“Inspiration” is part two of my series on Plotter-Oriented Writing. The series introduction is here. I’ll more more articles on this topic soon.

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Inspiration.

A writing professor of mine at UCLA – Richard Walter, if my memory serves – once told the class this story: a student came into his office, overflowing with excitement, rattling off his great new screenplay idea. “It’s so awesome,” the student effused, “it’ll write itself!” Whereupon the professor grabbed a pen, stood it up on a pad of paper, and let the pen go. The pen flopped over. The professor replied: “Nope.”

The flash of inspiration that begins any project is its most exciting, and most over-hyped component. Where does this idea come from? Is it a divine force? The result of years of earnest and deep reflection? Perhaps it came from a drug-fueled bender that one summer in Lake Oswego. Science Fiction writer Barry Longyear once joked that “It Came From Schenectady!” suggesting that all great ideas are actually beamed telepathically to writers from a small city in New York. I recently had a cool new idea based solely on the fact that I was reading a book written in first-person, present tense.

As I said in my introduction to Plotter-Oriented Writing, I have relatively little to say or recommend about inspiration. I’m including it here because, in a series about process, I can hardly leave out the necessary beginning of that process.

Look, up in the sky: inspiration!

The plain fact is, I have no idea where great inspiration comes from. Not even my own. An idea might manifest because a cloud reminded me strangely of a winged basset hound. Or because I thought of a corker of a title with no idea what I’d connect it to. Or from a movie or book or TV show where I thought “If only they’d done this differently!” Maybe – and I hate to admit how often this has happened – it came to me while I was sitting on the can.

Honestly, I won’t dwell on this. I happen to believe that a great idea can come from almost anywhere. And decades in technology have convinced me that ideas are probably the least important ingredient in any creative work. Execution gets you through. As Thomas Edison once said, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” I personally believe he gave the former more credit that it’s due.

So if an idea speaks to you, if you’re passionate about it, go with it. Make that your cause and convince everyone else to see in it what you see in it.