Sometimes, It's Nine Parts Inspiration

I used to be jealous of William Wordsworth, not just because the guy could write poetry and I suck at it, but because I read once of him conceiving the opening of The Prelude, word-for-word, and later writing it down. It struck me at the time that it was similar to things I'd heard about Mozart (another bloke who was good at something I suck at) that he could imagine a whole symphonic movement, note-for-note.  The very idea that people can perform such feats of imagination and memory seems magical to me. Of course, both reports are untested, unverified, and may be apocryphal, but I see no particular reason for doubting them, especially since I recently caught a glimpse of what it must be like.

I'm taking part in another one of Jodi Cleghorn's madcap, crowdsourced anthology projects: a thing called Tiny Dancer. The process is unlike anything else you'll see in publishing and takes about six weeks from go to woe. To cut a long story short, you end up with what is, essentially, a writing prompt – a line from the lyric of a popular song – and you write a 1500-word spec. fic. story based on that and a theme Jodi provides. I got my line just before bedtime and went to sleep mulling it. Then, BAM, I was wide awake at 4 am with the story in my head. And I don't just mean an idea for the story, the feel of the story, a plot for the story, the way it usually happens. I mean I had the story – words and all. I fought it for a while, trying to get back to sleep but, in the end, realising how crazy I'd be to look this gift-horse in the mouth, I got up and wrote it down.

It turned out I didn't have all the words I needed and the detailed structure of the piece required some work, but by the time I'd finished writing it and revising it, I'd say about half the original story survived – including whole paragraphs transcribed verbatim from the original inspiration.

I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself. Not only did I write a story in a couple of hours that I might have agonised over for weeks, but I have slain my personal dragons of Wordsworth and Mozart. In your faces, brilliant geniuses! My story may not be The Prelude, or Don Giovani, but it helped me share one of those astounding experience I have hitherto only read about. It wasn't as perfect as it might have been, either, indeed, as some dead geezer once wrote, "an ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own."