As part of the Write by the Rails Endless Possibilities Blogtour, I’m happy to welcome Tamela Ritter to my blog with a little taster of poetry.
Pip invited me to come to her blog today and talk about inspiration, where I find it, where it comes from.
Where does inspiration come from?
I used to love this question. I had such an awesomely pretentious author answer.
*adjusts horn rim glasses*
*lights pipe*
*clears throat coated with Scotch*
“For me, it is simple; I dream what I write and write what I dream,†I would say, paraphrasing Van Gogh… badly.
Or I would talk about breathing fresh air, being out in nature. For you see, back when I lived pretty much smack-dab between the Cascades and the Rockies, I used to get inspiration on the lake shore, on the mountain tops, under the star filled sky with coyotes baying in the distance. Of course, I was also in college at the time so there was also a lot of inspiration found at dive bars.
But now? Now I scratch my head, shrug and say, “Um. Everywhere?â€
Really, it’s the only answer I have anymore. Inspiration is out there everywhere, and sometimes what worked for you in the past, won’t anymore. That’s okay. That just means you have to find somewhere else, someone else, something else. Look in the most unlikely of places. If it isn’t there, move on.
Sometimes inspiration is a place. Like I’ve mentioned, I’ve found it while hiking, while sitting on a canoe, around a campfire and I have hundreds of scribbled napkins to prove that dive bars are great for inspiration. I’ve also found it at coffee shops, book stores, once on a Greyhound bus heading cross-country. And I always, ALWAYS find it on long roads in late night drives, not to mention the truck stops that I frantically frequent to get the words out before I lose them on those trips.
Sometimes inspiration is what you read, what you watch and what music is on your iPod. I get lots of inspiration from reading. Not in a “I want to write a book just like this one†way, but in a “Wow. That makes me think, makes me feel and makes me want to be better in what I put out there in the world†way. Sometimes movies do that to. Like when you come out of a theater and you’re surprised that the planet is still spinning just like it always has and nothing has changed except your perception of the world and all its inhabitants.
And sometimes you find inspiration in a person or persons. This happens to me a lot. I’ve had to stop thinking of writing as a solitary endeavor because of the frequency I get inspiration from the company of others. Whether it is an online community of writers like National Novel Writing Month and the like, a loved one who lets you bounce ideas off them or people who gather to write and almost more importantly, commiserate.
A few years ago, I had a group of writers that we self-titled “Writers On the Rocks†because we met at the best bar in the world–most of those napkins are from this bar–and wrote and eavesdropped on patrons. Between those nights and the ones I shared with a friend in her tiny apartment and writing frantically as we marathoned The West Wing, I accomplished so many things I never thought I’d find anything to replace them when the bar closed down and the friend moved away.
For a while, I lived completely uninspired and unmoored, and yet, words still needed to be written. How unfair is that? Truth is, I stopped looking for inspiration long ago. Now, I make it when I can, and if I can’t, I soldier on regardless.
Like Jack London said: “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.†Or if you need your truths harsher, like Stephen King said: “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.â€
Tamela J. Ritter was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, her debut novel From These Ashes was published in March 2013 by Battered Suitcase Press. She now lives and works in Haymarket, Va. You can find her on Twitter or on Facebook.