Outspiration

Voltaire called it “divine flatulence”, Faulkner claimed never to have seen it for himself, Updike believed it arrived as a package at your doorstep, and Jack London advised going after it with a club.  Inspiration has been a highly sought commodity for the artist since, well, the beginning.  The ancients believed muses were responsible for doling it out which explained why it could be so elusive and even finicky, leaving the poor mortal feeling like some magic life-giving tonic was being held just outside his grasp.  And so, over time, we artists have spent mountains of time and money searching the globe (or at least the internet) in the frenzied pursuit of the powerful elixir.

My own office looks as it an inspiration piñata had exploded all over it – there are stacks of books by my favorite authors filled with highlighted passages for easy reference, the walls are plastered with framed poems and colorful art and plaques touting famous quotes all designed to dispense an inspiring word at a glance.  I keep a journal of inspirational phrases close by for easy access, and if they aren’t quite getting the job done, all I have to do is pull up Facebook or Twitter to give me an instant inspiration fix when I’m jonesing. 

That’s why this week it occurred to me, I am an inspiration addict.  And the problem with addiction is that it warps your mind into believing that what you need to survive is somewhere outside of yourself, something to be grasped or purchased or fought for.  Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that it is a bad thing to be inspired by a book or movie or someone else’s words from time to time.  But when it becomes a fulltime pursuit, an insatiable appetite, a grasping dependence on “the other” to make you whole, that’s when it is time to take a step back and just breathe.

In fact, the word “inspire” comes from the Latin word inspirare which can be broken down to “in -- in + spirare -- to breathe.”  That’s right – to inspire literally means to breathe in.  That’s why it is called inspire, not outspire.  If you think about it, we would never depend on someone else to breathe for us!  We have all the breath we need in our very own lungs.  True, sometimes illness necessitates external breathing help, whether from tubes or inhalers, but by and large we are designed to breathe from deep within our own selves.  And so too, I believe, we are meant to take the time to get quiet with ourselves on a regular basis, to allow the inspiration to bubble up from the spring at the center of each of our hearts.  To listen to that still small voice that the bible describes as the voice of God. 

I know there are times when the well feels dry, when the cup seems empty and we are so desperate and thirsty that we search high and low for someone or something out there to fill us up.  I have experienced it recently myself after the death of my beloved pet and a heartbreaking miscarriage.  I found writing to be a chore and my creativity felt completely tapped out.  Panicked, I began reading three of my favorite books at the same time, I listened to backlogs of sermons, flipped through my archives of Oprah magazines and watched more Ted Talks than I can count…but instead of quenching my thirst for inspiration, the words seemed more like so many grains of sand than water. 

Tired and numb to the colors splashed all over my walls, I tossed my books aside and flopped into my armchair.  My dog took it as an invitation to jump into my lap, so I acquiesced and we sat there, for the better part of an hour, just breathing.  I closed my eyes and felt my breath and that’s when the thought came to me -- when the well runs dry, sometimes you just need to dig a little deeper to discover what you needed was there all along, just under the surface.  I believe there is a call placed within each of our hearts, but when we focus all of our attention on listening to everyone else’s voice, we sometimes fail to hear our own. 

So instead of going after the mirages in the desert, those false promises of water just beyond your reach… hunker down, dig deep, and discover what it is that you want to say.  Stop looking for outspiration -- breathe and find your inspiration.  Be your own muse.

Pollyanna's Playbook

I was taken off guard the other day when during a discussion about my favorite Oscar nominated movie this year, SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, a friend of mine commented: “It was good – up until the Pollyanna ending.”  And so, Dear Reader, I just have to ask… what’s so bad about POLLYANNA?  Granted, the first time I saw the 1960 Disney classic on television with my mom, by the end, I stomped out of the room crying that I would never trust my mother to pick out the Sunday night movie again.  It absolutely shattered me.  How could a young girl, who had never been anything but good and kind, be so unfairly rewarded for her optimism with possible paralysis?  And how could the movie end without letting us know if she was going to be okay?  “It’s not fair!” I shouted.  To which I received the standard parental platitude, “Well, honey, life’s not fair.”  My mother tried to explain to me that the story wasn’t just about the one girl, Pollyanna, but about all of the lives that one girl changed. “Look how much better those people’s lives are now because of her.”  But I didn’t care about the other people.  Other people didn’t matter!  Or…did they? 

That question settled deep down inside, and at that moment, something in me began to change.  There were other people in the world!  Other people with their own lives and their own hopes and their own pain.  The movie wasn’t just about Pollyanna – and maybe life wasn’t just about me.  Pollyanna helped me to see that optimism is not for the faint of heart.  That goodness takes courage.  She taught me that each act of kindness can envelop pain and precipitate beauty, just as a snowflake forms around a spec of dust.  Finally, Pollyanna showed me that it’s those “other people” who will be there to help you when life isn’t fair to you.  Which brings me back to SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK and the realization that my friend was right – it does have a “POLLYANNA” ending.  Sure, Jennifer Lawrence is a much edgier version of Hayley Mills, but she shares the same can-do attitude that transforms the lives of the “other people” she encounters by coaxing them out of their own private hell of isolation and giving them something to hope for…together.  And that is something both movies do well – they both show the indomitable power of hope.   As Bradley Cooper’s character Pat says, “The world will break your heart ten ways to Sunday. That's guaranteed. I can't begin to explain that. Or the craziness inside myself and everyone else. But guess what? Sunday's my favorite day again. I think of what everyone did for me, and I feel like a very lucky guy.”  How very Pollyanna of him…

How Salinger Broke My Heart...and Started My Career

I have been waiting for September 6^th like a kid waits for Christmas, like an Apple-lover waits for the new grande-nano-mini iPad, like a total nerd waits for the J.J. Abrams reboot of STAR WARS (okay, I’m waiting for that one too).  What is this September 6^th event that could have me so twittery (remember when that was a word completely unrelated to technology?) and breathless with anticipation? 

It is the release date for SALINGER – the new documentary about the life of Jerome David Salinger, better known as J.D. Salinger – recluse, author, and love of my life.  I can hear you thinking to yourself, “Oh no – she’s one of those Salinger quoting, dog-eared Catcher in the Rye toting weirdos” to which I can only say – you don’t know the half of it, buddy. 

The love affair began in high school, which is the time when so many of us afflicted by this disease first begin to notice symptoms: uncontrollable head nodding upon each and every mention of the word “phony”, bouts with nervous giggles over the curse words, and the distinct and overwhelming feeling that someone finally really gets you.  A certain someone named Holden – I mean, have you ever heard a cooler name? 

If the exhilaration of reading The Catcher in the Rye was my first contact with Salingerphilia, Franny and Zooey gave me a full blown case.  It was absolutely revelatory and pretty much shaped my life philosophy – to this day it is still one of the most brilliant distillations of what Christianity is really about that I’ve ever encountered. “Don’t you know who that fat lady really is?...Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy.  It’s Christ himself…” 

Of course from there I read his Nine Stories, and then when those were devoured, I set up shop in the microphiche (look it up, kids!) department of the library to pour over his stories published in magazines like Good Housekeeping and The Saturday Evening Post.  In fact, it was one of those little known stories (A Girl I Knew) that inspired me to write my very first screenplay.  Salinger wrote about a young American man, a thinly veiled version of himself, who meets a young girl in Vienna and falls in love with her while tying her ice skates one day.  They begin a romance, but then the war breaks out and the man must go back to America… he leaves behind the young woman who he later hears was killed in a concentration camp. 

I was so devastated by the story that I decided to imagine a different fate for the characters, and so wrote a script about a teenaged girl who discovers her grandmother was the girl with the skates, and that she escaped with her life, married and moved to America – the girl discovers her grandmother was in love with J.D. Salinger and so sets out with a group of friends to try and find the recluse and deliver the news that his beautiful skater was indeed still alive.

When I finished the script I was proud and excited – and grateful to have been inspired and encouraged, if not directly, at least in example by Mr. Salinger, and so I decided to send the script to him.  I had hopes that he would respond favorably, feeling very much like Holden in Catcher when he says, “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”  And so, with visions of future phone calls with my favorite author, I mailed a copy of the script along with a letter and a headshot (I had heard he had a soft spot for young, wide-eyed actresses) by Fed Ex, just to show how professional I was.  Oh how I dreamed that he would read the script and invite me to his cozy New England home to read his secret stash of Glass family novels that I was convinced existed.  But that dream was never to be.  A month or two after I mailed my heart to the New York offices of J.D. Salinger’s agent, I received a short letter back. Seven little words that amounted to a dagger to my soul, 

 “Mr. Salinger does not accept fan mail.”

Fan mail?  FAN MAIL??  It was a script that had taken me a full year to write!  I was broken hearted.  My hard work and passion had been reduced to unwanted, unworthy trash.  Just like that, my fantasy of knowing Jerry better was crushed.   But in the rubble of the experience, a writer was born.  A producer read that script and liked it enough to stage a table read for investors.  It didn’t sell, but the interest was enough to encourage me to keep writing, and soon after I applied to USC to get my Masters in writing – and got in.

And now, some ten years later, there is a new film promising to give me the unprecedented, unvarnished glimpse of Salinger that I so craved.  Even more exciting, the biographers released news this week that there are indeed more stories about the Glass family – rumored to be published in 2015.  And buddy, you better believe I’ll be first in line to get my copy, dressed not in a rabbit fur collared coat, but in a nice warm cloak of nostalgia.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering – Holden is not the name I was born with.  It’s a little nod to the character who first inspired me to write, and so began my whole career. I can’t help thinking that it would’ve made Mr. Salinger’s eyes sparkle at the irony of a writer honoring him by adopting a fake name…what a phony.
 

She Believed She Could...So She Did

I once accosted Gregory Peck outside a library in Los Angeles by exclaiming, “Mr. Peck, you’re a wonderful actor…and I just have to shake your hand!”  At which point I ignored his wife’s angry glare and thrust my hopeful hand towards him.  Thankfully, he didn’t leave me hanging, he gave me a hearty shake and seemed genuinely touched that “young people still enjoyed” his films.  I enthused that ROMAN HOLIDAY was my favorite movie, and I couldn’t help but ask him what my favorite actress Audrey Hepburn was like.  His eyes twinkled and he said, with that beautiful rich voice of his, “She was everything you’d hope she’d be – and more.” 

That phrase has stuck with me over the years and in my mind is pretty much the greatest thing you could ever say about another person.  I was thinking about that moment this morning as I was considering what to say about my mom for this Mother’s Day tribute, because that quote fits her so perfectly: she is everything you could hope a mom would be – and more.

The screensaver on my phone is a picture of a plaque that my mother gave me to commemorate the day I bought my first home.  It was especially poignant for me considering the fact that only six years earlier I had found myself homeless and jobless and on my own for the first time in my life at the age of 29 after having finally worked up the courage to leave an abusive relationship.  Four months later, I had sold my first pitch for a movie and was blessed with the opportunity to rebuild my life from there with my mom cheering me on every step of the way.  So when I opened that first housewarming gift from my mother and looked down to read what it said, “She believed she could so she did” I immediately burst into tears.  And I immediately adopted the slogan as my motto for life.  But the slogan doesn’t only apply to my life, it describes my mother’s life as well.  In fact, I believe it is entirely a case of  “like mother like daughter.”  And I am forever grateful for her blazing a path of courage so that I could follow her lead. 

She left her small town and went to a big university as the first in her family to go to college, and when the money ran out and she was unable to continue with her classes, did she go crawling back home to the domesticated life that was expected of her?  No way.  She wasn’t about to let other people’s lack of imagination for her determine her life, and instead she set out on a grand adventure flying the open skies as a stewardess in the 60’s.  After she met and married my father in 1970, who was in the army at the time, there were no spouses allowed on base in Korea, and the wives were encouraged to stay at their home base in America while their husband’s served overseas.  But my mother was not one to just sit around and pine for her man.  She got a job in Korea teaching English to bankers and got her own apartment so she would be close to my dad.  In fact, she lived there for two years – only leaving when she became pregnant with me.  (I feel like she deserves a metal just for flying from Korea to the US while pregnant and terribly sick!) 

As a stay at home mom for my sister, brother and I, she educated herself about nutrition and began making all of our bread, yogurt, and cereal from scratch – even getting reprimanded by my preschool when she refused to bring Kool-Aid for snack time as instructed and instead went rogue with no-sugar-added apple juice.  When things became tough for our family financially, I remember her handing me to a stopwatch so that I could time her as she taught herself to type.  After cultivating the fastest fingers I had ever seen, she was able to get a job as a legal secretary, eventually working all the way up to becoming the office manager for a huge law firm.  And even though she never got her college degree, her boss once told me that he hired her because she was the only person in the history of applicants to ever earn a perfect score on the grammar test, adding that she was the smartest woman he had ever known.   Not only smart, but shrewd – when times were tight one spring, she made sure my sister and I still had new Easter dresses by winning enough money in a penny poker game!

Industrious, caring, and hard working, my mother showed me by example that there was nothing I couldn’t do (well, except say the word “fart”, she abhors crass language!)  And I love that her prayer for her children when we were young was not that we would be rich or wildly successful, but that we would grow up to be interesting people.  Of course being interesting stems from being interested, and she (along with my dad, of course) always made sure her children’s hearts and minds were always engaged.  She taught us to follow those hearts and minds, encouraging my screenwriting career, my sister’s work as a published novelist and my brother’s passion for composition and music. 

It has become clear to me over the years that the reason Audrey Hepburn has been the actress I most look up to is that she is the screen version of my mother.  Beautiful but humble with a quiet strength that is only enhanced by its vulnerability, Lynn McLeroy believed she could, and so she did.  Which allows me and my brother and sister, and even my dad, to believe we can too.  And I hope that her example will inspire all of you who read this, so that you may grasp hold of the truth that we can each be whatever we believe we can be.

Also, because all of this attention based directly on her is sure to make her uncomfortable, I’m going to give a shout out to my brother and sister as well – who have grown up to be very interesting people, just as she had prayed they would be all those years ago…

You can find my sister’s wonderful books here: http://www.haveyourcakeandreadittoo.blogspot.com/p/books.html

And my brother’s blog with his beautiful music and poetry can be found here: http://www.lineandlandscape.com/p/why-line-landscapedespite-risk-of-being.html