Originally asked
The Creative Independent, to working artists, its interview series
A repeated Creative Independent tension, asked as inspiration, muse, discipline, ritual, or the requirement to show up.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Interview, Cape Town, South Africa, American Academy of Achievement, 3 July 2009 source ↗
Moments of pure inspiration are glorious, but most of a writer’s life is, to adapt the old cliché, about perspiration rather than inspiration. Sometimes you have to write even when the muse isn’t cooperating.
If you’ve got a book that’s writing itself, let it! Follow it as far as it takes you, as hard as you can. Forget the willpower business.
Right. It saves you from giving up. This present novel that will be out — Villages — I several times thought it might be a bad idea and kind of abandoned it. So, it was really the habit — the habit of writing that kept me at it in the end. It was like a bad marriage. I mean, whatever. This is the wife I’m married to here, and I’m going to finish this book. Finishing it becomes the only way to get rid of it. So yes, it’s good to have a certain doggedness to your technique.
So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.
He’s been a total delight. So I now have a son of 41, a son of 40 and one of four.
And I got stuck in my unconscious for years. I had trouble getting out of explaining, “When I walk, why does my left foot go in front of my right foot?” There was nothing that just happened. Everything had to be predetermined, explained.
I would try to keep myself going by inventing games, and I would sing songs, a song beginning with “A,” “Always.” “Because,” “Charmaine,” “Daisy,” go through the alphabet. ... I would try to remember the states in the United States of America.
Monday to Friday, very, very industriously from ten in the morning ’til about six in the evening, I just sat and wrote, and revised and revised, and wrote.
It’s art that influenced me while I was in exile – Dumile Feni’s work.
I was part of a very big ANC team, and I worked very, very closely with Oliver Tambo, who was the president of the ANC in exile, who had an enormous influence in my life.
Athol Fugard, Hiroshi Mikitani, Alan Cumming, Jensen Huang, Spencer Bailey, Ursula K. Le Guin
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