Writing is getting little bits of language now and again. It might be a sentence, or a phrase, and often these fragments are a starting point or a conclusion for something larger. It’s as if a text were already written somewhere, and pieces fall to earth to be gathered. Some will be bits to assemble into a finished thing, some will expand all on their own, and some will remain forever fragments.
Inspiration falls in fragments, and the crumbs are everywhere. It’s hard to see the trail, and the fanciest bits fall the fastest - they're eye-catching. But consider these ones carefully, they may be unpalatable. I save them all, and review them from time to time. Some get moved around to keep them in good company, some will always be solitary, and some will get deleted.
For many reasons, fancy bits make me suspicious: It’s important to distinguish inspiration from ego, and it’s difficult to separate ego-boosting from something that's just a helpful idea I can let loose in the world.
The best criterion I’ve come up with is whether the idea is surprising or not. If it feels as if I’m reading it for the first time as I write it, then I consider it the product of inspiration. For example, this piece started with the part about crumbs and falling fast. Everything else has been just explaining it. It’s almost like pattern recognition.
And then comes the editing. That's the work, and that doesn't feel like inspiration. It's problem-solving, a matter of uncovering what was already there. I don't know what I write about, but it has a light that dims or brightens as I work with the words.
I subscribe to Brian Biggs’ Random Orbit. While I was writing this, he published a little misunderstanding, also about inspiration, . It helped the process, thank you Brian Biggs.