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Craft & work

Do you rely more on inspiration or discipline to make your work?

27 answers answered between 1985 and 2025 one of 4 from The Creative Independent

Originally asked

The Creative Independent, to working artists, its interview series

A repeated Creative Independent tension, asked as inspiration, muse, discipline, ritual, or the requirement to show up.

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Public figures who have answered a question like this elsewhere. Quoted from the source shown, not written for FLAPSS.

Read by field Everyone Science and medicine 7 Arts and letters 17 Business and finance 2 Sport 1
Read by age Any age Before thirty 1 In their thirties 4 In their forties 4 In their fifties 2 In their sixties 5 Seventy and beyond 10
Jonathan Lethem Novelist and essayist; National Book Critics Circle Award winner
So, yes, it is very hard work, and there are days where there’s something I have to do in the book, something I have to learn or put myself and the characters through that I am… That makes me fearful or sorrowful. But I do think also that this aspect of writing is over reported at the expense of the pleasurable aspect as well. If writers didn’t love to be in this space between themselves and their language, they probably wouldn’t do it. You’d give up.
Recorded The Talks, published interview, 27 March 2019 source ↗

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