Larry M. Coleman

Albert Einstein once said that creativity is intelligence having fun. But what happens when it’s not fun?

Not every day of writing will be fun. Writing is easy; writing well can be hard work. While hard work can be fun (there are people who enjoy running marathons, and I actually enjoy a hard ride on my bike for 2-3 hours straight), sometimes hard is just hard.

What do you do when it seems like you’re going nowhere? Sometimes the answer is to do nothing. Set it aside and let your unconscious chew on it. You might end up doing more work on it than you know. So, ironically, although Friday Fiction Inspiration is usually about helping you to come up with things, this week is about coming up with the ability to do nothing. (Consciously, at least.)

Henri Poincaré was one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. He used this technique often when he was facing a problem that seemed impossible to solve, and more than once after setting it aside, the answer came to him suddenly and without warning. You can do the same thing.

First, what could a mathematician know about the beauty of creation? Poincaré already has an answer for that:

It may be surprising: to see emotional sensibility invoked a propos of mathematical demonstrations which, it would seem, can interest only the intellect. This would be to forget the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true esthetic feeling that all real mathematicians know, and surely it belongs to emotional sensibility.

—Henri Poincaré, from “Mathematical Creation”

However—and this is very important—you can’t just sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. You must have already put a lot of effort into trying to come up with the solution, whether it is a plot tangle, a character problem, the piece not seeming to “come together,” and so on. Only after you have poured a lot of energy into it can you move on to something else and let your unconscious chew on the fat of the problem.

There is another remark to be made about the conditions of this uncon­scious work: it is possible, and of a certainty it is only fruitful, if it is on the one hand preceded and on the other hand followed by a period of conscious work, These sudden inspirations (and the examples already cited sufficiently prove this) never happen except after some days of voluntary effort which has appeared absolutely fruitless and whence nothing good seems to have come, where the way taken seems totally astray. These efforts then have not been as sterile as one thinks ; they have set agoing the uncon­scious machine and without them it would not have moved and would have produced nothing.

—Henri Poincaré, from “Mathematical Creation”

This is a subject that is near to me this time of year, especially since this is the first year there won’t be a NaNoWriMo because the organization destroyed itself through a horrible lack of coherent leadership. September was always the month I’d let myself start mulling over what I’d be writing about come November 1^st. I’d think about who was going to be in this year’s book, what the themes would be, what I wanted the book to say, where it might start and where it might end, and so on. Then in October, I’d start sketching out scenes, ideas, and notes so that when November started, I’d already have two months of both conscious and unconscious work put in so I could hit the path to 50,000 words already in a sprint.

When NaNoWriMo struggled, they gave up. You don’t have to. When it seems you’re starting to struggle and getting nowhere, don’t do what the stereotypical writer on TV does and ball up a piece of paper and throw it in the trash. Take it and neatly set it aside for a day or a week or a month and let your unconscious work on it. You won’t have to force it: it wants to work on it as much as you do, and maybe even more.