The Shine Journal

INSPIRATION

by

Murray Brozinsky

I’ve always wondered how it is that writers write.  Do ideas spring onto blank pages fully formed, as Beethoven transcribed the divine music in his head? Is story freed from parchment in the same way Michelangelo described his sculpture being freed from the tyranny of stone?  Is writing a messy process of trial and error, author as Edison, experimenting with thousands of words until the light shines just right?  To whom should the aspiring writer apprentice himself: musician, artist, or inventor?  Perhaps writing is not a creative endeavor at all but rather an act of discovery.  In that case, maybe I should be seeking guidance from the likes of Heisenberg or Bohr.

These were my thoughts one night as I stared at the blank white parchment. Truth be told, it was a blank white screen with much of the blankness taken up by so many icons and a cursor blinking in the upper left corner, a constant reminder I had not yet written a word. I sipped my coffee and swiveled in my chair, looking for inspiration.  I took an inventory of my home office:

On top of the desk, the implements of my craft – paper, pens, pencils, scissors, stapler, staples, paper clips, small binder clips, medium binder clips, large binder clips, OED, highlighters, a tower built from colored cubes of Post-It notepads – offered ample distraction from my quest for inspiration. There was a thick tome about how to use Microsoft Word, my word processing software. In case I did manage a word in the upper left corner of the screen I would be prepared to move, delete, boldface, italicize, underline, center, justify, indent, enlarge, reduce, and morph it into different fonts. 

Under the desk, a shredder ensured nobody snooping around the trash would steal any of my ideas. But with nothing much to protect the shredder earned its keep by shredding my credit card bills, usually before my wife wrote the checks. Three lamps – one on the desk and two halogen floor lamps – flooded the room with artificial light. Each was plugged into the electrical outlet. I gazed out the window at the Golden Gate Bridge spanning the waters separating San Francisco from the Marin Headlands (I have to crane my neck to get that view). I thought of Homer gazing out over Adriatic in ancient Greece, another City by the Bay. I like to think we are similar, Homer and me.

The electrical outlet got me thinking. The outlet is a metaphor for a larger outlet. It leads to the power line outside. My power line, along with the power lines of all the other homes in the neighborhood, joins larger power lines, together making up the local distribution network.  The local distribution network looks and acts like the branches of tiny capillaries in the human body, delivering sustenance to points of consumption.  Larger lines, called transmission lines, transmit power from the power grid to the distribution system, similar to the function of arteries in the human body.  The power grid, the heart of the system, is a “pool” of power fed by various generating plants where the power source is produced.  These generating plants use natural gas, coal, running water, or nuclear energy to produce the power that enables my computer to compute and my halogen lamps to burn. 

Millions of years ago beasts roamed the earth.  They died and decomposed.  Years later, their corpses were dug up as fuel for the generating plants. Their dead bodies were transformed into the lifeblood of our society, pumped through our man-made vascular system to sustain the vital organs of our body politic. This transformation from matter to energy, from dead to living is nothing short of miraculous. It is a three hundred billion dollar-a-year industry.  There is an idea in there somewhere.

The phone line got me thinking, too. It is another miraculous outlet metaphor.  I picked up the handset and ordered a pizza. 

My Bio: Murray's stories have appeared in numerous literary journals, including: 3711 Atlantic, 400 Words, Ascent Aspirations, decomP, Duck & Herring Pocket Field Guides, GHOTI, Laughter Loaf, Opium Magazine, Peeks & Valleys, Rumble, The Big Jewel, and Yankee Pot Roast. He has written essays for Brink, Business 2.0, Prose Toad, Science Creative Quarterly, and Wired Magazine. He has been a semi-finalist for the Theatre Oxford's Ten Minute Playwriting Contest, winner of Oxford University's Cuppers Playwriting competition, and has read at San Francisco's InsideStoryTime reading series.

Motivation: Creation, Frustration & Procrastination