{"id":3903,"date":"2014-10-28T08:53:32","date_gmt":"2014-10-28T12:53:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=3903"},"modified":"2014-10-28T09:12:05","modified_gmt":"2014-10-28T13:12:05","slug":"where-does-the-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/writing\/where-does-the-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Does the Writing Come From?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sky<\/a>When I listen to Itzhak Perlman<\/a>\u2019s violin in the Theme from Schindler\u2019s List<\/a>, it reaches a wordfree place inside me that resonates and curls around the melody. It brings me a kind of hovering freedom that hurts. The plodding and soaring notes take me wide, across time to other people, and simultaneously, they bring me into myself, solitary.<\/p>\n

Readers often ask me how I get inspired to write, as in, where did you get the inspiration to write Birthmarked<\/em>? I have an answer for that<\/a> which covers where the earliest ideas came from, but in a way, the answer is deceiving. It implies that a writer gets a light bulb idea on a given day and takes off with it, embellishing on the way.<\/p>\n

It helps to have an initial idea that fascinates. That much is true. But when writing is the job that meets you every morning when you wake up, \u201cthe inspiration to write\u201d is kind of an irrelevant issue. I don\u2019t have a choice. This is my job. Doing it badly or well, I\u2019m going to do it all day and produce words or revise the ones I wrote before. It\u2019s the only way to make progress.<\/p>\n

Yet, the writing still comes from somewhere, and that\u2019s why I bring up Perlman\u2019s violin. His music is certainly played on a violin, but the music comes from inside him, from decades of living the music. He is the one who puts the agony and the longing in the notes. He\u2019s the one who makes them sweet, who reaches into my own wordless place. It\u2019s no accident that he can do this. You can be sure he\u2019s playing his music on all of the days he doesn\u2019t have a concert. Why wouldn\u2019t he? The music is clearly his life, as well as his life\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

And so, today, my inspiration comes from Perlman. I want to write deeply. I want to explore the inner layers of this novel and bring myself closer to its core.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I listen to Itzhak Perlman\u2019s violin in the Theme from Schindler\u2019s List, it reaches a wordfree place inside me that resonates and curls around the melody. It brings me a kind of hovering freedom that hurts. The plodding and soaring notes take me wide, across time to other people, and simultaneously, they bring me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3904,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-3903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-writing","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3903"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3909,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3903\/revisions\/3909"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}