Nothing New Under the Sun by Gabriel Valjan

 

What inspires you in your day-to-day life, something that influences your writing?

 

Let’s be honest, if you’re well-read across time and world cultures, you will realize that nothing is new under the sun.

 

Nihil novi sub sole. The Hero’s Journey. The Stranger Comes to Town. All the plots have been uncovered and analyzed. Consult Ronald B. Tobias’ 20 Master Plots as a resource.

 

What writers do to renew the soil is bring their unique experiences, their particular style, and their personal perspective to the scene. I suspect the ‘What if?’ is applied to familiar scenes.

 

I’m reminded of William Goldman’s preface to Marathon Man, and how he had to hash out why a Nazi would come to the US. What if? After he’d read about a Cleveland cardiologist’s latest, he thought his fugitive Nazi should have a failing heart, as if Nazis had hearts. Goldman would nix the idea when he realized there wouldn’t be many pages or suspense if his villain had a bad ticker. He reverted to an ancient motivation: greed, the want of money. No inspiration there. The real inspiration came from the conversation he had with his periodontist. What if? Bill told the doctor that his dentist didn’t believe in Novocain, and the Gum Man told him that if you wanted to inflict some real and serious pain: drill a healthy tooth. The rest is cinematic history, and the late William Goldman became the bullseye for every dentist worldwide.

 

Writers ask themselves all the time, “Is it safe?” Tropes, conventions—whatever you want to call them—are tried-and true as a cliché and ‘safe’, but Inspiration, that little tweak is the Special Sauce. Sometimes something doesn’t have to be well-written, but if it is unique and clever…

 

Inspiration could be an unexpected take on the familiar or born of randomness, chaos theory.

 

A challenge inspired my ROMA SERIES. A work colleague had told me that men can’t write a credible female character, so I wrote a short story to prove her wrong. It was so much fun (the writing and not the proving her wrong) that I went on then to write what became a series of six books. I’d also been told a straight guy can’t write a gay character, so I wrote two, Bill in the SHANE CLEARY series, and Sheldon in THE COMPANY FILES.

 

The ‘What If Question’ inspired THE COMPANY FILES. While reading postwar history, I noticed that the US was the only country that had emerged from World War 2 unscathed. I’m talking about infrastructure. Europe and everyone else had to rebuild. Literally. It became clear that the US had an unprecedented geopolitical advantage. I’d known about the Office of Strategic Services, that it was the precursor to the CIA. The Brits had already created MI5 before World War 1. What if the US created their own intelligence agency BUT didn’t know what the hell they were doing? History proved truer than Fiction. Research led me to Operation Paperclip, and writing THE GOOD MAN, the first of three novels. Two subsequent novels would be nominated for Agatha and Anthony Awards.

 

Contemporary discussions on diversity plus my own life experiences inspired the Shane Cleary Mysteries. The novels would receive nominations for the Agatha, Anthony, Shamus, and Silver Falchion awards. With Shane, I tweaked tropes. Bad guys were sometimes good, and good guys, bad. The real fun for me as a writer is to play with reader’s comfort levels in the series. Moral ambiguity seems to horrify American readers, whereas it’s a given for Europeans.

 

While all the stories have been told, I try to write in scenes other writers have not imagined. 

And let the fun begin.