The Durability of Inspiration
A man sits on a park bench on 5th Avenue, feeding pigeons and contemplating if he’s made a mistake devoting his life to writing. He’s broke. He hasn’t been paid to write in over a year and the bills are piling up. The ideas just aren’t coming anymore. At the moment, he is ready to give it all up for a steady job. Out of the corner of his eye he catches sight of a single piece of weathered paper floating on the breeze. It lands in front of the man. It’s a page out Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. The rain has made almost everything on the page illegible except for one line:
“The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”
A single tear rolls down the man’s face and he instantly knows what he was made to do–write THE musical. He runs home and pushes his face into his Macbook. He writes all night and as the sun rises, he types the last word of his musical which he will call…Hamilton.
Guess what? NONE OF THAT HAPPENED. I made that story up as an exaggeration of what we think happens when the great artists get inspired (you can read the true story of the creation of Hamilton HERE).
I like to imagine that people often think of inspiration like a train–a train with no posted schedule, but when you see it, you just have to hop on and let it carry you to the finish of your creative work.
I had a great conversation this past week with my friend Devin who is pursuing his Master of Arts. He posed the question, “Is our inspiration durable enough to last until we can find the time to write the song or story? Is it durable enough to remain clear–even when ignored or “shelved” for months or even years? The durability of inspiration will be tested when we get frustrated, fail, or meet resistance and obstacles in the pursuit of creative goals.”
So is your inspiration durable enough to not break under the pressure of frustration, lack of time, or failure? If it’s not, then how do we make it so? To answer this, we can look at how other materials are made more durable. For instance, let’s look at steel. Recently, scientists have found a way to make steel more durable by coating the outside to protect the steel. The coating seals the steel and protects it from the harsh elements so it won’t corrode.
Similarly, there are ways we can seal our ideas so they are protected by the elements through two types of discipline.
The first type of discipline is that of Immediate Capture. Immediate Capture is the act of bottling an idea the moment it comes into our heads. How many times have you been inspired to create something, only to be distracted by life and come back to the idea with only a vague fragment of what you first had? I’ve gotten into the discipline when an idea for a blog comes to capture my thoughts immediately in Evernote as detailed as I can be. I also keep what Blaine Hogan in his book Untitled calls a “Scratch File“– A file filled with photos that inspire me in photography. It’s a central place I can always go to look for ideas or to revisit styles I want to try. You also do this with music. Certain songs can help seal inspiration. I wrote my last book Unfinished while playing the same songs over and over. They helped me get into the right frame of mind and since they were familiar, my mind wasn’t distracted.
The second type of discipline is consistency, which we’ll discuss in part two next week.