You may sift through your mind for a spark, toil into the early hours of the morning, just for inspiration to write. But sometimes, inspiration hides in the things you don’t notice. Like the high heels you wore last night, or the newspaper boats sailing in the gutter, or the stranger who smiles at you every day.

Some of the most amazing stories in the world have emerged from something spectacularly random.

1. Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson was on vacation in the Scottish Highlands. With nothing to do, he painted a map to while away time. In the end when he stood back to admire his work, he couldn’t help but imagine a set of pirates.

“They passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection,” he recalled.

That’s when Treasure Island began. And it went on to make millions gasp in excitement.

2. Hunger games

Suzanne Collins got the idea for Hunger Games from a reality show and from a footage of war that she saw right after.

“One night, I was lying in bed and I was very tired, and I was just sort of channel surfing on television. And, I was going through, flipping through images of reality television where there were these young people competing for a million dollars or a bachelor or whatever. And then I was flipping and I was seeing footage from the Iraq War. And these two things began to sort of fuse together in a very unsettling way, and that is when I, really, I think was the moment where I really got the idea for Katniss’s story.”

Reality shows aren’t that bad then, are they?

3. Around the world in Eighty days

This idea was born from an advertisement in the newspaper. The advert offered tourists a chance to travel all over the world in 80 days. Jules Verne caught sight of it sitting in a café. During those days, this was an enormous feat and Verne’s mind sparked up and started a fire around the idea.

4. Anna Karenina

The inspiration to this beautiful novel is- an elbow. Leo Tolstoy lay on a sofa after dinner and saw an elbow. This vision slowly became bigger and a woman materialised, all melancholy, in a ball gown. She haunted him so much that Tolstoy decided to write her story.

5. The Twilight Series

The origin of this story is, as we may expect, a dream author Stephenie Meyer saw about two people in a meadow. One was a sparkly boy, the other a normal girl.

“The boy was a vampire, which is so bizarre that I’d be dreaming about vampires, and he was trying to explain to her how much he cared about her and yet at the same time how much he wanted to kill her,” says Stephenie.

Sparkly boy dreams are now every day affairs for young adults because of her novels.

6. The Hobbit

On encountering a blank page in the middle of grading papers, J.R.R Tolkien wrote down the first thing that popped into his head- “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

He had no clue what a Hobbit was, but he wrote its story for the world to know.

7. Animal Farm

George Orwell’s story about the animals taking over a farm first sidled into his head when he saw a young boy steer a massive cart horse on a narrow path. What if animals realised their own strength, he couldn’t help thinking.

Thus, Animal Farm was born.

So listen up writers. Everything around you is a story. You cannot know what may suddenly make you write pages and pages of thrilling twists. Look around and enjoy but expect a flash of creativity anytime.

Posted by Maithri Warrier