On Inspiration

“I dream of mowing that lawn over there,” said Sasha.

“That’s an impressively ambitious dream,” I said.

“I adjust my dreams to reality. Well, it’s not exactly that I dream of mowing it. I just really want it to be mowed so that nobody has to do it anymore.”

And of course I understand that feeling perfectly.

In fact, it’s the driving force behind about 97% of my drawings. Draw them as quickly as possible so I never have to draw them again.

There used to be a meme: if you do everything really fast, you’ll still have time to do something else before you die.

I stared at it for a very long time, thinking how astonishingly well it described everything I do, and how I should hurry up and cure myself of this (presumably so I’d still have time to cure myself of something else before I die).

The remaining three percent are born from inspiration.

Which, apparently, doesn’t mean they’re better, more popular with the audience, or more likely to survive eternity. It only means that they dragged me into drawing them, instead of me dragging myself.

What do I know about inspiration?

1. It is born from boredom.

That’s the main thing I’ve learned about it.

Nowadays, reaching boredom requires almost superhuman willpower. I try, but not very successfully.

The periods richest in inspiration were when my older children were babies and toddlers. You lie there feeding the baby, and the book you wanted is in another room. You go for a walk in rain or snow. You stand forever at the playground. You’re dying of boredom and showing yourself the most amaaaazing pictures inside your head.

Now, of course, it’s different.

Maika started preschool two years earlier than her older siblings did.

I have much more work and many more responsibilities.

The older children certainly don’t let me get bored, oh no.

And then there’s the phone, always with me. Even when I deliberately leave it somewhere out of reach, there’s never enough time left to actually become bored.

2. Inspiration cannot be rushed, forced or predicted.

Once I had a commission where the client wanted a book cover, but it absolutely had to contain some brilliant idea.

I told them I needed two weeks, and maybe one would appear.

It didn’t.

Two weeks weren’t enough, so I designed an ordinary cover.

I got paid.

And together with the payment I received a one-star review: “The promised brilliance never happened.”

3. Inspiration has absolutely nothing to do with sunsets, mountain views, or any of the other famous triggers people keep talking about.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that absolutely anything can trigger it.

4. Inspiration can be endogenous, spontaneously generated inside the organism (provided the organism is well-fed, well-rested and sufficiently bored), or exogenous, coming from some situation, observation or conversation.

I also divide exogenous inspiration into “raw” and “semi-finished.”

Raw inspiration comes directly from the surrounding world.

Semi-finished inspiration comes from other artists’ work (the final result may end up miles away from the original — it’s not plagiarism, that’s not the point).

Personally, I’m rather snobbish about being inspired by other people’s work, no matter whether it’s years old or thousands of years old.

Although, of course, it’s hard to resist taking screenshots of something wonderful on social media.

They never get used, though.

5. Most inspiration consists of tiny sparks.

Usually you can ignore them.

But sometimes you can’t.

Sometimes you will do absolutely anything to satisfy them.

That’s what happened with my book The Beast Jan.

I drew it with four-month-old Yasha tucked under my arm and simply couldn’t do anything else.

Little Yulia was handed over to a specially hired nanny.

(You’d have to know just how stingy I am to appreciate what that means.)

6. Inspiration is bad for family life.

An inspired person becomes rather unbearable.

On the other hand, a person with no inspiration at all isn’t particularly bearable either — just in a different way.

So we keep balancing and learning to let each other fly off into the heavenly spheres.

And while one of us is floating somewhere up there, the other wakes the children, plans lunch, searches for the pink trousers — no, not those ones, and not those either, the other pink ones, how many pink trousers can there possibly be?!

Mows the lawn.

Adjusting dreams to reality.