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Available on Amazon
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About the Book:
Revolution rages in 20th-century China, a rusting container ship sails the world for two decades, and a tiny fairy is frustrated in a northern harbor town. “Trixi Pudong and the Greater World” is a family saga with a magical twist, spanning Shanghai’s Golden Age to Hamburg, Germany, 2015. It is a tale of four generations of a Chinese family, torn between their deepest dreams and loyalties.
Check out her awesome trailer:
Say hello to Audrey!
Audrey Mei was born in Oakland, CA, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area before studying cello and biological psychology/pre-med in Boston (New England Conservatory of Music/Tufts University). Following graduation, she received a Fulbright Grant for graduate studies in cello performance at Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland. Since 2006, Audrey has been dedicated to writing prose and poetry and has been published in Gangway Literary Magazine and Glimmer Train among others, as well as participating for several years in the Berlin English language literary scene.
The Anatomy of Productive
Inspiration
Thank you Diedre for hosting me on
my blog tour!
My pleasure, Audrey! I know you've been really busy.
This week, I've posted about why I
wrote my novel Trixi Pudong and the Greater World on Lidy Wilks' blog, and on Quanie
Miller's blog about the secret to writing a page-turner that moves
forward. Today I'm writing about Inspiration, how I use Inspiration as a
concrete tool in my writing.
I'm one of those authors that writes
backward -- to create something that moves forward. My inspiration comes from
knowing where my book ends. And how the chapter ends, and how the paragraph
ends.
But how do I find a good point of
inspiration to work towards? Well, you know that feeling when you see a movie
or read a book and that profound moment comes where you think, "This is great"?
Like the scene at the end of Sofia
Coppola's Lost in Translation where Bill Murray jumps out of the taxi in
Tokyo to bid one final goodbye to Scarlett Johansson on a busy sidewalk. He
whispers something unknown into her ear, but exactly what he says isn't
important anymore; the moment is pure intimacy.
Or the scene in Florian Henckel von
Donnersmarck's film The Lives of Others, where the Stasi officer Gerd
Wiesler is wearing surveillance headphones in a drab East Berlin attic, spying
on his enemy, but instead hearing a beautiful Beethoven Sonata from the
apartment below. The moment is infused with Wiesler's tacit longing to be loved
himself.
I try to capture this feeling --
what is it exactly, a feeling of emotional Quality? -- and I try to put
together elements that will build this feeling. There's a point where I get
obsessed with this inspiration and I can't let go. I start working backwards,
filling in the story that sets up and prepares this moment. It's a true
meditation and it takes concentration.
I didn't
discover this process intentionally. It was more my obsession with powerful
emotions that move an audience. But then when I finished the first manuscript
for Trixi Pudong, and one of my hardest writing critics (a
self-described Asberger personality) responded, "I actually cried a few
tears when I got to the part where Trixi [spoiler information]. How did you do
that, Ms. Mei?!"
Then I realized that with enough
focus and discipline in adhering to the rules of good writing, the emotional
state while we are writing can be transmitted through little black-and-white
words on the page.
What is your experience in using
Inspiration while you write?
