Creative splurge

About 9 days ago I went to a concert. One of the people on the bill was this Armenian composer who presented his arrangements of several Armenian folk songs. During one song I got such a strong visual image: of low golden sunlight on a barren plain lighting up a collection of isolated buildings that turn out to be a monastery of some sort. (Actually I think my mental image was set more in Siberia or someplace a lot farther north than Armenia, not that I know anything about Armenia other than it's down by Turkey somewhere.)

Sekretnaut, with whom I was attending the concert, had mentioned to me previously about how, during a Vipassana retreat, it was not uncommon to have one or more extended flashes of creative inspiration during the nine days. They even had a standard name for it, which I forget -- something like a "creativity dump." I knew just what she meant because I experienced such a flash of inspriation myself back in July 2002 when I was doing all that Zen meditation -- one day during a day-long sit, I suddenly focused completely on my book, all these ideas welled up, and without trying to I solved several problems with the narrative and with characters that I had been working on for months without much progress. So I had such a flash of inspiration during a single musical number during this concert. It was such a strong image that I feel like turning it into a novel, notwithstanding the other novel I thought I was going to start this spring.

Of course, if I paid attention to every strong idea I had for novels, I wouldn't have time to write them all even if I worked eight hours a day on nothing but. Nonetheless, I'm tempted to just go for it.