Category: Writers 4-UM

Every picture tells a story

Be Still and They Will Come by Diana Durrand inspired Craig Spence to write Waking Dream (see below). Photographs, paintings, sculptures—any art form—can resonate in the minds of writers.

If you are interested in a workshop that engages participants in responsive writing to shared images (photos & paintings), please contact me. More info below…

Every picture tells a story, which makes art a source of inspiration for writers. The same goes for music, dance, and every other art form out there, but the visual arts, especially, are a trove of ideas.

Open up a family photo album and memories are triggered by the images you see. That’s a source for writers whose chosen genre is memoire. But images from other collections can also inspire.

What if your mode is historical fiction? Take a walk around Chemainus and every wall comes to life in your imagination. You can feel yourself being drawn into the large-as-life scenes and back in time—hear sails luffing, wagons clattering, trains chuffing, the rhytmic stroke of paddlers in dugout canoes.

Is there an image that inspires you? Perhaps it’s not even a specific picture, but a sequence made up of many related images,  times, and places.

Craig Spence was inspired to write Waking Dream when he saw Diana Durrand’s mixed media piece Be Still and They Will Come, which has been displayed at the Cowichan Valley Performance Centre. Art galleries are great places to go in search of inspiration!

Stories or poems inspired by images aren’t descriptive exercises; they are works of art in their own right, which add a literary dimension to what you are experiencing.

Art, in the deepest sense of the word, is not meant to be ‘looked at’—or read, for that matter; it’s meant to be ‘invoved in’.  Looking at a painting, or reading a story, becomes an imaginative act-—it’s participatory. So stories and poems based on imagery are works of art in their own right.

Would you like to participate in a free workshop built around responsive writing to shared images? 

Waking Dream

They came to her
in a dream
on paws as soft
as evening light

They huddled in
the contoursof her restless soul
creatures of the land
between day and night

And she lay perfectly
still…
For an eternity…or so it seemed
Aware only of their being
and her delight

She dared not move
or even think…
of stirring…
for if she did
her moment…
she knew…
would take flight.

Craig Spence

Inspiration from beginning to end

Inspiration can be shared. This mural, One Feather at a Time, was created by 20 students and staff from South Grenville District High School in Prescott, Ontario.

Inspiration: The Beginning, Middle, and The End

In the Beginning

“The idea that poetry comes from beyond oneself is vital… One doesn’t know what one’s doing and is inspired in that respect… it’s just about allowing a poem to come from wherever it comes from and getting it into the world.” 

—Paul Muldoon, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Moy Sand and Gravel

What does it mean ‘to be inspired’ as a writer or poet?

For me, entire novels sprout suddenly from the fecund soil of experience and imagination. That’s not to say they have revealed even a tiny fraction of what they are going to become, but they unfurl like flowers whose literary DNA infuses the creative process of telling from inception, every word along the way. I am startled and amazed at the things my characters do, and I know I am moving in the right direction when I laugh, or cheer, or moan at their behaviour.

In the Middle

If your idea of inspiration stops at wide-eyed wonder and shouts of Eureka, you will never succeed as a writer. Inspiration drives writers, poets, playwrights, and memoirists from word to word, page to page, episode to episode through a creative feat that can take years to work itself out. Inspiration dances and ballyhoos at the moment of inception, then puts its shoulder to the harness, quietly celebrating each laborious step along the way.

In the End

And when an author types ‘The End’ onto the last page of his manuscript, he’s really saying ‘The beginning’ in several essential ways. It’s time for him to begin a new work—to leave off editing, revising, proofing, and rewriting a story he knows inside-out and move on to another story. It’s not that the current work couldn’t be improved—the process of refining could go on forever. It’s just an admission that “I am done,” to quote Michelangelo from his Sistine Chapel scaffold.

It’s also time for a transition into a new creative phase for the work that’s just been declared completed. It takes most writers years, even decades, to realize that inspiration can’t end once a book has been printed and bound. Literature lives in the minds of readers—or audiences, to use a term more appropriate for our digital era. Books are like children. They have a life of their own once they’re fully fledged, but our responsibility for their success never wavers.

CraigSpenceWriter.ca