Inspiration
by Matt Worley

Maybe it's all the holiday advertising, or maybe I'm just out of original ideas, but I've been thinking about what inspires people to do things lately. The most interesting examples of inspiration come from creative projects and ideas. Recently I received a preview copy of Yngwie Malmsteen's latest guitar opus, Inspiration. Ah, the wheels are now turning. Malmsteen, while not as well known as Steve Vai or Joe Satriani, is one of the pre-eminent guitar slingers that proliferated music in the late 80s. This new CD is supposed to explain why Malmsteen plays the way he does. Totally comprised of covers, it includes run-throughs of Kansas' "Carry On Wayward Son" and Jimi Hendrix's "Manic Depression." It made sense in a way, guitarists are always drawn to music that features stupid lyrics and bombastic arrangements. I'm just a little surprised he didn't cover "Smoke On The Water."

For the longest time (up until I was almost 17) I didn't understand where writers got their inspiration. I thought there was no way that I could come up with any kind of story as interesting as the ones I saw on TV, in movies or in novels. I didn't realize two things: 1) Experience is necessary. And 2) Writers are the biggest liars in the world. I was watching the movie "Mannequin" when I realized the latter. It was during a vacation with the family, and we (the three kids) were dropped off at a movie theater so our parents could get something done. I don't know what it was about the movie (possibly the fact that a gomer like Andrew McCarthy could get a woman like the Mannequin, but I'm not counting out the big pink Cadillac either), but I left it with a revelation in my head: I could write stories of total and utter lies just as good as the next person.

So for the next few years, that's what I did to a limited extent. All of my stories came from "what if's" and "I wonder's" that popped into my head. There was the regular run through fantasy, science fiction and horror stories. It's very easy to deal with inhuman characters because there are no absolute rules to them-everyone just makes it up as they go along. I contemplated ideas and story arcs that, in reality, were totally unknown to me. My characters fell in love, committed suicide, turned into vampires, cheated on their boyfriends and girlfriends, drank, smoked, shot up, played guitar, made a lot of money and were sometimes even famous. It was a fun time because I wasn't restricted by anything in my mind. And then I met this girl.

I don't know exactly what it is about falling stupidly head over heels for the wrong person, but it changed the way I looked at life and writing. Suddenly these things that were just figments of my imagination were happening for real. My real world began to open up as much as my fantasy world. This changed the way I wrote for about three years. I suddenly thought that real life was more interesting than all of the lies. I wanted to explore why people interacted with each other in the ways that they did. I wanted to figure out their personal thrusts and parries. I wanted to make everything utterly realistic: which scared the hell out of most of my friends. The most common question from them during this time was, "So, am I in this one?" I got tired of the question, so I just let them read and guess.

Now I have melded these two extremes (truth and fiction) into what I call my personal mythology. My cast of characters interact with the real world in real ways, but most of their actions and thoughts have nothing to do with myself (except that they exist only in my head). It's like separating work time from playtime.

Reminds me of a line from "Tequila Sunrise." Michelle Pfeiffer is having a conversation with her part-time lover, Kurt Russell.

"Sooner or later you've got to lose sight of the truth," she says. "You don't lose sight of the truth," he says, playing with an unlit cigarette. "Not unless you're crazy."

Probably not the best response if someone thinks you're crazy already, but it sounds cool. You never know where it's going to come from, but it is a lot of fun when the brightness invades your brain long enough to write it down. So, this week, we can blame it all on "Mannequin," which is a little bit better for casual conversation than my inspiration for writing song lyrics: Frank Zappa's "Titties & Beer."

Matt Worley doesn't think it really matters whether or not he's a real person, as long as someone lets him ramble a bit every now and then.

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