The Inspiration Myth

January 18, 2018

Probably one of the hardest situations as a creative person is sitting down at the start of a work session and finding you’re supremely uninspired.  Your whole job or hobby revolves around creating things, you’ve set aside this time specifically for working on your creative projects, but now that you’re here inspiration has walked off and left you high and dry. And now, you have so few ideas and so little inclination to do the work that it hardly seems worth starting. I’ll bet we’ve all been there at one point or another.

However, there is good news. You don’t actually need to feel inspired to be able to put in a good day’s work. Sure, it helps, but you can get even the most creative work done without feeling particularly inspired. Certainly there are some tasks that are easier to complete when your brain doesn’t feel like i’s had the creative juices sucked out of it, but it’s nothing you can’t get around. There are amazing people out there who create and innovate every day whether or not the muse has visited them overnight. There’s this great quote from Peter De Vries that goes:

I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.

A big part of creating consistently is being disciplined enough to sit down and get going whether you feel inspired or not. Sometimes, just getting through that tough starting phase is enough to make the brain fog go away.  The thought of starting is almost always worse than the actual act, and the act of starting is harder than the act of continuing. Your brain might not be in the right head space now but push through the beginning and you could be sailing along in no time.

But maybe the slog continues throughout the whole work session. Unfortunately some days the inspiration fails to appear when you need it most, and it can feel that whatever you’re creating feels dull, uninspired, dragged out of you painfully, piece by piece. How could anything created under such circumstances be worth anything? However, come back tomorrow and what you’ll probably find is that what you made in that dry, uninspired spell is much better than you remember and might actually be quite decent.

In fact, work done when you feel unmotivated and uninspired is almost more valuable than work done when super inspired. It’s easy to create when the muse taps you with the magic stick. But when you work through the days when you don’t feel like it, you’re committing to discipline. Discipline is so much stronger than inspiration. Discipline is what separates people who achieve things from people who don’t. Inspiration is fickle. It visits once every couple of months, and flits away again almost immediate. Don’t get caught up in the need to feel inspired before you work. You don’t need that. You just need the discipline to push past your tough beginnings and trek through the difficult days and often you’ll find that inspiration follows activity. As Isabel Allende says:

Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.

The ideas will come and you’ll create your own inspiration. Discipline frees you from being dependent on inspiration to begin in the first place. Feeling inspired is amazing, but the days of disciplined creation when you’re not particularly inspired will serve you better in the long run and turn you from a person who only creates every once in a while to a person who creates regularly, improves their skills greatly, and is not dependent on any fleeting feelings to get in there and get the work done. You’re not always going to feel inspired. But the great news is that you don’t have to in order to create.

Want to see what I’ve been creating recently? Check out my latest video below!

1 Comment

  1. “Discipline frees you from being dependent on inspiration”!
    Very true.
    My sculpture teacher used to say, he showed up to his studio everyday no matter what, and on bad days he would tidy it. At least he was useful and served his creativity!
    I try to remember that.

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About Me

Hi, I’m Imogen Elvis.
Indie Author ✍️
Book Lover  
📚Reading and writing all things YA fantasy/sci-fi.  
My new book THE IRON WINTER (2023) is out now!

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