Fellow creative writers, join me in a mind-meld with Beethoven, and together we will steal some of his magic juju.
Good creative writing comes from a bucket of words in the subconscious. When the bucket is full and the tap is open, the words pour out in a manic rush, creativity burning up the page. As the bucket empties, the flow slackens, and is eventually interrupted when the last dreg from the bottom finds its way onto the page. Then you’re done. Finished. Empty.
There’s no alternative but to wait for daily experiences to refill the bucket of inspiration. But it’s slow; most days are mediocre at best. Experience trickles in, resulting in long, frustrating periods of down-time. Trying to write is a tortuous, mechanical exercise that results in bad prose and misery for the author. You can try speeding up the process by increasing the intensity of your experience through travel, trouble, or the perennial writer’s favorite, alcohol, but inspiration is a fickle and capricious substance that must percolate and dissolve over time before it liquefies enough be dipped from the bucket.
So what’s a writer to do when his bucket is empty? Mope, rage, grouch, wallow in misery? Absolutely. All of these are valid tools that help the bucket refill. Only problem is, the writer is despondent during the process. And the people around him are victims of his plight, waiting for the bucket to refill, drop by drop, day by day.
I’ve discovered a better way, a quicker way. Steal from someone else’s bucket, and pour the purloined inspiration into your own. It’s easy and cheap. Is it cheating? Maybe, but authors aren’t known for integrity where an unfaithful muse is concerned. So steal your inspiration. And if you do, steal from the best. Today I’m stealing inspiration from Ludwig van Beethoven.
I remember the first time I ever heard the full Ninth Symphony. I was a skeptical teen, and in my mind the greatest practitioner of “classical” music was Pink Floyd. The thought of listening to old dead guys playing violins was ludicrous. Guitar power chords in a rock arena was the pinnacle of musical experience.
All that changed when my best friend in high school, a drummer in a local garage band, made me listen to the second movement of the Ninth Symphony in his parent’s basement, lights out, at full volume. To say that it blew my mind was an intensity of understatement. I’d never heard anything like it. The sheer raw power of the music cracked open my teenage skull to a whole new world of enlightenment. It was then I understood why people were still listening to this stuff hundreds of years after the death of the composer. I had to admit that while it was possible people a hundred years from now would still be listening to Pink Floyd, it was a dead certainty that they would still be listening to Beethoven.
So today I’m stealing from Beethoven’s bucket. I sit in front of my word processor, little white wires hanging from my ears, Beethoven in my brain, watching for inspiration on the blank white screen, fingers poised to capture the first drops from the master’s bucket of inspiration. The strains of the first movement of the Ninth Symphony fill my earphones and my soul. Beethoven knew how to push every emotional button. He’s shameless in his manipulations of your soul. He doesn’t hold back one whit. Everything he’s got, every erg of emotion, he gives into the music. Everything. His consciousness is on raw, bare display. From the moment of the first whispering violin you know you’re in for something very, very rare.
All music is a form of telepathy, the communication of emotion and idea and inspiration from the composer’s mind directly into the listener’s brain. But with most music, it’s a trickle of consciousness, only occasionally a stream. The Ninth Symphony starts that way, but it builds quickly until it is a full-on torrent of immensity. Sitting in a dark room with Ludwig van Beethoven’s emotions crashing through your headphones is the ultimate mind-meld. This guy knew not only how to push aside the cares of the world, but how to crush them, to turn them into little insignificant specks, shriveled dots of nothingness that flutter away in the sweeping gale of emotion. His bucket of inspiration is huge and deep, and by the fourth movement he’s dumping it all over you and you’re gasping for breath.
Today, telepathy begins with a martial rhythm, then a soaring romantic theme, a melancholy passage that bring tears and but then rises to a crescendo of human spirit. A thousand years of Europe’s tortured past in a few rhythmic notes. Men on horses crashing through rivers on horses, women ripping their hair and gnashing their teeth. Horror and beauty and joy and yearning and melodrama and vengeance and pride and love, direct from his bucket to yours.
I jolt back to reality and pull the earphones out of my ears. The blank white screen is still there, waiting for me to fail. You can’t write from the void. Come on, Ludwig. It’s up to you. Help me find my inspiration. I put the earphones back into my ears.
The second movement starts with a bang like cannon fire and then introduces one of the most beloved musical riffs of all time. As the famous staccato rhythm wanders up and down the scale, suddenly I’m no longer consciously aware of the music. It’s somehow channeling directly into my bucket without my interference, and words begin to bubble to the surface and into my fingers and through my keyboard and into my word processor. I remember myself as a nine-year-old dashing down the steps of the school bus at the end of the last day of school, summer break staring me in the face with such joyous intensity it would leave me warm for three whole months. Flying kites on the edge of town, chasing squirrels through vacant lots, the flag on the back of my bike cracking in the wind as I flew down the steep hill of my childhood.
In the pause between the second and third movements I surface for a moment and see some words on the screen. I don’t try to read them, I just take a deep breath and wait for the music to resume.
During the introspective third movement I dive deep into my own bucket. I swim down through the swirling mixture of memories, feelings, faces. Down I go, toward the bottom, toward the clogged tap. I force my way through and find the night sky ablaze in the warm Georgia night. Listening to the katydids, watching falling stars. Catching and providing fanciful names to the insects drawn to a porch light at night: Crispybugs. Clickbugs. Green biters. In elementary school, making and flying paper airplanes at recess. Swinging in the high swing, the one on the end of the swingset with the wooden bench, the one where you could go so high that the chain would go slack and you would freefall for a slim, precious moment. In middle school the freedom of my bicycle, and the exploration of every alley and dirt road in my small town. The cool summer mornings where every day held endless possibilities. The clubhouse I made in the hidden cavern under the concrete steps of the old Methodist church. The pet flying squirrel I kept in my jacket pocket. In the third movement Beethoven somehow bottles all the sunshine and clouds of childhood into a mere fourteen minutes.
But I know the best is yet to come. The incomparable fourth movement. The Ode to Joy: a complete and unalterable redemption of everything awful in the human race, and your own life, in just 23 minutes and 48 seconds.
Listening to the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at full volume is like riding the world’s most thrilling roller coaster. If you allow it, your soul leaves your body and ascends to some rarified plain where triumph and pride and folly are the energies that fuel our humanity. Not before, nor since, has a work of art succeeded in weaving together so many disparate themes in a single work, and done so with such flawless grace that the result moves you to the true center of all human spirit.
There is a moment, at about thirteen minutes, where the symphony goes quiet, pulsing, and then—well, then Beethoven pulls out the last final wedge between genius and the sublime. When the chorus bursts forth it compresses my chest with the devastating joy of life. It sweeps me through the pain of high school, the wonders of girls, the first glimmerings of the wide world that lay beyond the city limits of Tallapoosa, Georgia. An old Chevy that let me break through those limits forever. Meeting the woman in whose eyes the souls of my children dwelt. Bringing those children into the light of the world. Renewal. Redemption. A new sunrise bursting over the mountains.
The chorus sings in German. I have no idea what words they sing. I hope I never find out. To me, they are singing about my own soul, mine and yours, and of course our good buddy Beethoven’s.
As the movement concludes, inspiration roars into my bucket like a waterfall and I realize that I’m not stealing the words I write. This is exactly what Beethoven wanted. He wanted to inspire us. He knew that living life at a full and unrestrained tilt was the only way to keep our buckets full, and he is sharing with us the product of an unrestrained life.
The Ninth Symphony: giving the middle finger to the mediocrity since 1824. Inspiration in a bucket, for everyone.
Now, write.
