Writing When You Don't Feel Like It
J.R.R. Tolkien liked to tell of how he came to discover hobbits. He was grading examinations, and on one of the empty pages, he wrote, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” He didn’t even know what hobbits were at the time. There was something about hobbits that he knew he had to learn more about.
While this story seems almost unbelievable, it does raise an important question about the writing process. What if we are not inspired like Tolkien was in that moment? Can we force our writing, and what are the consequences of doing so?
The easy answer to this question is that we can force our writing. When I wrote papers for school, they were much more formulaic. It started out with the five-paragraph essay in high school. It eventually expanded all the way up to thirty-page papers for my doctoral classwork. Many of those papers were not written out of inspiration. I had an assignment, and I wanted to complete the assignment. If that meant forcing my paper, the paper was forced. While I tried to produce the best paper I could, I know that some of them were just not that good because my heart was not in them. As Robert Frost once said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” Many of these papers definitely betrayed my lack of feeling.
On the opposite extreme, a few years ago I participated in National Novel Writing Month. If you have not heard of it, this project spans the month of November every year, and you try to put down 50,000 words by the end of the month. It is a fun challenge that feels good when you complete it. My story was a piece of inspiration; nothing was forced. No one told me I had to do it, and I had a story in my head I wanted to get down on paper. I was able to stop at any time, but I wanted to find myself at the end of the story I had discovered, much in the style of Tolkien. It is still sitting in a folder in my Google Drive and needs a lot of work, but I think that I was able to write so much in such a short period of time because I was excited to do it.
This is, of course, the greatest conflict of being a writer. To write something of quality, you need that inspiration. You can force your writing; we all have done it. Your product is going to suffer though unless you are extraordinarily talented. For the rest of us, we need to love what we are doing because that love is going to be evident in our work. Not every day is going to be the best day of your life, but you have to keep going. William Faulkner offered this advice, “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good.” Somehow, when you are probably going to write something bad, you have to power through and write something.
Perhaps Sam Gamgee gives us the best advice for this situation. He remembers that his gaffer used to tell him, “‘It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.” Even if we don’t feel inspired like Tolkien and begin our sub-creative quest on the back of an exam paper, we have to start somewhere. Yes, some days we might have to force it, and our writing might suffer on those days. Yes, that’s frustrating. But it has to be done. If you write 1000 bad words, maybe 100 of those words turn out to be good with a little polish. Maybe those 100 words givs you the spark you need to get back on fire again. I don’t like it any more than you do, but I don’t know that there is a better way, so we might as well get to work.