when the well dries up
on inspiration, creativity, and trusting the process
“The work reveals itself as you go.”
Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
The year is 2011. I’m a starry eyed freshman in college, eager to immerse myself in my music education and pursue my dream of becoming a professional musician. I walk into my first master class—my major’s small group lessons for songwriting and composition where we shared our work for critique and workshopping—and my professor, a whimsical sort of guy, had a bunch of random paper paraphernalia taped onto his walls. It was exactly the type of wall clutter you’d expect from a jazz musician whose primary instrument is the vibraphone. The one that stood out to me the most, however, was a quote he’d typed up in Microsoft Word in all caps and printed onto a piece of copy paper:
INSPIRATION IS FOR AMATEURS
Every Wednesday for an entire school year, I walked into his classroom for my master class and my eyes were automatically drawn to that particular quote on his wall. Every time I saw it, I wanted to tear it down and scream, “YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT!” Those words haunted me. I couldn’t stop thinking about them. It’s been nearly 14 years since then, and I still haven’t stopped thinking about them. Ironically, I tend to agree with that sentiment now. That 17-year-old version of myself would be appalled, but frankly, she was too young to know any better. It would be years before I’d learn the full context of that quote, and years after that before I’d truly understand what it meant.
The clever quip that plagued my thoughts for so many years came from an interview with visual artist Chuck Close:1
“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.”
In Inside the Painter's Studio—a series of interviews with 24 artists—the interviewer, artist Joe Fig asks Close, “Do you have a motto or creed that as an artist you live by?”
Close answers by saying again that “Inspiration is for amateurs,” but he then continues on to share that he also lives by “the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will—through work—bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.’ And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you’ll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere.”
This, I’ve gathered, is a fairly common sentiment among artists. In the same book, Eric Fischl expresses something similar: “My discipline is that I try to work on a regular basis rather than in spurts. I certainly don’t wait around for inspiration!” Joe Fig himself says, “Something that’s very important to me is the idea—it was also scared into me at undergraduate school—that you have to keep working. Just get into your studio and always be making something. Even if it’s crap, finish it and then make something else. But always be working. You can’t just sit there staring at the walls waiting for inspiration. Creative thoughts come while you are creating.” Even Picasso (allegedly) had something to say on the topic: “Inspiration exists, but it must find you working.”
During the third and final year of my music undergrad, one of my professors was a pretty eccentric musician who also happened to be the lead singer of the Spin Doctors. He, too, had a similar outlook on the creative process. When I was in his master class, he held up one of his cheap spiral notebooks—the kind you used to be able to get at Walmart for under a dollar—filled with lyrics and told us that he had dozens more where that one came from, and that most of them were filled with shitty songs. His credo was this: in order to create something really good, you have to create a lot of shit too.
Anyone who’s ever gone to any sort of art school knows that these types of programs often force prolificity out of its students, sometimes to the point of overwhelm. If I brought the same song to master class three weeks in a row, I was definitely getting some side eye from my professors (and my classmates) because by that point it was expected that I’d be working on something new. During my three years as a music major, I wrote some really bad songs that never saw the light of day beyond my master classes and the occasional composition seminar. However, I also wrote some of my best songs during that time. Because I had no other choice but to keep writing or fail my classes, waiting around for inspiration was never really an option.
I think much of why I rebuked the notion that “inspiration is for amateurs” is because I’d lived most of my life allowing inspiration to guide my creative process. When I was young, it felt like I found inspiration everywhere I looked because back then, nearly everything was new and unfamiliar to me. There was so much I was experiencing for the very first time. There was a sort of rawness and intensity to adolescence and young-adulthood that required creative expression to even survive it.
Eventually, that intensity would fade. Now that I’m in my early 30s, the novelty and newness of everything has long worn off and that seemingly bottomless well of inspiration has dried up. I finally understand how fleeting and unreliable it is as a means of driving creativity. Despite knowing this, I still tend to fall into the trap of waiting around for inspiration to strike—for the perfect idea or concept to magically materialize inside my brain. This, of course, isn’t exactly conducive to a rich creative life; if anything, it stifles it. As a result, I’ve become quite detached from my own sense of creativity over the past few years.
And so, in mid-June, I decided to dive into The Artist’s Way. I won't go too far into detail, but the TL;DR of it is that it's a 12-week course meant to help people rekindle their creativity. There’s a lot that goes into completing The Artist’s Way, but one of the most important exercises is what author Julia Cameron calls the Morning Pages. Every morning, you wake up and before doing anything else, you write three pages of, well, whatever. It’s essentially stream-of-consciousness journaling, and its purpose is to clear the clutter from your mind in order to make space for creative thinking. The important thing is that you acknowledge and accept that the Morning Pages aren’t at all meant to be perfect (or even good, for that matter) which means you must learn to turn off your inner critic while writing them. It’s difficult at first, but not impossible.
A lot of the time, my pages are little more than unhinged nonsense:
“I’M ALLOWED TO WRITE WHATEVER I WANT ITS MY DAILY PAGES NOBODY IS READING THEM (NOT EVEN ME) AND NO ONE IS HOLDING A GUN TO MY HEAD DEMANDING I BE THE 2025 VERSION OF SYLVIA PLATH!
LETS NOT BE SYLVIA — DIDN’T SHE STICK HER HEAD IN AN OVEN OR SOMETHING?
I DON’T REMEMBER. FIG TREE METAPHOR.”2
But sometimes, coherent thoughts emerge amidst the chaos:
“I want to get writing but I frankly cannot start without getting absorbed. But then again, maybe it’s healthier for me to spend only a little bit of time on something instead of burning myself out by furiously writing for 5-10 hours (depending on the day) and then not touching it again for weeks. I really do everything in extremes, don't I?”
I never would’ve thought it in the realm of possibility, but I’ve somehow managed to do my Morning Pages every single day (albeit not always first thing in the morning and not always three pages worth) and have done so for over seven weeks now. At first, I didn’t think it was doing anything for me; it felt more like a chore than anything. It took a few weeks for me to realize it, but I now understand that the writing itself isn’t the most important part. It’s the showing up—the act of putting my pen to the page every day whether I’m “feeling it” or not—that matters most.
Sometimes, the insights I glean from these pages are merely informational; if there’s something that comes up repeatedly, I figure it’s my subconscious mind trying to tell me something. Other times, ideas that come up while doing my Morning Pages turn out to be ideas that I want to expand on in my writing. Through this practice, I’ve come up with more ideas than I ever thought imaginable, and the thought of transforming those ideas into something tangible doesn’t feel as daunting as it did before. There has been nothing more integral to my reconnecting with my creativity than this simple act of showing up every single day. Hell, I wouldn’t be here writing this very essay without it.
For weeks, I’d been trying to figure out what my next post should be about. It’s been a constant topic in my Morning Pages. Maybe I should write about online identity, I’d write. Maybe I should write about my own journey with The Artist’s Way. Or maybe I should just do what everyone else is doing and write about my gripes with genAI. I’d occasionally elaborate more on my ideas when they came up, but more often than not, I’d simply move onto my next errant thought. I suppose I hoped that if I thought about it enough, I’d eventually come to an epiphany and suddenly know exactly what to write. To my dismay, that didn’t happen.
Soon enough, I would have the epiphany I was waiting for, except it wasn’t the perfect essay idea that struck me. Instead, I realized that I wasn’t going to get anywhere without actually writing something. So, that’s what I did. I settled on the idea I had that appealed to me the most and simply started writing about it. My original intent was to ponder the question, “If I’m not online, do I even exist?” I churned out over 700 words and it ended up being more about the idea of logging off in general than it was about the original question, so I scrapped it. Then, I wrote a few hundred more words that were much more relevant to the topic at hand, but I ended up scrapping that, too. Out of nowhere, I had a visual flashback to that stupid quote on my professor’s wall, and the words started pouring out of me.
In a way, it did feel like lightning struck my brain. However, it only happened that way because I’d created the conditions necessary for it by doing the work; by engaging in the process of creating something without giving too much thought to the end result. In The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin writes,
“When inspiration does arrive, it is invariably energizing. But it is not something to rely on. An artistic life cannot be built solely around waiting. Inspiration is out of our control and can prove hard to find. Effort is required and invitations are to be extended.”
More and more, I’m realizing that creativity isn't necessarily about outcomes. Yes, the feeling of accomplishment we get when we complete something we're proud of certainly can propel us forward, but the heart of creativity is the process. It's the two completely unrelated drafts I started and abandoned that somehow led to this one. It’s spending two days writing a dozen mediocre lines before coming up with the one that would make the bridge of my unfinished song punch the listener in the gut. It’s showing up every day to create something. Anything. Even if it’s total garbage. Because eventually, you’ll come up with something that isn’t.
Through the practice of Morning Pages, I’ve come to witness firsthand the magic of creation, the serendipity of how an idea can materialize through the work itself. It’s funny, in a way, that after all this time, I’ve come to truly understand the wisdom of Close’s words by undergoing the very process he was describing. Of course, this is only one essay, and I’m still finding my footing when it comes to cultivating a daily creative practice. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s this: to do the work is to put yourself in the way of inspiration—to give yourself the opportunity to find it instead of waiting around for it to find you.
While searching for images to include in this essay, I learned that Chuck Close was the subject of multiple allegations of sexual harassment—something I was completely unaware of while writing this. It feels wrong for me to publish this without acknowledging it, so this is me doing that.
If you aren’t familiar with Sylvia Plath’s famed fig tree metaphor, I’ve got you. In The Bell Jar, Plath writes:
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
Early 20-somethings across the internet frequently quote this excerpt, probably because it so eloquently and effectively captures the feeling of fear and anxiety about the future that is rather characteristic of that stage of life; how all of our choices feel so monumental in the scheme of it all.