Michael Stearns: The Habit of Creating

I read a lot of interviews with favorite authors of mine to see how they do their work, and sometimes it seems there are two very different kinds of writers.

Some write only when hit by what they've humbly labeled "inspiration." You get the idea they sit around on velvet pillows all day, sipping tea and waiting for that magic moment. Another sort of writer treats writing like a regular job. They write every day, writing a set number of hours or pages or words, forcing themselves to sit down and work.

But writing is supposed be fun, right? Why treat it like a job? And besides, who doesn't want to say they wrote a story while "inspired"?

But why should it be an either/or kind of thing?

An interviewer asked W. Somerset Maugham (author of one of my favorite novels when I was a teen, the classic The Razor's Edge) whether he wrote when inspiration struck him or according to a schedule. He replied, "I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp." It was a smart-aleck answer, but he was making a point: The best way to take advantage of inspiration is to make sure you're there when it strikes—and to train it to strike on a regular schedule.

And, according to many of the writers I have worked with, the best way to do that is to write on a schedule. Make sitting down at your desk and facing a blank page no big deal. Make it a routine. Make writing and creating a habit. Teach inspiration to strike when you want it to, when you've set aside time to fully capture your best ideas with pen and paper.

It doesn't matter when you write (some prefer early morning, others keep vampire hours); and it doesn't matter where you write (one writer I know still writes on a typewriter propped on a board in his garage—the only peaceful space he could find when he started writing years ago); it matters only that you make the time to write. If you do that, everything else—especially inspiration—should follow.

Michael Stearns,
Editorial Director, HarperCollins Publishers