My Inspirations

Hello all,

I’ve been taking a nice, long day off since I finished the latest rounds of edits, and, to be honest, I kinda got bored with all this free time. I’m used to spending all my time reading/writing/putting out fires/trying to do social media stuff. So I thought I’d tell you my inspirations for Manual Automata, my current work-in-progress and future works.

I have a strict policy of working on one thing at a time. In the past (not with writing), I’ve tried to multi-task, and I only satisfy myself with my work if I do one project at a time. However, I have about a dozen ideas all floating around for books. I plan to get them all down in book form, but it’ll probably take me years.

I began writing in late 2016/early 2017 by writing down my life story. It wasn’t very inspired, but it was what I knew. I had a few threads to follow, but I had no idea where to start or even how to consider plot elements or how to write an introduction or all those important details. So I just wrote and wrote endlessly, and I learned a lot. I mean, I had learned a lot already by writing my two theses, but they were academic non-fiction. I discovered how I’d write transitions and introductions and all those things: by not doing it.

I’ve always been a big fan of abandoning formalities. I think it really started when I got into linguistics, and their whole prescriptivist versus descriptivist bend influenced me. When I transcribed audio the first few times, I got a taste of how people actually speak. And it’s nothing like writing.  Add on top of that a preference for Realism and against Romanticism. I should write how things occur. The sounds, the emotions, the small imperfections, repetitions, ten millisecond pauses, hundred milliseconds-long awkward pauses, all that sort of stuff. What you don’t pay attention to shouldn’t be ignored. Life, communication is hardly ideal like people pretend to. Nothing corresponds 1:1 with something else.

I think living abroad complemented my realizations. Once I started to really learn Italian, I started to really conceptualize that a foreign language is a product of foreign thinking. If concepts like evil aren’t able to be expressed in a few words, what did they really mean?

Anyway, back to my inspirations. My first book, Manual Automata, was the combination of two elements I had for two different stories. A man turning himself into a robot was the first one and is the driver of the action of the story. The second was great economic division. I covered where I got the latter idea on a Podcast so you can learn about it there! The former was because I kept having the feeling while looking for work that the world and most employers would prefer me and many of those who work minimum wage jobs to be robots that didn’t complain and didn’t have those stupid human needs.

My next book (the one I’m editing now), which will be coming out in the next few months hopefully, was inspired by an event in my life and my own revelations. It was a short period of my life, but one that has affected everything that came after it.

My fourth book (let’s skip the third for now) has two inspirations, Stephen King’s Tommynockers and a story I read online about a man’s wife suddenly disappearing for a long period and coming back all of a sudden.

The point of me talking about this is that inspiration can come from anything at all. When I’m in a creative mood (usually in the process of writing a first draft), I frequently wake up to write something down. I’ll dream, or an idea or configuration of words will come to me. Maybe a memory will surface from my youth or something of the like, and I write it down. Then in the morning I can figure out how it should fit in. I love dreams most of all because I believe confusion reflects human experience better than clean-cut words and well-structured sentences. And I think a lot of people (readers and writers alike) think formalism and formality are more important than an author using the forms of words as an expression other than their meaning. Also, I may just be writing badly.

Until next time,

Ben