Inspiration by Another Name: How to Create a Relationship with Revelation

TRUST ME, THIS IS A BETTER RELATIONSHIP. INSPIRATION KNOWS 50 WAYS TO LEAVE YOU, WHILE REVELATION, IF YOU LISTEN, HOLDS TRUE.

It's about revelation—not inspiration. And the secret to stoking your inspiration and staying in the creative flow is to change your relationship with revelation. 

In Uncommon Hours, my online community and class that helps writers master their creative process, we use poetry as invitations into reordered thinking. Poetry can get us out of our heads and into our hearts. It reconfigures us from the inside.

(For more on this, I invite you to Padraig O'Tuama's podcast, "Poetry Unbound", or his book, "Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World," which is available in my bookshop here: https://bookshop.org/shop/story-catalyst.)

We use this poem by David Whyte, "Revelation Must Be Terrible," as an invocation to hold a different stance with revelation.

We must let it be done to us. We often don't let it come because if we did, we would have to act upon it.