Inspiration: The Good and the Bad
To “inspire” = to “breathe into.”
Ancient peoples considered deities to be agents of inspiration. The sheer power of creative force pushing us to bring art into the world was so compelling, it seemed to come from beyond mortal beings. Greeks, for example, ascribed inspiration to the Muses. Muses supplied the impetus to art. They prodded and guided the hand of the writer, the lyrics of the songster.
Inspiration makes us feel like we’ve been hijacked by a higher power. It makes the writing process feel surreal and vaguely divine — for as long as the burst of inspiration lasts, anyway.
We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.
― Jean Cocteau
The Good?
Inspiration is a blessing. Inspired writing has soul. It summons deep emotion in the reader, because it has been laboured over with passion. It almost writes itself. You can’t tear yourself away from the page.
And The Bad…
Here’s how inspiration tries to have her pound of flesh:- in the end you’ve entwined your heart within the story. Your ego has been awakened. To take something away, or to add something else, feels blasphemous.
Editing doesn’t just involve running spell check and fixing the grammar. A large part of editing involves using a scalpel. Lifting whole scenes. Removing paragraphs.
To make something work for you, you must apply it at the right time, and in the right doses.
Inspiration is an external trigger acting on the cauldron of your collective experiences up until that point, to create new configurations. Different “what ifs.”
Inspiration is not the totality of writing. Only a phase of it.
