In his most recent weekly newsletter, Atomic Habits author James Clear quoted painter and visual artist Chuck Close on the subject of inspiration:

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to do an awful lot of work.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.

This quote reminds me of my daily ritual of doing The New York Times Wordle and Connections games with my daughter. Working as a team, one of us might say something that's not quite right or that provides only a partial answer, but that might spark a thought in the other person, leading to the right answer or the complete solution. For example, in the game Connections, I might see the word BROAD and wonder aloud, "BROADCAST?" And Mel might chime in, "Of course, BROADCAST, FORECAST, PODCAST, TYPECAST"—finding the connection between BROAD, FORE, POD and TYPE.

I wondered what other artists had echoed Close's advice to get to work rather than wait for inspiration.

"The writer is an explorer," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Every step is an advance into a new land." Like Close, Emerson seemed to recognize that the process of writing leads to discovery. So did Beatrix Potter, who wrote: "There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you."

Similarly, the process of writing takes an initial attempt and turns it into a polished, final product. Margaret Stones argued that, "The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written."

And "No writing is wasted," said Erin Bow. "Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfranciscensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey." What's the point of this analogy? Bow continued: "No writing is wasted: the words you can't put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better."

Agatha Christie understood that a writer writes. She relayed in Agatha Christie: An Autobiography: "There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well." Similarly, Richard Bach said, "A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit."

Though this might sound dreary, Barbara Ueland insisted that writing makes us better: "When we commit ourselves to writing for some part of each day, we are happier, more enlightened, alive, light-hearted and generous to everyone else. Even our health improves."

But my favourite quote about writing is from Isabel Allende: "Write what should not be forgotten." That could be the subtitle of this blog: I write what I don't want to forget.