IfI’m honest with myself, the inspiration for Novel Noir came from an incredible amount of different source material that I synthesized into one coherent unit.

I could feel it.

A little steam was escaping, occasionally, and there was a lot of red-hot magma churning around inside me.

And yet, I was overwhelmed.

I really couldn’t find a way to coordinate it all into one central plot.

But then, some synergy arrived.

And good timing.

At that time, my wife and I had never been on a cruise.

But we had booked an inexpensive Caribbean Cruise, and in the smail-mail, I received all the information about the ship.

That was when everything sort of snapped together.

I researched color-blindness.

But it wouldn’t work.

With color blindness, you can still see some color.

Hmn.

So, we went on the cruise.

On pure faith, I took photos of anything I thought might fit the plot that I now had in mind.

When we got back, I had all the photos I needed to motivate me to start a novel.

All I had to do was Photoshop them into black-and-white.

And the color-blindness research took me to an even more rare eye disease.

Achromatopsia.

Achromatopsia is a rare, bilateral inherited retinal degeneration affecting all three types of cone photoreceptor cells that results in reduced visual acuity, photophobia, hemeralopia, and severe loss of color discrimination.

Yeah, I know.

Me, too.

Very achademic.

And boring.

But within that boredom, there was a secret door to create a main character who could only see things in black-and-white.

Which took me deeper into the central character.

I watched maybe the best noir movie ever– Double Indemnity.

I locked in on the then-popular Sharon Stone, and studied her characterization in the movies Diabolique, Sliver, and, of course, Basic Instinct.

Sometimes, inspiration is the synergy that comes about from the combination of a lot of different ingredients!

Here are some of the additional source materials that went into researching Novel Noir:

To this day, I still have an entire box of books, character sketches, notes, images, outlines, and rough-drafts.

But before each rough draft, I reviewed my black-and-white photos.

I’ve read about other fiction writers doing similar things. I remember reading about Anne Rice having an image of the vampire Lestat near where she worked. Years ago, I remember how astounding this discovery was. I assumed I was the only one.

But, of course, you never are.

Still, in spite of all this research, I think a great way to give you a vibe similar to the things that led to the inspiration for Novel Noir might be to share a sampling of some of my photos (click to see a larger image):

*Header Photo by  Lewis Faulkner at Faulknerfiction.com