Do you have enough quiet time in your life to hear your story speaking to you?

If not, keep trying until it is.

To be a good writer, we have to be curious about everything, hungry to learn, eager to experience full, rich lives. I have to admit this is something I’ve always struggled with. I hate taking time away from regular writing, but I’ve found as I get older that the more I become a rich-in-experiences person outside my writing life, the more I have to say when I do write.

The past few years in which I’ve written very little have been a time of filling up on experiences, and in spite of my utter panic about not writing “enough,” have ultimately made me a writer I never could have been if I’d kept slogging away and forcing myself to write on a nearly empty tank of experiences.

If you pursue any kind of creative passion seriously, you will encounter difficult times. The trick is to see the lesson in the adversity. What does it have to teach you about your art? Plenty, if you pay attention.

“You’ve read the same articles I have in the Sunday supplements that say on your deathbed you never regret the days you didn’t go in to the office. Bullshit. That’s not my world. I do regret those days. Norman Mailer toward the end of his life was asked if he had any regrets. The interviewer expected, I imagine, an answer like, “I wish I’d spent more time with my kids.” Instead Mailer said, “I have three or four more books in my head; I wish I had written them.””

This is indeed my particular fear–not getting written what I want to write. The challenge, of course, is making each day a no regrets day.

That’s one of my favorite quotes about writing, because no matter how many times I see it or hear it quoted, I never cease to need the reminder.

I want guarantees when I’m writing that the pages I write are part of a cohesive whole and that the destination will be worth arriving at. I want to know I won’t have to cut the scene later. I want to know how long it will take me to reach THE END. I want, I want, I want…control.

But all that control-seeking can keep me from writing anything at all. Better than I keep moving slowly through the darkness, getting to know my characters along the way. Even if I ultimately don’t use the scene, I’ll know my story better for having written it.

Moving through the dark also forces me to focus on the immediate scene and its details, which isn’t, in the end, such a bad thing.

My current listen is David Morrell’s The Successful Novelist, a book I’m thoroughly enjoying so far. He points out a habit I developed many years ago but never thought of as an actual writing technique. If someone had told me to do it at the very beginning of my career, it probably would have saved me the writing of a few terrible and overly plot-driven books.

The technique is this: When you are in the process of developing an idea for a book, and writing the book itself, have a conversation with yourself about the story on paper. It becomes a loose sort of plot outline. I keep a document for every book called “story notes” in which I brainstorm, write down ideas as they occur to me, ask myself questions I don’t know the answers to, and most importantly, I constantly ask myself why.

It looks something like this:

I think the heroine should be afraid of kids.
Why should she be afraid of kids?
Maybe because she has so many bad memories of childhood, and kids remind her of the pain she experienced when her dad drank too much and beat up her mom, and….

And it goes on that way. In the end I have a messy document, pages and pages of random conversations with myself, and always asking why, why, why. This question forces me to dig deeper. The temptation is always to go with that first idea that feels good enough, but the question why forces you to see if it’s really worthwhile. If I can’t come up with a good answer, I need to keep trying to find a better idea.

I don’t frequently need to refer back to my story notes document. Often, I have these conversations with myself right in the middle of my working manuscript when I get stuck, and if it’s something I feel I might want to refer to later, I’ll eventually cut and paste it into the story notes.

This kind of process, Morrell points out, is like a kind of written meditation, and I love that comparison. The written conversation forces me to put my meandering thoughts into real words, where I can examine them and see if they look pretty in the light of day.

(Definitely smart to avoid the narcotics a few famous artists found so essential to their routines (until they crashed and burned).)

What struck me immediately about the list is how many more men than women were included. I’d love to see a list of the routines of women writers and artists. Why? Because we tend to be the ones who’ve mastered writing during nap time, writing at 5AM while the family is asleep, writing while breastfeeding, writing while sitting in the car during karate practice, writing at 11PM when the family is asleep…

With unlimited time available for creative acts, anyone, with enough self-discipline, can find the time to write or be creative in other ways. But for the rest of us? We must fight for that time. I’m fascinated by all the ways we manage to carve out time for creativity.

Although I’m far from being a morning person, I find that my mind is freshest at that time, if I can somehow wake it up enough to get going, so my current time-carving project is attempting to re-set my internal clock so that I can wake early and write.

What do you do to make time to be creative?

Yay, Cindy! Visit her website for an excerpt, reviews, and more fun stuff.

I got a new computer for Christmas, intending to use it only for photo editing and the general playing-with of photos. My little Macbook Air is wonderful in innumerable ways, especially for writing, but it doesn’t like big honking jpeg files being crammed by the thousand onto its hard drive. Nor does it like Photoshop Elements.

Anyway, this new laptop is free of the psychological baggage that goes with years of less than productive writing habits such as checking email, checking email again, popping onto the internet for just a second to look up some oh-so-important fact, checking Facebook, checking Twitter, checking email again… Using it is like sitting down at a new desk, in a new office, with a lovely new view from the window, and getting busy on refreshing new work.

Because my laptop computer is my desk, office, and window all rolled into one handy little device, it’s by far my most important writing tool. I began writing on the new laptop (just because the newer version of Word fascinated me), thereby breaking my self imposed rule that the old computer would be for writing, and the new computer would be for photography and fun. And the words flowed.

And flowed, and flowed some more.

The lesson here isn’t that if you’re stuck, you should buy a new computer. Rather, it’s that it never hurts to change things up a bit. On a regular basis, try changing your work location to another room or outside, or switching from computer to paper and pen, or moving from home to a cafe. Or all three. Try writing with a fancy new pen, in a beautiful journal, or try writing on notebook paper with a pencil.

You’ll be surprised how sometimes these changes can jar you into a new feeling of creative flow. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes it does. My favorite place to write is in the hammock under one of our redwood trees on a warm day. But do I get much writing done there? Not generally. It’s too relaxing. My least favorite place to write is sitting at a desk, but often I can get loads of work done there. And sometimes I can’t.

I have to remind myself to be aware of how a writing session is going. Does it feel like pulling teeth? Then it’s time to try something different.