You don’t try. That’s very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it.
Charles Bukowski on creativity and writing. I think there’s something to it. Nothing good ever comes out of striving for creation. I think Platonism is ridiculous, but sometimes it’s like an idea comes out of the world of Forms and grabs you by the throat and will not let go until you have committed it into the world, and that’s possibly the best feeling in the world and certainly the way the greatest things I’ve done—which aren’t all that great—have come into being. Which is, of course, incredibly frustrating when for some reason you want or need to create. Bukowski’s advice is incredibly easy to misunderstand. So I just sit on my ass all day and wait for inspiration to come? That’s the worst advice ever. But that isn’t it. Fortune favors the prepared. Inspiration doesn’t really come from Platonic ideals, it comes from your imagination, which only flourishes when you feed it: read, watch, listen, talk, think, do, don’t.
Then wait.
Oct 25, 2012
