Imagination@Work

If Only They Had Known

For Mother’s Day, I took my wife to LakeArrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains for a nice lunch and a cruise around the lake. It’s a familiar haunt for us, close enough for a one-day trip, distant enough to feel “out of the area.”

Lake Arrowhead is one of the many manmade lakes in California. Tall pines surround pristine blue waters. It’s the kind of place the rich and famous build homes. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys has a stunning house on the lake, Doris Day once lived in the area, and the inscrutable Howard Hughes used to fly his seaplane and land on the lake.

It is one of loveliest spots on our planet.

Lest you think the Lake Arrowhead Chamber of Commerce has hired me to shill for them, I’ll get to the point: To buy a home on or near the lake will cost you—cost you big time. Unless you’re the type who doesn’t worry about the occasionally misplaced ten grand, you might find the mortgage payments a little steep. Bare property will set you back a million and half or more. If there’s a house on the lot…well, it goes up a few million.

During the early 1930s the Los Angeles Times undertook an interesting marketing plan. They owned a good deal of property around one of the lake’s bays. Someone decided they could increase annual subscriptions simply by giving everyone who signed up for a year’s worth of papers a lot at Lake Arrowhead. Yes, you read correctly—give a lot to everyone who paid for a year’s subscription.

Of course, in the third decade of the Twentieth Century, property values had yet to skyrocket. Still, property in exchange for a newspaper subscription seemed a pretty good deal, and many people took advantage of the offer.

Then the bill for property tax arrived. Some found the $37 a tad exorbitant and returned the lots. Actually, all the new property owners returned their subscription gift.

If only they had known.

To be fair, getting to Lake Arrowhead was more challenging seventy-five or more years ago, and the Depression had driven many families to their knees. Still…one of those “free” lots would pull in millions today.

One problem with being human is we cannot see the future. Some of us have trouble remembering the past and just making our way through the present is challenging enough. But the future is coming, and we can make a mark on it.

One idea that keeps writers going is the knowledge that their books may live beyond them. It might be in the dark corner of the library, but the book is still there. When we do what we do—writer, engineer, homemaker, whatever,—we make an impact on the future. We don’t know what the impact will be or if will land like a Rhode Island-sized asteroid, or a speck of dust, but it will be real.

I have no idea what, if any, impact my books have had. On the scale of noticeability my work may barely register, but it will register. No one knows what the outcome of their work will be. We can plan, make educated guesses, but we can’t know with any certainty so the work itself needs to be gratifying.

King Solomon said it well: “So I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany him in his work all the days of the life God has given him under the sun.” (Eccl. 8:15 NIV)

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Good Question; Lousy Answer

Every published writer has heard it. They ask it at parties, book signings, in airplanes, and any place where author shares air with a reader. While never offensive, the question is akin to asking a very tall man, “So, how’s the weather up there?” If you’re tall, then you’ve probably answered that a fair number of times. For the writer it’s, “So, where do you get your ideas?”

Let me answer that with all the finality I can. I don’t know.

You see, it’s not that I mind the question. I love to hear from readers and answer as many of their queries as I can. The problem is my answer to that ubiquitous question never satisfies. It fails to satisfy the questioner and it doesn’t satisfy me. 

While reading the Writer’s Almanac, a daily newsletter about writers written by or under the guidance of Garrison Keillor (no slouch in the idea department himself), I came across a passage about Dr. Richard Feynman, physicist. He’s one of the bright stars in the science heavens and received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965. His work lives after him.

The tidbit that interested me most in the Writer’s Almanac piece was this paragraph: 

“He took a job teaching at Cornell University. One day he was sitting in the cafeteria when he watched a student throw a plate across the room. Something about watching the spinning of that plate gave Feynman an idea for how certain subatomic particles might interact with each other. The result was his theory of quantum electrodynamics, which helped explain the relationship between light and subatomic particles.” (Writer’s Almanac, May 11^th, 2007)

I don’t know about you, but it is quiet a leap from flying plate to quantum electrodynamics. Someone has to fling an entire dinner set before I’d come up with that connection. 

Do you suppose the late Dr. Feynman went to the cafeteria looking for inspiration? Usually one leaves a school cafeteria with indigestion instead of inspiration…at least at my alma mater. Yet, Feynman’s mind, open as it was to inspiration, saw what no one else in the room did.

Writers are no different. Some time ago, I wrote about a story idea that came from a windblown piece of paper that slapped against the driver’s side window of my car. It hung there for less than a second. By the time I crossed the busy intersection, five story ideas were swirling in the wind of my imagination. 

Where do ideas come from? Anywhere and everywhere. They don’t come by searching; they come by recognition.

Granted, not every idea is a good one, but since they’re free, I have no compulsion about tossing away the ill-fitting ones. Who knows, may the breezes of imagination will blow them into a more suitable mind where they will root and grow. 

That’s the beauty of the world. There are more ideas than people. What’s missing is minds trained to recognize a good idea when it appears flailing its arms and screaming, “Look at me.”

AG

Fiction Matters

I was having a conversation with Jack Cavanaugh when he made a comment that reminded me of the power of fiction. In our chat, he mentioned Gene Roddenberry’s habit of dealing with earthly problems by placing them in an otherworldly setting. Of course, Jack had classic Star Trek in mind. The moment he made the comment, images from several episodes flashed in my brain. The first broadcast of an interracial kiss came when Captain Kirk planted one on the lovely Lt. Uhura. Of course, the writers attempted to avoid criticism by making the kiss the work of mind-controlling aliens. Apparently, Kirk didn’t want to kiss Uhura but couldn’t help himself. (Right, I was a kid when that episode aired and I wanted to kiss Uhura.)

Racial tension and bigotry were shown as foolish beliefs in an episode where one bilaterally, two-tone alien (black on the right side; white on the left) tries to track and kill the racially inferior bilaterally, two-tone alien (white on the right side; black on the left). Although the episode played as a drama, its obvious moral lesson was laughably clear and successfully showed bigotry for the foolish mindset it is. 

All of this made me think of Rod Serling and Twilight Zone. He too, despite his statement that he had no social agenda, often crafted stories that dealt with society’s struggles with the significance of the individual (The Obsolete Man), the price of dictatorship (in a half dozen episodes), and dozens of other concerns.

Fiction has the ability to touch areas of the mind and heart often closed to other means of communications. CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, documentaries, and the like provide us with much needed facts and insights, but they cannot do what a well-crafted story can: enable the reader or viewer to experience vicariously the event. 

Fiction allows us to see through someone else’s eyes, to feel their joy and pain, to think their thoughts, views that might not normally percolate in our minds. Alex Hailey’s Roots may have done more good for race relations than all the speeches and marches combined. Through his words, he put faces on slaves and slave owners, moving the topic from the shelves of history to the coffee tables of our homes and deep into our thinking.

This is not to say that fiction is superior to nonfiction. It’s not. Then again, it’s not the redheaded stepchild as some wish to portray it. 

Sometimes a story is just a story, a jaunt into a world with only the intent of being entertained. There is honor in that as well. Other times, fiction is an alarm, a slap to the face, or an apologetic for a meaningful cause.

Jesus used parables for a reason: More can be said in a story than can be in a lecture.

AG

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