Inspiration or perspiration

My two children's books, "Hi, Pizza Man!" and Making Up Megaboy, were written in the incandescent heat of inspiration. Each one was a gift from the writing gods. In fact, I didn't so much WRITE Making Up Megaboy as channel the voices I heard in my mind on to the computer screen. There was little conscious thought or effort. It gives me chills to remember it.

I have tried many times since then to find the source of that inspiration. There was one summer when I cleared my calendar and tried to write every day, as my serious writer friends advise me to do. "Never mind if it doesn't go well," they say. "We all produce page after page of useless prose. Just keep at it. Revise, revise, revise. And don't be afraid to just chuck it all in the trash. Eventually the right words will come."

It didn't work for me. All that came of that summer of persistent literary effort was page after page of labored prose -- trite, banal, and definitely uninspired -- and a conviction that my earlier children's books were flukes. I certainly didn't want to bring another mediocre mid-list children's book into the world. So I stopped trying to write the great American children's novel or picture book.

I turned back to the kind of writing that my day job demanded anyway -- scholarly or professional books and articles. "Publish or perish" is not just a catchy turn of phrase. It is gospel at a major research university like UCLA where I was able to survive by publishing enough to satisfy the dreaded Committee on Academic Personnel. It became a challenge for me to find an academic writing style that had a personal voice as well as appropriate content. This kind of writing owed very little to inspiration, however, and much more to perspiration. Just sit at the computer and do it.

So here I am again, writing a professional book, hoping for the inspiration that will allow the words to soar from the page but knowing that ultimately this process owes nearly everything to perspiration and discipline.