Of course we all know what it feels like to ‘just know’ what to write: to have a character walk into your head, a plot-idea land in your lap, a phrase or image flower for your inner ear, or a crucial scene pour out of your fingers.
So much of the ordinary discourse about art and creativity centres on those magical moments: ‘the spark’ of ‘genius’. It’s so much more interesting than stories of seats of pants on seats of chairs, of doing the hard yards, of reading the data of what sells and doing that, of feeling the boredom and doing it anyway.
It provides an explanation for the artist’s and the audience’s sense of an experience which can’t entirely be analysed, of something (and maybe someone) being special and worth cherishing at least till you give the book away.
But by definition you can’t make those moments of inspiration happen at will. So what if inspiration fails you? Whether you’ve a contract to fulfil or a child’s birthday poem to write, or simply an internal need to finish the story, what will you do then?
