To solve a problem, know the problem. (Really, really well.)
Inspiration can often come at the worst possible time. Which is a good thing.
TRAINING INSPIRATION (part three)
TO FIND INSPIRATION, it helps to apply some rhetorical theory to your life. The trick to rhetoric is to start by framing the issue, defining the problem in a way that benefits you most—precisely . In rhetoric, we call the problem the exigence: the exact thing that needs solving.
Suppose you’re a fitness trainer who wants to write a book on home workouts without equipment. What’s your exigence? You might say it’s the problem of learning how to write a book. But that won’t bring inspiration. You need an idea before you can even think about the problem of creating chapters or finding a literary agent. You go online and find dozens of books on home workouts without weights—not to mention DVDs and videos and fancy mirrors and the like.
Then one day you pass an elementary school during recess, where first-graders are swarming the playground. Some kids are tearing around, some jumping up and down, some standing around arguing, some squatting to look at an ant mound, and the rest climbing around the equipment. You spot one little girl in a red sweater. She’s doing all those things. In intervals. You set the timer on your smartwatch and time her activity—20 or 30 seconds of frantic bursts, followed by…not rest exactly. When she isn’t scrambling up the sliding board steps or running to catch up with a friend, she’s squatting, or standing with her hip out, or bending over and adjusting the Velcro on her shoes.
As a trainer, you know this as “active stretching” or “mobility exercises.” The short bursts of activity are “high-intensity cardio sessions.” There are plenty of existing workouts that alternate intense activity with short rests. But what interests you are what the little girl—and, it turns out, most of the other kids on the playground—are doing during the rests. It’s amazing how many of them are doing what you know as “passive squats”—getting their butts down close to the ground while putting up a weed or watching a bug. What if you devised an interval workout that devoted the rest periods to flexibility and mobility, making you feel like a kid again? Boom! Inspiration! And then the security guard approaches, thinking you’re some kind of stalker, and you run home thinking of what to call your workout program. Kid Again? The Playground Workout?
Notice what you’ve done to prompt that inspiration. You drilled down to the exigence, the need for a truly original workout. Having done that, you primed yourself to notice things that you otherwise might have passed by. Then you took something that existed—kids playing—and applied it to a different situation: an adult workout.
Playground + Home Workout = The Kid Again Workout
A good idea? Terrible? Plus you have no idea how to sell such a workout? The point is, you got an idea. An inspiration.
Often you may find an exigence in someone else’s pain or need. When my wife’s father died, Dorothy wanted to make Christmas a little less lonely for her mother. She typed up a couple dozen memories of family Christmases past. One of those memories had to do with the infallible tradition of opening the window of an advent calendar each evening. Inspiration! Dorothy cut a square out of an old flannel blanket and sewed 25 pockets onto it. Then she printed out each typed memory and rolled it into a scroll, tucking each into a pocket.
Advent Calendar + Holiday Memories = Memory Calendar
Recently, the minister at my wife’s church asked me to give a talk on inspiration. He scheduled me to speak on the day of the Pentecost—a festival that marks the coming of the Holy Spirit among Jesus’s disciples, the seventh day after Easter. He wanted me to talk about what inspired my novel.
Inspired? Well, it wasn’t exactly a bolt from the blue. My wife had just returned to earning a paycheck after 20 years of staying home, raising the kids, and doing a lot of volunteer work. She was understandably nervous about going to an office after so many years. So, to support her, I greeted her at the end of the day with a lime gimlet cocktail, and a silly little story I’d written. It had to do with a middle-aged crank who seemed a lot like me, working out of a small cabin in a little town that seemed a lot like where we live. Being my wife, she loves everything I write (which makes her a terrible critic but a great audience), so I continued to make her cocktails and read her more stories about the fictional town of Weimar and the crank—who I called Jonah Mudgett.
The biblical Jonah, getting in some writing time while being swallowed by Leviathan.
The stories became a kind of home tradition until I realized I’d written some 300,000 words. I figured I might as well write a novel. To come up with a plot, I stole a story from the Bible: the one about Jonah, the reluctant prophet who gets swallowed by a giant fish.
My Own Character + Biblical Jonah = Stories for My Wife
In short, I wrote a novel whose main character was, more or less, me. The setting was the town I live in. The plot was stolen straight from the Bible. I rewrote the manuscript a bunch of times and then sent it to my agent. She sent it out to a bunch of publishers, who all wrote very nice things about the writing but said they found the main character extremely unlikeable. The character based on me.
So I dropped it for a couple years. Then, suddenly, in the middle of the night, I heard a voice. At least this is how I remember it. Maybe an idea just popped into my head. Maybe I was only half asleep. But I remember it as a voice that I literally heard speaking to me. A girl’s voice. It said, “I’m a girl, stupid.” And I realized that Jonah Mudgett wasn’t a middle-aged man but a young girl. And so I rewrote the novel. It’s called The Prophet Joan. The girl in the novel hates that title. She insists on being called Jonah.
Just what happened there? I believe that my subconscious had been struggling with an exigence all its own: the character I’d written failed to match the story.
I believe this is the secret to getting the “compound” kind of inspiration: find the exigence—the problem or need, or the desire to help or persuade. Then stay open to a solution that you can combine with the situation that caused the problem in the first place — a playground recess, an advent calendar, a change of gender, or whatever pops up. The magic behind the bolt out of the blue, the energy that creates that bolt, is the exigence you’ve defined in the first place.
EXERCISE: Define a particular problem; or even better, a loved one’s need or desire. Before trying to come up with an idea, write that exigence as many ways as possible, editing down to its clarified essence. In a future post, I’ll show how inspiration can come from “refining” an existing thought. Now, just focus—and refocus—on the exigence. I often find that just by “chewing my cud” on a problem, the solution sort of digests itself.
In the next post, I’ll cover the most literary form of inspiration: modeling.
