When Inspiration Does/Does Not Strike

A word to the wise – when you’re feeling inspired, don’t stop!

Although, inevitably, there are going to be things that make you stop. Desperate need of sleep. Plans with friends and loved ones. The afore-mentioned day job. But when you really hit your stride and just get going, it is a magical experience – and one that’s not always easy to recreate a few days later.

This is what happened to me last week. I had the most amazing night of writing. I got completely sucked into my script, and rattled off about 12 pages with little to no effort. (I find that amount of pages is a bit harder to do when in the middle of a large project than if you have one strong idea and blast out one short, focused script.) I finally forced myself to stop – it was getting late, I knew I needed sleep – but I was so wired, it was impossible to sleep, anyway, and by the time I sat down to write again, the streak was gone. It took about a half hour of sifting through my notes, re-reading what I’d written before, and getting into the right mindset before I could start.

Part of being a writer, though, is also forcing yourself to do the work even when uninspired. Being able to pick up the voice even after you’ve dropped it. With this project, I’ve been forcing myself to do this more than at any point in the past, and it’s been good for me. Writing – to the point of completing a large project that no one is paying you to work on – is as much an act of intense discipline as it is anything else. Any good writer will tell you to make time for it every day if you ever hope to improve. Stephen King says it takes at least 4-6 hours a day to be any good (and FYI, SK, that’s literally all my free time in a day).

I feel that a big part of it is just developing such a steady writing routine that your mind begins to automatically shift into the right place when, say, the clock strikes 7. Setting an easy goal – say, two pages a day – is also helpful, since usually, with a script, I find you’ll go much beyond that, then feel like a champ. (A page a day when we're talking prose is probably good.) One other helpful tip I picked up while reading about Hemingway’s tactics earlier: stop writing mid-sentence so that the next day, you have an easy way of getting started, and of slipping right back into the voice you’d been using previously.

I’m curious, from all the other writers out there – what helps you stick to a writing routine, even when uninspired?