Shimmering, Golden Stars
How Writers Gather Inspiration
Laura Pashby (whose Substack has inspired articles around here before) wrote an article this week on ‘shimmering pictures’. She shares a few of these, captured in photographs, from her process of writing her upcoming book, Chasing Fog. The photos are a charming behind-the-scenes peak at an author’s life and research, but the phrase ‘shimmering pictures’ (which she stole from Joan Didion in her work here) and its insight into the mind of a writer is what most captivated me in Pashby’s piece.
The most common question asked of writers is that of inspiration: where do the ideas come from? How do you come up with them? I have always found these questions misleading, because the ideas have always been there—shimmering pictures waiting to be used. For Pashby, these images include a llyn in Wales that houses the mythological afanc, lighthouse lenses, and paving stones. For Didion, they include a Bevatron up the hill, a Greyhound Bus, and the Panama airport at 6 a. m. For me, there are too many to list. These aren’t pictures we seek out, but rather pictures that pop up as we go about our lives, our homes, and our relationships. In reading Pashby’s article, it made me wonder whether the difference between writers and everyone else is this fascination with shimmering pictures.
If you have known me for an extended period of time, and certainly if you have known me since childhood, you will by no doubt know that my memory is a funny, yet reliable place. Just last week, Hannah texted me this: “What is the tragic animal movie Grandpa and Grandma used to have?” And my reaction was to immediately remind her of the two movies (The Seventh Brother and Once Upon a Forest) that we watched with alarming frequency on the carpeted living room floor of our grandparents’ old farm. It did not shock her that I knew the title immediately, nor did it surprise her when we discovered that she had been blurring both of those movies together in her memory, which I had safely shelved next to each other in mine. It isn’t an uncommon occurrence for me to bring up a memory everyone else has forgotten, or for me to be asked for the details on a story from when we were younger, simply because we’ve all come to accept that I probably still remember it in detail.
This is not to suggest that my mind is a well organized or efficient place. In the months before my husband and I dated, we made a habit of discussing how differently our brains work. My first metaphor was born out of the kitchen: he is at all times a great, robust stew, which simmers away at each thought until it is broken down and easily digestible. He prefers to share his thoughts when he has finished this process and finds them easy to communicate and clear to understand. I am more of a sauté pan: whatever is fresh, ripe, and easily accessed I eagerly throw into conversation, adding variety to it as I watch it react and respond to the cooking process. I always fall back upon the core beliefs that guide me (a generous pour of olive oil or melted butter and my favorite spices), but I experiment with every thought until I find a conclusion that is satisfactory. In fact, this may be one of the reasons we got back together and got married: he spent three years simmering away on the thought of me and my place in his life and I happily explored my own interests and waited until he finished simmering and was ready to talk about us and our relationship.
This idea of sautéing is crucial to my creative process as well, and I think another metaphor is the stronger here. I would describe my own thought process as a large, ornate spider web that I constantly weave as I go about my life. If I follow any given thread to its base, I will be able to retrace my steps, or recall the events of a past event with relevant ease. Each thread is added as it occurs, but since I am the one who weaves it, it is a pattern unique to me. This weaving of thoughts together is the basis of my creative process, and it is impossible to trace the pattern if you are not the spider who wove it.
When reading Pashby, it struck me that these shimmering pictures are a part of the web: at every cross-section of threads, there is a shimmering picture that binds them together. This is the heart of creative writing, I think: to have two thoughts that have intersected in one image. It is in contemplating these intersections that stories appear. The intersection of major and minor feast days in the church year with some of the most interesting people I have met in my life created a collection of short stories, each their own intersection along the thread of church festivals and customs I've grown up knowing and celebrating. I have pulled out my phone and recorded voice memos while I’m driving in order to describe a shimmering picture I saw on the road. Often, the shimmering picture presents itself before I understand what it means, and it is only months or years later that I can see what two thoughts led me to notice and preserve that image in my mind. Writing is the intersection of language and image: using language, writers are able to create entire worlds in the readers’ mind. These worlds exist before this, however, in those shimmering images. It is said of Tolkien that no one liked to go on his walks with him because he stopped at every tree. Yet millions of people gladly walk through Fangorn with him to greet the trees as old friends. What Tolkien saw in Oxford trees we see in The Lord of the Rings.
These shimmering pictures, these spider-thread intersections, are what I owe my memory to. I grew to understand the world by observing picture after picture, by marking similarities between physical things and abstract concepts. Creative writing allows me to share those similarities with an audience. It is not that seeking out ‘shimmering pictures’ makes you into an author like Laura Pashby or Joan Didion, it is rather that the inability to escape these shimmering pictures makes you one. Whether you stew on them or sauté them, I encourage you to keep your kitchen (and camera roll) full of those shimmering pictures and invite others in to share them with you when they are done.