Odd Inspiration Moment

I love love LOVE when something about a WIP finally clicks. I was struggling a bit figuring out the backstory of my book, and since the backstory is a HUGE part of this particular book, this was kind of a problem. There were several things I was struggling with:

• why my MC had ended up where she had
• why her love interest was also there
• how he got there, and how he came to be her love interest in the first place (I needed their families to be against their being together, but I didn't want it to be too Romeo and Juliet with all the hate and family feud issues going on)
• and there were several other issues about my MC and her family/background/personality/character, etc that I just was having a really hard time figuring out.

So, needless to say, work on this WIP has been pretty slow because I needed this stuff worked out before I could really dive in. Oh, and add to all that the fact that I've been toying with making this book a partial verse novel (and hence needed to decide when and where to use poetry...and what type of poetic form(s) I wanted to use) and yeah...issues LOL

And then last night, I was sitting there watching Drop Dead Diva (awesome finale, can't wait for next season!!) and all the answers just fell into place. And I'm not really sure why. There was a murderer on death row on the show. He'd killed somebody = he was bad. But he loved his sister, wanted her to have his heart after he was executed, and he seemed genuinely sorry for what he'd done = maybe he wasn't so bad. 

And something about his character sparked an idea and everything about my story that I was struggling with just fell into place. I'm not even sure what it was because I'm not going to make my MC (or her love interest) a murderer or anything like that. It wasn't in any way a literal "ooo I'll do the same thing." 

But something about that character's story, the conflict in him, tweaked the right creative thread and the issues I was having in my manuscript were suddenly clear...as were their solutions. 

I grabbed a notebook and wrote out 2 pages of notes. And for the first time in a long time I am excited to start writing :D

Have you ever had a weird inspiration moment? Where something totally unexpected inspired an idea or made that problem area you'd been working on suddenly fall into place?