What Inspires You to Write?

I have many blank "books:" journals, really, but I like to think of them as books that just haven't been written yet. One of my favorites is a care-worn leather journal with leather strap that I use on special trips, to record thoughts, observations, little snippets, ideas or turns of phrases I want to remember. This journal looks like something among the possessions of Indiana Jones or Dian Fossey: a soul keeper that has seen salt and spray, been lost in a jungle mud slide and found under sand-swept dunes many times over the course of its life. It has the appearance of something inherited, or won in a fist fight. It is the kind of journal that can only improve with age, wear, and the vicissitudes of life. It is my Velveteen Rabbit.

I took this journal to Devil's Fork State Park, on Lake Jocassee, last week. I knew that, of all my blank books, this was the one that should accompany me there. This was my nature book yet to be written. Nature is my best inspiration. It makes me introspective.

And itchy.

Lake Jocassee is 75 miles of undeveloped shoreline and more than 7,500 acres of water as clear as any in the Caribbean. It is deep. And cold. At its deepest, it is 385 feet. Where land licks liquid, sandy shores spread out below bright white rock. Thumbing through my "mind pictures" right now I can see Turtle Island. Behind it are three progressively higher mountain ranges, each one a lighter shade of green, like a watercolor, until the last barely visible peak almost blends into the clouds. I can hear the cicadas. I can smell the faint fishiness of mountain stream-fed water. This is what I want to preserve in my journal, for myself and for future generations. This is the image I want to share. This is what inspires me to write. And it makes me wonder: what inspires others to write?

Something in me believes that Janie Mitchell, the 77-year-old black woman who wrote a journal of her Charleston memories from 1862 through 1931, wanted to write. I think maybe she didn't write, until that journal, but I think there was a writer in her. There's a little captain in all of us, as the sage advertising copywriter reminds us, but some of us have more "captain" than others, and some of us have souls that ache to communicate, to be understood, to make a difference on little slips of paper. Janie was one of those souls, one of those "writer types," even if she had never written before, or since.

So what motivated Janie to write on that Emancipation Day January 1, 1931?

For one thing, she was encouraged to do so. At that time Janie worked for a family whose youngest daughter was home from college, where she studied history. This young woman had grown up hearing Janie's stories. And she knew the old cook had personal experience of a pivotal point in American history; with Janie's passing, these first-hand observances would be lost. So she made a gift of a composition notebook to Janie, and encouraged her to write about her life and those times. Janie did just that, in a burst of inspiration, never knowing that her words would reach across generations almost a century later.

Janie had something to say, and she knew it. She knew men, black and white, who were instrumental in the war and who played significant roles in moving forward after the South's defeat. Charleston was a broken city. The nation was brought to her knees. These were Phoenix times, and Janie knew people who helped us rise from the ashes.

She also wanted to speak to the younger generation, both of her time and of coming times. Janie was steadfastly religious. I often think that exceedingly trying times will polarize a person: either they cling to their beliefs or they abandon them completely. Janie was the former, and she watched as a generation came along who had not been brought up in the church. She wanted her writing to make a difference in their lives by sharing what she had clung to.

And Janie wanted certain facts to be remembered, because there are just some things that should never be forgotten.

But the truth is, Janie probably just got itchy.

She was inspired to write on that New Year's Day 80 years ago. She had a sudden urge to scratch out her observations. Because really, when you're itchy, there's not much else you can think about.

We all have something to say, to preserve and interpret for posterity. We all can be history's eyes, recording the truths of our short life spans. Certainly along the timeline of history, there are generations who can never travel the path of those years, except through our telling of it. So my question today is, what makes you itchy?

And to that, whatever that is for you, I raise my camp cup to the possibility of an epic shortage of Benadryl.