Beth Kephart
BE INSPIRED

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

I know. I know. So grotesquely obvious. Except for the essential sequitur: Be inspired by what?

The metronome flick of your puppy’s tail?

The mellifluous hum of the antique AC?

The letter m, lowercase, written, for the first time, by a child?

The problem is, the possible sources of inspiration can be measured by infinitudes, and to write we need some curb or cramp, a boundary or horizon, a wall against which to toss our nouns or a pocket into which to tuck our thoughts.

We need a place to start; we need some traction.
Here’s the first page of Autoportrait, by the author Jesse Ball:

I read Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait and found I admire its approach to biography. It is an approach that does not raise one fact above another, but lets the facts stand together in a fruitless clump, like a life. He wrote it in his thirty-ninth year. In my thirty-ninth year, this book follows his.

And there it is—the place where Ball’s book starts, the borderlines the author gives himself. He will write in a way that does not create a hierarchy of facts. He will pursue a “fruitless clump.” 

Go to your shelves. Pull down a favorite book. Study its first lines. Write down the constraints that the author suggests and then make them your own. Maybe you’ll end up writing toward color (Bluets). Maybe you’ll pursue the chemistry of tears (The Crying Book). Maybe you’ll write to reach someone (On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous). Maybe you’ll start to think very hard about “how much we pad our lives with … stuff.” (Index Cards).

Let another writer’s structure or obsession shelter your thoughts. Then exhale and free yourself to take a good long look around.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of three-dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher, co-founder of Juncture Workshops (now running the Story of You lecture series), and a book artist. Her new books are Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays and We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class. More at bethkephartbooks.com and etsy.com/shop/BINDbyBIND.

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