Inspiration

"Where do you get your ideas from?"

This is for Anna, who, in the midst of having huge amounts of stuff of her own to deal with, had the generosity and clarity to suggest this is as a topic to explore.

I confess it is a question that tends to make writers squirm, because it’s really, really hard to answer. My usual go-to response, as I have mentioned before, is to say, ‘I’ll write anything that anyone will pay me to write.’ While that has an element of truth in it, it’s only a very small element. It would be an extremely unthinking (or desperate) editor who would commission a writer to put together an article or a book on something about which they were entirely ignorant. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, and, on occasion, it has happened to me, but by and large it’s not the way things work.

My own writing tends to fall into two relatively distinct categories - non-fiction and fiction - but, as that ‘relatively’ signals, it’s not, it can’t be, an entirely clear divide.

As far as my non-fiction writing is concerned, that has been instigated by two rather different drivers. On the one hand, areas of expertise, which have led to being commissioned to write articles, reviews and textbooks about, on the one hand, contemporary crime fiction and early twentieth century poetry, and, on the other, the teaching and learning of English language and literature. The other driver has been translation work, and that has been where there have been, on occasion, extremely steep learning curves. I have been very fortunate to have been asked to translate a number of non-fiction books, a lot for the very young, and a few for the highly academic. The most taxing of these, in terms of subject-matter and the sky-high level of thinking, was a racy little number entitled The Intellectual Origins of Leninism, by the outstanding French historian Alain Besançon. A fascinating, complex book, which had me, amongst other things, sitting in the old Reading Room at the British Library, doggedly making my way through the entirety of Karl Marx’s Capital. So, yes, sometimes being a professional writer does send you down some very unexpected alleyways.

Inspiration - ‘the breath of God’

Overall, though, in non-fiction and fiction alike - and I think this is true of most writers - I have been fortunate enough to have been able to follow where my interests have led me. And I would much rather think in terms of interest than in terms of ‘inspiration’. Inspiration is a word which makes me profoundly uneasy. First of all, it derives from New Testament Greek, where it describes the soul being animated by the breath of God, and I really don’t think I’m in any way competent to to go there. Secondly, it has been drawn on rather heavily by nineteenth century Romantic writers, and some later authors with less excuse, to suggest a kind of ‘specialness’ in their writing, and, by association, in them themselves.

Statue of Byron, the ultimate Romantic

So no, for me, it’s not inspiration, it’s interest. And for me, fundamentally, my interest lies in people - myself, as handy source material, but above all, others - and what it is to be human, and why we do all the absurd and awful things we do. I was travelling on a train yesterday - maybe a couple of hundred individuals - and we were each our own little universes.

We know so little about each other, even those closest to us, even ourselves, but we are nagged at by consciousness, aware of our foolishness and frailty, unaware, for the most part, of our idiocy and the harm we do. And all that messy stuff of being human is where my interest lies, and, if you like, that is my inspiration.