Five Decisions That Are Better Than Waiting for Inspiration

The screen sits blank. Your head feels as empty as the page before you. The chasm between what you want to say and having said it grows wider and deeper with every blink of the cursor.

You know a fifth trip to the bathroom in thirty minutes should trouble you, so you coach yourself to remain seated.

Nothing.

You stare at the clock: the minutes move slower than when you took standardized tests in school. You've now sat there—uninspired—for a whopping thirty-five minutes.

And, despite what all the Instagram coaches tell you, inspiration feels a universe away.

What's an uninspired writer to do? Take a break? Wait until the breeze of inspiration catches the sails of creativity? Perhaps another episode of Game of Thrones will send a gust your way.

What Hath Writing to Do with Inspiration?

Inspiration is illusive—and dangerous. It's addicting. Once you've encountered a little, you crave more. You begin to depend on it.

And when you depend on inspiration, you fall under its spell, believing it's a superior source of writing.

And that's a problem. It's a problem because it replaces the true, and only dependable, source of writing: the writer.

And once the writer has been replaced, the only course of action for the would-be writer is inaction.

As Stephen King puts it, rather bluntly, "Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration. The rest of us just get up and go to work."

So, what are you to do when you lack inspiration? Here are five helps.

1. Show up.

Time and time again, you show up.

It's important for writers, especially younger ones, to know that inspiration is illusive and shouldn't be a surefire step in their writing process.

Taking breaks, listening to music, going for a walk, these are great ways to grease the gears and clarify a stubbornly cloudy thought. But if the first fifteen trips to the fridge didn't get the creative juices flowing, the sixteenth one won't do it.

We all want the words to flow. We want to see the best words take to the page with the precision of a military platoon. But it's rare the right words arrive right away, and it's even more rare for them to arrive in the best order.

I don't want to give the impression that inspiration isn't enjoyable. Inspiration is great. Like wind being caught in a sail, inspiration can help you get to where you want to go. But the wind doesn't always blow. In fact, it rarely does. And when it doesn't, it's time to abandon ship and begin swimming.

And while waiting for a breeze will always be more appealing than swimming, jumping ship and making your own waves is what makes you a stronger writer.

And being a stronger writer is better than being an inspired writer.

As my friend Erin Brenner says, "Put in BIC time: Butt in chair."

2. Embrace the hard work of the sentence.

Expect writing to be more difficult than accidentally easy.

Expectations are tricky. We try to avoid making them, but we make expectations for movies, days off, people, places, food, restaurants, etc. And nothing throws a wet blanket on an experience like an unmet expectation.

The same is true for writing. Too often, writers arrive at a writing project, expecting to feel inspired. They expect words to flow like the waters of the Niagara on a clear day, except their writing feels more like the Sahara: desolate. What follows next is the worst feeling for a writer: defeat.

Don't expect writing to feel like a trip down a lazy river. Instead, expect writing to feel more like an upstream swim. Embrace that.?

Writing isn't always an upstream swim. Some days it's easier than others. When it is easier, lean into it. But, as William Zinsser says, "The clear sentence is no accident. If writing feels hard, it's because it is."

3. Work from a plan.

Show up. Expect writing to be more difficult than it is easy. Then, work from a plan.

Juxtaposed against inspiration, organization will always be more valuable. In other words, grow familiar with writing outlines.

But outlines aren't creative, right? What professional writers outline anymore? Shouldn't we leave with those with colorful writing-process posters of our middle-school English classes?

Yes and no.

Countless young writers, hooked on inspiration, want writing to feel like a safari expedition with Hemingway. But even Hemingway's safaris had an itinerary.

Jon Franklin, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning nonfiction writer, wrote, "And, you say...outlines are optional, aren't they? Did Hemingway outline? you ask. Did Steinbeck outline? Did Shakespeare outline? Yeah. Sure they did, Of course. Obviously. I don't care what you've heard, or what your literature teacher said, or even what the writers themselves said. Every writer of any merit at all during the last five hundred years of English history outlines virtually everything he wrote."

Yes, you should outline.

And there’s good news: you don’t need those Roman-numeral-infused outlines from school.

Those helped our fourth-grade selves learn that writing is a process. But a survey of professional writers will reveal that writing outlines and plans are as sundry as writers themselves.

Nearly every writer goes about a writing plan differently.

Some writers write an ending first and reverse engineer everything else. Others organize their notes to make a functional draft, leaving some gaps to fill with their creativity later. Others write a brief mission or summary statement above their empty drafts to give them a target. Everything after that is a happy mess.

It doesn’t matter whether the plan is high process-low haphazardness, low process-high haphazardness, or anything in between. Writers don’t see their outlines and plans as playing second fiddle to inspiration. Instead, their outlines prepare them for the upstream swimming that is writing.

As my friend and editing mentor Michael told me, "Organization is the suitable replacement for inspiration."

4. Clear your throat.

Part of working from a plan, I suggest, is to "clear your throat" before you draft what you consider to be your true attempts. In other words, draft a few throwaway paragraphs.?

When I ask writing-coaching clients what the most difficult part of writing is, most respond with "getting started." It's a universal dilemma.

My advice to them? Deal with the difficulty of getting started by getting started. Punch a few keys. Jot down some words. Create potential sentences. And then prepare to delete them.?

Why? Because you’ll likely not keep a lot of those first paragraphs. Right now, you're clearing your throat.?

Too many quality introductions and leads masquerade as body paragraphs. Readers often find these vagabond intros buried under hundreds of words of the writer's throat-clearing. Now, the problem isn't that writers spend words doing so; the problem is they didn't remove them after they found the terra firma of their true introductions.?

Plan to jot down a few throwaway paragraphs. Get started for the sake of getting started; get the throat clearing out of the way, find a few ideas or words you can get behind, then delete the rest.

5. Hoist the sail.

If the winds of inspiration blow, hoist your sail!

How do you cash in on feeling inspired? Here are a few ideas:

1. Write down all those ideas you thought were stupid. Take advantage of the confidence. If those who came before us silenced every?crazy idea, we wouldn’t have The Chronicles of Narnia or Toy Story or Carrie or Spider-Man. Not every crazy idea is a good one, but nearly every good idea was a crazy one.

2. Capture the moment. You can't bottle feeling inspired. But you can remind a future-uninspired you what this moment feels like. Grab your journal--or a sticky note--and jot down some thoughts. Record a quick video on your phone. Dig some neural pathways back to this moment.

3. Get to work. Writers journey through the writing process in bare feet. Feeling inspired is like being handed a pair of Nikes. Put them on. Get running.

You don't know the next time you're going to feel this way. Have some word count to show for it.

Happy Writing.