What to do if you have no inspiration? Professional writers never wait for inspiration to come to them

As a writing teacher who teaches writing in many companies, public sectors, and universities, students often come to me to ask me questions about writing, and most of them are related to inspiration.

“Teacher, how should I collect inspiration?”

“Teacher, what should I do if I have no inspiration?”

“Teacher, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, but I still don’t know how to write it?”

Questions like these, like the migratory birds that visit Taiwan every year, appear in various writing classes year after year. Behind every question-asking face, there is actually the same anxiety: they have given all the responsibility that cannot be written to something invisible, ungraspable, and that comes and goes without a trace, called inspiration.

Well, should writing rely on inspiration? Before answering this question, I inadvertently remembered a past incident of the literary weirdo Li Ao.

Li Ao’s wonderful metaphor: Inspiration is not a condition for accepting customers

In September 2011, Mr. Li Ao once said this in an interview on Phoenix TV: “Someone asked me, Li Ao, do you rely on inspiration to write? I said I don’t rely on inspiration to write, I can write when I sit down. I asked him: Does a prostitute rely on sexual desire to pick up clients? No, she doesn’t need to be in heat to pick up clients. If she relies on heat to pick up clients, she is not qualified to be a prostitute.”

Although these words may sound a bit vulgar, if you think about it carefully, they actually make sense. What Li Ao wants to say is actually something about professionalism: The so-called professionalism means that no matter whether you are in a good state today or not, and whether you have the urge to come and go as soon as you want, you can produce stable output.

Especially if you expect to become a professional writer, you really shouldn’t rely on inspiration. The reason is simple, because if you are limited and constrained by inspiration, you may not be able to write anything even if you rack your brains. You may find yourself waiting all day for a moment that you don’t know when it will happen, while the deadline is approaching day by day. People who wait for inspiration often wait not for inspiration, but for anxiety.

The truth about inspiration: It never comes out of nowhere

The reason why we love and hate inspiration is mostly because we misunderstand it. Many people think that inspiration is a mysterious gift, like the muse suddenly coming and whispering a word in your ear, causing the paper to bloom. But the truth is less romantic.

Inspiration does not appear out of thin air, it is the result of the sum of all your past inputs and being triggered at a certain moment. The books you read, the roads you travel, the sentences you jot down when talking to people, and the things you suddenly think about in the middle of the night are all stored in a corner of your mind. The so-called sudden inspiration is nothing more than the rearrangement and combination of these old materials in new situations.

In other words, inspiration is actually a “result” rather than a “condition”. It is something that will happen naturally after you continue to input and continue to think. A person who never reads, observes, or writes, even if he sits there and waits for a whole year, there will be no inspiration. On the other hand, for a person who continues to input and writes diligently, inspiration is not a scarce commodity for him, but a daily thing.

Therefore, instead of asking “Where should I find inspiration?”, it is better to ask yourself: “Have I typed enough recently? Have I written continuously and regularly?” When you shift your focus from waiting to accumulation, inspiration is no longer the key to whether you can write.

Instead of waiting for inspiration, create your writing ritual

So, to be on the safe side, please get rid of the habit of relying on inspiration. Of course, if you think about it and still feel that you need inspiration to write, I have a suggestion for you: in addition to constantly improving your writing skills, you can also strengthen your writing motivation by establishing a sense of ritual.

To put it simply, through a series of preparations or adjustments in advance, you can quickly enter a state of concentration and devote yourself to a certain thing.

The function of the sense of ritual is actually a psychological switch. When you repeat the same set of actions every time you sit down to write, over time, your brain will associate this set of actions with “entering a working state”. So you no longer have to wait for inspiration to come, just press the switch, and your body and mind will automatically switch to writing mode. It’s a kind of focus that you can create with your own hands and be at your fingertips.

Many great writers never rely on erratic inspiration, but on this disciplined ritual.

For example, Simone de Beauvoir, a well-known writer from France, has her own writing ritual: “I start with drinking tea. At about ten o’clock, I will start working until one o’clock in the afternoon, and then meet friends. At five o’clock, I will go back to work until nine o’clock. In the afternoon, clearing my mind is not a problem for me.”

Stephen King, the best-selling American author, is used to doing these things repeatedly every day: he must take vitamins at a fixed seat from 8 to 8:30 every morning, listen to music of his own choice, and then start organizing manuscripts. For him, fixed times, fixed seats, and fixed order are the spells that summon output.

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s rituals are almost ascetic. When writing a novel, he got up at four o’clock every morning, immediately wrote at his desk for five or six hours, went for a run or swim in the afternoon, read some books and listened to some music in the evening, and went to bed on time at nine o’clock in the evening. He repeated this routine day after day, almost without interruption. He said that repetition itself is the point, and this pattern will bring him to a deeper mental state like hypnosis.

As for Hemingway, he even designed an ingenious “continuation mechanism.” He has a habit of stopping when he still knows exactly what to write next, rather than squeezing out all the inspiration for the day. In this way, when he sat down at his desk the next day, he would not have to face the most terrifying blank space, but could easily continue writing along the threads left yesterday.

Have you noticed that none of these top writers sit around waiting for inspiration? They each created a rhythm that suited them, making writing as natural as eating and sleeping.

From ritual to habit to flow

By establishing a writing ritual, you can naturally find a writing rhythm and style that suits you. Slowly, you can naturally develop the habit of writing, and even enter the flow of writing. This way, you don’t have to rely on inspiration!

There is actually a clear path to advancement hidden here. In the beginning, you need to rely on ritual to “start” yourself, because putting pen to paper is always the most difficult step. When this ritual is repeated enough times, it will become a “habit” and you no longer need to remind yourself to write. When the time is up, your body will naturally sit at the table. And when the habit accumulates to a certain extent, you will begin to experience a wonderful state: you forget time and your surroundings, you are immersed in words, and your thoughts flow out endlessly. This is what psychologists call flow.

Interestingly, flow never comes by waiting for inspiration. On the contrary, it almost always comes quietly after you have started writing and have been writing for a while. This is why I emphasize again and again: Don’t wait, write first and then talk. When you are willing to take that step first, all the things you thought you had to wait for inspiration will emerge one by one during the writing process.

If you like, you can try to start with the smallest ritual: fix a time period, make a drink of your favorite, play the same song, and then tell yourself, no matter whether the writing is good or not, write for fifteen minutes first. Don’t aim for a blockbuster, just show up on time. Being able to sit down at the table on time day after day is the most precious skill for a writer.

If you are really interested in writing, or want to learn to write well, then I would like to suggest that you start from now on and try to get rid of your dependence on inspiration. Writing starts from the moment you pick up a pen or type on the keyboard, and have a good dialogue with your own soul!

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