Effortless Writing
AKA Inspiration
Writing turns effortless when words drop out of the clouds and bounce just right
Some call it inspiration. A professional athlete would call it “being in the zone.” Me, I call it writing.
On a good day, that is.
On a good day, it seems I’m more the audience than the writer. While working on one of my novels (“Miss Buddha”) there were many a good morning when I woke up eager to get back to the keyboard to find out what was going to happen next.
By then each character had grown a life of its own, and no matter how hard I would plan for him or her to turn left at the next intersection, damn if she didn’t turn right. At this point I took Ray Bradbury’s advice: I hung on for dear life and took good notes.
When writing goes well, you will surprise yourself (pleasantly). The other day I was writing a brief essay about a specific take on a Buddhist tenet that I had held for years and now felt I had held wrongly, or, as I watch my fingers on the keyboard put it: I had been barking up the wrong Bodhi tree.
This is when you lean back and amaze: where did that come from? And then you laugh and thank the writer’s beautiful muse for being such a very nice person.
Many a teacher of the writer’s craft make a big point of writing every day, preferably at a set time — whether you feel inspired or not, whether you know what to say or not, because the only way to guarantee that you will not find words drop out of the clouds and bounce just right is to not write.
Even if the first paragraph is like pulling teeth, and bad ones at that, the second paragraph might sail into word bouncing and then: all is now well with the world again.
© Wolfstuff
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