My Inspiration . . . in a bag

Lately, I've taken to keeping my inspiration in bag on my desk. It sits in the corner, right on top of my dictionary, the phone book, and a pile of Writer's Digest. 
 

There's only one catch. . . .

It's empty!

It's no secret that I've been coveting the Tiffany Setting engagement ring ever since I spied in the Bellagio shopping court in Vegas three years back. I think it's perfect in every way: sparkly, chic, elegant. But there's one little catch: the yowsers(!) price tag. Obviously there's a bit of writing success that needs to happen before we can bridge the gap between me and the ring, not to mention a small portion of my lifetime spent saving. 

Sure, it's frivolous and silly to dream of someday owning a 15K ring. And if I did manage to squirrel away those funds, chances are they'd end up being a down payment on a house or something else slightly more . . . substantial.

But a girl can dream.

I remember the story a volunteer at work told me the other day about her mother. Although her mother grew up as one of 11 children on a small town southern MN farm, in her adulthood she traveled to all the major cities as a buyer for a retail store. When she visited New York, she insisted on having the most fashionable hat from Saks 5th Avenue, the one with an entire small bird on it. (You know, the kind that prompted the Everglades to be designated a national park to save the birds from hat-hood.) The volunteer still has that hat of her mother's.

Moral of the story: if you work hard and make deliberate fiscal decisions, nothing is out of reach, as long as you don't want everything.
 
So when a lampshade showed up at work with two harps tucked into a taped up Tiffany's bag at the bottom of the box, I decided to pull off the tape and keep the bag. Because someday, I know I'll fill it.

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Writing into Stupidity

Inspiration is all around us. Like this icicle that looks like a hand. Or carrots . . .

“The artist goes through states of fullness and emptiness, and that is all there is to the mystery of art.” – Pablo Picasso

Writers like to call upon muses to guide us through tricky plots and help us wrap our pen around poems which float evanescently through our minds. We like our writing to feel like it comes from some external source. Nothing’s more fun than feeling like we’re simply the funnel who captures words on the page.

But common knowledge is, if you want to make a buck at the whole writing game, you haven’t got time to wait around your muse. There’s writing that needs to get done right NOW and the best way to get that writing done parking your butt in your chair and starting in, well, writing. Muse or no muse.

To be honest, I find the muse concept kind of flighty and impractical. (It’s stuff like that that gives us writers our starving artists’ reputation.) But I’m enough of a dreamer to find the “butt parking” mandate a little harsh. I mean, it kind of takes all the supposed romance right out of this writing life.

So I spend my writing life in between those two mentalities. I have to use the latter advice because I think my muse’s kind of beach bum. She spends most of her days sunbathing in her bikini and sipping pina coladas. She can’t be bothered with the whole inspiration thing too often.

I write nearly every day, but rarely in a “omigod I think I was just struck by lightning bolt” manner. And so the deadlines are met and fiction projects move forward. I try not to worry when the inspiration just isn’t there, like . . . last week.

Last week was one of the scheduling nightmare weeks which involved running all over creation. While I was getting interviews and plenty of other “pre-writing” activities done, I certainly wasn’t generating much of a word count last. Whenever I sat down to get a little writing work done, it felt like each sentence was a gigantic beach ball I could barely wrap my arms around, let alone manage to somehow shove it into my laptop and coax to nicely sit still in a Word document. Ugh!

But some weeks days of the writing life are like that. That’s when I remember one of the helpful things I heard in the writing class I took last fall. When describing his typical writing day, the instructor said: “I write until I get stupid.”

When the words really aren’t coming one little bit, it’s time for a mug of hot cocoa, a shower, a good book, or a stroll outside. The muse seems to respond well to a wee bit of pampering.

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Weekend Wishes

"To trudge: the slow, weary, depressing yet determined walk of a man who has nothing left in life except the impulse to simply soldier on." 
-- Chaucer, A Knight's Tale

Things really aren't as bad as the above quote might seem to indicate, but as I'm posting this, I've got a trudge ahead of me. I'm about to strap on some snowshoes and head out across the snow-packed, wind-drifted lake for a writing date with my neighbor. 

Andy and I have been watching HBO's John Adams mini-series this week and I found a timely bit of knowledge/advice on one of the DVD's special features: a short piece on the author of the infamous John Adams biography, David McCullough. During the bit, McCullough states: "The great thing about the arts is that you can only learn to do it by doing it."

So true, so true.

No book on writing is going to produce the next Great American Novel for you. I'll happily trudge across the lake if it means some words of substance show up on the page.

Wherever this weekend finds you -- trudging or no -- Happy Friday!

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Women Who Inspire

We writers are supposed to know a thing about inspiration. Yet when faced with today’s Back to Blogging challenge, “write about a women who inspires you” I came up a little befuddled. Let’s face it, writing prompts and I have never been great friends.

I thought about all the women who inspire me: my mom, grandmothers, co-workers, friends, even authors I’ve never met.  For a while I planned to center this post around writers Anne Lamott and Madeleine L’Engle who were both influential in prompting me to trust my pen and lead the life I do.

But a few things happened before I got around to writing that post. For one thing, I had a couple days off. The days off lead to a trip to Duluth, which lead to looking at woodstoves, which lead to a second trip to Duluth to purchase and transport a wood stove home. Before I knew it, it was time to go back to work and I had an article deadline staring me smack-dab in the face. And instead of writing this blog post in the morning like I’d planned, I worked on my deadline this morning and spent the whole day alternating between being mad at my deadline and being mad at myself for procrastinating.  Now I’m writing this post at 8:15 in the evening, after finishing up the drafts of my deadline stuff. Supper might be a good idea. . . .    

While I cursed my poor planning, railed against having to devote my evening to writing articles when I’d rather be doing so many other things, I took a minute to look at the article I was working on. The article profiles the work of our local domestic and sexual violence prevention center.

And I thought to myself, “Listen lady. Wake up and smell the roses. Stop looking for inspiration and open your eyes.”

So I blinked and looked back at my computer screen. In the article I was talking about

women who in the worst of conditions have the courage to tell their stories, to “change their stars.” And volunteers who devote their spare time to being trained and putting in on-call hours so they can help others overcome the affects of violence. These women are so much braver than I’ve ever been and most of the time we don’t even acknowledge that violence is a reality in every one of our communities.

If there isn’t inspiration in the stories of violence survivors, of people like S.A.R.K, of violence center volunteers, then I don’t know what inspiration is. They’re the people who actually wrestle again the hugeness of it all, who trust in change and healing even in the worst of situations. That’s something very few of us do.

Tonight I thought, maybe inspiration isn’t something about realization. It isn’t something that strikes from the heavens. Instead, it’s a re-remembering of something you always knew.

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Standing Out

The other night, Andy and I motored down to the north bay to do a little fishing. Our true motivation wasn’t fish but to take in a still, warm summer evening in a quiet bay removed from the rest of the lake’s evening anglers. As we headed down the lake, this island, with its single bright tree, caught my eye. "That," I thought, as I tried to take a non-blurry picture as we cruised by, "is what I want to be."

There are always plenty of doubts to tangle with whatever you do in life and if you’re setting out as a writer, it seems you’re especially susceptible to doubting whether or not you have what it takes to really, truly stand out. Imagination/muse, whatever it is that keeps the words sprinkled across the page in a somewhat logically manner, is a fickle utensil to base a whole career around. And imagination has a sneaking sort of way of ending up not quite as original as you thought it might be.

Often it seems as though my imagination is little more than a parrot. Like any writer at any point in time, dealing with the seven original plots this entire world offers can seem a little stifling. Gore Vidal said that “each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. . . . I have 10 or so and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.” 7 basic plots? Lucky to have 10 unique characters? That seems like a pretty limited toolbox to be playing with. As the number of aspiring novelists rises, it’s easy to feel lost in a sea of aspiration instead of inspiration.

On the other hand, for centuries writers have scratched out a life for themselves with only a pad of paper and a pencil (or a laptop). They probably didn’t spend too much time worried about how original their stories were. Instead they wrote what amused them. More than that, they met deadlines, negotiated contracts, and let go of projects that weren’t succeeding. Does perseverance trump skill/imagination?

It’s hard to say, but I do know to keep going. To keep imagining, writing, revising and polishing until some bit of prose turns into a gold flash on an evergreen island.

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