363 Words to Round Out The Week (About Inspiration & Work)

I like this commercial from ESPN. It’s pretty simple. If you want to play on the big stage, you have to do the work to get there.

I’m doing that ridiculous workout program you see on infomercials late at night right now. In fact, I’m nine days from finishing my first ninety day circuit. (And I’m going to do it again.) When I started the program, I couldn’t do very many push-ups. But every week I worked at them. Now in week twelve I can do quadruple the number I could in week one.

The same is true being a creative. The fundamental thing that always held me back from writing anything was my desire for it to be perfect. But how could it be perfect if I never worked at it? It’s taken me WAY too long to realize this simple truth.

The last definition for inspiration is “an act of breathing in; an inhalation.” I like that a lot.

The body requires oxygen. I learned why in eighth grade science but I can’t recall now, so I just accept that it does. Inspiration in the physiological sense is the oxygen delivery process for the lungs, which in turn passes it on to the blood and so on. Inspiration in the creative sense is the catalyst delivery process for the mind. The thing I like most about this last definition is the implied constancy of it. We are always breathing. Constant inspiration. The day we stop is the day we die.

We are always breathing.

Inspiration is inevitable. Because we are created as emotional beings, we will always intersect with catalysts that send us into that transcendent state. That’s a comforting thought. Before I was always afraid of not being inspired. Now I live confidently that inspiration is always right around the next corner. Always in the next breath.

“What is the result inspiration produces?” If I’ve done the work to play on the big stage, if I’ve placed myself in the path of success, loaded for bear with a double-barrel full of words, full of rhythm and syntax and structure…

I’m working to be ready for that next breath.

497 More Words on Inspiration (& Work)

I spent the better part of the last twenty years waiting to be inspired to write something awesome. I didn’t get a whole lot written. Sure, I started a bunch of stuff, but I could never finish it. The inspiration (that feeling of invincibility derived from a catalyst) would run out and I would wait for the next catalyst to push me further down road.

What a complete waste.

Then in the last few years I started digging deeper into the craft of writing. I spent more time thinking about and working on the mechanics of good writing, rather than relying on talent and waiting for inspiration. In 2010 (in addition to all the stuff I wrote for work) I wrote a both a feature-length screenplay and stage play. I was inspired to write both, but finished them through perseverance, through pushing through that place where there’s no more inspiration and only a mountain of words left to write.

Because if there’s one thing that’s been beaten into me about living and working as a creative, it’s that it’s a habit. You have to get up and do it whether you feel like it or not. Inspiration has little to do with it. It is hard, painstaking, gutting-it-out work. Inspiration has its place as the jumping off point (see the definition: “a sudden brilliant, creative or timely idea), but inspiration is a fleeting emotion that doesn’t get you through the dark night of the soul. (Donald Miller has touched recently on this too. Here and Here.)

The question then, I don’t think should be “what inspires you?” It can actually be counterproductive. We find something we think is the bee’s knees and can’t wait to share with people but when we do we hardly ever get the desired response. A “yeah…cool” at the most. We get our feeling hurt because they didn’t get it. If this happens enough we get bitter. Inspiration wasted. Lord knows I’ve lost plenty of good ideas that way.

So I think it’s important to recognize that the inspiration you experience is for you. It’s your rocket fuel to break out of the centripetal force that’s holding you where you are, but it’s only the stage one booster of breaking orbit. You have to maintain your trajectory after lift off. Stage two. This question I believe, is the important one: “what is the result inspiration produces?”

In that earlier series I wrote, I talked about that symbiotic relationship between faith and inspiration. I believe they are inexorably linked. You can’t have one without the other. The next logical step (for faith and creativity) is found in James. As paraphrased by Rich Mullins: “Faith without works, it just ain’t happening.”

I plan to double my output this year. Two screenplays. Two plays. And I plan on writing at least one of them here in front of you. I have not an ounce of inspiration for any of these four projects.

That’s also for later.