Where Do You Draw "Inspiration" From?

How are you “inspired” to write? Some people get inspired, no doubt, scraping the last peanut butter from the bottom of the jar, trying to get the last bit of that sticky chemical from the swirling plastic nub at the center of the bottom. The whirlpool scene from the Pirates of the Caribbean might have been the afterthought of the construction of a peanut butter sandwich. Probably chunky peanut butter.

I have no problem coming up with ideas; some are just more usable than others. I think one of the best jobs in the world would be those screen writers who come up with a movie by sitting around playing “what if…” Leaving Stephenson's Treasure Island out of this, what Muppet movie was ever based on a book? In The Muppets Take Manhattan, there was a great cameo of Mayor Ed Koch. That must have been brainstormed when they came up with the original idea, like “let’s make this movie take place in Manhattan and we can have all these hilarious cameos.” What Ed Koch said was immaterial; whatever he said would draw a laugh. Make it in the least way funny and you get double-plus laughter.

When I was a press card carrying reporter I had all these opportunities that came up in the normal course of business. I filed many of those instances in the back of my head and I find that I am drawing on more and more of them lately. That means that they were either fortuitous opportunities that don’t come around that often or my life has gotten a whole lot more boring since those salad days.

The point I want to make is that when an opportunity comes along, keep a very open mind and try to be as aware and observant as you can be in the moment. If something looks odd or curious or even unidentified, ask the question. You’re there, make it worthwhile. Last summer I happened to cross paths with a cousin I hadn’t seen in 10 years. He mentioned that he would be in New York in August and that we ought to get together. As it turns out he has an unusual job. He’s the captain of a yacht. I mean yacht as in capital “Y.” He said he would berth at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan (at 23^rd street and the West Side) and he had to babysit the boat that night so we could sit and talk. He also promised a complete tour.

How many times have I ever had the opportunity peek into every nook and cranny of a large boat before? How about, never? So I made my way after work over to the Chelsea Piers that night, a pleasant balmy 68 degree evening in August. We sat on one of the three after decks and looked out at the Manhattan skyline as the lights came up, focusing straight ahead at the Empire State Building. My cousin was great, taking time to explain all the electronics, daily life on the ship, and how everything operated. He was patient with my 1001 questions. I’m not sure I’ll ever write about a boat but, should I have to consider a plot that involved a boat, I would be prepared or know where to go to ask a specific question, a great way to start. No pressure, just go and have fun and scribble a few thoughts.

Years ago, my publisher called me into his office, a paneled version of Ward Cleaver’s den, the location of many lectures to the Beaver. He gave me two tickets to a luncheon junket that was a promo for a movie. It would be the first review I ever wrote and a good start because I would be given identical opportunities in the next few years. I would be attending in his place and I could preview the movie and have a freebie lunch along with cocktail hour. I arrived at the huge movie theatre on Route 46, arriving several minutes early at a large dining room still being set up by the staff. The press corps, a motley crew of middle-aged adults, was bunched in a group at one end of the dining room and at the other was a collection of chairs, folded and stacked against the wall, some of those serving tray holders stacks, and a short-bearded man with a small felt hat, a trench coat and an umbrella. As I remember that day, there was not a cloud in the sky, no rain in days and no prospects of rain in the near future. Since he was clutching that umbrella on such a beautiful day I immediately figured out that he had to be the movie director. As he shyly backed away from the scene, he was moving into the stacked serving tray racks and they were pushing into the chairs and the whole arrangement was in danger of cascading down. I hurried over, caught the chairs and gently steered him away from the impending avalanche and introduced myself.

We struck up a conversation and I realized that I was a friend indeed and he needed an anchor because he was too nervous to face all those nasty press people alone. In fact, he was great one-on-one but looked like he was going to his execution when he was asked to stand up and greet everyone with a few words about his movie. He was 27 at the time. By now, he’s 61 and in between he’s learned to stand up to a bevy of reporters and calmly discuss his projects. Back then, he thought the press was the enemy, like they were going to find out that he was a canard. Success breeds confidence.

We had a great lunch and he was very open and friendly. He pointed out where the flaws in the movie were and told me to watch a scene were a man is being chased down the hall of a hotel and at the last instant jumps into an elevator, and into the open arms of four nuns. A close look reveals that the nuns were men, one even having a mustache. Naturally it happens so quickly the brain is fooled when the eye is not. The eye records the event but the brain only reports out what it’s used to seeing. Nuns don’t have beards.

For the record, that director was John Landis, whose next movie months later was Animal House. The movie we were previewing was Kentucky Fried Movie, made on a budget of $650,000 that eventually grossed $20-million. He went on to add to his credits: The Blues Brothers, 1941, American Werewolf in London, Beverly Hills Cop III, The Twilight Zone, Trading Places and Coming to America.

That whole experience got filed into the back of my brain file so that if I ever need to write about a conversation over lunch with a movie director, I’ll just know that it’s almost like every other lunch conversation. Having said that, I am sure the next director that I am discussing my movie deal with will be a vastly different experience.

The next time you have access to an extraordinary occurrence, flip on that recorder in your memory and then file the event for future “inspiration.” Some writers carry notebooks around, not trusting their memory. You could do that, and then toss that notebook onto a pile of scads of other notebooks and rely on some sort of personally developed filing system for a recall of which notebook had what experience. Or, have a memory like mine, wired for eclectic and strange recall. That’s how I am “inspired” when I write.

Working In The Background

The brain is amazing. Recently, I’ve just spent several visits to the brain rehabilitation unit at a center just outside of Philadelphia. I’ve seen a whole variety of ways the brain is affected by various accidents and illnesses. One thing that made a lasting impression is the resiliency of the brain. You’ve heard the expression “spark of life” and I think that what they look for in those rehab units are sparks. All you need for a fire is a spark and all you need for a brain to reboot, so to speak, is just a spark.

In my own writing I am discovering my subliminal thought processes. My brain (everyone’s not just mine, so to speak) works on ideas long after I’m consciously entertaining them. We all know that but because I am working on very specific things, I’m noticing how much this is true and to what extent.

When one beta reader finished reading my manuscript he shocked me by saying that he especially liked the way I had set up a sequel to the book. I was surprised. What sequel? I had no intentions of writing a sequel and my interests are too eclectic to pigeon hole my writing into one area. I think that must have come from the permission to write about anything I chose when I was the editor of a weekly newspaper.

Everything was fair game for a story and when it wasn’t timely and newsworthy it became a feature. Having a press pass was a huge advantage because of the access you have. Not to mention the fun of speaking directly to people about their craft. I asked Mario Andretti about race cars and Virginia Wade about tennis. With Bill Bradley I stuck to his Senate race because asking him how he missed that buzzer shot in the 1971 playoffs against the Baltimore Bullets would have been poor form. Looking back, he might have been more comfortable had I asked him that.

Getting back to how the subliminal brain works (that digression was a revealing example how my conscious brain works), I have found lately that not only is it active but my subliminal passes off to my conscious brain in a persistent, forceful way. It’s a nudje. The only way I can get it off my mind is to write something down my brain’s subliminal suggestion. If I don’t, the “request” gets louder, louder and then more persistent, until I can’t stand it. A little voice kicks in reminding me that if I don’t write it down, it’ll get lost forever.

In the early days newspaper computers and filing stories, the Passaic bureau, that I wrote from in the last days of my reporter years, had workstations that were connected to the Hackensack main office of the Record, called “The Bergen Record” at the time. After and event, a meeting, and interview, I would drive back to the office and word process a story. When I was satisfied that it was complete, with no holes, the story would be transmitted to Hackensack. In those days, there was a one in five chance the transmission would get lost. I was composing live at the time so the story would be lost unless I had printed it out just before sending. If you can imagine that we thought the crude, dot matrix printing on that paper with the sprocket holes was cool rather than extremely clunky then you’ve put yourself back in the time frame of those heady days.

My newspaper luck had me hitting that one-in-five jackpot more frequently than I cared. Each time a lead headed into cyberspace it was a pain because once you write a good lead and lose it, you never get it back. Many times you can get close but for some reason, the lead never sounds as good as the first time you compose it. On the 15-20 minute ride back to the office, the lead would be composed and rewritten several times in my head. It was just a matter of getting there and inputting the characters. I think this is how my brain trained itself to keep being a nudje.

So now that a sequel was suggested my subliminal brain took the handoff from conscious brain and started working feverously on ideas for a sequel. Conscious brain would have never done that. It would have thought it presumptuous to write a sequel when the original idea hasn’t been published yet. But subliminal brain forged ahead and then started tapping me on the shoulder. Finally, to get rid of it I thought of a workable situation but it was still in the vague stage so subliminal brain didn’t pester me to write it down.

A few days later, when subliminal brain found a suitable scene it started pestering me to write it down. But before all the details came to me I had to figure out how the scene would be used in the story. I had a great scene in mind. Years ago, a Russian delegation had been sent by the state department to tour a US factory. There was an incident that happened that only those present knew about and, of course, those people to whom the story was related. The story made an impression on me so that I conscious brain called it up about 20 years later. The two brains working together came up with this really great scene. To subliminal brain’s joy I wrote it all down and then wrote an outline of the general sequel plot line, and gave the conditions under which the scene could occur.

To my relief, so far, subliminal brain has left me alone. I am not being pestered to jot anything down and unless this blog entry dredges anything up, I may not hear from subliminal brain about the sequel for a while. When the time comes I’ll poke and prod him to nudje me with ideas until I commit them to paper. In fact, I have a tremendous guard against “writer’s block,” something that never seems to be a problem with me. Should I ever get stumped, I’ll just saturate my consciousness with a subject and hand off the task to subliminal brain. When he’s ready, I’m sure he’ll get in touch with me. Meanwhile, I am terribly busy.