A recent blog post by designer Andy Rutledge, which I discovered thanks to Dee Wilcox got me thinking about the thin golden thread we call inspiration. My own experience, both personally and from engaging with other artists, confirms his point: inspiration is overrated. That’s right, overrated. In fact, inspiration isn’t even essential to jump starting the creative process. So all you artists waiting around for your muse to show up, well, it’s time to get a new strategy because she’s probably not gonna show up.
Now, before you go throwing stones at the heretics hear me out because I want to be straight with you for a minute. If you are an artist (particularly a writer), you will probably never start, let alone finish, anything if you’re just waiting for inspiration to strike. You feel that twinge right now in your chest? That’s because you know what you just read is the truth. And that’s why, if you’ve ever waited until you were inspired to start something, the weeks bleed into months and months into years, and why that ________(fill in the blank) still hasn’t gotten done (or started).
Why is that? It’s because the creative process has nothing to do with making something out of nothing and everything to do with discovery. Creating is discovery. Creating is doing. And that, friends, means action. Movement. Blisters.
I love how Stephen King describes it in his book On Writing. He says that every story that you will ever tell already exists, but like a fossil buried in a field, you have to find it. And that means picking up a shovel and digging and digging and digging until you find it. The creative process, with all of it’s sweltering work and blisters, is the digging. It is the deal. Now, every once in awhile a muse will come along and point out exactly where an extraordinary specimen lies just beneath the surface almost in plain view. They’ll even be snarky about how clueless you were that it was right under your nose. That’s what muses do. Those are the gifts. They don’t happen often, and they only happen to the people in the field, never to the ones on the sidelines.
Now, you may think this is the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard, but I can tell you that it’s true. Every author I know–every single one–has told me this exact thing in one way or another. Inspiration is nice, but not necessary. The sooner you can set the romantic ideas aside and get on with the business of digging, the better. Inspiration may eventually find you, but your job is to show up and get dirty. That’s enough. The rest will take care of itself.