You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
I was dreading that. This quote reminds me of a poem I once read that called inspiration “an elusive mistress”. I’m not sure why, but it stuck with me. Reading it I thought, how awful for creative people! How horrible to have to wait around to be struck with an idea and to be depressed and feel like a failure if you’re not inspired. The poet is no helpless victim, however; at the end, she writes, “those who live and die by the strike of her match . . . kick her to the curb.” Basically, screw inspiration and put in the work. Cue the writer’s process.
So this chapter is talking about the writing process, in no specific terms. It manifests itself differently for everyone, and as I read I’m trying to figure out what mine is, or if I even have one. I suppose I do–it tends to be more recursive than linear, without prerequisites other than a cup of coffee. I’m also finding out that brainstorming is not something I do consciously, and maybe should. I’m gonna give these freewriting and clustering things a try I think. Listing I’m well familiar with, but my outlines usually end up being scratched out and rearranged and disregarded. Of course I brainstorm; I just don’t see it as a separate step. With ideas floating around in my head (and sometimes scribbled in my notebook or on napkins or on my hand), I tend to like to sit in front of a blank document and just go. This may not be the best approach, I realize, but it works for me.
So then we have the research path. Although I don’t need to do research per se to write a memoir, which I’ll be doing very soon if I can force myself not to rely on inspiration (which tends to hit at midnight the night before a due date, thanks a lot), I have been spending some time soul searching since it was assigned. I just tried out the question and answer research tactic, and it surprised me. To every question I asked–what gave you a change of heart? What was a discovery, a decision, a disappointment?–the answer was the same. Every single one. It was something I hadn’t even considered writing about for my memoir, but now I see it’s the clearest option and probably the best one.
I hadn’t considered it before because I didn’t see it as a story or a life-changing moment; but it is the thing that has caused the most personal growth and the most change in my life. It’s not a single event, and there’s not much logical progression to it; I worried that it wasn’t quite a story. But reading this chapter has given me ideas on how to write it as one. With the right structure and rhetorical devices (I’ll probably be leaning on narration, description, and cause/effect most heavily), I think I can make it a good one.
Com 201 