This is yet another article in the series inspired by Through the Magic Door, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's little volume of essays about books, reading and associated topics.
This post highlights two propositions that Conan Doyle makes about inspiration and creative people: he suggests that inspiration comes from outside and that creative people are often frail and die young.
It also mentions a few other writers in connection with these topics.
Conan Doyle says this about the source of inspiration:
“...the feeling which every writer of imaginative work must have, that his supreme work comes to him in some strange way from without, and that he is only the medium for placing it upon the paper...Is it possible that we are indeed but conduit pipes from the infinite reservoir of the unknown? Certainly it is always our best work which leaves the least sense of personal effort.”
That last sentence is often very true. Rudyard Kipling said something similar when he gave his Daemon credit for assisting and inspiring him in his work: he said that the writing he did under this influence was 'frictionless'.
Conan Doyle's mention of a conduit pipe reminds me of another of Rudyard Kipling's Daemon-related images: he likens the end of a good run of genuine, friction-free creativity to “the water-hammer click of a tap turned off.”
Many other writers have speculated about where their inspiration might come from.
Robert Louis Stevenson for example said that it came from vivid dreams caused by the Brownies!
Frances Hodgson Burnett thought of herself as just the custodian rather than the originator of her gift. So where did this gift come from then?
Maybe some fiction writers really do channel or download their works and ideas from somewhere.
