Thomas Sullivan: THE PERFECT SETUP, WRITING WITH LIZARDS, AND OTHER KEYS TO INSPIRATION
21 COMMENTS follow
Picture this. It’s a 70° Saturday, and your kids are away at Death Valley survival camp, your spouse is shopping at Mall of America with a new credit card, the teen across the street who drives the Panzer with the heavy metal band locked in the trunk is in bed with the flu, phone service is out, and the neighbors’ dog has stopped barking for the first time since squirrels were invented. You are sitting in front of your computer, fingers poised above the keyboard, staring at a blank New Document in Word. Eager images crowd into your thoughts like actors waiting to audition at a cattle call — a Spanish galleon weighs anchor on the edge of your imagination, two lovers with eager moist lips lean across a red rose, gunfire slashes through dense jungle around a Mayan pyramid, a lone cowboy urges his horse up a dry gulch on a mountain, from the Oort region of the solar system a meteor is bumped into Earth trajectory, a broken-hearted woman with tear-stained cheeks climbs to the rail of a bridge… Your fingers attack the keys with very little guidance from your brain and what you get is:
At last they stood on the quarterdeck, remembering how they had escaped their Mayan captors — he, a lone cowboy from the mountains of his native Spain where the rain falls mainly on the plain, and she, an English Lady so recently suicidal (had she really tried to leap off that bridge into the Thames) over her last lost love — and now, anticipating their first kiss within the heady scent of roses that somehow mysteriously perfumed the breeze, they were blissfully unaware that a meteor half the size of East Sweet Pea, Arizona, was hurtling toward them.
So goes the perfect writing circumstances of an optimal afternoon. Those porcelain acoustics you hear in the distance are your muse retching in the toilet.
But maybe the problem is that creativity really doesn’t take place in front of the computer or hovering over a blank sheet of paper. It takes place in all your collective experiences, your associations, your memories, and everything you know about life BEFORE you sit down in front of the computer. The specific act of writing is pretty much a sorting out process applied to what you bring to that point. And so, in your frustration with eliminating distractions, you may have overlooked the need to stimulate or inspire that fundamental collective of thoughts and insights that brought you to the game.
Wordsmithing is the shaping of content into expression. The content has to be there, has to be drawn from the well, refined into gold, distilled from swamp water; and maybe you sat down in the perfect absence of distraction and expected it to be on the screen — that dead piece of glass covered with electrically excitable dots known as pixels. If you spend a lot of your time doing that every day, you get farther and farther from the source material. Moreover, you get saturated with your own uninterrupted words and dead-ended in the ruts of circular thoughts. Good writing needs priming. Properly primed it can almost flow by itself.
And you prime by going back to the well. It took me a long time to learn that. I thought that the only things that stood between me and success as a writer were the demands of gainful employment and the distractions of a home life. Curse the world that thought it didn’t owe me a living! Where was the booklined study where the author sat ensconced in golden silence meticulously crafting deathless prose with a goose quill on parchment? Hungry mouths at home dictated that quitting my job as a teacher was out of the question. I became habituated to parked cars, bathrooms and restaurants in order to practice my craft, as if it were a dark perversion in the otherwise pedestrian flow of life. And then I learned to separate — to see the natural separation, actually — between creativity and the physical act of writing.
You can create anytime, anywhere. In fact, anytime/anywhere is the precise coordinate of time and space where your source material resides. Why separate those sources — those rich and tangible associations from everything you know — from the act of creation? All you need do is think while you are out and about engaged in the act of living. The things you must think on are the questions that need to be answered about wherever you are in the creation of a book or story. Need a new idea for a book? A character? A plot twist? A scene? Know what the question is, and as you go about your life with insightful eyes, seeing and appreciating the world around you with all the insight you can muster, I guarantee you that answers to those questions will come. They will come as possibilities, suggestions to yourself that you can refine into workable directions for what comes next. But you can — nay, must — ask those questions before you quit a writing session, if you want the answers to be there when you return. Hemingway called it “leaving something in the well.” I think that’s what he meant. I’ll ask him next time we talk.
Despite my making light of them, the physical circumstances of writing are a factor, of course. I’m just trying to point out that much of distraction is self-inflicted and that you can parse out a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to creativity. It isn’t like someone shoots off a starting gun when you sit down in front of the computer. “Ready…set…think!” By putting my brain in gear and my muse to work, I learned to write very fast when I actually sat down. Typically I would drive 12 miles to the school where I taught, take the steps two at a time to the library loft on the third floor, and there in the five minutes or so before first bell, knock out a couple of handwritten pages of a novel. It happened on demand because I was ready by the time I got there. The major work was prepped sometime after asking the right questions at the end of the previous writing session. Knowing what I had to answer kept me engaged in the intervening time as I simply passed through life with my eyes open. Eyes open — very important. Won’t work for sedentary spectators. You have to make yourself into the kind of person who thinks, notices, analyzes. It’s sort of like being a quick-start computer that is never completely off, and when the right signal jars your circuits, you come consciously to life with a linkage or an answer. And you never know when that will happen, because you don’t know when the right associations or inspirations will appear. My first novel was sketched out on a scrap of paper I borrowed from a stranger working in her backyard when I was out running. Even today I routinely leave plot notes on my voicemail.
The many ways writers acclimate themselves to a day’s work are legendary. Nabokov wrote at a lectern, recording each sentence on a 3 x 5 card he kept in a shoebox. Janet Berliner tells me that Harlan Ellison similarly composes at a typewriter on a podium. Loren Estleman uses one of many antique typewriters from his collection, repairing one with parts from another. I know a former 9-5er who simply must shower, shave, dress formally and drive to an office he has rented before he can write. Come to think of it, a hypnotherapist once loaned me his penthouse office overlooking a quiet city to write in the middle of my nights. John Stchurr used to spend a couple of hours setting up (usually in a library carrel) before he could work and even then he found himself easily distracted. Other writers have an amazing ability to concentrate, perhaps born of necessity. David Niall Wilson, the author king of multitasking, can focus on tweets, screenplays, novels, short stories, e-mail, blogs, and take the nanowrimo challenge all by turns while watching movies or TV or listening to audio sources and fielding a full family of chilluns. Proust, by contrast, worked in a cork-lined room. Nikolai Gogol is said to have reached a contemplative state by killing lizards with a silver-headed cane in his garden. And was it Bach who solved the routine aspects of composing by putting his 20 – or 24? (the number varies, and some of his children did not survive infancy) — offspring to work copying manuscripts?
I’ve tried them all. Well…not the lizards (though somewhere there is a picture of me on a writing retreat in the Bahamas with a lizard on my shoulder). Other places I’ve tried writing include a canoe, bathtub (which is the same thing only with the water inside), taxi, golf course, attic, moving around the house, outdoor deer watch in the dead of winter, Golden Meadow, Mall of America, small island in a pond, woods at night, alternating with playing T-sax in same woods, numerous backstages in numerous theaters, skate skiing while dictating into a cell phone recorder, ditto snowshoeing — and a zillion other venues, the point being that a muse is portable and can benefit by a change of setting. I am writing this now using Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice activation software. Sometimes it helps to make oneself comfortable, sometimes uncomfortable. Curiously, I love to write in a crowd if I know that I won’t be interrupted. In fact, I used to write in the local Wal-Mart pharmacy where my tight-lipped pharmacist would charge my battery between laptop sessions. Some of these columns were written at a Humana display and a Subway shop in that same Wal-Mart’s. And the photo that heads up today’s column is of the author hisself working diligently in a gazebo overlooking Lake Minnetonka at a place called Noerenberg Gardens, which is a frequent workstation for me.
I’ll focus more specifically in another column on ways to stimulate that fundamental collective of thoughts and insights mentioned earlier. In the meantime, may I invite you to follow me on Twitter? Here’s the link: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan . It’s fun and unintrusive. Example of my recent Tweets: “To my heirs: there’s a fortune in carwash coupons lost around the house. Sorry, I’m taking the car with me.” And at the end of several Tweet exchanges with a friend: “4 me, romance and imagination r paramount. Irony gave me a glimpse… now have to live on knowing ‘it could’ve been.’” I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters, which includes photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net . Past newsletters are archived at the website below. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, a new short story, “Case White,” is out in the latest issue of Cemetery Dance http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/_cd060 , and the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website. Live large and write on….
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/
http://twitter.com/thomassullivan
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Comments
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Comment by David Niall Wilson on August 16, 2009 @ 8:02 am
You captured that very well, my friend, and while I strive to avoid ALL of those distractions at once, we do what we have to to get the words down…
I want to hear the story of how the cowboy happened to be there to rescue the lady from the Thames prior to their capture, but maybe (probably?) that’s just me.
Write on!
Comment by Jeani on August 16, 2009 @ 8:08 am
I don’t think I have the stomach for killing lizards, but a silver-headed cane would look good standing in the corner by our front door.
Comment by Serg on August 16, 2009 @ 9:03 am
Very interesting article. Thanks You!!!
Comment by Robert Jones on August 16, 2009 @ 9:50 am
The constituents in your colorful description of what should have been a perfect day for writing were delightfully diverse and imaginative. I was particularly amused by your mention of the across-the-street Panzer driver confined to bed with the flu. That described my years-ago Detroit neighborhood. The neighbor in question had no band in his trunk but did have recordings of bands with which he enriched the lives of his neighbors by keeping his volume control at its highest setting and keeping his trunk wide open while he and his friends bounced a basketball continuously all afternoon and late into the night.
Your advice on noting ideas on the spot is especially valid. They don’t call short-term memory by that name for no reason. I’m often left frustrated by how unexpectedly quickly my short-term memory runs its squeegee down my mental blackboard.
Descriptions of how writers position themselves for writing is always interesting. An enlarged version of yours would make an interesting and amusing article. A college English teacher once described a famous writer’s REQUIRED preparation as involving having an apple and a pen positioned just so on his desk. That smacks of conforming to a childhood image.
Your e-mailed picture of a low Sun’s reflection and the aura-like circle of hazy colors is a beauty that provides as much mood as image.
Thank you.
Amalgam
Comment by Firewolf on August 16, 2009 @ 1:12 pm
Hi,
thanks for your words! I’ll follow you on twitter once I’m home from work.
Julie
(long time lurker)
Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 16, 2009 @ 7:15 pm
Ah, Davie, you could work out that little logistical probably without a hitch. You never miss a thing. Well, maybe one thing…I used your initials backwards on Twitter yesterday to create an anagram…
Sully
Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 16, 2009 @ 7:18 pm
I’m with you, Jeani. That author (Gogol) was a study in isolation. His schoolmates wouldn’t even touch books he had handled. Hmmm. Sounds like a normal author to me.
Sully
Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 16, 2009 @ 7:19 pm
Your welcome, Serg, and thanks for taking the trouble to comment…
Sully
Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 16, 2009 @ 7:25 pm
Back atcha, Amalgam. I’m up here in the Boundary Waters using Ely’s Grand Lodge computer to answer these. Had a fantastic day and night. Canoeing in tsunamis with storms raging around, island hoping, and having stimulating conversations in the lea of one cove or another. Then swimming in a storm and a superb dinner…
Glad you liked the photo. Anyone reading this who would like to receive my free newsletter with the photos Robert Jones is talking about can email me to get on the list at mn333mn@earthlink.net.
Sully
Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 16, 2009 @ 7:30 pm
Thanks very much, Julie. Just visited your blog, and I’ll look forward to keeping track of you there…
Sully
Comment by Alan Russell on August 16, 2009 @ 8:11 pm
Wonderful column, Sully.
I knew I was missing something. I need more swamp water to distill.
Alan
Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 17, 2009 @ 7:36 am
Hey, Al, I’ll look for some swamp water today up here in the Boundary Waters. Though this pristine stuff looks more like the distilled variety. Wish u wuz here. What a setup. Class by night, adventure by day. Ah, the loons are calling and I must answer (snicker)…
Sully
Comment by Janet on August 17, 2009 @ 3:27 pm
Right now (as opposed to write now) it’s 106 degrees indoors because the power has gone elsewhere. Makes me nervous, given that I’m oxygen and other equipment dependent. My shaking hands don’t do much for me either. Ordered #4 version of “Speak and it shall appear.” We’ll see. Meanwhile, as always, it is a joy to read your words.
I like writing in a New York Deli, at Grand Central Station, and plugged into a Palm tree.
Much love, Janet
Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 17, 2009 @ 5:37 pm
Well, I don’t know about plugged into a palm tree, Janet, but today in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters I could have used that pea green boat you sail in Granada. My Tasmanian buddy and I jammed a canoe into some boulders in the middle of a huge wind-tossed lake and road out storm winds on an island about twenty feet across. What a hoot! Am jumping from computer to computer whenever we make land, trying to keep up with newsletter/column feedback. Adventure, hoy!
106 degrees sounds like time to fill the bathtub with ice water or gin and tonic, Janet. Think of it as another sterling saga in your most interesting life. I do believe your autobio could be presented alphabetically in 30 volumes, a la encyclopedically. Take care and write on…
Sully
Comment by Larry on August 19, 2009 @ 3:33 pm
Yes nothing but natures music. Truly inspirational.
Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 19, 2009 @ 3:55 pm
From a man who knows about music that is much appreciated. Thanks…
Sully
Comment by copywriting seo on August 21, 2009 @ 10:22 pm
I am yet to find my inspiration for writing. Like everybody else, I put too much pressure on myself to write the good stuff. Sometimes, distractions can also be an inspiration.
Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 22, 2009 @ 6:44 am
Distractions as inspiration — well put. Like they say, there are no negatives for writers. Everything is material. A trained artist’s mind takes everything — including so-called distractions — and mines them for associations, patterns, insights, metaphors and portable minutia that apply to whatever they are working on or might work on. Thanks for the…inspiration, CS.
Sully
Comment by Lectern Guy on September 7, 2009 @ 11:01 am
I love this blog, and I can’t wait to read more from you! I’ll definitely be following you on twitter too!!
Comment by Thomas Sullivan on September 7, 2009 @ 1:15 pm
Thanks, Lectern Guy. I kind of surf through the Tweets of my followers informally, but Twitter seems to be the way to go these days. Cheers and best…
Sully
