Tag: nanowrimo

Writing a Novel and Seeking the Magic Fix

Nova Ren Suma

November 9, 2014
My state of mind while writing lately.

I am writing what will be my fifth published novel. Five is a number I like, so you’d think this would be a glorious experience, but nothing is ever as easy as I’d hope it to be, most of all writing.

This novel I’m writing was originally slated to come out Spring 2016, a year after The Walls Around Us, but I’m still writing it, so maybe it will come out Fall 2016. I don’t know yet. It all depends on how this draft goes, and if I make this deadline in January, and what my editor thinks once she reads this Thing.

By the way, I feel calmer when I call it a Thing, rather than a BOOK.

A Thing is a hairy little monster. Ugly. Misshapen. It yowls. It drools. No one expects a Thing to be polished and proper and un-embarrassing.

A BOOK is expected to not spit up on the floor. A BOOK is contained. It makes sense.

Right now, I’ll keep working on my Thing, thank you.

So I’m thinking, what are the optimal conditions in which to write a draft of a Thing/BOOK quickly?

(Also note: I said draft. There will be many drafts. This is just the first one. I don’t have any illusions that the Thing will be perfect when I turn it in.)

Well, in an ideal world I’d be in a quiet place with my own writing room and we’d have no bills or student loans to worry about so I wouldn’t have to work on the side and stress over finding more work and there’d be pancakes made-to-order from phantoms in the kitchen every morning and I would be totally healthy and not so tired all the time and I’d have a kitten to play with, because hey why not, in an ideal world I wouldn’t be allergic, and I’d have an intern to deal with all my emails and other randoms on my to-do list like remembering to pick up the almond milk, and, best of all, the internet would be down for months. Seriously, months.

But I live in this world. I live in a shoebox in a very loud city. (And I kind of need the internet! I might be addicted, plus I have a book coming out in March and I don’t want you to forget me!)

So I need to create optimal conditions here at home, in my loud shoebox surrounded by the internet. We all have to find ways to write in the cracks and corners of real life, which is something I said once when I was trying to write during one of my demanding day jobs (the old post is set to “private,” and I’ll keep it that way). But if I did it then, how can I not do it now?

In order to finish this novel, I need:
- To stay off the internet for large swathes of times like a mature adult with some semblance of self-control.
- To organize my time so I reach all my work and other writing deadlines and don’t get overwhelmed.
- To find quiet and isolate when needed. (I’ve talked about this need before.)
- To have momentum.
That last one is key. Momentum. Really, it’s everything. Because once I have momentum, I don’t care so much about the internet, and I make way better use of my writing time because I am so very FOCUSED.

The way I get momentum is to force myself to write every day. Every. Single. Day. Even when I have work deadlines. Even when I have somewhere to be. Even when I’m sick. Even when I’m sad. Every day.

Some days I might get 500 words. (That’s my optimal—and realistic, if I’m even bothering to count words.) Some days, like yesterday, more than 1,200! And some days, quite a few days, I get 8 words. Some days—many days, since I edit as I go—I am in the negative.

But the point is that I’m keeping up momentum. I’m working on my Thing every day, even for twenty minutes. I’m keeping my Thing (it’s a BOOK, or it will be) always in my mind.

This is why watching NaNoWriMo from the sidelines always cheers me up. I tried to do it once and failed to reach 50K (and ended up not using any words from that draft… they were crap… not worth salvaging). Writing that fast is not for me, and not my process. BUT what works really well for me is the rhythm of writing every day, even a little. And that’s what’s at the heart of NaNoWriMo.

So this November, and December, and into January, I, too, will be writing every day.

I may be getting -8 words or 500 words at best, but I’ll be doing it. Because when I keep up the momentum, I feel inspired. I feel close to my characters and my story. I feel connected. I feel overtaken. I feel on fire.

That’s what I need to write this Thing in my loud, busy shoebox. That’s all.

The kind of quiet I’m craving. (Taken at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, when I was teaching a workshop earlier this year.)

Next month, though, I do have a bonus.

One lucky break that fell from the sky into my lap is that I got a residency from Yaddo in December, and I’ll be there for a little less than three weeks, which is pretty much the longest I can be off the grid at this point. There’s no internet in the bedrooms or writing studios at Yaddo, which is a true blessing, so I hope to stay away from the noise as much as I can. I want to try to stay off Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr and all else, if I can. (Unless there’s some news about my book I have the compulsive need to share.) I want to take a break from emails, unless they’re from my publisher or my agent. E will visit for the holiday, and I’ll attack him with pages and talk about the progress of my Thing—which always helps, he’s the only one I can talk to when I’m in this delicate first-drafting place—and then I’ll dive back in. I hope to come home for the New Year with many, many, many words. I hope. Because, once I get home, that deadline is days away.

But even so, I know that Yaddo, or any colony or retreat or residency or stay in a glorious hotel, isn’t the magic fix. All your problems and flaws follow you to a colony, you know. You still have to do the hard work once you get there.

The magic fix for me, no matter where I am, really is momentum. The fix—what will get me to deadline, and what will get me a worthy manuscript to show my editor—is putting in the time and effort and gaining forward movement every single day.

Even if it’s twenty minutes in a notebook, twenty minutes stolen in the cracks and corners of real life, like so many of us have to do.

What do you need in order to finish your novel? Bonus points for saying a kitten.
What Inspires You

Nova Ren Suma

January 8, 2012

Remember the “What Inspires You?” blog series that ran here in November? It’s really wonderful to think that it’s continuing to live on, outside this space. I was excited to be contacted by a writer and blogger named Mieke Zamora-Mackay, who said that reading the inspiration guest blogs helped her through NaNoWriMo and even inspired her to write her own piece! I wanted to share her blog about what inspires her to write. Thank you so much, Mieke!

If you, too, were inspired by the November series and have put up your own blog, I’d love to see it and share the link here. Just email me!

And speaking of inspiring blog series? I have a new one starting this week, on the topic of Turning Points…

Come back tomorrow to find out more of what I mean by that.
Turning the Question on Myself: What Inspires ME?

Nova Ren Suma

November 30, 2011
(Design & illustration by Robert Roxby)

Talking about what inspires me to write is really talking about what makes me a person. It goes back to the beginning, to who I used to be.

I’m often asked when I decided I wanted to become a writer. That’s a funny question to me, because there was no conscious decision. I didn’t actively choose to be a writer, or come to it after trying other things. There was never a time when I didn’t want to write. Sure, maybe what I wanted to write evolved from one thing to another: poems, short stories, novels for adults, novels for young adults… but the writing itself, the desire—no, the need—to express myself in words was always with me.

Just because you want to write and always have doesn’t mean publication comes easily. So maybe that’s why I’m asked the question so often. I published my first book beyond the arbitrary line I’d drawn for myself: I was older than thirty. So maybe it seems like this is something I came to later in life.

It wasn’t. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t write, even in my journals, only for myself, but always, always, I was writing. I’m a writer first, and then a person, even though this can be—is—a very dangerous thing.

I wrote before I thought of publishing. I wrote because reading stories was my escape, and so writing my own stories became the next step toward that escape. I wrote to make sense of things. To reimagine. To re-remember. To hold close. To push away. To live again. To invent. To fight and to win.

At some point I became aware that writers wrote to publish and have people read them. So I tried that. And sometimes I succeeded, but mostly I failed. I wrote when I thought it would be easy, and I wrote when all I heard was: No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Still, I kept being inspired to write.

But what inspired me? What pushed me to keep telling stories? When I think of all my years of writing—the good, and the bad—I feel that fire of inspiration that consumed me and made me want to keep making art from the absolute scratch of a blank page.

I think of what got me up at five o’clock in the morning so I could take the subway to my writing space before my full-time day job, even if I only had an hour or two before I had to get back on the subway and go to work. I remember those half-asleep mornings, the sky dark as I made my way to the train, only the people begging for change and the people waiting for the nearby methadone clinic to open were awake with me at that hour. I remember falling asleep on the train and then jolting awake when my stop came. I remember sitting at that writing desk with the morning hours ahead of me and feeling so perfectly, wonderfully alive, the inspiration to write worth everything.

It’s important that I remember this.

To remember being at work. At the artist’s studio. At the educational publisher. At the comic-book company. At the children’s publisher, the first one and then the second one. At all of these places over the years, being in the midst of doing my job—checking the mailroom, marking up the proofs, lugging the heavy piles of pages up the stairways—and having to stop in the hallways, in dark stairwells, in corners, or hide myself in bathroom stalls, in elevators, scribbling a few fevered words down. The inspiration to write followed me everywhere.

I think of what kept me at the writing when I had a box of rejections, stuffed full. When staring at a five a.m. dark city morning when all you hear is No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No still seems worth it somehow. Still seems necessary.

I think of what keeps me writing now. Now, when I’m trying to make writing a career. With deadlines. And reviews. And paychecks depending on what I can produce. With all the doubt that threatens to ruin me.

Because the truth is, I don’t write for you. Or you. Or you. Or you.

I write for myself and always have.

What originally inspired me to write was the simple fact that writing was a way for me to speak when I didn’t know how.

Writing gave me the voice I couldn’t find any other way—and this is where I find my inspiration.

* * *

We’re going back in time. There I am in the nondescript middle of a classroom. I am holding myself very still while the teacher scans the room for someone to call on to give the answer. It is math class. It is social studies class. It is science. It is even English, my favorite subject. I am eight. I am eleven. I am thirteen and fifteen and seventeen and eighteen. I may know the answers. I may have opinions or things to say. But I can’t utter them, not in front of all these people.

I can’t lift my hand or open my mouth to speak. I can’t even look up. I hope against hope that I won’t be called on. I keep my eyes from meeting the teacher’s. I hold my breath. I shrink.

What am I afraid of? Being embarrassed. Being thought of as stupid. Being uncool to the kids I want to be friends with in class. Being someone no one ever wants to hear speak again. Being me. Having people know who that is.

The teacher’s eyes fall on me. My stillness hasn’t kept me from being seen. “Participating in class” is part of my grade—sometimes it’s what brings my grades down. But there comes a time in every classroom, maybe once a month, once a quarter, when my name is called and I am forced to talk without prior warning in front of everyone.

The pain of this can be excruciating. Heat fills my body, bubbling and fizzing and clenching around my heart. It rises to my face and then the color blooms. Kids in class point out, “Look how red she is!” I open my mouth to talk and the teacher often asks me to speak up. I try to be loud, but I can’t. Still, I give the answer. Sometimes it’s the right answer. I can’t hear it, though, because my ears thrum with blood. My eyes tear from the heat. I want to never have to see any of these people ever again.

This doesn’t get too much easier over the years, because we keep moving. We move in time for first grade. Again in time for seventh grade. We move just before ninth grade, the first year of high school. We move one last time before tenth grade.

So how do you rise out of debilitating shyness to show that you are a person worthy of opinions, a person with a voice who has things to say? To show you are worth something. You are someone.

How?

In my case, you write.

There was a short story unit in elementary school. There were papers in English. There were my journals, my pages of poems. There were my short stories about disappearing girls—I still write these stories; now I can even publish them as novels. I once wrote a paper on female mathematicians for math class—my former math teacher came to one of my readings because she remembered me and this paper. I wrote at every opportunity, happily, on anything. It was the one thing I did that made me feel like myself.

The writing was personal, too. I wrote everything and everyone around me. I wrote the things I couldn’t say out loud. When painful things happened to me (family that hurt me, boys who hurt me) I wrote them down and wrote them away. I wrote what I couldn’t say.

My mom—a voracious reader—saw this and encouraged me at every turn. Eventually, it was my writing that gave me the inspiration and the courage to speak. To even be loud.

Now that I can talk in front of people, now that I have, on uncountable occasions, stood before of a room of people and talked about myself, my books, revealing who I am to strangers, you may think I’m a different person. It’s miraculous to me, how much I’ve changed.

But it all goes back to that girl sitting very, very still in the nondescript center of the classroom. Hoping no one will notice her while she burns up with all the things she’s noticing inside.

It is the act of writing that inspires me. The idea that I didn’t feel like I had a voice, and I did.

I write for that strange, uncomfortable girl I was, the beet-red face in the classroom, filling up with the shame and fire of wanting to disappear. I’m inspired by the girl I was who thought she had nothing worthy to say.

She did. She does. We all do.

Thank you for reading November’s “What Inspires You?” blog series! And thank you to all the writers who wrote guest blogs for me. I’m honored to have been able to post them.

Here, you can read the entire blog series:
- Inspiring Novel Openings
- What Inspires Lisa Schroeder
- What Inspires Tara Altebrando
- What Inspires Bryan Bliss
- What Inspires Sara Zarr
- What Inspires Anna M. Evans
- What Inspires Christine Lee Zilka
- What Inspires Sophie Rosenblum
- What Inspires Mike Jung
- What Inspires Mike Martin
- What Inspires Veronica Roth
- What Inspires Laurel Snyder
- What Inspires Bennett Madison
- What Inspires Alexander Chee
- What Inspires Kathleen Duey
- What Inspires THE INTERN
- What Inspires Stephanie Kuehnert
- What Inspires Timothy Braun
- What Inspires Julia Karr
- What Inspires Jamey Hatley
- What Inspires Sabina Murray
- What Inspires Michelle Aldredge
Guest Post: What Inspires Michelle Aldredge

Nova Ren Suma

November 30, 2011
(Design & illustration by Robert Roxby)

Today is the last day of the inspiration series on my blog! I love the following essay by Michelle Aldredge, creator of the new arts site Gwarlingo. She speaks to art and life, creativity vs. commerce, and so much more in this eloquent piece on what inspires her to create:

—We are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved

A visual artist I know once told me about an audit she endured with the IRS. My friend is a professional artist in New York City with her own studio. Her work is shown at galleries and museums. She has received grants, been accepted to artist residencies around the world, and every now and then, she even manages to sell a few pieces of artwork.

During the audit, one of the IRS employees explained to my friend that she couldn’t keep declaring a loss for her business year after year. “This looks more like a hobby than a profession,” the auditor said.

My friend attempted to explain the financial ups and downs of being a working artist. Yes. There had been a dry spell in the “income department” in recent years, but her expenses were legitimate. Art was her business, her life, her passion–not a mere hobby. The auditor was completely puzzled. “But if you aren’t making any money creating art,” he asked, “why do you keep doing this year after year?”

I love this story because it says so much about the profit-oriented culture we inhabit as artists (and when I say “artists,” I define that term broadly to include writers, performers, designers, filmmakers, composers, visual artists, etc.).

For most artists I know, money is a constant source of anxiety because most creative projects don’t make economic sense. As artists, we have chosen an alternative paradigm to the profit-oriented one. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be smart about the business-side of art making, only that money isn’t our primary motivator.

The concept of creating for its own sake remains a radical concept in our culture. This is one of the central rifts we see playing out now between Wall Street bankers and supporters of the Occupy movement. One camp places a higher value on profits, while the other a higher value on more elusive qualities like imagination, empathy, and justice.

Of course, if you have your money invested in the stock market, then you want your broker to be greedy with your money—you want to earn 6%, not 4% like everyone else. But when it comes to art, greed turns the best ideas sour. It isn’t hard to sniff out the difference between work that was created from a free, deep place, and a blatant commercial commodity.

You may be able sell the end product of art—the concert ticket, the photograph, the book—but the idea itself is free. Art is a gift. It is an elusive mystery that thrives only when it’s shared.

Being an artist is hard because we’re operating in a parallel universe—one that values imagination, creativity, and ideas more than money or status. But a true creative exchange—one in which art is given and accepted without obligation is a way of side-stepping the soul-crushing grimness of consumerism. I would go so far as to say that it’s an alternate way of being. It’s this free exchange between artist and audience that creates movement, provides pleasure, provokes change, and offers meaningful connection.

As writer and MacArthur fellow Lewis Hyde says in his classic book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, “The gift moves toward the empty place. As it turns in its circle it turns toward him who has been empty-handed the longest, and if someone appears elsewhere whose need is great it leaves its old channel and moves toward him. Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then pulls gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us.”

“Motion” is a key word here, for an artist needs this movement to thrive. “Make the work,” said Walt Whitman. “Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping,…Stop it and just DO!” wrote artist Sol LeWitt to his friend Eva Hesse. “Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world. If you fear, make it work for you—draw & paint your fear and anxiety…You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO!”

“No art is sunk in the self,” says Flannery O’Connor, “but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.”

In Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton writes: “There is only one real deprivation…and that is not to be able to give one’s gift to those one loves most…The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.”

“The artist who hopes to market work that is the realization of his gifts cannot begin with the market,” Hyde explains. “He must create for himself that gift-sphere in which the work is made, and only when he knows the work to be the faithful realization of his gift should he turn to see if it has currency in that other economy. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.”

From an early age, I understood that art possessed its own strange power. Growing up in a conservative, fundamentalist family in suburban Atlanta, I was taught that the Bible was the inspired Word of God and that its words contained the literal answers to all of life’s problems.

I was also taught that many books, songs, movies, and artworks were dangerous and capable of damning you to hell for eternity. During my childhood, art was like a red-hot burner; its mysteries and dangers were a constant lure.

This idea was further cemented when a group of angry citizens demanded that the public library I worked for remove several “pornographic” books from the shelves. Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War and Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries were the two books that sparked this ugly censorship battle. It was a divisive fight that dragged on for years, but the death threats, mudslinging in the press, and outraged library customers who screamed in my face and accused me of hurting their children taught me that the freedom to read should never be taken for granted.

While I didn’t support the group’s efforts to ban books, I did understand why some members of my community were afraid. They understood the old cliché that knowledge is power. They were afraid that what happened to me might happen to their own children—that all of their efforts to instill “family values” might be undermined by the freedom to read contrary opinions. For some parents, there is nothing worse than having your own child “backslide” into a state of doubt.

After so many years of seeing the world in crisp black and white, I’ve learned to value the beauty of the gray areas. I can still find solace in the woods, in a sacred space, or a room of friends sitting silently together, but the gift of art remains central to my well-being. I hate to think what my life might be like today without it.

It’s the hard, deep, uncomfortable work that inspires me most. Easy answers, like easy art, make me suspicious. I’m in awe of writers like Darcy Frey, Adrian LeBlanc, and Jeff Sharlet who spend years on a single book. They have devoted years of their life talking to people, shadowing them, researching their subject, listening, and writing in order to shine a light on a subject that was previously invisible.

But art doesn’t have to have an overt social conscience to be meaningful. A short piece of music or a seemingly simple painting can be as powerful or transformative as the thickest Tolstoy novel. By choosing to pay attention to any piece of art, we are acknowledging the value of imagination. To look, to listen, to attempt understanding is to participate in this free exchange.

My new arts site, www.gwarlingo.com is also an exchange of sorts—a way of giving back to the artists who have given so much to me through the years. I created Gwarlingo because I was tired of seeing the same movies, music, shows, and books covered in the mainstream press again and again. There are a lot of exceptional alternatives out there, but the trouble is knowing where to look. My idea was to create a place where art lovers and artists of all disciplines could discover compelling work. I wanted to go deeper than the average blog—to have real conversations with real artists about ideas and process. To break down the barriers of genre, geography, and age, but to also have a little fun along the way.

It is difficult to talk about the meaning of art without sounding fanciful or foolishly idealistic. We’re all afraid of sounding uncool or demystifying the creative process by talking about it too much. And yet, I know artists are hungry to discuss these ideas because they’ve told me they are.

The best art emerges from the tension of opposing impulses: discipline and play, solitude and community, intellect and emotion, success and failure, fear and fearlessness, giving and receiving. I believe this, and yet, I still find it difficult to fully comprehend the creative process. I have learned to be satisfied with these mysterious gray areas.

“The passage into mystery always refreshes,” says Hyde. “If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies…It is when the world flames a bit in our peripheral vision that it bring us jubilation and not depression…for we are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved.”

—Michelle Aldredge

Michelle Aldredge is a writer, photographer, and the creator of Gwarlingo, an arts and culture website that covers music, books, film, visual art, and the creative process. Since 1999, she has worked at The MacDowell Colony, the nation’s oldest artist colony founded in 1907. She has also worked as a librarian, a docent at The High Museum of Art, an English and literacy tutor, and an editorial assistant at an arts magazine. For two years she cared for injured eagles, hawks, and owls at a raptor rehabilitation center in Vermont. She also likes sailing, bird watching, hiking, and Southern barbeque. She has received two fellowships from The Hambidge Center and recently finished her first novel, Promiseland.

Visit Michelle at www.gwarlingo.com.

Follow @gwarlingo on Twitter.

Or follow Gwarlingo on Facebook.

Want more in this blog series?
- Inspiring Novel Openings
- What Inspires Lisa Schroeder
- What Inspires Tara Altebrando
- What Inspires Bryan Bliss
- What Inspires Sara Zarr
- What Inspires Anna M. Evans
- What Inspires Christine Lee Zilka
- What Inspires Sophie Rosenblum
- What Inspires Mike Jung
- What Inspires Mike Martin
- What Inspires Veronica Roth
- What Inspires Laurel Snyder
- What Inspires Bennett Madison
- What Inspires Alexander Chee
- What Inspires Kathleen Duey
- What Inspires THE INTERN
- What Inspires Stephanie Kuehnert
- What Inspires Timothy Braun
- What Inspires Julia Karr
- What Inspires Jamey Hatley
- What Inspires Sabina Murray
“Inspiration” or “What I Found at the Victoria and Albert Museum”: Guest Post by Sabina Murray

Nova Ren Suma

November 30, 2011
(Design & illustration by Robert Roxby)

Today is the last day of the inspiration series on my blog! I love this surprise zing! of an inspirational moment that author Sabina Murray describes… You never can tell when one will hit you:

This past summer I was in London at the V & A attending an exhibit about beauty: an impressive showcase of pre-Raphaelites, people like Morris and Rossetti, that also presented the decorative arts in a lovely wash of stained glass and Arthurian verve. Regardless of the excess of beauty surrounding me, I was not inspired. I was somewhat jet-lagged and despite the fizzy, grape-flavored liquid cheerfully administered by my friend Liz earlier that morning, still a touch hung over. While explaining to my kids the importance of sculptural elements and repeated imagery in Pre-Raphaelite visual art, my phone had gone off: my cousin’s son (in Philippine culture this is the equivalent of an identical twin) was traveling Stateside with his daughter to show her Deerfield Academy, where he’d studied, and wanted to visit. I was facing a dilemma firstly because I wasn’t at home to host him, but secondly, since I was in London and hadn’t contacted his cousin (also the equivalent in Philippine culture of one’s identical twin) who lives in London, with whom I should have made a plan, and would now be exposed. So, I had trans-Atlantic guilt, with a jigger of family, all poured over some nice cubes of hangover. While I was trying to get off the phone with my “nephew” a disapproving museum guard had taken me by my elbow and was steadily leading me to an exit that certainly led to some Doctor Who-like fourth dimension, and, no doubt, once I had been expelled through it, I would never see my family (nor fizzy-drink dispensing friends) ever again.

All to say I was not feeling inspired. And the odds of me getting inspired (for those gamblers amongst us) were very, very slim.

Everyone will be happy to know that I am not posting this from the Doctor Who-like fourth dimension. I was able to get off the phone with my nephew before reaching the “portal of banishment.” More importantly, as I was making my way back to my people, I paused by an unassuming pen and ink drawing, and by the image read this quote:

“All art consistently aspires towards the condition of music.”

This was penned by a Walter Pater, whom, Wikipedia later informed me, was an eminent Victorian famous for being an eminent Victorian, although perhaps not eminent enough to be recognized—without further scrutiny—for much else. Suddenly I found myself inspired. If the room had begun to spin about with me as epicenter, it would have been no less remarkable. This simple sentence sprung before my reasoning and distorted and sharpened every struggle and triumph I’d ever had while writing.

I am a writer of ideas and am inspired, in a loose sense, by injustice and history and art. But when it comes to the finer sense of inspiration, I am interested in taking these large notions, creating characters moved by these forces, and bending the sentence to most approximate fine music. This is my goal on a daily basis. Filling pages has never presented much of a challenge to me, but what makes it sublime is to try to make the words sing on a page. I am not impervious to the “gotcha” moments in life, but in a refined sense, the “state of music” is my writing compass and what keeps the challenge and focus—the inspiration—real.

—Sabina Murray

Sabina Murray is the author of three novels and two short story collections, including the PEN/Faulkner Award winning The Caprices. Her work is included in The Norton Anthology. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation and Radcliffe Institute and is on the fiction faculty of the MFA program at Umass Amherst. She wrote the script for Beautiful Country, a Golden Bear contender, for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. Her latest, Tales of the New World, was recently published by Grove/Black Cat.

Visit Sabina at sabinamurray.com.

Want more in this blog series?
- Inspiring Novel Openings
- What Inspires Lisa Schroeder
- What Inspires Tara Altebrando
- What Inspires Bryan Bliss
- What Inspires Sara Zarr
- What Inspires Anna M. Evans
- What Inspires Christine Lee Zilka
- What Inspires Sophie Rosenblum
- What Inspires Mike Jung
- What Inspires Mike Martin
- What Inspires Veronica Roth
- What Inspires Laurel Snyder
- What Inspires Bennett Madison
- What Inspires Alexander Chee
- What Inspires Kathleen Duey
- What Inspires THE INTERN
- What Inspires Stephanie Kuehnert
- What Inspires Timothy Braun
- What Inspires Julia Karr
- What Inspires Jamey Hatley
Guest Post: What Inspires Jamey Hatley

Nova Ren Suma

November 29, 2011
(Design & illustration by Robert Roxby)

Jamey Hatley is such an inspiring writer. I love the image of her reading as a child, and I love knowing how it made her into the writer she is today:

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them—with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.”

~Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings

One of my first clear memories is of my mother reading to me before bed. When I was old enough to read on my own, I would often recline upside down in our big armchair with my head resting on a footstool, my body in the seat and my legs up the back. My mother wouldn’t ordinarily allow me to sit in any chair like that, but I guess she indulged me since I was reading. My nephew said recently that I would pull a book from a tall stack and throw the completed ones over my shoulder. I dispute that I would ever throw a book, but I concede to the precarious stacks.

I relish the delicious sensation of entering the world of a book and letting the “real” world slip away. When I read something wonderful, I feel this wild flutter in my chest as if the story is alive inside me. I could not imagine stirring another human with my words, so I studied marketing and public relations instead.

Since books didn’t grow out of the ground, I turned my attention to their makers. Book jacket bios and author photos were never enough to satisfy my curiosity. I learned to scour the public library’s old-fashioned card catalog for books by and about my favorite writers. From those carefully typed see, also cross-reference cards I discovered that there were whole books with interviews of writers. Conversations with James Baldwin, Black Women Writers at Work, Interviews with Black Writers and books like them enthralled me. I devoured these interviews.

At the time this was really the only way I could hear from the writers I loved in their own words. Lines from those interviews shaped me as a writer before I ever wrote a word. For example, in Black Women Writers at Work, Toni Morrison says, “My stories come to me as clichés. A cliché is a cliché because it’s worthwhile. Otherwise, it would have been discarded.” This is most likely the seed that got me thinking about clichés and archetypes that appear in my work.

In a way, without even knowing it, my favorite writers became unwitting mentors to me—answering questions that I didn’t even know to ask. These tiny details about the daily work of writing convinced me that perhaps I could write, too. These interviews provided a tiny, tiny window for me to peek through to find out about the invisible world of the writer.

I still love a smart, rigorous interview. The ones in BOMB are really nice because they intentionally pair certain artists together. These interviews always seem to go deep, and most times in ways you could not predict. I have the four-volume Paris Review Interviews boxed set on my wish list (hint, hint). I also plan to have a Proust Questionnaire party sometime in the near future.

I’ve come a long way since my see-also card-catalog days. I now know all too well that books don’t make themselves. Now that I am a maker of books, when I’m feeling stuck I almost always seek inspiration from writers and artists who have gone before and managed to make art of the world.

—Jamey Hatley

Jamey Hatley is a native of Memphis, TN, who believes fiercely in the power of sweet tea and stories to heal. Her writing has appeared in the Oxford American and Torch. She has attended the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Voices of Our Nation Writing Workshop and received scholarships to the Oxford American Summit for Ambitious Writers and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In 2006 she won the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for a Novel-in-Progress, which is still in progress. After an undergraduate degree in marketing and a masters in journalism, she received her MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University. She makes her home in New Orleans, LA.

Read Jamey’s blog at jameyhatley.wordpress.com.

Follow @jameyhatley on Twitter.

Want more in this blog series?
- Inspiring Novel Openings
- What Inspires Lisa Schroeder
- What Inspires Tara Altebrando
- What Inspires Bryan Bliss
- What Inspires Sara Zarr
- What Inspires Anna M. Evans
- What Inspires Christine Lee Zilka
- What Inspires Sophie Rosenblum
- What Inspires Mike Jung
- What Inspires Mike Martin
- What Inspires Veronica Roth
- What Inspires Laurel Snyder
- What Inspires Bennett Madison
- What Inspires Alexander Chee
- What Inspires Kathleen Duey
- What Inspires THE INTERN
- What Inspires Stephanie Kuehnert
- What Inspires Timothy Braun
- What Inspires Julia Karr
Guest Post: What Inspires Julia Karr

Nova Ren Suma

November 29, 2011
(Design & illustration by Robert Roxby)

On this beautiful Tuesday morning, Julia Karr reveals what inspires her to write. I think many of us may share these inspirations:

It’s so sweet that Nova asked me to write a post on what inspires me. I have to say—Nova’s a pretty good inspiration on any day! But, I’ll try to go beyond that… because there was a time when I didn’t know Nova, or any children’s authors except as names on the spines of books that I devoured.

First off then, I’d have to say that reading inspires me. There are so many fabulous books out there in the world—old, new, fiction, non-fiction, digital, papyrus—you name it. And, first and foremost, the written word inspires me. It inspires my creativity and my life. Which, honestly, are one and the same. I would be lost if I weren’t creating something—be it a pot of soup or a pot-boiler!

Add in other creative arts, such as music, paintings, sculpture, performance art, dance, etc.—those, too, are inspiring to me. Maybe it’s because they are created by other people—human beings—just like me. That is inspiring because it lets me know that I am capable, too. Capable of expressing the creative spirit that’s in me.

Then… there’s Nature—capital “N” Nature! From a snowflake to a hurricane—a ladybug to an elephant—there is nothing more inspiring to me than nature: the crisp clean air of an October morning, the dripping humidity of a midwest summer night, the air filled with bird songs on morning in April, or a quiet snowfall on a January night.

And—not to deny the inspiration of love—whether experiencing it firsthand, or seeing the expressions on the faces of a mother with her baby, a dad watching his “little girl” get married, a grandparent helping her grandson take his first steps—these inspire me, too.

I think the combination of all of these things—arts, nature, humanity—serves to move one’s soul to find ways express itself. And, I hope to always be awake to the call of that inspiration.

—Julia Karr

Julia Karr lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with her four cats and one dog. Her love of books led her to be the youngest child to complete her hometown library’s summer reading program—garnering her a photo on the front page of the Seymour Daily Tribune. When her two daughters were little, she wrote them bedtime stories; now that they are grown, she writes novels. Her first book, XVI, a young adult futuristic thriller that began its life as a NaNoWriMo experiment, was published by Speak/Penguin Books for Young Readers in Spring 2011, and the sequel, TRUTH comes out in January 2012.

Visit Julia at juliakarr.com.

Follow @juliaakarr on Twitter.

Want more in this blog series?
- Inspiring Novel Openings
- What Inspires Lisa Schroeder
- What Inspires Tara Altebrando
- What Inspires Bryan Bliss
- What Inspires Sara Zarr
- What Inspires Anna M. Evans
- What Inspires Christine Lee Zilka
- What Inspires Sophie Rosenblum
- What Inspires Mike Jung
- What Inspires Mike Martin
- What Inspires Veronica Roth
- What Inspires Laurel Snyder
- What Inspires Bennett Madison
- What Inspires Alexander Chee
- What Inspires Kathleen Duey
- What Inspires THE INTERN
- What Inspires Stephanie Kuehnert
- What Inspires Timothy Braun

distraction no.99

Tag: nanowrimo

Writing a Novel and Seeking the Magic Fix

What Inspires You

Turning the Question on Myself: What Inspires ME?

(Design & illustration by Robert Roxby)

Thank you for reading November’s “What Inspires You?” blog series! And thank you to all the writers who wrote guest blogs for me. I’m honored to have been able to post them.

Here, you can read the entire blog series:

Guest Post: What Inspires Michelle Aldredge

(Design & illustration by Robert Roxby)

Today is the last day of the inspiration series on my blog! I love the following essay by Michelle Aldredge, creator of the new arts site Gwarlingo. She speaks to art and life, creativity vs. commerce, and so much more in this eloquent piece on what inspires her to create:

—We are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved

—Michelle Aldredge

Want more in this blog series?

“Inspiration” or “What I Found at the Victoria and Albert Museum”: Guest Post by Sabina Murray

(Design & illustration by Robert Roxby)

Today is the last day of the inspiration series on my blog! I love this surprise zing! of an inspirational moment that author Sabina Murray describes… You never can tell when one will hit you:

—Sabina Murray

Want more in this blog series?

Guest Post: What Inspires Jamey Hatley

(Design & illustration by Robert Roxby)

Jamey Hatley is such an inspiring writer. I love the image of her reading as a child, and I love knowing how it made her into the writer she is today:

~Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings

—Jamey Hatley

Want more in this blog series?

Guest Post: What Inspires Julia Karr

(Design & illustration by Robert Roxby)

On this beautiful Tuesday morning, Julia Karr reveals what inspires her to write. I think many of us may share these inspirations:

—Julia Karr

Want more in this blog series?