It has been a long time since I was last struck by inspiration. Most of the time, when an idea “comes to me,” it’s the result of me chewing something over in the back of my mind for a long time before coming up with whatever thought or idea will form the center of what thing I’m going to produce. Poetry, short stories, a novel draft, all these blog posts… None of them are the result of inspiration even if I’ve often claimed to have been “inspired” by something. Even those times, I came up with an idea after thinking about some media or idea for a while. Which might sound a lot like inspiration, but I would define inspiration as something external that plops a fully-formed idea into your head. All of my “inspired by” ideas are a result of my internal processing coming up with an idea based on thinking about something else. It feels like quite a thin hair to split, which is why I haven’t written about this before and am somewhat hesitant to write about it not (mostly because it doesn’t much matter to me which side of the split hair you’re on since it’s all a part of the writing process and the only person the precise definition of this stuff matters to is the person doing the defining as a part of their process). Still, this feeling of actual, true inspiration is rare enough that I feel compelled to say something about it now that I’ve been on the receiving end of it for the first time since I set up an online D&D campaign back in 2019.

I’ve spent most of my life writing for reasons other than inspiration. I was a storyteller as a child, usually the leader of whatever make believe games my siblings and (when I had them, anyway) friends would get up to. As a teen, that transformed into actually writing down stories to share with my lunch friends in high school. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I wrote then because I needed a way to process what was going on in my life, both the repressed feelings and trauma from my life before high school (the traumatic stuff starting happening less often once I was started high school since I was actually out in the world rather than stuck at my parents’ home for the first time in my life) and the difficulties I had adjusting to the incredibly different life I suddenly found myself living while outside of my parents’ house. In college, I started writing to explore ideas merely for the sake of exploration (though I had to pass through a phase of “exploring ideas to get good grade” before I arrived there) and realized that I’d been doing most of my creative writing as a form of processing my repressed emotions and trauma (both the repressed and the open stuff). This meant that, when I wrote, I could actually explore those ideas more consciously and actually do something with those thoughts and feelings other than write them on a page.

Throughout all that time, up to my junior year of college, I’d never once been inspired the way that people spoke about it. There’d been no lightbulb flashing on in my mind, no strike of lightning, no suddenly unfolding idea. Just me, my thoughts, and the way those thoughts twisted in my mind until they came out as a different story. Which is why the sudden moment of inspiration I had walking down the library stairs in my college was such a shock. I found an entire world unfolding in my mind, a massive change to a story I’d abandoned because I was certain I’d never be able to separate it from the early days of it serving as a method of processing my trauma and family relationships. The simple act of walking down that large, square double-flight of stairs was all it took to launch me into a reworked version of the story. There was no thinking on my part, just the sudden arrival of a fully formed idea all because I was staring down the center of the stairs to the ground floor below as I walked. It was a bit confusing to deal with that the time, since this was my first instance of being properly inspired (and it launched a heavy fascination with the idea of inspiration and muses that resulted in me combining two papers from two different classes in my final semester of college into a single massive paper that was basically my own voluntary undergrad thesis), but it made me stop doubting that inspiration was real.

Since then, I’ve been inspired from time to time. Discipline has always carried me further and been a better supplier of work since my inspiration-based ideas had a tendency to not turn out super well. I’ve had more success with recent inspiration-ideas, though, but mostly because I did the work to actually flesh out and develop the idea first, rather than just running with it. For example, my Infrared Isolation story is an inspiration-based story, since the entire thing came to me in a dream, and the second version of it is much better than the original one I was working on in 2018. The D&D campaign from 2019 also went better than expected because I actually did the work to develop and incorporate the idea that came to me, rather than just insert it into the campaign and hope it turned out alright merely because I knew it would fit the group perfectly. And then, probably due to stress, my divided attention from everything going in my life, COVID, and all the events of the past four years, I wasn’t struck by inspiration again until just a couple of weeks ago. Which kind of sucks since I absolutely do not have the energy to launch myself into a new creative project, but the general drive of it is so strong that I’m considering where I can fit a little bit more daily writing into my life. Which also kind of sucks because I have so many other creative projects languishing in incomplete states that could really use just a bit of time and attention every day to get them over the finish line.

So now I have to balance this surge of inspiration, my limited ability to do any more work of any kind, my desire to work on older but still loved projects, and the fact that I’m currently willingly staying in a hell of my own design (since working this much seems like my best path toward the future I’d like to have). All the discipline and inspiration in the world can’t help solve that problem, nor can they do anything about the burnout that is limiting my ability to push myself even a little bit. All I can do is jot down my idea, add whatever notes come to me as I continue thinking it through, and hope that eventually something will give and I’ll have more energy. Maybe the medication I’m taking will finally have run its course. Maybe the project I’m assigned to at work will finish its heavy manual labor phase (though I’m pretty sure that’ll continue up to and through sometime next year). Maybe the costs of living will drop enough that I can continue paying down my student loans as much as I do now but without requiring me to work ten hours of overtime per week. Maybe I’ll win the lottery. Lot of things that could potentially happen, but few of them seem likely to happen any time in the next month or so. Which means I’ll continue to stick to discipline as my source of creative output rather than inspiration for going on a sixth year. Which, you know, isn’t a huge amount of time measured against a full life, but does represent a solid third of the time I’ve been writing. Feels like a lot of time to continue working on stuff by sheer grit and determination alone, rather than because of any sudden and inexplicable fuel. At least I can count on myself to keep up the work, though, since I apparently have discipline in spades.