Goodreads asked Michelle Hazen:

How do you get inspired to write?

Michelle Hazen For me, inspiration just drops in little bright packages from the heavens, like those gifts from sponsors in the Hunger Games. And for as lovely as that sounds, it's not always particularly helpful. I frequently get inspiration for projects that I don't have time to work on, or for pieces of a story that I have no idea how to fit together into a coherent, sympathetic narrative.

But usually the way it works is I'll get a bright little bit of something, a concept or a character, and I'll start to try and build a story around it. Once I get going, I'll get lines of dialogue and images and all kinds of things when I'm lucky. And when I'm not lucky *shrugs* I have to make all that stuff up and it's much harder.

For instance, once I wrote a story about a mainstream actor filming a very sexual movie (think 50 Shades) and the inspiration for the story was this one scene where his thoughts begin to blend together with the thoughts of the character he's playing and it all becomes very schizophrenic and he breaks down emotionally because he's so ashamed of his own reactions. Or for my most recent project, the heroine just started talking inside my head and the girl was so funny, I had to write her a book!

I very frequently get inspiration for things that I know I HAVE to write, and I don't understand what they are doing in the story, and then they always end up sort of automatically fitting into place later. This is some of the magic of writing for me, because it feels like there is something out there with a Master Plan for each of my stories, and I'm just writing blind, hoping I can get as close as I can to that Master Plan.

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