Notes and news, insights and inspiration from the autonomous collective mind of GS.

I recently found a bit of wisdom on the Drawn blog that I'd like to share because I found it chock full of truthy goodness. In a nutshell, the post asserts that good old-fashioned work trumps inspiration every time. And I have to say I concur. I admit that technically I was “inspired” to write this post after reading the paragraph below, but research is part and parcel of the work involved to keep a blog current and relevant. So that means my work on this blog led to the inspiration for this post. Overall, I feel discipline leads to ideas as much or more than passively waiting for the inspiration fairy to pay a visit. Has your experience been different? Let me know in Comments.

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work and that's almost never the case."