Complex Numbers

Just Breathe

PROMPT November 23rd

Write about writing. What makes you feel inspired to write? What steps do you take to get your words from your head onto the page? What does your editing and rewriting process look like? What have you learned from fellow writers?

Inspiration is a funny thing. If I always waited for inspiration to write, I wouldn't write much. Certainly not every day. I don't get inspired often, but once I commit to start writing, somehow I almost always come up with something to say. Sometimes even something funny or inspiring, but not always.

The word "inspiration" etymologically has the sense of "spiritual guidance," or "divine guidance." But the Latin root, spirare, was probably far more mundane: it just means "to breathe," and the word inspire can be rendered as "to breathe into." The connection between breath and spirit is an ancient one, and it figures in ancient Hebrew writings as well, most famously the part where God breathed life into clay to create a human. The dividing line between the living and the dead was seen as that the former breathe while the latter do not. Of course it's not really that simple - we can stop breathing for many seconds or even a few minutes and survive, under certain circumstances - but the metaphorical connection remains.

Obviously, I don't accept the notion of divine guidance. It's all in my head, even if triggered by external events. Lots of things can spark the urge to write. Perhaps oddly, one of these things is seeing, reading, or hearing a badly written story. "I could do better than that!" and then I proceed to probably not do better than that, but at least it got me writing.

But like I said, inspiration isn't a requirement for writing. Nor should it be. Like, when I started this blog entry, I didn't know where I would go with it. Nor did I really feel like writing. I still don't, because there are other things begging for my attention (cats, video games, mild hunger, desire for a cigar and a whiskey, the Netflix binge I'm in the middle of, sleep, etc.) but if there's one thing I've learned from other writers - both amateur and professional - it's this: a writer writes. If you don't write, you are, by definition, not a writer. You don't have to be published, you don't have to be good, and you don't even have to have your words seen by others. But if you write, you're a writer. Hooray for tautology!

A writer also edits, but I kind of suck at that with my own writing. I could edit other peoples' writing, but I often suffer from the delusion that I can write something, give it a quick once-over to check for egregious grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style mistakes, and then I'm done. I'm wrong about that, of course, but that doesn't stop me from losing interest. Once it's written, it's written, and that's that. There's always someth- SQUIRREL!