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 . . .)

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

I never intended this to be a political blog. Still less did I intend it to be a blog about marriage, of all things. But sometimes you get seized by a political moment. It’s made writing my novel hard, although I am about to land my narrator in McCarthy-era Los Angeles, so maybe I can fuel all of these feelings right into the story. Never thought of that!

First, let me say that I am OVERJOYED about Obama’s election. This is past-due and gives me a renewed faith in this country. I really didn’t think we’d be willing to elect an intelligent man president . . .

I am so angry that I even have to think about the probable passage of Prop. 8 and the lawsuits these reactionary people have already filed to annul my marriage. This is a time of celebration and hope, and I am sitting here wiping crap pie off of my face.

So I want to talk about the practice of writing. Writing every day. Whether you feel like it or not. Whether you like how it’s going or not. Whether you have time, energy, inspiration or a clue. Much like parenting, this is the only way to develop a relationship with writing that will sustain it and you over the long haul. I have not done this always, and for that reason, I have accomplished more as an editor and a teacher than as a writer. But in the times when I do it–and this is one of them–I break through the romance of writing and take it up as a responsibility (to myself, because who else cares, really, at this point in the drafting?).

Imagining being a writer and actually writing are two such different experiences as to have almost no commonality. It’s like the first year of being a parent (at least when you have two): you have no time or capability for understanding or analyzing your experience. You are just living it, moment after moment, diaper after diaper, feeding after feeding, nap after nap, story after story, meal after meal, laundry load after laundry load, grocery shop after grocery shop . . . Wanting children is all about desire and imagination and feelings (sometimes hard feelings, when it isn’t going well). Having children, at least at first, has very little to do with any of that (except when the hormones through you over the emotional edge).

And yet, having children has connected me to myself and a sense of being human that has transformed me. It’s not a splashy transformation. Few people even know about it, I would guess, since I don’t have time or energy to telephone people anymore, and when you meet me at the park, I am running five different directions at once and conversations are choppy at best. Anyway, I think this is true of writing, too, and I’m not sure how I feel about it: paragraph after paragraph, attempt after attempt, each sentence structure, the lousy voice of judgment harping on in the background while the fingers move and move, the mind hoping for some combination of complete, transcendent brilliance and extra time left at the end of the evening to watch Californication.

Maybe changing the world works the same way. Conversation after conversation, rally after rally, defeat after defeat, the highs, the lows, a kind of daily commitment to believing that things can be other than they are, that things should be other than they are. One day, you look up, and there is a stack of manuscript pages in the printer, a grown-up person who was once your little jumping bean, and a President of the United States of America, whose own parents, like my sons’ parents, could not have gotten married at the time of his birth in 1961 in sixteen states in the Union.

This morning, Angie went down to our local freeway overpass to hold NO ON 8 signs, alongside the imported yes on 8ers. The boys and I started to clean the house, and then we got a call from Angie that the yessers had huge signs strung all along the fencing, and she was there with only one other person.

So I called someone and she called someone and then I called my mom. Then I changed diapers and went off to drop the boys at a park with my mom and join Angie. By the time I got there, there were just two yes guys and their one big yellow sign, and several older women (my mom’s age) had shown up and were pressing a no on 8 sign against the fence, with the wind pushing back at them. I held a big tarp sign with a woman who teaches at Los Positas Community College. She told me that many of her students were voting for the first time today.

It was freezing on the overpass, and while we got a lot of thumbs up and honking from the west-to-east side, the folks going the other direction–who had the yellow yes sign to react to as well–seemed a lot more conservative.

I found myself feeling so angry. I wanted to turn to those yes on 8 men and say, “What does it feel like to be on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of family and the wrong side of Christianity??” They seemed more jovial than I–sort of that “we’re all in this together” feeling that you can get when everyone is pressing signs against the wind, and streams of traffic are gushing under your feet, shaking the cement structure on which you stand. I did not share their joviality, perhaps because this is my family and my marriage we are voting on.

This could be the most momentous, historic occasion of my entire life, past and future, if things go my way. If things go really, really wrong, I’m going to feel like getting out of here, though some folks on Talk of the Nation today suggested that this was an unsportsman-like attitude. In general, my slogan is that of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”  But I do want to keep my loved ones on one side of that line for as long as possible.

Meanwhile, I’ve pounded out 6017 words on my novel in the past three days. (I will start chugging on my next 1667-2000  words when I finish this blog.)  I always say that it is easier to write than to think about writing, but of course it’s easiest of all to do neither. At the same time, I get irritable and draggy when I stop writing for long enough. My father used to say, “If only coffee tasted the way it smells . . . ” (Angie says that it does, but then she is on a slippery coffee slope.) I wish that writing felt like reading feels.

The closest I get to that is when I just keep writing, past the extreme judgments of my inner editor (how come my inner editor is in there with my inner child and she still has time and brain power to be so harsh and detailed? Shouldn’t she be changing diapers or something?), past the hiccups and the slow, uphill inclines, past the raging uncertainty . . . and did I mention the judgments?

I think critics, inner and otherwise, are a little like yes on 8ers. They are angry and negative about something that really had nothing to do with them. There are, for example, a certain number of people who are really angry about NaNoWriMo. They say that it brings thousands of crappy manuscripts into a world overrun with manuscripts and makes thousands of people believe that they are writers when they are not. And the people opposed to gay marriage seem to feel that marriage is unravelling if all these extra people get to get married, as if we are producing shoddy relationships in a world overrun with relationships . . . Okay, I might be working too hard or not hard enough at this metaphor. I am sugar-filled and caffine-walloped and sleep-deprived, so I hope you can bear with me.

What I am trying to say is that people writing crappy manuscripts and people creating unorthodox relationships are NOT A THREAT to the establishment. People who write crappy manuscripts are more likely to buy published books and to read them well. People who are getting up together each day to figure out how to make breakfast, get everyone dressed and out the door, keep the house clean and the laundry done, make a living and have quality time with the children and each other are not ripping at the fabric of traditional marriage.

One literary-political note. In plots, when things are looking really good for the hero and you’re fifteen, twenty minutes from the end of the movie or, say, a quarter of the way to an eighth of the way to the end of the book, what are you thinking?

You’re thinking, in the immortal words of my sons, Uh oh. We know the rhythms of plot so well when we are consuming it (creating it is a different story for some of us). It does not bode well for our guy when things are looking up too far out from the end. And it’s been going well for Obama for a while now. Better and better. I hope that real life will do as it often does and rebutt our understanding of plot and just soar right on to victory.

Because it felt incredible to walk around Whole Foods today, grocery shopping, and look at all the people who populate my world and think, “We just might be electing an African-American man president today.” I want my boys to come to consciousness with a man of color in the White house. I want them to think that if it was ever another way, that was a long time ago, back in the last century . . . Besides which, our Cobra insurance coverage runs out next year, and it would be great to have an alternative to Kaiser . . .

I have yet one more undeveloped thought. As you know, we’ve never made any kind of reparations to the many Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in this country. I know that Obama may not be one of these, except possibly on his mother’s side, since we are all quite a lot more mixed up than we pretend. But it occurs to me that all this fear of “redistribution of the wealth” taps into a national knowledge that the original distribution of the wealth was acquired by theft and murder, and that a Black president might look at reparations in an entirely different way. I think the fear of redistribution of the wealth is a fear of honest reparations being raised as a real issue–some seriously messed up mortages coming due with a big balloon payment.

But walking around today, I felt excited. I felt like we might be able to do something far beyond reparations, and move right on over to fairness and representation and something that actually looks like democracy.

At the start of last November, I had a two-month-old baby and a six-month-old baby. Years before I’d published a novel, and for the years since, I had been revising and revising my second novel, Strip. Sure, I had written some short stories, published some articles, made a couple of films, even. I’d gotten and given up a tenure-track teaching job, and taught elsewhere and privately, too. I’d moved across the country a couple of times since my first novel was published. In other words, I kept busy, which is sometimes the same thing as productive and sometimes not.

But I was not really a writer. “A real writer is someone who really writes,” Marge Piercy says in her rather profound poem “For the Young Who Want To.”

This is not to say that someone else had penned my novels–the published one or the endlessly revised one–or articles or any of that. It was just that, despite knowing better, I had a sort of passionate, on-again, off-again relationship with the kind of Writing that hangs out in clubs with people who call themselves “Inspiration” and “Great Idea” and “Excitement.” They have little gang rumbles with people who call themselves “Doubt” and “Brilliant Editor” and “You Could Do Better.”

Having babies got me really focused. I couldn’t hang out with that kind of writing anymore, had no time for skirmishes or romances or other capital-D Distractions. But did I have time to write?

That’s when NaNoWriMo came along. It sounds goofy, amaturish, like a crutch or a scam or some kind of edifice with nothing behind it, perhaps. But what, you may be asking, is NaNoWriMo? NaNoWriMo, Friends, is National Novel Writing Month. A web site; a sort of a program; a contest in which the number of winners is unlimited. Check it out at http://www.nanowrimo.com . . .

So there I was with the two babies, and after they would fall asleep, around 7 or 8 p.m., I would sit down, half-asleep myself, and type out about 2,000 words. (Officially, you must write 50,000 words between Nov. 1 and midnight on Nov. 30 to “win.” This works out to 1667 words/ day, but I started a day or two late, so I aimed for 2000 words. Also, I knew that I would be cutting so much of what I wrote, that I felt I had to get over 80,000 before I stopped.)

I crossed the 50,000 word line at the end of November, and then I kept on going, at a slightly less hectic pace, but more or less the same, until about Xmas, when I got to about 85,000 words and the end of a draft.

Those are the logistics. Also included are writing buddies, all sort of cafe events and marathons across the country (none of which I participated in because of the aforementioned babies), pep talks sent out by NaNoWriMo from various authors, and forums where you can get advice, solicit plot suggestions, commiserate, or just waste time.

Oh, and there are a number of people who’ve published their NaNoWriMo books (after, one assumes, significant revision), including Curve editor Diane Anderson-Minshall and her partner Jacob Anderson-Minshall, as well as Sara Gruen, whose Water for Elephants was a NaNoWriMo book, as was a previous book of hers. (There’s a list at the web site of other published authors; these were the ones I’d heard of . . .)

But more importantly than all of that, for me, is the personal experience I had of sitting down, night after night, exhausted and uninspired much of the time, leaking breast milk, to pound away at the keyboard. Sometimes I was nearly asleep, leaning close to the screen of my trusty laptop, letting my unconscious take over. My unconscious did all right.

Sure, the book is full of extra information, a lot of “ideas” and digressions, and even an excess of description. But I tend to be a minimalist when it comes to writing fiction. This comes from a certain fear, I think, something M.F.A.-driven that has to do with “purple prose” and a tendency toward embellishment and nostalgia. In other words, I have been developing a style that is in many ways opposite to my own “natural” style–a reaction to the “faults” that others have pointed out to me.

Fitzgerald said something about keeping all the quirks that the critics hated because that was his original style. I can’t find the quote right now, even at Google, but my larger point is that writing a first draft full of my inherent stylistic choices taught me a lot about myself as a writer.

Honestly, while I was doing this–churning out 2000 words every night–I felt confident that I would continue doing this every day for the rest of my life. I felt a kinship to Joyce Carol Oates that I’d never felt before. Because if only half of what I wrote was worthwhile, I could still write several decent novels a year at this rate, and raise up a passel of babies, too.

I forgot that babies stop sleeping so much and start running around and talking, at which point they need to be chased and answered, and it’s just harder to mull over the coming night’s writing while chasing and talking than it is while humming, rocking and nursing. I also forgot that good habits are hard-earned. Which is to say that I have not continued to write 2000 words every day, or even 1000 (though since I began blogging, I’ve written some number every other day or so).

However: November approaches.

Here’s what happens when I put my seat in the seat and type. Characters do things I hadn’t imagined; scenes develop; histories unfold; the people talk to each other and I listen, carefully, sleepily, and take notes. I know more and have more to say in front of a keyboard than I ever do anywhere else. Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” My partner, Angie, talks about writing in that way–to find out what happens. When you write everyday, no matter what, you get as close as possible to being a reader of your own work, with the attendant pleasures, surprises and identifications readers get to experience.

I heard an interview with Joyce Carol Oates once on the radio (with either Terri Gross or Michael Krazny, can’t remember), in which she talked about how she goes jogging every day, and while she jogs, she tells herself stories, so that when she goes to the keyboard, all she has to do is write from recall. Let us not forget that she lives in New Jersey, a place of winter, of snow. So this takes some dedication to the running, not to mention the writing.

In any case, for that month, I was more of a writer than I’d ever been, despite the above mentioned published novel, the unpublished novel, the M.F.A., and the teaching. Which is to say: I was writing. And when you are writing you don’t much care if you are a writer, just as when you are making love, you don’t much care if you are a lover. You’re just doing it, and it’s great.

So I invite you to join me over at the NaNoWriMo site. Become my “buddy,” so we can encourage each other along. I know you are busy and perhaps frightened and maybe you have a dissertation due or a job that drains you or babies to tend, but really, is that any excuse not to write a novel in November?

[Note: Fifteen percent of the 100,000 people who participated in NaNoWriMo last year completed their 50k words. Check out the course I am offering to see you through before, during and after: http://www.elizabethstark.com/courses. Thanks.]