Recently, a friend of mine has been on an extraordinary writing kick, churning out 3,000 to 4,000 words of good prose on her novel, day after day after day, for weeks on end. She is ecstatic, and I am happy for her. Truly happy.
Of course, I can’t help but be a little envious, too. I mean, isn’t that what we all hope for when we sit down to write: that we will achieve that glorious flow state where the ideas pour forth from our imaginations almost as fast as we can get them down on the page? Then later, upon re-reading, we will discover that we had managed to say more or less what we had intended.
At some point, every writer experiences that flash of inspiration, and the high it produces has got to feel better than any drug. Chasing that feeling is what keeps many of us coming back to the blank page day after day, even when the writing feels like a chore.
When I was just starting out as a writer, so many of my short stories were composed in this way that I didn’t understand how rare these episodes are. When I began taking writing more seriously and writing more consistently, those flashes of inspiration were necessarily fewer and farther between. I’m not aware that seasoned, professional writers experience this all that often, although George Saunders has recounted how he drafted his short story “Sparrow,” from Liberation Day, in a single sitting, at his kitchen table, in the dark, without his glasses on. What a story!
Nowadays, I never expect such writing gifts to just fall into my lap. However, recently I was flipping through an old journal and came across a detailed account I wrote a few years ago, just after experiencing one of these flashes of writerly good fortune.
“These conditions are reproducible!” I wrote, with added emphasis. “This was the greatest story I have ever written—ever. It was my own unique idea, and it flowed out of me just as I had conceived of it. The high has sustained me for two weeks, even though I haven’t been able to write a single word. I just know I can do it again….”
Boy! Can you hear her enthusiasm, her confidence?
What I wrote next surprised me even more. I actually made a list for my future self of the “key conditions” I felt had contributed to this bout of inspired storytelling. Here’s what I wrote, verbatim [plus new comments in brackets]:
The conditions:
Protect a quiet block of distraction-free time, preferably at the same time every day so that I am primed and ready to “show up on the page.” [At the time, I was able to put in about four hours of writing every morning.]
Draw inspiration from other great stories. [A few paragraphs earlier, I noted how I had just that very morning finished reading Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s short story “Control Negro,” and it showed me a possibility for transforming a struggling personal essay into a dystopian short story.]
Learn more craft tips. [I had just finished watching Roxane Gay’s MasterClass on writing for social change, which helped me reimagine my essay for another genre.]
Find the right mechanical tools/methods for my writing process. [I had just read this article in The New Yorker about distraction-free devices for writers and discovered I write better rough drafts when I write longhand, then type to revise.]
Get in touch with my feelings by writing in my journal about the themes and experiences I want to wrestle with in my fiction.
Walking helps. [During this period in my life, I often walked a couple of times a week for up to two hours at a time while listening to an interview, profile, or short story that was somehow related to my fiction.]
Look, I will be the first to acknowledge that all of this requires the privilege of time. And often time means money. There have only been a few short periods in my life when I have had the large blocks of uninterrupted time that I had when I wrote this diary entry. Still, I think it’s important to name what conditions those were, even if they are not always available. Because once you name them, you are better able to find them.
My friend—the one cranking out 3,000+ words a day—currently devotes hours and hours a day to her writing. But it’s not because she is independently wealthy or because she recently won the lottery. She has a lighter-than-usual workload at the moment and has pulled back from all of her other commitments so that she can focus on her biggest priority: finishing her novel.
As for me, I can pinpoint at least four more instances of similar inspiration that sustained me from the beginning to the end of a story. Now have any of those stories been published? No. Even that first story—the one that inspired me to wax poetic in my journal—does not seem as brilliant to me now as it did back then. But each of those stories was better than anything I had previously written and was an important step along my writing path. I still love each of them for what they taught me and for the way they became the story I hoped they would be.
While I don’t believe anyone can engineer inspiration, I do believe that the more you pay conscious attention to the conditions that lead to it, the more likely you are to encounter it. Discovering this journal entry made me aware of my back-sliding ways, and although I have been pretty consistently performing conditions one and two, I haven’t really been attending to conditions three through six for some time. Now that I know what led to previous inspiration, I know how to do better. I’m not just idly waiting around for lightning to strike. I’m walking into the right field, at the right stormy moment, carrying the biggest metal lightning rod I can find.
My kernel of advice: Revisit past successes to summon the lightning strike of writerly inspiration.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
Sarah and Neidy attended the AWP conference in Kansas City this week. They went to readings, listened to panels, perused the book fair, and just enjoyed each other’s company. They 100 percent recommend you attend—especially if you go with one of your best writing friends!
Natalia tried to find some more time to read this week and she picked up Swann’s Way, There There, and The Song of Bernadette. In between books she is resisting checking the Grad Cafe website and the MFA Draft Facebook group.
Shelby read the short story collection Patterns of Orbit by Chloe N. Clark, which utterly spooked her as she read them right before bed. The stories focus on science fiction, folktale, and horror, and Shelby loved reading Clark’s thought process in the acknowledgements: “I realized one of the biggest, my biggest, preoccupations in [the stories] is the orbit of people who surround the protagonists. Who do we love and how do they help us? What do we owe to one another and how do we honor those who surround us?”
This reminds me a bit of Cal Newport’s Deep Work and the LifeHacking subculture that’s so prominent in the tech community. I think all of us now struggle with distraction and divided attention. In the modern world, creative people have to consciously cultivate the conditions for serious work. Big blocks of distraction-free time. Embracing boredom and daydreaming. Whittling your life down to what’s important.