Does Inspiration Come in a Vacuum?

Maybe some writers are social butterflies by nature, but not this lady. While I can turn on the smiles and energy for a group, I’m not particularly outgoing without a cause. The COVID era hasn’t helped in this department either. After two years of avoiding crowds…well, like the plague…my social anxiety is at an all time high.

To add to that, when I am in a group setting, my mind is often wandering elsewhere. I’ve always been that person with a story percolating in the back of my head, even if it isn’t well formed yet. In elementary school, I was the one the teachers called out for daydreaming, and they were spot on. I absolutely was leagues away from multiplication tables and diagramming sentences.

In a chaotic world, I ran/run into my stories. It’s where I process pain and joy. For me, creating those worlds is as necessary as breathing. Sometimes, it’s nearly impossible to not slide inside those magical narratives and hide.

Here’s the thing, though— hide in your head long enough, and you miss out on life.

While that can feel like a good thing sometimes, it inevitably becomes detrimental. It goes without saying that withdrawing from the world affects your relationships with others, but it also has a profound impact on your creativity.

I’ve mentioned it before, but one of the most impactful pieces of advice I’ve ever heard from another writer was to go take a walk. If you want to break through the fog of your own mind and find creative inspiration, you have to take a look at the world around you.

That advice came from Neil Gaiman, so it’s safe to say, the method works.

Over the past few months, I’ve struggled with the feeling of racing against the clock with my writing. I literally wrote a 115k novel in a little over a month during the fall. I’ve spent a lot of time hiding in my head, not only weaving together stories but fighting to create and follow a path to actually publishing the massive backlog of works I’ve written trying to go faster and faster and faster.

Call it post-Pitch Wars anxiety; blame it on a steady diet of social media where it seems every other writer just acquired the agent of their dreams or a sweet publishing deal. My brain keeps screaming to keep pushing ahead, or I’ll miss out on the moment…that my writing will wither away on my laptop never to see the light of day before I kick the bucket.

The result of that constant anxiety-fueled sprint is that I pull back even more than usual, using every free moment I have to push through edits or crank another few thousand words out. It’s a great recipe for burn-out…and eventually loneliness.

Several weeks ago, I went home to Hampton Roads, staying in an Air BnB on my own instead of at my dad’s. The plan was to go bananas on my edits for THE HIEROPHANT in between seeing my family for dinners and maybe a stroll or two on the beach. I had to take advantage of literally every second in complete isolation…

Then, I had a friend call. Laptop still open, fingers hovering over the keyboard, ready to wrap up the conversation any moment to dive back into my novel, the last thing I had planned was a four-hour long phone chat.

But that’s exactly what happened.

Rather than hopping off the phone when she called, I decided to stay on the line for however long the conversation would go. I drank a couple glasses of wine; I sat on the beach, burying my feet under a sand heap while watching the waves and just…talking…to someone other than my characters…for fun.

Before I knew it, the evening had slipped away, and so too had the precious few hours I’d allocated for editing. 

This isn’t something I do.

Pictured = the reason my stepmom can’t take my dad and me anywhere at all

But I did it the next day too.

Instead of coiling up inside the Air BnB with my laptop, I went out with my family, and I didn’t worry about the time.

I wasn’t sweating looking at the clock and calculating how all my writing time was slipping away along with any progress toward publishing.

I took my time with dinner.

I sat out on the porch long after I’d planned to leave. Then, when I started to leave my dad’s place, I decided to stay even longer to give a relative a last-minute tarot reading.

I didn’t get back to my room until after midnight.

And you know what happened? How much my writing suffered? How I missed more deadlines? How I lost the thread of my edits and the novel just fell apart?

Yeah - none of that happened. I wrote less, sure, but I still got several hours of quality edits in.

They’re ones I feel good about…ones that don’t feel rushed or tired. 

Taking that pause and spending time in the moment outside of my own head actually helped my writing. Relationships between the characters became richer, their conversations more realistic because oh yeah…I engaged in actual conversations. The setting was better described because…oh yeah, I actually spent time in the environment. And it allowed me to actually sit in front of the computer without panicking…to take my time and breathe because time wasn’t racing.

Taking time to pause and simply exist in this world enriched the world I’m spinning outside of it.

So, if you’re like me, stop for a second. Close the laptop and call a friend. Leave your editing notes, outlines and sketches on your desk and grab dinner with your loved ones. Come back and visit the world around you for a bit.

Go take a walk.