With the year winding down (it’s December already?), I’ve been thinking about what inspired me most in 2024. Most of what I would put on my “Things That Inspired Me in 2024” isn’t surprising. I loved Dune: Part II, which is very on-brand. I finally started reading The Eye of the World, and to no one's surprise, I'm interested in it. I read a little Flannery O’Conner, Jacques Phillipe, and Frank Sheed as well, and writers like them are always the most potent fuel for my creative fire. But upon reflection, a few things inspired me this year I never would have predicted. I thought it’d be fun to share.
So, below are three things that surprised me with inspiration in 2024.
Andor
I liked Star Wars a lot growing up. I don’t like Disney’s Star Wars. I’m hardly alone in my opinion that money people have achieved total control of the franchise. Just about every step they’ve taken has taken them further away from what made us all love Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in the first place. Most things Star Wars these days feel hollow and artificial – a poor imitation of what came before, slapped together for no reason but to make money. The writing is often nonsensical and contrived, the action is clunky and subpar, and the acting is often unconvincing. I’m hardly the first person to say as much, but say it I must, for my disappointment in Disney is almost beyond words. They had the resources available to do something special with Star Wars, but they’ve fumbled it badly.
That’s why when Andor came out a couple of years ago, it was not even on my radar. But I kept hearing rumbles about how good it was. I remembered that Andor was a prequel to Rogue One, the one Disney Star Wars product that I hold in high regard. Then one day, I saw a clip of a speech by Stellan Skarsgård’s character, Luthen, and I found it so compelling that I had to give the show a shot.
I was pleasantly surprised.
It wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was solid. Sure, there are one or two eye-rolling contrivances that move the plot along, but overall, the writing is pretty good. It’s head and shoulders above most other Disney Star Wars I’ve stomached (I’m looking at you, The Rise of Skywalker). I loved the season’s first act, in particular. Characters are nuanced and well-acted. Even the villains are more than two-dimensional cardboard cutouts of some greater villain that came before. The small scale personal perspective of the show makes it feel a lot more grounded than most Star Wars, and the pacing was fantastic (other than Andor’s visit to a prison later in the season).
One might ask how a merely “solid” piece of fiction made a list of things that inspired my creative endeavors. In short, simply creating a decent Star Wars show allowed me to escape into a galaxy far far away for the first time since Rogue One. Like many sci-fi/fantasy nerds my age, Star Wars played a huge part in my formative creative years, so enjoying Andor felt like returning to my roots. It reminded me of who I was (creatively speaking).
2. Close Your Eyes by Tom Player
If this list was a ranking, this would be number one, and it’s not even a story. It’s music!
I don’t remember how I discovered Tom Player’s 2019 album, Close Your Eyes. Honestly, I don’t know the first thing about Tom Player. What I do know is that this album, especially the first few tracks, has been constantly rolling around in my head since about February. When I need to immerse myself in the violent, dragon-infested tropical world of my work in progress, this music always does the trick.
The thing about music with me is that it taught me how to pace a novel. Weird? Maybe. But it is what it is. It taught me how to build tension in layers. How to maintain rhythm. How to land a climax. How to play with themes and resolve them satisfactorily. Music taught me how to hold down the heartbeat of a story (bass and/or rhythm section) while adorning that story with unexpected and often beautiful action (think strings or lead guitar). In my mind, great musicians are pulling off many of the same tricks as great storytellers. I think they often don’t realize it.
My favorite track is Ordinary Hero, which builds a little tension with strings and piano before the drums and horns kick in and things get epic. It’s not Beethoven – none of the tracks are more than three or four minutes long – but Player never stops toying with his powerful, memorable themes throughout each relatively quick piece. Very little in any of the pieces is repeated, and all the tracks are distinct, so it never gets monotonous. It's mixed really well, too. This kind of music is perfect when you need a jolt of epic while writing. My second favorite track, Axis, would probably be the biggest crowd-pleaser. Its eerie horn intro and string and vocal build-up give way to an incredibly violent, primal rhythmic drive accented by horns and strings. If I can ever come close to capturing the energy of this piece in a sequence in one of my novels, I will die a happy man.
3. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
This book has been on my bookshelf for a few years, though I’m not exactly sure where it came from. Early in the year, I needed a little. . . literary mind-floss. . . after picking up a couple of contemporary books that I had to put down, so I plucked The Picture of Dorian Gray off the shelf without knowing anything about it. The funny thing is, I put it down after reading the first two sentences. If I counted correctly, the first is forty-five words long and the second is one hundred and thirty-four words long. My modern-reader/writer taste is nowhere near sophisticated enough to read sentences like that regularly, so I put it back on the shelf, tried a couple more of the classics I’ve never read, and eventually made my way back to give this one a chance. I’m glad I did.
The premise caught my attention. If you’ve never read it, here’s a bit from the plot summary on Wikipedia that sums it up nicely:
Newly understanding that his beauty will fade, Dorian expresses the desire to sell his soul, to ensure that the picture, rather than he, will age and fade. The wish is granted, and Dorian pursues a libertine life of varied amoral experiences while staying young and beautiful; all the while, his portrait ages and visually records every one of Dorian's sins.
Now, there are a lot of opinions about a lot of aspects of this book, and I’m not going to pretend to be an expert and comment on them here. What I will comment on is what struck me about the book right after reading a couple of books that felt a little thin in their thoughts. What struck me was this: Oscar Wilde held a deep and thoughtful outlook on human nature, and the depth of it came across in the novel. It gave me something substantial (okay, several things) to ponder. Given my fiction choices leading up to reading it, it was a breath of fresh air. Writing like that tends to expand a reader's world, even if the reader doesn’t agree with everything the writer is trying to say. I think this book had that impact on me. Parts of it will stick with me for a while.
So, there you have it: three unexpected things that inspired me in 2024. Here’s to 2025 and all the pleasant surprises that await us!
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