I found an extremely poignant quote on the wall of perhaps the worst hotel I've ever stayed in in my entire life during the move to San Francisco. Now that I'm in my apartment instead of the afforementioned crappy hotel, I'd like to share it with you guys:

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” -Jack London.

Finding that quote was worth all of the sticky carpets and dirty bathrooms that were endured in the process. (And no, I have yet to figure out why the carpets were sticky...)

How many times have you put down the pencil, the paintbrush, or the stylus because you didn't feel "inspired"? For writers, how many pieces did you scrap or never finish writing because it just wasn't flowing right? If it's similar to mine, then you lost count years ago.

We all make excuses for why we don't draw or paint as much as we feel we should; we call it "artists block" or say our muse has "gone missing."

Either we slave for hours over a piece that refuses to come out right, or we realize somewhere along the line that we don't yet posess the technical skill to get our mental image down on paper correctly. It's a discouraging realization, so we stop, we crumple it up, and we say we'll do it later.

Then we never do.

Don't let yourself make excuses whenever you realize your work just isn't flowing, because if you're pursuing art (or writing, or photography, or pretty much any creative field) professionaly, you won't have the luxury of waiting for inspiration. Even if the end result isn't what you'd hope for, even if it's not perfect, even if it just downright sucks, push through and finish it. You'll learn a hell of a lot more than if you'd just given up and chalked the loss up to "lack of inspiration."

Next time your muse goes missing, hunt her down, club her over the head, and drag that troublesome skank back by the hair. It'll be worth it when 6 months down the road you realize that finishing all of those terrible paintings and awful sketches made you one hell of a better artist. And they will.