Being a writer and making a living as a writer are often two different things. Maybe you’re writing poetry at night but by day you’re writing technical manuals or web copy. Journalist Michael Erard, whose day job is writing for think tank, describes such a writer as “a dancer who walks for a living.” How do you make the transition between the two? How do you inspire yourself all over again to write what you love? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Finding Your Writing Inspiration”
If you’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it, I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
If you’re a writer or want to be one, then you know the pain of trying to arrange those words in just the right way.
And you also know the joy of hitting that sweet spot when you succeed.
But what if, in order to pay the bills, you have to spend a lot of time writing in another genre?
Maybe you’re a novelist who has to write web copy by day, or a poet who has to work as a grant writer.
Take Michael Erard. He’s a journalist and essayist, but for his day job, he has to write reports for a think tank.
And he describes the tradeoff this way. He says, I’m a dancer who walks for a living.
Oh, nice.
Isn’t that great? So here’s a question, Grant.
If you’re a writer who has to compromise that way to make ends meet, how do you keep your creative work from being polluted?
What a struggle that must be, right?
Well, I had it. I ran into this back when I was trying to support my etymological habit.
I was writing for a beauty magazine by day.
I was pouring all my energy into stories like how to get the perfect butt.
And then by night, I’d be trying to write gracefully about ancient Greek.
And it wasn’t easy.
It was really hard to make that transition between the two because you get a rhythm going.
Did you do something to clear your mind?
Was there something like a walk or even something simple like that?
Well, certainly walks and that kind of thing.
But in terms of language, you know what? Often I would just copy the kind of writing that I wanted to emulate.
I mean, literally, almost like an art student painting an old master.
I would read other writers aloud.
I would read my betters, plenty of them, and I would read them aloud.
And sometimes I would actually either try to write in their style, literally, or I would just take dictation from them.
I would copy what they were writing.
And it helped.
And then it influenced you.
You could put that copy aside and then do your own thing, but it would still carry the flavor.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It’s called structural priming in linguistics where you do, you get this sort of muscle memory.
You go through the motions.
It’s like when you’re in physical rehab and you have what they call passive motion, you know, where they’re moving your limb for you before you’re able to do it.
And that’s how I did it.
But I’m really curious.
We have a lot of writers in our audience.
And it reminds me of what happens when you learn a foreign language.
I learned when I was learning Spanish and French that if you spoke those languages in a way where you were almost mocking or making fun of the native speakers, you would fall back naturally to a more real, a more accurate kind of sense of the language.
Your cadence would be right and your accent would be better.
Just by overdoing it and mocking almost.
Yes.
Interesting that you mention that because one of Michael Erard’s books is on polyglots.
And he goes into great detail about this one guy who just speaks a zillion languages.
And one of the things he does is goes on walks and shouts the language at the top of his lungs and really exaggerates it.
And that’s partly how he internalizes it physically.
It’s really interesting stuff.
We know that you’ve had writer’s block.
We know that sometimes you don’t have a block, but, well, you just can’t shift your tone.
How do you find that other register?
