writing inspiration

31 invitations from the muse: Prompts and games

You could think of this post as a hallway lined with doors, 31 of them, to push open when you want to want to enter a new space in your writing.

It's a month's worth of writing prompts—lines, games, images. The visual prompts give me particular delight. They're the work of two of my favorite creative people, David Glynn and Lynell George. David's are the color photos, Lynell's the black-and-white.

I hope you lean into them, and all of the entrances you find below, and discover something that surprises you. 

LM under chiffon look_6732GLYNN

The muse says: Start here

1. What's scribbled in light on her body? What has she just released?

Opening lines and phrases

2. Everything I’m about to tell you is a lie.

3. Forgetting is the fourth stage of memory, the fifth stage….

4. Window, cigarette hole, sky—

5. When I held it in my hands, it….

6. Nothing survived but the ….

IMG_8105

7. The chairs.

8. Something cracked.

9. The Comforter, the Mind’s Promise, the Beautiful Order of Thistles…. (found in Mary Ruefle's "Madness, Rack, and Honey.")

10. This is what he would bury:

11. They had no words for ____ so they ____…..

12. It looked like a ____ when it finally landed....

 

13. The questions.

 

Instructions for poems and other pieces:

14. Place a sheet of white paper under the vase of flowers to capture the scatter of pollen. Read the words inscribed there.

15. Find a seat in a crowded place and let conversations flow past you like wind. Write down the secrets you hear or imagine.

16. Scry through the belly of a glass of cold white wine. Write what appears in the glass.

17. Ask a question and flip through a book, stopping the pages with your finger and finding your answer in the words beneath it. Write the question, and the answer.

18. Type a section of something you’ve written into the “Electronic Poetry Kit.” Make poems by rearranging the words. Make a list of missing words you long for, words you don’t want to live without. Use them to make lines.

 

19.  Something delicate, or dying.

 

Stolen titles awaiting new bodies

20. Dark Wild Dream

21. Becoming Animal

22. Bitters

23. A Ruin That Isn’t  a Ruin

 

 

24. A fact. A mood.

25. Seven Days of Falling

26. A Photograph of a Plate Glass Window

27.  A Walk in Victoria’s Secret

28. Woman With a Yellow Scarf

20. The Book of Questions

30.  A Guide to Forgetting

 

 

31. The light, the globe.

That's enough for a month, if you took on one a day.

Bonus: A trove of amazing toys and prompts you may not know about—for all the days after.

(See more of Lynell's work at lynellgeorge.com. Find more of David's at glynns.com.)

Feeling the sensous pull of summer? 25 ways to let it draw your writing into the dreamtime.

I’ll be away for a while this summer, not on vacation or at some retreat but in a staring-at-the-ceiling (or the stars) reverie, re-entering that space where identity and time are fluid, if just because nights are warmer and something in me knows that a summer night is one long dream.

And I admit, there will be small … side trips. I’ve been thinking of how some summers when I was young were a series of obsessions: learning to type, and then making newsletters. Or going out in the dark to filch roses from nearby bushes so I could fill jars with petals that never quite dried. Or playing Monopoly until no one could stand it, and moving on to Scrabble or tag.

So many games and adventures began with a ringleader saying: Let’s. Let’s sneak onto the golf course and pick up balls. Let’s see how many Popsicles we can eat. Let’s hide in a crawl space and play cards till someone finds us.

What does this have to do with writing? Nothing and everything. Some part of summer’s expansiveness has to spill into the way we write, and maybe it’s time to let sensuality and imagination overtake us and see what happens.

So let’s. Let’s experiment. Let’s pretend the list below is a treasure map—or a series of writing prompts. Three, two, one… Go!

3097772125_bf8244bc6f_z

 

Let’s all:

Climb to the top of a grassy hill and roll down.

Get up at sunrise on the solstice to watch the longest day of the year  begin, then linger outside as sunset becomes twilight and watch till the final drop of daylight disappears into the dark.

Lie on our stomachs in the grass and watch the intricate rituals of ants.

Sit outside whispering in the dark.

Let's write aerogrammes to imaginary selves that live in Paris or the South Pacific.

Listen to waves and wind.

Or drive with the windows down and the heat turned up to a place where the stars are too thick to count.

Let's make up stories about our past lives and write them in locked diaries.

Let's dye our lips and tongues blue with berries.

Go barefooted all day.

Sit under trees and listen for wisdom.

Let’s write love notes to ourselves and our cats and our books and our favorite places.

Throw wildflower seeds on bare patches of ground.

Stop to admire dandelions growing up through sidewalk cracks.

 

7581156168_ecb29fa682_z (1)

 

Let's walk around the block backwards.

Make forts out of card tables and blankets and go in and write.

Let’s take our laptops out to the patio or porch or park and transcribe the language of night.

Let’s buy packs of index cards and write a word we love on each card, then shuffle them into poems.

Pretend we know we’re being spied on and find private places to write, out of the reach of  recorders and cameras, even our own, even the ones on our phones and computers, even the ones we trust.

65691831_9690a97f80 (1)

 

Let’s write in the margins of books and on our hands and on cocktail napkins.

Let's write in invisible ink and code, as if our secrets were precious.

Let’s sip mugwort tea and dream.

Let’s read with a flashlight under the covers.

Let’s fill ourselves up and write each other letters about what we've tasted.

Let’s write like it’s summer, like it’s play.

And if you’re in a part of the world where it’s not summer, come join us anyway, in your sweaters and hats.

Enjoy! 

(Grass image by sundaykofax, patio image by ahdummy, cocktail napkin by Listen Missy!, all  via Flickr.)

A path to writing: Reaching into the richness of the world

The first “real” writer I ever studied with was a charismatic, sad-faced poet with a droopy mustache who’d walk into the room with a book of poems, light a cigarette and begin reading or reciting. He put the voice of Pablo Neruda in my ear, the glowing end of the cigarette moving perilously close to the skin of his tapered fingers as the poems progressed, stamping his image onto my archetypal picture of what writers are like, how they breathe, how they stand. Writers, he told us, need to know the names of flowers and stars, the geography of the body, the sounds of ancient languages, the words of folk songs.

As I write and think about writing, his is the voice in my head the pushing me to name the features of the worlds I create, to hold my ear to them and find the sounds that evoke them. To reach into the richness of the world out there and pull it in.

“Live a more interesting life,” I write on my list of things to do to feed my writing (and yes, there’s always such a list). It sounds silly to me, so I cross it off and replace it with, “Notice more.”

That impulse makes me itch to get beyond the rote paths of my usual thoughts. I click over to see what an anthropologist I like has been thinking about, just for the chance to look through his eyes, and that leads me to an adventure.

 

It’s a remarkable project, beautifully explained here by Ferris Jabr on the Scientific American Brainwaves blog. A researcher, anthropologist Andrew Irving of the University of Manchester, stopped people on the streets of New York and drew them into an experiment that would document their fleeting thoughts.

Jabr describes Irving’s approach—called “New York Stories: The Lives of Other Citizens”— this way:

“Excuse me,” he would say, “this might sound like a strange question, but can I ask you what you were thinking before I stopped you?” If the stranger did not run away, he would ask them to wear a microphone headset attached to a digital recorder and speak aloud their thoughts as he followed closely behind with a camera. He would not be able to hear what they were saying, Irving explained, and they would be free to walk wherever they liked and continue their business as usual.

“I was surprised by how many said Yes,” Irving says—about 100 in all. By overlaying the recorded audio onto the videos, he has created portraits of individual consciousnesses on a particular day in New York City.

The effect, Jabr notes, is one Virgina Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway would recognize, the thoughts that pivot endlessly beneath a silent surface made audible.

Willing the invisible to show itself

My senses felt heightened when I walked outside after watching the videos (there are several on the Scientific American blog), as though I could feel inner conversations rippling around me.  I was curious about everything again—the shopgirl’s sad expression and what might be behind it, the pacing half of a cellphone conversation gaining volume on the corner, what happens in the brain as it speaks to itself. I’ve certainly been looking moe curiously at the thoughts circling in my own mind.

I’ve had my notebook out, trying find the light bulb that renders the invisible ink of the world legible, so I can name what I sense and see.

I don’t know if you’ll be as transported by these glimpses into the inner worlds of “other citizens,” but I do know that stopping to find what does transport you will draw you into your writing.

Today, beautiful writer person, look through new eyes. Observe one thing carefully. Intuit your way into it afresh. And then write down what you notice. The world is enormous, with so many entrances. Choose one. Write.

Running dragons, and other mascots for a busy life

There are stories that keep me coming back to my small-scale writing practice in busy times, rather than "waiting till things calm down." One comes from the wonderful poet Marie Ponsot, who shook me awake in a workshop at the 92nd Street Y when she described how she continued to write during the years she was rearing her children—six boys and a girl. I picture her with a pen and a scrap of paper, baby balanced on her hip as she tries to calm a 4-year-old who’s chasing a toddler, the ambient chaos of blooming, moody, needy beings filling her household. That’s the rough version of the scene, if you double the number of little ones.

In the midst of this, she wrote in a Chinese form called "running dragon," which uses two- and three-line stanzas, small bursts of description as the “dragon” leaps from stone to stone. She built her pieces two or four or six lines at a time.

'It's easy to keep writing ... in whatever time you have.'

Ponsot wasn’t visible to the publishing world as she was tending her tribe, but she was writing all the while. Here’s a bit of a 2003 interview she did with Bomb magazine :

Bomb interviewer Benjamin Ivry: “There was a span of a quarter century in which you didn’t publish a book. Obviously you were very busy taking care of your kids and working, teaching English in the SEEK program for disadvantaged students at Queens College as well as translating and scriptwriting.”

Marie Ponsot: “I was very busy. It’s really that I was entirely out of all those professional poetry loops. That’s worth saying, because it’s easy to keep writing without tremendous agitation in whatever time you have. If you don’t imagine yourself as a career poet but rather as a person who writes poems, you can just go on doing that.”

We writers with busy lives are all “people who write novels” or “people who write memoirs” or “people who write poems,” and all of us can tap the wise impulse to keep writing in the time we can grab. Small scenes, “sudden fiction,” bits of dialog or description—they’re all available to us in short spans of time. And from there, we build, no tremendous agitation required.

I summon my own form of “running dragon” during weeks like this one when I’m spinning in busyness—starting projects, nudging others along, doing research for what I hope will become a book one day, oh, and doing my taxes. In the midst of it all, I grab 10 or 15 minutes and make notes, do my observation practice and write down lines, or shape a couple of paragraphs.

The dragon keeps running. The work takes shape.

(The Bomb interview with Ponsot is full of treasures for poets, fans of the Beats, women looking for inspiration and writers who occasionally fear that “it’s too late to start now.”  The blog item that describes the running dragon form is also rich with insights from Ponsot. And if you missed them, you can see suggestions for trapping wild bits of time here, and tips for making good use of them here.)

Image by Alias 0591 via Flickr.

Following the mystery: We're all going to Graceland.

Graceland underfoot

 

My DVR decided recently that I needed to watch a documentary about Paul Simon and the making of his “Graceland” album. It was a happy accident—I’ve loved those songs for years. They accompanied me on a long-ago train ride that wound along the edge of the country from Seattle to Washington, D.C., days and nights of staring out at snowfields, swampland and kudzu until my face looked back at me clearly from the glass and told me that what I’d left behind was broken, but I wasn’t.

It was no wonder I couldn’t get enough of lyrics like these:

There is a girl in New York City Who calls herself the human trampoline And sometimes when I'm falling, flying Or tumbling in turmoil I say Oh, so this is what she means She means we're bouncing into Graceland….

I’d always just assumed that some logical process had produced those words—a pilgrimage to the land of Elvis, perhaps a break-up. The writer was sparked by something he wanted to express and searched for the words to say it, artfully. Isn’t that how such a song would come to be?

Actually, not at all. Simon explains that as he worked to match lyrics to pieced-together tracks of music recorded with African musicians, he played with “certain sounds that became words. Sometimes those words formed a phrase and the phrase was interesting. Sometimes the phrase was banal. Sometimes it didn’t make any sense, like ‘I’m going to Graceland,’” which he used as a placeholder because it fit the music well.

“I kept singing this chorus, “I’m going to Graceland, I’m going to Graceland,'" Simon says. "And I kept thinking, ‘Well that will go away, because this song is not about Elvis Presley…. But it wouldn’t go away.

“Finally, I said ... I’d better go to Graceland—I’d never been. I’d better make that trip and see if maybe there’s something about this that I’m supposed to find out.”

Slowly, it came clear that “the song was about a bigger meaning,” he says.“It was a metaphor for a state of grace. I was taking an absurdist lyric for which I thought I had no place … and finally saying, Well, maybe it does….”

I find this account comforting and inspiring. Sometimes, we back into meaning. It glimmers around the edges of a phrase or image that sticks in the mind and won’t let go. Inconveniently, it doesn’t make sense. The opposite of the “lightning through the pen” image of creativity, it’s not delivered fully formed. Or half-formed, even. It’s a wisp, a problem, a distraction. You can easily it brush off, push it away.

Or you can give in and follow it to Graceland.

(The documentary, if you’re interested is called “Paul Simon’s Graceland Journey: Under African Skies.” Some segments are available on YouTube, and a 1997 documentary, “Paul Simon: Graceland,” parts of which are used in the new one, is streaming on Netflix. It’s worth a look, even if you’re not a fan, for Simon’s articulate account of what it’s like to be drawn toward a beautiful mystery, then—with a mixture of willingness, doubt and persistence—to find out what it wants to be. Lyrics above are copyright Universal Music Publishing Group.)

Image by Whatnot (Jack Keene) via Flickr

The world expands beyond the glass. Open a window. Let something wild fly in.

A pigeon muscled into my imaginings recently. I was suspended between lines—words were elusive and connections weren’t coming—and I couldn’t help but notice that the avian equivalent of a Harley had pulled up outside my office.  The throaty coos echoed in, amplified as they bounced off the many concrete surfaces nearby, and I sat, almost drumming my fingers, willing the words to come and the bird to pipe down.

Man, I remember thinking, you’re quite the delicate flower. It’s just a bird. But at that, the pigeon gunned its engines and the decibels climbed. I figured I’d see if I could spot it and shoo it away. I got up from my chair, and as I reached the glass, I heard a small voice in my head saying, “Open a window. Let something wild fly in.”

Open a window. Let something wild fly in. The pigeon was gone as soon as I pushed the curtains aside—it had been on the ledge and startled at the movement—but I’ve been repeating those words to myself all week, thinking at first about the disoriented sparrow that flapped around our living room when I was a kid, and a bat that whizzed past my ear in the dark, both of us vibrating like tuning forks.

 

5407116023_039b2009bd

Those small encounters stay with me like dreams. I don’t know why the wild comes to us that way—maybe because the contact is inevitable, with only thin glass panes and our habits of seeing keeping us apart.

I take everything as a message for my writing—though this was the first delivered by carrier pigeon—and I’ve been trying to open myself to what’s around me rather than shutting it out. Even on the Internet, I’ve been spending time with what’s less familiar to me, paying attention when I something feels wild and alive as it comes through my computer screen. Perhaps that’s why I’ve stumbled onto so much inspiration this week. I can feel something new taking shape.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that regularly I round up a few “small and magical things,” mostly related to writing, that I gather ‘round the Internet and append as links to the bottom or margin of the newsletter.  This time, I want to share them at slightly greater length. If something strikes you, I hope you’ll engage it. Go to the comments and let me know what happens.

1. Beautiful musings on writing, reading & the stories we tell 

Guernica magazine online (www.guernicamag.com) has a memorable excerpt from Rebecca Solnit’s new book “The Faraway Nearby,” which explores the way we make stories. Guernica’s presentation is laced with exquisite images of eggs in nests, the work of Northern California photographer Sharon Beals—even more reason to click the link.

A taste of Solnit:

“Like many others who turned into writers, I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods. What surprised and still surprises me is that there was another side to the forest of stories and the solitude, that I came out that other side and met people there. Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.”

Read the rest of the excerpt at:http://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-faraway-nearby/

2. A sharp-eyed guide into the work of memoir writing

Friends and clients working on memoirs, I highly recommend the pieces to be found on the blog of the wonderful teacher and writer Debra Gwartney. Two posts in particular, a recent one titled “A Few Memoir Pitfalls,” and an older one called “On Beginning a Memoir,” are excellent starting points and refreshers, full of examples from powerful works. Go read them, especially if you’re puzzling out that big question, “Who’s the I telling this story?”

From “A Few Memoir Pitfalls”:

" A memoir that truly engages ... explores emotional patterns, the relationships that draw us in, that still have their hooks in us for reasons that are often unconscious. These memoirs recognize that the person called “I” is attached to a certain version of the past. At the same time, it’s important to remember that memory is malleable—our memories shift over time. Just ask your sister about a certain day in your childhood, and no doubt you’ll have divergent details of whatever episode you brought up. Also, the way you remember a childhood incident today is likely not how you remembered that same experience five years ago. Our memories are there to serve us. The ways we need to be served change as we change. Tapping into this very notion—just how are my memories serving me?—is a door into compelling memoir writing."

You can find Debra Wartney at:http://www.debragwartney.com/blog/

3. Roll the words in your mouth and discover what they mean

You’ve never seen a maluma or a takete, but from the sound of the names, which of the objects is soft and rounded and which is jagged? Poets and others will be interested in linguists’ research into the evocative power of names, and the way they sound.

The New Yorker “Elements” blog has the details.

4. Notes on scraps of paper: snapshots from the creative process

Creating is messy, and the Pocket Notes project,http://www.pocketnotes.org/ collects the evidence: “Pocket Notes can refer to a passing scent, a bill, a type of bond, a memorandum, an effort, commentary or reference, an indication, a formula, to notice something, an observation, a piece of news, a reminder. Pocket Notes documents process, charts, maps, lists, graphs, diagrams, drafts, recordings, & the leftovers of experimentation.”

For me, flipping through the pages of Issue 2 opened a dozen windows into wildness, as writers and creators show notes, scraps and drawings and describe their projects.

Start here, with the messy notebook of Amaranth Borsuk, and then see the rest of the projects by clicking the “current issue” link in the menu bar. See what shakes loose.

5. Your turn

Take the inspiration and run. Keep writing in small bursts, if scraps of time are all you’ve got. And don’t forget to open a window, beautiful writer person. Let something wild fly in.

(Image of birds by $omebody, via Flickr)

5 easy ways to trigger a growth spurt in your writing

How’s your spring going? This season feels like the real start of the year to me, with all the bursting, blossoming and waking from the inwardness of winter. It caught me in its gusts recently, and launched me into the kind of writing I’d been missing—unexpected and interesting to me and, most of all, fun. What brought on the big jolt of creative energy besides the season itself? I've been tracking the path that led me out of the black hole of my desk, where the mantra is often "deadline, deadline, deadline," and into the more playful realm that nourishes the poetry and other "non-work" writing I do. Looking back, I can see the power of following small impulses, the nudges to push out of routine and make something new.

Today's impulse?  To write another poem. And to share this list of ways to trigger the growth spurt that's aching to surge through your writing life.

1. Throw yourself into the path of the writing and writers you love.

That can mean reading, of course, but it's never been easier to put a favorite (or new) writer's voice in your ear. I've been listening back through the rich and diverse readings and conversations given in recent years—and collected in podcast archives—at the  New York Public Library, the Los Angeles Public Library and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. (Each of those links will take you to a list of podcasts.) Beyond that starting point, a quick search will turn up worlds of literary podcasts (the Scottish Poetry Library is my newest discovery). I sometimes turn on readings the way I used to turn on the news—for background noise or company—and find myself drawn into the music of the language of Zadie Smith, say, or Paul Auster. It's hard to hear that music without starting to hum.

2. Hang out with your tribe.

 Go to real live readings at real live bookstores and libraries and other venues. Spending a half hour in the company of other writers at the back of a bookstore recently reminded me how comfortable it is to be around my people, the ones who are constantly finding ways to make art of experience and to pull that art to the center of their lives. It's easy to lose that habit of just hanging out, comparing notes on books or quirky places to look for inspiration, if you're not in a writing group, or haven't been writing. But don't fret—renewing contact is as easy as venturing out of the cave. Your people will recognize you and draw you in.

3. 'Not writing' is a habit. Imagine what life would be like if you broke it.

 Writing used to be what you did in response to inspiration or disappointment or a memory or an image you just couldn't shake. It was a habit. If you were in the habit of writing right now, what would be different about your day? What conversation with yourself and the world would you carry onto the page? What would it be like to do some writing right now? How would it feel? What would it be like to remember how much your soul craves that feeling?

These questions sound simple, but I mention them because considering them pushed me into writing. I could remember the feeling of being with my writing intimately and regularly. I stayed with my longing for that instead of ignoring it or pushing it aside. And the only thing to do in response was to write.

4. Finish something.

Nothing blooms in the netherworld of work left hanging. But finishing releases the energy furled tight in buds. Take out the paragraph you gave up on before working through its problems. Pull out an unfinished story. Find one sentence and then another to polish. You know how to do it. Pick it up. Reach the end.

5. Take a step, any step.

If all the items on the list seem obvious to you, great. Choose one simple, obvious action and actually take it. Spring forward, beautiful writer person. It's time to bloom.

(Peony photo by Sarah's Yard via Flickr.)

 

Your writing's trying to tell you what it wants—tales from George Saunders and L.A. spring

It’s the equinox as I write this, and I’m caught up in the way this moment in Southern California tips us into full bloom. Last night I walked through a friend’s front yard while he gave me a tour of the “orchard” set against two side fences. It was a scattering of trees, some mere twigs dotted with blossoms, one already heavy with grapefruit that reflected back gold in the flashlight’s beam. “That’s a pomegranate, and this is a peach,” the friend said, pointing to a couple of newly planted sticks (to use the fancy horticultural term). A few weeks ago, there was nothing to see. Just bare wood too slight to hold up the word “trunk,” and a few twig-like branches. But something happened, a swelling of buds and petals and scent. We knew it would come. And with luck and cultivation, we’ll see the pomegranates and lemons and first-year peaches later on, too.

Those predictable rhythms don't hold for people and pages, though it would be handy if they did. What we see, sometimes for long periods, are fragile-looking twigs stuck in the ground. They’re the projects we tuck into stray spaces and build from the words left at the end of long days of trading our energy and imaginations for money.Time passes, sometimes a lot of time, before what we have looks like much, or we notice the nubs of buds on what we feared might stay dormant for good. At our best, we persist, staying in conversation with the work, pushing it, then letting it lead us.

George Saunders, talking to a stalled story

saunders quote

In L.A. last month, the fiction writer George Saunders mentioned just that process.

Once, while waiting for a bus across the street from the barber shop in his town, he decided to take on the barber.

“He was one of these guys who checks women out fearlessly—and even after they bust him he keeps looking,” Saunders remembered. “We had just had two daughters, so I was a new feminist and I thought, ‘What an irritating [jerk].’ My first idea was, ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna write, but I’m gonna nail that guy. So I did.

“I wrote what I really thought was some fun inhabiting of this perverted guy…. I did that for about a year, and I had some pretty funny bits, but the story stalled, and I think it was because I knew too much about him. I was going to crucify this idiot. That was my plan.

“The story said, ‘All right, go ahead, but you’re not gonna be interesting doing that. So at some point about a year into it I went, ‘You know what? I’ve gotta somehow make this guy more sympathetic because as this story stands, it’s just kicking him. So then it’s the magic moment when you go, okay, how do I make this [jerk] more interesting?

“Well…  Hmm…. And then you start titrating in bits of yourself, which you were already doing, but now you’re being a little more sympathetic. Not being the most subtle writer, I said, ‘Oh yeah, he doesn’t have any toes!’ That was my way of doing it. But that did the trick … and suddenly it came alive. So I didn’t know that I was out to humanize him, but the story teaches you that. The story’s very stubborn. And it will say, 'Go ahead, write as much as you like, but I’m not movin’ until you show a little sympathy.' And that can happen again and again.”

‘A year later…’

There’s so much to love in how the process evolved, from the original mission (“I’m gonna crucify that guy”) to the more complex (and toeless) version the story wanted. I’m sure Saunders says that often his students: “The story teaches you.”

What struck me most, though, were the toss-away words: “I did that for about a year….” He repeats them, too. “So at some point about a year into it….”

The process can—and often does—look like that: chipping away, experimenting and keeping the conversation with your work going for weeks and months and years.

That doesn’t happen when you simply put the manuscript away and “think about it,” which usually means “wade through guilt, bemoan not having time to work on it or feel flattened by the soul-crushing, 5,000-pound boulder it’s become.”

It doesn’t happen either when you keep ideas locked in your head without making a move to get them on paper where you can start the exchange, however slow, that will move you forward and bring blooms to those awkward little sticks.

Time to amp up the conversation, don’t you think?

One writer I know felt dogged for more than a year by stories she wanted to write. When we talked about them, and she gave herself some “getting reacquainted” sessions to feel her way into the work, she realized that she was actually excited about an entirely different project. And she wouldn’t have known unless she sat down to reach toward the vague shapes in her imagination and pull them into the light.

My guess is that she just would’ve stayed frustrated and blocked and cringing whenever anyone said, “So how’s that writing going?”

The speed of the work you do isn’t important, but the constant conversation and tending are.It’s spring, beautiful writer person—such a fertile time. Feed your work. Talk to it and consider what it wants. Do a small writing practice daily. And as always, let me know if I can help.

(If you want to revisit the George Saunders story in context, you can hear it here, courtesy of the wonderful Aloud program at the Los Angeles Central Library. The photo of blossoms above is by Sterlic, via Flickr.)