What inspires you?

You know, what makes you want to drop everything and run to your instrument and start banging away on that germ of an idea?

For me, it can be anything, quite literally anything at all. I don't control what inspires me. What I do control, though, can kill inspiration altogether.

A number of years ago I was in the middle of a compositional cycle. For me I write in cycles. I will write five or six songs in a reasonably short timeframe, sometimes within a few weeks, sometimes over a couple months. It varies. So I was in one of these cycles and I found myself dismissing some of the things that were coming out. I didn't like them all that much and just cut them off. Within a few weeks, I found I was not coming up with anything. A couple months went by and there was nothing happening. No songs, no ideas, nothing. I was 'dry'.

This had happened before, a few week dry spell here, no ideas on a given day. But now it was turning into months, and then a year, two years. I began to get really worried. I had fallen into the dreaded condition known as "writer's block". No matter how much I played my guitar, even switching to other instruments, nothing of consequence came out. I couldn't even write a decent sounding progression. Everything sounded like something written by somebody else, something I had already heard.

Eventually, I sat down to really take a long hard look at my situation. I needed to understand why my creativity had dried up. Where were all those inspiring influences? What happened??! Had my Muse abandoned me?

A little background...

I have been a creative person all my life, from childhood. The slightest word or image would inspire me and I'd go off into my own little world and live there, fighting dragons, flying through space, creating stories and living this amazing imaginary life. I started drawing pictures at around 5 or 6 years old, emulating my brother's drawings at first and then creating ideas all my own. And I was prolific. I drew on everything, in the dirt, any blank paper, at school when I was bored with the lessons (and getting in some trouble for that!), and I drew all the time. I loved creating. I loved the process, though at the time I didn't know that was what it was called.

At 7 years old I began playing the recorder, switching to piano at age 8 (and drums at 10, guitar at 12ish). And almost from the beginning I began to create musical ideas. Creativity flowed out of me like water out of an artesian well. There was no end to what I would create, and no end to the things that would inspire me.

So, you see, I was always writing or drawing... always creating something, all the time. Therefore, when that creativity suddenly dried up, when I got no inspiration from anywhere or anything, I began to panic a bit. This was an unknown place for me. I began asking the dreaded questions: "What if I don't write anything more?"... "What if that's it, I've tapped the well and it's now dry?" And questions and doubt far beyond that.

Once I sat down and began to investigate the cause, to examine how I came to that dead end, I started to see what it was that happened.

Remember, I'm a creative soul. To not create is like a living death to me. So it was imperative I find out why I had stopped being creative. And here's what I found.

Quite simply, it came down to a simple fact: I was trying to control the output of my creativity. I was trying to channel it into specific things and dismissing anything, any inspirations that did not conform to my ideas, my demand, my requirements. Therefore, I was restricting my creative output, rejecting anything and everything that did not fit my ever more narrow view of what I wanted to create, musically...and artistically I suffered as well, a kind of collateral damage effect. My drawing suffered, my intellectual inspirations suffered, everything suffered.

I did not even notice that I was doing this to myself, that I was creating the very condition I never believed would ever occur in my life.

Once I understood that, I began to let go and just allow what came out to come out. I came to realize that I did not want to control the process, in the sense that I should not restrict my writing, musically to only the styles I wish to perform and be known for. I had to simply allow the music to flow out. And in my artistic endeavours, painting, drawing and so forth, I had to just let the canvas fill with what came out of the brush or other media in which I work.

In music, my influences are broad. I listen to classical, ethnic and varying kinds of music outside the traditional 'labeled' variety. What I mean is that some music is difficult to classify in a genre sense. And I listen to some of that, too. I listen to Standards, Jazz, Bebop, Blues, Opera, Broadway style, folk, alternative, religious historical performances (motets, madrigals, chants, et al), region centric music (Bluegrass, English, Irish, Scottish, Russian, etc...). I listen to just about anything and everything if it is well done.

To ignore, even eschew these influences and the diversity of input that has gone into my unconscious creative centers is suicide. And that's what I did by refusing to allow all these divergent influences to find expression, no matter how small or secondary they may be, through my creative processes.

Within a few months of this epiphany, my writing began to emerge again, slowly at first, even a little 'generic' in some ways. And I was once again being inspired by all manner and sorts of things. Now armed with the knowledge that I can write in any style - to allow that to happen - and which would in no way diminish the things I wanted to create, ideas began to pour out once again. These things in fact enhanced the creative processes beyond what I thought possible.

And here was another thing I learned:

If you are a writer, an artist or a scuptor, whatever, you have to just write, paint, draw, sculpt - you just have to create. It is the process that matters, not always the finished product. And that is the thing here, beginning a work does not mean you necessarily must finish it. Sometimes just the exercise of writing, regardless of the style, regardless of finishing or not, is the thing. Any incomplete work may find life, in part or as a whole, in another work you are creating later. I've certainly done this. I've begun a song, laid it down and started another tune, a year or more later, and found that earlier tune had bits in it, or whole sections, that would fit quite nicely in the new song. And so knitting them together gave me a greater accomplishment than the two apart would ever have made.

Okay, one story I really want to relate to you. It's a bit left of center in a way, but still quite interesting with regard to inspiriation.

Gillette, you know the razor blade company, was designing a new razor. They had pioneered the twin blade design and were now working on what would become a revolution in the shaving industry, the three blade design.

During the testing of prototypes, they kept running into problems. The testors would always report back that the design was working fine, but for this whole razor burn thing that they kept experiencing. No matter what the engineers tried, this problem persisted.

Well, one of the men involved in the R&D department, but not an engineer, actually solved the problem. You see, he had been involved in blade and razor development for years with the company. He had amassed a wealth of knowledge over time about the whole process and methods they used in designing and testing the razors. Years of knowledge and sitting in on the design and development meetings went into his brain; masses of written research material was absorbed over the time he had been there.

So one day they were lamenting the problem and couldn't see the solution. He chimes in, quite to his own surprise, with an epiphany idea: Why not recess the middle blade of the three just a slight degree to relieve the pressure on the skin. The engineers looked at him and were astonished.

They quickly engineered the modification, sent prototypes to their test subjects and waited.

The reports came back from the testors that there was no longer any razor burn, and that the blades, when compared with previous twin blade designs, were giving them a closer shave - and all without razor burn as an after effect.

Inspiriation can come from anywhere, and from anyone. And it can come from within. This guy was not an engineer. But he had acquired enough knowledge that somewhere in his brain the problem was being turned over, addressed, assessed, pondered. And because he wasn't hampered by engineering knowledge, he had a particularly 'outside' approach. Would the engineers have figured it out eventually? Perhaps. But then, perhaps not. And certainly not before Schick, who may or may not have figured out this little detail in releasing their own design some months after Gillette came to market.

It took someone ignorant of engineering to solve an engineering problem, but who was in the unique position of having accummulated knowledge not possessed even by he engineers.

Your inspiration is going to come from many places, many people, many situations, even people and things which have nothing to do with the creative process. Your task, your challenge, is to open your eyes and your ears to listen and watch for just those moments that coalesce before you, in your sight or in your hearing, resulting in a moment of clarity you then take with you and put to the creative process in coming up with something truly unique and fresh, something wonderfully You.

We can't all be geniuses. But then, not all geniuses figure stuff out and benefit from it, being sometimes too smart for their own good. Or their great big brains are not required to solve a problem. Intellect can help, but it can also hinder. Learning to know when to employ it - and most importantly when to shut it down - is critical to the creative process and in discerning an inspirational moment.

Some of the most incredible music I have ever heard, some of the most beautiful art and photography ever produced have all come from people who were not particularly brilliant in the sense we generally consider necessary to produce great works.

Think about that for a while. Then go out and get inspired and put that inspiration to work. Commit a random act of beauty, whether in song or in a visual medium.

And enjoy the ride.