In my own writing I am very conscious of whether I’m writing from a place of inspiration.
All my most successful posts came to me as a vibrant and compelling idea that very quickly took shape in my mind and ended up being finished and posted quickly. What made them clear and living in my mind is what made them readable and engaging to readers, my job was mainly to stay out of my own way, to translate that lightning bolt of thought into writing.
There’s a symmetry there: it was easy to write because the idea was so clear to me in my own mind, and this clarity is also what makes it enjoyable to read. If you don’t quite know exactly what you’re trying to say, that problem isn’t going to be overcome by more “effort” at the prose level.
Unfortunately you can’t force inspiration, or at least I haven’t figured out how to do it. I have a lot of drafts that never go posted because that inspiration/clarity wasn’t there.
In my own writing I am very conscious of whether I’m writing from a place of inspiration.
All my most successful posts came to me as a vibrant and compelling idea that very quickly took shape in my mind and ended up being finished and posted quickly. What made them clear and living in my mind is what made them readable and engaging to readers, my job was mainly to stay out of my own way, to translate that lightning bolt of thought into writing.
There’s a symmetry there: it was easy to write because the idea was so clear to me in my own mind, and this clarity is also what makes it enjoyable to read. If you don’t quite know exactly what you’re trying to say, that problem isn’t going to be overcome by more “effort” at the prose level.
Unfortunately you can’t force inspiration, or at least I haven’t figured out how to do it. I have a lot of drafts that never go posted because that inspiration/clarity wasn’t there.