Sources of Inspiration

I've been thinking lately about where my inspiration for certains stories or poems comes from.  Sometimes I just get a feeling and then a thought follows that, and that thought births other thoughts and then there's a big thought family that I have to excise from my brain in textual form before these thoughts commandeer all my other brain functions.  But why/when does this happen?

Well I've figured out two of my inspiration sources: nature and music.  I grew up in a nature-loving, musical family, and so--whether by genetics or conditioning or both--I grew up to love both in my own way.  I grew up going on family camping trips and hikes, and roughing around my best friend's farm: rafting down his creek, riding his horses, leaping around in the hayloft.  I came to appreciate nature in all its shapes and forms, finding beauty in all things small and large which many people would dismiss or even find repulsive.  And then once I started thinking more deeply about things, I saw connections in what I found in nature with things in real life.  And thus most of my poems were and still are formed.

My Mom was a music ed major in college.  She heads our church choir and she gives lessons in piano, guitar, and voice (and she still has a pretty good voice and piano hands herself).  My sisters both sing, and one plays piano and clarinet.  I sing and play the trumpet, a little piano, and recently picked up the tenor recorder.  Even my dad used to play trumpet, and still knows stuff about music.  All my exteneded family have some musical abilities.  It's in our blood.  I get a lot of (vague, preliminary) inspiration for stories from listening to instrumental (especially orchestral/symphonic) music.  It has to be wordless, because I'm an advocate of the old adage "where words fail, music speaks." I still love my indie rock bands and local acoustic groups for their deep, poetic lyrics and quirky sound, but that's more for entertainment's sake than deep reflection or inspiration.  When I listen to instrumental/symphonic music, I tend to hear it as a soundtrack, and a vague narrative tends to form in my head depending on what the music sounds like.  Many people experience the reverse of this: they see a movie, love the soundtrack, then purchase the soundtrack: then when they listen to certain tracks, they can "feel" what's happening in the movie even though the movie itself is nowhere to be found.  It also happens that, since I'm a pretty melancholy, pensive fellow by nature, a lot of the symphonic music I like is that way also, and so a lot of my stories end up that way.  Sort of calm, introspective and bittersweet.  That's what I strive for; also I strive to make my prose have an emotional depth, since that's what I respond to.  I can't write funny prose...it's just not in me.  When I do I kind of scare myself because it's so out of the ordinary. 

My two favorite songs of late are October by Eric Whitacre and Persis by James L. Hosay.  October is a gorgeously melancholy piece with powerful full-ensemble swells that really get at the heart of October and the Fall season...it captures (for me) the sights of autumn in sound, and on a deeper level that sort of bittersweet fading feeling of things passing away and time moving on.  Persis is one of those totally epic songs that's really long and sweeps through a huge variety of emotions, from fear/adrenaline, excitement, deep contentedness and extreme emotional distress.  It has an exciting beginning, and a sweet, melancholy oboe solo in the middle followed by a slow crescendo of building emotional intensity, more instruments adding their voice, and the middle section climaxes in this hugely epic emotional peak that never gets old.  The song ends with a fast-paced interweaving of all the musical themes that came before: you have the relentless drums, the frantic woodwinds, and the desperate brass all vying for attention and the whole ending is just phenomenal.  I want my stories someday to be able to evoke those emotions from readers.

I also get a fair amount of inspiration from people-watching.  Like yesterday, I went to the coffee shop alone to read and think, and I saw out of the corner of my eye a frantic college girl rushing out of the shop talking on the phone, and she dropped one of her red gloves and left it behind, totally forgotten.  I couldn't stop looking at and thinking about that lovely red glove, and how she seemed so intent on it before she got whatever desperate call she got and then totally forgot about the red glove, leaving it on the dirty floor.  So I made a note of it to see if I could do something with it later, and sure enough I wrote a poem about it. 

But anyway, I've talked enough.  What do you, anonymous readers, think are your sources of inspiration?

Reading, Reading, Reading

My last semester here at Geneva is a reading semester.  Kind of a new change of pace, considering the last several semesters have been dominated by writing.  But this time I'm taking mostly lit classes, and an independent study in novel-writing (and the novel doesn't even necessarily have to be finished, just what I have has to be well-written and coherent) so most of my time will be spent reading.

I'm taking a class on C.S. Lewis, Masterpieces of World Literature, Old English literature, Political Science (required for the core), and Cinema (my favorite class so far...we get to sit around and listen to a quirky flower-child professor talk about film techniques, then we watch an interesting movie and talk and write about it.  That's it!).  Over the course of the semester I'll read most of Lewis' philosophical works (The Problem of Pain, The Abolition of Man, The Screwtape Letters, etc.), and The Iliad, all 3 parts of Dante's Divine Comedy and the Brothers Karamazov, and lots of Anglo-Saxon poetry (I even get to learn to speak Old English).  Oh yeah, and that poli sci stuff...theories and whatnot.  Not so looking forward to that.

I know I'm going to have a great time reading all these things (and thinking and writing scholarly papers about them too), but all this will leave me with much less time to write creatively (except for working on that novel...funtimes!).  But I know I shouldn't complain, since even my greatly reduced time is still a lot greater than a lot of people's time in the real world.  So I guess I should count my blessings.

And besides, reading the classics will (or should) help me in my own writing.  Now that I have a writer's eye--an eye for little semantic details and grammatical nuances--reading all these things might help me in finding my own style.  And after the frantic writing of earlier semesters, I think this relaxed, almost leisurely novel-writing experience should be pretty restorative.  I was starting to get tired of writing, because I had to do it so much at regular intervals that the magic seemed to fade away.  But now I've got a new lease on the writerly life and I think it'll be fantastic.

Now to go hit the books!

"Adverbs suck," he said angrily

http://www.users.qwest.net/~yarnspnr/writing/adverbs/adverbs.htm

This article got me in a tizzy at first, but when I continued I saw that I agreed with (some of) the comments made.  However I don't think adverbs are totally evil and unnecessary.  I think a well-placed adverb can enhance a passage of prose and actually make it tighter, especially when discussing abstract concepts or feelings, things that aren't easily or succinctly translated into concrete language.  Like "he gazed at her coldly."  Is that bad?  Cold has a ton of definitions, most of them abstract things like "dispassionate" or "unfeeling."  So, in this sentence the word coldly could mean "in an unfeeling manner" or "dispassionately" (another adverb!).  If someone told me to get rid of that adverb because it's too vague or something, then I'd ask them how would they convey this feeling?  "He gazed at her in a dispassionate manner?"  How is that any better?  Or it could be longer and even more abstract, like "He gazed at her, feeling nothing in his heart but a sterile chill like the frost that clung to his bedroom window."  (Okay, maybe that was over the top.)  In some circumstances something like that might be good, but what if I'm trying to make this particular passage go quickly, like it's an argument passage?  To me, either of the latter two would feel too long--put too much of a pause in the action of the scene, which is supposed to be quick and snappy.  I could just leave that out, let the readers infer what they will into the passage.  But what if they think he's angry or sad, when I really want them to feel that the speaker feels *coldly* toward the woman he's gazing at?  I don't know, maybe I haven't studied enough/ lived enough/ written enough yet to understand.

I mean yeah, I don't think adverbs (and adjectives for that matter) should be used prolifically, or that they should carry the full weight of power in the prose.  But I feel the negative response to over adverbifying (complete rejection of ever using adverbs ever) is not a good solution.  Instead we need to think and learn about how to use them properly in the right situations.  They're part of the language for a reason; they have a function.  And sometimes I don't know what I would do without them.  Maybe that says something about my noviceness as a writer, but oh well.  What do you all think, you who might be reading this?