The nature of inspiration, part 1
Flavors of inspiration and the nature of motivational inspiration
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The two posts, Simplicity vs. sophistication in mystical fiction part 1 and part 2, looked at the “simple” part of the phrase, “simple devotional stories that inspire people to seek God.” This is the phrase that launched this whole quest of Deus in Fabula to understand mystical realism in fiction.
The next step is to explore and better understand what it means for stories to “inspire people to” some kind of action, generally, which then leads into the matter of inspiring people “to seek God,” specifically. In both cases, we’re really talking about how written words might not only engage readers emotionally about the lives of fictional characters, but how words might touch readers’ hearts in such a way that they begin to think differently about their own lives.
If you think for a moment about some past experiences or events that you described or would describe as “inspiring,” you can quickly see that we use that same term to describe what are somewhat distinct experiences. This series begins here, then, by differentiating these flavors of inspiration as they appear to me. If you have any thoughts or insights about them, please share in the comments!
Emotional and inpletional inspiration
The evening before this post first went live, Freddie Freeman of the Los Angeles Dodgers hit a walk-off grand-slam home run in the bottom of the 10th inning to erase a 3-2 deficit and win the Game 1 of the 2024 World Series against the New York Yankees. In the highlight video, you can see the Dodgers fans going bonkers—hooting and hollering, jumping up and down, and enjoying serious the rush of endorphins.
Such is emotional inspiration. It’s how we respond to most performances that we attend, from sporting events, concerts, plays, and movies, to attractions like museums, historical sites, and rides at Disneyland and other amusement parks. The same can also be said about many ostensibly religious and spiritual events that try to evoke emotionally powerful experiences through entertainment and spectacle more so than helping people connect to God in the silence of their own souls.1 We might also feel such inspiration from viewing what we might call natural performances, such as a grand waterfall, a towering redwood tree, a colorful sunset, or, as many in the United States have done in recent years, a total solar eclipse.
When the inspiration is of an emotional nature, we enjoy it in the moment and perhaps savor the experience for a little while afterwards, but soon it all becomes just a pleasant (hopefully) memory. I imagine that the elation of the Dodgers’ comeback started to wear off for many fans before they even left the stadium and certainly for many more when they sat in traffic trying to get home.
Emotional inspiration, though intense, is usually short-lived,2 which is, I think, the exact reason why many attractions force you to exit through gifts shops that offer convenient means to capture the fleeting joy of the moment in tangible symbols, aka suitably representative merchandise.
There are times when we can capture the energy of emotional inspiration and feed it into another type, effectively energizing a more durable form. If that energy, too, is turned inward, rather than dissipated outwardly, then it becomes what we could call inpletional inspiration (to use the term coined in Emotion, inpletion, and devotion, part 1), a counterpoint to emotional inspiration. Some music, for example, as well as meaningful ceremonies awe-inspiring experiences in nature, can be so moving that it brings you to a place of deep, inner stillness, which is certainly a kind of inspiration.
Confirmational inspiration
Another less emotional but more durable type of inspiration is what we might call confirmational, which is perhaps the most common type of inspiration that we encounter even if we don’t label it as such. It happens any time an experience increases our confidence in a choice we’ve already made, thereby making us feel better about ourselves without asking us to change anything.
One of my favorite examples of this is in the movie Dave, where Kevin Kline plays a presidential look-alike who gets brought into the White House to cover for the fact that the real president is in on life support after a stroke. In one scene, he works the Cabinet to make some budget cuts so he can save a program for homeless children. One items on the chopping block is a $47 million advertising campaign run by the Commerce Department to “bolster individual confidence in a previous domestic automotive purchase,” as the Commerce Secretary puts it. To this the “president” replies, “So, we’re spending $47 million so that people can feel better about a car they’re already bought?” (The clip below is linked to that exact segment.)
I can understand the original intent of that campaign because I’ve grappled with some self-doubt after making major purchases or making a career change. It's very natural, after making such decisions, to watch for and grab hold of anything and everything that increases our confidence in our choice.
In this way, we might call this flavor egotistical inspiration, but such a term would create negative connotations for a kind of inspiration that does have it place—and a rather important place at that.
Another way we experience confirmation inspiration is when we attend a lecture or a rally, read a book, or watch a TV talk show that reinforces our opinions and, again, bolsters confidence in choices we’ve already made. We’re even more likely to do so if the inspiration is delivered in an eloquent manner that makes us feel smart for having those opinions (which is to say, reinforces a sense of specialness of elitism).
A fair number of non-spectacle Sunday sermons fall into this category. I know it’s true of those I attended in my youth, quite a few I’ve attended as an adult, and most of those I’ve watched online. I’ve read other posts on Substack that say the same thing. And it’s no great mystery why: building confidence does mean to build faith in one’s beliefs and one’s associations. Many people attend church for a sense of comfort more so than to be challenged to revolutionize their lives, and ministers respond accordingly.
Confirmational inspiration also serves to re-energize choices we’ve already made but for which we’ve lost some of the verve we might have felt in the past. A stirring talk, class, concert, or ceremony, for instance, can inspire us to give a little (or a lot) more energy to, say, spiritual practices that have been languishing in the doldrums. The community where I live (Ananda Village) hosts annual events called Spiritual Renewal Week (June) and Inner Renewal Retreat (February) for this exact purpose. In this way, confirmational inspiration provides a bridge to motivational inspiration, which is to say, the inspiration to change the energy we’ve been giving to certain areas of our lives.
Another bridging effect of confirmational inspiration is to encourage people to begin considering certain choices even if they haven’t yet made them. As we’ll see in the next section, this opening of possibilities is the first stage of motivational inspiration. I thought about this recently when a friend described Corrie ten Boom’s biography, The Hiding Place, as “inspiring.” My friend wasn’t so much referring to ten Boom’s accounts of being a Jew in Nazi Germany and ending up in a concentration camp. It was rather her accounts of holding onto God’s love despite everything she suffered even to the point of being able to forgive one of the guards at the camp where the rest of her family perished. Such an account is what can inspire a reader to think, “Wow. If she can do something like that, I wonder if I could, too?” Such is the beginning of faith.
Motivational inspiration
A fourth type of inspiration, which is more rare than the others but has the greatest impact, is what I’ll call motivational. This type is the one that moves you to act and/or to change something about how you think and how you live. It’s rare because there’s only so much change you can accommodate, but it has the greatest impact because it leaves a permanent legacy. (And often, after such an experience, we’ll seek confirmational inspiration to reinforce our decision to make that change, indicating again why confirmational inspiration plays an important role.)
With emotional, inpletional, and confirmational inspiration, we typically say that we were “inspired by” the experience in question: “I was inspired by that story.” Another way of stating this feeling is, “I found that story inspiring.”
With motivational inspiration, we use the phrase “inspired to” followed by an infinitive, as in “I’m inspired to travel to Asia,” “I’m inspired to volunteer,” or “I’m inspired to seek God.” Clearly, in the context of everything we’re talking about with mystical realism on Deus in Fabula, we’re looking to understand how to write fiction that delivers the specific motivational inspiration "to seek God.”
Regardless of the specific action involved, motivational inspiration means that an experience brings about a definite outer change. That outer change, however, doesn’t happen unless there’s first an inner change, which we can break down into these elements:
Greater inner clarity about what one’s life is about or at least about what’s possible;
Greater awareness about how to go about living with that clarity, which is to say, the different choices that one would have to make; and,
Greater will (and courage) to embrace those new possibilities and make the choices that turn potentiality into actuality.
Notice the infinitives here” to embrace new possibilities and to make different choices. Change—doing something different—is what distinguishes motivational inspiration from the other flavors. Confirmational inspiration can also bring a greater clarity and awareness, but by itself it only reinforces how you’re already living. If, on the other hand, you’re inspired to more deeply commit yourself to that existing pattern of living, then the inspiration is motivational because there is, in fact, a change, namely in your degree of commitment and the energy you dedicate to it.
To inspire readers to seek God, then, means helping readers (a) develop a greater inner clarity about that highest purpose of life, (b) visualize what living with that clarity could look like in the modern world (as opposed to a distant historical or future/fantasy world), and (c) awakening the necessary will and courage to carry out the necessary choices in their own lives. Courage is necessary because changes in the patterns of your life will challenge existing habits, routines, beliefs, and even relationships, all of which will put up a fight!
A simple way of stating the whole of motivational inspiration is “touching the heart,” not in terms of emotion but in terms of an inpletional awakening at the center of one’s being—touching the heart of courage to awaken that sense of “perhaps I can” along with again the clarity and courage to take the next steps.
Coming up next
In this post we’ve discussed the kinds of inspiration (which aren’t mutually exclusive, by the way) that any given experience might evoke to one having the experience.
If you’re in the business of creating such experiences, which includes writing stories, then these types of inspiration become a kind of toolkit with which to work. That’s the thread we’ll pick up in Part 2 as we first examine the roles of inspiration in rhetoric and then map those roles into story structure in Part 3 and Part 4.
Until then, share your thoughts!
(If you like this post, bless the Algorithm Angels, the Digital Devas, or whatever you’d like to call them by selecting the “heart” icon ❤️ even if you’re not a subscriber. It helps!)
Wherein Jesus said the Kingdom of God is found. “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” –Luke 17:21. “Be still and know that I am God.” –Psalm 46:10
Such brevity, it’s worth noting, applies to the emotional uplift but doesn’t seem to apply to in the other direction with negative feelings, such as disappointment. When a team loses a big game or a chosen candidate loses an election, for example, people are often stay upset or disgruntled for much longer periods of time, complaining bitterly to friends and colleagues for days and even weeks to come.