Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "inspiration"

It's hard to write cyberpunk.

Or any science fiction at all, for that matter, but cyberpunk's what I'm currently writing so it's the most relevant bit for this. It doesn't flow out of me as fantasy does: I keep having longer breaks, I constantly second-guess what I'm putting down to paper, my mind drifts to other things, and in the end I get out only somewhere around two thousand words a day at most. Really hard to obsess over, and feels a lot more like work.

A big part of it, I think, is the relative lack of works - books, comics, video games, films - to find inspiration out of. There's just so much more fantasy stuff available than scifi: I have to go actively looking for the latter, where I just keep stumbling at the former by accident - and then I read them and end up getting a couple ideas for some really great fantasy novels that I can't wait to get to writing. My head ends up bursting with all the wrong sort of thoughts. My focus is where it shouldn't be.

I feel like it's a sort of a vicious cycle. There's more fantasy than scifi - and so people get more excited by fantasy, and inspired to write more fantasy, and make the whole problem worse. A dark and nigh-inescapable mire of magic and dragons and wonder, spitting out more of the same, growing bigger and stickier with each new work of fantasy. The scifi equivalent is more like a puddle that you have to actually go looking for, and if you leave you will get lost and have a difficult time coming back... and the whole time you risk being swallowed by the great big fantasy swamp. You have to work a lot harder for that. Or, maybe it's just me and I'm overthinking the whole thing.

Right now I want to write about pirates.

It's when you're walking home while thinking, and all of a sudden you get this brainwave of inspiration - like a strike of lightning revitalizing your brain. Raw written text runs through your mind and you know exactly what to write and how and for how long, and you break into a run as you can't wait to get back home and open up the computer and pop up a new word file and get right into it.

And then you just write, and write, and write, and write. A floodgate has opened in my mind. Three thousand words and counting: the only reason I will stop is that I'm too tired to continue, and I will surely pick it up again tomorrow.

This one's about barbarian tribes, prophecies and storms, and an undrawable bow. I feel like I can write another few short stories and put them all up into a collection, provided I get a few more lightning strikes such as this one I just did.

Oh, yeah, weren't I supposed to write cyberpunk?

...Nah.

If I said that I listened to some type of music my every waking hour, it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration. Sure, sometimes I'm outside, or seeing my parents... or does it count as "waking hour" if I'm lying in bed and actively trying to sleep? I don't know. Even in those times I usually have music running in my head.

About a decade ago I got into D&D, and I sort of semi-accidentally ended up picking up a "soundtrack" for the first full campaign I was in. I listened to a bunch of music I had discovered at around the same time (mainly Sonata Arctica), always during games and only during games, or at least while thinking and talking about stuff related to it.

To this day I can't listen to any of Days of Grays without getting a really heavy hit of nostalgia. I've never been in a D&D game as fun as that first.



I began to realize just how much power music held, and how much it could influence the going of my (and probably everyone else's) mind. From there on I started to build myself soundtracks like that first: for every game of D&D (and later other systems), for every story I'd write, for some comics and books I like, even a few video games that don't have soundtracks of their own - I would find something to listen. I have a lot of songs and albums and entire bands, some of which I really liked, that I permanently welded together into one specific work or game, and that I only now listen if I want to feel nostalgic.

Sometimes I carefully pick up my music based on the sort of a thing I want to write, resulting in fairly consistent and well-managed stories that keep well in hand and don't go anywhere weird. Other times I just appropriate whatever I really like to listen at the time, which can easily shoot the whole thing into someplace bizarre and unexpected but not necessarily bad. I've done both successfully.

Often, how well this works out - how completely my brain associates the work and the music together, and how much I manage to listen to that same stuff while I work on it - directly correlates to how much I like the end result, be it something I'm writing or something I'm playing in or something I'm reading. If it goes poorly, it can lead to me throwing a story out altogether.

When I worked on The Straggler's Mask, for instance, I listened a lot of Blind Guardian, Twilight Force, a bit of Blackmore's Night and Blue Öyster Cult, and the soundtrack of a game I liked to play at the time, Risk of Rain. A lot of the sort I'd associate with adventure and exploration, but some of it was spontaneous and probably had a hand in the wilder bits of the story.

For The Vagrant's Wings, I picked up a bit heavier stuff like Bal-Sagoth, Celtic Frost, something more soft but foreboding such as Nox Arcana, and then just to spice things up, a bit more Blackmore's Night. It's one of the ones where I succeeded in picking a pretty fitting soundtrack - something for horror and romance alike - rather than just going with whatever, and I think the fairly grounded nature ended up for its benefit in the end.

One of the less successful drafts of mine - codenamed Shadowland - involved a lot of Manowar, Iron Maiden, Blind Guardian again, and the Balance & Ruin remix album for Final Fantasy VI. I don't know exactly why the interest to this one just sort of petered out: how much of it was because I had listened to all these soundtracks before, and elsewhere, and couldn't pair together with this story effectively? How much was because I just got distracted by other things and ended up not feeling like it anymore? I wouldn't know. I'd guess a bit of both.

(Although listening to some of the soundtrack kind of puts me back on the mood of returning to that story... which is inconvenient because I'm kind of already juggling between a lot of things I might want to write.)

Chaos Star is sort of half-and-half: I had no idea what kind of music could fit for this, so in the end I defaulted to Iron Savior, Hyper Light Drifter soundtrack, and a little something nice I found on Youtube called Edge of the World. I'm sure the music can take some credit of it probably being the most out-there story draft I've managed to complete so far. It's been pretty hard to edit, though.

I haven't begun to really work on Ivar Stormling of Skar yet, but I already know it's going to involve a lot of Magic Sword and Gloryhammer. How well this works, remains to be seen.

The cyberpunk story, as I think I've said, is pretty tough to grasp and maintain interest on regardless of music - but it has one of the more duty-picked soundtracks, taking stuff from Blade Runner and Deus Ex, and interestingly, Command & Conquer series, especially Tiberian Sun. Lately, though, I also started to click stuff on Youtube at random, listening to a lot of synthwave and such while I wrote it... and I'm still doing this, even though my interest in the story itself has largely died away again.

So we come to the pirate story, currently tentatively named Pirates of The Demure Sea. I probably should look into Alestorm and such stuff, but because of the cyberpunk fallout I'm currently listening to things like this. Lemme tell you, it's helping me spawn out some pretty weird story notes and ideas.



But on the other hand, I had already decided that the Demure Sea is a weird place. So maybe it'll all work out in the end.

It's not just the music - when I write, I do my best to dive deep into the popular culture of everything even remotely related to that stuff. I'm going to watch a lot of pirate movies in the next couple weeks.









And of course,



I expect to have a good time.

A friend asked me to find pictures of goats ("they're a menace!") for a small project of his. It has inspired me, too. I kind of want to put something in the story.

I love goats.

I was never the one for black metal, but I still enjoyed the somewhat more symphonic interpretation of Bal-Sagoth. And I was always a bit sad that they'd stopped recording new stuff by the time I found them.

Well, only yesterday it turned out to me that they'd since regathered and reformed, and recently threw out something brand new in this realm of ours. It's pretty much all I've been listening since then, and is doing a great deal of good for this ocean short story I've been writing lately.



If you like this sort of stuff, give it a spin. I like Vow of the Exiled the best myself.

(Oh, and Scourge of the Silver Wings is currently in a Goodreads giveaway. If you live in North America and haven't picked it up yet, you could participate and maybe win a print copy.)

I decided what I was going to do this year several months before, and managed to mostly keep the inspiration in check and gradually building up... but now, with only a few days to go, something else has infringed. Something that's coming on strongly to me right now, but with very little build-up to it. Something that I'm certain will interfere with my performance if I stick to the original plan... but if I switch gears and write this new thing instead, I'm certain I can't keep up with it. I don't even know where it would go after the beginning points.

Sometimes I feel like that one author in Sandman, that gets more ideas than he can handle and is driven mad by it. And I didn't even get to sleep with a muse for it!

They just come out, unwanted and unbidden, in the thousands, if not millions. Every few minutes there's another one of the little bastards. Like the Richard Madoc bloke.



But unlike him, I never got to write even a single good novel before this started, and I never did anything to warrant a dream-god laying a curse on me.

...Did I?

And sometimes one sticks for a little longer. Nags at me and bothers me and takes up space and eats up all the other little ideas. I feel at peace for a moment. I feel like I have a purpose again. Almost without realizing, I start building it up. Or maybe it builds itself. I don't even know.

I think it could make for a blog post. Something to idly muse about, jot down some random ramblings, as I do right now.

Then it grows, and I think it could make for an actual story. I think people might want to read it. I even think I could sell it.

Then it grows too much and I start to see the cracks. I see the bloat, the fat and water and hot air, with no muscle, no substance. The idea could not sustain anything more, after all: now it's a heart that beats hot and heavy and shriveled to sustain what it can not.

And most importantly, the big question: who would ever care?

I've had better ideas, after all. I've written entire stories about them, whole books. And no one cared about those either. Why should this be different? How can that which is worse do better than the better?



Then it collapses. It dies. It goes away. I can do nothing with it anymore. Not a story, not a blog post, not even talk about it to friends. It's gone.

Then, repeat.

Hey, I did get a blog post about it. A blog post about blog posts. I guess that's better than nothing.