'The Bolt of Inspiration Strikes Invariably'

“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).]