inspiration

Inspiration Redux

/ unspywriter / 6 Comments

I’ve written about inspiration in this blog before and talked about the various things that get an idea going in my head. A local writer friend of mine picks up snippets of conversations and jots them down. Maybe they’ll go verbatim in something he’s writing, or maybe they’ll inspire a whole new piece. You never know. You also never know where or when the muse decides to mess with your psyche.

This past week’s Friday Fictioneers’ story was, as are all Friday Fictioneers’ stories, inspired by a photograph. (If you click on the link in the first sentence, you’ll see the picture.) I’ve said before how amazing it is that the same picture can inspire widely different story interpretations of it. Last Friday’s picture lent itself almost universally to “body buried behind a wall” stories, and each one of them was unique. The comments on my story were all ego-strokes–yes, writers need them, too–but one person asked if it were the beginning of a longer piece.

Hmm. I hadn’t given that much thought, since I’m collecting the 100-word stories for inclusion in a fiction chapbook I’m drafting. I copied that story into the manuscript and added a counterpoint 100-word story as well. Then, I pretty much put the comment out of mind since I was about to head to Northern Virginia to get on a train to New York City.

On board the train, I was supposed to be writing a book review for an on-line magazine, but that comment about a longer piece began to nag at me, so much so I had to put the book I was reading for the review aside, pull out the Moleskine, and start making notes. By the time the N. E. Regional rolled into Penn Station in New York, I had a decent amount of notes about a possible new novel–no spies, no intrigue, no terrorists, no sci-fi; what’s up with that?

Throughout my weekend visiting friends on Long Island, I kept coming back to those notes, adding things, asking questions–and answering them–about possible characters and their motivations. I even decided it needed to take place in a town in the Shenandoah Valley very familiar to me, but I also decided that town needed to be fictional. A Google-search later, I had ten or twelve possible town names. Then, I decided that fictional town needed a fictional, private, women’s college, and another Google-search later, I had the name of the college.

I told myself that this idea would be perfect for this year’s National Novel Writing Month, but that’s not until November. I’m telling you, these characters are begging to be brought to life sooner than that.

Or perhaps it was just that a new tale needed to be told. I’ve been writing new short stories for the past two and a half years, but my primary focus has been on editing/revising the trilogy I want to submit to agents. A few weeks ago I had lamented to myself I hadn’t started a brand new novel project in several years.

So, one part suggestion from a reader, one part the desire to start a new project, add in pushy characters (I mean, really, they’re only nascent right now, but they are making themselves known in a big way.), and I’m pretty excited about this idea. Like, giddy and childlike about it. Not bad for an old broad writer.

Oh, To Be in Paris Now that April’s Here

/ unspywriter / 4 Comments

I’m a little behind in my movie-watching, but tonight I watched “Midnight in Paris.” I can take Woody Allen’s movies or leave them. Some have been brilliant, and some are just the same story retold. “Midnight in Paris,” however, is like porn for writers–it gets your writerly blood moving to all the right places. Seriously.

In the movie, an aspiring novelist on vacation in Paris with his fiancée is somehow transported each night to the Paris of the 1920’s. There, he meets every famous author and artist from that period. Gertrude Stein helps him polish his manuscript, and despite a tempting offer to stay in the past from a mistress of both Picasso and Hemingway, he goes back to his present and, ultimately, his future as a writer in Paris.

I started wondering how I would react to meeting the writers I studied in high school and college or the ones I’ve read and admired over the years, other than being speechless with shock. I’ve never been a Hemingway fan, with the exception of the short story, “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and the novel The Old Man and the Sea. So, he and I would probably have little to discuss. He would be a great drinking companion, however.

Fitzgerald, though, would be someone I could talk to all night. He and I could compare notes about how he dealt with Zelda the nutcase and how my father did the same with my mother. And Gertrude Stein–wow, that would be an amazing conversation. We could discuss lost generations–hers and ours in the 1980’s.

Several years ago, for a trip to New York City, I had the opportunity to stay at the Algonquin Hotel–the Dorothy Parker room, no less. I ate dinner there and could almost hear the voices of Parker, Sherwood, Ferber, et. al., at their famous Round Table. (The first editor I worked for as publication assistant was a “adjunct member” of the Round Table, and I loved her stories about those famous lunches.) I felt pretty cool, sitting at table in the Algonquin Hotel dining room, having a delightful dinner and wonderful wine, while jotting story ideas in my Moleskine. Yes, I thought that was an authentic touch.

Do writers imbue places with their essence to inspire future writers? Who knows, but maybe the inspiration comes from walking the same streets or sitting the same room. Maybe the inspiration is ours, and a shared history brings it to the surface.

If you were the 21st Century author in “Midnight in Paris,” which writers would you want to go back in time and meet? Believe it or not, I’d want to meet Thomas Hardy. Why? I’ll write about that some other time.

Inspiration

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The interview question a writer of any renown hates to hear is, “Where do you come up with your ideas?” or some variant thereof. That’s a process difficult to explain, so it’s easy to say, “From my family,” or “From life.” But those answers are a bit glib, perhaps disingenuous to someone who sincerely wants to know how you do it to enhance their craft.

Every writer has to answer that question–or not–from his or her own background. When I was getting some counseling after my father’s death, the therapist suggested journaling. Yes, I journal-ed before journaling was cool. She told me to, as one presenter at AWP advised, “vomit words on the page.” Many of those journal items became stories in my collection of short stories, Rarely Well-Behaved, which was published in 2000. Other stories in the collection, however, just “came to me.” Yeah, that’s a technical term.

When I write short stories I’m a bit of a seat of the pants writer. I start with a picture, a word, or a snippet of conversation I’ve overheard and expand on it. I let it go wherever it wants, and sometimes that works. My short story “Trophies,” published in the February issue of eFiction Magazine started out as a writing exercise inspired by hand-fishing–from the fish’s point of view. Then it moved to a character with aspects of my brother and my father, and that character did something that a friend’s stepfather did years ago. In the end, the catching-fish-from-the-fish’s-POV got canned (a good thing), and the story got refined and published.

Sometimes the seat of the pants approach doesn’t work. Last year, I wrote a short piece about a tree that falls on a house, in response to a writing prompt from a magazine. The tree’s falling brought out pent-up emotions in a suburban community not unlike where I lived in Northern Virginia. Those hidden emotions boil over, and a slaughter occurs. I workshopped it and got some good feedback, then one person just went off on why I’d written such a “stupid mess.” I was going for quirky, psychological horror, but he excoriated the story, me, and why I’d ever thought I was a writer. Threw me for a loop, I’ll tell you. I haven’t been able to look at the story since, even though I thought it was a good piece of flash fiction. Who knows? Maybe I’ll overcome the clench in my stomach and have a second look at some point.

Almost every Friday, I write a 100-word story inspired by a photograph posted by Madison Woods, and since I’m a more visual person, I generally get more inspired by looking at something than by a word or a phrase. When I see the picture, the story plays out in my head, which is cool, but my mother used to think it was weird.

I’ve learned a lot about craft from the workshops I’ve attended at writing conferences, including the recent AWP conference, but I’ve also filed away conversations I overheard in Kitty O’Shea’s, physical descriptions of some of the unique people I observed, and a great talk I had with a cab driver on the way to O’Hare on Sunday. All fodder for the imagination.

Life, death, friends, family, your physical surroundings–all of them can have a story that needs to be told, so tell it.

What inspires you? Are you a story planner or a seat of the pants writer? Do you see the story in your head, or does it just come from the fingers on the keyboard?