Creativity and Inspiration

Be thou the tenth Muse.

O! for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention!

To do great work, a man must be very idle as well as very industrious.

Don’t ever write anything you don’t like yourself and if you do like it, don’t take anyone else’s advice about changing it. They just don’t know.

I N THE AFTERNOONS , Gertrude Stein and I used to go antique hunting in the local shops, and I remember once asking her if she thought I should become a writer. In the typically cryptic way we were all so enchanted with, she said, “No.” I took that to mean yes and sailed for Italy the next day.

Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing. I’m careful about what I give voice to.

You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say.

H EMINGWAY GAVE a great piece of advice about writing, which I follow. He said always finish when you’re in a little bit of a flow, for the next bout.

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it’s the readers who build that world in their own minds.

If you have enough talent, you can get by after a fashion without guts, you can also get by, after a fashion again, without talent. But you certainly can’t get by without either .

Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

Writers who get written about become self-conscious. They develop a regrettable habit of looking at themselves through the eyes of other people. They are no longer alone, they have an investment in critical praise, and they think they must protect it. This leads to a diffusion of effort. The writer watches himself as he works. He grows more subtle and he pays for it by loss of organic dash.

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

It’s like making a movie: All sorts of accidental things will happen after you’ve set up the cameras. So you get lucky. Something will happen at the edge of the set and perhaps you start to go with that; you get some footage of that. You come into it accidentally. You set the story in motion, and as you’re watching this thing begin, all these opportunities will show up.

In the writing process, the more a thing cooks, the better.

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don’t always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

Revision is just as important as any other part of writing and must be done con amore .

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait and obey.

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.

Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author’s soul. If that upheaval is not present, then it must come from the works of any other author which happen to be handy and easily adapted.

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.