Inspiration: Writing

Inspiration—Origin: Middle English (in the sense “divine guidance”); via Old French from Late Latin. Literally, in spirit.

My favorite piece of my writing—a poem—sucks. It’s juvenile, which is appropriate, since I wrote it when I was 17 years old. My adult inner critic and I reread it recently and we both cringed over the labored language, the forced rhyming and alliteration, the sloppy teenage angst. This poem is no work of art, and yet it’s my favorite writing because it is one of those rare pieces that woke me up in the middle of the night demanding to be written.

I wrote the first draft of my novel, which also sucks, in six months. There were nights when I sat down to write—after I’d run out of ways to procrastinate—for a mere 15 minutes. Six hours later, I got up to make a cup of tea or pee, and realized how much time had passed, that I’d been completely absorbed in my work, that I was one with my words.

I became infatuated with words young. My father told me I spoke in full sentences before I could walk. My mother taught me to read when I was four. I am in love with novels and novelists, poems and poets, sportswriting, satire, travelogues, biographies of athletes, every word ever written about Mt. Everest. I would rather read TV show recaps on Vulture.com than watch the shows.

These days I balance out full days of business writing with working on the third draft of my novel, which doesn’t suck nearly as much as the first two drafts. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night, inspired. I don’t have the luxury of awaiting inspiration. I have to seek inspiration, grab it, hold it close and nurture it. I pray. I meditate. I remind myself inspiration can be a regular occurrence, rather than some random mystical act. I look to famous authors and find comfort in knowing that even Nobel Laureates struggled to get their writing right.

Here are some of my favorite writing quotes:

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us get up and go to work.” —Stephen King

“The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.” —Joyce Carol Oates

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” —Ernest Hemingway

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” —Virginia Woolf

“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.” —Doris Lessing

“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.” —Lawrence Block

“When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.” —Stephen King

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” —Mark Twain

“I almost always urge people to write in the first person. … Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.” —William Zinsser

“The first draft of anything is shit.” —Ernest Hemingway

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” —Franz Kafka

“All writing comes by the grace of God.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson