On Inspiration

Something that I’ve learned over the past few years is that inspiration is bull****. Not that it doesn’t exist, because it certainly does, but rather that the type of inspiration I wanted is unrealistic.

We are all painfully aware of how inspiration is portrayed in media: in a dark room, a lonely creative stares at a glass of something, wrapped in the cold wet blanket of imposter syndrome. Then, as though the clouds have parted, their eyes widen and they can finally see what was missing. Leaping to their feet, the creative then rushes to their art and works feverishly to bring it to life.

A nice fantasy. A beautiful lie.

While these instances of sudden creative mania do exist, I once achieved an astounding 6,000+ single day word count thanks to one, they are vanishingly rare. A high that we chase, never quite understanding why we don’t achieve it; since it’s already happened once, why shouldn’t I be able to catch that lightning again in this here bottle?

Forgetting that such sudden blasts of inspiration are almost completely random chance. We do something innocuous, a completely normal every day thing, and suddenly a flash. But that’s all it really is, a flash. We don’t leap out of our tub and scream “EUREKA!” before launching full force into our passion. Instead, that flash gives us a foundation, a place to begin.

Allow me to explain what I mean. I was in my basement, lifting weights and listening to the English cover of “The Crimson Bow and Arrow” as sung by Jonathan Young when one of the clearest instances of inspiration I can remember happened. On the line, “as we climb over the dead, keep advancing ahead,” I had a vision of a cliff made of broken bodies, with my characters using the extending hands to pull themselves up.

When they get to the top, they start sprinting forward as other characters are taken down by machinegun fire behind them and still more clamber over the top. Morbid. Dark. The same kind of tenth grade angst and anger that fills every lyric of the original song. But it did what I needed it to.

I listened to the song again. Then again. Listening to each lyric very carefully and assembling images from my novel (unfinished and unreleased as of this essay). “To those, reaching for a dream, chasing after more than just your life. If you, ever will succeed, you will have to make a sacrifice.” More visions filled my head, a man in a suit talking to a collection of tribal elders. People weeping, others willingly stepping forward to give their all for the cause.

“Liberty’s pawn they’re pressing you on, the shackled will ride to victory!” I saw, clear as day, a young soldier in a beige uniform carrying the weight of the world on his back. His name is Omawale, and his is a very sad story.

But, critically, everything that I imagined, everything that I thought of, every scene and line of dialogue that popped into my head, I had already thought of. Each piece was something I had already been tinkering with, trying to fit together like one of those 3-D puzzles. The song caught just enough of them at random for me to see the rest of the structure.

Riding that wave, I was able to – in my own way, since I am not an outline writer – assemble my story before I wrote it. The inspiration was not enough on its own; in a vacuum its gift to me was just a load of pretty pictures. For years, I assumed that I was without inspiration because I only saw it through the lens that media portrays; the dramatic effect of that portrayal is impressive, and the reason why they portray it.

But real inspiration does not work that way.

Looking back on it, I can see several things that inspired me to write that novel. The movie “Siege of Jadotville,” on Netflix inspired a critical plot element. The song “This is War” by Thirty Seconds to Mars gave me the roles of my principal characters (the soldier, the civilian, the martyr, the victim. The prophet, the liar, the honest. The leader, the pariah, the victor, the messiah) and I was able to assign their faces and names to those roles.

In the news, I saw the horrors of refugee camps around the world and the dangerous indifference of not only national governments, but also the common people who choose not to look. “Zombie” by the Cranberries, gave me another piece of the puzzle and showed me where to put it, “but you see, it’s not me, it’s not my family.”

Through online and in-person discussions on the morality of billionaires and my own education in philosophy, I assembled the motivations for my main character, if he can be called that. His goals, ethics, ethos, and the purpose of his grand experiment, came to me when those discussions meshed with my own opinions on idle hands and things too freely given.

When I finally started writing the first draft, I had a half-baked concept (thoroughly fleshed out by lengthy conversations with my dad) of disjointed ideas that I needed to glue together. I set myself a daily word count, and almost always reached it because I had thought about this story for so long that the work was just a matter of putting everything together.

A second draft quickly followed the first. And now, after more than a year away from the story – practicing my craft with short stories and poems because I realized I wasn’t yet good enough to write the story I wanted to – I can see my inspirations for what they are. I can trace lines between the idea and the things that helped me give them shape.

Inspiration, in the grand and dramatic fashion, does not exist. Or at least, it exists in such vanishingly rare instances that it might as well not. It is a lightning strike that, if captured, can produce wonders. But dedication, constant awareness, and the slow grind of genuine, earned inspiration wins out every time.

Had I waited for the TV version of it, I would never have finished the first draft of my book. Would never have even started a second or a third (abandoned because I wasn’t ready to write it yet).

To those reaching for a dream, I can only offer this advice, at the end of my long rambling: don’t go looking for inspiration. Think about your work, consider it from every angle, be patient and be consistent. Eventually, you’ll realize that you were inspired all along, and one day you’ll be able to map the major influences.

It worked for me, maybe it’ll work for you.