One Percent Inspiration: Guest blog by US author Tara L. Masih and book giveaway

We’ve all heard this quote many times (it’s actually a slight misquote from Albert Einstein), that creativity is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. For the most part, this feels like a truism to anyone who struggles to finish a poem, story, play, song, or novel. However, what about that one percent?

A question I’ve been asked a lot lately, since I just came out with a debut collection, is what inspires me as a writer? In other words, where does that one per cent arrive from? I never had to think so closely about the process before. In the past, I just waited or looked for inspiration, not giving much thought as to how it happens.

I’ve become conscious that my main source of inspiration is travel. My father, with a PhD in psychology, often used to tell me and my brother that it was important to put positive, beautiful images into our minds because images never leave us. Once our vision processes a scene or picture, it is stored in our unconscious forever. Our minds are one big filing drawer that stretches to infinity. This is one reason I’ve tried to avoid graphic violence on TV and film; one reason I like to garden, go to art museums, and explore different places and cultures. I don’t shrink from reality or disturbing human situations, but I don’t want to waste space in my cabinet on gratuitous images that can depress, if too much accumulates.

I remember early on spending a summer in London, when I was about six years old. Everything I came into contact with intrigued me — the townhouse garden, the towering foxgloves, the neighbors, the strawberries we ate out of a paper cone, the huge pennies, Big Ben, the countryside, the ballet under the stars, the cliffs and castle ruins where King Arthur supposedly roamed. But nothing intrigued me more than the Queen. I toddled around the garden in my grandmother’s high heels, wearing a crown of ball-fringe pom-poms I had sewn together, and carrying over one arm a handmade pouch I had primitively created — I was pretending to be Her Majesty. Perhaps it was the beginning of my desire to get into other people’s minds, even before I could really read and had any sense of writing or being a writer. I was building a character I didn’t know in my own childish way.

Since then, all the files of color, smells, objects, flora and fauna, weather, architecture, culture, personality, clothing, and food are my ingredients for story making. In the same way that someone turns to a little tin or wooden box of recipes that’s been handed down for generations to build a family meal, I turn to that mental file box to mix and stir and build a story.

The urge to travel fuels my writing, and my desire to write stories about many people and cultures urges me to travel. I hope readers get the feeling they are traveling with my characters as the characters take their own physical and emotional journeys.



Tara L. Masih is editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction (2009) and author of Where the Dog Star Never Glows: Stories (2010). She has published fiction, poetry, and essays in numerous anthologies and literary magazines (including Confrontation, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Natural Bridge, Red River Review, Night Train, and The Caribbean Writer) and several limited edition illustrated chapbooks featuring her flash fiction have been published by The Feral Press. Awards for her work include first place in The Ledge Magazine’s fiction contest and Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and Best of the Web nominations. www.taramasih.com.

Where the Dog Star Never Glows is available at Blackwell UK:

http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jsp/a/Tara_L_Masih

We have one copy of the fantastic Where the Dog Star Never Glows to give away. All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is to leave a comment below. We will choose one person at random, so check in with Strictly on Sunday.

Characters in Fiction: Where do they come from? Guest blog by US author Susan Tepper + Prize Giveaway

Characters can come from anywhere. They can be earthlings or moon people, half-man half-beast, they can be folks the writer knows well, or slightly, or perhaps someone glimpsed briefly on a crowded subway platform never to be seen again.

Characters can also come out of pure imagination, as a compilation of people and events that create a fire in the writer’s mind, something that can’t be put out with a hose or by beating it down with a rug. It can be a seed that irritates the writer’s brain, a type of fantasy, much like the fantasy of sand that irritates the oyster to form a pearl. Then over time this seed (pearl) connects to an egg that makes an embryo into a fully formed character. A birth!

But in keeping with nature, a moment, please remember that all parents do not love all their offspring. Some may be fabulous children while others are mean, miserable and generally bothersome brats. For me, as well as many other writers, it’s the bothersome ones that come begging to be born. They want to play with us on the page, inhabit our dreams, become alive, immortal — that dark seamy side of humanity brought into the light by means of a story or book. Most memorable characters in great literature are quirky at the very least, and evil, corrupt, narcissistic monsters at their worst. They act out all the stuff that’s repressed by civilized society. Which makes them such fun to write! Nabokov gave us creepy Humbert Humbert in his novel “Lolita.” Philip Roth created the sex-crazed Portnoy in “Portnoy’s Complaint.” For Salinger, it was a young, quirky Holden Caulfield who captured our hearts and minds in “The Catcher in the Rye.”

Of course lots of women authors have written incredibly outrageous characters, too, but at the moment these three come to mind. The list of memorable literary characters is long. And that is due to the courage of writers who let down their hair, don’t give a damn, let these characters out of the box, allow them to run wild and free on the page, so that readers may experience new and provocative realities. The life of the mind — not to be taken lightly. So, I say to all you writers out there — make characters that cry out to you, be true to your vision, and don’t worry about what others may be doing. Courage! (now say it the French way).

Susan Tepper is the author of the fiction collection Deer & Other Stories (Wilderness House Press, 2009) and the poetry chapbook Blue Edge. Over 100 of her stories and poems have been published in journals and anthologies worldwide. Susan has received five nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She is Assistant Editor of Istanbul Literary Review and hosts the reading series FIZZ at KGB Bar in NYC.

* We have one SIGNED copy of Susan's "Deer and Other Stories" (Wilderness House Press) to give away. Simply leave a comment below by Friday, February 26 and we will pick one winner. The winner will be announced on Sunday, so tune in then to Strictly Writing.

www.susantepper.com