I’ve been trying to write something all week and despite waiting patiently for the muse nothing much has been happening.
This is no longer a shock or even a surprise. I have come to be quite familiar with the feeling of nothingness that invariably springs up just at the moment I am hoping for “something”.
I Google “How to find inspiration” and am confronted with endless lists such as “50 Ways To Find Creative Inspiration.” (Fifty? Really?).
Flicking through them results in what little inspiration I did have draining away.
Changing tack I read the latest edition of Nick Cave’s “Red Hand Files” to discover that he is answering the question, “I feel so uninspired, can I have some of yours?”
He quotes Kafka’s view that it can be found by waiting for it patiently until it will “roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
Cave has found this not to be true and, in part at least, I agree with him. Instead, he believes it comes most readily through rigorous maintenance of routine and habit.
Having now written this blog for over a decade every single week, and coming quite close to 200 episodes of the podcast, also every week, I too have found routine to be a big help.
Musician Richard Thompson once described his approach to songwriting as one of “keeping the shop open” by writing every day even though most of what he produced was not at the level he wanted. The habit, he claimed, meant he would be ready when the good idea, the muse if you will, arrived.
Hearing this some years ago unlocked something in me because I, like many enthusiastic creatives, always imagined that the muse either visited or did not and that nothing could ever be forced.
Quantity, it turns out, can be the birthplace of quality albeit this is always in the eye of the beholder.
When a writer I admire agreed to edit me for a month and told me she’d include everything I wrote in that period I churned out 1000 words every single day all on different topics.
Most of it was garbage but the feedback was like gold and so I stopped waiting for inspiration and started to create it myself like some sort of wordy alchemist.
While thinking about all this I realised that quantity, routine, and putting in the work is what I always rely on.
When I meet a new client I often feel overwhelmed, as if I am standing at the foot of a huge mountain about to begin what might be a very long and painstaking climb with them.
By settling in for the long haul I find I can create the energy and ideas to keep moving, however hard it gets.
Routine, the acceptance of heaps of material you can’t use, a willingness to make constant mistakes and metaphorical re-writes until something usable emerges are all effective ways towards inspiration.
But Kafka is right too because had I not been devoid of inspiration and gone searching for it rather than waiting patiently for it to arrive I would never have happened upon Nick Cave’s answer, or Kafka’s opinion and I would probably not have thought about how it’s not always enough to wait for a muse and that often you have to just make it yourself.
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