“Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.”
A student and aspiring fiction writer wonders why I seldom refer to “inspiration.” What is it? Do I deny its existence? Have certain writers successfully relied on it? Can he? My answer is yes and no, which betrays my background as a newspaper reporter. Telling an editor I hadn’t completed a story because I wasn’t “inspired” would be grounds, at minimum, for mockery if not dismissal. All those years of writing for a daily deadline resulted in a work ethic that now is second nature. You learn to budget your time appropriately, make telephone calls in a timely fashion and write even when the Muse is nonresponsive.
Writing can jump-start
inspiration. Just plow ahead, get something on the page or screen, and you’ve
created the conditions necessary for inspiration to bloom. Shortly after
publishing his penultimate novel, Transparent Things (1972), Nabokov
published a teasing essay titled “Inspiration” in the January 6, 1973, issue of
The Saturday Review. Listen to the voice of a man who had published his
first novel almost half a century earlier. He describes his experience with
inspiration in detail:
“The bolt of inspiration strikes
invariably: you observe the flash in this or that piece of great writing, be it
a stretch of fine verse, or a passage in Joyce or Tolstoy, or a phrase in a
short story, or a spurt of genius in the paper of a naturalist, of a scholar,
or even in a book reviewer’s article. I have in view, naturally, not the
hopeless hacks we all know—but people who are creative artists in their own
right . . .”
[The sentence at the top is Jules Renard’s entry for May 9, 1898, in his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]
1 comment:
This is true for other arts as well, such as mathematics. The mathematician's final paper looks like a model of step by step logic, but it developed from days or months of noodling around a problem, trying this and that, filling wastebaskets. And then, as with a poem, the direction begins to become clear, and the artist will make it beautiful -- but not without that initial labor.
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