On Inspiration

From a Wired article about where certain people got their inspiration from...

#4 was J.K. Rowling on how she got the idea for her wildly successful series of Harry Potter books. She says it came to her as she was riding in a train car between Manchester and London.

It was extraordinary, because I had never planned to write for children. Harry came to me immediately, as did the school and a few of the other characters such as Nearly Headless Nick, the ghost whose head is not quite cut off. The train was delayed, and for hours I sat there thinking and thinking and thinking... The irony is I almost always have pen and paper; I write all the time. And on this one occasion when I had the idea of my life, I didn't have a pen. For four hours my head was buzzing. It was probably the best thing, because I ednded up working the whole thing out before I got off the train.

Crazy! But I really do believe that there are stories out there, floating somewhere in the energy of the universe -- that want to be written. And that if you can keep your channels open (as Georgia Heard says), one of them might find you and speak through you. Which is why it is so important to follow the advice of Julia Cameron (or was it Natalaie Goldberg -- sorry if I've got the wrong person) who says it is vital for writers to spend time each morning writing what she calls "Morning pages." Three pages (or was it three hours?) of writing every day about anything so long as you are putting words on the page.

I was doing it religiously last fall, until I got discouraged by people (mostly non-writers) who would ask, "So, what are you working on?" and when I didn't have a specific project to answer with, "Well, what's your genre then?" and wouldn't take "I'm just writing" for an answer. I know, it's a convenient excuse now that time is no longer an issue for me, and if it weren't that one, it would probably be another.

So it's time for me to get back to those morning pages in my notebook. To spend time each morning listening for those voices in the universe, the ones that want their stories to be told, the ones that want to be heard.