When you work in the kind of high-tech, leading edge company that I did back in the 80s and early 90s (it's still the same company now, but I no longer think of it as leading edge. Even though it is still in the business of high tech), you become so familiar with being surrounded by people of enormous intellect that it's easy to feel almost less than normal. Or at least, below average.
Over the years I've heard anecdotes from ex-colleagues who left. They all shared a theme: no-one within the company really knows how good they are until, voluntarily or otherwise, they step outside it. Only when given the chance to compare oneself with regular people outside can one begin to appreciate the amazing talent that exists inside.
Without wishing to blow my own trumpet overmuch, it's true that in all the 34 years I've been there I have never been asked to do something that I couldn't, eventually, succeed at. And before the cynics among you start, I have been asked to do some pretty off-the-wall, technically challenging stuff. But even allowing for the fact that the staff in general were above average for "the marketplace" there were still some particular outstanding individuals that I looked up to, wanted to emulate, and who I thought of as a source of inspiration.
Outside the workplace, in common with a lot of people (at least those who don't allow their work life to grow so that it consumes their entire life) I got busy with private endeavours. More artistic endeavours. Here too I was lucky to meet people who I looked to for inspiration.
But in thinking of how I would approach this theme, it came to me that these people, almost to a
It was me.
When I seek an idea for a story, or a poem, or a song, I don't go to people I respect or admire. I sit quietly, possibly listening to music (yes, also possibly, just possibly, playing Spider Solitaire) and I run ideas through my head. Or, more often, I wait for them to come to me. I open myself up to what ancient scholars would have called my Muse. And I've learned, more so in the last few years than at any time in my life, to trust it. If I let my mind free wheel, ideas come. It might only be a line of dialogue or it might be an entire conversation. My memory is so poor, and the ideas often so fleeting, that I have to write them down as quickly as I can. The trick there is not to start writing too soon. To let the idea ripen and develop until it feels "done." You could liken it to letting dough "prove" before baking. Only then can I write it down without losing it, and so that I don't lose it. Getting the timing of that right is quite a delicate balance, and I still miss regularly (mostly on the side of waiting too long and forgetting the important bits, unfortunately).
Of course when it's a song I'm writing I have the source of inspiration right there on my computer. The music. I can just let it play over and over on repeat until the words begin to suggest themselves. I've often referred to this as "letting the music tell me its story," and that's exactly how it feels.
The example I most commonly use to explain how this inspiration works when at its best, is the time I wrote Tumbleweed (one of the poems in my first collection - Well of Love - which is linked in the sidebar). It was a quiet weekend afternoon and I simply sat at my keyboard, opened up my mind and started writing. To my astonishment the words poured onto the screen, my thoughts flying so fast I could hardly type quickly enough to keep up with them. So fast, indeed, that I was hardly conscious of what they were saying. It was an exhilarating experience. At the end of that brief period of frantic typing I had well over 90% of a completed poem. The only missing parts were where I had felt my mind groping for a word or a phrase that was missing from the stream of consciousness I was recording. When that happened - only three or four places in what is quite a long poem - I simply skipped over the word or line, leaving a dash to mark the place.
Going back over the piece and replacing the dashes with real content was a matter of only half an hour or so. The words were there, it just felt as though they had somehow "got stuck" in the frenzied flow.
I can't explain it and it's probably silly to try. It has only happened once since, although on that occasion it was a deliberate experiment to see if I could repeat the experience - this time with a song rather than a poem. Contrarily perhaps, the fact that it worked a second time has made me reluctant to try again until and unless I reach a point in my writing where I absolutely need it. It's like a pure wellspring that I don't want to drink from too often for fear of tainting it. That probably sounds crazy, but
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