Inspiration can come from your own glorious screwup.

Some of the best opportunities begin as failures.

  TRAINING INSPIRATION (part six)

While we tend to think of inspiration as bolt-from-the-blue brilliance, I think this instant form of ideation is extremely rare. The Greek scientist and inventor Archimedes allegedly found a way to calculate the volume of an irregularly shaped object. He devised a screw that moved water uphill, a heat-ray weapon, a planetarium, and a precursor to modern calculus. But only once is he said to have leaped naked out of his bath shouting “Eureka!”

Isaac Newton almost certainly didn’t discover gravity when an apple bonked him on the head. Instead, he devised his physics by mathematically and painstakingly hoisting himself onto the giant shoulders of his scientific predecessors.

The Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, John Wanamaker (who built the first department store), George Washington Carver, Josephine Cochrane (who invented the dishwasher)…none of these inventors seems to have gotten their ideas from a sudden bolt of insight or the breath of any god. They worked with deep knowledge, experimentation, and patience.

None of these innovators got their ideas from bolts out of the blue. Some succeeded by repeatedly screwing up.

On the other hand, I’m convinced that inspiration can come out of nowhere, in the form of an opportunity, a door that opens us to discovery and invention. (The word “opportunity” comes from the Latin porta, meaning “entrance” or “passage through.”)

Some brilliant inventions have come from those rare souls who notice an open door when they see one.

Often, an opportunity begins as a failure.

That’s why most of us miss it. The chef George Crum responded to a grouchy diner who complained that the French fries in the Saratoga Springs resort were too thick. Crumb shaved the spuds down to a crispy thinness, and so in 1853 invented the potato chip.

Spencer Silver was trying to create a stronger adhesive for 3M, but ended up making a weaker one. One day he spotted a friend using this weak glue on paper as bookmarks that would stay on the page. Silver eventually used the discovery to make the Post-it note.

The history of inventions is full of triumphal screwups. Doors carelessly left open. Or unlocked by the gods, letting in flies, criminals, scary winds…and great creations. Inspiration rarely comes from a bolt from the blue.

Except when it does. My own bolt struck me in that voice in the night, proclaiming that my male character was, hey, stupid—a girl. It took me a year or so to write the original novel. My agent took it to publishers, who said they liked the writing but hated the character. Not a single publisher made an offer. So I shelved the book and went back to more useful tasks. Then years later, in the middle of the night, I woke up. The way I remember it was this (memory is unreliable, so I can’t guarantee it actually happened this way): I had heard a high angry voice: “I’m a girl, stupid.” And suddenly it seemed absolutely clear: Jonah Mudgett was a girl. Next day I wrote an author’s note just to see how she sounded. It went like this:

To the Reader:

My name is not Joan, it is Jonah which is my beloved father’s name. I took it for my own until I could find the evil doer who slew my mother and until everybody found Daddy innocent of the foul deed. And also found, period. Because he was missing.

Also, please stop calling me a prophet. I am sick of it.

Jonah Mudgett

Where did that bolt come from? The gods? The goddess Memory, the one Homer begged from? Did it come from the modeling I did, putting a character in a situation that ended up proving I had the wrong character for the situation? Or did it come from my exigence, the desire to make the damn novel work eventually? I have no idea. But the important thing is, I responded. I walked through that door with no clue what was behind it.

Not that a work of genius lay on the other side of that door. But that bolt from the blue led to months of happy enjoyment, as I listened to the girl prophet Jonah tell her tale.

I listened to her. In the next and final post of this series, I’ll talk about the need to be open to the craziest of your ideas. Some of them just might be genuine inspirations.