"The mark of a true writer with inspiration from God...voices in your head...visions in your mind."
That's what Pam, my wife, wrote to a screenwriter friend of ours in Los Angeles who thought she had "lost it." The screenwriter had written to us: "I'm back!" after having difficult over the last few months "feeling" her characters' emotions, or "hearing" their conversations. "I wasn't able to 'watch' the film," she explained.
But she was back and being productive again.
As a writer of narrative fiction you definitely have the need to psychologically engage with your characters and the story’s diegesis (the created world of your story) before you begin to write. How one gets to that point I suppose is a mystery. You may call it inspiration or intrigue. Perhaps it's a personal tragedy, or a deep unrest about a value that you see is out of balance with society that you want to change. That of course gets back to the conflict of values and the moral premise concept. It involves a desire that is rooted in your moral values to communicate some ideal that grows out of a disturbing personal experience.
Such an emotion gives you the power and imagination to write. The mechanics of ow that happens may be a total mystery to you, that is you can't always recreate the motivation at will. Some writers, however, do understand the source of their motivation and are able to channel it into a work. Others are motivated for reasons they cannot articulate, but nonetheless get to work.
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| Maya Hawke as Flannery O'Connor in "Wildcat" directed by her father, Ethan. I loved the movie, which is as intriguing as narrative cinema as Flannery's stories of the South. |
An example comes to mind. I am reading the Complete Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor right now. I’m about halfway through the thick book. Twice I have read her collection of essays on writing titled Mystery and Manners (M&M). There, she is explicit about her motivation, which is definitely a mystery to her. Unlike most writers, she told her frustrated publishers, “I cannot outline a story. I do not outline. I do not know what’s going to happen until I write it.” Consequently, her stories are often a mystery in themselves. I usually must read several pages of her short stories before I understand what's going on. Some of the stories begin in such an obtuse way you can almost see how the plot is unclear even in Flannery's mind and how it slowly develops and becomes concrete...to the writer. Her stories rarely contain a logical through-line or conventional plot. Thus, some of her stories feel inefficient. Other times they are deeply intriguing. As depicted in the movie Wildcat by daughter and father (Maya and Ethan Hawke), it seems obvious that Flannery would see a strange person (a one-armed man) and be inspired to write a story based on her imagination of such an different person who lived in the south in the 1920s, 30s, or 40s. She had a creative affinity to people she labeled "freaks," no doubt because "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large startling figures." (M&M) In M&M she writes that to Northerners such stories were "grotesque," but to Southerns they were simply "realistic." Thus, her inspiration came from observation of real life that intrigued her, which then caused her to research, investigate and write something that satisfied her gothic, Catholic, Southern muse.
Of course, the whole concept of a muse is mysterious, isn’t it? Going back to my book, The Moral Premise, I believe a writer's muse is ultimately motivated out of an imbalance between our personal moral values and what we see around us that does not reflect what we think is important and we want to change it and we believe that writing a story is the best way to communicate our ideal. I am sure that is not true of every writer.
There's a YouTube clip of George Carlin talking about Native American Indians. Of course it’s funny. But the comedic tenor of the clip is rooted in the contradictions he's noticed between the words we use and historical reality. That contradiction comes out of his values of wanting to tell the truth. Telling the truth, of course is related to goodness and beauty. And so the historic trilogy of goodness, truth, and beauty are ultimately the motivations a writer uses to do their work.
OK that’s enough. I need to get out of bed and get to work.
