The Slow Burn of Inspiration by Derek B Miller

 

Inspiration doesn't always strike. More often it simmers.

When I was a teenager in the 1980s, I had a killer stereo system. I'd saved up — and gladly forked over – over $500 (serious money then) for an NAD 7155 stereo receiver to drive my B&O turntable, Luxman cassette player, and Klipsche speakers. My bedroom wasn't big so there was no perfect place to sit to catch the sound right. My solution was turn the speakers towards me from either side of the dresser, and then lean back on the drawers, creating enormous defacto headphones that came at me from either side. 

This is how I first listened to Telegraph Road from Dire Straits.

I normally had enough money for one or two albums a month at $10 each. Without a car, that left me with one (and only one) record and tape shop in my hometown outside Boston, Massachusetts. I padded this meagre haul with a few albums I stole from the high school library (BB King's Live at the Cook County Jail; With a Little Help from my Friends by Joe Cocker; A Farewell to Kings by Rush). But those were stuck in Pergatory and … how had they gotten there anyway? No, they were better off with me. Stealing is bad, but letting art languish or die is wrong. 

Decisions were made. 

Anyway: I had first heard Telegraph Road on the radio — all fourteen minutes and eighteen seconds of it — in a car park at a mall on a truly god-awful car stereo that I did not switch off until the WCOZ DJ (bless his heart) mentioned the name of the song. I was gobsmacked. So when I dropped my coin to buy it, and spun it up at home off a crisp and shiny LP (the plastic film still clinging to my jeans). I was whisked away. So much so that some thirty-five years later I can confidently trace the first inspirations to my new novel, RADIO LIFE, to that song and that moment. 

Mark Knopfler's first stanza reads, 'Well a long time ago, came a man on a track /Walking thirty miles with a sack on his back / And he put down his load where he thought it was the best / He made a home in the wilderness.' In my mind, back then, the wilderness as a western American desert. I can still picture the rock formations. The color of the sands. The river nearby. The distant hills with touches of green. In RADIO LIFE, this is where The Few came upon the Stadium to later create the Commonwealth.

I started writing fiction (quite alone, and without a word to anyone about it) in a tiny apartment in Geneva, Switzerland on the Rue Louis Favre in 1996, when I moved there to pursue a doctorate. I had no TV, no internet (of course) and nothing to do but read and write. So I did. Twelve years (and about four manuscripts) I published my debut novel, Norwegian by Night, and only in 2020 — among a host of contributing factors — would the tiny spark of Mark Knopfler's song help inspire my latest novel.

I believe that inspiration is made possible by a cumulative process of artistic growth, which is itself made possible by exposure to both unmediated experience on the one hand, and art itself on the other. We too frequently look on objects and events as sources of inspiration — imbuing them with almost magical force and effect. A bridge. A tree. A sunset. A smile. There are such moments, it's true, but it's our Romantic philosophic inheritence that makes us fetishize them. The harm is that it turns our attention away from the slower burn that is the crucible for our artistic sensibilities — as artists and appreciators of art. And to me this is a pity because it sets the artist on a mistaken quest to seek out a kind of inspirational Grail, with all the incumbant possibilities of failure. Instead, I see a virtue in reflecting on our simple lives and how sometimes the smallest experiences lay the foundations for some of the greatest; like how an old song can help craft a new novel, and the imagination of a teenager can later inspire others with a new work of art.

Radio Life by Derek B Miller Published by Quercus Books. (Out Now)

When Lilly was first Chief Engineer at The Commonwealth, nearly fifty years ago, the Central Archive wasn't yet the greatest repository of knowledge in the known world, protected by scribes copying every piece of found material - books, maps, even scraps of paper - and disseminating them by Archive Runners to hidden off-site locations for safe keeping. Back then, there was no Order of Silence to create and maintain secret routes deep into the sand-covered towers of the Gone World or into the northern forests beyond Sea Glass Lake. Back then, the world was still quiet, because Lilly hadn't yet found the Harrington Box. But times change. Recently, the Keepers have started gathering to the east of Yellow Ridge - thousands upon thousands of them - and every one of them determined to burn the Central Archives to the ground, no matter the cost, possessed by an irrational fear that bringing back the ancient knowledge will destroy the world all over again. To prevent that, they will do anything. Fourteen days ago the Keepers chased sixteen-year-old Archive Runner Elimisha into a forbidden Gone World Tower and brought the entire thing down on her. Instead of being killed, though, she slipped into an ancient unmapped bomb shelter where she has discovered a cache of food and fresh water, a two-way radio like the one Lilly's been working on for years . . . and something else. Something that calls itself 'the internet'.