Motive, Magic and Mundanity: Why Do We Write?(Transcript‪)‬

A friend asked me recently, "What inspires you to write?" She is a writer herself, so I knew she wasn't asking me, "Where do you get your ideas?" She would know that ideas are as random as shooting stars; they come while you're cleaning the bathtub, or watching Four Weddings and a Funeral for the ninth time, or in the morning when the last bit of your dream is fraying away, just before you open your eyes. You see it, then, what you've been searching for all these weeks or months, clear as day; you look at it and think "Oh. Yeah," and open your eyes. That wasn't what she was asking. And that was why I couldn't answer; I could only sit and stare at her with my mouth hanging gracelessly open, because all the answers that sprang immediately to mind answered the question she hadn't asked. Such as, well, money. Money is an enormous and entirely respectable source of inspiration when writing is your sole means of support. I did the math recently and was astonished. I've been writing for 42 years, since I sat down one morning when I was 14 and wrote a 30 page fairy tale. I sold my first novel when I was 23, so I've been published for 33 years. Which means I've been supporting myself by writing for over three decades. My agent swears that I'm most inspired when I'm broke. As when, during one financially dicey period, the cesspool of the 130-year-old house I had bought in the Catskills gave up the ghost one spring on the first day of May. It is a day indelibly etched in memory, because I had a guest with whom I was trying to kindle the fires of romance, my cesspool was backing up into my bathtub, and I remembered then that my plumber and his wife, who threw a Kentucky Derby party every year, and everyone who worked for him would be three sheets to the wind by the time the horses galloped out of the starting gate.