ABSTRACT
The process of creative writing by the Danish poet and novelist Inger Christensen (1935–2009) is the focus of this chapter. She is widely regarded as one of the most influential Scandinavian writers of the twentieth century and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1996.
Christensen describes how she is familiar with the classical situation of a writer confronted with the looming blank page with nothing happening. The search for an inspiration is in vain and she just has to wait for the word or sentence “that immediately begins to transform nothing into everything conceivable.” She maintains that when the coincidence of coming upon the right word or phrase occurs, language becomes alive and self-producing in the same way that a sunflower seed sprouts into a sunflower. She draws our attention to the fact that nature has its “necessity, direction, and constraints” and the same applies to the creation of art. Just like nature, creative writing has a structure that is already there with the initial inspiration.
