…I’m inspired, so I see to it that I’m inspired every day at 9 o’clock.”
Peter De Vries might be credited with this quote, but virtually every writer I know has said a version of this (if only to themselves) at some point. Because while inspiration is delicious and there is nothing like having creative energy roar through us with such power that we can barely keep up, it doesn't happen every day. In fact, most days it doesn't happen. And if we waited for that rush, waited to be inspired to write, we would never write. That's the bald truth of it. So what to do?
Well, in practical terms, we start by sitting down. (That's honestly the best writing advice I've ever been given.) It's very easy to talk about writing, tell our stories, go on about that book we're going to write, but talking about writing is not the same as Actually Writing. In fact, it's the opposite: no writing has ever been done while talking. So, in order to Actually Write, we need to sit down and stop talking. (That's the second best piece of writing advice I've ever been given.)
I was once invited to be part of a Career Day for high school students. When I arrived at the classroom, I was told to recount a 'day in the life of a writer,' and I remember first laughing loudly and then being struck dumb. Because there is nothing more boring than a day in the life of a writer.
We sit down, alone, for hours, snacking, until at some point, we write things down. Most of the things we write down, we end up erasing. Over and over again, until eventually, we've written more than we've erased.
The talk didn't go very well.
But that's truly the gig. And the only way things get written is if the person who wants to write shows up day after day after day after day, even and especially when she doesn't feel inspired. At first, nothing happens. Sometimes, nothing happens for a long, long time. And it is at precisely this point when the 'sit down and stop talking' advice becomes most critical, because the temptation to get up and start talking becomes almost unbearable.
Let it be unbearable.
Because only on the other side of that agony can a mysterious alchemy occur. Thoughts drift and lift, ideas coil through memory and possibility, people speak, time shifts, and something begins to pull from us, unspool into the silence and thread through our fingers, until suddenly we are typing and worlds are coming to life in front of us.
So it's sort of like being a magician, one of the students said to me at the end of my talk.
Yeah, I replied. That's it exactly.