Inspiration May Affect Our Enthusiasm But It Doesn’t Matter For the Quality of Our Work

Writer’s believe inspiration results in innovative work but there’s little difference between what we produce when we’re inspired and what we produce when we feel unmotivated.

As writers, we’re all constantly looking for that zen state. Perhaps you’ve heard this referred to as “being in the zone.” When we’re in the zone, no one better interrupt us. We don’t answer the phone, reply to texts or even respond to someone who comes up to speak to us in the coffee shop where we’re writing. When our muse hits us over the head with an idea, it doesn’t matter where we are or what we’re doing, we have to stop then and there, pull out a notebook, cell phone or laptop that’s become like another appendage and get it down.

Those ideas that come out of the blue always seem like genius to us. This is perhaps because we think that ideas that take effort to come up with such as those we only get from reading, researching, examining data and reviewing analytics anyone can generate by doing the same things. Ideas that strike randomly, especially when we’re not trying to think up anything, we believe must come from our own unique creativity, insight, or perception.

Why Do Some of My Best Article Perform Poorly and Some of My Most Ordinary Ones Perform the Best?

This is one of the most common questions I see regularly asked by writers and I have asked it myself. We’ve all experienced this. We get a really inspired idea that we’re convinced will knock people’s socks off and go viral. We write it up and send it out to receive it’s deserving standing ovation, only to find it gets a lukewarm reception. Frustrated and disappointed the next day we throw something together off the top of our head that isn’t particularly creative and which we don’t spend hardly any time on. The next thing we know, that one has gotten thousands of views and tons of positive comments.

I’m sure there isn’t a writer anywhere that hasn’t been made crazy by this phenomenon at some time or other. We all wonder how we are ever supposed to become successful when there seems to be no predicting which of our articles are going to do well. How are we supposed to get ahead if it’s hit or miss and we end up wasting time on articles that are bound to flop?

The bigger question writer’s ask though is, “What am I missing?” Our inspired pieces are, well, inspired so how can they not receive the reader engagement they deserve? We can only conclude there’s something wrong with the readers out there or maybe there’s just a plot against us. “If not”, we request, “Could someone please fix the bug so what is created through truly inspired thought can rise to the top like the cream that it is, letting the uninspired pieces sink to the bottom?”

How We Perceive Ideas

Typically, when thinking about where ideas come from, we have two views:

• Pure mental effort — This is the perspective that ideas result from force of will, focus, attention, concentration and work. Most writers tend to believe that the majority of their ideas are generated in this way.
• A spontaneous manifestation that is outside our control — This is also known as inspiration. You will often hear this referred to as the presence of our muse. Writers frequently talk about how rare these ideas are and recognize that waiting for them to come from wherever they originate will result in infrequent writing at best.

We often attribute value and quality to these categories such that ideas that come from pure mental effort, we believe to be less creative, original and of a lower quality than ideas that come from inspiration.

The Truth About Ideas

The truth is that while ideas may seem to come more from one or the other, they always need some degree of both. Inspiration without the effort put into developing it will leave it as just something you have a sense of without it being delineated. It is more potential than reality at the stage of pure inspiration. The distinction between Inspiration and. mental effort is similar to that between wisdom and understanding.

Similarly, any idea that you work to develop must have at least some inspiration driving it. Otherwise, you aren’t likely to bother with it past perhaps some initial thought or research and you are even less likely to write it up. What you are most likely to do with an idea completely devoid of inspiration is forget it.

Creativity involves seeing the relationships between different things you have experienced, thought about or learned. This is why inspiration seems to come out of the blue. All of a sudden, something will bring up a thought that we had before in a different way because of some kind of connection we are making. We don’t generally stop to recognize that this connection exists as we are usually rushing to try to establish whatever has been inspired before it we lose it.

The Myth of Inspiration

Writer’s romanticize and idealize inspiration as this mystical muse that whispers an idea into our ear. We attribute inspiration to something magical, undefinable and inexplicable. There’s no doubt that when inspiration “hits” and we’re in the zone, that it feels good, our confidence in our ability soars, and we believe what we have produced is a masterpiece. We believe it is a completely different kind of writing process and is qualitatively different than what we produce based on ideas that come from effort.

Yet an idea is nothing more than a new combination of old elements we see as related to each other. Which old elements are called to mind is determined by what we are focusing on, reading, or coming into contact with at any point it time.

The closer related we perceive the elements to be, the less effort we will need to combine them in new ways and transform the idea from potential to actual. The easier this process is, the more likely we are to perceive the idea as having come from inspiration. The harder this is, the more we will feel it was generated through pure mental effort.

The quality of the writing we produce however, doesn’t differ. What differs is what we perceive to be it’s starting point. The reality is that If you put your writing away for a week, when you look back at it you won’t be able to tell the difference between what you wrote when you were inspired and filled with enthusiasm and what you wrote when every word seemed like pulling teeth. And readers won’t be able to tell the difference either. The difference is in our head, not on the paper.

Take Away

It’s important to keep in mind, that while we may perceive a difference in our writing when we are inspired and everything seems to just flow, and when it seems like a huge amount of work and we have to force ourselves to keep at it, the reader doesn’t. We need to remember that the quality of our work isn’t significantly impacted by how much inspiration, enthusiasm or motivation we feel when writing it.

This will prevent us from throwing in the towel on those days when we just aren’t feeling it and conclude whatever we write will be too terrible to publish. It will also decrease some of our discomfort regarding the unpredictability of how our articles will perform and help us make sense of why it seems our “inspired” articles often don’t do as well as we expect while our “uninspired” articles may take off.

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