More on Inspiration: When Lightning Strikes

Inspiration is a funny thing: you can be 'blocked' for days and then some dumb episode from your past pops into your head, and there you have it: what I call the 'Million Dollar Idea.'

After reading about Sharon Garner's great LASER 'Cat-toy' idea in a previous post, I'd love to hear other epsiodes of inspiration from the Five Star crew. Which were your personal favorites when writing your book(s)? Which, perhaps, didn't work out as you thought they might?

Here's one of mine from my upcoming July release, Under Cloak of Darkness (minor spoilers ahead, in case anyone wants to read it):

There's a scene where my protagonist, a spy, is in a race against the clock: he must get back to his safe-house before 7 pm--the time of his rendezvous with a colleague--or that colleague will be intercepted and tortured.

My inspiration came from the great Cinema verite film Rendezvous, by French director Claude Le Louche. Here's the tale. In the mid-seventies, Le Louche bought a Ferrari at about the same time he was testing a new car-mounted 'steadi-cam'-like camera. He decided--and this is true, cuz' I've got the DVD to prove it--to mount it on his Ferrari and hire a Formula 1 driver to test-drive it.

The driver's task was to drive from one end of Paris (starting near the Louvre) across to the other side (the Cathedral Sacre Coeur) while the bumper-mounted camera filmed the whole thing.

The catch? He was to drive AS FAST AS HE POSSIBLY COULD! No blocked-off streets. No police notification. Just some nut (I've always suspected the driver was French racer Didier Pironi) screaming across Paris at 6 am in a Ferrari, exceeding speeds of 120 mph!

And he did it, in under ten minutes. But what a ride! People diving off sidewalks, cars honking, lights flashing, near-misses, ventures into on-coming traffic. When I show people this DVD on my big-screen, I swear some of them are about to s--t their pants! You simply can't believe it until you've seen it.

So I thought, What a great idea for the climax of a book! Have my protagonist hijack one of the classic London taxis in Soho and charge him with driving to South Kensington as fast as he can. I won't tell you if he gets there in time, but this ride was a blast to write: dodging pedestrians just done shopping at Selfridges and Marks & Spencer, getting stuck behind plodding two-story red London buses, running vintage automobiles (the story takes place in 1955) off the road, flying past landmarks like the Dorchester Hotel and Marble Arch.

It's said that at the first screening of his film Claude Le Louche was arrested by Paris Gendarmes for his little stunt. My character, I will tell you, didn't get off quite so easily as paying a fine and having a brief stay at a station-house. But if people accuse me of writing something too fantastic to be true, I can say this in my defense:

Stop by my house--I've got a little movie to show you.

If you ever have a chance to see it--please do. I swear, you won't believe they actually did it.