Inspiration

I decided to write about inspiration today because I was experiencing a serious lack of it. I sat down to do my blog entry, and nothing came. Nothing. Just a blank screen. I didn’t even have a topic or theme. After three or four deleted dead-ends, I was back to the blank screen and decided: enough. Time to leave my desk and go out walking. This week, the hot and humid edge of summer is softening, hinting at the moderate perfection of early autumn. It’s ideal walking weather. I was just ten minutes out the door, not even at the most scenic, peaceful part of my route, when I had a moment of inspiration about, well, inspiration.

I am not the kind of writer who waits for inspiration. If I did, I would rarely write. Nearly every page that I have written over the past few weeks for my next deadline (Monday!) has been a slow go. I make progress by consistent effort. The pages accumulate, one paragraph, one piece of dialogue, one scene at a time. Only once or twice have I had real “eureka” moments. If they happen, it is usually when I am out walking. Last fall, after years of struggling to organize the material for my philosophy book, I was plodding along the same tired road that I always take home, when suddenly, I saw the shape of the book, chapter by chapter, fall into place right before my eyes. There was no question in my mind that I had hit it. From the title, to the way the halves would divide up, to the names of each chapter, it was all there. I rushed home, went straight to the computer, typed out the outline, and taped it to the wall right beside my monitor. That was my guidebook. I had only to fill it in. Even with my moment of inspiration, the ideas would not write themselves. After that, it still took months of diligent, daily chipping away at it to get the thing written. During that time, there were few moments where I felt inspired. Instead, there were some days when the writing flowed lightly and easily and other days when it felt agonizing and slow. I logged the hours regardless.

A colleague of mine described his manic experience with his last book. For the majority of his leave, he avoided his work. Then, just a couple of months before the end of the leave, he said he started to feel guilty for having squandered it. One night, an idea came to him, as if from the sky. “Truly inspired,” he said. For the next four weeks, he worked round the clock, snatching bits of sleep here and there, sustaining himself on coffee. He lost twenty pounds. But at the end of it, he had a book. He took a computer diskette out of his pocket and waved it at me. “Here it is,” he said, “All right here.”

That is not my style. If I spend four hours in a day actually writing, that’s a good day. Two hours, and I’m perfectly satisfied. One hour or less will sometimes have to do. I take at least a day off each week, where I don’t do any writing unless I feel irresistibly inspired, which, as I have said, doesn’t happen to me much. I love writing the most when I know that it is not the only thing in life, when it is a choice among others. So, instead of waiting for inspiration, I am most productive when I have other things to do. I got quite a bit done today, for example, despite having a committee meeting. In some ways, the meeting helped me get focused. Tonight we’re going out to dinner with friends. No doubt, that has contributed to my sitting down to write this blog entry. Knowing I can’t do it later, has got me doing it now. No inspiration required.