There are times I certainly struggle with being inspired for my writing. I can't seem to figure out what to write, so I write nothing. This holds for my blog more than anything else. Well, it was nice to read how Jack London (
White Fang) dealt with
inspiration. Below are a couple quotes from the article:
"To write — and make a living — the way London did, there just isn’t the possibility of waiting around for inspiration to strike. The same holds true in other fields. When we’re in need of inspiration for any project, we have to be prepared to go find it."
"Nice as inspiration is, there are always projects where we just don’t have the time to find inspiration. While inspiration can make the work go faster, though, it’s not always necessary: sometimes just sitting down and putting together an uninspired project is the best option."
Where do you go hunting for inspiration? I get some of my inspiration from the online blogs I subscribe to, or news articles that come across my virtual desk. What do you do when you go looking for inspiration but come back empty-handed? For the most part, I don't write, but I'm getting better at either going to revise an earlier work, or simply writing to get
something down on paper, and worry about making it "inspired" later.
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2 comments:
Excellent thought - looking for inspiration. Here I am looking for it right now :-)
I'm going to just nano the rest of Letters to Edward this week. It's got to get done. And, since I can't sleep anyway, might as well write. Thanks for posting - it is inspiring!
Opinion: you can't force inspiration any more than you can force a seed to grow into a plant, but you can cultivate the soil and wait and see what sprouts up.
The inspiration for past work came from reading a set of books and deciding I wanted to do something similar, but in my own way. My current nonfiction project is inspired again from a preexisting work; I'm just inserting my own topic, something I've grown passionate to explore. And then, sometimes you just have a vivid dream, sit up in bed and write or sketch something to remind yourself what you were thinking when you're back in the coherency of the real world. I haven't done much with the latest inspiration yet, but it's been rattling around in my head for a week, and I'm hoping to polish off the edges with the inside of my skull and see if there's enough gem there to do the work of translating to text (or sketch).
(Frankly, this blog is a good source of inspiration, too. Thanks, Mike!)
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