On Writing Inspired

Writing is a strange process. I’ve been writing my entire life, and I’ve only recently realized the art of writing inspired, which is to say that I’ve realized the struggle of wanting to say something and knowing what you want to say, but not being able to put that into words until one day, randomly, divinely, it seems, you just know. The words come, one after another, seamlessly, flawlessly, and you almost can’t believe that you’re writing them. And then you wonder: Am I writing them? Or am I piecing these words together only because I’ve been divinely tapped on the head?

Allow me to share two such moments with you. The first happened after I got married. My wedding day was one of the best days of my life, and I wanted to capture it, all of it. Not just the play-by-play of moments, but the unmatched feeling of happiness I felt from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep that night.

The day after the wedding, on our way from Birmingham to our cabin in the Smokies, my new husband and I stopped by Barnes and Noble for coffee, and I bought a journal. I tried writing as we drove, but nothing came. Days later, I tried writing again, sitting on the porch of our cabin in the midst of crisp mountain air and the ambient glow of nightfall, and still, nothing happened. I kept trying—the Saturday we returned home, a few weekends later at the lake. But eventually, I gave up. I knew how I felt, but I didn’t know what to say.

My moment of inspiration came while I was lying in bed one night more than three months after the wedding. Wide awake, husband asleep, the wedding not even on my mind, and all of sudden, word-by-word, the story just started appearing. Inside my head, a paragraph formed, then two. I was awestruck. I jumped out of bed and wrote the whole story I had wanted to write for months, from start to finish, in about 30 minutes in the wee hours of the morning.

My second moment of inspired writing came just a few weeks ago, although it was even longer in the making. I’d wanted to write this story for so long, in fact, that I even wrote about not being able to write it. When I finished writing, I shook. My dimples ached. I was overcome. I had finally drawn forth a handful of words that, despite their brevity, seemed to sum up nearly a year (a year!) of my life.

This second story, the story of my year as a teacher—well, you’ll notice that very little of it is about teaching. That’s because very little of my year as a teacher was actually about teaching.

I’d tell you what that means, but you have an entire story waiting to explain it to you. Besides, it ends with a message I couldn’t possibly attempt to reword.