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Where Do Writers Get Their Inspiration? |
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by Carroll Williams, Editor - Conway Pages |
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I have often been asked to tell my readers where I got the idea for a particular story, or essay. When I decided to do some writing, I first read the advice of other writers in some of the publications devoted to the craft. The most frequent advice given was, "Write about what you know." Over the years I have found that simple approach to make imminently good sense. Every person has a unique set of experiences. Personal experience provides the writer with a reservoir that if explored will prove to be almost limitless. In addition, a writer must also be a patient and relentless researcher. If your story needs detail, go to the most reliable sources. Do the digging. Find the facts. Then write. What follows is a brief look at the sources of inspiration that propelled me to write each story or essay. If you are kind enough to read some of my works you will find hyper links (in blue) leading to photos and sometimes to sound effects. I love the World Wide Web and HTML hypertext markup language - a programming language for web browsers. This technology opens up new vistas for writers and artists to exploit. My travel essays on Mexico and Russia are far too long to include photos directly in the text. Most web browsers would load a page much too slowly. By including hyper links the reader can view the photos and return to the text. Most personal computers will accommodate this approach, but would choke and stall if fed tons of photos along with text. Hyper text links also allow the writer to share outside web sites related to the subject. My Fiction Mary Margaret was the result of many conversations with a young lady from Ireland who enrolled in one of my classes at Arapahoe Community College in the 1970's. She brought me up to speed on life in a typical Irish Catholic home in Belfast Northern Ireland. She grew up with parents very similar to those described in my story. In addition, I visited the Republic of Ireland in the summer of 1975 and had many conversations with the folk there. My wife and I strolled along the beaches of County Donegal talking with folks on holiday from the troubled six northern counties in Ulster. We learned a great deal from those conversations. We were stopped at roadblocks many times by army troops and sometimes by local constables checking for terrorist weapons. We came to feel the presence of the troubles with which the Irish have lived for so long. First Kill was inspired by many conversations I had with fighter pilots that were veterans of World War II and the Korean War. I was privileged to have participated in salvaging a number of obsolete P-51 fighter aircraft in 1948. When I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1951 I serviced several newer P-51 fighters on the flight line during my first year. I have a personal acquaintance with the airplane and feel a spiritual kinship with those who flew it in combat. The Wood Box was inspired by conversations with Russians young and old. My wife and I toured the Soviet Union in the summer of 1984 and visited the locations mentioned in the story. Kolodnya is a small village near Smolensk on the road from Moscow to Brest. We were particularly struck by the sterility, the emptiness, and the lack of hope expressed in their conversations. We walked with young Russians through the miles of rye I talk about in the story. We witnessed the effects of Vodka on the youth in the villages. We saw the work of the motor transport ministry on the main roads, but not on the back roads. We witnessed first hand the bottlenecks in a command economy which led to the problems described in the story. I chose the device of the Wood Box as a symbol of the emptiness and futility of life in the Soviet Union in 1984. Island Air was inspired by conversations with naval aviators over many years, and by my reading of naval aviation history. I was privileged to have had access to a Japanese Zero fighter aircraft at a technical school in Seattle Washington in 1954. I was working at the Boeing Company just down the road on East Marginal Way. You will notice that I placed the pre-war flight training of my character Tanaka Kobayashi at King County Airport which is Boeing Field. Very convenient since I had worked there. How did I decide to name my Japanese pilot? I made my fictional character the cousin of a real Japanese Imperial Naval flight officer, Michio Kobayashi. Not only is Michio a real person, he took part in the raid on Pearl Harbor, and he died at the Battle of Midway where my story takes place. Of course I don't mention the death of Michio in the story because Tanaka could not have learned of it until the end of World War II. When you read the story look for symbolic uses of dates and times. There is a real connection between the Battle of Midway in 1942 and the flight of the Island Air Boeing 737 from Honolulu to Kahului on the Island of Maui. Why did I choose those places. My wife and I accompanied our friends Whitney and LaVera Shoup on a wonderful four-island vacation in 1994. We flew in and out of Kahului airport several times including a round trip to Hilo airport on the big island. There we took a helicopter flight over Kilauea crater and stared straight into the eye of Pele the Hawaiian fire goddess. Kimberly Writes Home is a spoof about a college student who really must have raised the blood pressure of her parents as they read her letter. The story was inspired by something similar I heard years ago in a faculty meeting at Arapahoe Community College. I spiced it up with tidbits from conversations I had with some of my students through the years. A Good Day was inspired by news reports I read in the Florida Today newspaper when I lived in Indialantic, Florida. Portions of the story are taken from conversations with social service workers I met on my job as a computer systems analyst with the Department of Family and Children's Services in Georgia between 1990 and 1996. While the story is totally fictional, there are just such troubled individuals and families as depicted in the story. Sand Castles was inspired by a story related to me by my friend Whitney Shoup from Silver City, New Mexico. A man in that city had an experience of a slightly different sort, but by reversing some details I was able to weave the fictional account into my story. I placed Brad and Heidi in a set of surroundings more familiar to me on the Space Coast of Florida and wound up the story in Tallahassee where I lived for several years. The Kiss is a story woven from my imagination and from my experiences with the DC-3 aircraft. I met the mysterious island beauty in my story and was impressed by her appearance. If I say any more I might give away too much. Read the story and you will see what I mean. My Non-Fiction I Can Fly is a compilation of my lifetime experiences with airplanes and some of the people who fly them and work on them. A Flight to Remember is a true account of a sight seeing flight I made in the fall of the year along the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with two of my college students. Dad Goes to War is the true account of my father's entry into World War II as I remember it from my childhood and just beyond. Sixteen is the account of my sixteenth year of life. When thinking back on my youth I suddenly realized that my sixteenth year might have been one of the most unusual years any boy any age ever experienced. Read the story and see if you agree. Connections begins with my return from Florida to Arkansas at age twelve. My family left Arkansas in the Great Depression to seek work in Florida. I was three months old when we left Arkansas. My dad worked on the overseas highway to Key West, and later worked on other causeway projects along what is now the Space Coast. At the end of World War II we moved back to the state of my nativity. This essay is my account of getting to know my father's family. Two Men With A Vision suggested itself to me when I began thinking one day about explorers and existing technology. This is an essay on the many similarities between the lives and times of Wernher von Braun and Christopher Columbus. 2K or Not 2K is a fun essay on the big flap we all heard so much about as we neared the year 2,000. The millennium was supposed to bring on many problems including computer crashes. Most of the speculation turned out to be just that and nothing more. In this essay I explore the idea that our millennium may not be a millennium after all. Adventures in Mexico is a compilation of six journeys I took to that beautiful country over the course of five years. Four of the trips were excursions with my college students. One trip included only myself, my wife and a niece, and one trip was a solo trip to Mexico City to arrange for a business seminar. This essay describes the places we went and the people we met. Traveling in Russia is the longest narrative in this collection. In the summer of 1984 my wife and I toured the Soviet Union while it still existed. We made the usual tourist visits to Leningrad, Novgorod, Moscow, Smolensk, and Minsk. We met and conversed with many ordinary Russians. We enjoyed a degree of freedom and learned more than our official Intourist guide was probably supposed to allow us. A Visit to Ernest Hemingway's Key West Home is a very short two-page photo visit to the famous writer's home and writing studio. We enjoyed the visit and hope you will also. Immigration is an essay inspired by all the recent talk about illegal immigrants and their impact upon our country. As a historian and an amateur genealogist I was inspired to take a different look at the subject. Alaska Highway Photo Journal is a collection of ninety-two pages of photos and very little text. In July and August of 2003 my wife and I drove a VW Rialta camper from Conway, Arkansas to Fairbanks, Alaska and return. We spent sixty days on the road and traveled through the heart of North America. We begin the photo journal at Dawson Creek British Columbia and end it as we return by way of Lake Louise in Canada. There was simply not space enough to include all of the photos we made. I am sure the ones we included will be more than sufficient to share the beauty of the experience. Growing Up White in the Segregated South is a personal essay that grew out of conversations I have had over the years about the experiences recounted in the piece. I felt that it was time to record some of my feelings on the subject, and Black History Month this year seemed a good time to get this done.
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