LJILJANA w CLIFF #3.1
- Today you did almost all of the talking.
- I asked you of to talk to me a bit about the research that you were doing, that you are going to be writing about in your papers, and boy did that light a fire under you.
- I don't even know if you took a breath during that whole time.
- You told me about the the research that you've been doing and the situation that you were investigating and the experiment that you were running, and I did my best to assimilate that information and convert it into written language as you spoke so you could see me writing what you were telling me.
- So, we'll go back to that and we'll do that a little bit more, but what I wanted to add to this recording was something that we didn't talk about in the call because I didn't think that we need to have a discussion about it.
- It's just a little tidbit that you might find useful.
- One of the things that you would mentioned in our prior discussion was the difficulty sometimes in getting the motivation to write, and wanting to have that motivation all the time.
- To be inspired to write all the time.
- Let me tell you, that is the primary wish of everybody who ever sits down in front of a keyboard or in front of a pad of paper with a pen in hand.
- Every single writer wants to be inspired all the time because no writer is inspired all the time.
- It is one of the biggest struggles a writer will ever face.
- There are others, don't get me wrong, but that's a biggie.
- It's top of the list.
- And one of the things that I have discovered is actually something that an author that I very much like and respect, his name is Stephen King, wrote about in an excellent book about writing called, funny enough, On Writing.
- In this book King talks about the Muse, which is a metaphorical representation out of Greek mythology for inspiration.
- The Greeks believed that these Muses, I don't remember if there were seven or nine of them, they were daughters of Zeus, and they would visit artists and allow them to mentally transcend into a higher plane of thought where they would be inspired and would produce tremendous works of art.
- So these days whenever anybody talks about finding their muse, they're really talking about inspiration.
- So what King says about the muse is that it's real.
- Artist's can absolutely be wrapped up in that feeling of inspiration and write, or produce any art really, just effortlessly and do amazing work that when they turn around they say “wow, where did that come from?”
- But the way that he describes the Muse he specifically says that it is the sort to show up at the office, rock back in the chair, put her feet up on the desk, and sip some wine.
- The Muse will come, but she does not work for free.
- You need to be a hard boss and make the Muse sit down and get to work, and once she gets working, she does brilliant work.
- Which is his way of saying that inspiration will come after you begin to work.
- If you wait until inspiration strikes you, you are almost never going to write.
- You might write a handful of days out of the year.
- You're not going to feel like it 90% of the time, maybe more.
- So what he suggests, and what I have found to be not easy but very true, is to do what I call the five minute rule.
- You are going to write five minutes every day, bare minimum.
- If at the end of five minutes things just aren't clicking, you're still struggling for words, you're erasing everything that you write, it's just terrible and it's hard then okay, today is not the day.
- Not every day is going to be your day.
- But more often than not, if you sit down and do the hard work of getting that ball rolling for five minutes, you will have built up some momentum and things are going to start to click.
- Things are going to start to work.
- Things are going to start to get easier.
- You have inertia now.
- Once you start writing, continuing to write is going to get easier.
- The work is going to get even better.
- And though you only committed to five minutes, you might wind up putting in a half hour, an hour, ninety minutes, maybe more.
- Sometimes it'll work so well that you don't want to stop.
- But you have to sit down when you don't want to and commit to at least that five minutes everyday.
- That you are just going to do it no matter what it feels like, and trust that more often than not things are going to get better in a very short amount of time.
- But King and I do not recommend waiting until that moment of brilliance strikes you while you are out doing anything else, and only then sit down to write, because maybe you'll get one week out of an entire year that way.
- So give that a thought, maybe even give it a shot, and I look forward to hearing how that works for you.
