In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy expends a lot of effort trying to get back home after being lifted out of Kansas by a tornado.
She has to befriend a ragtag band of scary freaks one by one, embark on an impossible quest, get drugged by a field of flowers, and suffer an attack by hordes of flying monkeys.
In the end, to get back home, all she has to do is chant, “There’s no place like home,” and tap her ruby slippers together.
She could have done that from the start and saved herself a lot of trouble.
You might have waited around for months to get struck by lightning, absorbed other people’s finished work, scoured books about writing technique, wrung your hands, and paced, wishing and hoping you could get inspired to create something great.
Like Dorothy, you can save yourself a lot of trouble by taking 30 minutes to dash off ten ideas every day, occasionally focusing on project ideas. Once in a while, you’ll come up with a project that will light a fire under you, a project you simply must complete.
This is the source of creative inspiration, and it’s yours right now.
Great analogy. Quantity yields quality.
I read somewhere that The Wizard of Oz was an elaborate allegory about fin-de-siècle American politics. Oz refers to the gold standard, blah blah blah. Maybe Dorothy had to go on her little adventure to satisfy the author-wizard's zeal for obscurantism. Besides, I don't really want to go home. Home is kind of dull.
But then she would have missed out on so much good material.
"I've managed to kill two wicked witches. I wish mother in laws were that easy to deal with."
"I got sucked into a tornado, sent somewhere I wasn't expecting, and I had to team up with a scarecrow, a lion, and a tin man to get back home. It's still better than flying WestJet."