From Whence
Inspiration comes in many forms, but I often find myself doing one of two things when I sit down to write.
1. I either sit down to write a thought or turn of phrase I had, which needs some exploration. It might be a title, a pun, a response I have to something I overheard, two ideas that come together in an idle moment. Sometimes, it’s a walk into the neighborhoods of my brain that are dark and scary, uncharted.
OR
2. I hear a message on television or a news story, and I say to myself, “That is precisely the kind of thing I should write.” To me, it is a Really Good Idea that has a complete shape and form, having been fully realized on Oprah or CNN, and all it requires is MY voice, chiming in.
And guess which one is more often than not the most successful seed from which a page or paragraph doth spring?
If you guessed No. 1, then you would be correct most of the time. I start with titles. I think, I just need to jot this down, take some notes, make this quick joke to my email friend. The big graduate school word is juxtaposition. And a page later, I have something to say, or have said something. Maybe it’s interesting to me and needs editing or revision, maybe it’s just a quick send and forget about it.
I have also found myself staring at an email, thinking, GAH, this is not exactly what I need to be saying to that person. Where do I get off lecturing them? And then I will cut and paste into a blog window, and about 50% of the time, it becomes something, usually fluff, but sometimes high quality fluff, or the stiffer stuff like denim or brocade. Sometimes, it remains unpublished, awaiting further notions or buttons from the sundries department.
In the case of No. 2, most of my unsuccessful and usually unpublished entries/unsent emails are Really Good Ideas that fizzle after about 15 seconds and five syllables. There are two drafts here in this blog that began as someone else’s good ideas. I’d like to finish them. I probably won’t, and after a while, I’ll delete them without regret.
Once I can drown out the Big Teacher voice in my head (which surprisingly sounds like Oprah mixed with Barbara Jordan and a dash of Mr. Rogers), I can get on with my own work. But if I succumb to the Really Good Ideas and Big Teacher Voices, I fizzle.
One of the drafts is about music - the link to a video that I watched seven or eight times which moves me. But I have no words about music, and that is probably why I love music so much. It’s completely non-verbal (ok, smarty, even when it has lyrics, it’s non-linear… and now I sound like that character from Bull Durham). Perhaps I should say I am non-verbal about music. I could never be a music critic, and I admire much of the writing in Rolling Stone. And so that entry sits there, an artifact of my failure to say anything worth writing down about music.
And in writing that, I thought of a way to write that entry, without saying anything about the music… or my feeeeelings. Much in the same way composers loved Latin texts, it was not about the words.
So there you have one of my secrets, and perhaps you didn’t even know it. I start with titles or quips or quick thoughts, and I listen to music while I write. Maybe it’s like GreenTuna said: my inner three-year-old needs something to do while the grown-up sorts through the toybox. (And while you’re there at Tuna News, be sure to check out the B-52’s video because it’s one of my inner three-year-old’s faves.) I’ll leave the great posts about music to her, and stick to what I do better.
Um, which is hard to categorize - so we’ll just call it “woolgathering.”