Inspiration Shminspiration

I used a misleading word yesterday. INSPIRED. When I sat down to write today after my little morning rituals, I became aware suddenly of my grave error and felt it necessary to correct it as soon as possible.

There were a few old ideas I operated on in regard to writing. Some of them I’ve discussed already. A big one was that I had to be crazy in order to be creative. (No jokes at my expense, please.) Another falsehood I operated on was that I had to be INSPIRED to write.

It turns out that these are both fabrications of the grandest variety. They are the kind of lies that one tells to oneself that kill the dream. And I couldn’t just have that hanging out there like that, possibly bolstering someone else’s misconceptions.

Turns out you don’t HAVE to be crazy in order to be creative and you don’t HAVE to be inspired in order to write. The only thing you HAVE to do in order to write is write.

I hate that.

But it’s true.

It’s discipline that brought me here. There is a creative force that I have tapped into, but I never would have been able to access it if I hadn’t been disciplined enough to put myself in the same place at the same time every single day and train myself or let God train me to receive.

I am committed. I am regimented. I thrive on structure. And it’s served me well. Every writing book I’ve ever read has touted the same thing, and for a long time I thought, “Phooey. I just need to be INSPIRED. That’s what’s lacking in my life. INSPIRATION. I can’t write because my life is an awful, dry, meaningless desert and who wants to write about that?”

But everyone kept saying it. And the same thing caused me to grow out of that idea that always pushes me out of old ideas that aren’t working and into new ideas. Pain. You can only deny your deepest dream for so long before it starts getting uncomfortable. And when that happened for me, “miraculously” I came upon The Artist’s Way and a friend who was willing to take me through it in a very enthusiastic, encouraging way.

The first thing that was asked of me was to start Morning Pages. That is, three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing every morning. At first, I thought I was supposed to be writing, like, prose. This put a lot of pressure on my already pressured brain. When I ended up writing things like, “My hand really hurts and I’ve only written two paragraphs. I have to go to the grocery store today and pick up some peanut oil,” it became discouraging. Where was the beauty inside? But I was accountable to my friend. She would ask me if I’d done the morning pages, so I wanted to be able to tell her I did them. (See, character defects (i.e. caring too much what people think of me) work for me sometimes.)

So I kept at it, even though I was totally missing the point. This is the thing: It doesn’t matter what is behind the action. As long as you take the action you will get the results. Eventually, because I was committed and disciplined, I got the gift. I began to see that, if I let them, the Morning Pages could be like taking out the garbage, an emptying of my mind. They cleared out a space for some other voice(s) to get through.

I want writing to be romantic and feverish. I want it to be like those scenes in Shakespeare in Love or Becoming Jane. Ink from my quill all over my bloodied fingers and a little bit at my mouth where I’ve touched it in thought, crumpling up page after page of inferior product, going after it and after it until I finally hit it, the exaggerated flourish as I place the last period on the page and push back from my desk, satisfied.

I write on a computer. My mind works way faster than my hand could ever carry me. So there goes the ink well image.

Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes it is like that. Sometimes I see something so clearly, I still can’t get it out fast enough, even though I type maybe 90 words a minute.

But sometimes it’s a struggle. Sometimes I rearrange the same seven words over and over until I have the sentence I’m after. Sometimes I write a paragraph and spend the rest of my writing time staring helplessly at my screen. Please don’t be put off or think that there’s some kind of insane comparison going on, but Bestie A and I call them Kerouac days and Hemingway days. (The reference is about production, not quality.)

No matter what kind of day I have, you can bet I am going to have a day, because no matter what, I sit at my computer every morning at 5:30. And it’s awfully good to have a day. It confirms that I am, in fact, a writer. Not because I’m published or because that's how I make my living. Yet. I’m a writer because I write.