On Getting Started

Being new to Storytellers this month, I’ve had “beginnings” on the brain. It was for this reason that I’d decided to take a look at some of the things that have motivated successful authors over the years. I’ve always been fascinated by that tiny seed that grows up to be a towering Redwood. This week, while digging around the roots of old novels in search of acorns and nuts, I hit upon a completely different discovery. Sure, it’s neat to know that Injun Joe was based on a real guy who wore a scary red wig and died from eating pickled pig’s feet, but I was surprised to realize that sometimes the more interesting story behind the story is what didn’t inspire the author.

Perhaps the most startling piece of non-inspiration I bumped into is some recent evidence suggesting that Dracula is not based on Dracula. The New Annotated Dracula by Bram Stoker makes the claim that Stoker was not even aware of Vlad Tepes when he first began his manuscript. He renamed his original count Wampyr after he was already deep into his work. It would appear that it was simply a lucky coincidence that history and fiction matched so perfectly. I might doubt the chances of this happening had I not experienced similar things with my own writing. The fact that Stoker did not steal from the dark past of Vlad the Impaler makes his novel all the more creative in my opinion.

On the flip side of this, consider the theories of one Prof. Emeritus Radu Florescu, a respected authority on Eastern Europe who enjoys studying the origins of mythical characters. Florescu believes that Mary Shelly’s original Frankenstein seed got planted in a castle in Germany, not Byron’s infamous Villa Diodati on a dark and stormy night in Lake Geneva. Shelly, he says, once toured Castle Frankenstein, the home of Dippel Frankenstein, a dubious alchemist with a yen for a laboratory and the ability to perpetuate life. Dippel was said to be in possession of a special oil that could make a person live two hundred years. He rounded up cadavers as part of the process. A prior visit to Castle Frankenstein doesn’t really change things of course but, unlike Stoker’s historical lark, Shelly’s impromptu ghost story gets less fictional upon closer examination if Florescu has the background right.

I don’t much like the thought of this last one but, according to Windblown World: the Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954, evocative Jack did not, as the old story goes, write On the Road in a feverish three week scribble on one long continuous roll of paper. Rather, he kept a highly detailed account of all his thoughts and experiences. Furthermore, he wrote Psalms in his spare time and did not consider himself a hipster at all, but more accurately an “observer of hipsters”. In this instance, I sort of miss the image of an endless spool of paper bleeding confessional ramblings

Frankly, some of these claims are a bit hard for me to swallow. Dracula not Dracula? Kerouac a beatnik wannabe? Then again, the genesis of greatness can be a highly elusive thing. I can tell you right now, I will never tire of hearing stories of how an author got started – that brief flash of genius Eudora Welty experienced after seeing brightly colored bottles on the ends of tree limbs, the convent with the iron swings that launched Carson McCuller’s on-going theme of spiritual isolation, the way Fitzgerald’s life flowed from the tips of Hemingway’s fingers in the form of The Snows of Kilimanjaro… Sometimes inspiration is truly divine. Other times, its just another nice story to go along with the story. In any case, we all have to get started somehow, right?