Inspiration

I've been thinking a lot, lately, about inspiration. About where it comes from, how we receive it, whether we have any control over it. You know, the easy questions.

Take the story behind my first novel. At one point, one day, I got the image of one of those old station wagons, with the wood-paneled sides--I mean a really old one, from the forties, maybe. I'm not a very visual person, nor do I have much of an imagination. But suddenly I had in my imagination the image of this car. Where it was painted, the paint was old, faded, chipped and dented dark green. The wood panels were scarred, marred. A really old car.

I watched (in my head, remember) as this car turned in to a tree-shrouded lane and disappeared. The road, I noticed, was dirt. There was a small cloud of it still hanging in the air after the car was gone. I also saw that there was no sign naming the road, as a street or as a county road. And I suddenly realized that, though I hadn't seen them, the inhabitants of the car were two women. Old women--or at least older--as would befit a car of its advanced age.

About a dozen or so years ago, I joined one of the offshoots of what was then the Austin Writers' League. The group was called Novels in Progress, and its members were NIPpers. We came together to share what we wrote, the novels we were beginning, struggling with, or polishing up for publication. As it became clear that I'd have to produce something for the group to push around and poke at, I sat down one day in front of my Mac and--didn't have to wait too long--suddenly there was an image in front of me. A child's sneaker, red and empty. And I began to write.<

Couldn't get much beyond a first chapter, though my group got quite a bit of mileage out of it. But I couldn't figure out where the story wanted to go. Was the owner of that sneaker, a small boy, going to make it to the end of my novel? Had he been kidnapped? And who was this person who had seen the sneaker? She was a woman, I knew that much, and she was not a terribly worldly woman (sort of mirrored me, her creator. Imagine that!). But was she going to fall in love with the policeman who answered her question in that first chapter? And--oh my goodness, look at that! One of those two women in that old station wagon had also showed up in that first chapter. Where did she come from? And where was she going to wind up? What part was she going to play as the whole thing unwound?

Those questions just ran around in my head like a herd of loose cats. I had no idea how to corral them, to manage them into a story that those NIPpers would approve of. Until one day, when my friend Joanne and I wound up in a car together with a couple of hours to entertain each other. I mentioned my story, she asked me to tell her about it, and I did. I told her about that first chapter, with its red sneaker. And when I'd gotten to the last page of that first chapter, my mouth continued to move and a second chapter manifested, and then third, and by the time we'd reached Brooklyn, our destination (almost under the bridge, as I remember it), I was mentally typing "The End" on my narrative.

Where the heck did it come from? And I could also ask, where did it go? I didn't have a tape recorder on that trip, which was something I regretted for a long time, because neither of us could remember everything--or even most of the things--that I had said. I thought for some time--years, actually--that I had lost that story. But it wasn't lost. It was waiting for me to reach the point where I was ready to put it down in a more permanent form. When that time came, last November, elements had changed, endings turned up in very different locations, characters disappeared and were replaced by more interesting ones. This time, the story made it onto the page, all the way to the end, and it flowed just as easily as the first one had, and the place it came from was just as mysterious as ever.

And I still don't know where that place is or how it works, or how--or even whether--we can have any control over it. But it sure is fun to be dipping my toes in that stream, to be catching some of the ideas and urges that are available when we tap into it. In fact, I'll tell you about some of that fun, maybe in the next post.

Till then, buy the book, Awakening, if you haven't already, write a review if you have, and in either case, tell all your friends about it. That's your job. Mine is to write the next book. And then the next. And I'm on it!