‘I spit in my hands…’ The sentence has been in my mind for a couple of days now. I am not sure what it wants from me. What does it want me to do with it? What does it want to be?
I haven’t had the time to write anything properly in the past months. Sure, I have written things. But those were essays, answers to interview questions and Instagram posts. All of them had the purpose of helping aspiring writers with their craft or telling the world about my first novel.
They are not “truly” creative. No new chapter for my second novel. No ending to that unfinished short story, which I buried in a folder somewhere on my laptop (I even wonder if I can still retrieve it).
Wrapped up in the promotion of my book, going from one to the next book shop, library, or university, being a guest on radio shows and doing interviews, I have been too tired and distracted for inspiration to strike. I haven’t forgotten what it feels like though, the excitement, the rush as if you have struck gold.
‘I spit in my hands…’ Could this be the beginning of something? I pick up the sentence and turn it around in my head, looking at it from various angles. It indeed seems to spark something inside of me, but it isn’t strong enough yet to actually catch fire. I put the sentence down again and decide to leave it alone for now.
~
When it comes to the craft of creative writing, inspiration seems to be one of the most difficult things to pinpoint. Both as a writer and an academic, I struggle to find the right words to talk about something that seems almost otherworldly.
When people ask me how I got the idea for my novel Fake Fish, in which a student makes a deepfake video of one of his professors and by doing so upends both of their lives, I usually takes me quite some time to find an answer.
There hasn’t been one specific moment in which the idea came to me. Rather, the story is the result of multiple moments and influences. I single out one or two of those when answering the question. But although those carefully selected moments have indeed shaped the story, the process of writing the novel has been much more complex and is nearly impossible to capture.
~
‘I spit in my hands and watch the spittle thread…’ The sentence has resurfaced. It has changed somehow, it has been extended and turned into something of a paradox. Wouldn’t it be far more logically if the hand spitting was followed by an action instead of mere observation?
Why am I just watching? How would that amount to anything? I am now even less sure what the sentence wants me to do with it, but it doesn’t feel like an ordinary sentence at all anymore. Afraid to forget, I write the words down in one of my many notebooks, using pencil, not pen, as this would feel too permanent.
~
I am not the only one who has likened creative writing to a mystic endeavour. There is a long history of connecting poetry and prose to heavenly inspiration, dating back to ancient Greek mythology.
The Greeks believed the Muses played a crucial role in inspiring writers and artists. Poets like Homer and Hesiod explicitly call upon these goddesses in their works, begging them to speak through them.
In the contemporary poem Aas (which translates into Bait) by Cees Nooteboom, one of my favourite Dutch poets, inspiration is likewise pictured as something nearly divine. In Aas, poetry exists before the writer puts pen to paper.
Albeit still shapeless, the poems decide who will write them. The poet “merely” needs to lure them with the right form.
I wonder if this divine quality is also why I find it difficult to pinpoint how inspiration works. Although I am an atheist, there is no denying that there is something transcendent bout writing poetry or fiction.
~
‘I spit in my hands and watch the spittle thread…’ As the book touring has come to an end and I have again ‘idle’ time to think, the sentence starts tugging at me. The words greet me in the morning, even before I have greeted my kids.
I find them annoying as I don’t know what their desired purpose is, but they are stubborn enough not to allow me to put them on the back burner again.
Then, on a late fall afternoon, when I am walking through the nearby woodlands, all of a sudden the sentence is followed by other words. I know what the sentence wants now, it wants to be a poem. All at once it is there.
Excited and in a flow state, I get my phone out of my jeans pocket and start recording as I say the lines aloud:
I spit in my hands
and watch the spittle thread
spin
around my wrist,
around my lower arm,
upwards to my chin…
I watch the dread
dislocating
my elbow,
my upper arm,
going for my neck,
my breath…
I guess I should be doing something,
but I just watch and watch instead.
~
Many modern authors have spoken about the pleasures of getting into a flow state: a state in which writing seems to occur on its own. Virginia Woolf described the process as being ‘in the thick of the greatest rapture known to me’ (1953, p. 115 as cited in O’Reilly & Yeh, 2023, p. 12).
And when writing The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) Margaret Atwood reports being so immersed in the process of writing that she didn’t even make any notes in her writing journal—’From September 12, 1984 to June 1985 all is blank in my journal (….) though by my page-count entries it seems I was writing at white-hot speed.’ (Atwood, 2018).
Similarly, Kazuo Ishiguro wrote his novel The Remains of Day (1989) in what he calls ‘The Crash’; a four-week period in which he was completely absorbed by writing this story and had ‘vital imaginative breakthroughs’ (Ishiguro, 2014).
These examples seem to suggest that inspiration is something that overtakes us, like a force of nature. This realisation might drive many (aspiring) writers to despair, as it seems that all we can do is to sit and wait, hoping for the Muses to speak to us.
But do such moments, in which inspiration strikes, indeed come out of “nowhere”, or is there something we can do to make it more likely for them to happen? I think we can.
When Ishiguro talks about the Crash, he for instance mentions that he carefully planned a period of isolation with his wife Lorna, so he could focus on writing only. Moreover, he admits that he didn’t start from scratch when going into that period of isolation:
I should say that by the time I embarked on the Crash, I’d consumed a substantial amount of “research”: books by and about British servants, about politics and foreign policy between the wars, many pamphlets and essays from the time, including one by Harold Laski on “The Dangers of Being a Gentleman”.
I’d raided the second-hand shelves of the local bookshop (Kirkdale Books, still a thriving independent) for guides to the English countryside from the 1930s and 50s. (Ishiguro, 2014)
Getting into a flow state thus seems to be about more than sitting and waiting for the Muses to sing to us. Looking back on the process of writing the poem above, I perhaps unconsciously also did various things that boosted my inspiration.
To begin, I took the time to think about the first sentence when it came to me and to write it down. I also made use of the ‘idle’ time by reading poetry, watching films and visiting museums. As such, I was feeding my creative mind.
Although I wasn’t writing that much fiction, I was writing non-fiction and I made it a habit to write down preliminary ideas for my fictional work at least once a week.
Crucially, the poem came to me during a walk and that wasn’t a coincidence either, as psychological research shows convincingly that ‘walking opens up the free flow of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the [goal] of increasing creativity.’ (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014).
Inspiration is thus also about creating the right conditions, about developing a writing habit that works for you, about doing research and spending time on the actual act of writing and about figuring out what you want to write.
It’s indeed about spitting in your hands and getting to work. But although there are many things we can do to get those creative juices flowing, the above poem and the process of writing it also made clear to me that it’s necessary to let go every once in a while too, even though this might feel counterintuitive and scary.
It’s important to embrace the fear that comes with letting go, to allow ourselves to see where the current will take us, to just watch and watch instead.
Tips for Boosting Inspiration
Besides the more obvious things such as doing research on the topic of your work of fiction, and reading the published work of other writers, you might want to consider the following practices:
- get into the habit of writing regularly, preferably daily, even if it’s only for ten minutes.
- Many writers fear the blank page and it can be tremendously difficult to write down that first sentence. Remember that the first sentence will most likely not remain the first sentence. You will probably change or even delete it.
- Apart from realising this, it can be helpful to start every writing session with the same sentence. For example, to get the blank page out of the way, some writers use a well-known typing exercise consisting of typing the line ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’, which contains all letters from the alphabet.
- Starting your writing sessions with a free writing exercise can also be very helpful in generating ideas. This means writing for a very limited amount of time (say 5 minutes) and pouring out everything that comes to mind without taking your pen from the paper and without overthinking or wanting your writing to be beautiful.
- Keep a writing journal to note down when and where you work best. It’ll give insights into how you can best organise your writing. What are the best times of the day for you to write? Do you work better in that busy café where they make great cappuccino, or in complete silence curled up on your comfy sofa?
- If despite all of this you still get stuck, a change of scenery can be helpful, so go for that walk.
References and suggestions for further reading
Atwood, M. (2018, April 25). Margaret Atwood on How She Came to Write The Handmaid’s
Tale. The Origin Story of an Iconic Novel. Literary Hub, Retrieved
https://lithub.com/margaret-atwood-on-how-she-came-to-write-the-handmaids-tale/
Ishiguro, K. (2014, Dec. 6). Kazuo Ishiguro: how I wrote The Remains of the Day in four
weeks. The Guardian, retrieved from
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/kazuo-ishiguro-the-remains-of-the day-guardian-book-club
Nooteboom, C. (1982). Bait. Retrieved from https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poems/poem/103-28581_AAS#lang-en (Original Publication: Nooteboom, C. (1982). Aas. Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers)
Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of
walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory,
and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036577
O’Reilly, S. & Yeh, J. (2023). Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings.
London: Routledge/Open University Press.
