New Year, New Inspiration

What inspires you?  Whether your inspiration motivates you to create a new story, or create anew in your life, take a moment to look back on those "Aha!" moments that helped you discover a new beginning.

My inspiration for new story ideas has often arisen from strange places.  Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," I once dreamed a story, the middle readers novel The Forest Witch.  Ironically, that old, old manuscript is the one I'll be seeing afresh sometime in the next month or so.  (I have another I'm revising to submit to a publisher.)

Back when I wrote murder mysteries, a whole chain of plot and character ideas came to me after I watched the first five minutes of a movie on television, then had to hop in the car to drive to an appointment.  The foundation for the book unfolded in my mind as I drove.  (In The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron describes the creative inspiration often triggered by being in motion, whether that motion is walking or running outdoors, or being in a car.)

For a while I kept a notebook and pen on the passenger seat in my car.  Ultimately, I decided writing while driving was just too dangerous.

Inspiration for poems tends to flood me only when I'm in love.  As far as inspiration for daily life goes--well, maybe I'll write about that next time!

Bonus

I experienced an unexpected boon the other day.  Big chunk of the morning-into-the-afternoon scheduled with a client who needed to postpone.  That left me with a full day to spend with my keyboard, back in 650 B.C.E. with my character Judith, just as she is making the transition from the safety of her village into meeting her enemy face to face.

Judith was not happy that day but I was and am.  Six hours and two chapters of revision instead of less than half that much.

Feeling the World Come Alive

I've finished the post-research revision on Judith. Though I took the manuscript with me on vacation, I truly took a vacation for the first time in years and did not touch the story (or give it any conscious thought) until the last day, when we had stopped to visit my writing partner in Virginia on the way back to Kentucky. For the first time in several years, Rita and I could savor our mutual feedback face to face instead of over the phone.

Back home in Louisville, I checked in with my characters, especially Judith herself, to feel what she (and her world) need to come fully alive. Over the last ten days I've been revising . . . the first chapter of the novel. One slow pass, page by page, to make sure each new character is visible as a physical being. Another slow pass to insure that each one is located clearly in space. A third--and a fourth--to allow Judith's sense of faith to saturate all she says and does.

On one of the last posts here I wrote about my sudden (only several decades in the making) insight that revision needs no rushing, and in fact requires us to slow down. Now, as I live that, I cannot describe the joy of switching off my internal clock, the sense that I need to hurry in any way. I am a voracious reader, but for the last ten days or so my character's reality leaves me no time and little interest for other writers' stories. (Though I am compiling a list of books to read when I step out of the cave. Whenever that happens to be!)

Awakening

It's been a challenging couple of months. The car broke down three times. I've been unwell twice, including my present head cold. The computer broke down, as I believe I mentioned before, but all is well now. And I realized I've worked non-stop on Judith since well before I left for the research trip back in April.

A more important realization has unfolded over the last couple of months, something I've known for years but only with my head or my brain. Now I comprehend it with my heart, or my full consciousness. Something like that.

I realized that every time I revise a manuscript--or every time I've done so up until now--I've believed "this was it." It. The final draft. But as I've worked through this very special revision, which integrates the research from my week in the library, I am recognizing that there is more yet to do. Another revision probably won't be enough. I can glimpse Judith and her friends, her neighbors and enemies as they grow more fully into themselves and into their world.

They're just not there yet. How many manuscripts have I written now? A dozen at least, from children's book manuscripts, murder mysteries, the memoir and more. Yet I feel I'm only beginning to understand the old maxim, "Writing is revision." And revision is seeing again, more clearly.

It feels like I've outgrown (or at least broken through one layer) of the familiar writer's urge to be done. To have written instead of being inside the writing. I'm happy to be here.

Judith

I leave Monday morning for my research trip to UK. My research questions spill over onto a seventeenth page, all single spaced and categorized, from Architecture and Agriculture to Wine and Weaponry. Many of the questions are actually variations on a topic that appears in dozens of places throughout the novel. (I included a chapter by chapter reference so integrating the research will be easier in the months after my return. That's the plan, anyway.)

I've also searched the library's online catalog so there's no time wasted on day one of my trip. As I always told my students, in the two decades when I taught college, "Don't be too task oriented." I'll find this original layer of texts . . . then browse the shelves in that area. Some of my most successful and enjoyable research discoveries all began that way, with a book or books I just happened to discover while I browsed the shelves.

That's how I've also often discovered authors I would never have read otherwise, in that different kind of browsing in bookstores.

Can't wait to get started. Keep your eyes on this space for details as the story behind the story (the research in support of the novel Judith) unfolds.

Did I write this?

As I work through the draft of Judith in preparation for my research trip to Lexington, I'm stunned to read passages that, while familiar, also feel as if someone else wrote them. Judith, perhaps? I always sit down and meditation before I write a new scene. I visualize myself in a location where Judith (or whichever character I'm working with) can approach me.

It's not unusual for me to have a feeling of "Wow, where did this come from?" as I read something I wrote a while ago. Never as strongly as with this manuscript, though. It feels so real.

Can't wait to get to the library and help make Judith's world even more solid, sensual and alive.

Research

I'll be going on a research trip for Judith in the next month or so. Now that I'm recovered from my stomach flu of last week--on my birthday no less--I'm going through the novel and finalizing my list of questions to be answered. I have a general list/outline already; now I'm breaking it down by the page.

On any given page, sometimes in any given paragraph I'll have one question and sometimes more. They range from details of Assyrian armor to women's hairstyles from the period. I don't expect (or need) to answer every question, but I'm looking forward to learning more about my characters' world.

I plan to work through the novel and gather information, make lots of notes and photocopies and bring the data home from my week at the library. The integration of that information? That will take place at home over many weeks, probably months. I once said I never expected to write a memoir. I never expected to write an historical novel, either! This will be a very different way to revise for me. I'm looking forward to it.

More on how that works as it unfolds.