Inspiration Day Two: Having New Adventures

Hemingway hunted, fought in wars, and spent time in bullrings, so his books were full of grand adventures.

Anne Sexton wrote about a different kind of war. Her struggle was against mental illness. She lived a life of domesticity as women in the Fifties were wont to do. Both perspectives dominated her life, so that’s where her poetry came from.

Ted Hughes was an academic, so he wrote both about academia and tried new literary tools. He also had children, so he wrote some of the best children’s books that have ever been published.

Perspectives are one of your best tools, but they’re not easily won. Your lifestyle can only give you so much material, so if you don’t go on new adventures, your writing will grow stale. You’ll run out of interesting things to say because learning makes the world a vibrant place. New experiences attract new thoughts. This is why I’m always encouraging you to get out and involve yourself in new experiences. Sometimes, like Virginia Wolf, you just need a “room of one’s own.” Sometimes, your internal landscape becomes stale, and no room is going to do the trick.

If you’re writing on Legendary Level, you’ll be able to turn even the smallest experiences into massive, vibrant metaphors, but this is a skill that takes time to learn. Before you get there, you must get out and do things you don’t normally do.

We have a new weekly theme: Finding inspiration. I’ve decided to cover this theme on Mondays so that you have the entire week ahead of you to practice.

This week’s inspiration exercise is to do something you don’t normally do. Take a bike ride. Do a hike. Visit cats at a shelter. Wash dishes. Visit a garden. Draw something. I don’t mind what it is as long as you’ve never done it before. Please keep us up to date on your experiences, even if they never find their way into your writing. Let’s talk about how they changed your perspective.

The Thought-Fox - by Ted Hughs

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.