While combing through the writing section on Reddit.com a few weeks ago, I came across a writer who lamented that his inspiration seemed to come at ridiculously inconvenient times.
If you’re a writer, you can relate. When you’re overcome by that sudden urge to sit on your arse, put the pen onto the paper and scrawl out the second coming of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, you just can’t do it right at that moment because you’re busy doing other shit.
Maybe you’re driving to work. Maybe you’re in the middle of some important meeting with some pompous guy in a suit. Or you’re late for that hot date with that woman in the ponytail who you’ve been meaning to ask out for four months but couldn’t work up the courage to do it until last week.
Or, perhaps, it’s four o’clock in the morning, and you open your eyes and you think of the perfect ending to your zombie-ninjas-in-Mexico trilogy. But the problem is, you have to be up at 7 a.m. because you have that goddamned job interview and you don’t want to show up with those unsightly bags under your eyes.
I get it. Believe me, I get it. One of the most frustrating things I experience as a writer is the utter inconvenience of daily life. Daily life is like a precocious child – it demands all my time and energy. I’m so busy getting shit done that I don’t have any time to get shit done. Like writing.
Singer Tom Waits has his own way of dealing with his inspiration when it’s most unwelcome. There’s a well-known story that he was driving on the highway one day when a song popped into his head. Of course, Mr. Waits couldn’t just pull over and start writing down the musical notes, let alone get his guitar out of the trunk and start plucking away. No, man. He’s got important shit to do, and right now he doesn’t have time to deal with that other stuff.
So, he shouted at his inspiration: “Not now! Can’t you see I’m driving?!”
That’s all good and well if you’re Tom Waits, but he’s missing one thing.
He’s missing a notepad.
Yes, an old-fashioned, stuff-it-in-your-pocket notepad.
And a pen.
An old-fashioned, medium-point, blue-ink Bic. That belongs in your pocket as well.
I know that many people will say, hey, what about my iPhone? Or my Blackberry? Or god damn it, my Android?
Those will work as well. But, unless you’re a whiz with your smartphone, it’s a challenge to get everything organized. If you’re like me, you’ll be emailing yourself some ideas only to see your emails buried under all those letters from Gadhafi’s son’s lawyer offering you a third of his fortune if you can help him smuggle his money out of the war-stricken country.
Or you’ll furiously type it out in an electronic notepad and save it somewhere and forget that it was there in the first place.
It could get messy.
Really, nothing beats an old-fashioned notepad for sheer convenience. When an idea takes root in your head – such as when you see a pigeon shit on a Mercedes and you think it’s a metaphor for Angry Birds – you just whip out the notepad like a boss and write down a sentence or two about it.
Once you get into the habit of writing down a fresh idea every time you think of one, your notepad will be bulging with new starting points, scenes, characters, one-liners, and all kinds of other great stuff.
Odds are that your brain is already filled with a wealth of stuff that you often forget you had in there.
Yes, I’m talking about all those ideas you had from years past that you never wrote down. You just need to know how to find them. Sometimes you need to scratch your brain in the right places to get these ideas to surface.
That’s where the notepad comes in. Those notes are guides that will help you navigate the dark hallways in your brain where all your ideas reside.
And then, once you’re sitting down at your desk, or in the coffee shop, or wherever you like to write, you can pull out that notepad and suddenly everything is at the forefront of your mind again.
And then, you write.