Needing this advice right now! I'm in the early days of writing my third novel, and wishing I felt a little more inspired and excited, Nuala Ni Chonchuir says more about what she calls The Novel Fear here
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the... work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.”
- Chuck Close
4 comments:
Hear hear!! I can sit for hours and stare at a blank page and hope my muse will smack me across the head with The Big Idea mallet but of course that never happens. The smidgeon of a workable idea comes after many many words are written - all of them crap in my case but every so often, a glimmer of writerly hope!
Good luck with your THIRD NOVEL!! What's the second?!?! I'm still yet to get my hands on your debut novel!!
Take care
x
Amen to that Niamh!
Gottha!
I completely agree. My job is to show up. If I keep showing up the work will too. It might lag behind but that is just because it is a tad cynical and wants to make sure I'm showing up before it pulls up ready to work only to find I've gone out for a latte.
there.
Post a Comment