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These calls are really fun with amazing, insightful writers sharing their experiences, frustrations and answers. Plus I always have a thought (or three) to help you get excited about your writing and plunge back into it. This is a free call; please join us!

What makes a blog both exciting and dangerous is the immediacy of the format. Confessions, passions and urges are typed onto a little box on a screen, one rectangular button with the corners worn off is clicked with a tap of a key, and those confessions become public.

I’m a person with three novel manuscripts waiting perfection. I’m not impulsive about getting my work out before the public eye because I’ve been wounded by the public eye, been overly-sensitive to what others wrote about my work or thought about it. The blog format, therefore, is good for me. In many ways.

But it is still dangerous, and right now I’m aflame, in a quiet and deep way.

I just crawled out of bed after a long “nursey-nappy” with my family, a nap I spent finishing Po Bronson‘s excellent What Should I Do with My Life? The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question. He’s got quite a target market there: anyone who’s ever wondered, Is That All There Is?

But what made me LOVE this book was first, the excellent writing. It’s just so well-written. If you want to know what good writing is, read this book. It’s not flowery, pretentious, or even poetic. It’s honest, articulate, driven by a voice of intelligence and integrity.

If I knew Po Bronson better, which is to say if I’d ever met him or met his cousin or seen him do a live reading, say, I’d call him up right now instead of blogging, and I’d run my ideas past him. But you, dear reader, are being asked to stand in. Here’s what I’ll do to help you out. I’ll quote a few lines, and you see if you can take up the spirit of the voice of this book and answer me back, okay?

He writes:

So finding your calling is not “the answer.” Callings are vehicles that help us let our real selves out; callings speed up the process. You can find your calling, or you can find your people, or you can find an environment that nurtures you–they all lead to the same place. Many people get there without ever finding their calling. Head in that direction. (p.390)

And then he writes:

A calling is not something you know, it’s something you grow into, through trials and mistakes. Work shouldn’t just be fun. Work should be like life–sometimes fun, sometimes moving, and defined by meaningful events. Attack your fears, rather than shy away from them. Bring what you do in alignment with who you are. (p.391)

And just one more:

You can get good at what you need to to serve what you believe in. . . . Nothing helps like knowing you are not alone. (p. 391)

Okay, go buy this book! And then come back here and listen to me confess.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve been studying marketing with Michael Port, and that I appreciate that he emphasizes love and integrity. In fact, our last class, in which he made good use of a book called Love is the Killer App, by Tim Sanders was mind-bogglingly wonderful. It focused on the idea that networking is the process of taking care of other people by sharing your intangibles.

What are your intangibles? Your network, your knowledge and your passion.

Meanwhile, I’m reading Po Bronson at night, surrounded by babies, with my little clip-on reading light fading mightily. I got to the end of Ch. 46 last night and it was late for someone with two little guys who wake up before the birds around here, and so I switched off my sputtering little clip-on light, but I couldn’t sleep for two more hours. I was thinking about what he wrote at the end of Ch. 46.

And I’m working out who and how I want to teach, who and how I want to edit. I love teaching and editing; I love being good at making connections, pushing people toward their strengths, teaching what doesn’t seem to be taught much–craft, for example, close attention to words; how to write the books you write best, better. And how to finish things . . . write a whole book and then rewrite it, and write another one. What if people left an M.F.A. program with two complete, book-length manuscripts?

So I’m thinking about how to build my teaching and coaching and editing business, how to serve the people I’m meant to serve. But at the same time, of course, there’s something else: I want to be a writer.

I’ve known this for a really long time and it keeps not changing. I don’t like growing in public or marketing my wares-cum-deepest creative efforts. But I keep pulling past those blocks, changing my mind, being willing to figure out a new way to be willing to grow in public and to see selling my wares in a different light.

Add to the mix that I’m raising two kids, and that I want to raise them. I want to be there for the rolling out of the new words, for the jokes they make and the dance moves they invent and the art they create that, frankly, blows my mind.

So that’s business, writing, kids, in no particular order, and not to mention my relationship, my friends, and my voracious appetite for reading . . .

And each of these items has a few sides to it.

Because besides the amazing sentences my boys utter and the laughs they earn and the hugs they give, there are also endless meals to cook, surfaces to wipe down (counters and bottoms and floors) and dishes to clean and toys to pick up off the floor–again–and laundry to do and baths to be given and hair to be washed and no one likes to brush teeth, it turns out . . .

And writing comes with building a platform and collecting rejection slips, which means addressing and stamping and mailing envelopes (or is anybody even doing that anymore?) and researching markets and proposing articles and books and then convincing other people to buy them . . .

And building a business comes with letting other people know about it and developing products and courses and trying methods of outreach that fail, and doing taxes, and keeping books and records and mailing lists and returning phone calls and emails . . .

Everybody else just woke up, and I was planning to drive the point home if I could, but then people needed dinner and a lot of attention.

So . . . where was I? Oh yes, all the pieces of a whole and the many wholes that compete for attention.

Here’s my immediate, not-yet-digested idea after finishing Po Bronson’s book: I am going to structure my courses and coaching to support my–and hence my clients’–writing life. Perhaps a first-thing-in-the-morning group check-in to rev us up and get us going? Followed by a three-hour writing block. A lunch hour course rotating between planning your book (Mondays?), writing your book (Wednesdays?), revising your book (Thursdays?).(Clients can move among them as needed.) The craft course to keep all of us in the best shape possible for writing great prose . . . And then afternoon coaching sessions for people who are ready to soar.

This is a work-in-progress, but at its heart is my belief that serving others can be done best when I am serving myself. And as I learn about building a platform using all of the exciting media options available, as I create tours and promote books, I will share this information. I want to help apprentice writers become professionals, and professional writers become stars. Myself included.

What do you want? What is your driving passion? What should you do with your life?

The title of this post is a quote from a conversation with a wonderful coach named Sharon Sayler (check out her radio show), and I think it’s the perfect description of what writing demands of us.

Someone was saying to me this week that it’s not the writing she minds, but the voice in her head that accompanies the writing. The voice that says, “This is not good enough; this is terrible.” That’s what makes writing hard.

I see my kids creating so joyfully. Charlie loves typing at the computer. He’s 18 months old! And we don’t let him watch any television (except inauguration), but we’ve not been able to shield him from our own obsessions with the computer, and he’s hooked. Leo loves to draw. “More drawing,” he says if he has to leave the blank page to, say, eat. And when one page fills, he says, “New page.” With delight.

That voice that critiques the writing as we go is the sum of all that is wrong with the world. It’s a voice that lacks empathy, artistry, depth (other than the depths of despair), compassion, curiosity (what might come of following this line, this trail of words?).

If we heard this voice directed at anyone else–on the political stage or at a restaurant or on television–we would know that we’d sworn enmity to this voice and all it believes in. But in the privacy of our own offices or journals, that voice becomes an ambassador from the land of common sense. It’s Carl Kasell, and you can win him recorded on your answering machine.

The most important thing to remember about the voice that tells you anything at all about the wet new writing you’ve just laid upon the fibers of your page is that that voice is wrong. Plain wrong. That voice doesn’t know. It’s the loudest kid on the bus arguing about whether or not there is a Santa Claus or who is the best softball player. But it doesn’t know the truth; it doesn’t even know how to pause softly and fumble for the truth. It’s a bully. Don’t let yourself be bullied.

You won’t know the worth of the writing until later. Much later. After the draft is finished and some time has been spent recovering yourself and engaging with other things, you will curl up with it and get to know it, this thing that you’ve created. You will have the distance from it so that you can treat it as a friend, not someone you snap at to take the garbage out, not all the shame from the worst moments of your childhood heaped upon the thin thread of your attempted sentence. It will be something else: its own being, separate from you, alive and flawed and wonderful and fixable.

You, at your kitchen table, at your neighborhood cafe, under a blanket on your couch, waiting in the car for your kid to come out of gymnastics. You are working miracles. You are leaping from the trapeze without seeing the net. You are soaring, caught in the currents of air, in the uncertainty that gifts us with new possibilities we could not have imagined otherwise.

Treasure that act. Trust it. Silence the voice. Laugh at it. Shrink it down to size. Write down what it says and put those words in the mouth of your villain. Copy out the opposite of the voice’s evil message and post those words around your house and in your notebooks (computerized or not).

I, and hundreds of thousands like me, are waiting on the other side of a page for that miracle you grind out with so much labor and hesitancy and recklessness and terror and joy. I know a world of people who are not supposed to exist–freaks and queers and manly girls and girly men and all manner of others who are not, anywhere, described or anticipated. If someone is trying to add “readers” to that list, I defy them. We are everywhere, waiting, for the next story that will change our lives.

[Thursday, Feb. 26, I am offering a FREE TELE-CLASS on dialog. Dazzling fun that will grow your writing in ways you won't believe. Email me for information about how to join us.]

There’s a reading series in San Francisco called Writers with Drinks, but I’ve been thinking lately about the ingredients that make someone a working writer or a professional writer–whatever you want to call it in a country that does not recognize the existence of, let alone the profound need for, professional writers. A way with words helps. A sense of story, storytelling, or having amazing stories to tell helps. A work ethic helps profoundly. But what pulls all these out of thin air, what makes something from nothing? Deadlines. What takes the esoteric task of creating something “good” in writing and forces each of us to the page to do the dance and see what happens? Deadlines.

I hope you are hearing this in the grovel-y, growl-y voice of the Cowardly Lion doing his own call and response with the word “Courage!” Deadlines and courage are much the same thing in the life of the writer. The one forces the other, round and around. You have a deadline, you find the courage to produce. You have courage? You create deadlines for yourself. Sign up for readings, enter contests, submit your work, create a group, take a class, hire a coach, sign a two-book deal, whatever it takes.

My friend Kendra told me the Something from Nothing story at Habitot Children’s Museum the other day. The small underground museum was crowded with toddlers running and playing with trains, paint, water and baby dolls, plastic groceries, farm equipment. Not so far from the clubs where Kendra and I first met a dozen years ago, trading stories in the din and passing dates back and forth the way we now pass babies. Drinks instead of snacks . . . Anyway, she told me that she had two copies of this book Something from Nothing, about a grandfather who makes his grandson a jacket. After a while, the jacket is worn out, but the grandfather says, “There is just enough material left to make a vest.” So he makes a vest for the grandchild. When the vest wears out, there is enough material to make a scarf (say–not remembering exactly, as fatigue has replaced drunkenness in these new “clubs”), and when the scarf wears out, there is just enough material to make a button. Then the button falls off and is lost. “That’s okay,” the grandfather says, “for I think that there is just enough material left to make a story.”

That’s it, folks. You work with what you have and you stretch it in service of those you love. Kids form a kind of deadline. They make you realize that you have precious and limited time, that life is its own deadline.

There’s a great twenty-minute talk by Elizabeth Gilbert on genius at TED. Elizabeth Gilbert wrote the hit book Eat, Pray, Love, which Angie calls Eat, Pray, How Barbie Got Her Groove Back. This is a talk about doing your part–doing the work. She’s had enormous success, and now, she says, people look at her with an expression of . . . doom. What can she do to top this success? The talk is worth listening to. It builds to a point much related to my own point today, but rather more joyfully and with a large audience and a standing ovation at the end. But I guess the bottom line here is you’ve got to do it in the back room of a strange cafe with E=mc2 (don’t actually know how to do squared on my computer keyboard!) painted across a black brick wall of planets and DNA structure with only the cell phone conversation of the guy in the corner as accompaniment. Take the evidence of life, your own waking and sleeping dreams that keep telling you stories, the richness of what’s around you as encouragement. Take the growing word count (what as a child I  fantasized would be a stack of pages beside a typewriter), the hours clocked, the clicking of the keyboard as applause.

And find, force, create a deadline. A real one. Invite your friends over to a party to hear your latest story . . . and then write it. Do what it takes to make the work urgent, and then do the work. Cut your judgment about how great or terrible it is out of the loop until you’ve got a productive rhythm that serves you and can’t be broken. If you aren’t writing, it really doesn’t matter how good the writing that you’re not doing is, does it?

Declare your deadline here. Let’s have it now.

I have been all charged up about some recent finds I want to share with you.

One is Michael Port’s Book Yourself Solid — a book, audiobook and system for marketing and building your business that takes that brave journey away from crass, haranguing, uphill effort and turns it into connecting with what you love and sharing it. That sounds simplistic, but it’s not. His book is packed with information and a powerful approach. These are times when many of us are shifting around our economic models and tracks, and if you are building your own business–including writing-related businesses (such as being a published author!), I cannot recommend this highly enough.

The second find is thanks to author Cornelia Read, and this is a series of blogs on craft written by Alexandra Sokoloff. You can find Sokoloff and the amazing craft blogs at Murderati.com or at thedarksalon.blogspot.com. Scroll down the right margin and you’ll get to a list of “Writing Articles.” She’s trained in theater and screenwriting and writes suspense–all of which contain keys to any writing, even the most poetic literary flights. Her blogs are immensely readable and incredibly clear. They make me want to try things in writing, always a good sign.

Alexandra Sokoloff, in turn, recommended reading The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker (subtitle: And Other Survival Signals that Protect Us from Violence). I’m in the middle of it and it is amazing. Besides that it should be required reading for anyone who might encounter violence (which is, as he convinces you quickly, anyone) and especially women (who too often choose not to be rude over listening to their instincts), it’s great reading for anyone interested in understanding human behavior. Everyone, more or less, should fall into that last category, too, but especially writers. That’s what we’re doing alone at the keyboard, no?

This is some of what I am jazzed about right now. What are your latest finds?

Yesterday my family played ball together. This sounds trivial, but it was the first time, really, that we’d tossed a ball around: Charlie to Mommy to Mama to Leo to Charlie . . . It took some doing to convince the boys to play. Leo, especially, wanted only to hold the ball, as if it were a teddy bear, and Charlie was willing to throw, but not to Leo, since that seemed too much like handing the precious commodity over to his brother wholesale. In fact, Leo went off to play with sand, and we ended up forming our rhombus around him. Angie and I taught the boys that the great good fun of playing ball is in letting it go, again and again. It seems obvious to adults, now, but why, when there is so much meant to be held close, does this toy create more fun when you keep pushing it away?

As we cheered the throws and attempted throws, it occurred to me that there is a parallel here–as there usually is–to writing. So many people want to write, and I think it is because reading a great book makes you want to toss it–and maybe your own addition–right back into the world. The story exists between the reader and the writer, just as the fun with a ball exists between the players, not in grasping the object itself. Movement, energy, force, intent, connection, misses. Zoom. Leap. Catch. Throw.

It’s a funny thing. People take drawing classes and painting classes without long portions of the time given over to discussions of how to interest galleries in your work or get into the Whitney Biennial. But I don’t think that writers are so much more commercially oriented than other artists. I think the sometimes crass focus on “getting published” has to do with the desire to throw the ball. After all, your family probably wants to leaf through the pictures you’ve drawn in your live nudes class. But do they demand that you read your latest novelistic efforts at the dinner table?

There are multiple layers to the application of this metaphor to writing. You throw the ball when you take an idea and toss it onto the page. You throw the ball when you edit this work and renew it, and again when you show it to someone else, and again when it bounces out and back to various publications, agents, editors. You throw the ball when you blog, too, or comment on a blog. It’s a handy little game of catch, not the World Series, but a friendly back and forth while you chat about what is going on in your life.

I’ve been listening to a book on tape that Angie stuck onto my MP3 when I was going to London. It’s called Book Yourself Solid, and it is amazing if you are a service professional building a business. Maybe someone who hates marketing . . . It’s made me excited about thinking about the language that describes what I do. I work with people who love books and want to write them. I assist in transforming people into writers, ideas into manuscripts, manuscripts into books. I’m interested in clients who have a way with words or an amazing story or a powerful work ethic. If you have any one of these, I can get the other two up and running. If you have more than one . . . watch out, baby.

Okay, this is in the rough stages. Probably too early to share. But I like the bounce that comes from throwing something out into the world. I like the joy on my boys’ faces when they lobbed the ball away from themselves, learning that holding on tight is not the only, or the best, way to play.

January 20, 2006 My day started listening to Aretha Franklin sing, My Country ‘Tis of Thee, and it will end singing the Internationale while my grandmother is interred.  By then it will be tomorrow in the place I am traveling to.

A premise is a journey. It’s the itinerary of a journey, more precisely. It says, if you get on this plane in San Francisco, you will get off in London. It does not say that all planes go from San Francisco to London nor even that all planes that leave San Francisco arrive in London. It just talks about this plane, this journey. But what it says is true.

A premise is not the flight itself, not the play list you listen to or the memories each song evokes. Not the two seats that you try to lie upon, legs folded against one armrest, head propped on pillows, blankets, jacket at the too-close other armrest. A premise is not the orange juice you drink, the articles you read in the New Yorker, the way you laugh at Eddie Izzard and wonder if the people around you notice. It is not the freelance golf writer on her way from Maui via Los Angeles and San Francisco and London to Scotland who does not like to fly. It is not the view of the ocean cliffs and the Richmond Bridge that you point out to her, feeling that you have been drafted to distract her as the plane takes off. It is not the baby boys you have left behind, the nap they are supposed to be taking and the park they will go to afterwards. It is not your questions about what they make of your absence. It is not your grandmother’s funeral ahead, the dawning realization that she died of old age and is only twenty years older than your mother, her daughter.

The premise takes all of this and more and kneads it as your reader’s mind will knead it, until it joins together and rises, and the journey becomes clear, the specific journey–San Francisco to London, child to adult, a person who feels outside a family to a person who feels inside a family, perhaps. Your premise looks at where you started and what kicked you over to where you landed, and it makes a claim:

Commitment leads to connection.
Ritual triumphs over daily life.
Responsibility conquers division.

Not always. Not all commitment leads to connection. Not all ritual triumphs over daily life. Not all responsibility conquers division. Not all planes that leave San Francisco arrive in London. But this journey went that way, and showed us something about these qualities: commitment, ritual, San Francisco.

Once you have made the journey–written the book–you read back over it and you dig out your premise. What does this journey teach you? Name the qualities that characterize the book’s movement.

This becomes the lens through which you revise. It is the unity that pulls your book together, and anything that does not support your premise belongs in another book.

Now, just to be clear, this does not mean that scenes, actions, characters and events that directly oppose your premise should be excised. On the contrary, your premise requires a good fight, a fair fight, to prove itself. Let it do battle with ideas and forces that suggest it is wrong. Just don’t wander off on a little Los Angeles to Los Vegas loop when you are going SFO to Heathrow. See?

When someone dies there is, I’ve found, a kind of internal reckoning. Their premise becomes clearer, once the whole arc stretches–rainbow-like–before you. Not that I can see anything like the whole of my grandmother’s arc, but I see that she lived a single life, after all. My father used to talk about how life zigzagged while you were living it, but looking back, it turned into a straight line. What is remarkable about a human life is that its conflicts and contradictions and layers all unite, in the end, into a single strand of days, years, decades–nearly nine, in my grandmother’s case.

Near the end of her life, my uncle asked my grandmother what the purpose of life was, and she mouthed one word: “Love.” Now, this is not the most original idea, but if you’d read the whole book, you’d know that there was a distinct character arc, that that moment and that insight represented a journey and an arrival.

Love conquers even politics.
Bitter memories and eccentric independence lead to the embrace of love.
The revolution of the heart conquers even a family whose spine looks like the post-1988 Berlin wall.

What’s the premise of a book you love? Of your own book?

Writing is hard. If you are honest with yourself and you really are a writer, you will admit that you like it that way.

I was listening to a quirky little interview with Ethan Canin yesterday, and he as much as confessed that he writes novels because they are harder for him than poetry or short stories. When I arrived at graduate school lo these many years ago, I was surrounded by people who had been considered the best writer in their class or school. Many found it frustrating to be part of the crowd now, to be told they weren’t ready to write a novel or that a story needed profound revisions.

But I suspect that the (many) people who went on to publish and continue writing welcomed–or learned to welcome–the challenge of writing well. There were a lot of people in that class who are doing remarkable work, and who have gotten some serious recognition, too, but all of them probably sit down to the blank page feeling at some level like a beginner. Afraid. Excited. Worried. Trepidatious, even.

Writing is hard. You have to ask yourself questions whose answers you don’t know (Barbara Kingsolver). You have to use your own flesh as bait (Annie Dillard). You have to follow the story, getting better at writing as you go, not waiting to know how to write before you begin. There is no bunny slope.

I just finished reading Mindset, a sort of pop-psych book by Carol Dweck, a non-pop-psychologist at Stanford. She proposed, and has done a lot of research to support, a theory that there are two mindsets that shape how people view learning, risk, challenges, intelligence, ability and self.

The fixed mindset sees intelligence, artistic ability and the like as, well, fixed. These are givens. Therefore, people with a fixed mindset are usually trying to prove that they are intelligent or able, rather than trying to get smarter or more able.

The growth mindset believes that intelligence and other abilities are gained through hard work, effort, learning, struggling and growing. These folks approach challenges and even failures as opportunities to become more intelligent, while the fixed-mindset folks are threatened by challenges which might de-throne them from a status such as “smart” or “good at writing.”

Dweck assures her readers that it is possible to change, that she herself changed from being a fixed mindset person to being a growth mindset person. At first, I found it hard to believe that one could change. This, I saw, put me in the fixed mindset group. At least in some respects . . .

I know that as a teacher, I have embraced a growth mindset, although even there I have been influenced by the reading of this book. But I see many ways in which I have a fixed mindset. And even with my students, I’ve sometimes had the desire to protect their egos instead of pushing them to do their very best. Dweck talks about the difference between praising someone’s qualities and praising his or her efforts. Some of these ideas go against the very grain of how I’ve been taught to interact, to encourage. Dweck shows that folks who are praised for their abilities tend to turn away risks and challenges that might prove that in fact they are not so great, while people praised for their efforts gladly take on new opportunities to grow and get better, smarter.

In the background, I hear Angie explaining this to our lovely babysitter: “If you can remember, and we can’t always ourselves, try to praise effort instead of ability. So instead of saying, ‘You are so strong,’ say, ‘I can tell you’ve been practicing.’ We’re really trying to emphasize the idea that learning and practice and effort are good things, over ‘being smart.’”

To her credit, our babysitter, despite having years of experience with kids, is very open to this new idea and not at all threatened by it. Growth mindset. See?

As writers, we have to encourage a growth-mindset. You simply cannot sail through with no challenge to your ego or your ability. This is a great good thing.

In New York, I taught at the Gothem Writers Workshop. One thing I loved about those classes was that because they were open to anyone but cost a fair amount, the people in them generally had some serious success in their careers but were willing to be beginners again–beginning writers. These are fun folks to teach. They have a growth mindset.

So what can you do to give yourself a growth mindset today?

Drawing from a wonderful chart Dweck publishes (on p. 245):

Accept challenges. Writing is hard. Don’t wait until it feels easy or you think you know what you are doing. Sit down and start. Expect it to be difficult. Welcome the challenge.

Persist in the face of setbacks. Writing seem terrible? Feel stuck about plot? Not sure you are even making sense? Keep going. The way to get better is to practice, to do the work, to keep at it.

See effort as a path to mastery. Someone told me when I was twenty-one that there was a ten year apprenticeship for being a writer. That really helped for for those first ten years. Then I forgot–after the first apprenticeship comes . . . another decade-long apprenticeship, and another. You are not proving your brilliance and talent when you write, you are learning that mastery. You are getting better.

Learn from criticism. No need to get defensive. Your draft is not a submission to a contest that deems your worth as a writer. Your draft is an opportunity to grow. This doesn’t mean you have to listen to all criticism or believe everything someone else has to say about your work. But do be sure you are wringing it for everything is has to offer you and the work.

Find lessons and inspiration in the success of others. This is a big one. There’s a wonderful interview with Jonathan Safran Foer by Micheal Krazny, on Forum, where Krazny quotes Flannery O’Connor’s famous dictum that writing workshops don’t discourage enough young writers. Krazny seems to be hoping JSF will agree with O’Connor, but instead he is so gracious and joyous about finding that his work encourages other people to write. It’s been a while since I’ve listened to it, but it is quite inspiring, and I recommend it.

So, as you head into the New Year, consider celebrating some of the failures and challenges of 2008–risks you took and opportunities you grabbed (often mistakenly, when you hoped you were grabbing the gold ring at the merry-go-round) that made you smarter, more talented, and better than you were before.

Here is the next round of inspiration “triggers.” I also recommend taking a look at a great posting called “Use the Difficulty” on Blog of Stowers.

It’s not that any of these exercises is the key. The key is to begin. Starting out is so hard. It sounds exciting. It’s fun to sharpen pencils or buy new widgets. But actually getting those words on the page when you don’t really know what you want to say or how you want to say it–that can be downright painful. Writing is hard, Annie Dillard says in her great book The Writing Life. Many people prefer life to it.

So these are little bridges across that starting moment, ways in to what you want to say and how you want to say it. You find that out by writing. You get to the great writing by writing poorly but consistently. You get to the true stories by mucking around in the possible stories and flailing around for what matters most to you, for what feels right when you are writing. You cannot wait for the good feeling and then write. You must write badly, awkwardly, until you look down and find you are flying.

11. Look through the personals in the newspaper or on Craig’s List. Find two different personals, and make each one into a character. Now write a story in which these two characters meet.
12. Mine your family history: how did your parents or grandparents meet? What were the turning points in their lives? What are your family secrets? What are your family stories? 12. cont. What is not told in the tellings and retellings of your family stories? Write it down. Write a family story from a different point of view.
13. Look at somebody’s life that seems stable and set. Imagine this person in the opposite set of circumstances, emotions, etc. Now write the story of how he or she moved from point A to point Z.
14. Write a historical incident from an unusual point of view. Or write it so that it turns out differently from the way it actually did.  Feel free to get it wrong. Use your imagination.
15. Write about the future. Where will you be in five years? In twenty? What will the world be like in fifty or a hundred years? What might your grandchildren struggle over?
16. Find photographs (at estate sales or online) whose stories you do not know. Write the stories of the people and places and things in the pictures.
17. Go to a museum and look at the paintings. Write stories using the emotions or subjects of the art.
18. Watch a movie whose plot you do not know (foreign films are very good for this exercise, as are older films). Watch with the sound turned off. Write the dialog as you imagine it.
19. Write the life story of someone you see but do not know.
20. Borrow a plot or characters from the Bible, Shakespeare, or a classic work of literature. Make it contemporary or choose the perspective not usually represented. Write that story.

Exercises invented or collected by Elizabeth Stark (with thanks to my teachers, in person and in books: Gil Dennis, Natalie Goldberg, John Gardner, Joyce Johnson, Stephanie Moore, Eileen Myles, A.M. Holmes, Gloria Anzaldua, Ken Atchity, Buchi Emecheta, Angie Powers and probably some others on the way . . .)

I once taught at a jock/ drinking school in upstate New York. The town was depressed. While once the Finger Lakes had provided commerce, now only the college did so, and as a result, there were about twelve different bars but no place to buy shoes, for example. Anyway, I taught creative writing there, and my first round of students became very frustrated with me because they expected me to teach them how to be creative. I had mistakenly assumed that being young people, they needed only encouragement, channeling and response to their vibrant, overflowing creativity. I taught them craft. I taught them fruitful critique. But I suppose I did not teach them creativity. I still hold that we are chock full of creative impulse. One of my favorite stories about this (but I forget its source, sorry to say) was the woman who told her little girl that she had a new job: she was going to teach drawing to adults. “You mean they forgot how?” the little girl asked.

That’s about what happens, I think. We forget how to tell stories–well, maybe not to cops who pull us over for speeding or to spouses who suspect us of flirting with an old flame or to auditors, but in more abstract contexts. I sympathize. How, Annie Dillard asks, on an ordinary day do we set ourselves spinning? (Quoting from memory here with apologies . . .)

Here’s a list of ways you might begin. Try one a day for a month. Pull them out when you need them. They come from my own teaching and writing, and they come from the many amazing writers who’ve taught me, in person or through their wonderful books (or both). So, ten at a time, here are

Thirty Shots at Creative Inspiration

OR

The Fine Art and Grunt Work of Inspiration

Exercises invented or collected by Elizabeth Stark (with thanks to my teachers, in person and in books: Gil Dennis, Natalie Goldberg, John Gardner, Joyce Johnson, Stephanie Moore, Eileen Myles, A.M. Holmes, Gloria Anzaldua, Ken Atchity, Buchi Emecheta, Angie Powers and probably some others on the way . . .)

The following are suggestions. Mix and match. Try some; try all. Modify to suit yourself. Rebel and do something else. Just write, write, write.

Some useful tools: notebook, ideas file in your computer, index cards, timer, unlined paper.

Part One

1. Carry a notebook and pen with you at all times. Jot down inspiration, flashes, ideas, observations, overheard anything, memories, and so on. Keep a list of things you want to write in the front or back of your notebook. Add to it as you think of ideas. Turn to it when you are ready to write.

2. “Free write.” No editing, judging, erasing, thinking, worrying about spelling and grammar or even about making sense. Time yourself. Grab a starting line from a book, poem, newspaper, or from your own writing–something you want to expand. Play.

3.     A)Write the story of your life from birth to now in five minutes. Time it. Go. If possible, read it to someone.
B) Now do it again–write the story of your life in five minutes from birth to now–without mentioning any of the same events.
C)Try it one more time, for five minutes, going backwards, from now to birth.

4. Write a table of contents of your life.

5. Write down the story of your most joyous or triumphant moment. Your most terrifying moment. Your saddest moment.

6. Write a letter (e-mail?) to someone to whom you no longer speak. Write a letter to someone you hate. Write a letter to a character from a book or movie. Write a letter to someone you’d like to meet.

7. Write down your dreams. Before you go to bed, put out a notebook and pen by your bed. At the top of the page, write, “Dreams” and the date. When you wake up, write down everything you remember. Do this every day for a week. A month. You will find that you remember more and more, and you will need more time to write in the morning!

8. Eavesdrop. Go to a cafe, ride the bus, or just sit in class before it starts and listen to what people are saying. Take notes. Remember to include gestures, expressions and actions (if you can see the person).

9. Write a list of questions you do not know the answers to, but which matter to you: your real questions about the world, life, anything. Now pick one and write down anything that might be part of the answer: memories, images, imagined interactions, characters. Invent a character who knows the answer and have him or her tell you his/ her story.

10. Find a news story in the paper or online that catches your attention. Write from the point of view of one of the people in the story. Tell what isn’t in the article. Write from another point of view about the same story.

Let me know if you try any of these . . . or what else works for you.

Join me and the wonderful, warm, smart and funny community at http://www.elizabethstark.com/courses for Building Your Book, a revision and editing course. Early enrollment discounts in effect through Dec. 21, 2008.