Writing and Inspiration
“One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you knew that this hour were your critical, decisive hour, would you wait for inspiration?
WordNet says it is a stirring up, a push to “special unusual activity or creativity.” If we, writers, wait for inspiration to push us to that special activity of writers, we will never succeed. Writing, writing often, writing much, and writing well cannot be special and unusual for freelance writers. It must be the daily work, the norm, the standard. If we get a flash of inspiration, it should push us on to write 5000 words instead of 3000, or to draft the entire book proposal instead of only the first half as planned.
Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” he replied. “Fortunately it strikes at nine o’clock sharp.” That’s a pro. Maugham reckoned another deeper truth: that by performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration, as surely if the goddess had synchronized her watch with his. He knew that if he built it, she would come (69-70). From jcnoguera.com quoting Pressfield’s book The War of Art.
The small movements of a diligent writer, pushing and pushing toward a page filled with words, eventually becomes the faster movement of a writer inspired. You start out slow. You jot down a title or two. You fill in some main points. You close every distraction down and focus. You form the words into sentences, and even as you are thinking how stupid they sound you are forming more. One paragraph. Two. Three. Suddenly you’re not trying anymore, you’re just typing as quickly as your hands can to keep up with the flow of your mind. At some point you stepped out of the drudgery and into the pale, beautiful light of inspiration. You’re flowing, you’re moving, you’re writing, and you’re loving it.
When it dries up, though, when you get to the end of the story or the conclusion of the article, when you break for lunch or have to take a phone call, you must often start again at the same place. And that’s when it is difficult. You just felt the rush and pull of the inspiration, and that’s the way you want to feel when you write. But remember, remember how it started. Not by sitting, and waiting, and thinking inspired thoughts, but by pushing yourself through the drudgery.
Inspiration is always there; it just likes to play a little hard to get. It doesn’t want to appear desperate, so it waits for the writer on the other side of a few dry paragraphs. Go get it.
Make it a good day.
Image Credit: Ravages.
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