One challenge many writers face is this: Do I wait for the “muse” or just plunge ahead. Sadly, many go to their grave still waiting for the muse. But that said, it is useful to think about how and where you find inspiration.
I vote for not waiting. As Tom Clancy famously said about the craft of writing: “I tell them you learn to write the same way you learn to play golf. You do it, and keep doing it until you get it right. A lot of people think something mystical happens to you, that maybe the muse kisses you on the ear. But writing isn’t divinely inspired — it’s hard work.”
In his controversial Rede lecture at Cambridge University in 1959, the English novelist and scientist C. P. Snow addressed the widening chasm between the two dominant strains in our culture. There were the humanists on one side. On the other were the scientists and applied scientists, the agents of technological change. And “a gulf of mutual incomprehension” separated them. Though Snow endeavored to appear evenhanded, it seemed evident that he favored the sciences. The scientists “have the future in their bones” — a future that will nourish the hungry, clothe the masses, reduce the risk of infant mortality, cure ailments and prolong life. And “the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist.”
In the antagonism between science and the humanities, it may now be said that C. P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures” was certainly right in one particular: Technology has routed the humanities. Everyone wants the latest app, the best device, the slickest new gadget. Put on the defensive, advocates for the humanities have failed to make an effective case for their fields. There have been efforts to promote the digital humanities, it being understood that the adjective “digital” is what rescues “humanities” in the phrase. Has the faculty thrown in the towel too soon? Have literature departments and libraries welcomed the end of the book with unseemly haste? Have the conservators of culture embraced the acceleration of change that may endanger the study of the literary humanities as if — like the clock face, cursive script and the rotary phone — it, too, can be effectively consigned to the ash heap of the analog era?
I vote for writing. The activity of writing them redeems itself even if it is only a gesture toward what we continue to need from literature and the humanities: an experience of mind — mediated by memorable speech — that feeds and sustains the imagination and helps us make sense of our lives. More here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/books/review/sing-to-me-o-muse-but-keep-it-brief.html
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