Grant Faulkner

Inspiration is a rare sighting (like Bigfoot)

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Inspiration is a funny thing. It’s powerful enough to move mountains. When it strikes, it carries an author forward like the rushing torrents of a flooded river. And yet, if you wait for it, nothing happens.

The irony is that so much is actually created—mountains moved, sagas written, grand murals painted—by those who might not even describe themselves as particularly inspired. Instead, they show up every day and put their hands on the keyboard, their pen to paper, and they move their stories forward, bit by bit, word by word, perhaps not even recognizing that inspiration is striking in hundreds of tiny, microscopic ways as they push through another sentence, another page, another chapter, of their novel.

This is the principle way writers finish 50,000 words of a novel each year during National Novel Writing Month, and it applies to being creative the rest of the year as well.

Inspiration is often characterized as a thunderbolt—a brilliant flash that strikes from the heavens—and that metaphor certainly holds truth because inspiration can be a sudden igniting force, random and illuminating and otherworldly (and even a bit dangerous). Yet I sometimes think of inspiration, at least the big, gobsmacking moments of inspiration, as more like Bigfoot. Sightings of Bigfoot are rare, and he’s so elusive that he can’t be captured, physically or even truly on film, so his very existence is in question. It’s wonderful to believe he exists, because it’s nice to think of the world as strange and beautiful enough to spawn such a creature, but if you go out into the woods and look for Bigfoot, you’re not likely to find him, just as you can’t force sweeping gusts of inspiration to appear on any given day.

“And the muse? I have no idea who has one, but if anyone does, I’d like to know so I can stage a kidnapping,” said author Kami Garcia in a NaNoWriMo pep talk.

The fantastical “muse” Garcia speaks of is the source of inspiration in Greek and Roman mythology. Ancient authors invoked muses near the beginning of their work, asking the muse to sing directly through them. As Homer puts it in Book I of the Odyssey:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns

driven time and again off course, once he had plundered

the hallowed heights of Troy.

This mythological muse was often illustrated as a creature in a beautiful flowing gown, playing a harp and singing a song from the heavens, but I’d like to recast this muse because maybe, just maybe, the “kidnapping” Garcia mentions is possible (or at least a type of kidnapping). I see the muse as invisible sprights that sleep in the whispery spaces between each word. This sprights are enlivened only by the breaths of a churning imagination, by the stirrings of a story moving forward. Such a muse is ineffable, so miniature that she often goes unnoticed, yet an author must trust that the responsibility for bringing those story sprights to life resides in the spool of words spinning onto the page. The muse doesn’t sing the words of a story; the muse is conjured in the telling.

“No one looks forward to those lulls in the writing process, but they are natural, and they can be overcome,” Marisa Meyer wrote in a NaNoWriMo pep talk. “These are the times when we must proceed on willpower and caffeine and the unflappable confidence that each word we write is one word closer to a finished novel.”

When willpower isn’t enough

True words, but such tough moments can certainly feel like they’re killing inspiration more than they’re nurturing it. Your thoughts dull. All of the synapses that used to fire with such eager alacrity have either gone into a deep hibernation or abandoned you all together. Perhaps your initial bolt of inspiration carried you through the first hour, the first day, the first week, or even the first month of your novel, but it’s becoming a faint memory, a cruel con, because without its strong winds, you feel adrift, your journey stalled.

This is a dangerous moment because when inspiration stops carrying you, the doldrums of self-doubt creep into your thoughts (perhaps in between sips of your favorite caffeinated beverage and your diligent intentions). You tell yourself no one wants to read your story. You tell yourself your characters are clichés, your plot unremarkable. And you—you!—are not a writer. You are a person with silly dreams who should know better, and you should just return to a life where you sit and simply be entertained by other people’s imaginative creations. A life of binge watching Netflix isn’t all bad, is it?

Here’s what you must know: Every single creator throughout history has experienced such moments. The question is how to deal with such deadening humdrummery.

“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time,” said Leonard Bernstein.

The unromantic and unheralded “rest of the time” is actually a yeasty opportunity. It’s an invitation to fertilize your imagination. If a dulling lull is smothering your willpower and caffeine’s power to propel you through another paragraph has dissipated, then pull away from the page for a spell: Pick up your favorite book to be reminded of the fantastic places words can take you, take a walk and marvel at butterflies twirling about in dapples of sun, or go to a museum and stare at paintings and people—anything that it takes to stir and heighten your senses, to let your mind dash back onto the playground of the imagination and caper with your new ideas.

Every writer needs a strategy to deal with those dulling lulls. Joan Didion describes her method of retrieving her imaginative oomph in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook”: “When the world seems drained of wonder … when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write … I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest … dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavilion (one middle-aged man shows his hat check to another and says, ‘That’s my old football number’).”

“It all comes back,” Didion writes.

Yes, it all comes back. If you revere and remember the natural, irrepressible gambols of your imagination, writing won’t be all about a ponderous and painful plodding forward. And it’s necessary to make sure you don’t write with too much of the “no pain, no gain” approach (those tiny story sprights can only handle so much discomfort). “If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun,” Ray Bradbury posits in Zen in the Art of Writing, “you are only half a writer.”

So step away from your writing if need be and find a source of inspiration that will put air beneath your wings. But don’t step away for too long. Many a writer has made a lifestyle out of stepping away. You must return after an hour or an afternoon and concoct inspiration on the blank page. Let the blank page be a spigot for all of the dramatic, ornery, lyrical, and shocking thoughts in your head that are eager to come out.

“The blank page is yours,” wrote Chuck Wendig in a NaNoWriMo pep talk. “Cast aside worries over art and criticism. Imagine a land without rules. Imagine that nobody has ever told you that you cannot or should not do this thing. Those people were wrong. Forget those voices. Because, for real?

It’s an empty field and you’ve got the keys to a freaking Ferrari.

It’s a white tablecloth and you’ve got ketchup, mustard, and relish.

It’s a blank page and you’ve got all the letters and words you need.

Rev the engine and take the ride. Paint with all the colors the condiments at your table allow. Create whatever robot-human monstrosities your mind cares to conjure. Crack open your chest and plop your heart onto the page.”

When you plop your heart onto the page, you’ll realized that the words you create every day are each fruit-bearing kernels of inspiration. Each word wants more and more words to follow. And you are the God that sends those words—those story-igniting lightning bolts—into a world that’s coming to life before your own eyes. You are your own muse.

Here’s an inspiration exercise to fuel your inspiration engine:

Exercise

Write a page or two about what inspires you to write—whether it’s the desire to create lyrical prose, escape this world, or explore your inner world. After you’ve written this short piece, focus on the things that inspire you as your guide to sit down and write on even the worst days. Your big “I” inspiration can open a pathway back to writing.

The Author as Hero

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This is a brief summary of my speech at this year’s Night of Writing Dangerously (also known as the best writing party on the planet).

I spoke at the Frankfurt Book Fair earlier this year. The theme of the event was “The Heroes of Storytelling.” Naturally my heroes of storytelling are authors, but I began to think about how authors are portrayed in books and films, and, well, they don’t fare too well. They certainly aren’t heroic, or at least not in the terms of the transcendent heroism of characters in many stories.

Here are some images I collected of different writer stereotypes from films.

Barton Fink

The joy of creativity glimmers in this author’s eyes, right? This image of John Turturro from Barton Fink is a portrait of the three “A’s” of a writer’s life: alienation, anxiousness, and awkwardness. I’d like to invite this man to NaNoWriMo write-in and give him a big hug. I’d like to tell him, “There’s no need to be afraid. You are a creator.”

Emma Thompson

No, this is not a NaNo writer anguishing in the swampland of week two. It’s Emma Thompson in Stranger than Fiction, demonstrating ye olde writer’s block. I want to tell Emma to practice a little “writing with abandon.” Empty your ashtray, change out of your pajamas, and have some fun.

Nicholas Cage

This is Nicholas Cage from the film Adaptation. What I like about this scene is how it looks like he’s been in a wrestling match with the book Story—a how-to write book—and the book won. It pinned him. Many a how-to-write book has pinned me. I recommend a good dose of “exuberant imperfection” to this writer.

Ray Milland

And then, oh my, there’s Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. The alcoholic writer staring into the darkest of dark nights. The bottle as forgotten inspiration, found desperation. Portrait of an author as a drunk.

It’s not that these images are inaccurate. Authors themselves wrote these characters, after all. Writing holds struggle, persistence against the forces of critics, internal and external. If you come over to my house on any weekend, you’ll probably see a variation of these authorial states (although hopefully not the one from The Lost Weekend, or if so, at least with more moderation).

But I think of the author as a heroic figure–a figure of verve, moxie, derring-do. So I sought a different image of the author, and here’s what I came up with.

Philip Petit

This is Philip Petit, who walked on a high wire across the Twin Towers in 1974. The documentary about him, Man on a Wire, won an Oscar a while back, and he just wrote Creativity: The Perfect Crime.

So why is this my image of the writer as hero? I’ve got ten, but I’ll give you three:

No. 1: This was an act he had to do. He was sitting in a waiting room at the dentist’s in 1968 and read about the Twin Towers being built, and he obsessed about walking on a high wire between the towers. The urge was so overpowering that if he didn’t do this, he would have felt a hole in his life forever. When asked why he did it, Petit said, “There is no why. Isn’t the joy, the beauty, the sheer magnificence enough of a reason?” I feel the same urgent need to write. There is no why other than my life would suffer tremendously without writing, and I know many NaNo writers feel the same.

No. 2: He didn’t do this alone. It looks like he’s on the wire alone, but he actually had a whole support team. They helped him plan this for years, mulling over blueprints and even taking field trips to New York City. They helped him practice. When he walked on the tight rope strung up in a French prairie, they’d yank it back and forth to replicate gusty conditions at that height. And then they helped him sneak in all of this heavy equipment and actually string the wire between the towers (not an easy thing to do). But most of all they were there when he took that first step, 1,350 feet above the ground. That’s the third reason he’s a hero.

No. 3: He embraced vulnerability. He said, “If I die, what a beautiful death!–To die in the exercise of your passion.” To be a writer doesn’t risk death in quite the same way, but to decide to be a writer is a clinch with vulnerability. To tell the world you’re a writer magnifies that vulnerability because you invite naysayers in. And then to do something crazy like write a novel in a month, you’re testing your grit, your time management, your resilience, your resolve to do something big. You might fail, but that’s the definition of vulnerability, risking failure.

To be vulnerable is important. Only by embracing vulnerability do we connect with others. Being vulnerable makes life meaningful because by being vulnerable, we’re giving our souls, our challenges, our imperfections to others. We’re giving the truth of who we are. That’s what we need to aspire to as writers. Being vulnerable in our prose helps forge connections with readers; being vulnerable opens up new worlds.

I used to make New Year’s resolutions, but I could stand seeing “Do yoga” on my list only for so many years. I decided to change my approach. For the last three years, I’ve just focused on an invitation: “Invite more opportunities for embarrassment into my life.” In other words, I decided to risk vulnerability.

I’ve always wanted to tap dance. But I’ve never taken a lesson, never watched a how-to video. I thought it would be transformative to tap dance in front of 250 people at the Night of Writing Dangerously. I couldn’t do it alone, though, so I invited volunteers up on stage. People filled the stage–with gusto! And we tap danced, very appropriately, to Fatboy Slim’s “Because We Can” from Moulin Rouge.

“You are untying yourself from the tangible and becoming half a bird,” Petit said of his venture on the tight rope. I felt the same way when I became a tap dancer last Sunday night.

I now want the world to tap dance with me over and over again. I want to tap dance for infinity.

 

The Power of Getting More Ideas Faster

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speedFor years, my writing process formed itself around the notion of ponderous preciousness. I distrusted the idea that anything of quality could be written quickly. A story, a novel, a script had to be as finely aged as a good bottle of wine in order for all of the nuanced tannins and rich aromas to fully develop.

I’d conceive of an idea for a story and then burrow into it. I’d write one draft, usually in a somewhat plodding fashion, and then I refined and refined, and then refined some more, sometimes over the course of years. It was as if I held a very tiny chisel and carefully maneuvered it again and again through the practically microscopic contours of my story world.

Steeping a story in deep and obsessive ruminations has a place, but I’m becoming more interested in the benefits of hastening my creative process after reading an interesting study that counters my “a fine wine takes time” approach.

The book Art & Fear recounts the story of a ceramics instructor who did an experiment in his classroom. He divided the class into two groups. The first group was graded on quality, represented by a single ceramic piece due at the end of the class. The second group was graded on quantity, literally the amount of work they produced.

Who produced the highest quality work? Not the group that practiced my refine, refine, refine approach. Those who threw pots “with abandon” (as we might put it at NaNoWriMo) created the highest quality pots.

Why? Because they tried more ideas. Instead of creating one overwrought pot, they produced pots that held more verve because of the creative pressure put on them and the loose structure of banishing the restricting limitations of “quality.” They might have encountered more botched pots, but they were astute enough to learn from those failures and build on them.

As Thomas Edison said, “The real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into twenty-four hours.”

Yesterday, I spoke to the Sacramento Writers Club. As part of my presentation, I had everyone do a five-minute automatic writing exercise, to just choose a subject and write as fast and loosely as possible.

Honestly, even though I’ve done this several times with groups, I never know how it will turn out. I always expect to be challenged by a naysayer from the “ponderous precious” camp. I was so gratified to feel the risk-taking energy in the room and see the deep immersion in writers’ eyes. Afterward, people told stories of newly found character insights, wild plot discoveries—and in just five minutes of writing like a dervish.

I felt the same. I jumped in and wrote to this prompt: “When I was five, I ____ .” “When I was nine, I _____ .” And so on. I somehow struck upon a recurring vision that a character in a my novel has, a vision that guides, taunts, and troubles him throughout life.

The dangers of such free-flowing expansion is that you’ll encounter too many “plot bunnies”—that a story can bound out of control when you get too many ideas, because one idea breeds with another like rabbits.

I think that’s a good problem to have, though. In fact, I’ll take that problem any time because I can slow down in revision and choose the bunnies I like.

So here’s to writing more—and doing so with alacrity.

The Never Ending Journey of One’s Writing Process

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Did I choose my writing process, or did it choose me? This was the question I asked myself after 20+ years of writing fiction. I wondered if I’d stumbled thoughtlessly upon my creative practice, and instead of actively scrutinizing it or consciously constructing an optimal process, I’d just decided to live with the results.

Over the years, I’d read a bevy of writing books, innumerable author interviews, and a trove of hefty biographies about my favorite writers. I’d taken every sort of writing workshop, and even finished a Masters in creative writing. I’d dallied in outlining my stories. I’d written an onerously exhaustive character profile or two.

Despite all of that, I largely wrote the same way as I did when I first started: I opened my laptop and started writing a story sentence by sentence, sometimes going back to revise a paragraph, sometimes moving forward.

In other words, although I’d defined myself as a creator by becoming a writer, I wasn’t taking a particularly creative approach to my writing.

At the urging of a friend, I finally decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month, the challenge of writing 50,000 words in 30 days in November. I figured it was time to shake things up, and as a Kerouac fan, I’d always been interested in his brand of “automatic writing” and wanted to see what crazy storylines I might unearth. I didn’t have anything to lose, and as it turned out, I had only novels to gain.

Full disclosure: I’m now executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), so you can take my words as biased, but what I really want to get across is that as creators we should always be playing with our creative process as a living, evolving thing. A creative process that has dug a rut in your mind will likely produce rut-like stories.

Since my ticket to constructing a new and ever-changing writing process was NaNoWriMo, I want to share the five things I got out of “writing with abandon” with NaNoWriMo and later in Camp NaNoWriMo, a version of NaNoWriMo that happens in April and July.

1) Writing with abandon allowed me to test ideas. I have a long list of novel ideas backed up like cars in a traffic jam (they’ve been blocked by the semi truck of a novel I’ve been revising for, well, ages). NaNoWriMo gave me permission to dive in and test an idea in just a month instead of waiting until God knows when to write it. It’s easy, and even creatively beneficial to take a break from a long project to let one of those stalled novel ideas open its throttle for a while. Now I have a draft of a novel burning to be revised after I get that semi truck out of the way.

2) Writing with abandon allowed me to generate more ideas. To write good ideas, every writer has to try his or her hand at plenty of bad ones, but the more active your brain is, the more likely bad ideas will beget good ideas. Because I’d banished my internal editor, that censoring snob, I started following dangerous and even ridiculous story lines because of the urgency to forge ahead and keep my tale going. Sure, some of those narrative escapades turned into dead ends, but others opened up the tightly wound confines of my story into glorious vistas.

3) Writing with abandon allowed me to achieve “flow.” Flow is a concept of single-minded immersion proposed by the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who describes such states as egoless and timeless. “Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost,” wrote Csíkszentmihályi. Because I had to write with such crystallized concentration to hit my daily word count of 1,700 words, my brain seemed to enter an almost athletically saturated endorphin state. My inner world eclipsed my outer world in a way it never had.

Later, I read Charles Limb’s neuroscience research about how when jazz musicians improvise, their brains actually turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition and turn on those that let self-expression flow. Their brain regions also showed a heightened state of awareness—tasting, smelling, feeling the air around them.

Yeah Daddy-o. Play it!

4) Writing with abandon opened me up to a community of others. I was the worst kind of solitary writer. Years passed before anything I was working on was polished enough to show someone else, largely because I wanted to impress more than I wanted to receive feedback or simply share.

Because NaNo takes the cavalier approach of valuing “quantity over quality,” I let my hair down with my prose and reveled with others over the occasional atrocious phrase. Since we were all involved in a cauldron of a creative mess, we opened up to one another, and before I knew it, my friends and others I met in the NaNoWriMo forums were brainstorming ideas with me. Solitude, as much as I love it, can be over rated.

5) Writing with abandon is fun. Unfortunately, I’d made writing into work over the years. I thought of the Picasso quote: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” As I watched my kids finger-paint, I decided I should do the equivalent with my words. NaNoWriMo helped me shake off the shackles of writerly aspiration and rekindle the sparks of creative joy and discovery that made me want to do it in the first place.

My new promise to myself is to try something different in each NaNoWriMo event. What writing promises have you made recently? What are you doing to ensure that you keep them?