Inspiration is a shy Muse. You reach out to see if you two can meet but wait for a call that never comes. Inspiration can remain hidden from you behind a tree, asleep, inattentive, aloof. She can disappear for weeks without a word. Many of us lament our sorry self then. ‘Poor me, no inspiration today, or tomorrow, or any days as I simply have no ideas. I never have new ideas. I am empty. My mind is a waste land.’
Then you go about your work at the bench and become deeply engrossed in a project. Perhaps it involves four table legs to be shaped and sanded and readied for gluing. This is repetitive work. Once your movements are in place you go about them with some measure of skill and then of speed. Your mind is untethered and wanders off on its own to search out things while you work. An idea will then burst to the surface of your brain. It should make a popping sound when it appears. Where once was a great flat oceanic void called your imagination, now there resides an Idea, albeit a small one, but an Idea floating on top of it.
And you say to yourself, ‘Hmm. That’s not a bad idea floating there.’ This germ of a thought was nowhere to be seen a moment ago, not even the tip of a tiny mast appeared on the horizon of your mind to announce this little skiff. Then blink: there it is. An idea has arrived. Now where was this little morsel hiding? And what is to be done with it now that it’s here?
This kind of inspiration did not occur because you held up a finger to summon your Muse. [She may have responded with one of her own fingers to your request. Temperamental, a Muse]. Inspiration it turns out requires a pair of odd shipmates to faithfully arrive with: Discipline and Failure.
Ideas need to be nurtured, cared for, attended to, and worked. They tend to wither and die on the vine when not massaged, trimmed, ripped at, dismembered, torn asunder and reassembled. All this activity indicates your interest. [He loves me]. And your discipline to keep this practice alive makes other ideas easier to form. It’s like dirt. Dirt is easier to work it if you don’t ignore it, if you keep it active all year round, adding compost and amendments and cover crops and then when it’s time, you find that the soil is quite fertile.
This discipline to keep playing with ideas makes it easier to find them. They will start crowding your brain, ‘Let me on board!’ And most of them will not be worth a penny but they will start to show up more often. Then your real work begins. As any creator knows, an idea is only the first small push off the shore. The direction one ends up taking is subject to currents, winds, storms, calms, passing waves, water spouts, and frantic rowing. It is real work is creating. The idea is the easy part. Once you have one then you must get to manipulating and working it and then face that other companion: failure.
Failure is as necessary to creating as discipline. Failure is the stepping stone to success. It is a requirement, a needed torch to light the way to create more ideas or better ones, or in making that little idea now worth something big. There is not a single straight line to a successful, creative idea. It has no direct path but many efforts and realizations that ‘oh this does not work and maybe that does’. It is the job of the creator to keep at it, try on new iterations, new variations, new notes, new endings, new colors textures and hues until it becomes if not perfect then at least damn good.
Let the geniuses create perfection by just rolling out of bed. The rest of us need to keep our inspiration alert by our practice, our discipline, and our failures.