Girl with a Pearl Earring

Hubby and I watched Girl with a Pearl Earring last night.  Well...I watched.  Hubby slept.  I read the book on which it was based earlier this year and enjoyed it quite a bit.  (If you haven't read or seen it, I recommend reading first, as there are a few things left out of the movie that make the story a little richer.)

As I watched, I was struck by the way the movie portrayed  Vermeer's (played by Colin Firth) inspiration for paintings.  In one scene, he walks into his studio and Griet (played by Scarlet Johansson) is washing the windows.  He sees her with one hand on the glass and the other on the table, and sees a scene he wants to capture on canvas.

It reminds me of the writing process.  I have had moments like that.  I see someone standing at a bus stop or in the mall and a character unfolds.  Or I walk through a park and suddenly see a setting for an intimate conversation between two characters.  Sometimes writing is like that.  You're walking along, living your life, and the inspiration materializes before you.

It's not always like that, of course.  Sometimes writing is a bitch, and you have to pull characters from your fingertips.  But it's those quiet moments when you suddenly see what you've been missing or hear a bit of dialogue that fits seamlessly into a scene that are the moments that are immortalized.  After all, it's much more glamorous to get the inspiration that way because, as Kay Eiffel says in her immortalization (see previous link), "...like anything worth writing, it [comes] inexplicably and without method."

As writers, I think we want to believe that the best written moments are revealed to us when we're gazing out windows or walking in the mall or coming home from buying cigarettes and seeing an apple roll onto the street.  (You didn't get that one, either?  Seriously, watch this movie.)  We want the craft to be wrapped in mysterious inspiration.  We want our art to be the product of whispers from the muse.  We want the craft to be glamorous.

Not every writing moment is standing on a desk, thinking about leaping off buildings.  Enjoy those moments, but don't discount the words that are pulled from us, sculpted, painted, glazed.  Because whether we walk into a room and see the maid standing in the perfect pose, waiting to be painted, or we spend hours tapping away until the right words appear, we still write.