This is the second essay by Peter on the intricacies of the English language. Here, he writes on where inspiration comes from, and why no amount of effort can quite summon it.
My first piece in the English language series talked about the quality of writing that appeals to a wider readership and qualifies for contests. Today, we talk about how to get such writing done.
Writing is hard work: it has been said to consist of “1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration.” Many would-be writers of everything from a nephew’s thank-you note to a doting aunt for her birthday present to a harried graduate student with a delayed doctoral thesis, inevitably learn that every act in the laborious process of writing requires careful planning and thought if it is to be successful in conveying in a timely fashion what needs to be said. It must be fluent, convincing, sufficiently serious, and free from a host of common writing errors recalled from bygone English classes. There are countless authorities, pamphlets, handbooks of usage, and the like to help us write better by hard work, but there is very little we can do to acquire inspiration, without which we will remaåin stuck in neutral until we abandon the effort in frustration. Inspiration is a crucial ingredient in effective writing, but how are we to come by it?
What kind of an Ironist are You?
Charles Lamb, the Victorian essayist, antiquarian, and poet, considered it “foolish to suppose” that alcohol was or ever could be an aid to inspiration, according to novelist Peter Ackroyd, who adds, “He knew that it constrained his imagination, confining it to the layers of drunken perception.” To those who choose not to drink it, this seems so obvious as hardly to need saying, but the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who took laudanum, a similarly addictive stimulant then prescribed as a painkiller, was awoken from a drug-induced dream by a loud knock from someone who had come to see him on business. Once this caller had left, Coleridge sat down at his desk and feverishly attempted to describe the exotic dream vision set in “Xanadu” where a “sacred river ran/ Through caverns measureless to man/ Down to a sunless sea” that the caller had interrupted, but it was by then too late, as the dream had fled, the poet tells us, “passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast.” All we have of his experience is the intriguing poetic fragment, a mere 54 lines, of the unfinished poem “Kubla Khan.” Suffice it to say that all addictive substances can be quickly eliminated as vehicles for creative inspiration, as this faculty cannot be summoned, if at all, in such a crude way. It comes unexpectedly, at any time, while we are riding the bus or taking a shower, shifting snow, listening to music, during a phone call, or at any time when the mind is apparently idle and miles away from the discipline of composition. In its refusal to be compelled, inspiration is similar to mercy, whose quality, as Portia insists in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, “is not strained ( forced)/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.”
If we have been lucky, we each might have been inspired by the example of someone whose influence we recall with fondness years later. Teachers are sometimes great sources of inspiration. I have been fortunate to have had three of them: all teachers of English, one in Venezuela, a second in England, and the third here in Ottawa. All three may well have been unaware of the lasting effects their interest in and encouragement of my work had on me, although I suspect not, and if the writer Penelope Lively, a shrewd judge of human nature, is correct, the effects of inspiration came about as a result of what she has called “some mysterious process of free association.” It is mysterious because we do not understand its origins. In Christian belief, ‘inspiration’ is a gift from the Holy ‘Spirit’, both words derived from the Latin spiro — I breathe– so that an inspired artist has been ‘breathed into’ by a force not subject to human, or chemical, control. No wonder, then, that there is no handbook for an ‘aspiring’ writer, one who wants to ‘breathe in’ better. Inspiration comes, if it comes at all, in unexpected ways, often at times when the mind is otherwise engaged. A case in point is that of Margaret Laurence, the Canadian author of The Stone Angel, whose main character, Hagar, she has told us, was the “old woman who walked into my kitchen” one morning while she was occupied with something else. Entering a writer’s kitchen is an unusual thing for a fictional character to do, but it is of a piece with the way in which imagination, the engine of all human discovery, works as the handmaiden of inspiration, and there is no reason to doubt that ‘unreality’ imposed itself on reality in just such a fashion, whether or not the Holy Spirit was responsible for sending Hagar to her.
J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, creator of works of mythopoeic and epic fantasy read by millions around the world, was also a University of Oxford scholar who was marking student examination papers as part of his duties. While he was busy with his evaluations, he suddenly felt impelled to write down on a piece of paper, the following words: “In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit.” At the time, Professor Tolkien confessed, he did not know why he wrote this, or what a hobbit was, so he had to keep on writing to find out. Similarly, when some hobbits arrive in Bree on their mission to Mount Doom, there is a mystery man in the hostelry where they are staying, whose identity Tolkien confessed he did not then know, but was able to discover as the story unfolded: this person was to be revealed to him, and then to us, as ‘Strider,’ whose true identity and importance become clear much later.
C.S. Lewis, a friend of Tolkien’s, and author of the Narnia books for children, revealed that years before he set pen to paper, he had had for no obvious reason, “a mental picture of a faun with an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood,” a striking image that was to be the prelude to a series of adventures that several children who emerge from a wardrobe into the land of Narnia are to have together, beginning with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and ending six subsequent novels later with The Last Battle.
A story I wrote several years ago called “Her Finest Hour” was based loosely on a real girl’s apprenticeship in a pretentious department store in pre-war England. I knew the ‘plot,’ and how to describe the steps that would lead to the girl’s decision to leave her employment, but for some reason I could not think of how to get the story started, until an image flashed into my mind unbidden as I lay half- awake in bed one morning. It was the image of a young man walking gingerly along the hard sand of a beach, careful not to wet his shiny new shoes in the gentle wavelets that lapped the shore. I had no idea who he was. The sky and sea were grey, so it must have been an English shoreline. He was, I thought, taking a short cut to work, as why else would he risk damaging his shoes with salt water? On the face of it, this image, which I used to begin the narrative, exactly as I recalled it, had nothing to do with the girl–unless they met at the beach, and a romantic interest resulted. That would work! I began the story eagerly, and was pleased with the result, but then I had help with it, didn’t I?
Another of my stories was initially sparked by the 1880 American hymn ‘Softly and Tenderly’ that I first heard at the opening and closing of the moving 1985 film The Trip to Bountiful. The hymn’s soulful lyrics, sung beautifully by Cynthia Clawson, impressed themselves so deeply on my mind at the time that they eventually, years later, became the inspiration for my story ‘Home,’ a meditation on the nature of homecoming that I began writing in 2015, and have revised five times since then, most recently, this morning. The hymn’s composer, Will Lamartine Thompson, confided that he would always write down words or melodies that came to him “at odd times” if he deemed them worthy of a song, “no matter where I am, at home or hotel, at the store or travelling.” Such extraordinary interventions by the creative spirit are, I suspect, more common than we realize, but they come when they will; we cannot make them appear, nor is there a guarantee that we will make anything of them. But when they arrive and lodge themselves in our memories, writers should be grateful. I certainly am for mine.
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Contributed by
Peter A. Scotchmer
