Terrible writers will tell you that they’re not writing today because they’re waiting for inspiration. Terrible tutorials will tell you that inspiration is a red herring; that you can’t wait for inspiration to strike and you just need to write, inspired or not. It is very possible to write without inspiration. It’s not possible to like what you have written without inspiration. In my experience, writing without some kind of inspiration becomes lifeless and turgid.
Inspiration is the “why” and the “what.” Without inspiration, you may have written a book, but is it truly the one that you wanted to write, deep down inside? It’s hard to answer that question with a yes. Most writers will tell you that inspiration is a waste of time. This is because they are career writers. If you want to make a career of writing, then yes, you are going to need to put this quest for inspiration aside. Writing is your job first and foremost, and waiting on inspiration to write for a career writer is like a career truck driver waiting on inspiration to drive a truck.
I have attempted to write things without inspiration before, on a clockwork schedule. As I did that, other ideas routinely came to the forefront. I had lapses in the work that I was currently writing on. I’m a kind of person who lapses in schedules just because they are schedules. Writing without being inspired makes the task of writing exponentially difficult. There is one thing that I feel I must clear up.
I am not telling you to wait for inspiration.
Most people have this specific impression of inspiration. It is a butterfly that will float towards you when you least expect it. At just the right time, it’ll float onto you and magic will strike. People who wait for inspiration will wait forever. Inspiration is not something that comes to you. You must come to it. It isn’t something given, it is something earned.
Most writers and writing tutorials will recommend that you read as much as possible. They say that it helps you learn the form and the way that words work, how tales and stories connect. These are valid reasons to read. Another valid reason is that this is where much inspiration lies.
A lot of people are afraid of reading other people’s works while they write their own thing because they are afraid of ripping someone else off or unconsciously plagiarizing. This fear, while not entirely unfounded, it’s something that you must push yourself past. People have this misconception about creativity. They believe that creativity is pushing things forward whole cloth out of the ether.
Creativity is actually a very logical process. It is impossible for the human mind to create a new thing without any reference points. If you don’t believe me, try thinking up a new color without references any other colors you currently know of. Try thinking of a new emotion without comparing it to any others.
What creativity is, in its essence, is taking bits and pieces of other things and putting them together in new ways. The Lord of the Rings is known as the defining work in modern fantasy, and Tolkien created it by putting together many English myths and histories that he researched and came upon. Much of the battles in the book were inspired by his combat in World War I. Giant spiders plague many heroes within the book, which makes sense when you learn that Tolkien nearly died in his youth from a spider bite.
Does this make his works any less significant or creative? Not at all. This is what every artist does in every medium. The act of creativity is putting together the bits and pieces that have been collected over the years. They are the raw ores that you must smelt and shape into your own stories and your own worlds.
Reading is important, but you need to go beyond just reading if you want to find the ores that you need. If you have picked up a book, read through to the end, and then put it back down, you have done it wrong. In terms of writing, reading comprehension is more than just remember plot points and character motivations.
If you’re reading a well-written book with well-made characters, you should be able to create a mock interview with the characters. You should be able to ask them questions that were not answered in the book. They may not be the answers that the author came up with, but if all goes well, you’ll be able to capture their voice - their word choice, the beats and the rhythms to their speech. There’s a music to well-written character dialogue.
In a fantasy novel, you should be able to draw a map of the characters’ journey, and perhaps even fill in the blanks. In a horror novel, you should be able to write about the monster’s next victims and their experience. And you should be reading fantasy and horror. You need to read everything.
A lot of this amounts to fanfiction. Fanfiction has a poor reputation in the world. A lot of it is very shoddily made for a variety of reasons. Many are written by the very young and many of them are just the writer inserting themselves into the world. However, a writer should not dismiss anything.
Fanfiction is a very useful tool, especially for those just starting out. A fanfiction can help you gain a better grasp on the characters of others, which can help you get a better grasp of your own. It can help you understand story better, but jumping past the legwork of creating a world and characters. It’s an exercise in creativity, applying new pieces to an old puzzle, and helping something familiar look much different. The tradeoff though is that you need to try and be as honest and earnest to the original piece as possible. You need to understand it.
Some of my best experiences in reading, in terms of writing, is reading bad books. Bad pieces of media are invaluable tools to those learning. A good book, or movie, or video game is like a pristine ornate clock. It looks beautiful and you can marvel at the art of it. But, if you open it up, it’s very hard to describe the purpose of each piece because each piece is working in tandem.
A bad piece of media is like a broken clock. From the outside, you can see that something is off. When you open that up, it’s easier to see which parts are malfunctioning. It’s easier to see what that piece overall does for the entire experience. Every writer needs to read The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis. Every movie maker needs to see Plan 9 from Outer Space. Every game designer needs to play Bubsy 3D.
One of the most useful exercises that I have ever done is taking a bad piece of media and trying to fix it. Take the same basic concept and go in a new direction, one that helps it rise up past the flaws. It’s very rare that there is a piece of media with absolutely nothing good in it. It’s an important skill for any writer to have - to be able to find the beauty in some of the worst creations imaginable.
This is how I ended up creating my most prized creation. In 2006, Disney ran these animated pilots in a series called Shorty McShorts’ Shorts. Many of them had an interesting premise, a small kernel of something magic within them. However, each of them had trouble realizing their own potential.
The last in this series was called Flip-Flopped. The main premise is that the kids were adults, and the adults were kids. The adults in that short acted exactly like kids. The entire short’s premise could be chocked up to an animation error. With that out of the way, everything else was stale and humorless. There was no other point in that.
There was an idea within it though: a world where kids were in control and had the reins of society could lead to something remarkably interesting. From that small seed, I planted an entire world. It became entirely my own and so much more than the original kernel that it was. This is, by and large, inspiration.
The trick is to get inspiration from a wide variety of places. Telling the same story as someone else is plagiarism. Telling the same story in a different way is homage, allegory, or parody. Using a piece of one story, with a tiny piece of another, and another piece of a third, that’s creativity. You will use less bits and pieces of stories making paper mache than finding your inspiration.
This is one of the reasons that you cannot rely on books alone. This is something that most reader-writers neglect to tell you. Reading is incredibly important. Reading alone will get you nowhere. You can read Moby Dick one hundred times, cover to cover. You can grasp all of the themes and memorize each and every word. You can paint each page.
None of this is a substitute for actually going on a boat, and experiencing the wind through your hair. It can’t make you understand the random jolting of the hull as the boat bobs in the water, seeing the shadows of the waves hit the walls. It can’t make you experience land disappearing before your eyes, and leaving you abandoned from any true frame of reference. Inspiration does not come to you. You come to it.
It’s impossible for a human being to ride a dragon. Dragons do not exist in our world (sadly). It’s not impossible for a human being to ride a rollercoaster and take note of all of the twists and turns, to feel a corkscrew jolt through your body, to feel your stomach drop as you go down over the next bend. Piece that together with the view from a plane, seeing the rolling farmlands pass by, the cars that look like little beetles scurrying to their destinations.
Waiting for inspiration is a massive failure to understand the point. Inspiration comes from experience. You cannot wait for inspiration just as you cannot wait for experience. While worlds and characters and plots can be inspired by pieces of media, the actual telling of the tale cannot be. You need to live your life before you can live the lives of your characters.
How long has it been since the last time that you were scared? Truly frightened that something bad would happen? When was the last time that you heard something so funny that you laughed until your eyes began to water? When is the last time you read or watched something that made you feel viscerally disgusted?
Life can be frightening. There are many worlds of chaos and conflict right outside our doors. Some of which we are blind to. Some of which we are all too aware of. In terms of telling a story, it’s wise to become aware of them. Some things that you experience may viscerally disgust you, they may make you rethink everything about who you are.
These feelings are what we are looking for. When you’ve come across something that moves you, on a deeply personal level, whether in a positive way or a negative way, then you have become closer to answering the all important “what” and “why.” The “what” is what has moved you, to joy, to tears, or to tears of joy. The “why” is how it did so. That is your inspiration.