AL Kennedy on inspiration

May 17

Last week, AL Kennedy gave some insight into what actually inspires writers to write via the Guardian blog. For her, it was not writing courses or workshops, but rather the unexpected throws of everyday life:

‘As a tutor I feel that workshops are often designed to make all those involved feel they're achieving something, while taking part in an activity which is almost exactly not writing. They fill up time, if not timetables: that, and you can maybe flirt a bit in them, should you wish to embark upon something with a scribbler. Poorly-balanced workshops can very easily descend into a horrible demonstration of what happens when the verbally blind lead the creatively deaf with a bit of arty bullying and random rule invention thrown in for colour.’

I am half-inclined to agree. Of course workshopping can be inspiring if the right group is found and the right dynamic clicks into place, but I find that this inspiration usually comes through as a kind of ‘fix-it’ compulsion. A good critique can immediately set your brain going as to how to improve the story (you want to pick up the pen to strike out, restitch or refresh) but they rarely provide the exact spark of that will propel a story onto paper.

‘I can't speak for anyone else,’ Kennedy says, ‘but I find more interesting avenues of inspiration arise from a mental commitment to find anything and/or everything inspirational. This means my environment need not change, but my mindset undoubtedly may.’

As an example she gives ‘two small nubbins of inspiration’. The first being a Harris hawk, which she arranged to see through a decorator friend who is also a falconer. ‘I have no idea if, or when, I will make use of Mr Hawk, but he will have rattled something somewhere which will eventually rattle something else that'll cough up something.’ So it’s the slightly unordinary then, the colour or word or image that sticks in your head and pushes and grows until that ‘something else’ takes shape. The second was a ‘new perhaps-portrait of Shakespeare’, which gave her a new sense of the playwright as ‘a person of muscle and blood, as someone more and less than the words (whatever he looked like) and an odd little reminder of the risk in his writing, another angle on that big dark edge’.

Kennedy also blogs on various other aspects of a writers’ mind here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog+series/al-kennedy-on-writing

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