Toni's Inspiration
By Toni Blake
©2005 Toni Blake. All Rights Reserved.
People ask me all the time where I get the ideas for my books, and I never really have a good answer. Sometimes it has to do with travel – visiting new places seems to make new stories burst free in my mind, and sometimes it has to do with something physical that seems to present an opportunity – a journal, old love letters, anything you can hold in your hand but which still possesses secrets or seems to have some life of its own. But when I think of inspiration and writing, my mind usually tends to shift to the “big picture” – the question of what inspires me to write, period.
Flashback to 1975ish or so, when I was a somewhat lonely little girl on a farm in the middle of nowhere. (Okay, it wasn’t really as bad as all that – but it felt that way.) I never had the opportunity to play with the kids next door – because there were no kids next door. And although I had friends in school, I wasn’t overwhelmed with them – there were a lot more kids who scared and intimidated me than who liked me, in fact – and I had yet to find anyone in life who I could truly relate to.
My remedy? Penpals. Through school, I got a penpal in England, which just seemed impossibly magical to a Kentucky farmgirl. Then, slowly, I amassed other penpals – throughout the United States. At one point I had seventy-five of them – and I’m not exaggerating. The postage was insane, but it made me happy because I was connecting with other people – and that’s really all I wanted – to feel I was making some sort of a connection with someone outside my little world.
My other remedy? I took a lot of long walks. I remember zipping up hooded sweatshirts on brisk fall days, walking back through the fields behind our house, down into the valley where a lovely babbling brook teemed with crawdads and water spiders and the grass was soft and green from heavy shade trees. I remember hillsides covered with junipers, and fences that became jungle gyms, and ponds where I learned to skip rocks, and cows that meandered past while I tried not to think of taking them to market when they were old enough. But, mostly, I remember thinking during those walks. Thinking and imagining and spinning wishes and stories in my head.
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