"INSPIRATION OF THE POET," NICOLAS POUSSIN
Following up on my response to his ad for a ghostwriter-blogger, the Craig’s List Guy emailed me a list of questions—sort of an email job interview aimed at learning more about what I am like as a person, what it might be like to work with me. I liked being able to answer in writing; I’m better at it than speaking. And the questions were good—many were the same as the ones I’ve asked when interviewing prospective new hires. A few of the blog posts in this space are based on my responses to the Craig’s List Guy’s questions.
Among my favorites—a question that I’d never been asked in dozens of interviews I’ve endured in job-seeking throughout my publishing career: “As a writer, where do you get your inspiration from?”
Here’s the Top 10 list that I sent him:
1. Leonardo da Vinci—a polymath, a hard worker and possibly the only celebrity in history to have made a name for himself without trading on gender identity.
2. Miguel de Cervantes—for his ability to nail a writing style and for inventing the novel as a literary form, while distancing himself from the momentous innovation. Students of literature will remember that the style of The Ingenious Nobleman Don Quixote de la Mancha was taken from the romances, tales of chivalry, popular during the primogenitor’s day. Because they were fictional, romances were considered lightweight at best and possibly immoral by priests and other serious scholars simply because they were—well, fiction. In his introduction to Don Quixote, Cervantes feigned that the origin of the work was an Arabic manuscript he had found; he was merely the translator—smart positioning for an author may be shunned and excommunicated for what he writes.
3. Dave Winfield—the Hall of Famer and 12-time All Star, who played for four teams during his 22 years in the major leagues. A career .283 hitter with more than 3,100 hits, 465 homers and 1,833 RBIs, Winfield was a streak hitter prone to prolonged batting slumps; he’d go 6-for-10, then 0-for-40. Asked by a writer how he hung onto motivation during the slumps, Winfield explained that when he wasn’t hitting, he’d try to steal a base, throw a guy out from the outfield, sacrifice. “I just come to the ballpark every day and try to do something.” A good rule for a blogger as well as a ballplayer.
4. Andrea de Jorio—the 19th-century priest/anthropologist who studied antique Greek and Roman vases, and correlated the gestures of the figures appearing on them with the body language he observed in Neapolitans during his own day. Many of these gestures catalogued by Fra. de Jorio are familiar today in the Italian neighborhoods of northern New Jersey and New York City, where I spent most of my life. De Jorio’s work helps me ward off the evil eye, toss off an appropriate retort when someone flips me the bird and illuminates the body language of my in-laws.
5. Gabriel Garcia Marquez—the Columbian writer, for One Hundred Years of Solitude, an epic novel with no hero, and particularly for the character Remedios the Beauty, who nourished herself by eating earth and ascended to heaven on a gust of wind one day as she was hanging bed sheets on a clothesline to dry.
6. Otis Redding—the King of Soul, for “Try a Little Tenderness” and “Respect.”
7. Charles Bukowski—the post-office clerk and prolific writer, for his Beer-Nuts prose style and particularly for his impertinent, irresistible titles.
8. Larry Page and Sergey Brin—the founders of Google, for changing everything, just because they were smart enough.
9. Entenmann’s Chocolate Donuts—the sure cure for writer’s block. In my experience, one box taken with a half-gallon of milk yields five 250-word manuscript pages.
10. “Imma Be”—the Black-Eyed Peas’ pop song, for its rhythmic structure and aspirational spirit.