It’s hard to not feel jealous when an artist releases a song with lyrics that touch my heart. I feel like I could have written that, if only I was in the right time and place. I’ve felt that inspired, and I just wish I would have pulled out a pen and scribbled my thoughts.
But then I sit down to do it.
It’s like watching someone do an extreme sport and critiquing their methods, I suppose.
How did Mary Oliver fill books, with hundreds of pages, full of words that feel like walking through a painting? The pages seem to shine, and looking down at the window to her mind looks like an escape from life, like it adds at least three new primary colors to my perception.
Did her mind just work like that? Did Tolkien see the Shire when he closed his eyes before he wrote his books, or after? I’ve read that revision is the true art in authorship, but I wonder if the beauty comes from furiously inspired writing, made legible by revision like cleaning a lens to see a painting after an explosion of paint on a canvas. Or perhaps revision is the energy that makes an author shine.
For me, short bursts of inspiration are the soul of everything I write. I explode onto the page and sculpt back to what I really meant to say. I don’t know if that’s the right way to do it, though, because it’s not sustainable. It doesn’t make writing a discipline, it makes it an anomaly. Yet that’s the only way it feels real, like a part of me.
I think I should join a poetry class and work on my jealousy.