How To Write When You’re Not Inspired
The potential wasted in waiting for inspiration
Sometimes, I think of myself as Dr. Frankenstein. Awake at all hours, traipsing about my lab (my desk), tinkering with Petri dishes (adjectives), beakers (thesauruses), and dead body parts (commas), half-crazed and pulling my hair out, ignoring my friends, waiting for that spark of electricity (inspiration) to come down and create life (make the words come flowing out of me like a Yellowstone geyser and make me millions of dollars).
But inspiration isn’t really a viable — or dependable — resource. It’s fleeting, and honestly, so intangible that it might not even exist.
Working on an idea as a writer is about .5% initial inspiration, and 99.5% about having the endurance to sit there and massage that idea into something legible, let alone worthwhile.
A few years ago, when I was in my MFA program, most of my classwork involved completing full-length scripts, sometimes as many as three at once. In the summer between my first and second year, I decided to take a lesson from one of my heroes, playwright/screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks.
As explained in her book of short plays, 365 Days/365 Plays:
“The plan was that no matter what I did, how busy I was, what other commitments I had, I…
