Creative Inspiration: What to Watch To Get Back to Writing Memoir

I WAS ASKED about my writing influences. The question came in the form of a recent interview. This is one of those questions that can really trip up a writer, letting us either get slavish in our attention to ourselves and our seemingly great reading habits, or honest, and admit to what we really read as kids, what genuinely informed us and how we still use it every day.

I’ve seen this go both ways, and every time I am sympathetic to the author being asked, since most writers genuinely do want to help other writers along and provide real inspiration. How, though? With honesty, or do you defer solely to what you think you should say and blurt out things like, “One can only truly learn to write by reading all of Proust, Tolstoy and Camus.”

Oh, you know that’s been said. It gets said all the time, and every time I read that kind of response I feel like I’m watching a Woody Allen movie. Allen, the master of seeing into our insecurities, has no problem writing about his, and so it was to Woody Allen that I went recently for some inspiration.

I keep a copy of his screenplays on my desk. They are there to remind me how to write dialogue. It’s just one of the many reference books I surround myself with in my corner by the window, and while that collection of his is not on this list of recommended references I published in my recent book, the collection is there, always, to remind me how people really speak.

But I needed a little more than mere dialogue recently, and holding to my absolute belief that there is no such thing as writer’s block, I slapped on the Woody Allen documentary, a brilliant look into how and why to write. Made by Robert B. Weide for PBS, the film is also a fascinating look at Woody Allen and his life, but more than anything I found it inspirational in its reassurance that he is just a guy from Brooklyn who writes every day. In fact, until watching it, I did not know that the day he finishes editing one movie is the same day he begins writing the next screenplay.

In this two-part documentary, Allen has wonderful, generous, interesting, provocative things to say about writing, as well as much to reveal about his day-to-day process.

Have a look. We all need some creative inspiration, yes?

Oh, and how did I answer that question posed to me about my influences? Despite my own slavish adoration for the Tolstoy-Proust-Camus frame of reference, I was honest. As a kid I read Mad magazine and Emily Dickinson in equal measure. And you see the results.