Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Dickens

Dickens turns the creative process into a parlor-room haunting: the “idea” arrives as a ghost, half-seen, half-believed, and stubbornly uncooperative until you address it. The metaphor is doing double duty. It flatters the mystery of inspiration while quietly insisting on craft. An idea doesn’t “explain itself” because it isn’t a finished thesis; it’s a presence with atmosphere before it has argument. You don’t interrogate it like a clerk with a form. You speak to it “a little” - tentatively, repeatedly - the way you might coax a nervous witness into coherence.

That small phrase “spoken to” is the tell. Dickens, a novelist of voices, implies that thinking is dialogic: you talk, the idea talks back. Subtext: writing isn’t the transcription of genius; it’s the social act of conversation with the barely formed. Even the ghost image, so Victorian in its taste for the uncanny, is practical: ghosts don’t obey you, but they can be appeased. You return to them. You give them scenes, sentences, pressure, time.

Context matters here. Dickens worked in a culture obsessed with spiritualism and séances, but he was also a working writer in serial form, producing under deadlines, forever meeting the next installment. The line offers permission to start before certainty arrives. It’s a rebuke to the modern fantasy that clarity precedes labor. For Dickens, clarity is what shows up after you’ve had the nerve to speak first.