The question
Do you rely more on inspiration or discipline to make your work?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.
I don’t remember which writer said this, but in an interview, a prolific novelist was asked, “Do you write only when you’re inspired, or do you write all the time? Do you wait for the muse, or do you just kind of knock it out? You can just sort of spin it out?” And he said, “Well, I do wait for the muse. I write when the muse comes, but fortunately she shows up, like me, every day at 9:00 a.m.
Academy of Achievement interview, San Francisco, California, 13 September 2014 source ↗
It’s best to start writing when you wake up in the morning, or afternoon, or whenever it is you wake up. Just start then, because you are closer to the dream state than at any other time in the day, which means the imagination is really working on all cylinders, and it means that whatever it is that manufactures sentences in your head is very fresh, and you have all kinds of slants on things that by the end of the day you won’t have, or you will just lose along the way. Further advice I have not.
The bitterness. I am very sad if I think of the status of the world now. This is my deepest inspiration. This could be also an inspiration for the next generation or generations in literature. Inspiration to give something for the next generation, somehow to survive this time because these are very, very dark times and we need much more power in us to survive this time than before.
People tell me that I work hard. I never feel that I do particularly, because it’s fun. I always say, “Well, I’ve never worked hard in my life.” I’m busy, but most of what I do is enjoyable. It isn’t that it’s not tedious to some people, and so on, and of course I have routine to do, but I don’t mind it. I just don’t feel that I’m put upon. I spend a lot of time, but it’s fun. It’s a very intensive hobby. I would say it’s my most serious hobby. I have lots of hobbies, but the one permanent one is science, physics. So yes, I spend a lot of time, and I would agree with Edison, you have to work very hard and intensively.
It comes out of an intuition, or a learned intuition, I guess. You study a long time ’til you can do it. But it’s from looking around you, it’s from understanding what’s happening in the culture, what’s happening in the world.
Danny Elfman, Arlo Parks, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Updike, Frank O. Gehry, Jonathan Lethem
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