Thomas Edison once said “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” That ratio may work for an inventor, but I feel that artists are much more dependant on inspiration than that. Personally, I take inspiration from books I enjoyed while growing up, as well as relying heavily on the experiences of my past. I’ve also found that one art form will frequently fuel another.

Songs are a tremendous source of inspiration. Lyrics are a form of storytelling so compressed that they often leave much to the imagination. This, accompanied by the way music intensifies emotion, makes it easy to dream up a story while I listen. Some of my books have anthems, songs I listen to over and over again to get me in the right mood. On rare occasions I’ll even tweak scenes to better match the lyrics. Without a doubt, the anthem for Something Like Summer was a song called Faster Still by The Fold.

I had a small tracklist of various songs that correlated to scenes in Something Like Summer, and their rhythm beat like the heart of the story for me, bringing life to the relationship between Ben and Tim.

Sometimes even a simple photo can be inspiring. I was halfway through the first draft when I stumbled upon a photo of professional model Bruno Santos and felt like I had found a photo of Tim Wyman instead. Bruno has had a number of looks over the years, and only some of them truly remind me of Tim, but being able to flip through those when I needed to get closer to the character was a great help. The two photos featured here made me especially glad, since one could easily be Tim in his teen years, the other how he appears at the end of the book.

These are just a few examples out of many. To paraphrase the opening quote, I’d say art is 40% inspiration, 30% imagination, 18% desperation, and 12% delusion. Hmmm. Maybe we better leave the famous quotes to Edison.