There’s a quote from Ursula Vernon that’s stuck with me, something I think I found in one of her Author’s Notes. “Inspiration knocks now and again, but spite bangs on the door all year long.”

That doesn’t ring fully true for me—my spite-writing is usually a rant or half-formed polemic in my journal, and I struggle to turn those into fiction—but it sparked a funny question for myself the other day.

Do I write like oysters make pearls?

It’s been a while since I learned how pearls are formed, so I assume I’m somewhat wrong here. My understanding is that pearls are basically irritating pieces of grit that oysters coat in layer after layer of nacre to make them less irritating. The fact that humans may find them beautiful is really beside the point.

Like Vernon’s experience of insistent spite as a muse, I think many of my stories have grown from insistent and lingering irritations or wounds or experiences. I take them (sometimes unconsciously) and start slowly building up material around them until they don’t bother me quite as much anymore, or until I feel like I’ve been able to explore them and can now share that exploration with the rest of the world.

It doesn’t always work this way. Sometimes inspiration knocks. But even then, that inspiration can often feel like an irritant.

Strong inspiration feels like an idea, a yearning, that will not shut up until I’ve wrestled it into story form. Sometimes, if I’ve wrestled for long enough without success, the yearning will finally fade—but the moment something else reminds me of it, the yearning returns. Worse, simply writing isn’t always enough. If whatever I made feels lacking, if I can’t feel what compelled me to begin with in the piece I’ve written, the compulsion will remain.

If I’m lucky, I can set aside the compulsion, placate it with enough notes to reassure whatever part of me is most invested in the idea. It’s like putting the book down with a big bookmark in it; I can glance at the bookmark and know that it’s still there, that I haven’t just lost the idea, that I can return to it whenever the time seems right. That wait can last for years, if I’m chasing other projects.

If I’m unlucky, the compulsion won’t settle down until fatigue and frustration set in. Sometimes despair joins too. When this happens, the compulsion finally dulls. But then, instead of bringing a constant needling urge to make something—anything—to resolve it, the inspiration becomes a weight added to an already heavy load of unrealized ideas. They feel a bit like regret, at that point.

I can try to pull out these old inspirations after they’ve become dead weight. I can try to satisfy and resolve them. But it takes effort and luck to turn them back into something exciting again instead of something tiring and frustrating, which makes chasing the old inspiration—and satisfying it—far more difficult.

Jumping between projects, or even tracking which projects are in current rotation, is an ongoing nightmare if too many of them are needling me at a time. Though my inspirations come in cycles of flood and drought, I inevitably have more inspirations than I can satisfy. 

I’m making a lot of pearls, whether I like it or not.