Some Thoughts on Inspiration

Like everyone else, I come to writing from a varied background. I’ve had many interests over the years, most recently rock climbing, which I picked up in earnest back in 2021. It’s a unique and challenging sport, somehow at once solitary and social, physically punishing and mentally rewarding. It takes me into nature, keeps me in shape, and often gives way to social connection and friendship, both of which are perennial sparks to the writerly tinder within.

I’ve found with climbing, if I want to psych myself up in preparation for a trip or outing, the best way to spur that eager thrill and urge to climb is to watch some climbing videos, just as I used to do in high school when I’d watch skateboard videos before hitting the streets to skate with my friends. Watching others actively do what you aspire to is, for the sincere and passionate practitioner, a failsafe way to invigorate the spirit. It helps to have a good soundtrack, too!

But while sports and other such kinetic activities offer the bottomless trove of videos, reels, and clips for the eager novice to ponder wild-eyed, writing is a desk-bound and sedentary practice. It features no such visual complement to the actual doing. Or does it?

Years ago, in the early days of YouTube, I recall watching a curious series of videos put out by Florida State University featuring Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, Robert Olen Butler, called “Inside Creative Writing.” In it, Butler sits at his desk in his FSU office and, over the course of seventeen episodes, drafts from scratch, edits, and revises a short story ultimately called “This is Earl Sandt.”

Butler begins each episode talking to the camera, introducing the video, reflecting on the writing process, addressing certain craft concepts, and so on. Then the camera shifts and the viewer is given a direct view of his computer screen as he types sentences, creating, editing, and plotting in real time as he thinks and imagines his way through the story. He tries to narrate the process of creating narrative and character and, considering the difficulty of the task, he does rather well. We watch the story emerge word by word as Butler explains his decisions. Then the session ends with Butler answering questions emailed to him from viewers (the videos series was originally broadcast as a live webcast).

But with all due respect to the author and aim of this project which, as he acknowledges, “has never been done before,” this isn’t exactly entertaining stuff, let alone the kind of content that might normally light the sparks of literary creativity. Butler even admits that “at some point I’m going to have to just shut up and maintain that kind of trance state that creative writers must nurture in order to get in touch with their dream state and unconscious.”

There are seventeen episodes and every episode but one is roughly two hours in length, which comes to a total of about thirty hours of real-time writing, silent trance, intermittent metacommentary, and the rest. Again, I don’t call this inspiring so much as an interesting experiment, something from which serious writers might gain perspective and craft insight. It’s also a good model for how to sit down, shut up, and get to work. I think the fact that the first episode has some 270,000 views while the last has accrued only 6,000 is quantitative confirmation of the dull and laborious nature of these videos. Still, I encourage my reader to look them up, if only to glimpse something different and intimately human in the world of art-making.

So where does this leave us writers when it comes to catalyzing the literary-creative gears? For me, the answer often resides in published work, specifically language and stylized prose, as well as verse. Over the years, certain authors have consistently inspired me to want to put pen to paper, among them the early modernist, Joseph Conrad, and the American poet, Mary Oliver. For the remainder of this post, I’d like to speak to why I find their words so intoxicating, true igniters to my creative spirit.

I first read Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness in my final year of high school, long before I felt any inkling toward writing fiction. The book was the subject of my senior English critical essay, and my impression of Conrad’s prose was skewed by the criticism I read as an inroad to understanding the book’s main themes. I thought Conrad’s writing dense and dictatorial, overtly archaic, and stylized to excess. It was at this time also I first encountered the literary term, periphrasis, and I came to see Conrad’s writing guilty of such a charge, as in the following passage:

There were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.

The brooding nature of these sentences seemed to my non-writerly rebellious teenage mind nothing more than the author indulging himself, showing off more than showing truth. Okay, so memories return unexpectedly in the quiet moments of the present. Just say that. Why cloud it with all the gratuitous clauses and poetic diction?

Yet now I read these lines, and many others in Conrad’s masterful novella, with a different sensibility, one more receptive to the intoxicating effects of language, the way reading such stylized sentences that hover between straight prose and the rhythms of poetry can release a surge of creativity within. Every time I go back to this book, it makes me want to sit down and try to write a story myself and make the language beautiful, to charge the sentences with a dynamism that might affect the reader in the way I feel myself affected after reading Conrad’s.

With Mary Oliver, the experience is different, though the results be the same. I read a poem such as “When I am Among the Trees,” so simple in its message, so restrained in its expression, and feel not so much excitation as reverence. I am stirred, but it is a gentle stirring, a tranquil urge to unearth some quiet and ancient truth within. The kind of excavation that only prolonged and intimate company with words can accomplish. Like the trees in the poem, which “call out” to the speaker, “ ‘Stay awhile,’ ” I too am called to stay awhile with my own writings. I let myself  “ ‘be filled / with light, and to shine’ ”  as the words flow through my consciousness. I quote the poem in its entirety so my reader might feel something similar:

When I am among the trees,

especially the willows and the honey locust,

equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,

they give off such hints of gladness.

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

 

I am so distant from the hope of myself,

in which I have goodness, and discernment,

and never hurry through the world,

       but walk slowly, and bow often.

 

Around me the trees stir in their leaves

and call out, “Stay awhile.”

The light flows from their branches.

 

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,

“and you too have some

into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled

with light, and to shine.”

Inspiration comes to us in countless forms—lived experience, bits of overheard conversation, memory, dream, dead wakeful silences in the darkest of nights. The possibilities are as numerous as there are writers in the world, and I don’t dare claim that reading is my sole form of inspiration, nor the abovementioned authors my only literary lodestars. Far from it. But as writers we are in the unique position of pursuing a calling whose actual activity—the tedious, protracted, and sedentary process of putting words to paper—is outwardly quite boring and antithetical to our current moment of screen-dominated, screen-stimulated life. Therefore, we must turn away from these things, and turn toward that which has more lasting potential to impel: the inherent magic of language itself.

Nathaniel Meals was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A graduate of the MFA program at Bowling Green State University, he is now an emerging scholar and writer studying and teaching at Georgia State University where he is earning a Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing. His writing appears in The Southeast Review, Masque & Spectacle, Rock Salt Journal, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. You can find his Substack here: https://mountainquietpress.substack.com/.