Snark Comes to Spark

By Ellen Notbohm






As I wake this morning after another night of badly broken sleep, I see my pencils sitting there on the nightstand in the half-light, their points dulled from the last time I used them. Which was—when? My weary thought is, I can’t write this morning. My pencils are dull .



My pencils are pointless, literally and figuratively.



The resistance to writing, the fear of having nothing to say, the fear of writing poorly—it’s common to many writers who’re between inspirations.



How’s that for a euphemism for writer’s block? “Between inspirations.”



To write from inspiration can feel providential, heaven-sent. It is life-affirming. It’s a gift. I’ve had it in abundance, for which I’m depthlessly grateful. Some writers write only when inspired, content and able to wait for that inspiration. Nothing wrong with that. Happy for ’em.



Me, I’m able to hit the page ahead of the sun most days, energized by the pre-dawn darkness and its blank slate of possibilities. But then will come a stretch when I’m dismayed to find that my ability to kindle that spark of inspiration seems to be aging right along with the rest of me. If I don’t force myself to walk across the house to sharpen my pencils, literally and metaphorically, my writer’s muscle and mind will become as flabby and blue as my “real” muscles and mind. Nothing inherently wrong with that either, as long as I acknowledge it for what it is—a choice.



By getting up each morning, traversing the house to sharpen my pencils and pushing those pencils across the page, I make the choice to strike the flint, keep using the muscle, even if only for the sake of using the muscle. I make the choice not to write anguished screes about losing my mojo, my jones, my hoodoo.



I make the choice to embrace author Isabel Allende’s famous advice: “Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.”



When Isabel isn’t enough, when I need a firmer kick to the keister, I turn to artist Chuck Close: “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. All the best ideas come out of the process, out of the work itself.”



A favorite advice post of mine offers what the columnist calls a “snarky answer” to the so-called writer’s block lament. To some of our self-inflicted literary angst, the answer should be: “So?” Followed by a scenario that either will or won’t happen.



Maybe I’ll never write another book.



So?



Not everything I write is scintillating and publishable.



So?



I send my work into the world where publishers and editors will respond to my submissions with what feels like a fusillade of declines.



So?



So, I make the choice to see my pencils as dull, but not pointless. Who inspires me? I inspire me. Snark comes to spark. I choose to be a pencil pusher. To get the lead out.



I show up.



___



Ellen Notbohm ’s internationally renowned work has touched millions in more than twenty-five languages. She is author of the award-winning novel The River by Starlight , and the nonfiction classic Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew . Her short prose has most recently appeared in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Eclectica, Halfway Down the Stairs, Well Read, Academy of the Heart and Mind , and several anthologies in the US and abroad.