3 Simple Ways For Writers To Stay Inspired
Being a writer in 2020 has been the equivalent to being a miner and digging in new, uncharted territory that’s composed mostly of quartzite. With each swing, the mineral is scarred, but not broken down enough to be of any use. So, we swing, again and again, trying to generate enough material to become substantial.
For some, this part comes with ease having the strength and endurance to keep going back to the site each morning, hot coffee in hand as the sun crests over the horizon, signaling the beginning.
For others, this is not a sustainable practice. Our bodies might begin to break down before progress is made, or mental fatigue makes each morning more unbearable than the last as we sit in silence with paper and our pens or pencil or the blue glow of the laptop’s screen burns our tired eyes.
I fall into the latter of the two categories. It was difficult to admit that I might not be as inspired or unphased by the events in the world. But when I look more closely, it’s not a matter of being uninspired or unphased by the tumultuous events that have transpired so far in 2020. And if you, too, fall into this camp, it is nothing to be ashamed of.
Barely halfway through June, barely halfway through the year, and we’ve already seen so much: an impeachment hearing, a global pandemic, insider trader and deep government corruption, the abuse of power and total disregard for human life, and the subsequent protests in response to the deaths, so many deaths.
It’s been a year. We still have a long way to go.
That doesn’t mean you should give up on your writing. Despite how frivolous it may seem, writing still matters. What you produce today is still important. Record what you can now so that later, when the world takes a much-needed breather, you can make something out of it. Keep mining so that one day you will be able to create something meaningful out of all this.
Just the other evening, in preparation for this essay, I found mementos from the house I lived in while working and eventually finishing my second book of poetry, Delirium. That was back in 2015 through 2018, through the midst of more turbulence of Donald Trump’s election and the start of his vexatious presidency.
Most often, visitors asked why I had so much junk in my office. But it wasn’t junk or scraps of paper. These simple little reminders surrounded me; tiny shreds of inspiration were always in sight, keeping me on task or providing the answer to a question that long eluded me. And I think these reminders work much harder for us than we give credit to. Just as writer’s place a favorite line as an epigraph, these can be placed around our space and offer inspiration on those mornings we wish not to work, but still show up, just in case.
The Preservation of Poems
Reading is the most beneficial way for writers to stay inspired. At its best, a book can move us to action while we’re at our worst. I’ve provided short story collections that might spur you on. For me though, poetry has always been a means to easing myself into the proper mindset when it comes to writing. A good poem has a way of helping me find my center and reposition myself in the world so that I see things just differently enough.
Above all else, keeping poems that moved me visible helped the most. It started with Frank O’Hara’s poem, “Mayakovsky.” The last three stanzas, even today, often echo in my mind:
4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.
On my typewriter, which I still use today—for reason beyond nostalgia and hipsterdom—I wrote these final three stanzas of “Mayakovsky” and pinned them to the wood-panel wall opposite from my second desk, one that was left behind by my step-father’s father and that I used for computer desk for my undergrad assignments and book edits.
Before I’d start working on my manuscript, I’d read these three stanzas aloud to myself and sit with them. It was a form of meditation that helped me lower softly into the mentality I wanted to be in while working on Delirium.
Posting poems around my workspace didn’t stop there though. In time, I typed up “roll the dice” by Charles Bukowski, which always struck me as reaffirmation in harder times to what we, as writers, must do and continue to do. And eventually, I returned to O’Hara and one of my favorite poems by him, “Lines Across the United States,” which can be found in the collection Poems Retrieved.
By the time I was finished writing Delirium, my workspace was covered by eight or so different poems from different poets. But each one captured a tone or mood that I was working through in my own work so that even when the news was bad or the day lousy, I could take some time to sit at my desk, read over the poems, and know what it is I wish to say.
Epigraphs and the Power They Wield
While I’m one of those chaotic evil types who dog-ear their pages, my favorite pages marked with pen and/or highlighted, notes illegibly scribbled in the margins, I always felt this helped me to better understand the sentence or paragraph that moved me to this point.
As a practice, I’d sometimes steal a page from Hunter S. Thompson’s book and type the paragraph or sentence that held my attention. That, in itself, is a good exercise to better engage with the sentence structure of each line. Eventually, this line from Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams made its way up onto my walls:
“Perhaps I let myself believe too easily or fully in the surface of joy without attending to the complications of its underbelly.”
A reminder to keep mining and to dig deeper. Sometimes, when we’re pleased with a sentence, we stop there. But there is always something more than what’s on the surface. Often, what’s beneath is far more valuable.
Sometimes though, I’d come across an epigraph that struck me. These were always the most interesting to me since, for better or worst, I was moved before the book even began. Some of the better epigraphs I’ve read were from Raymond Carver collections, one of which was a quote from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, one of my favorite novel’s to date and a surprise to see it used by Raymond Carver, though I understood its importance to the overall collection by the end of it.
For these, I was more aggressive. Carefully, I cut the page with the epigraph from the book and taped it to the wall, the tanned, aged paper a dull contrast to the old wood-grain finish. And while I’m sure some people would disapprove of this, arguing the sanctity of books, I don’t believe we should be so precious when it comes to books. They should be cared for and treated well, yes. But they are also tools for us to engage with and improve from. We should use them as we best see fit for ourselves, and in my case that was carving out a couple of Carver’s epigraphs to keep me inspired.
Admittedly, I didn’t take this approach for all the epigraphs I enjoyed and felt a strong connection with. Some of those I typed up, just the same as I had done with the poems and the Jamison quote. Though I did so without much detail, leaving their origins a bit of a mystery since time has since muddled the memory of which book they belong to. But they are significant, nonetheless. They peppered my walls so that when my eyes strayed from the page or screen, they were greeted with words:
“When hope is gone, the ultimate sanity is to grasp at straws.”
—Raymond Carver
The Map of Progression Through Rejection
Part of being a writer is coming to terms with rejection. During a time when the world seems to be burning around you, rejection can be hard to stomach. I know I’ve had my share of difficulties with a recent short story I’ve been working on, one that’s been met with rejection after rejection. That comes with the territory.
When I was an undergrad student, one of my workshop professors brought in all of his rejections he ever received since he started submitting his writing. Some were expected, but others were a bit surprising in their lack of tact. The Paris Review comes to mind specifically, who sent him a small card that read “Rejected” on the back. Nothing else.
Of course, what he was showing us was from a time when rejections came in the form of letters and you had to mail out your submissions. Now, with everything being digitized, I think writers are inundated in rejection like never before. But the idea of preserving your rejections can help map out the path of just how far you’ve come since you first started.
Work on Delirium started back in 2015. By late 2016, I had a full manuscript and some rough edits. I felt that it was finished and was pleased with that thought—finished. It brought about the false idea that it was, in fact, finished. But as I know now better than ever, no piece of writing is ever truly finished.
But with the idea that it was a complete manuscript in mind, I sent it away to a few smaller indie presses for publication. The first round of submissions were all rejections. So, I revisited the manuscript and edited it, deleting pages that felt unnecessary and trimmed it down from nearly 200 pages (I know) to roughly 130 pages and then sent it off to another round of presses.
Most of what I received back from them were the typical rejection notices. But one that I was particularly eager to work with, C&R Press, never responded. I assumed they’d left it to remain in the slush pile.
What I didn’t consider was that my manuscript could’ve made an impression on the editors. In July of 2017, I received this email at 12:45 AM:
Hi Coty,
Thank you for your manuscript. I know it’s been longer than we would have preferred and that’s because your manuscript made it through to our final round of readers. We thought you’d want to know that was the case. Though we can’t offer you a publication agreement at this time, we wanted you to know it made it much further than most manuscripts do and we are glad that you thought of us for your work. The door is always open here.
Please do keep us in mind for the future.
Warmly,
John + Andrew
Long Live Books!
While it wasn’t an acceptance letter with a publication agreement, it was something better for me, a writer who had been hard at work on what was technically a second collection—the first being published via 451.Press during the height of Instapoets, only to be pulled from shelves a week after its publication due to numerous sexual assault and harassment charges, breaches of contract, etc. with the parent company, Underwater Publishing. It was a sign of progress.
I printed out the email and pinned to an earlier email I received from Driftwood Press regarding a short story I submitted that garnered debate in the editorial process but was ultimately rejected, to remind myself just how far I had come from start to finish. By March of 2018, after submitting my manuscript for a third round to various presses, Bowen Press offered me a publication agreement for Delirium.
And though it’s been a hell of a year so far, though it was a hell of a year then for various other reasons, it’s incredible to see just how far these simple little things can carry us when we allow ourselves the chance to indulge in them.
