Muse and Trixie

I suspect every writer secretly wishes for a muse, a mysterious inspiration that the next sentence might actually be worth writing. Homer called upon a muse before beginning The Iliad and The Odyssey. Three thousand years later we’re still talking about those poems, still making movies about them. Some people even read them. It apparently worked. My muse didn’t turn out to be a mythical Greek figure in billowing white linen. It turned out to be Idaho.

Idaho offers up inspiration freely and often, in the white-hot crack of a summer lightning storm, the haunting bugle of a bull elk in rut, the fiery scarlet of an eastern Idaho autumn. It’s there in the electric pull of a rainbow trout on the upper St. Joe, and in the dizzying sweep of country from the summit of an Idaho 12er. And if you’ve ever watched the last blaze of orange spill across the immense Owyhee Desert at sunset, you know the temptation to pull off the road, shut off the engine, and simply stare. Idaho can feel lush and forbidding, intimate and immense, all in the same day.

Inspiration is important, but I think showing up matters more. A muse seems to reward preparation and favor the ones who arrive eager to listen and learn, to write and write again. Not always, but often inspiration comes in the form of a deadline. To a writer, deadlines matter. If it weren't for deadlines, Outdoor Idaho might still be in its 10th season. The 18^th century English writer Samuel Johnson could just as easily be speaking of deadlines when he commented “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." A broadcast deadline also  focuses the mind and lends an inevitability to things. It helps with writer's block, too.

Sometimes tricks and rituals can help, too. I usually wrote three versions of each script, if only to remove the excessive adjectives, preachy tone, and bone-headed analysis of complicated issues. Someone unwilling to rewrite shouldn't call himself a writer. I always kept my first version, in case my re-writes drained emotion the stories deserved. I asked my artist friend Fred Choate when he knew to put down the paint brush, and he said, “two days ago.”

The right words have power and impact. They can teach and they can also trip you up and haunt you. There are Outdoor Idaho programs produced in the 1980s that still air today. So be careful what you write. Rewriting eventually taught me something unexpected. My job wasn’t always to write more. Sometimes it was to say less. Some of my favorite Outdoor Idaho programs hardly needed a narrator at all. They lead with video or the interviews and get narration out of the way.

I learned to try to keep my ego in check and use the quiet pans, the sound of wind in the trees, or the flutelike notes of a western meadowlark. Play with the silence, the pauses, the music. Trust my videographer to capture the special images that bring us to tears. Trust the editor who makes it all flow seamlessly. We had some of the best in the west: Pat Metzler, Sauni Symonds, Jay Krajic, all retired now. They made the final product better than I imagined it could be. As a friend told me one day, in an unguarded moment, “I turn the sound off when watching Outdoor Idaho, so I don't have to hear you. It’s enough to just watch.” We’re still friends. 

Over the years, I've gathered writing tips from famous authors, thinking it might help me down the road if I ever wrote something more than a TV script. The strangest piece of advice was from writer Kurt Vonnegut. "First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."

I studiously went through my words for this book and removed the semi-colons, even when I thought they worked just fine. Later I heard that someone had gone back to Vonnegut’s first novel and found semi-colons. I put some of mine back in.

Here's some advice I actually found useful. Never use a long word where a short one will do. Make people believe in your story first and foremost. If it sounds like writing, re-write it. You can fix anything but a blank page. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. Thank you, George Orwell, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Elmore Leonard, Nora Roberts, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Stephen King. 

Then there’s Ernest Hemingway’s pointed advice: "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." I wonder how many people have thought twice about writing a book after digesting that bit of wisdom. He also admonished would-be writers with "Nobody but fools ever thought writing was an easy trade." John Steinbeck had the same advice: “The profession of book-writing makes horseracing seem like a solid, stable business."  

I tricked myself into writing by telling as many people as possible that I was finally getting around to writing a memoir where Outdoor Idaho would feature prominently. Painting oneself into a corner can sometimes work. Luckily for me, I found writing scripts enjoyable. I found writing this memoir to be cathartic. It has also helped with my memory. At least, I tell myself that. When Cort Conley, friend and author of 15 books, encouraged me to write something for publication, saying “there will be nothing else like it out there,” my response to him was that sometimes I couldn’t remember what I had for breakfast. His response: “No one cares what you had for breakfast.”

I’ve also discovered that once you commit yourself to a project, things you had forgotten start bubbling up to the forefront of your consciousness. Mark Twain supposedly commented, “I’m now finding myself more and more convinced about things that probably never happened.” I understand the problem, so I’m comfortable telling people this book is “based on a true story.”

The most frequent comment I hear when I meet someone for the first time is not about my muse. It’s about my voice. I've always thought my voice had an unfortunate nasal quality to it. Yet so many people have told me that my voice works, that it's distinctive and fits the show well. I just know I’ll never be able to rob a bank unless I use cue cards.

 

It's 6:30 a.m. and I am rewriting this chapter in the lobby of the Clarion Motel, along the Snake River in Idaho Falls. The TV is blares Fox News. The lobby is full of Japanese tourists heading to Yellowstone National Park eating breakfast sandwiches, with their suitcases next to them, talking excitedly, no doubt, about the buffalo they hope to encounter or the cowboy hat they’ll buy. Perhaps they are commenting to each other about the strange American in the corner with his laptop, madly typing away, with his expression alternating between joy and perplexion. My muse can silence the outside noise. I just know I have to be ready for these moments. Sometimes they come at four in the morning. I fix myself a cup of tea and let the thoughts roll.

The mind is a drunken monkey, and sometimes a change of venue and a cup of coffee help stimulate creativity. Baristas know me at certain Boise coffee shops. I know the hours of each coffee shop, or more precisely, when they close in the afternoon. Very few stay open past 4 p.m. Can't say I blame them, because often I'm the only one in there at that hour, stealing their electricity so my computer won't die on me. Long ago I finished the strawberry smoothie so I wouldn't feel too guilty about using their wifi.

Sometimes nothing happens. I accept that. The Muse visits you, doesn’t live with you. As Stephen King cleverly put it, “make sure the muse knows where you're going to be every day from nine 'til noon. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he'll start showing up.” Sometimes she visits when it’s entirely inappropriate, like when I'm driving up Highway 21 to my cabin outside Idaho City. I keep a notebook nearby for such occasions and pull off to the side of the road to write just enough so that I won’t lose the thread. I’ve started using the “record” feature on my cell phone, but I’ll always be somewhat of a luddite, afraid I’ll accidentally delete my own inspiration.

Eventually, every writer discovers certain places where words come easier. Mine became my cabin on days when the wood stove floods the living room with penetrating warmth, and the large ponderosa pines sway softly, dappling sunlight through the bay windows. I watch the antics of wild turkeys as they search for seed below the bird feeder, glimpse a doe darting across the front yard. I feel certain I am where I need to be.

As a child, I was attracted to the concept of an angel who guards, guides, and keeps us safe. I used to sit off to the side in my chair in grade school, so that my guardian angel could sit next to me. It had nothing to do with me hiding my transistor radio in the 7^th grade to listen to the World Series. Having a guardian angel may seem an antiquated notion in the 21^st century, but why toss out such a comforting and practical belief? I call mine Trixie. That way some of my friends can’t take me too seriously. Besides, the name Gabriel was already taken.

If the Muse helped create Outdoor Idaho, Trixie kept us alive so we could create more programs. I’m surprised and relieved that after four decades, no one suffered life-threatening injuries working on Outdoor Idaho. The opportunities presented themselves on a regular basis, given all the Class IV rapids we crashed through, the questionable trails we hiked and traveled on with pack animals, the slippery logs we scrambled over to get us past swollen streams, the boulders that missed our heads on dozens of climbing expeditions. We even had to get help from the Idaho County sheriff when the ice-hard dirt road melted and left our rig stranded in mud somewhere on the Lewis & Clark Trail. Ah, the irony.

Trixie must have been traveling with us when a tandem axle and tires on a semi-truck broke loose and crashed across the interstate corridor traveling 70 miles an hour and headed straight for our Outdoor Idaho rig. At the last moment, the errant wheels hit the road just in front of us, then bounced over our car, missing us by mere feet. After several seconds of quiet shock and bewilderment, Pat Metzler, the driver, calmly said, “I guess we’re not going to die today.”

Whether Muse and Trixie exist beyond my imagination or represent parts of myself no psychologist has explained doesn't concern me very much. Over the years I’ve stopped worrying about definition. I only know what they’ve done. One taught me to slow down, pay attention to the world, and trust that every river, mountain, mining town, wilderness trail, and interesting character might hold a story worth telling. The other quietly encouraged me to keep moving through the uncertainty, to launch the raft, climb the ridge, meet the deadline, rewrite the script, drive 500 miles down another Idaho highway. Sauni, Pat, John, Jay, Peter, Royce, Lauren, Terry, Aaron, Manny, Marcia, Joan, Ricardo, Jim, Melissa, Chuck, Tim, Rick, Alberto, Andy, Roger, Greg, Hank, Kris, (Good Lord, there must be a dozen more) took those journeys with me.

Perhaps Muse and Trixie were never separate companions. Perhaps inspiration and faith always travel together. They’ve stayed beside me and my colleagues through four decades of Outdoor Idaho deadlines, triumphs, misses, coffee shops, lonely motel lobbies, rivers and mountains, and one log cabin where the words still occasionally arrive before daylight. If imaginary, they’ve been remarkably dependable. Nevertheless, I still look both ways before crossing the street.