Inspiration is such a crucial element in creating new songs, new worship sets, or song arrangements. For us creatives, it’s basically the fuel that keeps our motor running!
Yet we usually treat inspiration like a random thing that happens when it pleases, and often do nothing to take responsibility for our own process of getting and staying inspired. Yes, the Holy Spirit IS involved in the inspiration process….but actually some of it depends on us being good stewards of our own creative development.
If we leave all responsibility for inspiration on the Holy Spirit, we become passive recipients of divine sparks of illumination. Thus we can sit around, lazily waiting for this to strike us. That doesn’t sound like the co-labouring partnership that God invites us into! And it doesn’t sound like us giving our full energy and brainpower to the calling God has put on our lives.
So… how do we GET and STAY inspired?
Taking responsibility is the first thing
Simply taking on board that we have a responsibility to help our own creative proces, is the first step. Once we move away from the ‘waiting for a spark of divine inspiration to hit me’ passive model, we are already well on the way to a healthier approach. It’s easier to see inspiration as God’s work not ours, as that gives us a source to blame when we aren’t inspired. We can simply say ‘God hasn’t given me any good ideas lately!’.
Believing that we are a crucial part of the process means we have to own up to times of writer’s block, and creative dryness, and realise that it IS because of us, and that we need to take steps to get healed and re-illuminated again.
“Inspiration Assessment”
If you’ve been in any of my seminars on the subject of creativity, you’ll have heard me ask you to take an Inspiration Assessment, which is a term I devised to help you figure out WHEN, HOW and WHY you get inspired.
So… let’s do it now. Think of the last time that you felt really creative and came up with a brilliant new lyric, melody, set list, song arrangement, or whatever your creative field may be… Picture yourself on that day, in that moment. Try and remember what you’d done leading up to that moment…that day, the day before, that week.. try and figure out if anything specific sparked your creative processes.
Often for me it’s watching movies. So if I think back to the last time I really got inspired, it was after watching The Social Network at the movies. I came home, pulled out my laptop, and started working for hours, on ideas for articles, blogs and lyrics.
Try taking the Inspiration Assessment further back, to the last 5 or 6 times you got really inspired (if you can remember!). See if patterns emerge – like you always get creative after hiking outdoors, or after seeing lots of friends, or after having a few hours of quiet.
Build it in!
This assessment is only useful if you learn from it and begin to build it into your life!
If you always get inspired by certain things/people/places, then make that a weekly and monthly priority…these are your ‘inspiration triggers’. I need to try and see a few good movies a month, in order to keep my ‘inspiration tank’ full up. Another crucial thing that gets me inspired is silence and solitude. So I need to build that in.
What are your ‘inspiration triggers’? Write them down somewhere you will see them regularly, like on your refrigerator or bathroom mirror!
Urgent vs Important
Life will always feel too busy for you to do your ‘inspiration triggers’ regularly.
Stephen Covey, one of my favourite authors, wrote “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” (don’t be put off by the cheesy title, it’s a great book!). In it, he distinguishes between “Urgent” and “Important” tasks. The urgent ones may be much less important, he says, yet they always crowd out the non-urgent yet more important things.
The items on your Inspiration Assessment are 99% likely to be non-urgent…things that you rarely get around to doing in an average day unless you MAKE them happen! Things like watching stirring movies, walking in nature, carving out time for silence are usually pushed out by the urgent stuff like going to work, paying bills, laundry, taxes…. We need to fight to get these things in our schedules – it’s a life and death battle for the wellbeing of your creativity!
Accountability
Getting others to help you stay on track is an age-old method of gaining good, new habits. Its also a way to help you be able to do the things that trigger your inspiration, as we all need grace from those in our close community, to help us make time for them.
For example, if you are married and life is busy, your spouse might not be overjoyed at the news that you are disappearing out alone to watch a movie tomorrow night with your lyrics journal, leaving them with the kids and housework!
But…. if you take the time to explain your desire to steward God’s gift of creativity in your life, and that you’ve taken the ‘Inspiration Assessment’, and discovered what your ‘Inspiration Triggers’ are, and that you want your spouse’s help and prayers to encorporate them into your life, you might get a very different response! We need to bring others on board with our vision.
A similar situation is if you are employed in a church, to oversee worship/creative arts. By sharing all this with your line manager and pastors, they will hopefully see that in order for you to do your job excellently, inspiration is a key factor. Perhaps they will catch the vision and enable you to get your Triggers built into the work week, with a day of silence at a monastery once a month…or meeting up with 50 other worship leaders…or whatever it is that stirs your fresh new ideas.
Befriend the white elephant.
Sometimes you just AREN’T going to feel inspired. So embrace it. Don’t try and pretend it’s not there, like a white elephant. Befriend it and see it as a blessing in disguise. When you feel uninspired it’s a flashing light telling you that you need to go do some of your “Triggers” to conquer the dryness. It’s like getting sick – often we don’t realise how run down we are until we get flu. Then we are alerted to the need to get medicine. Writer’s block is like catching flu…it reminds us of the need to get the medicine we need to get re-inspired, and to take better care of our creative processes to prevent us getting dry and empty again.
So embrace seasons of dryness, and let them be helpful reminders to start paying more attention to getting inspired. They can be a great wake up call, and result in better patterns of life.
Let me know!
Try out these approaches, and let me know if they help! Think of your life as a marathon rather than a sprint, and start building in good habits for a lifetime of inspiration. As we approach January, lots of us make New Years Resolutions…maybe some of ours can be related to taking care of our creative processes a bit more strategically! May 2011 be your most inspired year so far!!
Hope this has been helpful!
Any thoughts to add, or comments, or questions?
Vicky
Loved reading this! Thank you. I’m going to begin looking for triggers in my own life, as I know I have days of palpable inspiration. I just haven’t realized there’s a pattern to the flow… Looking forward to taking advantage of that pattern. Thanks Vicky!