Observations, Death, Inspiration, Darkness, and Light. A look at Edgar Allan Poe

Teresa Arrowood
Jan 19, 2019
3 min read

As a writer, I have found myself in multiple situations looking for characters or listening to myself and the ideas that I carry with me. But there’s never quite the experience until you sit down and quietly observe the people around you. I have gone on trips with my mother shopping, or with my husband on it of weekly date or another place of entertainment and found myself watching those around me. What I have seen is that I have derived characters from those people. One that comes to mind, in particular, was when I went on a shopping trip for Christmas a couple of years back. My mother and I were sitting in a restaurant, and we were talking with each other as an average family would do over the dinner table, but then I became distracted. The reasoning is I was watching this young lady sitting at the bar area holding a drink. I don’t know what it was about her that caught my eye, but I watched her mannerism as she sat there a and looked over her cell phone and sipping her drink. It wasn’t long before a gentleman joined her. And it came to me for some reason this couple made a good story. You start speculating about who they are and why they chose to meet there. Was he a boyfriend? Was he a lover? Was he her brother’s best friend? Was a connection there? I guess he could have been her boss and met her there for lunch but seeing that it was on a Saturday, I highly doubt it. But I watch them interact and All of these ideas in my head. What would it be like if she did this, she said this, he said that, well, you get the picture.

There are a lot of stories out there, but most authors have a reason why they write certain things. There are some famous writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen that all wrote romanticism that came from very troubled lives. Just a focus in Edgar Allan Poe died by the time he was 40. He grew up very hard, his father had abandoned the family, and his mother died before he was three. He was taken in by a family where he stayed until his young adulthood. In the household in which he lived because of debt from a gambling issue and monies used for his secondary education. In 1827 he enlisted into the Armed Forces at West Point, in this too he failed, this is where his publishing career started. He begins to write articles for journals and periodicals which forced him into larger cities.

Talk about something that would cause gossip today, Edgar married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm in 1836. In 1845 he published The Raven that became an instant success, but Virginia died of tuberculosis two years after it became published. If you want to think of it, this way, romance is born from tragedy. I write what I know. After 39 years of nursing, I have seen a lot of different things happen. Changes in particular but not only that but the things that people can do to themselves to inflict harm or to someone else. I built the books that I have written around first responders, and I hope that as I write these books will be written better and better as I go. It’s true that I’m an amateur and I’m growing. Working toward perfection in how I write and how the story is presented is merely my goal. I have used some incidents from things that I’ve witnessed and used the imagination of a 50+-year-old woman. Creativity is a beautiful thing, and as they say, the truth is stranger than fiction. I guess that is where they got the phrase sense great works can come from true beginnings.

In case you didn’t know today is Poe’s birthday he was born January 19, 1809, and passed from this earth at the age of 40 on October 7, 1849. Poe’s final resting place is Westminster Hall Baltimore Maryland, but this success of his writing career still lives on in literature being taught and appreciated by millions. So where does the darkness come from, the simple answer is living. Darkness and light are in the living, but a good writer can use both.