Trying To Write As A Busy Person

It is hard to write as a busy person. But, to describe why, exactly, I have to admit that I don't fully agree with a certain prominent quote on writing:

"Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working."
- Pablo Picasso

I have to admit, I do find writing inspiration while writing. But, I also find it when I am neck deep in busywork at my day job, or stuck in traffic, or on a walk. I have, actually, never found a way to prevent it from coming to me, at any hour of the day or night.

Perhaps I am "working" in the sense that my mind is simply turning all the time. I do, after all, drink quite a bit of coffee.

If others find themselves in the same boat as me - which is that you may wish to write at any time, day or night - and if they are a busy person, than the proposition of writing as a productive enterprise probably often feels like a certain narrow form of torture to the self-actualizing impulse that some of us are fortunate to find ourselves experiencing on our Maslow-ian stairway. But, maybe any perceived inconvenience - the feeling that time and inspiration actively oppose each other - is more than bad luck.

I spent a couple weeks writing what I guess you could call a first draft of a short story, then spent a month or more staring at it, repeatedly, trying to dissect what was wrong with it that made it limp, and formless, and searching for how to shape it around a more compelling narrative arc. This week, a number of things have come together in a perfect storm to make it essentially impossible to write productively, but the frequency and strength of inspiration I have felt has simultaneously exploded.

But first, to make one small aside - it's not just quantitative time that is the raw material of productive writing - it's also the presence of mental clarity, focus, and energy, and the absence of stress and distraction, and especially distractions that are mentally taxing. Well, the world we inhabit is not random. It is exceedingly complex, but there ARE correlations between all these things. So what is the correlation between inspiration - those nuggets welling up from the void that give us something worth saying - and those tranquil periods of free time that, at least on paper, would seem so ripe for use in writing?

It would be bad enough for it to be neutral (perfectly random), but my guess is that it's negative, which is to say that periods of turmoil are probably MORE likely to correspond to inspiration. It's terrible for the modern writer who sees the world analytically (as I have laid out above) but has visions of engineering their life to optimize writing. But, it makes a certain amount of sense. Turmoil breeds new experiences, new feelings, and lots of introspection. Sitting in a dark closet for a month might represent a virtual explosion in free time, but would it really produce more inspiration, and thus more writing?

For now, pre-scheduled time for writing remains a canard that does not correspond to inspiration. Perhaps I am looking at it wrong, or looking at it right but missing something in my analysis. For now, this is a problem I'll punt. Writing will happen when it happens!