Mariia asked Rosemary Cole:

Your writing style and ideas about postapocalyptic world remind me very famous in Soviet Union fiction authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Here is their book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16736014-prisoners-of-power I think they have very distinctive style of narrative. And the atmosphere in your book amazingly reminded me their books. My question is: where do you get the inspiration for your ideas?

Rosemary Cole I believe there are two sources for ideas. The first, of course, is one’s own imagination. These ideas are affected by our personality type and how we see the world. Someone who is more pragmatic, concrete or attracted to the mechanical might have inborn ideas that lead to stories about futuristic machines or habitats. My personality type tends to be idealistic and romantic. One of my earliest ideas—which I haven’t actually used in my writing yet—is about a girl with immense psionic powers, the product of a secret breeding program, who saves the world, saves humanity from itself.

The second source is other stories. Yes, authors definitely feed off each other’s ideas. Yet it’s not at all derivative or plagiaristic, because the elements we pick up from another’s writing go into a kind of simmering pot in our heads. They cook there for a while, combining with original ideas and each other, and suddenly one day a fresh new idea with our own unique stamp on it pops up.

I’ll give you an example. Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved space station stories, from Babylon 5 to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Downbelow Station by the great C.J. Cherryh sank to the bottom of my consciousness like a stone, where it still lives. I thought of the people that author depicted, struggling to make a living and raise families on their space station. I thought: what if (yes, the essential idea question!) there were a young mother, an asteroid miner dealing with harsh circumstances (quite possibly including abuse by some huge, faceless megacorp) who, while passing through such a space station, just quietly “lost” a kid she no longer was able to support and was too stressed out to cope with? I thought of the dark underbelly of Deep Space Nine and figured such throwaway kids would probably congregate there on the fringes, trying to keep away from the eyes of the station security personnel. And the germ of an idea was born. It expanded when combined with other elements, such as super-powers and alien invasions, to create something altogether new and different. I can’t wait to write this one! But you see my point, how ideas feed and spin off each other, merging and changing until a new concept is born—unique, but with many existing ideas feeding into it.

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