Alyce Wilson's Blog: Dispatches from Wonderland - Posts Tagged "inspiration"

Many years ago (is it really decades?), I read Erma Bombeck's newspaper column faithfully. I laughed at her sagas of lost socks, mercurial teenage children, and fractured domesticity. At the time, however, I knew of such things only second-hand. Without direct experience of parenting, I laughed mostly because I found her turns of phrase to be funny, or because I recognized my mother in Bombeck's imperfect but affectionate mothering.

Now, these many (many, many...) years later, finally the mother of a toddler myself (I've been busy, OK?), I reread some of her work in two collections: Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession, and Forever, Erma: Best-Loved Writing From America's Favorite Humorist. I wasn't prepared for what I would discover.

Bombeck's writing, as I rediscovered it, had many more dimensions than I'd remembered. Far from being merely lighthearted, it was also wise, and at times even heart-rending. In Motherhood, for example, she took a newspaper column and expanded upon it, sharing the letters a mother left behind for her children to read after she'd passed on. In them, she labeled each one her favorite child and told them not to tell the others, to save their feelings. I have to admit, I teared up and had to run and hug my toddler.

She faced head-on the hypocrisies of motherhood. At a time when mothers were expected to either be like Donna Reed or have the decency to shut up about it, she not only fessed up to her faults but reveled in them. She normalized the normal mom, and for that she was rewarded with millions of faithful readers who plastered her columns all over their refrigerators.

As I read through her columns and essays, I became aware of something else, as well. All these years, unconsciously, Bombeck has informed my writing. While I never analyzed her work in a writing class, I must have internalized her tendency to make serious thoughts more palatable through the use of humor. I learned to make emphasis through using short sentences, and to allow readers some space to draw their own conclusions. Rereading her work, I was astonished by how much I'd learned from her, without even realizing it.

My gratitude is too big to fit on a refrigerator.

As a writer, I am often inspired but whatever I am reading. So for example, if I am reading a collection of sparse, Asian-inspired poetry, I may write similarly concise poems. If I'm reading something lyrical and dense, I am more likely to brocade my paragraphs with adjectives. When I read more experimental works, I am inspired to take literary chances.

Recently, I read "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer. I loved his use of voice, the poetic way the characters' thoughts were depicted. This made me want to take more risks in my own writing and to bring more of a poetic feel to my prose. Because of this, I wrote two pieces I would never have written otherwise, both for Season 8 of the LJ Idol competition.

The first piece, which I called "Chateau L'Endurance," was based on the prompt "Sticks and Stones." This phrase, of course, conjured up memories of grade-school bullies (from the saying "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me"). Rather than simply sharing a story of a childhood confrontation, I took a more poetic, dreamlike approach to the topic. The end result was a flight of imagination, where I asked the reader to picture building a unique castle or fortress from both bad and good experiences, using some specific examples from my life. My reader feedback to this piece was positive, with many people praising the unique approach.

The second piece, "The Problem of Diving Horses," was a response to a "current events" writing prompt, where we were supposed to write something inspired by a news item. I drew my inspiration from a piece about the conflict that developed over the prospect of bringing diving horses back to Atlantic City. But rather than just writing an essay about the pros and cons of treating horses that way, I took the piece in a more intuitive direction. I allowed the news story to inspire a wealth of associations, which I followed through, stream-of-consciousness style, to a personal revelation about communication between loved ones. This piece met with an even more positive response, with readers exclaiming that I had outdone myself, or that it was their favorite piece of mine.

That is why I find it so exciting to discover new authors. I look forward to learning from them, as both a reader and as an author.

Writers, have you had similar experiences? If so, whose writing have you found inspirational?