INSPIRATION

Everyone talks about perspiration. Everyone talks about the long slog. Everyone talks about things like endurance and practice.

But what about inspiration?

I'll be honest. I've never understood writers who find the actual physical act of writing painful. To me, there's nothing more pleasurable than writing. There's nothing more insanely beautiful than sitting down to write--either longhand or on the computer--and find your fingers out-running your brain. To be so inspired that you're not thinking as you write, that you're just the vessel, the receptacle, for the words, which are pouring out as if they were your life's blood.

Look, the slow slog is true. A lot of your days are spent slogging through, of just making the forced march necessary to complete a story/novella/novel. You can't be inspired every day just like you can't be madly, deeply, insanely in love every day. It's just not possible. No one can sustain that. Your relationship over time with words, with stories, with characters, has to be deeper than that first rush of emotion.

But also, at base, that's what it's all about. It's about the almost sensual pressure of your fingers on the keyboard or the press of the pen against the notepad. It's about the point at which you stop thinking and you're channeling something through your fingers and you almost don't know how you got to that point.

You can't be madly in love all of the time, but if you're not in love some of the time, how do you continue?

I'm not suggesting that what one produces during blind inspiration/infatuation is superior to what you produce during the slow slog, but my god, why do you write if not for that moment when the world opens up before you and yet narrows to that singular point of pen against paper, that sensual drag of fingers across keys? Why do you write if not for that moment when you’re opened up to the point where there’s nothing of you left but the story and the characters and the words? Why?

We live and we die in such a short period of time. Why waste your time doing something you don’t get pleasure from?

I get pleasure from writing. An obscene amount of pleasure. From the physical act of putting pen to paper, or of typing words into a Word document, unromantic as that sounds. And on those days when I feel my heart beating fast and my mind focusing on something unreal to make it real. When I rise from sleep full of story or moment or character or image and when I write it seems as natural as breathing…well, that’s a bit like knowing what it’s like to be alive. Of being reminded. And of something flowing up and through me, which whether it is from me or something greater than me, imbues me (and the writing) with the same feeling.

I know the excrutiation of choosing the wrong word, of knowing I’ve taken the wrong path. I know the deep disappointment of being unable to make the vision on the paper match the vision in one’s head. This happens a lot. Sometimes it is unbearable.

But, regardless, on a basic level, why does one write except for the pleasure of the physical act of writing—without thought, without intent, without agenda. But simply…writing until there is nothing to the world except for the story.

God, I want to write right now. I want to be written.

Jeff