“Where do you get your ideas from?” It’s the question every writer has been asked at some point in their career, and one that never has a set single answer.

I addressed a similar question, “What inspires you to write?”, in a recent interview at the book-review blog Fiction Fascination, explaining the genesis of a couple of scenes in Blood Feud, the first Pandora Zwieback novel: Pan sitting out in a rainstorm; how her dad gave her a DVD copy of the not-suitable-for-little-kids movie Watership Down (“But it had bunnies on the cover!”) for her fifth birthday. Writing inspirations can come from almost anywhere—it can be a book you’ve read, a conversation you overheard, a song that played on the radio…

They can even come from observations of the most mundane events. For example: this scene in the 1999 film American Beauty—written by True Blood creator Alan Ball—in which Wes Bentley’s character Ricky Fitts describes videotaping a plastic bag floating in a breeze:

In an interview conducted in 2000, Ball explained that the scene was inspired by “an encounter I had [in the early 1990s] with a plastic bag one day in front of the World Trade Center.”

One of my short stories, “Laundry Day”—about a group of people trapped while doing their wash on the eve of a zombie uprising—got its start from a toy ring that I bought from a gumball machine in a neighborhood Laundromat. What popped into my head when I first saw the machine full of rings was a scene of a guy presenting this crappy, 25-cent jewelry to his girlfriend as a romantic gesture, knowing they’d never have the chance to get married. The “camera” in my head then pulled back to reveal them huddled inside a Laundromat that had its metal security gates pulled down; beyond the gates was a full-on zombie apocalypse. (Yes, a lot of what I “see” when I write involves Hollywood-style cinematography.)

Initially it was going to be a three-page comic book story, with the zombie reveal on the final page. I never got around to writing it, though, and the toy ring (the one you see in the picture) sat in a drawer for a few years. Then, in 2006, I was invited by editor Vincent Sneed to pitch a story for his upcoming zombie anthology, The Dead Walk Again!—and it just so happened I had this toy ring in a drawer to remind me of something…

By the time I finished the story it had taken on a much darker—some have said incredibly nasty—tone. My rationale was that, in a zombie anthology, there’s no surprise in having your tale end with “And then he became a zombie, too!” and a happy ending would seem like a cheat. Thus, the bleaker tone, and an ending that literally took people by surprise—which is exactly the sort of reaction every writer wants from their audience.

(“Laundry Day,” by the way, was reprinted in 2010, in another walking dead anthology: Best New Zombie Tales 2, published by Books of the Dead Press. Warning: it’s not a story—or a book—for younger readers. The stories are gory as hell, and in “Laundry Day” I drop F-bombs so frequently you’d think I picked them up at a discount at Costco.)

Next week, we’ll look at some of the inspirations that worked their way into the first Pandora Zwieback novel, Blood Feud. Feel free to sing along with them…