1.2 The Myth of Inspiration
You make writing hard when you accept the myth of inspiration.
What makes writing hard? Most writers claim facing the blank page provides their greatest challenge. Neil Gaiman notes “Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.” Peter Elbow (1981, p. 14) wants to help “with the root psychological or existential difficulty in writing: finding words in your head and putting them down on a blank piece of paper.” Annie Dillard (1989, p. 59) claims the blank page teaches us to write, “the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength.”
Many writers believe facing the blank page provides writing’s greatest challenge because they accept the myth of inspiration (Becker, 2020; Flower, 1989; Kidder & Todd, 2013). According to the myth of inspiration, writing proceeds as follows: first, inspiration provides ideas – complete sentences – to your mind; second, you move the inspired ideas from your mind to your world by writing them down. When you accept the myth of inspiration, you believe inspiration must provide ideas before you write.
The myth of inspiration appears in many anecdotes about creative thinking or writing (Poincare, 1913). Poet A. E Housman describes being inspired while walking: “As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the season, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once” (Housman, 1933, p. 46). When Housman returned home, he wrote his inspired verses down.
Housman’s anecdote reveals another property of the myth of inspiration: inspired ideas rise into consciousness unintentionally or inexplicably. “At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it” (Poincare, 1913, p. 388).
When you accept the myth of inspiration, you make the blank page challenging, because you expect inspiration to fill your mind with ideas to write about. Without inspiration, writing seems difficult or impossible. Perhaps inspiration distinguishes great writers from others: lesser writers lack inspiration and fail to meet the blank page’s challenge.
The myth of inspiration underlies much writing advice (Elbow, 1981; Goldberg, 1986, 2021; Janzer, 2016; Lamott, 1995). Some advice proposes you inhibit sentence creation – your inspiration — when you immediately evaluate the sentences which come into your mind. Techniques like Elbow’s freewriting encourage writers to increase creative flow – to enhance inspiration — by delaying criticism. Other writing aids provide prompts to spark your inspiration (Goldberg, 2021).
To me, a cognitive scientist, the myth of inspiration relates to a cognitive theory called the disembodied mind (Dawson, 2013). According to the disembodied mind, thought occurs within a mind separated from both your world and your body. I associate inspiration with the disembodied mind because inspiration occurs in the mind, not the world.
However, cognitive scientists explore other theories about the mind. Embodied cognitive scientists move thinking from inside the mind to outside in the word, a view called the embodied mind or embodied cognition (Clark, 1997; Dawson, 2013; Dawson et al., 2010; Shapiro, 2019). If you assume the embodied mind, then how might your assumptions about writing change? When your assumptions about writing change, how might you alter your methods for improving writing?
