Where do you find your inspiration? What inspires you?

While I’m often inspired by the unexpected—the sight of a bald eagle, the discovery of music I hadn’t heard before, a snippet of conversation that I can see stretching out into a poem or a play or a novel—I have to feed myself inspiration as well. Especially in my workplace.

So I keep things around me that make me dream, that give me ideas. An ancient oil lamp my great-aunt brought from Greece in the 1920s. Pictures of places I love and places I long to see. Quotes from William Wordsworth to Toni Morrison. Something seasonal is usually on my desk; I just made the change from flowers from my garden to a miniature pumpkin to celebrate the autumnal equinox. I love old typewriters and am surrounded by them—I can almost hear the clacking of their keys and imagine whose hands might have touched them. Music and silence. There’s a birdfeeder outside my study window and each time I look up I see another visitor there.

What does all that do? Much as I love my home, I couldn’t write if I were not constantly pulled out of it, out of its comfort and familiarity. These objects pull me away from my workspace even as they occupy it: they help me keep looking beyond.

It’s one of the reasons I travel; but traveling doesn’t have to be physical. What inspiration does is make us travelers of the interior, travelers of the mind. And our minds can take us anywhere.

Where does your mind take you? Where do you find your inspiration? What keeps you writing, day after day, year after year, when giving up would be the easiest thing in the world? Share your stories, and then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

This impacts my life, of course, but why am I sharing it with you?

Because, like mortgages, you don’t always end up with the same players in a book deal that you started with.

Here’s an example. An editor is excited about your novel, talks the marketing department and any other relevant people at the publishing house that it’s a good bet, and you’re offered a contract. You sign, ecstatic. You begin work with the editor on your novel. Then she (and mostly it’s going to be a she) gets an offer for another job—at a different publishing house, in Paris, an internal promotion, it doesn’t really matter what: for you, what matters is that she’s gone.

Your book is now officially an orphan. The publisher will honor its commitment to you, of course, but your editor was your book’s champion. Someone else will take it on, but they won’t feel the same about it.

Changes.

In my case, the change should be a good one. Dreamtime Publishing has been sold to the publishers of Transformation Magazine. The books have been out for some time and a new publisher will, I hope, breathe new life into them.

Change can be wonderful, and horrible … but it’s always difficult, especially when you’re dealing with your writing … your books are, after all, a part of you. But finding the silver lining is an important part of being a writer. Master that and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Well, yes and no. Someone on one of my discussion lists noted that it was a handy place to check out books, drink coffee, and meet friends, and that may well have been part of the problem: while the coffees were indeed expensive enough to cover rental on a small table for a time, this was, after all, supposed to be a bookstore.

Yet walking into one some time ago—before the many closures began—one could have been forgiven for thinking otherwise. Everything was on offer at the front of the store except books: notepaper, games, office decorations, cards, journals. All very nice, but isn’t that what stationery stores are for? Where was the seriousness, the intent to read, to be challenged, to think, that one automatically associates with books?

Not at Borders, anyway.

Borders Store Closing

I’m not trying to be a curmudgeon here. Any bookstore is better than no bookstore at all, and I did in my day work as community relations manager for two different Barnes & Noble bookstores; frankly, the same issues can be taken with that chain as well. But let’s be honest. Do you really buy substantial amounts of reading material in full-priced bookstores?

As a published author who needs to sell her books, I hope you do. But as that same slightly impoverished author, I know that I don’t: I can’t afford to. I buy most of my books used (which benefits their authors not at all, unless by chance I write a glowing review for them on an online bookseller site), and when I cannot find the book I require used, I buy it from—you got it—Amazon. This despite the fact that I live next to a town with three independent booksellers. The tourists and the summer residents buy books there; I’m always pointing people there; at Christmas I make some special purchases there. But for daily fare it’s Tim’s Used Books for me.

Or Amazon. I think I heard a collective gasp when I said that. Shocked, you are, shocked that gambling goes on in this establishment. Amazon delivers to my post office box (they’d deliver to my door, but in my rural village we don’t have mail delivery), and they deliver with the best price. That’s hard to beat. I wish it were not so. I wish I didn’t contribute to the cycle that makes it so difficult for midlist authors to make a living … but as a midlist author, I don’t have much choice.

And I’m far too old to start living in a garret now.

So there it is. Where does your conscience allow convenience and price to take over? I am unsure about it myself. I won’t shop at Walmart, but I will shop at Amazon. I’m not sure what thay says about me. I do know that in some ways, I am the fat lady, I am the one who helped trigger the end of a bookselling tradition that many people out there are mourning.

Tell me what you think: tell me whether I’m alone in my confused ethics here. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Jeeze, that Salon article is certainly depressing! Particularly with comments like this: ‘This takes faith — belief that it can be done and trust that the author can do it.’

If I ever get so ancient or crabby that I can no longer love what I’ve always loved? Shoot me, please.

(Margaret A. Frey writes from the foothills of the Smoky Mountains with her husband John and canine literary critics, all of whom prefer walking to writing. Her work has appeared in a number of online and print publications, including Smokelong Quarterly, Notre Dame Magazine, flashquake, Thema and most recently Foliate Oak Literary Magazine and Ken Again. Margaret is currently wrestling a longer fiction dealing with the lives and livelihoods of American miners and their families, those rightly credited for ‘keeping the lights on.’ She can be contacted at mafrey@tds.net)

So … do you read fiction? Why or why not? Let me know, and then you’ll be … beyondthe elements of style!

So what does it mean?

Genres are about marketing. They’re about what shelf the book gets placed on in bookstores. They’re about selling the right book to the right customer.

Before you sneer too much, though, remember that marketing exists because it works. If dividing books into genres didn’t work for readers, then marketers wouldn’t do it—they’d drop any program that didn’t draw in customers like a hot potato.

So why does it work for readers?

I can answer that for myself. I’m extremely eclectic in my reading. I read a lot of nonfiction, a great deal of literary fiction, quite a lot of historical fiction. I don’t think much about genres when I read these books: what I think about the book’s titles, subjects, content. I look for ideas that will challenge me, concepts that will make me stretch, information that will enlighten me.

But my bedtime reading is another creature altogether. I don’t want to think too much as I drop off to sleep. I want something that will be predictably enjoyable, the literary equivalent of warm and fuzzy. So I turn to genre fiction, because that way I know what to expect. I turn to author’s names, because that way I know what to expect.

Think about what you read—and write. Do you read different genres at different times of day? Do you like familiar and expected characters and plots, or do you like to challenge yourself through your reading? There’s no right answer … but it’s important to know how you think about it before you dismiss genres altogether. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!