Writing Podcast Episode 728: Tom Rob Smith explores love and marriage in 'Twenty Years Together'

Now, people often ask me where I find ideas for the things I wanna write about, right? And [laughs] sometimes I think they're hoping I'll say something a bit mystical or ultra creative, you know, that I wait for a bolt of inspiration to strike while I'm gazing meaningfully out over the Pittwater [laughs].

And I hate to disappoint them, but it's pretty much never like that.

Inspiration is lovely when it turns up, sure, but if you sit around waiting for it, you can really wait for a very long time, because the blank page doesn't want to wait for that.

And plenty of wonderful work gets written by people who didn't feel remotely inspired that morning or that day.

They just got curious about something and followed it, right? Like, now, for regular li- listeners, you'll know that I'm big on curiosity, because curiosity is the thing I actually rely on and that drives a lot of what I do and a lot of my decisions, right? So when I'm writing nonfiction or interviewing someone, the good stuff never comes from, you know, the big obvious question, right? It comes from the small little thing that makes you think, "Hang on.

Why is that?" It could be a throwaway comment or a odd little contradiction.

So follow it, and it almost always leads somewhere far more interesting than the plan that you had, right? So I really think that curiosity is more reliable than inspiration, because you can choose it.

You can't summon a bolt of lightning.

You can't summon the muse to come.

But you can always ask a better question, right? And you don't have to ask the question to someone else.

It's asking a question to yourself, right? It's like, "What's odd here? Where does that thread lead if I tug on it?" You know, that's a door that you can open any day of the week, and you don't have to wait for the muse.

So this is what I'd suggest this week.

Forget about whether you feel inspired, because that's just, that's just a red herring in the, in the process of creativity.

Instead, find one thing that you're really curious about, right? Not the thing that you think you ought to write about, but that nagging thing that you actually want to understand or has been niggling at you.

So start there.

Follow it, like, for 20 minutes.

Go down a Google rabbit hole and see where that takes you.