for those who didn’t already know. But when I sat down to actually begin writing, I realized that the same situations I had in my fan fiction didn’t translate well to an original, and if they did, it was so dramatic and traumatizing that I didn’t want to include it anymore.
I knew that I wanted the story to be about two boys who fall in love while living in the rural south of the United States. I knew that I wanted them to have a beautiful, undeniable connection. But I have to give them conflict, and the conflict from my fan fiction just wasn’t working. For example, I had a kidnapping (canon in the My Hero Academia manga/anime, for those who care), but that wasn’t easily translatable. I had to ask questions that I didn’t have to answer before, such as why was he kidnapped? When? How does he escape (like in my fan fiction)? What happens when he does? There was so much happening – love, fate, betrayal, trauma, etc. It was honestly too much.
So what did I do? I took out a blank sheet of paper (showing my age here) and broke it down to its simplest form. The book is about two boys who fall in love, and they’re scared of it and don’t understand it. And I went from there. I talked a little about this in What I have learned writing my first novel…
Once I did that, I felt like everything was opening up to me again and my creativity could flow more easily, and before I knew it, I had written a first draft in about two weeks. Perhaps some of this actually belongs in my other blog post, but I think it’s important to call out the specific inspirations here, as well. Sometimes inspiration can come from absolutely wild places. I never would have thought that I would write fan fiction about anime characters and eventually be inspired to write an original novel.
So…if you’re like me, and you’re overwhelmed by plot and frustration and whatever else, my advice is to take a step back, breathe, and break it down into the smallest bits you can. Obviously my novel is about so much more than two boys falling in love. It’s also about identity, bullying, mental health, addiction, and grief. But at it’s core – at the heart of it, it’s a beautiful love story. So break it down and see what you come up with. You might find that at the core of your story is something beautiful, too, you just have to dig for it.