Over the summer I read a book called The Mind at Night: The New Science of How and Why We Dream by Andrea Rock. Though I typically enjoy fiction and fantasy, I went on a bit of a science kick over the summer, reading this and a book called E=mc². And I realized that, while the other aforementioned genres are still my favorites, I often forget the fact that science is really cool. Like poetry and literature as a whole, it’s a field that translates the workings of the observable world into a codified, identifiable structure: it just tends to use numbers rather than letters. In fact, both of these books featured moments of spontaneous inspiration that played a major role in both scientific discoveries and other creative endeavors.

One of the many cool facts that I learned from Rock’s book was that “Yesterday” (which the book discussed as perhaps the best-selling song, ever), initially came to Paul McCartney in a dream. Apparently, one morning he woke up feeling as though he was holding onto the tail end of a haunting melody, one not yet combined with words, that was being played by a full string orchestra. Rushing to try to retain it, he pinned down the strains of the elusive tune with whatever words came to mind: “Scrambled eggs”…

Isn’t that amazing? I can’t even generate a ballpark estimate of how many times I have heard that song, yet I never had an inkling of its fascinating inception until now. What’s more, it has precisely the sort of haunting melody (sort of like “Greensleves”) that lingers in your mind long after the song is no longer actually playing. It is the sort of bittersweet tang that directly replicates, as few other things do, the essence of the human condition. And to think that it made its entrance into our plain of existence through a dream!

The near-gifting of this song to McCartney – he described it as “a phenomenal stroke of luck” – this prophetic, vision-like bestowal of masterpiece, is awe-inspiring. Yet how few times this kind of occurrence takes place! Furthermore, we shouldn’t think that this is the only way that inspiration can come about. As Elizabeth Gilbert says in her TED talk, it’s often part of the mystery of the creative process that used to be acknowledged by society in the form of the muses or another divine-based medium of inspiration. She suggests that our lack of acknowledgement of this today has led to the notion of the ‘troubled artist’ due to all the pressure and fear resulting from the notion that these mysterious workings are solely housed within the artist themselves. Instead, she states, we need to see this sort of incomprehensible, manna-from-clouds contribution as very often a part of the creative process which has a scope beyond any one person. I wholeheartedly agree with this, but also assert that this miraculous contribution occurs only with lots of hard work, and in only a very small proportion as compared with material generated by work alone (the proportion is similar to, if not in the exact percentages of, Thomas Edison’s estimates of its relative proportions in his renowned quip that genius is “one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration”).

Yet I assert, just as emphatically, that this shouldn’t be cause for despair, nor should we think that the best pieces can only come from inspiration outside of our control. Rather, the hard work, as tedious and maddening as it can often be, can not only surpass these “visitations” in the quality of material produced, but it can also have a lot more pride attached to it – something constructed of your own painstaking stitches, something for which you have gotten the joy of shepherding through its early phases, watching initially shoddy sentenceship transfigure itself through effort and sacrifice into a polished piece, whose final heights you can enjoy all the more because you saw it as, and helped it become more than, what it once was.

That’s not to take away from the awe that these rare manna-from-heaven moments can wake within us. Nor to preclude them from being a much-appreciated treat after scarcely endurable stretches of pessimism. It’s just to say that while it looks like we’re stuck with hard work for “ninety-nine” percent of our writing endeavors, that this is no disappointment in the slightest, but rather a pleasure and a privilege whose ultimate product and continually-yielded benefits may even surpass these miraculous moments themselves.