When I Get Excited to Write
Sometimes when you have to write, you have to write. On Friday, I was hit with an idea. Well, let me rephrase that. An idea that I have been considering for several years finally came to mind in a way that might lend itself to a book length treatment. No, I am not announcing that I am writing another book right now (I am still in the midst of the first one, after all). This may be nothing. However, I am writing today about how this weekend kind of played out because big writing projects require a great deal of inspiration, at least for me.
I can sit here at my laptop staring at a blank page for hours, not quite sure how to get started. As you can tell from my postings on this website, there are times when I post several things right in a row, and there are gaps in my schedule. Sometimes I just don’t know what to say or don’t feel like I have anything important to say. I even wrote a prior post for you about how to write when you don’t feel like it. I still think that post is true, but I don’t always follow my own advice. There are those days where I just end up looking at a blank page, not wanting to write anything because I’m not feeling inspired. That’s not good, but it is true.
Interestingly though, it can happen in the other direction as well. Like I said, I got hit with this idea on Friday night. I had a kind of chapter outline, and I knew that I could dive in and start to put some thoughts into a coherent format. I wrote approximately 12,000 words on that project this weekend. Sometimes I stare for hours at a blank page, and sometimes I put out pages of work in an hour. It all has to do with inspiration.
That’s frustrating on one level because I have a hard time controlling my inspiration. Like I said, the ideas I wrote down this weekend have been floating around in my head for months, if not years. Nothing I have written this weekend is especially revolutionary to me. None of it came about because of something new I just read. Perhaps some of the connections I was drawing were new, and maybe that is how the inspiration came about. However, I honestly don’t think they were. There were things that just naturally flowed together in my head, but it was because they were stored in my mind that way anyway. In my mind, it makes sense for Charles Taylor’s discussion of enchantment in A Secular Age to be classified by C. S. Lewis’s Medieval Model from The Discarded Image. I had never written about these concepts together, but it is hardly revolutionary to talk about them in the same paragraph. Again, I don’t feel like lightning really hit me in terms of my knowledge. The only revelation that really inspired me about this weekend was that I considered how to arrange a good number of these elements into a long form format. It wasn’t a content related inspiration by any means; it was an editorial inspiration.
The ideas just kept on coming. It is fun to write when that is happening. Things make sense and flow together. You feel like you are making progress, and it oftentimes feels like taking a break from writing puts you at risk of losing that flow. Even as I stopped to eat dinner tonight, it was funny because I wanted to get right back to work as soon as possible. I knew the weekend was coming to a close, and I wanted to get to approximately 12,000 words. It was the target I had set for myself, and I wanted to get there. I didn’t want the fire to go out, and luckily it did not. How do you know it didn’t? I probably would not be writing this quick blog post if I was working on writing my actual project for the weekend.
This has been a highly productive weekend for me. I haven’t written like this for some time. It feels good. We will see if I can sustain this high level of productivity. I probably will not be able to. However, like I said at the beginning, when inspiration hits, don’t squander the opportunity. Write all that you can. Dive in and get words on the page. These types of opportunities don’t happen all the time, or at least they don’t for me. Maybe you are special, and they do for you. If you are more like me, however, cherish these times and got excited about them. These are the high points of writing that you can remember when you are staring at a blank page tomorrow. Remember the good times and use that as motivation to keep going. They will return.
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