"Write Drunk, Edit Sober" and the myth of inspiration [x-post from /r/shutupandwrite]

Everything that's wrong with the global writing community can be summarized in one word: inspiration.

What is inspiration? No one seems to know. But they do know what inspiration does. Inspiration makes you jot down ideas on napkins. Inspiration wakes you up at 3am and forces your hands on the keyboard. Inspiration makes you crazy, makes you work, makes you, somehow, into a writer.

The problem with inspiration is that it's a good story, and worse, a good story told to people who are predisposed to love a good story. There's something romantic, dramatic, sexy about pounding out a novella fueled only by caffeine and determination through endless sleep-deprived nights. There's hardly anything interesting at all about constructing a novel slowly, over the course of weeks, months, even years, and having small, quiet realizations about characters or scenes or the right place to put a word.

Inspiration is a story we want to come true, a story that we want to happen to us. And like any good story, it is, ultimately, fake.

For a while I've been wondering why Hemingway's quote, "write drunk, edit sober" has achieved the godlike status it has in so many writing communities. Today, I finally made the connection: like anything else, "writing drunk" is appealing because it invites us to change our mental state into something different.

And changing our mental state is where, according to legend, inspiration will happen.

It's a myth that won't die, helped along every time a well-known creative person admits to somehow altering their mental state, even if that alteration is completely unrelated to what they produce. We go through our daily lives, waiting for Inspiration to strike us at any moment, and eventually we have the realization that we're Doing It Wrong; inspiration doesn't lie in the mind of the sober! We must get drunk, get high, go 48 hours without sleeping, or some other quasi-religious ritual to get in touch with our inner creative self.

The reason for this, best I can tell, is that we don't want to be writers. We want some heretofore undiscovered part of ourselves, our Inner Writer, our Muse, our Creative Spirit, to be a writer, and for the rest of our conscious mind to reap the rewards.

And even if that were possible, would it be satisfying to know that some part of yourself that you don't associate with the rest of your identity is responsible for your success? Or maybe you're not happy with that identity, and you're hoping that some new part of yourself that's "always been there" is just going to pop out and take over. Good luck with that.

The point is, this kind of bullshit is mentally blocking. It makes us do stupid things, think stupid things. I'm a massive skeptic about writing and the creative process and even I've stayed up late with a blank Word document somehow expecting something to happen because I'm overtired, or buzzed, or what have you.

What's worse about this is that inspiration isn't fake, but in hoping that it will somehow leap to the forefront of our minds and take the wheel, we miss out on it. You have to actually start something for inspiration to happen. Inspiration is that moment when your mind recombines two or more ideas in a unique and meaningful way, and that can only happen if you are already thinking. And yes, you may think better during a certain time of day, or with certain music playing, or in a specific place, or whatever. But the point is that you aren't just sitting there waiting to be inspired during those times; you are already puzzling your way towards an idea when creativity happens.

The point is, you want to be a writer. Not some magical Idea Fairy that lives in your head, you. So start acting like it, and stop acting like there's some writerly part of you that needs unlocking first. Because while that may be a good story, I think actually managing to achieve your dreams, even if it's through things as humdrum as hard work and practice, is much more narratively satisfying.

Crossposted from /r/shutupandwrite. The original post can be found here.