Concentration, not inspiration

Salman Rushdie says he doesn't rely on inspiration.

It’s concentration more and it is to do with developing skills of concentration and I think that is something which, well a few things I think about being a writer that you get better at with time. There are things that you perhaps don’t get better at.  Energy is something which maybe declines, but I think concentration, focus, the ability to shut out the extraneous and focus on what you’re doing.  I think the more you do it the better you get at it. 

When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on.  You’re just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you. 

I think inspiration is nonsense, actually.  Every so often I mean like one day in 20 or something, you will have a day when the work seems to just flow out of you and you feel lucky.  I mean you feel and often surprised and you don’t quite know why it is working like that. And on days like that it’s easy to believe in a kind of inspiration, but most of the time it’s not like that.

Most of the time it’s a lot slower and more exploratory and it’s more a process of discovering what you have to do than just simply have it arrive like a flame over your head.  So I do think it’s to do with concentration, not inspiration.  It’s to do with paying attention and I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.