On the Role of Inspiration

[velvetpage]

Inspiration, for me, is everything and nothing.

An idea has to grab me for me to do an excellent job of it. I'm more likely to do a competent job if the idea is one that has inspired reflection or daydreams. I actively court lucid dreams about characters and scenes. I rely on inspiration to provide the driving force behind my writing.

But nobody is inspired all the time. Everyone has dry periods, or times when their inspiration is shifting to other things without them being really in favour of the change. There does come a point when writing-as-work has to take over from writing-as-inspiration. That's when craft really comes into play. I'm a good writer. I can put words together to make them show what I see happening in my head, and I can get into the brains of my characters to see what makes them tick. There are times when I can't see what they're supposed to do next. The image is fuzzy, the details lacking, and I can either regret the lack of muse and do something else, or I can work through it using pure craftsmanship. It's the writers who take the latter approach who make a career of it.

When the muse takes a vacation, I backtrack a few steps, make sure my plans are in place, and then i work on a meat-and-potatoes plot exposition scene. Those are the pure action scenes with the least solid characterization going on, and they're generally easiest to write for that reason. I can map it out in my head, order my images onto the game board of the scene, and play it out. I can pull out the vocabulary from my mental dictionary and slot it in whenever the word choice strikes me as too repetitive. I can make use of the resources I use for research. I make conscious choices about sentence type and grammar and use them to good effect. I seek out similes and metaphors I haven't used recently and slot them in. None of this takes inspiration. It's just a subset of the skill entitled "writing - fiction" on my personal character sheet. I've bought many ranks in that skill in the last few years.

Usually, over the course of the scene, the muse puts in a casual appearance. It sits in the passenger seat and pipes up now and again, and usually it decides to take its turn in the driver's seat shortly thereafter.

I doubt I could write a novel that didn't grab me, or one with characters I couldn't invest in or care about. Inspiration is absolutely necessary for the early plot development, and I find I need it most for the interpersonal "relationship drama" scenes that speak to me the deepest. But if I waited around to be inspired for every word I wrote, I'd never finish anything.

Comments

[normanrafferty.livejournal.com]

I also prefer the Oxford comma!