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Inspiration or Skill?
This is personal reflection. It is not about any individual person on this site. If you need to be offended, PM me and I will gladly respond with a direct and personal attack against your psyche.
I live to serve.
Nearly 30 years ago I was sitting and writing something of little consequence and talent. I was in what I will call the middle stages of my transition as a writer. I had reached the conclusion that not everything I wrote was worthwhile and everything I wrote could stand editing but I had not reached the stage following the transition. We'll get to that in a minute. Things were not progressing well but I ploughed on, forcing myself to continue even as I realised what I was writing was complete and utter crap.
Most of us have moments of clarity in our lives. Times where suddenly things make sense. I've been fortunate enough to both recognize many of these and remember them. There was the one when I was 10 or so. I had gotten into an argument with my mother and stomped upstairs and gone to my room and slammed the door to show how angry I was. Directly after I slammed the door movement at the top of my closet caught my eye and I saw my GI Joe helicopter teeter for the briefest of seconds and smash to the floor, breaking it.
I looked at the wreckage and thought "This is my fault." It's a lesson I remember nearly 40 years later of the consequences of ill-though actions.
The writing project mentioned above progressed and for the better part of three months I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, waiting for that inspiration that would make everything better. Then one day I started reading what I had written and I cannot describe how bad, how utterly and unforgivably bad it was. I started to go in and edit it and look for things to re-arrange and to change and to tweak and after about a week I had another moment of clarity.
Sometimes what I write is unsalvageable and the very best thing to do is to discard it and move on. This was the stage after the realization that not everything I wrote was worthwhile. If something is bad, get rid of it, it just pollutes the place.
This sounds so very simple but thinks for a moment of how you may write. Me, I used to finish every writing project I started, no matter how bad it was, and ignore the quality, the style, the structure, the everything, in order to finish it and put it in my "completed" pile. This time I went through typewritten page after typewritten page with a pen, crossing out each one until I reached the end of the 70 or 80 pages and threw it all away. There was three months worth of hard work tossed into the trash; were it belonged.
And this moment of clarity taught me two very important lessons:
1) Classic inspiration ain't all it's cracked up to be
2) Skill is more important than classic inspiration
Since that time I have been both able and willing to put on hold or abandon or discard the non-working parts a project. An example of this is the piece Trainwreck (http://www.neopoet.com/node/24574) were I dropped 4 stanzas from a 10 stanza piece because I decided they added nothing to the narrative. There are many more examples in the lines I write and drop, in the poems I start and never finish, in the projects I conceive and never start.
Because this transition positioned me to pursue skill rather than inspiration. The pursuit of inspiration is a feeble thing. The best way I can put it is stop looking to be inspired and just be inspired. Be willing to fail, be willing to write badly, be willing to throw bad work away. And don't do this to impress anyone else, do it because you want to be a better writer.
As I get older and become more skilled, I find writer's block is a thing of the past. Oh I will still get stuck on certain projects, but I can set them aside, confident that if they do not make sense when next I pick them up, it's better that I stopped when I did. I have more inspiration in a day than about which I can write in a lifetime and the problem is not one of time but rather of selection.
It's why I can write an example for every contest, why I can compose 8 lines on anything, why I can give good critique and why I am an excellent editor. It's made me a better father, a better son, a better person. It's why I admit I am wrong as soon as I realise it, why I make public apologies for my transgressions, and why the intended hurtful words of others have no power in my life.
It is also why I trust skill over inspiration for skill will always produce something worthwhile and inspiration will do so only rarely. It's also why I can admit the inspiration can, at times, surpass skill. But just think what can be accomplished when inspiration is combined with skill.
That's my goal in my writing and my life.
Some people will take this blog post as a personal attack. These people are idiots.
I live to serve.
Nearly 30 years ago I was sitting and writing something of little consequence and talent. I was in what I will call the middle stages of my transition as a writer. I had reached the conclusion that not everything I wrote was worthwhile and everything I wrote could stand editing but I had not reached the stage following the transition. We'll get to that in a minute. Things were not progressing well but I ploughed on, forcing myself to continue even as I realised what I was writing was complete and utter crap.
Most of us have moments of clarity in our lives. Times where suddenly things make sense. I've been fortunate enough to both recognize many of these and remember them. There was the one when I was 10 or so. I had gotten into an argument with my mother and stomped upstairs and gone to my room and slammed the door to show how angry I was. Directly after I slammed the door movement at the top of my closet caught my eye and I saw my GI Joe helicopter teeter for the briefest of seconds and smash to the floor, breaking it.
I looked at the wreckage and thought "This is my fault." It's a lesson I remember nearly 40 years later of the consequences of ill-though actions.
The writing project mentioned above progressed and for the better part of three months I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, waiting for that inspiration that would make everything better. Then one day I started reading what I had written and I cannot describe how bad, how utterly and unforgivably bad it was. I started to go in and edit it and look for things to re-arrange and to change and to tweak and after about a week I had another moment of clarity.
Sometimes what I write is unsalvageable and the very best thing to do is to discard it and move on. This was the stage after the realization that not everything I wrote was worthwhile. If something is bad, get rid of it, it just pollutes the place.
This sounds so very simple but thinks for a moment of how you may write. Me, I used to finish every writing project I started, no matter how bad it was, and ignore the quality, the style, the structure, the everything, in order to finish it and put it in my "completed" pile. This time I went through typewritten page after typewritten page with a pen, crossing out each one until I reached the end of the 70 or 80 pages and threw it all away. There was three months worth of hard work tossed into the trash; were it belonged.
And this moment of clarity taught me two very important lessons:
1) Classic inspiration ain't all it's cracked up to be
2) Skill is more important than classic inspiration
Since that time I have been both able and willing to put on hold or abandon or discard the non-working parts a project. An example of this is the piece Trainwreck (http://www.neopoet.com/node/24574) were I dropped 4 stanzas from a 10 stanza piece because I decided they added nothing to the narrative. There are many more examples in the lines I write and drop, in the poems I start and never finish, in the projects I conceive and never start.
Because this transition positioned me to pursue skill rather than inspiration. The pursuit of inspiration is a feeble thing. The best way I can put it is stop looking to be inspired and just be inspired. Be willing to fail, be willing to write badly, be willing to throw bad work away. And don't do this to impress anyone else, do it because you want to be a better writer.
As I get older and become more skilled, I find writer's block is a thing of the past. Oh I will still get stuck on certain projects, but I can set them aside, confident that if they do not make sense when next I pick them up, it's better that I stopped when I did. I have more inspiration in a day than about which I can write in a lifetime and the problem is not one of time but rather of selection.
It's why I can write an example for every contest, why I can compose 8 lines on anything, why I can give good critique and why I am an excellent editor. It's made me a better father, a better son, a better person. It's why I admit I am wrong as soon as I realise it, why I make public apologies for my transgressions, and why the intended hurtful words of others have no power in my life.
It is also why I trust skill over inspiration for skill will always produce something worthwhile and inspiration will do so only rarely. It's also why I can admit the inspiration can, at times, surpass skill. But just think what can be accomplished when inspiration is combined with skill.
That's my goal in my writing and my life.
Some people will take this blog post as a personal attack. These people are idiots.