Michael asks:
"Do your skills and talents for analysis, critical thinking, and verbal
construction affect..."
A creative moment for a writer entails four stages. Something -- call it his
"prelibation" -- senses an effect needed right here; imagination offers up,
say, an event in the story (or an image, or a simile, or a witty thought, etc)
that might do it; the writer comes up with the words he'll use to convey the
event; sensibility judges the offering.
The sensed need is something of a generic thing -- simultaneously specific
and non-specific, like, say, a silhouette. Once the writer fixes on it, the
succeeding stages can be very rapid -- and repeated, because sensibility will
often reject the offering. Or they can be slow as the writer "thinks". He may
rethink the prelibation; he may come up with a reason why the offering is
inconsistent with something else already written, or why it makes the
character funny
but unattractive, or any number of considerations that makes sensibility
reject it.
Disentangling what you'd call inspiration from what you'd call your internal
craftsman/critic's necessary but not really creative contributions is hard to
do. To answer Michael's question, I'd say the inspired stuff and the
non-inspired craft/critic stuff are interacting seemingly all the time as I
write. The
good moments are when sensibility nods happily at a long string of offerings
-- but that doesn't mean it won't come back in a day or two and say, "I was
wrong yeserday. That bit's not good enough. Back to the drawing board.")
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