The nature of inspiration, part 2
Forms of inspiration within persuasive rhetoric and its relation to story structure
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Part 1 of this series laid out what I see as various types of inspiration that can arise in response to an experience or event: emotional, confirmational, and motivational, as well the directional variant I call inpletional inspiration. These forms are not at all mutually exclusive and often occur together in the same experience, like that of reading a story. Your most powerful times of motivational inspiration, for instance, might have started with emotional inspiration that turned inpletional, bringing you to a moment where you could at least see new possibilities for yourself even if you weren’t necessarily inspired in that moment to make a life change. Decisions to up-end your life in some way are, indeed, often the result a gradual accumulation of lesser inspirations that eventually reach a point where you have enough energy and will to make the change.
Different people, too, may feel different types of inspiration depending on what they’re ready for. For instance, when I attended a regional youth group convention as a teenager along with others from my church, I’m sure that some attendees came away inspired to attend Bible college, enter a seminary, or undertake some form of mission work. My biggest takeaway, on the other hand, was the name and address of a girl with whom I hoped (vainly, it turned out) to kindle a relationship.
The different flavors of inspiration are likely all present more drawn-out experience like concerts, plays, and movies, conventions, a sporting event, and even a story or a novel. Sporting events, however, leave a lot to chance: you might not experience much inspiration at all if your favorite team or player performs poorly. Well-produced concerts, plays, movies, conventions, pieces of music, and novels, on the other hand, can be specifically designed to deliver certain types of inspiration.
For written works (fiction or non-fiction), this aspect of design means that authors can choose to target any flavor of inspiration depending on what he or she hopes to achieve. Authors who simply want to entertain readers will primarily look to evoke emotional inspiration. Authors want to reinforce certain attitudes, opinions, or mindsets in readers will target confirmational inspiration. And authors who hope to inspire people to definite action will be more interested in inpletional as well as motivational inspiration. That’s what we’ll begin to explore in this post.
“I find inspiration in…”
First, though, I want to mention another way that we use the term “inspiration” that isn’t one of the flavors described in Part 1. All of these responses—emotional, inpletional, confirmational, and motivation—involve being inspired by a specific event or experience. But we also use “inspiration” to say “I find inspiration in …” followed by a gerund1 that describes a class of activity: working, jogging, writing, painting, dancing, listening to music, praying for others, meditating, attending lectures, birdwatching, and so on. In this usage, however, “inspiration” is simply a synonym for joy or delight. One could equally say, “I find joy in writing” or “I take delight in praying for others,” by which we mean, “I find writing/praying for others fulfilling, so I make time in my life for it.”
Because this usage is more tied to a class of activity than a specific experience or event, it’s not something that authors can typically evoke within a reader’s experience of a single story unless the story’s intent is to awaken inspiration for that activity itself. If a story’s premise is, say, “Dancing embodies personal freedom,” then the story could potentially inspire a reader (via motivational inspiration) to want to dance more, which is to say, to find inspiration in dancing.
For this reason, we won’t consider this type of inspiration further in this series.
Forms of inspiration within persuasive speech
When you’re creating an experience for others, rather than receiving it, these flavors of inspiration supply a kind of toolset to help you make your point. In fact, if you’re writing stories that seek to inspire readers in some way, especially to inspire them to action, then you’re really engaging in rhetoric, which is to say, the art of persuasion, just like an orator. For this reason, it’s helpful to briefly review the six stages of classical (Aristotelian) rhetoric:
Exordium, the introduction, in which the rhetor announces the subject and establishes credibility with the audience (ethos).
Narratio, the narration, in which the rhetor provides the necessary backstory or groundwork for the arguments that follow.
Partitio, the division, in which the rhetor outlines the key points and structure of what’s to follow.
Confirmatio and refutatio, the arguments for and against a proposition (logos)
Peroratio, the closing, in which the rhetor sums up the argument and seeks to engage the audience through feeling (pathos) so that they take the desired action.
We can see that emotional and confirmational inspiration would often occur during the exordium and narration. Emotional and inpletional inspiration, along with confirmational inspiration, would occur during confirmatio and refutatio, as needed to support the argument or premise. And then motivational inspiration occurs in the peroratio, perhaps accompanied by doses of emotional or inpletional inspiration (to activate pathos) and a bit of confirmational inspiration to immediately reinforce the desired decision. All the forms of inspiration, in other words, have their place within the structure of persuasive writing, which includes any fiction that seeks to inspire readers or at least be meaningful to them rather than merely entertaining.
Proving a story premise
Purposeful and meaningful stories usually aim to explore a particular premise such as “Life is beautiful even amidst the most difficult circumstances.” As Daniel Schwabauer explains in both his One Year Adventure Novel and Other Worlds courses, a good story—especially a novel—is like science: the protagonist is on a quest to prove the truth of the story premise (a hypothesis) but runs up against any number of obstacles or challenges, including the fierce opposition of the antagonist, that attempt to prove that premise wrong.
Stories that really read like stories (with characters and interesting plotlines), however, don’t lay out logical arguments in exposition, as one would in non-fiction and other forms of persuasive rhetoric. This is not to say that various authors don’t try. Some novels contain extended conversations between characters and/or extended quotations from another fictitious book that appears in the story. Marie Corelli did a lot of this in novels like A Romance of Two Worlds (1886) and The Life Everlasting (1911), as did Aldous Huxley in Island (1962) as I noted in Genuine spirituality in fiction, part 1. A few other examples, which are nevertheless quite popular, are The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, and The Shack by William Paul Young.
Such titles are rare exceptions: most authors won’t get away with the same devices because they’re so obvious and so easy to get wrong. Exposition relies primarily on deductive logic and typically makes a story didactic or sermonizing, even if it’s done through a fictional conversation or quotations from a fictional book. The Shack, in fact, is mostly composed of a long conversation between the protagonist and embodiments of God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost in an attempt to answer the question, “Why does God permit evil and suffering?” With what little action there is, the protagonist demonstrates almost no agency as one expects to find in a story.
Making a point through story relies not on deductive but inductive reasoning. Instead of blatantly stating the conceptual arguments for and against the premise, a good story follows the show-don’t-tell principle: it illustrates or demonstrates the pros and cons of its premise through the choices that characters make and the consequences they suffer as a result. Readers, then, are given the freedom to draw or infer their own conclusions about the premise based on those experiences that they are vicariously sharing with the characters.
Extending that freedom to readers is what keeps a story from being didactic or sermonizing. Indeed, the same is true of proper rhetoric: persuasive writing and speaking seeks to inspire others to arrive at a particular conclusion, yes, but does not dictate that conclusion.
The flavors of inspiration in story structure
Although a story that seeks to inspire (that is, persuade) through the fictional experiences of characters won’t typically employ exposition and deductive logic, it can nevertheless follow the pattern of persuasive rhetoric: the introduction/hook (exordium), foundation/background (narratio), the outline of the argument (partitio), arguments for and against the proposition (comfirmatio and refutatio), and the closing/call-to-action (peroratio).
These stages map quite well to story structure within which an author can employ the different flavors of inspiration that we discussed in Part 1. The posts that follow will explore how this works within the three-act structure: Act 1—The Opening (Part 3), Act 2—The Middle Cycle (Part 3), and Act 3—The Climax and Conclusion (Part 4).
Until then, your thoughts are welcome.
(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!)
Apologies for going grammar geek on you, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. The gerund is my son’s favorite grammatical construction and one that most people can’t identify by name even though they use it all the time. Gerund is the technical term for a “verbal noun,” that is, a noun derived from a verb, which in this case is one usually ending in -ing. “To read” is a verb; “reading” is a gerund that can be used as a subject, as in “Reading is my favorite activity.” In some cases, a gerund can also be used as an adjective, as in a “reading light.”
I'm learning so much. I wish learning was always this fun.