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Where Do Writers Get their Ideas?
One of the most common questions any novelist gets is “where do you get your ideas?” I can’t speak for other people, but my hunch is that most writers have a mind that is always asking, ‘what if?’ As I go through the day, something will trigger that what if question, then my imagination takes over. Sometimes it can be a turn of phrase, a news story, an interesting picture, or even a piece of music.
Here is an example. I was reading a copy of the The New York Times from 1884 to get a sense of what people were talking about in the mid 1880’s, and I ran across a tiny news article at the bottom of the page about a group of Civil War soldiers who had all been hospitalized following the battle of Gettysburg. They bonded in the hospital, and vowed to meet exactly twenty-one years later at Niagara Falls. Amazingly, eight of the surviving ten members showed up on the appointed day. Now that is the basis for a good story!
There are lots of ways this story could be tweaked to turn it into an interesting novel or a short story. Perhaps instead of soldiers, it could be nurses. Or perhaps it is set during the American Revolution or World War I. Maybe they weren’t soldiers at all, but college students, or refugees from Nazi Germany.
I was moved by the story, but I know it is not something I am ever likely to use, so I’m throwing it out there to the world. Maybe someone will try to do some research on these amazing men and follow it up. Here is the story as it appeared on the front page of The New York Times on July 5, 1884.
Balloon photo coutesy of Diego da Silva
Fall Seven Times, Stand Up Eight
There is a Japanese saying that I have engraved on a bracelet I often wear. Fall Seven Times, Stand up Eight. This phrase has served me well over my years as a writer, because I wrote lots and lots of manuscripts (around five or six, depending on how you count) before I got to the level to be published.
Very few things of tremendous value come easily. One of my famous quotes from a movie is in A League of their Own. Geena Davis is struggling to play baseball in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. She is juggling family complications, the physical demands of the sport, and profound loneliness. She is ready to throw in the towel and tells her manager, Tom Hanks, that she didn’t expect it to be so hard. And Hanks replies: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard… is what makes it great.”
I love this line, as it encapsulates the odd combination of struggle and satisfaction that comes from tackling something really big. Most really worthwhile things in life are hard. Raising kids, starting a business, training for a sport, writing a book….it is the hard that makes it great. Savor it. Embrace it. I believe that people underestimate what it takes to succeed in life, because frankly, we rarely witness successful people fail. We see brilliant athletes perform, watch famous actors on the screen, etc. For every famous athlete, how many kids never made the cut? Or how many actresses are still waiting tables, praying for their big break? Those failures are invisible to the wider public.
Just how many times should you fall before you throw in the towel and move on to something else? That of course, is a very personal decision. How badly does the aspiring singer want it? How good is her voice? What financial commitments does she have, and what sort of sacrifices will her family endure while she pursues her dream? The honesty and humility it takes to fairly assess yourself is something not everyone can do. Perhaps the singer was the very best soprano in her high school class. Perhaps she won first-place in a city-wide competition with hundreds of other sopranos. All well and good….but when she is competing on the national level with the very best sopranos from every high school in the entire country, now she is facing off against thousands of terrific singers. Add that to the tens of thousands who are within ten years of her age, and you see how small her odds are of making it to the Metropolitan Opera. And most of us will never know about those thousands of hopeful singers, because the only people we know are Lena Horne and Beverly Sills.
What to do? If she can’t be the next Beverly Sills, does that make her a failure? Of course not. But if the only thing that will satisfy her is that level of fame, she is unlikely to be successful. Perhaps she can be the best singer in her Church. Or share her love of music with her children.
If she loves singing for its own sake, she will enjoy the journey as she explores “what if.”
Back to Tom Hanks. “It is supposed to be hard. The hard is what makes it great.” You should never give up on something only because it is hard. Find a better reason.
What Inspires You?
I have been helping my parents move, and we were going through boxes of old pictures. Here is one that really captured my imagination:
In the center are my great-grandparents, surrounded by their nine children. They had a pretty difficult life. Both were immigrants from Germany to America in the late 19th century, and never really learned to speak English very well. They were poor. Hand-to-mouth, where-are-we-going-to-get-rent-money poor. And yet, most of their children did quite well in America. I think there is a real pattern among second generation immigrants. They are the children of daring, ambitious risk-takers who took on great sacrifices to forge a new life in America. Perhaps it is no surprise that the children of such people are driven to succeed.
My grandfather is in the back row, second from the right in the three-piece suit. He had an amazing life story. Forced to drop out of school around the 4th grade in order to help support the family, he never had many advantages in life other than being blessed with drive, determination, and a massive dose of raw intelligence. He worked as an errand boy and typist at a bank and was listening and absorbing what he learned. During World War I, he used that intelligence to get placed in a plumb position as the secretary to a General. After the war he gradually climbed the corporate ladder at the bank. When he retired in the 1960’s, he had risen to sit the Board of Directors for a Fortune 100 company.
My other great-aunts and uncles all had fascinating stories that I enjoyed hearing from my parents. As a writer, my mind was whirling with ideas for books. My great-uncle John (standing behind the priest, Father Ed) served in World War I, was gassed, and had to spend considerable time convalescing. By the time he was healthy enough to come home, his fiancé had married someone else. He never really got over it, and never married. I am so grateful I spent that afternoon going through old pictures when I still had an opportunity to hear stories about these people, most of whom I remember only as very, very old people at family reunions.
If your parents are still alive, I urge you to go dig out some old family photographs and start asking questions. You’ll never regret it.
Sheer, Magnificent Inspiration
I have a picture on my bulletin board at work that I look at whenever I start to feel overwhelmed:
This is Chris Sadowski in the middle of an Ironman competition. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Ironman Championship in Kona Hawaii, it involves a 2.4 mile swim in the ocean, a 112 mile bicycle race, topped off with a full 26.2 mile marathon, all of which must be completed in 17 hours with no break.
This is challenging for any athlete, but in 2004 Chris Sadowski had an extra wrench thrown into his race. When he was 105 miles into the 112 mile cycling part of the race, his bike was struck by a cameraman filming for ESPN. The back wheel of his bike was mangled too badly to function, but triathlon rules insist you finish the cycling portion of the race with the same bike. Rules don’t require him to ride the bike, but he had to cross the cycling finish line with his bike. That meant he had to shoulder the bike and walk the remaining 7 miles of the race. Like all the athletes, he was wearing only socks for this portion of the race, so he walked on the burning hot asphalt for seven miles with no water, no break, and no shoes. Other bikers zoomed past him, but he did not give up. It took him over two hours to finish what a biker could have done in a minute or two. When he finally completed the bike portion, he had to put shoes on his aching and blistered feet and run a marathon.
Chris Sadowski finished the race. I cut out his picture from the next day’s newspaper and tacked it to my bulletin board, where it remains….a little curled and yellowed with age, but still an inspiration. There are days when I feel wiped out, drained, and a little overwhelmed. Then I look over at Chris Sadowski with that bike over his shoulder and I quit complaining. Pick up your burdens and shoulder forward.
Who Makes Illuminated Manuscripts Anymore?
Sometimes you come across a person who has such a remarkably unusual passion it simply must be commented on.
James Pepper has spent the last nineteen years creating an illuminated manuscript of the Bible, page by page, exactly as the monks would have done it in medieval days. He used no computers or other forms of modern technology to speed the work, and he writes with ink in dip pens, which leaves no room for errors. I suppose the very process of using such primitive tools must require an immense amount of concentration as each letter is carefully placed on the page. Mr. Pepper has researched the history of illuminated manuscripts and has used a different type of historically accurate calligraphy for most of the chapters. His illustrations are unique as well. They are beautiful, leaning more toward the fresh exuberance of expression rather than artistic skill….but lovely nevertheless.
Impressed by the beauty and majesty of old manuscripts, he wanted to create one to inspire himself and others. He views his labor as a statement of faith, a spiritual labor that brings him closer to the Lord, and considers the creation of the hand-written manuscript to be one of continuous prayer.
Please, take five minutes from your busy day to appreciate the labor of someone who lives a truly unique, inspiring life.
Books as an Escape Route
During the day I work as a librarian at a college, which I must confess, is a really terrific place to be. In my profession, working at a college library is often considered the top of the heap in terms of desirability. Somewhat lower on my list of preferences would be military libraries, then government libraries, corporate libraries, then a public or K-12 library. But the absolute lowest of the low in terms of desirability is the Prison Library.
And yet, this article blew my mind, and almost made me want to turn in my resignation papers as soon as I could find a prison library that was hiring.
Avi Steinberg wrote a fascinating memoir about his two years working in a prison library. He was very frank about the inmates who use it as a means to pass notes to one another or check out mindless pulp. And yet, who knows when one of those pulp novels might help an inmate to take a different perspective on their life? Books can have a powerful, transformative effect on people, and it is likely that the typical home environment of these inmates was not bursting with a wide selection of reading material. In a world where Facebook and text messaging is the extent of pleasure reading for a huge swath of our population, it makes perfect sense that the typical inmate may not have had steady exposure to good books, but in a prison, what else is there to do? Avi writes of people who came to the library every day in order to delve back into the world of the printed word they had discovered, one without walls and dead ends. He writes of a young mother who had never even been inside a library until she was incarcerated, and was unaware she could apply for a free library card as soon as she was released.
As I read the article, I kept thinking of the phrase, whatsoever you do for the least of my brothers, that you do unto me. Who is more marginal in society than an incarcerated inmate? What am I doing at a plush college working with students who are on the launching pad to a glittering future? I can’t say that I am brave enough to walk away from my very cozy position, but the next time I see an advertisement for a prison librarian in one of my trade journals, I will certainly give the position a much greater deal of consideration.
Photo courtesy of Greg Klee and The Boston Globe
Can a Commercial be Absolutely Magnificent?
Can a commercial be inspiring and affirming? This one is!
Stick with it until the end….. it is worth it.
Words of Wisdom from Half a Millenia Ago
If you have never read Jen Fulwiler’s blog over at The Conversion Diary, you are in for a treat. Or perhaps her posts just resonate with me because we seem to be very similar in our outlook and situation in life.
In any event, one of my huge failings is that I tend to let myself get overwhelmed by the little details of life that can sometimes blot out the splendid abundance that I have been blessed with. A while back Jen wrote on this exact topic, and it was so moving for me that I have that post book-marked on my computer, and I turn to it whenever I feel those daily difficulties starting to overshadow the joy in life.
Never, never, never, never give up
I have no interest in wrestling, but a few weeks ago as I was doing yard work, my husband ran outside and grabbed me. He insisted I had to come inside to watch an amazing wrestling match in progress. You can imagine my unbridled joy, but I can tell when Bill is really keyed up about something, so I was willing to play along.
What I saw was so staggering, so life-affirming, I am asking the rest of you non-wrestling fans to watch. Anthony Robles was born with only one leg. Refusing to let that stand in the way of his ambitions, he proceeded to become a world-class athlete and chose to compete in mainstream sporting leagues. Ignored by many of the powerhouse wrestling schools, he enrolled at Arizona State University where he embarked on a rigorous training regimen. In order to compensate for his lower body weakness, he focused on what he could do well, which was grapple, develop amazing upper body strength, and simply refuse to quit.
Last month he won first place in the nation. As I watch the video as he wins the NCAA title, I cannot help but think of Winston Churchill’s famous line, “Never, never, never give up.” This kid is awe-inspiring. Here are some clips of Anthony in action on the road to the championship.
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