Sparking the Writer’s Imagination
Let’s agree on one thing: the writer’s imagination is impossible to describe. But, for some of us, life without writing is also impossible. Is there a secret behind the sparking of imagination? Except for making ourselves sit down and start writing, it’s difficult to say what makes those words jump onto the page. It helps to believe that our writing matters, especially to us. Anne Lamott described in Bird by Bird that writing matters because of the spirit. “Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed our soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
It’s important to write. Storytelling is important – in words or paintings. Expressing the imagination on the page (or on canvas) restores our soul. But, there is also the mystery of why we stop ourselves from self-expression and how to get the process rolling again and pour yourself into the work. If you are in the area of Mystic, CT on September 25 or October 7, 2017, join me at the Mystic Museum of Art for […]
If You Want to Write a Book: Part II – The Inspiration of Anne Frank
When Otto Frank read his daughter’s diary for the first time after her death in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, he discovered something new about Anne. “Every parent should realize that it is not possible to entirely know your children,” he described in an interview in 1979.
This is a surprising observation, considering that the Frank family, along with four other people, lived together 24-hours per day, for more than two years when they hid from the Nazis during World War II. Not only were they each other’s only companions, they lived in a tiny attic space about the size of a one-car garage above Otto Frank’s factory. Workers making pectin (a substance used for making jelly) continued to work on the floors beneath them requiring the fugitives above to be completely silent during work hours. Only a select few who worked below knew about the secreted inhabitants.
Anne was thirteen when she, her older sister, and her parents went into hiding from the Nazis who occupied Amsterdam, but she already aspired to be a writer. Initially, the red-plaid fabric covered diary she kept while hidden was the continuation of a writing routine. She started recording her thoughts and observations on her thirteenth birthday in June 1942, unaware that within one month she would climb three, steep flights of stairs to a space where she would enter isolation with her family from the rest of Amsterdam for more than two years.
When Anne began her diary she wrote, “Writing in a diary is a really strange […]
What prompted that? Looking for inspiration in the writing process
Recently – as I tried to jumpstart another essay – or at least get a few words on the page, I felt that familiar numbness spreading down my shoulders and arms and paralyzing my fingertips on the keyboard. Instead of writing I was listening to the little voice from writer’s hell that likes to play with my common sense. Some writers call it monkey mind. When it happens to me, I feel confused and drained of ideas at the same time.
Of course you have ideas, I prodded myself, but my genius moments were just wisps of smoke – amorphous, intangible, lost in the jungle undergrowth of my mind. Accessible only to the chimp in my brain. When I reached up to snatch a thought, it was nothing but air. Not even a gnat’s wing of substance.
Dr. Beatrice Hinkle, who opened the first psycho-therapeutic clinic in the United States at Cornell Medical College in the 1920s and specialized in treating artists, wrote, “ Every writer, …suffers from periods of drought, in which not a trickle flows. He is in full command …carried along on a flood of creation.”
I love her generous sprinkling of adverbs. Hinkle is certainly not the first or only therapist who has tried to understand artistic temperament and productivity, but I like the simple way she describes what is fundamentally an indescribable process; the torturous road of creativity where putting one foot in front of the other seems like an Olympic […]
