On Inspiration

An idea might occur to me, something very banal — for example, isn’t it strange that it is possible to both talk and think at the same time? That might be an idea for a poem. Or certain words or phrases might have come to my attention with a meaning I wasn’t aware of before. Also, I often put in things that I have overheard people say, on the street for instance. Suddenly something fixes itself in the flow that is going on around one and seems to have a significance. In fact, there is an example of that in this poem, “What Is Poetry.” In a bookstore I overheard a boy saying to a girl this last line: “It might give us—what?—some flowers soon?” I have no idea what the context was, but it suddenly seemed the way to end my poem.I am a believer in fortuitous accidents. The ending of my poem “Clepsydra,” the last two lines, came from a notebook that I kept a number of years before, during my first trip to Italy. I actually wrote some poems while I was traveling, which I don’t usually do, but I was very excited by my first visit there. So years later, when I was trying to end “Clepsydra” and getting very nervous, I happened to open that notebook and found these two lines that I had completely forgotten about: “while morning is still and before the body / Is changed by the faces of evening.” They were just what I needed at that time. But it doesn’t really matter so much what the individual thing is. Many times I will jot down ideas and phrases, and then when I am ready to write I can’t find them. But it doesn’t make any difference, because whatever comes along at that time will have the same quality. Whatever was there is replaceable. In fact, often in revising I will remove the idea that was the original stimulus. I think I am more interested in the movement among ideas than in the ideas themselves, the way one goes from one point to another rather than the destination or the origin.
John Ashbery

Different books start in different ways. I sometimes wish that I were the kind of writer who begins with a passionate interest in a character and then, as I’ve heard other writers say, just gives that character elbow room and sees what he or she wants to do. I’m not that kind of writer. Much more often I start with a shape or form, maybe an image. The floating showboat, for example, which became the central image in The Floating Opera, was a photograph of an actual showboat I remember seeing as a child. It happened to be named Captain Adams’ Original Unparalleled Floating Opera, and when nature, in her heavy-handed way, gives you an image like that, the only honorable thing to do is to make a novel out of it. This may not be the most elevated of approaches. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for example, comes to the medium of fiction with a high moral purpose; he wants, literally, to try to change the world through the medium of the novel. I honor and admire that intention, but just as often a great writer will come to his novel with a much less elevated purpose than wanting to undermine the Soviet government. Henry James wanted to write a book in the shape of an hourglass. Flaubert wanted to write a novel about nothing. What I’ve learned is that the muses’ decision to sing or not to sing is not based on the elevation of your moral purpose —they will sing or not, regardless.
John Barth

I suppose that all of us have a primitive prompter or commentator within who from earliest years has been advising us, telling us what the real world is. There is such a commentator in me. I have to prepare the ground for him. From this source come words, phrases, syllables; sometimes only sounds, which I try to interpret, sometimes whole paragraphs, fully punctuated. When E. M. Forster said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” he was perhaps referring to his own prompter. There is that observing instrument in us —in childhood at any rate. At the sight of a man’s face, his shoes, the color of light, a woman’s mouth or perhaps her ear, one receives a word, a phrase, at times nothing but a nonsense-syllable from the primitive commentator.
Saul Bellow

Let’s call it embullo, a Cuban word that means easy eagerness, a particularly gracious way of climbing on the bandwagons of the mind. I write every time the Holy Ghost whispers some sweet something in my ear. Of course I also write to meet deadlines, but that’s not really writing. Sometimes it comes just because I sit down at the typewriter.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante