Sunday's inspiration

My dear friend Debbie Emerson Echelberger Haas (whom I will forever associate with 'John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt' in a gigglishly endearing way) pointed to a blog post this morning entitled, "7 Inspirational Quotes That Could Change Your Life." Bryan Hutchinson lists seven quotes and what they have meant to him, and then challenged other bloggers to post quotes that have inspired them.

It's Sunday. How can I resist?

There are a myriad of quotes that have pushed, led, and otherwise guided me throughout my life, from the ache of Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and Hughes' A Dream Deferred, to the soul-rousing of Henley's Invictus (why, yes, I AM the master of my fate, thank you). But in the interest of time and space, I shall just list two, one that has steered my life and one that has steered my writing.

"Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death." - Auntie Mame

I saw this movie as a child. My mother was watching it one New Year's Eve, and told me it was a comedy. It is, but it is certainly sad and poignant and other things, too. (Incidentally, my mother thought The Apartment was a comedy, too, because Jack Lemmon was in it and used a tennis racket to strain his spaghetti.)

Here's the funny thing about that movie for me - my family couldn't have been further from the theme if they'd tried. My sad confession here is my parents and I did not enjoy a close relationship. My mother spent most of her time on our couch, watching television. She did very little else, except to insist on living vicariously through me, which made us both unhappy. My dad worked two or three jobs to keep food on the table and was as emotionally absent as he was physically gone.

It might make me inhuman to say I didn't suffer any regrets when they passed away, but how exactly do you regret what was always impossible?

Auntie Mame's pronouncement opened my eyes. Why was I sitting and watching a character fulfill her life, instead of fulfilling my own? It was that seed, planted when I was ten or so, that pushed me as a young woman out of Illinois and into California and away from my mother's strangulating ways.

Here's the trailer for the movie.



"I associate many things with many things." - Katherine Hepburn in Desk Set

It's a trifle of a movie, but I love it, especially the scene where Spencer Tracy is giving Katherine Hepburn an intelligence/memory test.

And her quote explains perfectly how I write. Most writers complain that the question they hate the most is, "Where do you get your ideas?" The answer is where don't we get them? What we see, what we overhear, what we read about, are all fodder for our imaginations. But we're not stenographers, recording the facts as they happen. We take one thing which reminds us of another and blend them into a third.  In this way, we associate many things with many things.

It's a long sequence, but worth it. BTW, if you haven't figured out the last riddle, ask me - I know the answer.




What are some of the quotes that have inspired you? If this post inspires a blog post of your own, feel free to put your link in the comments.

A postscript from the superficial writer

Don't whine, but I have to do one more post about the writer's conference before I return to the trip, only because I experienced one of those intense, personal, "aha" moments that take your brain cells and rearrange them inside your skull. I can actually feel them running around like they're playing musical chairs - I'll probably lose one when the music stops.

Friday night's speaker at the SCWC was Monte Schulz. He wrote a 900-page novel in ten years, spent eight years trying to get it published, finally broke it into three smaller novels, and got a publisher for all three books plus two more.

I would have thought it'd be easy for him. After all, he's Charles Schulz's son.

His speech was like a vocal pendulum, swinging from point to counterpoint. At first, he sounded as if literary fiction were the only books worth reading and all else was drivel. Then he told us of reading Stephen King and Clive Cussler and he didn't care if they weren't literary giants because they told great stories. In the next breath, he described a way of writing about a subject that no one else had thought of before and wasn't he just the genius of the century? As soon as I wanted to roll my eyes, he made a self-deprecating joke and disarmed me. He spoke of times when he wrote one sentence a day for a month, and I thought, I'd rather stick a sharp object in my temple than write that slowly.

Still, I was intrigued enough to attend his workshop the following day, "Using Style to Transcend Substance." He read us works from Truman Capote and Norman Mailer and Eugene O'Neill and more. He then said that many genre writers are great storytellers, but not great writers. And he laid down the challenge: If you love genre writing, why don't you resolve to be the best ever? Why whip out two novels a year (or, in James Patterson's case, a dozen) of mediocrity, when you can take your time and mold a work worth not just reading, but re-reading?

It dawned on me, as I heard him read from Other Voices Other Rooms, that the words became their own layer of the story and they sang to me and reached into me and beyond me and pulled me into another stratum. This is the hallmark of great literature and sets it apart from the plethora of pop fiction on Amazon. I listened and knew the difference between Capote's writing and my own: my writing skips across the surface of your consciousness like a flat pebble on taut water. You might like it, you might think it's a fun, quick read, but would you re-visit it? I could only come to one conclusion:

Wah! I wanna write like that!

To inspire you the way Monte inspired me, here is a passage from Death Comes for the Archbishop, describing Father Latour's impression of Trinidad Lucero.

"His fat face was irritatingly stupid, and had the grey, oily look of soft cheeses. The corners of his mouth were deep folds in plumpness, like the creases in a baby's legs, and the steel rim of his spectacles, where it crossed his nose, was embedded in soft flesh. He said not one word during supper, but ate as if he were afraid of never seeing food again. When his attention left his plate for a moment, it was fixed in the same greedy way upon the girl who served the table - and who seemed to regard him with careless contempt. The student gave the impression of being always stupefied by one form of sensual disturbance or another."

Today's editors might be tempted to tell Willa Cather to shorten this; she has broken every rule of the New Age of Writing with her passive tense and use of adverbs, but would you truly want to miss this opportunity to wallow in the images she has given us? The way that last sentence ties the paragraph up is so stunning, I want to go out and look at the world and learn how to describe it as Willa does.

Don't you?