Prolific Writer’s Don’t Wait to be Inspired

The trick to writing or any other creative endeavor is that once you start good things begin to happen — Steven Pressfield

If there’s one piece of advice I would give to any aspiring writer, it’s this. Don’t wait to be inspired. Start and you will be inspired.

In my practice of writing 1000 words a day, I frequently find that the first 500 words are unusable. Most of what we learned about writing we learned in school. To become prolific we have to unlearn, and undo all the brainwashing that taught us that “bad writing is not ok.” Once we do that we develop a system and a process.

Process

Every morning I wake up and I can feel the resistance.

• What the hell am I going to write about?
• Will it be any good?
• Can I shape madness into meaning?
• It would be easier to see what’s on Facebook or twitter.
• What did Seth write today to defeat his own resistance?

There are plenty of distractions, all of which fuel resistance. But I’ve put safeguards in place.

• I’ve blocked all these distractions
• I’ve got a pair of Beats headphones on with techno blaring.

This is all like armor for a soldier in battle.

The first drop of ink hits the paper and the resistance increases. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to write anything at all let alone anything good. I whittle and carve, push and cajole. I’ve got a sentence. I’ve won the first battle in this daily war of art.

Like a soldier who marches on to his next battle, I fight my way through words and sentences and I’ve got a paragraph. Is it any good? It doesn’t matter. I’ve won another battle. But my ultimate goal isn’t to win the battle, but to win the war at least for today.

I keep going. I’ve made it to the end of the first page in my notebook. It’s illegible, incomprehensible, and really not ready for primetime. It’s chicken scratch. There’s no way I’m going to publish this. But I march on to the next page.

Now I’ve got momentum. The battles of the next word, next sentence, the paragraph and the next page are easily won. That’s the power of momentum. But there’s one place where the resistance is still kicking my ass. I’ve got nothing but what my friend Sarah Kathleen Peck describes as “God awful essays that nobody would want to read, myself included.”

And right about here is where everyday I hit a dip, a moment when I actually want to quit. It happens somewhere between the first and thousandth word. Inside this dip resistance mutates into its most evil form. If I quit now the resistance wins. So I stick my sword into its heart, cut it’s head off, blood turns into gold, and I think of this passage from my friend AJ Leon’s book The Life and Times of a Remarkable Misfit.

When Medusa’s blood spills on the ground in that cave, Pegasus is birthed from the mixture of earth and blood. Pegasus. The divine winged horse, the icon of wisdom and strength, whose heel strikes Mount Helicon bursting forth a spring where the Muses would drink.

I’ve got no Pegasus, but I’ve outwitted, outmaneuvered and defeated resistance, not with intelligence, strategy, or any sort of ability to write poetic sentences, but through nothing but determination to hit a word count.

When I hit 1000 words I’m like a video game character who just beat the game

The victory music plays, dragons have been killed, the princess has been rescued, and I’ve saved the world. For today I’ve won the war of art. Tomorrow it starts all over again.

Inspiration and Big Projects

When I started writing my book, I was a bit terrified. I had to mould an empty Google doc into what would eventually be chapters, and a bound book sitting on a shelf in the store. I felt like I was taking a boat out into the middle of the ocean, with the shore I was trying to reach nowhere in sight.

Part of big writing projects is that you can’t always see your destination. I was wondering “how the hell am I going to get from here to there?” It was going to require fuel.You can’t run an automobile on Coca-Cocola. You can’t fuel a writing project with inspiration.

• The sailor keeps sailing until he reaches shore
• The runner keeps running until the marathon is over
• The writer keeps writing until he reaches the end of the book.

None of them wait to be inspired.

• Maybe while sailing there will be a storm.
• Maybe while running your legs cramp up a bit.
• Maybe while writing we get stuck

Then we have no choice but to slow down and correct course. The one thing that remains constant is that we keep going.

After 3 chapters, 3 months and chugging along, the resistance transformed, determined to keep me from slaying it, rescuing the princess, and finding the gold. I got stuck on a chapter. I had to slow down. I had to rewrite it multiple times.

• I sent friends Facebook messages.
• I made phone calls.
• I took long walks.

The chapter was what I referred to as “the bane of my existence.” It seemed like a sysiphean task to write that chapter. When I got the first round of edits back from my editor, it was the chapter with the least comments.

What fuels any creative project is habit. Stop waiting to be inspired.

I’m the host and founder of The Unmistakable Creative Podcast.

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