When Inspiration Stalls

A client wrote to me not long ago to stay that her inspiration had stalled. It was both a statement and a lament. Writers tend to be preoccupied with the notion of inspiration–its presence or absence, its ease or struggle.

Inspiration is a lot like the weather—a blessing when it’s good and an inconvenience or disappointment when it’s not. It’s unpredictable, sometimes seasonal, or can catch us unawares, either positively or negatively.

Our minds trick us into thinking inspiration is, at least potentially, an achievable permanent state. Deep down we know it’s not. It can be as fleeting as a rainbow, or as glorious and transient as a sunset. We want such beauty and grace to be permanent and we struggle to accept that it can’t be. Yet still our work must get done. We must write in all kinds of internal and external weather.

When clouds roll in and sunshine is absent it’s good to remember that somewhere, high above the clouds, if you just rose high enough, you’d encounter blues skies and sunshine again. Even when it’s night where you are somewhere on the planet it is day. It can be comforting to know that what we want is always there, even if we can’t be in its presence at a particular moment.

When inspiration finds us at our desks, what joy! An unexpected and very welcome guest. But when it’s off shining on others elsewhere, we must trust ourselves to remain devoted to our craft, to be willing to show up rain or shine.

To inspire is to breathe, to take in breath. So to be inspired is to be breathed into, presumably by some other force. This is a gift when it comes. But we do come with apparatus to breathe on our own, without thinking, and while sleeping, so we can show up to do our work anyway. One breath at a time.

When inspiration stalls, remind yourself it will rev up again. Part of it’s magic lies in not knowing when or where it will find us.

Don’t wait on inspiration. If you work regularly and with devotion, inspiration will find you. Like happiness, inspiration is a by product of meaningful action. Keep working. Keep showing up. And when inspiration strikes, let it wash over you like a summer’s day or the awe that accompanies the sight of a rainbow or sunset. Inspiration’s power and joy arises from its fleeting and intermittent nature. In the meantime, breathe thoroughly and deeply on your own. The more you do, the more likely you’ll be breathed into now and again.

The Most Important Ten Minutes of Your Day

Are you writing? It’s hard to start, isn’t it? We make such a fuss about starting, especially on those things most important to us. The things with stakes attached. And who doesn’t attach pretty high stakes to chosen dreams? Such as writing.

The expectations we have of ourselves and our work can make starting difficult, but here’s a little known secret: it’s only the first ten minutes that feel hard.

Have you ever noticed that when you start to exercise, things feel pretty rough? For about ten minutes. Then your heart rate is up and energy is coursing through your muscles. What about going to an event where you really don’t know anyone? The first ten minutes—brutal. Then you’re either in a groove or making an educated exit. That project at work that you don’t want to do but it really needs to get done? Give it about ten minutes. You’ll be able to take one more step toward completion.

It takes about ten minutes to transition from one state of mind to another or from one activity to another. Humans are naturally resistant to change (even while we also crave it). Every change comes with a period of discomfort, even small changes that occur in a day. Since we are physiologically wired to avoid pain (discomfort) we often experience resistance as we approach these thresholds of change. And the greater the stakes we’ve associated with the chosen activity (what if I don’t lose five pounds exercising this way? what if I don’t finish the novel I’ve set out to write?) the greater the potential resistance and the harder it can seem to start. My advice? Give it ten minutes.

Encourage yourself to endure ten minutes of discomfort in honor of your chosen dreams. Promise yourself a reward if that helps (though I sometimes find that to be a mental abstraction that doesn’t quite work for me). The greatest rewards start flowing at the fifteen minute mark anyway. Your muscles flex, the words fly across the page, and you’re doing what you said you’d do, which begins to cultivate self trust and self respect, two character attributes necessary for self-motivated work.

There’s a saying bandied about that goes, “No pain, no gain.” I’m not a big proponent of struggle or suffering, but all creators face inner resistance from time to time, and unless we find ways to move through it, our dreams hang out on the horizon and never really get a chance to come into clear focus. So take ten minutes and wade through that inner resistance. They could end up being the most important ten minutes of your day.

Abundance, Gratitude, and Writing

Have you ever noticed how abundance can build up momentum in your life so that good things seem to create more good things? Then all of a sudden abundance takes a step back, seems to drain away or run into hiding? In both cases gratitude is the key. When you have a lot to be grateful for, be grateful! And when it appears that you don’t have a lot to be grateful for, still choose to be grateful, whatever the size of the microscope you have to look through to find something. Because gratitude will keep abundance flowing and it will invite it back when it goes AWOL.

Contrary to many beliefs, you don’t have to have a good and easy life to find time for writing, and you don’t need to have lived a so called “bad” life to have something interesting to write about. It’s true that less stress can aid creativity, but it isn’t always the case. Likewise, a personal story full of trauma and drama can be compelling, but that’s not always the case either. We get what we get when it comes to life situations and histories. It’s what we do with it that counts. And that’s where creativity comes in.

Writing occurs within the context of the life we are living—you make time for it or you don’t. And our stories grow out of our personal histories—whether we are conscious of it or not. The gift of life plus an inventory of experiences leads some people to become writers. But that’s not the case for everyone. If it happens to be the case for you, at some point, you will have to reconcile with your life situation and your past.

You will likely struggle against some aspects of your life situation in order to make time to write. And you will likely wrestle with elements from your past on the way to finding something compelling to write about. Rarely will you approach either with gratitude.

But what if you did?

What made you who you are—all that you’ve experienced so far—also contributed to you becoming a writer and living the life you are now living. That’s worth an ounce of gratitude. It doesn’t matter if you’d like to make a few changes (most of us would), but it’s worth noticing that being in a position to want such change is worth being grateful for too. If you’re reading this newsletter you have tools and technology at your disposal that are gratitude worthy. If you have a glass of clean water within arm’s reach, or a hot cup of tea, you have something else to be grateful for.

How often are you grateful for your writing practice? How often do you love it just for the sake of loving it? Can you let yourself do that now?

Gratitude practice is subject to a particular, softly scientific phenomenon: the snowball effect. Writing practice is similarly affected. The more grateful we are the more we have to be grateful for. And the more we write the more there is to write.

I’d like to return to the first paragraph and substitute the words “abundance” and “gratitude” with the word “writing”…

Have you ever noticed how writing can build up momentum in your life so that writing seems to create more writing? Then all of a sudden writing takes a step back, seems to drain away or run into hiding? In both cases writing is the answer. When you have a lot to write about, write! And when it appears that you don’t have a lot to write about, still choose to write, whatever the size of the microscope you have to look through to find something to write about. Because writing will keep writing flowing and it will invite it back when it goes AWOL.

Choice, Change, and Conflict

In the midst of all the changes in the world, we are invited to make some new choices—collectively and individually. Unexpected changes bring us face to face with unexpected choices—to let go of certain assumptions and plans, to reframe cultural beliefs and “norms,” to examine what really matters, and why.Making choices and making changes are inherently anxiety provoking, and rarely occur without some degree of conflict. In the world at large we’re witnessing a lot of conflict, but many of us are dealing with it at a personal level too. We are each in our ways dealing with anxiety, worry, pain, and fear related to experiences or observations of inner and outer conflict. These are natural human responses to anticipating change and choice.I think about choice, change, and conflict a lot because they are so much a part of the writing life and telling stories, even in small or subtle ways. Just think: without that bit of inner conflict that arises when we want to write a book but haven’t done it yet, we wouldn’t choose to change our habits to get up early or stay up late to fit our writing in. And if we didn’t throw conflict in our characters’ paths by forcing them to make choices that lead to personal evolution through change, our stories wouldn’t get very far.As messy as conflict can be, I respect its energy to pressure us to choose and thereby provoke change. And I also respect—or better yet, trust—our human ability to adapt to changing circumstances as well as our ability choose and forge new paths. It’s not easy to change. Not for us or for our story characters. We resist it as much as we long for it. We fear what we may lose, and we don’t trust we can successfully create what we long for, so we often stay stuck.In the book I’m writing, I tell writers that their story situations “…must be compelling enough to overcome the inertia of being human. The truth is, we’d all rather not change because change is uncomfortable, inconvenient, anxiety-provoking, and often leads to real or imagined loss or even death, as well as changes to beliefs and personal world order. Of course, deep down, we do want to change. We, and our characters, just need the right set of circumstances and enough motivation to do it.”We seem to be living through such circumstances now, but it’s still hard to know exactly what to do. As our identities and belief systems are being challenged, we are called to examine our mental and moral natures, which are capable of change, but require will, determination, and trust in a vision for a new way of being. I don’t have any answers for rallying that will, focusing that determination, or expanding that trust, except to embrace the clumsy, vulnerable messiness that the choice to change entails—and to have the courage to face the inner and outer conflicts.Another passage in the book, which is about story characters but also applies to ourselves, seems to fit here: "Change is inherently conflictual whether it occurs on the inside or outside, but without it, we would not grow. We are wired to change. We are wired to evolve. We are wired to heal. And life—in the real version or the story version—provides us with invitation after invitation to rise to those challenges.” Collectively and individually, let’s accept these invitations…and rise.