Overbury Ink

Ian LeWinter – the writer behind Blank Must Die continues his exploration of a writers motivation:

“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make.” Truman Capote

After our impressions of the world are filtered through our understanding and experiences, thoughts and feelings intertwine — and from those inklings words emerge.

Prolificacy is governed by waves. Sometimes we stare at the screen, page, paper and nothing comes forth. No matter what we do, or how hard we stare, or if we beg, or even if we offer up our first-born: still nothing happens. Then there are times when words fly from everywhere. You find them in the shower, on the toilet, behind the milk, in your pocket, even behind your nephew’s ear. The inspiration can be an unending torrent of thoughts and ideas in word-form screaming to become real. They claw for shape, sensing that if they remain thoughts they will be lost forever.

It is interesting that these periods of vast aridity and rich fertility come and go, not based solely on the availability of our inspirations, but also on the presence of our fears. Fear of starting. Fear of being boring. Fear of getting it wrong. Fear of failing. Fear of succeeding. The flow of imagination and the choke of fear alternate, bringing energy or exhaustion, richness or dearth.

As we age and continue to build our own litanies of “What’s Important To Us” we resist the tendency to narrow the spectrum of people, ideas, events and locations that elicit inspiration. Depending on where you come from and what you’ve experienced, an item may or may not fall within the scope of “the things that get you going.” The decision is entirely personal, as are the methods we employ.

For example, consider two different reactions to atrocity. One human response to the abomination of atrocity might be to exile all traces of its existence from consciousness. There have been numerous transgressions against the social contract that, for many, are too heinous to speak aloud or to even let invade their thoughts. They block it. They confine it. And they erase it. The shock of it leaves them traumatically mute and inaccessible.

But equally as prevalent as the employment of denial is the exercise of passion. The former is used to erase, the latter to reveal. People enlist tremendous passion to obsess over an atrocity, to remember it and to tell the truth of it in an attempt to restore order and heal wounds, and, hopefully, to prevent its reoccurrence. Two equally valid, but vastly different ways of dealing with something larger than self. To paraphrase Kant: One man’s reason for dying is another man’s reason for living.

As writers, we are condemned to choose the latter. In this way, some of us write to set things right… (to be continued)