The Production of Inspiration

From Bogdangiusca via Wikimedia
Commons - in public domain

I've long heard writers talk about how if you sit around and wait on inspiration, you will probably never actually come up with much.  On the other hand, if you force yourself to crank along, day in, day out, you will produce enough stuff that some of it will be good.  I guess it is a corollary to the million words of crap theory that ostensibly comes from Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury, or Ernest Hemingway depending on where you hear it.  But that theory is that you have a million words of just utter rubbish inside you and once you've written that, you can start writing the brilliant stuff.  The corollary here would say that you probably still pump out bad stuff just as often as good stuff, but some of it is worth saving.  After trying to come up with something to put out every day this month, I've come up with a few reasons why this works, apparently.

First, it's Freedom.

"But no!  How can forcing myself to follow any sort of schedule free my artistic blah blah blah?"  The answer is, it doesn't free you timewise.  But it frees you in knowing that most of what you are going to throw out there sucks.  And as Mur Lafferty points out on I Should Be Writing, you are required to suck. But it's liberating, people.  If most of it is going to suck anyway, then what's the harm in generating a little junk.  Somewhere in there may be something worth saving.

Every now and then you find that something.

So you may generate a ton of junk, but every now and then there's something in there that is a diamond in the middle of the crap.  All it takes is some polish to clean it up.  It's a whole lot easier to take a 200,000 word novel and cut the crap and make it a solid 100,000 word novel than it is to take a brilliant 10,000 word story and stretch it out.  Just find the good parts and cut or polish the bad ones.  And that's the theory here, keep putting more and more out there.

It all comes back to statistics.

Ok, after writing a whole post (which you will see Sunday the 29th) about "the numbers" and how more submissions means more rejections but ultimately more acceptances, this borderlines on over-math'ing the writing world.  But the truth is, if you accept a chunk of what you are going to write is junk or crap, then just play the percentages.  If only twenty percent of your stuff is any good, you have to write five times that much.  If your percentage is higher, you're lucky.  If it's lower, you're probably more like me, with five or ten percent being really good and the rest mediocre walks from place to place.  So write more.

Finally, it works.

Don't believe me? Well I can prove it.  You're reading this post.  This post was inspired by writing another post for last weekend.  That post was crap, just a halfway point filler (self-acknowledged) in my month-long extravaganza of crap and filler.  BUT, while writing that I was thinking about how some of the stuff I had written this month actually was pretty good.  And how I felt good about the quantity of things I was writing.  And then I was inspired to write this post.  So there you have it.  Production leading to inspiration.

And don't worry - the stuff that seems uninspired after the fact?  You can throw it away.  Unless you post it in 31 days of posts on a variety of blogs for all to see.  Then the genie is out of the bottle.  But who cares?  There's gotta be something good in there or they'd have stopped reading.

You've stopped reading, haven't you?