Let me introduce you to my friend, Shauna Niequist. Shauna is the author of Cold Tangerines and Bittersweet, and her third book, Bread & Wine, will be released in the spring of 2013. Shauna and her husband, Aaron live outside Chicago with their sons, Henry and Mac.
Shauna writes about the beautiful and broken moments of everyday life–friendship, family, faith, food, marriage, love, babies, books, celebration, heartache, and all the other things that shape us, delight us, and reveal to us the heart of God.
Throughout this year, I want to introduce you to some of my friends. People whose voices I know, respect, and appreciate. Their words often challenge me in my thinking and faith. I hope they’ll challenge you, too. Enjoy!
The longer I write, the less I believe in the myth of inspiration-the cartoon lightbulb over your head, falling into a writing trance, losing track of time, pulling over your car on the side of the road because the magical idea came like a bolt of lightning right then.
I write when it’s time to write, when my older son’s at school and the baby is asleep. I can’t stay up all night and write. I can’t wait around for a cartoon lightbulb. I choose to believe that inspiration is my responsibility-I create it in the life I lead. And this means something different for every creative person.
For me, it means getting enough sleep, reading as much as I can, staying connected to creative people in my life who remind me how valuable art-making is, even when it’s hard. It means saying no to other things, so that my life has space and rhythm. It means not watching too much tv or reading too many celebrity gossip magazines, because both make my soul hurt a little.
It’s my responsibility to live a life that sustains me creatively, so that when it’s “go-time” and I’m staring at a blank screen, I’ve got something to say.
The work of inspiration doesn’t happen when you sit down to write-it happens all the rest of time, when you’re reading great writing, when you’re taking walks or taking naps or taking pictures on your phone at the farmer’s market.
Pay attention to what inspires you creatively, and work that into your life with the same urgency and intention that you plan writing time. Joyce Carol Oates speaks a lot about the time she spends walking-that’s when the creative work happens, the rest, she says, is just transcribing.
I wouldn’t go that far, but I would say that the magic, if it ever happens, doesn’t happen when you open a Word document. It happens when you live in your senses and in your spirit all the rest of time, so that the writing time is a natural outflow of how you live all the other hours.
In other words, you can’t live a frantic, busy, cramped, artless life and then expect to show up at a coffee shop and write with beauty and depth. I wish that were true, because left to my own devices, that’s how I live most of the time–pushing, getting it done.
But this is why writing saves my life: because it makes me live differently all the time, not just during my writing time. It forces me to live a better, richer, more creative, more sense-oriented, sensitive life. And I’m better for it, in a thousand ways.
Check out Shauna’s book Bittersweet. Follow her on twitter: @sniequist. Check out her blog, here.
