A Kernel on Finding Inspiration Where You Are
and writing it down even if it doesn’t “fit”
No one else may have noticed that I skipped my newsletter slot a few times this summer. But I did. It was because of the sheer chaos it has been to move, grow a human, and start a PhD program. My last weeks in New York City were not the magical wanderings I had envisioned. Instead, I holed up in my apartment from sun up to sun down packing and desperately setting last-minute appointments with friends to say goodbye. After a 6-hour loading up, my husband and I drove across Pennsylvania at midnight in a 22-foot moving truck, hauling furniture that had been given to us by my parents, that had stayed with us from college, that we had bought when we got married, and that I had acquired in preparation for a child yet to be born. That night, every nerve shot, the cat screaming next to me, my belly burning, I was overwhelmed. So overwhelmed that I started writing in my head. I hadn’t properly written in at least a month. If I am being honest, I haven’t properly written this whole summer—the summer I was going to finish my novel.
What I realized is that my life is not going to slow down, that perfect summer isn’t coming.
There’s a part of me that thought after I downshifted to part-time work a few years ago that there would be a break in life and that when I had those uninterrupted hours or at least high-level brain energy I would write and those words would be good. Ha.
Even now I’m writing with what feels like two brain cells and that is the reality I’ve come to accept or reaccept in the two weeks since moving to a new place. There will never be time and I know what people say about having kids—I will have even less time. And then the question becomes, well why on earth am I starting a political science PhD on top of all this if I want time to write a novel?
The point is that I find my novel, my fiction, my voice, in everything that I do, experience, read, and study. It’s there as long as I don’t close myself off to the possibility. As long as I don’t say I am a writer only when I sit and write. As long as I am a writer through all of the moving around the house, reading political philosophy, cooking dinner, and soon enough changing diapers.
I started reading for my political theory course (which takes me 16-20 hours of reading for one week of assignments) and everywhere I looked I found inspiration for my novel, for my thoughts on literature, for my reflections on the role of the writer. I think as writers we are always looking for these signs, like we are attuned to a separate wavelength of reality and every time the world overlaps with it we recognize it and sigh in relief.
My studies have already led me back to writing fiction. I found confirmation in the unlikeliest of places and at the unlikeliest of times of what it means to be a writer. Take these two examples that resonated deeply with my thoughts on the writing life from my reading of Sheldon S. Wolin’s Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought:
Political philosophy is a form of seeing, which means political realities are perceived from a particular perspective or angle; they are dependent on where the viewer is standing. Take this into the world of literature. Literature is a form of seeing, and a novel has an angle in everything from the tangibles and the intangibles to create a world and this is done by the writer who is undeniably standing somewhere in relation to the work of literature.
Vision is defined as an act of perception and the two general options are to either be a descriptive reporter or an imaginative seer. Wolin goes on to talk about how impossible it is to succeed in that objective goal of the descriptive reporter, which we all know is a hot topic in literature as well. Are we truly capable of being objective? Can we at least try to seem objective to meet our end? Wolin writes that trying to be a descriptive reporter is basically a waste of an exercise for a political philosopher anyway. Because what then are you contributing? The strength of the theorist lies in the imaginative. Here is where my writing senses were tingling and my love of fiction was reaffirmed as well. Because the imaginative doesn’t mean lie, it means use the tools of a potentially exaggerated, or specific, or corrected view to see things that are not obvious to a simple observer. Imagination does not seek to prove or disprove but to illuminate, to become wiser. This to me spoke not just of what political theory and the theorist set out to do but of what literature and the writer set out to do.
Waist-deep in political philosophy I am finding little nuggets of inspiration for the writing life. So even as I fill a notebook on notes about Machiavelli, Hobbes, Heidegger, political participation, and the hermeneutic experience (yikes, I still have to remind myself of what this word means every time I read it), I am trusting that my novels and stories are in there too and all I have to do is let go of what I expected and write down the reality in front of me (with the use of a little imagination, of course).
My kernel of advice: Look for inspiration no matter where you’re at and write it down even if it isn’t what you expected.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
Natalia has found inspiration in her political theory readings: Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought and Truth and Method. She has also continued reading Septology, though she switched to audio format so that she would realistically finish it in light of all the reading she has to do for school.
This week, Shelby’s virtual book club welcomed author Jessica Anthony to talk about her novella The Most, a compact, delectable story that makes every word count. On an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957, housewife Kathleen takes a dip in their apartment complex’s pool and refuses to get out. While not much time goes by in the present, Kathleen and her husband Virgil’s story is revealed through their past. Shelby was very impressed by Anthony’s ability to use alternating POVs to breadcrumb new information each time the same flashback was told from a different perspective. She loved getting to chat with Anthony and she highly recommends this book!
Sarah listened to two audiobooks this week, The House Uptown by Melissa Ginsburg and Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley, and both made her sit up and take notes about their brilliant characterization. She has also been working every day to prepare a short story for an upcoming workshop and to submit a nonfiction essay for publication.
Neidy has spent her free time this week house hunting. In each house she tours, she searches for a potential writing spot. She’s looking forward to the near future when she has more space and time to write.