When Inspiration Fails
Inspiration has never been a problem for me.
Inspiration isn’t my issue. Inspiration, if you want to get technical, really only pertains to something that sparks the want to do something creative; it is the mental stimulant, what gets your thought process going, what drives your desire to create.
Inspiration isn’t my problem.
Production is.
There are always things calling me to write: a snippet of a conversation I’ve overheard (and trust me, working in a high school? I hear some fantastic non-sequiturs), an image in a magazine, a line in a song. Hell, when I was in college, I wrote an entire 5,000 word short story that snowballed from my love of the phrase “Flow, Morpheus, slow, down the river of night’s dreaming,” a line from a song in the fucking Rocky Horror Picture Show (and had a wildly similar experience a couple of years later writing a 3500 word lesbian romance off a throwaway quip from the TV show MASH).
My point being, finding things — words, images, dialogue — that make me want to write is not problematic.
Writing is. Getting the words down on the page is.
It’s not getting the idea in my head, it’s getting my ass in the chair and my fingers on the keyboard and the words on the paper.
So, I guess the real question isn’t, what drives me to want to create; it’s, what finally sits me down and gets me to produce?
Simple answer? Two things: having a deadline, and the fear of semi-public humiliation. NaNoWriMo, helpfully, provides both.
I know, I should be a motivational speaker, right? I just named two of the biggest killjoys of writing — having to adhere to a schedule, and having people judge you.
Except that’s not how I look at it.
Personally, I often feel absolutely paralyzed with the absolute freedom I have when it comes to creating. I love the intellectual freedom to create, and I will defend to the death my right to a creative space that speaks to me on a personal level; I believe that no one should censor what I am able to write about, in what manner or medium I am able to express my thoughts, and…
