Probably the question writers get the most from non-writers is "Where do you get your ideas?" Some writers get psychological about it, talking about the subconscious and all of that shit. Some talk about their connection with universal unconscious. Some, like me, say "Hell, I dunno."
But sometimes, that's a lie, because I know the exact inspiration behind my first book, Sleepless Murder.
It all started with Lawrence Block's book Telling Lies for Fun and Profit. I bought it, read it, and proceeded to buy all of his books about writing. In one of them, Block mentions one of his serial characters, a man by the name of Evan Tanner, a thief who had the misfortune of having the sleep center of his brain destroyed by a piece of shrapnel in a war. Of course, being a fairly inquisitive person, I hit Google as soon as I read that, wanting to learn if this was possible.
Unfortunately, the only references to a "sleep center destroyed" were links to the Evan Tanner books. But I did find one thing that hit me as very interesting; an entry on Wikipedia referencing a disease called Fatal Familial Insomnia and its close relative Sporadic Fatal Insomnia.
Terrible diseases, of course, but also very interesting. I copied the article into a file, put it in my research folder. I had the initial idea at that point, I suppose. You see, one of the symptoms of SFI and FFI is hallucinations, and that was the
ultimate genesis of the idea: What if someone with FFI was having
hallucinations that told them to kill people? I started on a story then, but I didn't get very far; it felt too much like a copy of Silence of the Lambs at the time. I pretty much forgot about it for a year, maybe a year and a half.
It wasn't until October of last year, when I first learned about NaNoWriMo, that my brain began to fiddle with the idea again. But I still had a problem: my idea for a main character sucked. Like hard. It wasn't until I had a dream that everything came together. The dream was very clear and inspired my main character's profession, his hacker past and his family.
The only thing left after that dream was to put everything together and write it all down.
So there, that's where the idea, or series of ideas, that ended up becoming Sleepless Murder came from.
For anybody interested in Sporadic Fatal Insomnia, here's a link to a blog post about it.
