Apr 7, 2011
Germinating Ideas
The Morgan Library and Museum is doing an exhibit through May 22nd called The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives, displaying notebooks from various famous writers. Their description of the exhibit is filled with one fascinating example after another, but one in particular stood out to me:
A diary of Nathaniel Hawthorne includes this idea for a story subject: “The life of a woman, who, by the old colony law, was condemned always to wear the letter A, sewed on her garment, in token of her having committed adultery.” Hawthorne, of course, later developed this germ of a story—first documented in his diary—into one of the most celebrated of American novels.
It’s interesting to think about how one simple idea, upon conception, is scribbled down on paper, and will later germinate into a great story. These ideas often come in a moment of inspiration, at the most unexpected of times. What if, for lack of an available writing tool, they’re never written down? The exhibit points out that “more and more diarists turn away from the traditional notebook and seek a broader audience through web journals, blogs, and social media”. Hopefully, as this process takes place, writers can still cultivate some tradition of recording, in one form of another, even if electronic, these spontaneous gusts of inspiration, so that we can later discover and cherish them as a part of history. This might just pose an interesting challenge for the people who will do those installations in the museums of the future.