You could be writing, right now. I remember spending a strange evening in a hotel room with a somewhat famous poet. She read me Gertrude Stein and made me want to write. I guess people don’t usually take you up to their hotel rooms because they want to make you want to write. She wasn’t inspired to write with me, and I ended up leaving shortly thereafter to drive the long, dark highways of upstate New York to my own apartment with no television in a town with no bookstores.

What makes you want to write? Is it the same thing as what makes you actually write?

Knowing what makes you work–and not the fantasy you have about what makes you work–is very useful for a writer. Supporting the habits you have–and not the habits you wish you had–takes a lot less energy and provides a lot more creative productivity. In other words, spend your time writing, not changing the way you write.

If it helps to fool yourself, you could pick up a pen right now. Really, you are reading this blog, surfing the net, waiting to refresh the status list of your Facebook friends to see who else has posted. But at the same time, let’s say you were holding a pen or opening a blank document on your computer and carelessly, haphazardly throwing down some words, right there on a page or screen. Here are ten more places you might begin. But you can begin anywhere. Any time. You can begin now.

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 . . .)

21. Interview people about their lives. People actually love to talk about themselves. Ask about sensate details, about motivations and desires, about changes and turning points, about extreme emotions and challenges. Learn about the details of a place or profession or time that you don’t know about. Then write fiction and feel free to invent beyond what you’ve been told (so long as you aren’t passing it off as fact).

22. Go to the library. Wander the stacks with your notebook or index cards. Research a subject you know nothing about. Let the research seep into you, then emerge in your writing.

23. Use horoscopes from the newspaper or online to create characters and stories.

24. Create a deck of writing cards: ten brief character sketches, ten locations, and ten objects–one each on index cards. Shuffle each pile of index cards, and then draw two characters, a location and an object. Make both your characters compete for the object in the location.

25. Play, “what if?” Imagine roads not taken, for yourself or for other people you know. Imagine yourself or others to have different characteristics or circumstances. What if you won the lottery? What if your greatest dream came true and it didn’t make you happy? What if your deepest fear manifested? What if you had never . . . met a certain person, moved to a certain place, had a certain opportunity or loss? You can ask these and other “what if?” questions of any number of characters.

26. Take an ordinary object: a dollar bill from your wallet, a pair of socks, an antique desk. Imagine its history, the people who’ve handled or used or made it, their desires and hopes, their lives.

27. Write nonsense. Use real words and sentence structure, but let go of meaning altogether. Or look at a text in a foreign language you don’t understand and “translate” it. What might it mean?

28. Think of two irreconcilable goods or two irreconcilable evils. Now put a character in the situation of having to choose between them.

29. Listen to a song or even a piece of music with no lyrics and write the story you hear there.

30. Make up your own exercises. Writing will teach you to write and will show you what you think.

Tomorrow (Sunday, Dec. 21, 2008) is the end of my early enrollment discount for Building Your Book, an online revision and editing course. Come join this wonderful, warm, smart community of people writing books, and finish your book in 2009!

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.

Okay, I stole this title from Barbara Sher (the Wishcraft lady), who has a book entitled I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was. I am about to usher myself and a passel of writers and hopefuls through the process of planning and writing and revising a novel.

In October, we will plot and plan, write about writing, fumble and feel and think our way to the stories we think we will tell. In November and half of December, we will write our a**es off, at a minimal rate of 1667 words/ day. In mid-January, after a respite for perspective and recovery, we will gather again to see what these books are about and to begin to revise them.

But right now, we are about to start (on Oct. 6. To join us visit http://www.elizabethstark.com/courses). And I am asking people to come up with a pitch–character, motivation, obstacles. These are good times for stories. No one can say that nothing happens: corruption, greed, ambition, loss, fear, and a lot of the unknown, looming. And yet, what to write?

I won’t say that there are two types of people . . . but I will say that some people have tons of ideas (but don’t necessarily follow through) and some people seem not to have ideas. My theory is that people who don’t seem to have ideas are just shooting them down before they pop up. Scaring them away.

It is easier to come up with five ideas than only one. Five ideas is like dating; one idea is like getting married on your first date: what if I don’t want to stick with this idea?

The secret, I think, is to trust story. Not a particular story, but the fact that caught in the happenings and imagery and relationships of a story is everything you have to say about the world. Start with a composite of your grandmother and your dental hygienist. Start with a moment when someone loses everything on the stock market. Start with a little boy at the park hugging smaller little boy in a matching shirt until they both fall over in the wood chips and start to cry. (Character, dire situation, imagery.)

When I was seventeen and had just started college, I took a class with Gloria Anzaldua (another amazing writing teacher who died too young. Uh oh.). She has us write a Table of Contents of our lives. This is a great exercise for digging up story.

Shakespeare lifted his plots (stole them, you might say) and transformed them. I’ve heard that Jane Smiley always uses another book as a blueprint. (I know that A Thousand Acres uses King Lear.) Natalie Goldberg (not a great writer but a great writing teacher) would tell you, write down, “I want to write about . . . ” and then keep your pen moving, coming back to this phrase whenever you get stuck. Barbara Kingsolver asks herself a question whose answer she does not know, and she learns the answer in the process of writing her novel.

Start with a story from the newspaper. Or the story of how your parents met. Or the story you invented about that strange guy at the corner store. Think of someone you know and about what would cause this person to change completely. Then make that person a different gender or age or race, give them a different profession in another city; let them become a fictional character.

Take a stack of index cards and write down ten different characters, ten different impossible situations, ten different insurmountable obstacles. Then mix and match.

Write in crayon on big paper. Ride a bus and scribble in a little book. Go for a walk and let the rhythm of your feet turn into words, into a voice, and let the voice tell you its story. Look at someone across the cafe from you and imagine something in his life that changed him completely. Ever wondered, “Why do people do XY&Z?” Make-up a character who does that and let her tell you.

I remember a story–I think it was in a play? or in The Sun magazine?–about a woman who told her young daughter that she was going to teach a drawing class to adults. “You mean they forgot how?” the child asked.

Your mind is full of stories. What are you afraid of, what do you hope for, who did you think you might be? The great thing about the writing experiment we are about to embark upon is that you can start anywhere, explore, and move deeply into a story. Through that story you will discover other stories, discover a voice or voices, discover what you think about some piece of the world and–by extension–about the world itself.