What Electrifies You? Tell us and win!

Every once in a while, a student will come to my office, saying she doesn’t know what to write.

“What gets your heart pumping?” I’ll ask her. “What takes your breath away? What makes the hair on your arms stand up on end?”

And she’ll look up into the air until something dawns upon her, and then a smile (or pained expression) will spread across her face. Her brother’s addiction, she’ll tell me, or her pet dog, or her looming student debt, or her quest to bake the perfect red velvet cupcake, or her involvement in the Occupy movement.

“Write about that,” I’ll tell her and she’ll leave the office with a fresh burst of inspiration, a fresh sense of purpose.

When we write about the things that electrify us--either with joy or with fear--we bring a great zing of energy to the page. Energy that will propel our words forward; energy the reader will be able to feel.

Dance has always been one of my greatest passions; as I wrote The Book of Live Wires, I was thrilled to realize that my narrator Darryl’s grandmother had been a dancer. Through her journals (which Darryl has translated from Russian, Yiddish and French), I was able to vicariously experience what it would have been like to dance with two of my greatest dance influences--Isadora Duncan and Josephine Baker. These women have electrified me for years, and I loved translating their wild, uninhibited dance into fiction. Other aspects of the book charged me up, as well--writing about new parenthood, and illness, and other deeply embodied experiences made me feel more fully alive inside my own skin.

What electrifies you right now, as a writer? Please let me know in the comments below, and you could win a copy of The Book of Live Wires. The grand prize winner will receive an ebook and a rare physical galley of the book, along with a copy of my Bellwether-Prize winning novel, The Book of Dead Birds. The second place winner will receive an ebook and a rare physical galley of The Book of Live Wires, and third, fourth and fifth place winners will receive a free copy of the ebook. You can enter until Friday, January 27. The winners will be announced January 30.

I look forward to learning about what keeps you up at night, what thrills you and scares you and makes you race to the page.

Tags: contest, inspiration, novel, writing

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Comment by Linda Gunther on January 21, 2012 at 5:26pm: I relish the occasional note or photo from a long-time friend or relative that pulls me out of my lethargy and electrifies me to persue some of the ambitions I dreamed of as a young adult. I think I was a more courageous soul then. Certainly as I follow the life adventures ofmy brother's children and their babies do I find a personal encouragement that stirs me to mask my old reserve and assume my real disguise.

Comment by April Katko on January 21, 2012 at 4:35pm: I think what inspires me to write is my surroundings.

Comment by Stephanie Quinn Westphal on January 21, 2012 at 3:40pm: Any time when someone speaks the truth, the raw, pulsing truth. When people stop pretending and making themselves small (in a book, in a reading, on the stage, or across the table from me in the coffee shop), when they say what they really feel and know, that electrifies me. Taking risks, daring to be imperfect, standing in their place, being undefended—those acts thrill me and make me feel alive.

Comment by Gerda Govine on January 21, 2012 at 3:35pm: As a poet, what electrifies me and make me race to the page is when words find me. Words poke, whisper, dance, tease, squeeze and are very much at ease. It does not matter if I am asleep, driving, walking, minding my own business or listening to country music. An avalanche of words kiss, lick and swallow the page with purpose and gusto. Words bring me freedom, peace and safe passage to all of my tomorrows.

Comment by Carolyn Boyles on January 21, 2012 at 10:52am: Reading a writer I have just discovered I have never read before and really like, looking at how he or she has so magically arranged the words on the page, thinking "maybe someday I will be able to do this" and someday someone will be sitting reading my words which are having the same effect on them.

Comment by Alexandra van de Kamp on January 21, 2012 at 10:45am: Visual and verbal art electrify me--the awakening of a vision on a canvas or on the white (snowy) page of a poem or of a piece of prose--the getting-it-down, so a moment or morsel of truth is witnessed, archived before it disintegrates. I, too, love Josephine Baker and remember seeing Alexander Calder's (1898-1976) exhibition at The Whitney Museum a few years ago, in which he had created wired marionette-like sculptures of Baker--spinning articulations of her sensual, wiry spontaneity. Moreover, his wire-mobiles cast haunting shadows on the lit wall behind--so she was captured in two media at the same time, and there is something light and shadow-infused about her dance movements and film career. More on Calder--I loved finding out at this same exhibit, how he spent so much time with his mini-circus that he created--all the three-dimensional puppet-like figurines: the clowns, dancing girls, the assistants to the knife-throwers--each figure was so alive for him and he was so loyal to them. He would pack them up in a big trunk and take them wherever he went: tricycles, jugglers, the girl on horseback etc... That heart-breaking dedication to creating a world that you feel is true to something you have seen or felt is electrifying for me.

Comment by Caroline Bock on January 21, 2012 at 10:09am: My six-year-old daughter electrifies me, running into my bedroom at six a.m. shouting, "The world is buried in snow. Everywhere and everything except the tops of trees! And it's still snowing." Her unintentional poetry electrifies me as well as the truth -- it is still snowing on Long Island on this Saturday morning. The snow is deep and wet and covering us all as we hide under blankets, or in her case, looks longingly at it, wondering when, when, when will she be allowed to run out in her snow suit, climb up the snow mountains, touch the tops of the trees, or even, today, the sky. "When, mommy, when? Before it melts? Before I grow old?" A six year olds impatience with the world electrifies me because I remember that same impatience, with the sense the world is slipping away without me, that there is an urgency to nature that corresponds to the nature within us.

"Hurry," I finally say. "Snowsuits on. We're going into the snow."

And I'm off --

Truly yours, from author of LIE.

Comment by Mary Theresa Fitzgerald-Martin on January 21, 2012 at 8:19am: While at work at the other day we had a healthy competition going on on who could sell the most mints. It was so much fun and I found I was buzzing and flying high at the end of the day. Oh yea, I won!! lol.

Comment by Christina M. Rau on January 21, 2012 at 7:01am: My husband, a marathon poetry reading where I can scribble in a notebook, new notebooks with crisp pages, snuggling under blankets on snowy days, large paintings on concrete gallery walls, a walk through New York City in Autumn, a walk through my suburban neighborhood in August heat, the beach in winter...the excitment of electricity is everywhere.

Comment by Joanne Huspek on January 21, 2012 at 6:45am: Enthusiasm electrifies ME! That's why I love to attend the San Francisco Writers Conference (I can only afford one a year)...people giving the workshops are so jazzed up. They greet you - the writer wannabe - with so much enthusiasm it's contagious. They cheer you on. When I leave, I'm totally geeked and ready to begin again.