Friday, October 8, 2010

Flux, limbo, or *sigh* just plain waiting.

Sometimes a writer waits. And waits and waits and waits. We wait for edits, we wait for notes, we wait for 'the call', we wait. But the one thing I can't wait for is inspiration. I've discovered that if I wait for inspiration I might spend my whole life wordless. Inspiration comes by planting my butt in the chair and writing. Writing is my job. In my life I've had a number of jobs. I am an attorney, although I don't currently practice. I was also a motion picture agent. Whenever I find myself wanting to put off writing because I don't feel 'inspired' I have to giggle with the idea of what a judge would have said if I'd shown up in their courtroom on a trial date and said...

"Eh, don't want to go to trial today. I'm not feeling inspired."

Hmm. I think a contempt of court citation might have been in order and perhaps even a night in the hooskow. So although as a writer I may spend a lot of time waiting for others to get back to me about a specific project I don't have the luxury of waiting for inspiration to write. My stories don't write themselves (oh if they did!). These little golden nuggets only get written if I have the discipline to sit down and make my fingers do the tippity-tappity dance across my keyboard. Even on a bad day, when pulling words out of my mind is akin to shoving toothpicks under my fingernails, I still get words onto the page. These stories can't wait for my flitter flutter Muse to make an appearance. I figure while my Muse dances over a rainbow somewhere I can at least get the first draft finished and then maybe (hopefully) my Muse will be around to help me edit.



Have a Happy Weekend!

Maggie

1 Comments:

Blogger Amanda said...

The waiting is definitely hard in this industry, but yes, I agree you can't wait for inspiration, you can't wait for the perfect time, because sometimes it's just never going to be perfect and inspiration might not happen.

October 14, 2010 at 12:24 PM  

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