Ditch the Rules—5 Tips for Writing What Inspires You

I hate following rules, especially as a creative person. The very nature of creating is based on inspiration and generating something original. Once inspired, it’s our job to breathe life into that impulse and give it form and shape. How we do it, is our process to figure out and is unique to our talents and skills.

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When I was inspired to write my award-winning self-help book How to Have a Happy Birthday: Create Meaning, Fulfillment and Joy on Your Special Day, it took me many years to write it. While well-meaning people, writers themselves, told me I needed to do extensive research, keep detailed notes, craft a solid outline, and stick to a daily writing habit (because showing up is 90% of the work, right?), every ounce of me rebelled at the advice.

It simply isn’t who I am as a creative person. My style is more like this: If the inspiration hits me, drop everything and attend to it. Give it an outlet and watch what happens. This approach has served me well as an environmental educator, entrepreneur, and designer. It also served me well as a writer because that’s how it played out when writing my book.

Birthdays, by their very nature, only generate energy as the day approaches. In the same way I’m not thinking about Thanksgiving in April, I’m also not thinking about my January birthday in June. But as December approached, I could feel the impending wave of that sacred day and started to tune into my own energy around it.

Suddenly, I had a lot to say! I’d sit at my computer and release a torrent of ideas that were directly fed—not by research and notes—but by the sheer experience of feeling it and being inspired by my feelings. “Oh yeah!” I’d marvel to myself year after year, “That birthday energy is a thing!”

Working this way, only writing my book during the few months before, during, and after my birthday, I was able to let my inspiration flow and enjoyed the relief of writing words that hit the mark. Do you know how hard it is on your psyche to have a project lay dormant like that for most of the year? That’s a joke—of course you know!

While it’s true I worked hard on my book, (in addition to writing it, I also did the illustrations) the work itself didn’t feel hard. It just required the inspiration and the willingness to do the work on its own timeline. And the belief in myself that I could get it done my own way.

While the following tips may not work for every situation (I know they certainly won’t work for every writer!) I hope they give you permission to approach your writing in a different manner—especially if you find yourself struggling a lot more than you want to.

If an expert tells you they have the right way to write a book—regardless of the genre or topic—only take their advice if it feels right to you. We all know what happens when we do something we’re “supposed to do” that doesn’t feel right to us. We abdicate our own truth and create less than ideal consequences.

The best recipe for you is your own. As long as it works. Which brings me to tip #2.

That’s my life motto. How I write or paint or cook or decorate my home—or otherwise get from point A to B is entirely my choice to figure out as long as the outcome is what I’m aiming for. Sure, there are efficiencies that can get lost along the way, and difficult lessons we may learn from doing it our own way, but if following your own recipe brings you to an outcome that works for you, then in my book (and hopefully your own) you’ve succeeded.

Pressure is good. It can motivate us to accomplish our projects and reach our deadlines. At the same time, pressure sucks. It can literally suck the inspiration out of us. How can I write if I’m stressed out and not inspired?

I find that when I’m under pressure to write something and I’m able to comfortably ignore the feeling, it’s because I’ve already established trust with myself. I learned a long time ago that I will always deliver what I’m supposed to—if I really want to. (Sometimes, my subconscious is a rebel and influences me to drop the projects I’m honestly not into.) When I’m committed to something, I know I will get it done. Just like a peach will ripen in its own time (not under pressure!) so will my creativity flow onto the page when it’s time.

I recently wrote an article under deadline. I kept putting it off until I was ready and then sure enough, the words flowed quickly. It was a pleasure. I created a good enough first draft that only required minor edits. That was my unique process at work—to wait for my inspiration. All I had to do was show up when I was ready and trust the words would come. The creativity flowed.

This is obvious, isn’t it? Sometimes though, we get caught in this idea of what we’re “supposed” to write. This article is a good example. I was asked to write an article based on the pitch I submitted. But now that I’m writing it, I’m hearing those familiar (and boring) voices of doubt, “What if this isn’t want the editor wants?” “What if the audience won’t connect?”

My reply is simple, “That’s okay. ”

If the editor doesn’t publish this article, I’m fine with it. And if you’re reading this and thinking, “What the hell is she talking about?” I’m fine with that too.

Because all I can do (all I choose to do) is give voice to what’s inside me, based on what I want to share. And these ideas, this approach, is that. When we write what we want, we’re in alignment with our ideas, our voice, and most importantly, our inspiration.

That’s right folks. While ChatGPT can be your best friend while planning an adventure in India, and while it can help you condense a bunch of work blah-blah into something succinct and interesting, it can also kill your inspiration like bug spray on a fly.

While working on a recent article, I followed my husband’s well-meaning advice and ran it through AI to condense it from 1,450 words to 1,200 words. What I got back was dazzling! Impressive! So much better than what I wrote! Yet somehow, the slick gloss of fakeness erased my unique voice. It was like eating a Dorito. (Or really, a bag of them because it’s impossible to eat just one.) It was super enchanting at first until I perceived that it was full of artifice, however skillful and poetic. Yuck!

So, what did I do? I asked ChatGPT to give me four more versions, imploring it to keep my voice. And as each iteration got better—it also got worse. So, I thought, “Okay, let me just edit the AI version that I like the most.” I started to do that and suddenly felt like I’d been pulled into a vortex of complication and muddled vision. I was editing work that was no longer my own, and it put ice into my veins.

I quickly identified the sticky web I got trapped in and chose to disentangle myself by returning to my first version and editing it myself. Which is what I did. Successfully. Sure, AI identified the areas of excess that I could edit down (thank you, AI) and sure, if I had an idea for a novel (I don’t write novels but I like the idea) AI could help me with historic references and possible plot lines, but at a certain point, when the work stops being your own, so does the inspiration.

In the end, your inspiration, your creativity, and your voice are uniquely your own. That’s what makes you one of a kind. That’s what makes you the perfect person to write what you write. When you are given permission to ditch the rules, you can liberate yourself from other peoples’ ideas of how you should live your life as an artist. After all, it’s your life. Your rules should be your own.

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