5 Rules for Writing When Inspiration Feels Impossible

I made them up & that's the point

Artwork: Mariam Chagelishvili

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#1. Write what no one wants to read.

I once had someone¹ tell me that readers “don’t really want stories about sad moms anymore.” Every piece I’ve written since has been haunted by a mother or by some connection or motherhood or daughterhood, either written in the voice of one, or clawed out of the wet underside of another’s grief or joy or a mushy messy mix of both. I don’t think I’m trying to prove anything, not really. But I do think our writing ought not to be dictated by transient trends or even expert opinions. And often what people need to hear isn’t, on the surface, what they want to hear.

#2. If a sentence feels too long, let it keep going.

Writers might often get told not to write run-on sentences. I mean, it’s one of the first things they teach you in like, grade school English. And now, apparently, run-ons are bad because people have neither the attention span nor the intellectual acumen to really, say, trace out a Marquezian or Woolfian sentence. But fuck it — some thoughts deserve to spill and some truths can only be said if they arrive breathless and late, running down the stairs with one sock on and a hand ever lightly on the railing and someone yelling after them, no time to stop, no time to make it pretty, just the urgency of the thing trying to be said before it disappears.

#3. Let that one strange thing stay.

The talking crow. The goat with a haunted memory. The moment where the sun folds in half and nobody notices. Maybe a strict editor would cross them all out and scrawl “confusing” in big, red letters. But it’s not confusing. I mean, maybe it is — sure, but also…maybe it’s magic. Either way, for me, sometimes it’s just mine and that’s fine…it’s enough. So now I tend to leave at least one of my extra-weirds², in an edited draft. They’re my charm against anyone who thinks clarity is more important than wonder.

#4. Write about what you don’t understand.

“Write what you know” has always felt like colonial logic to me — obsessed with borders … ownership … pinning stories to individual experience instead of collective memory, myth, dream, desire... Look, I refuse to pretend I’ve figured it all out. I often write what I don’t know how to say. I wrestle with pen and page alike. I start things without endings, not even half-formed ones. I drag meaning through the dirt until it splits open and ferments. That’s…that’s kinda the whole “job”, right?!

#5. Never wait to be ready.

There’s always someone more qualified. More published. Less afraid. But I’ve learned that if you wait until the work is perfect, you’ll die³ quietly with a manuscript in your Google Drive and a poem on your tongue no one ever hears. So I send the email. I pitch the idea. I submit the weird little poem with its literary limbs all frankenstein’d together. Or I hit publish. At times out of that just-being-done-with-it-ness, or a pressing probably-faux urgency…but, I think (I’d like to believe) at the root of it…love. For myself, my purpose (or what I think it is…writing…of some sort). As well as my perhaps foolish belief that someone, somewhere, is ready for my particular kind of chaos.⁴

1. …who shall not be named, obvs

2. …as I sometimes call them

3. …metaphorically or otherwise

4. & hey…if there’s no one, I’m lucky enough to know I’ll always have

Karan Kapoor

as my ever-captive first & last reader.