Writing from home

At one level inspiration is the ability to see beauty and mystery in everything men and women do. That may be a gift not everyone has.

Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life

Ellen Gilchrist

Aspiring writers often think they must travel, experience hardship or know heartbreak to improve their art. Thus young writers flock to New York City, San Francisco or Paris. Young men go to war. Young women have affairs with married professors. They get involved with drugs and excessive alcohol.

Ellen Gilchrist, who has taught many aspiring writers, pooh-pooed that idea. She pointed out that such writers as William Shakespeare, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner and Ivan Turgenev achieved greatness without traveling far from where they were born.

Did they lack real-life experience? Hardly. They were readers. More importantly they were observers. Literature is about people, all different and yet in so many ways all the same. Stories are about people, how they act, how they feel, what they do, what they say.

Writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene traveled to many places and lived in many places, then set their stories in these various places. Yet these places were little more than background for stories about people, people they could have imagined without leaving home because the people around home are much like those in Spain, Cuba, Paris or wherever else a writer might go to experience "life."

First novels, which often turn out to be authors' best novels, are typically autobiographical.  In other words, they are fictionalized accounts of the writers' own early lives. If these early novels are successful, it is because the authors were inspired by the "beauty and mystery in everything men and women do." And they didn't have to go anywhere else or do anything dangerous or exotic to accomplish this.