Inspired Writing

Last Sunday morning I awoke early.  No, that’s not accurate; I was wrenched from slumber, early in the morning by a pair of conditions.  The second most attention getting condition was a burning sensation in my left shoulder.  Much later I would figure out that this was the spot where the shoulder strap of our brush cutter had pressed for several hours the day before.  As is often the case, it didn’t bother me at all the day of, but the day after is another story.  So I got up and took a BC Powder to deal with that.

The other, even more compelling condition was a string of words running through my mind as though printed on a ticker tape.  These words streamed through my mind and I was compelled to record them.

This is not a new experience for me; it happens often.  And I know from experience that if I try to put it off; to set them down on paper later, when it’s more convenient, I’ll lose them and never be able to recall them again.  Oh, I’ll remember the general gist of them, but not the exact composition.  Not the way they fit together and flowed with cohesive thought. No; to capture that I needed to obey their siren song now.

And so I ambled out to the dining room, started up the lap top and transferred the ticker tape words from my cerebrum to the hard drive.

The topic of these compulsion driven writing sessions can run the full spectrum of creative writing, but the most compelling of them tend to be religious or inspirational in nature.  I like to think that it is God whispering in my ear while I sleep, then elbowing me to get up and do something with the words.  This was one such.  I called it Looking At The Cross.  Maybe it will serve someone in need of hearing what it has to say.  That part is up to God.

I sometimes wonder if this is what it was like for the people who penned the letters and documents that eventually became our Bible.  Not, let me hasten to add, that I equate myself with any of them.  Far from it!  It’s just that it’s a little unnerving to be directed to write material that I have not constructed.

Most articles that I write I have to research extensively, pulling together enough interrelated facts to piece together an article that is both informative and entertaining.  Some of these “inspired” articles will grow from something I studied or heard, but the completed piece generally encompasses material that I was not aware of prior to writing it.  As a result, I research it after I write it to be sure I’m not spewing falsehood.  Sometimes these are controversial enough that I am not comfortable with publishing at all for quite a while.

Divine inspiration?  Leaps in logic?  Sheer dumb luck?  I don’t know.  But as long as I keep getting dragged from my bed in the wee hours of the morning with a head full of words, I’ll keep writing them down, just in case.