My Thirteen Year Old Self Hates Me.

When I was younger, I wanted to know how you found and kept some Inspiration. I'd lost mine, you see--it had wandered off somewhere, perhaps to hang around with Genius and the Muse in one big non-existence club--and I needed to know how to get it back. Because by George, nothing was going to get written until that inspiration was found, fed and tucked up warm in bed once more, ready for the following hard day's inspirationalising.

If I had the power to send a single .gif image back through time, I would address the following one to myself and send it back to the exact moment that I felt the most 'uninspired'.

I'd probably hate the quote at that age. It goes against everything that my thirteen-year-old self believed about what writing, art and creativity was. Plus, what would some dude from the future know about it, anyway? All this quote does is call me an amatuer in a roundabout way, and damn it, I'm thirteen! I know every goshdarn thing in the world, and screw anyone that says I don't, they're an old idiot.

But older me is persistent and wants to try and help thirteen-year-old me. If I could stress one thing to myself at that age, it would be that all this 'inspiration' that people talk about--especially the ones who seem to have an especially good and intuitive knack for their craft--is just another bit of fiction. Given the opportunity, I would do my damndest to try and convince young me that inspiration doesn't exist. It'd go something like this.

Young Mitch: you're feeling uninspired right now. You have decided that until your ideas begin flowing quickly and easily once more, you won't sit down and attempt to write. I know why you've made this decision. After all, nearly every writer you know or look up to talks about that one idea they had that ran away with itself. It was just so good that it practically realised itself on the page. So naturally, all you need to do is wait for that stroke of inspiration to hit you, and everything will be fine.

Except that, in a month or two when it still hasn't hit, you'll start to get a bit uneasy. Maybe, you'll think, you really are just an amateur. Maybe you're not cut out for this writing lark. If you were a better writer, surely inspiration would have taken hold of you by now and forced a story out of your imagination and on to a page.

But I have good news! They were wrong. All those people talking about inspiration? They're misleading you, albeit unintentionally. There is no inspiration that lasts from first sentence to final paragraph. There's no driving force that will churn out a rollicking narrative in a few weeks, tops. There's absolutely no way to stay 'in love' with your story while you're writing it. The things you're feeling right now--frustration, boredom, distraction--they're all normal. The hallmark of a writer is not that they don't feel all those things. It's that they do feel them, and carry on anyway.

The way you feel right now is how every writer feels. How about that? You thought you were waiting for the moment inspiration turned you in to one, but it turns out that you're already more like one than you could possibly have suspected.

I'd probably still ignore myself.

But all the same, maybe it'd quicken the realisation that was delayed by years of misconceptions about what writing is. If I'd known that 'inspiration' was more often an excuse not to write than any kind of legitimate writerly thing, I might have saved myself some time.

So from now on, whenever someone asks about inspiration, I'm going to tell them the most inspiring thing I can think of. I'm going to tell them that inspiration doesn't exist, and that how they feel right now is exactly how they'll feel after they sell their hundredth novel. Things get easier, you get better, but it never happens on its own.

Let go of the idea of inspiration, and become inspired at how you never needed it in the first place.