Writing Inspiration and Practice

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A field guide to finding material, making room, getting words down, and continuing when the work becomes difficult

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Writing advice often arrives disguised as a moral judgment. Get up earlier. Want it more. Stop procrastinating. Produce a thousand words before breakfast while somebody else, presumably, gets the children dressed, answers the emails, earns the money and locates the missing shoe. This is not that kind of advice.

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Writing is difficult partly because it asks two apparently incompatible things of us. We must be porous enough to receive what we have not planned, and practical enough to sit down and make sentences when nothing arrives wearing a halo. Inspiration matters. So do time, attention, repetition, play, privacy, nerve, reading, revision and the willingness to write badly for longer than feels dignified.

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Two of the most generous teachers of this double movement are Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron. Goldberg's writing practice trains the hand, senses and mind to move together. Cameron's creative practice clears internal noise and deliberately replenishes the imagination. Goldberg helps us enter the sentence; Cameron helps us build a life in which the sentence can keep appearing. Neither offers a formula for producing a masterpiece.

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