Sometimes a flashlight, sometimes a floodlight

The tree

In a recent writing group meeting, I said to my fellow writers that a lot of working through the first draft of a novel is like swimming through mud. In the beginning, so much is unclear: Who are these characters, anyway? How would they really act? What will they do? Where will they end up? What is their journey to that end point? What is this story even about?You’ve all heard the old adage that success is 99% perspiration, advice meant to keep us working and not expecting any breaks, and so we write and rewrite and rewrite again, hoping to find our way through the murk of all the false starts and wrong turns and dead ends to successfully complete a draft.

Most writers accept hard work as a given. But does our work have to be exclusively a dark, joyless slog? Are we only good writers if we toil? I don’t think so. After all, the second part of that adage: “and 1% inspiration.” 

Inspiration is the X factor, something a writer experiences that will leave her with the clarity she needs in order to understand just what is going on in her story. You’ll often hear these moments expressed in terms of light: a bright or brilliant idea came to you; the solution struck like a lightning bolt; it was as if a lightbulb turned on in your mind. And the image of light works, doesn’t it? You find that after the dark hours of struggling to put thoughts on a page, you have been touched by an idea that is sublimely illuminating for your work. In my own work, I think of these bursts of inspiration as flashlight moments and floodlight moments. The flashlight helps me see the way forward with who or what I am writing about; and the flood casts a wide light on broader pieces of the story’s landscape—its themes. 

Anything you encounter in your life can serve as inspiration for your work. In mine, it’s been overheard conversations, works of art, food, and birds, to name a few examples. The brain consumes and reviews and shuffles this sensory data, eventually returning relevant and helpful details when these are most valuable to you. Details in two poems became valuable to me as I continued through the drafts of In the Aftermath, and because April is National Poetry month, it’s a good time to share how images created by poets using the spare language of the art form can work as inspiration.

I first read Joseph Fasano’s “Hermitage” in 2016, during an early stage of drafting when I was struggling to pin down the character of David. David makes few direct appearances in the story and yet he’s the catalyst for much of what happens. If readers were going to understand what he set in motion and why, I was going to have to understand him. While I worked, I found my mind wandering back to the first four lines of Fasano’s poem.

“It’s true there were times when it was too much
and I slipped off in the first light or its last hour
and drove up through the crooked way of the valley

and swam out to those ruins on an island.”

The lines about people slipping off, driving away, and making solitary swims out to ruins when things got to be “too much” created a vivid picture in my mind of a man alone on a beach. When that happened, the events of David’s morning and what his state of mind must have been became clearer to me. 

Something similar happened in the spring of 2018. That April, I had gone on a weeklong writing retreat to Wellstone Center in the Redwoods just outside of Santa Cruz, intending to dedicate myself there to the final draft of In the Aftermath. A day or so after settling in, my writing friend, Terry—also on retreat that week—suggested a walk in the woods behind the retreat house after we stopped work for the day. Assured we’d see trail markers and have no trouble finding our way back, we set off. 

We did in fact have trouble and got turned around for a bit—proof that what’s evident to some isn’t evident to all. After a few futile circuits of the woods (“Didn’t we already pass that tree, twice?”), we eventually found the path home. As I got ready for bed that evening, still trying to relax after being not-quite-lost, the first two lines of the David Waggoner poem, “Lost”, ran through my mind.

“Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here”

Yes, these lines fit our experience with getting lost and with the tree standing in its place, knowing where it was all along while we tried to figure ourselves out. But the lines also illuminated the experiences of all the characters in my novel, I realized—some were lost in their circumstances and uncertain about the future but tried to calm down enough to imagine a way out; others were simply lost and struggling in a liminal existence. I kept these ideas close by until I crossed the finish line.

Click the links and read both poems in their entirety. They are beautiful pieces. They might give you ideas that you can use too, some light when you most need it in your drafting.