PaperWork: I can find inspiration everywhere, if I look, and listen

Time to write. So I turn to my list of ideas.

I have saved hundreds yet, here I am, wondering what to write about. Scanning my idea file little headlines pop up: “parenting never ends ... who taught you what? ... wise up, you’re dumb ... what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Nope. Nope. Nope,” I say as I scroll down. Nothing clicks. THEN! I see this one: “What inspires?”

Perfect. That simple question describes my gear-shifting process as I face a beckoning keyboard, a weekly deadline, and the need to write.

Yes, need to write. It does not start with a passionate desire to write. Before I am done, though, a fire ignites. Call that passion if you want. Or today, call it inspiration, taking me back to that question: “What inspires?”

I open that file to find a page I saved from the Wall Street Journal magazine (May 23, 2023) showing five creative people talking about inspiration. I was drawn to responses from author Susan Cain and poet Billy Collins.

“One of the most inspiring things is other writers who create something almost unbearably beautiful,” Cain said. “Whenever I see one of those jewels, I immediately feel like I can’t go to sleep, I can’t sit still until I’m in the process of trying to create a jewel myself. ... There’s something about the act of trying that’s the best feeling in the world.

“Everybody has their own way of expressing the intense beauty of the world,” she said. “Somebody’s inclination might be to go sing a hymn in church. I don’t think that’s very different from the desire to write a poem or a book. They’re all expressions of wanting to tap into the same heightened theme of existence.”

Cain recognizes the impact of seeing or reading or hearing something “unbearable beautiful” and then wanting to be part of that moment and even try to extend it.

For me, it’s often a comment I hear or read that captures me and demands that I do something with it.

Or, as she notes, it comes from the world around me. When this happens I want to point to it saying, “Look. Look and tell me that is not amazing.” Or … “Listen. Do you hear that?”

This links well with what Billy Collins said about inspiration.

“In 19th-century English poetry, inspiration became a kind of pathology,” he said. “There were metaphors for inspiration like flames, sparks and fountains. The trouble with inspiration in this context is that it suggests passivity – writers are people who write, but if you fall prey to this theory of inspiration, you’re not acting, you’re waiting.

“What I need is an initiating line,” he said. “It’s a seductive technique to get the reader’s attention and to give the reader something very easy to accept, something a reader can’t deny. Then the poem goes forward.”

Collins talks about inspiring those who read his poetry, but I find myself inspired by what he calls an “initiating line.” Today, for example, that line was a question: “What inspires?”

Collins also finds inspiration in the works of others.

“The trail of poets that has preceded you and affected your writing, those are my inspirations,” he said. “You’re never alone when you write. Your page is lit by the candles of the past.”

So true. Little of what I put on the page is original thought. I often share thoughts from others. What’s personal is how they change me or push me or remind me of what’s important. I share that with you, also.

Usually I am not trying to “spark” inspiration, as Collins noted. I’ve come to appreciate the smile or nod or “me, too” I get back from readers.

And that, my friends, is inspiring. And is one of the main reasons I keep writing.

• Lonny Cain, retired managing editor of The Times in Ottawa, also was a reporter for The Herald-News in Joliet in the 1970s. His PaperWork email is lonnyjcain@gmail.com. Or mail the NewsTribune, 426 Second St., La Salle IL 61301.