Inspiration or Perspiration? BOTH! Ever wonder why you have writer’s block? Or artist’s block? Or just general all-around block? Because you are waiting for inspiration. Keyword: waiting. Not working; just waiting. You have to dive into creative waters even if inspiration doesn’t strike. When you are in there, swimming around, dodging the boulders, riding through the rapids, and slogging through what you think is bad work, the “block” lifts.
“No one has found any evidence that writer’s block is real. It is the inevitable underbelly of that other unproven phenomenon, the aha! moment. If you create only when you are inspired, then you cannot create when you are not inspired: therefore, creating can be blocked.”
Are you unable to type? No. It’s what you type that bothers you. As Anne Lamott writes in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, “Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. People tend to look at successful writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated.”
Are you unable to draw? To paint? To sit and contemplate the problem with the practices I teach you in this blog? No, you just want it to come out great right out of the chute. Trust me, I know. I knock out blog posts week after week, thinking, how in the heck am I going to write something good this time?
I don’t really know if I will. I do it because I’m following the advice that consistency and persistence are better than perfection. I hope that occasionally something comes out brilliant, but I don’t expect it. I don’t stop because I am not Mark Twain. I believe I have something important to teach people struggling with creativity. I don’t think my writing is always useful, but I hope it is. I intend to do the best I can and dive in.
“A victim of “writer’s block” is not unable to write. He or she can still hold the pen, can still press the keys on the typewriter, can still power up the word processor. The only thing a writer suffering from writer’s block cannot do is write something they think is good. The condition is not writer’s block; it is write-something-I-think-is-good-block.” – Kevin Ashton, How to Fly Like a Horse
“The cure is self-evident: write something you think is bad. Writer’s block is the mistake of believing in constant peak performance. Peaks cannot be constant; they are, by definition, exceptional. You will have good days and less good days, but the only bad work you can do is the work you do not do. Great creators work whether they feel like it or not, whether they are in the mood or not, whether they are inspired or not. Be chronic, not acute. Success doesn’t strike; it accumulates.”
We aren’t entitled to peaks. We can’t stop because they are hard to come by. The greatest artists, writers, creators, and innovators spend 90% of their time slogging through work they have doubts about. You are not exempt from this process. Failing to take this journey means your ideas won’t amount to anything: value yourself and your seedbops. Take the arduous journey. You will create something amazing “just around the corner.”
“Just around the corner” brings to mind backpacking with my father Jake in the Eastern Sierras, on some of the steepest, rockiest ascents in the Continental United States. I felt like I was forever slogging upward, tired and wanting to stop. To which my dad would say, “It’s just over this hill.” It wasn’t. He just kept saying that to make sure we didn’t give up. And when we finally arrived at the glorious vista, the stunningly beautiful tundra, thousands of tiny glacial lakes, all that angst was forgotten. The astonishing beauty in front of us was worth all that agony. And we slept very well that night!
“Writing doesn’t come easy, it’s agonizing work, very hard, and you have to break your neck doing it. Tolstoy said, in effect, “you have to dip your pen in blood.” I used to get at it early in the morning and work at it and stay at it and write and rewrite and rethink and tear up my stuff and start over again. I came up with such a hard-line approach – I never waited for inspiration; I always had to go in and do it. You gotta force it. I found over the years that any momentary change stimulates a fresh burst of mental energy. So if I’m in this room and then I got into the other room, it helps me. If I go outside to the street, it’s a huge help. If I go up and take a shower, it’s a big help. So sometimes take extra showers. I’ll be in the living room and at an impasse, and what will help me is to go upstairs and take a shower. It breaks up everything and relaxes me. I go out on my terrace a lot. One of the best things about my apartment is that it’s got a long terrace, and I’ve paced it a million times while writing movies. It’s such a help to change the atmosphere.” – Woody Allen
“Inspirational lightning bolts are external – they come from without and are beyond our control. The power to create must come from within. Writer’s block is waiting for something outside yourself and just a shinier way to say “procrastination.”
All references are from How to Fly A Horse: The Secret History of Creations, Invention and Discovery, by Kevin Ashton, 201, Anchor Books
Photo by Tom Spross on Unsplash
Related posts:
What’s It Like to be Creative
The Value of Not Knowing What You Are Doing
Stop Judging the Process and Clear the Way for Magic!
