Can’t find inspiration? Just do it already.
When I talk about having to do your work, you artists, writers, craft mavens… you all know what I mean.
You need to do it. No matter how silly or whimsical your work might seem to someone who doesn’t share your enthusiasm. Even if you’re not being paid to do it. Whether your work involves establishing a daily writing habit, or practicing your instrument, writing a song, or taking photos. It’s about mastering process, then learning to go in a different direction. It’s also about using your abilities wisely, working your mojo, implementing some of your ideas, rather than letting them lie fallow.
Heading into 2018, I’m rooting myself on. I’m reminding myself to lean into my talents. I’m also reminding myself—and you—to face any given project by starting with the end in mind. If you have a plan, and start working, you make it easier to become engaged. In this way, by diving in, you just might experience the satisfaction of finishing one song, one short story, one blog post. At least, you’ll get a draft going.
As the remaining hours of 2017 wind down, I’m thinking about how to become inspired. How to get excited once again about making something. I’m also thinking about acquiring a mindset of hope and developing concentration. Or, as the dictionary puts it, undergoing a process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially something creative.
Now you creatives fortunate enough to live in or near the city, well, you might be taken off your productivity perch by day-job requirements but also from social obligations or a night life that not only beckons but demands your presence.
As you know by now, in Warren County, my town is rural and quiet. It provides fewer social distractions unless you consider drinking yourself blind one of them…though to be fair, there are plenty of places to walk and cycle. So my social life is not as distracting as it once was.
For now, I have to simply shake myself awake and not get invaded by laziness creep.
Inspired by a great doc
Today, I got busy. I organized myself during morning chores, then settled down to watch another documentary about alt rock music, this one called Lo Sound Desert by Joerg Steineck. The film showed how punk and post- punk and proto-grunge twisted and developed out in Coachella country. Well, don’t you know, I interrupted the video, and the experience of watching other people play. Instead, I picked up an acoustic loaned to me by a friend that I hadn’t touched nearly enough since it had been in my possession. Steve, the guy I work with, had given me some guitar picks the other day at the tee shirt factory, so that was another small, but crucial motivator.
Oh brother where art thou! I’m rusty as heck, these were the thoughts that went through my head and they were a fact. I was desperately in need of prolonged practice. Mind you, I never strummed or made complex chords all that adroitly even when I played regularly. So, this little jam-lite was nothing I’d want anybody to hear. The bigger point is I got momentarily inspired and acted on it.
I played for a few hours, and well enough to follow various rhythm guitar patterns played by Marty Schwartz, a guy I found on You Tube. I also recorded a very, roughly played lo fi version of that Car’s song, My Best Friend’s Girlfriend. (Of course, I substituted Boyfriend…into the lyrics and played some different open two finger cheat chords.)
Now, my ardent hope is to do the same with my writing. Work off of the little bits and pieces I gather in my journal and craft something broader and more thematic out of it.
Generate stories based on the people who spur my curiosity and just see where the experiments take me.
Ideas about writing
Recently, I read a few chapters in a book I’ve had for a while now by Phillip Lopate called To Show and To Tell, the Craft of Literary NonFiction. In it, he suggests in it that you turn yourself into a character by having some distance from yourself. And maybe I will follow his advice. I’ll start with this basic idea: I’m not the Lauren of before, I’m the Lauren of now.Lopate wrote that sketching a profile of yourself is a good place to start. He advised that you highlight your quirks and mannerisms, writing about your mental and verbal habits, any antisocial tendencies, whatever behavioral details that set you apart from the majority.
Okay, here are a few: I’m often sarcastic, in a quiet deadpan way that may give rise to a crack and a cackle, and this is because I tend to see absurdity often. For instance, while listening to a segment of a recent podcast of This American Life, I fixated on the presented facts that due to sleep deprivation, many in the U.S. Navy have been recently rendered unable to steer and operate ships, and keep crashing. Navy guys who can’t run a ship. Absurd.
I also saw online a story first broadcast on WNBC about a Floral Designer named Marsha Hunt who has taken to hanging XMAS trees upside down, which reminded me of the derisory practice of upside down crosses, which some believe to be a sign of the occult.
But my fixations aside I’m not entirely negative, in fact I am quite a softie who can be taken in by a good story because I’ve retained some of my youthful naiveté. Why else would I regularly bring muffins to the boy I work with? Acting like his mother, when he has a perfectly good one. Or, believing somebody’s sob story and giving them five dollars, when they could well have been fabricating the depth of their despair?
Whatever the year ahead brings, I know it’s time to wake up, pay attention and let the good—and less than good—times roll and dive into my work. This has been the Lauren Report Originally presented in January 2018