If you wait forinspiration to write, you\u2019re a waiter. Not a writer.<\/p>\n
– – Dan Poynter<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Feeling inspired is a high like no other. It\u2019s a divine spark. Your paintbrush skims across the canvas seemingly by itself. You hear the music inside your head before you open your mouth to sing. You feel the dance steps enlivening your muscles before you start to move. Your fingers fly across the keyboard like they have a mind of their own.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0Feeling uninspired, a far more common occurrence, seems like a gray cloud is hovering. Your mind is jumbled and unfocused, skipping from thought to thought like an Orangutan, jumping from one tree branch to the next, never resting or alighting anywhere. Writing anything decent feels so remote, you decide your scribbles read like a first grader reporting to the class what you did last summer. You can’t win. Sticking with your work feels foolish and walking away feels cowardly.<\/p>\n
The solution to this dilemma is straightforward. Just keep doing what you’re doing. Thomas Edison said that genius is five percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. If you keep at it long enough, you\u2019ll eventually break through the perspiration and find the inspiration underneath it, right where it always was.<\/p>\n
Does the following sound familiar?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 3 AM and the muse whispers in your ear and wakes you up, flitting and tripping around your brain, hinting at the fabulous stories she\u2019ll tell you when you start writing. She may even give you the first sentence. You sit up, jot down a few words and go back to sleep. The next morning, you boot up your computer. You look at the notes you made last night and your heart races with anticipation and possibility. You feel inspired as you place your fingers on the keyboard. You wait for a pulse of energy
to run through you, and then . . . nothing. Your hands are still and you have no idea where that inspiration went.<\/p>\n
When you\u2019ve been writing for what feels like forever, searching everywhere for the muse, there\u2019s no way to know if or when she\u2019ll pay you a visit. Like a snobby socialite, she arrives fashionably late to the festivities if she comes at all and she doesn’t say good-bye when she leaves. But when you find a way to romance her without smothering or being demanding, when you let go and resign yourself to writing with her or without her, don’t be surprised if she sidles up like a cat, rubs against your legs, and pounces into your lap, bestowing upon you breathtaking pathways to your soul\u2019s expression. I always seem to write better with a snoozing cat in my lap\u00a0<\/p>\n
I keep in mind that for me, writing is a practice. I do it every day.<\/p>\n
Inspiration on the other hand, is a gift. It comes and goes as it pleases.<\/p>\n
The question is: Can you write when you don\u2019t feel inspired? Do you have the patience to wait for the muse? For the inspiration? Do you have the wherewithal to write if she never shows up at all? Do you have the fortitude to face the blocks and find a way to move through them. I tell my students that I can\u2019t teach them how to write. What I can teach them is how to remove the obstructions like self-criticism and making comparisons, the things that stop the inspiration from coming through.<\/p>\n
When master painter Pablo Picasso was boarding an airplane in Spain, he dreaded flying and he was in a really bad mood when he took his seat, grousing at everyone and pouting like a child. But once he was in the air, he gazed out the window and he was astonished to see the clouds and the earth below appearing in cubic formations. This was his inspiration for his \u201cCubism\u201d period. Even Picasso was unable to predict when the muse would come but when she did, he recognized her.<\/p>\n
If you don\u2019t feel inspired to do your work, you can turn to someone else to help but be careful of how you interpret it. A writer friend of mine was inconsolable after he read the highly lauded William Styron novel, Sophie\u2019s Choice. The story line was so wrenching, the characters, the dialogue and the politics so authentic, he was too intimidated to pick up his own pen. He felt like it was a waste of time to even try. When I encouraged him to use that book for inspiration and give it a go, he said, \u201cWhy bother? Styron just did it perfectly. What\u2019s left to say? The last thing the world needs is one more bad book cluttering the marketplace.\u201d<\/p>\n
My friend denied himself the opportunity to utilize something wonderful, a book he admired, to inspire and catapult him into the next phase of his own greatness. All he could do was compare himself to someone else, feel small and decide that he came up short.<\/p>\n
When you witness a powerful performance, a masterful sculpture, a symphony or a good
book, you have choices:<\/p>\n
You can ignore the great work altogether. It has nothing to do with you and
it\u2019s way beyond your reach.<\/p>\n
You can listen to your inner critic belittling and discouraging you until you
vow never to try again. Nothing banishes inspiration faster than self-judgment.<\/p>\n
Or:<\/p>\n
You can revel in the magnificence of someone else\u2019s art, the power of the
music, the flow of the words and use it all for inspiration. If they did it,
why can\u2019t you?<\/p>\n
Genius is not that you are smarter than
everyone else. It is that you are ready to receive the inspiration. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 – – – Albert Einstein\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you wait forinspiration to write, you\u2019re a waiter. Not a writer. – – Dan Poynter \u00a0 Feeling inspired is a high like no other. It\u2019s a divine spark. Your paintbrush skims across the canvas seemingly by itself. You hear the music inside your head before you open your mouth to sing. You feel the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2876,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2877"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2878,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2877\/revisions\/2878"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}