“Write according to program and not according to mood!” Henry Miller advised in his 11 commandments of writing, a series of maxims he devised to direct his conduct, “If you can’t create, you can work.” Jack London had a similar no-nonsense approach to the writing life: “You can’t wait for inspiration,” he insisted, “You have to go after it with a club.”
Whether we’re rationalizing our decision to skip our regular morning run or our daily hour at the keyboard, we employ the same excuse. “Ah, I’m just not in the mood!” At some blissful juncture in the future (and it’s always the future— never the present, this minute, this hour), we’ll finally be struck by that mythical lightning bolt and be able to articulate ourselves. Until then, what’s the use? Writing, we become convinced, depends on the “muse.” When our muse calls on us, we’re inspired, a word literally meaning to be “breathed into.” During these rare visitations, writing feels effortless; we’re not speaking so much as being spoken through.
But the problem is we can’t depend on the muse. She could feel like getting to the page once a year or once an hour. She’s erratic, mercurial. Like a diva superstar, she’ll refuse to go onstage unless certain needs are accommodated for. First, her requests will be eccentric but easy enough— water sourced from tropical rain and purified by equatorial trade winds, dim lighting, essential oils— but her demands inevitably get more impossible as time goes on. Soon she’ll refuse to work unless her dressing room is exactly 78 degrees and all the yellow M&M’s are removed from her candy bowl.
Though we believe we can only write when we’re in the “mood,” time and time again distinguished authors assert writing requires one thing: a willingness to work. “Being in the mood to write, like being in the mood to make love, is a luxury that isn’t necessary in a long-term relationship,” Julia Cameron, creativity guru behind the perennial classic The Artist’s Way, once observed, “Just as the first caress can lead to a change of heart, the first sentence, however tentative and awkward, can lead to a desire to go just a little further.” If we wait to write until we feel the irrepressible urge, we’ll never write a word. Rather than romanticize writing as a sacred act surrounded by superstition and requiring ritual, why not begin where we are? In writing— as in life— success is 99% showing up.
The idea that we have to be in the “mood” to write is a myth Joyce Carol Oates, novelist, poet, playwright and one of the most prolific writers of our time, cogently debunks in her thought-provoking interview in The Paris Review Interviews: Women Writers at Work. Complied of wide-ranging conversations with our era’s finest women writers, including Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, Women Writers at Work has been hailed as “invaluable to students of twentieth-century literature.” Where do you get your ideas? Do you read your reviews? Do you keep a journal or follow a writing schedule? Whether you’re an aspiring writer looking to crack the code of the creative process or simply fascinated by the mysterious inner workings of the mind of the artist, these compelling conversations will illuminate the path to the writing life, not to mention inspire and instruct you.
A slender, shy woman with pale skin and otherworldly eyes, Joyce Carol Oates gives the impression, her interviewer writes, that she “never speaks in anything but perfectly formed sentences.” Indeed of all the interviewees, Oates is perhaps the most erudite and articulate. When asked whether she has to be in the mood to write, the phenomenally productive Oates replied:
“One must be pitiless about this matter of ‘mood.’ In a sense, the writing will create the mood. If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function— a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind— then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Generally, I’ve found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been uttering exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for more than five minutes…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”
Very few writers start the day wanting to write just as few runners start the day wanting to run. But in much the same way that “life begets life,” writing begets writing. Writing— like all creative endeavors— is self-generative and self-sustaining: once we begin writing, we want to write; we don’t wait till we have ideas, we get ideas once we put pen to paper. The hardest part of writing is beginning: once we overcome our initial resistance and simply start, we gain momentum and become unstoppable. Lesson? We have to sit at our desks no matter what.
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