Writing, inspiration and craft
June 26th, 2004 by Bill
I wrote something in an Orkut community last night and liked it so I’ve tweaked it a bit and posted it here as well. It’s about inspiration and while the original post was in the context of poetry and fiction, it’s applicable here too.
I think the wait for inspiration is a futile one. Here’s a good Jack London quote:
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
And another from Madeleine L’Engle:
Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.
I think writers sometimes think that what they write has to be good. It doesn’t. That’s why you rewrite. The first job is to just get it down. The real art of writing is in the rewriting. And quite often what you start out writing, or thinking you are writing, turns out to be something else entirely because the secret brain has its own ideas about what we’re creating.
One of my other favourite quotes is Sturgeon’s Law (Theodore Sturgeon, science fiction writer):
90% of everything is crud.
I think the point here is that the other 10% is gold, which is what you work for. But you still have to crank out that other cruddy 90%, embarrassing though it may be.
However (and it’s a big however), if you have worked on the craft of writing, if you brought some discipline and, over time, experience to it, that 90% need not be as cruddy as it originally comes out. You should be able to finesse the words and sentences into something pretty good and even, in some cases, great.
Because writing is a job like any other. A surgeon doesn’t wait for inspiration - she’s scheduled to operate at 9 a.m. and that’s when she operates. Trades people begin work at 8, or whenever their day starts, and they do their job till the work day ends. So, too, with writing.
If you expect to be paid for writing, be it business and other commercial writing or the area of fiction, even poetry, don’t expect to be very good or produce a great deal if instead of doing it you are waiting for the spirit to move you. The spirit comes and goes capriciously and you never know when, or even if, it will return.
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