The Myth of Inspiration

I’m not gonna lie: September kicked my ass. Why? Couldn’t tell you. I just know that October 1st hit, and I felt the elephant on my chest finally shift its weight, and lumbered off. I’m breathing easier now, even though my body still feels sore.

If you’ve been following my thread on Substack, you’ll notice that I talk a lot about being burnt out and exhausted. I recognize the importance of taking care of myself (thanks, therapy), and I know when to take my foot off the gas and snuggle up on the couch with my cats. Yes, I love to rot and do nothing. But it takes me a while to give myself permission to retreat to my couch. I have a checklist, you see, of everything I have to do in my day before I can relax. And one of those nonnegotiables is writing.

Lately, though, I’ve been circling the page more often than not. In fact, I feel like doing anything except writing. Yesterday, for example, I decided I would rather take apart and clean my dishwasher than write. It required a nut driver, of all tools. But I went to work willingly, sopping up the dirty brown dishwater and sludge until I could see the pristine white bottom. My fingers were pruned by the time I was done. I looked at the clock. It was late. But I thought, I have to write something.

Here’s the thing: I don’t like the term “writer’s block.” It makes it sound like writing simply stops, like a faucet that won’t turn on. That happens for some, sure, but more often (at least for me) the words still come — they’re just bad. Characters flop, conflict fizzles, whole pages are nothing but someone pacing around a motel room. You keep producing sentences, but they sit there like lumps. It feels pointless. That’s the real block: not silence, but sludge.

And when that happens, most of us get crafty. We tell ourselves we’re being “productive” by cleaning out the dishwasher, reorganizing our desk, answering all those emails. Really, we’re just avoiding the uncomfortable truth: writing feels awful right now, and we’d rather do anything else. Naming that tendency — avoidance disguised as productivity — is half the battle.

Last night, while teaching a class for New Ulm Public Library in Minnesota, one of the writers asked me, What do you do when none of it is good?

“Well, you keep writing,” I said. “You sit with the awful feeling that it’s terrible, and you keep writing. Editing is where the real magic happens. You can write garbage, and that’s fine — because revision is where it turns into something worth keeping.”

That’s my comfort: not all writing has to be good, but all writing has to exist. Because until it’s on the page, you can’t shape it. And to get it on the page, I sometimes lower the bar to absurd levels: Write one ugly paragraph. Write until the timer goes off. Write three sentences and call it a day. The trick is not to wait for inspiration, but to give yourself just enough structure to break through the sludge.

I think there’s a misconception that writers flock to their computers enthused, knowing exactly what to write next. Most don’t. I don’t. My writing process is messy: I type nonsense until I stumble across a spark. Then I cradle that spark, blow on it, feed it with kindling until it becomes a fire that keeps me going. That’s when writing feels good again. But to get there, I have to wade through the nonsense.

So I work in cold blood, more often than not. Because writing is my nonnegotiable, and it simply has to happen.