Inspiration by Sarah Gate

You Don’t Deserve Dry Towels!

Inspiration is everywhere when you pay attention to it.

If the weather is not warm outside then nothing dries in my house. Yesterday when I was getting out of the shower, I noticed that my towels were still damp. Still groggy from sleepiness I found myself thinking bitterly ‘I don’t deserve damp towels’.

I found myself wondering then what type of girl does deserve damp towels. The main character in my book definitely deserves them. She is the type of character who would realise she deserves them, too. And just like that I have a new paragraph to put into my book. A paragraph in which my character, after an evening in a cheap hotel with a married father of one, rubs herself down with a damp towel and realises that, because of the incidents which brought her here, she has no right to complain.

Like most writers, I find inspiration from the strangest things. The way someone moves or speaks. The things that people say. My youngest brother is my main source of inspiration for children and my housemates give me endless material on the comic rambling’s of twenty-something girls.

Dougie Brimson, award winning author and screenwriter of Hollywood funded movie Green Street, formed his book Billy’s Log from a Bridget Jones type conversation he heard on the tube in London.

“It was between two middle-aged women who were bemoaning the lack of suitable men in their lives. Speaking as both an average male and a hopeless romantic, everything they said was dripping with comic irony and so I went home and simply aped the book which had caused all the trouble by writing Bridget Jones’ Diary from a lads perspective.

“It was hilarious fun to put together and has actually become one of my biggest sellers. Indeed, thanks primarily to reader demand, I will be writing the sequel next year.”

Those two women will have not a single idea of what their conversation did to Dougie, just as my own inspirations can have no idea how much I appreciate them giving me ideas just by being themselves. As writers it is our job to pen down those instances that grab our attention in the hope that they will capture the imagination of those who read our work. There must be many millions of moments passed between people immortalised in writing. Something you said or did one day may now be included in the work of a stranger. What a wonderful thing to know!

For more information on Dougie Brimson please visit here.

by Sarah Gate

The Unofficial 'Brit Writers and Writers Everywhere' blog.