Distraction . . . aka Inspiration

I've written about inspiration before. It's whatever happens that triggers something in a writer's brain and -- wow! -- all of a sudden it's clear what needs to come next. The writer is inspired, sits down at the keyboard and all of a sudden the fingers fly. It's great.

And then there's distraction. It's whatever happens that doesn't trigger anything much but keeps you from getting your work done that day and should be avoided at all costs.

Or so it seems.

In fact that's not really true. One writer's distraction is another writer's inspiration. And in truth, one writer's distraction one day can be that same writer's inspiration the next. It's all in the way you look at it.

In an essay on writing published some years ago in the collection called A Thorny Paradise, noted British author K M Peyton wrote that she never knew what bits of 'real life' would turn up in her work. She said she had not spent a day crawling around on the ground in the woods at some country house looking for the gravestone of a dog who had fallen through the ice of a pond seventy years before because she intended to put it in a book.

She was simply doing it because she wanted to, because she was intrigued. Several years later, though, when she was working on a book, that interesting distraction became a pivotal piece of her book A Pattern of Roses.

Writing is funny like that. Life, I guess, is funny like that. It gives you ideas -- more ideas than you know what to do with -- and some you have no idea what to do with ever. And some you mess around with for a while, then move on, forgetting them or setting them aside. And amazingly, some reappear years later -- no longer distractions at all, but inspiration now, the very thing you need to make your story work. It's the piece that was missing, the catalyst you need to make things happen.

It happens that way in genealogical research, too. Genealogist Helen Leary spoke in a lecture about looking at old information from a new perspective. If you're looking for the dime you dropped on the floor, she said, staring straight down often won't help you find it. You need to get on your hands and knees and look across the floor sideways. This different angle can make all the difference.

It's the same when you're trying to figure out who's who in a village where every other man has the same name. Finding them in the church minutes or the jury list or the road crew can give you a new perspective. Believe me, reading road crew lists is the ultimate distraction. But it can give you neighbors. It can sometimes help distinguish one man from another of the same name. It can be the distraction you need to become inspired to look at your data from another angle.


Myers-Briggs temperament tests do that for me with my characters. When I'm stuck it can give me a new way of looking at them. Dropping them in a completely new environment can do the same thing. If Flynn is silent while he's walking down the street with Sara (odd -- he was rarely silent before he got his own book), I can toss him into a scene with his mother and tell him he's sixteen years old again and step back and watch the sparks fly. Or I can find him a nice Irish castle on the internet (for example, this one) and tell him he' s expected to pay its heating bill all next winter, and silence is no longer a problem.

And you thought all that time I was "wasting" looking at drafty Irish castles was just a distraction, didn't you?

Well, it might be if my editor thinks it is. Then again, you never know -- it might not.

(And you thought I was going to write about inspiring men-in-towels, didn't you?)