Stories start as a scratching, a tapping, a dripping faucet - something that niggles at us as we go about our day like a shadow that keeps shifting in our periphery. At least, this is how they start for me, and for most of the authors and writing students who've shared their processes with me. Something, whether beautiful or problematic or curious, will not leave us alone. 

So we turn our heads. We look in the direction of the shifting shadow and see a bit of a shape to it, and we write down what we see. 

Sometimes this leads to the next thing and the next thing. Those times are gifts, when the story reveals itself to us in full, continuously, as we sit with it and open ourselves to the words that bring it into the world.

Most times, we have fits and starts. The scratching creature gets skittish and scurries away the moment we've turned our attention toward it. We have a line or two, a page or two, and don't know where the little beast went or how to follow. We look for its tracks in the rooms and landscapes of our minds, and along the way, we see what it saw as it ran. 

Sometimes, we find it that same hour we started searching. Other times, it takes weeks, months, or even years. There are traces of story that started in me over 20 years ago, back when I was in high school, and I'm only now picking up their footprints. In the time since they first tickled at the edge of my conscious to now, I've written many, many other stories. And even in these, I've come to dead ends and missing trails at different moments along the journey.

Some of us call this writer's block. I have come to think of it as not being ready for the story, or for the particular part of the story, that we're writing. 

Stories are one of our most ancient containers for truth. When we didn't understand nature, or cruelty, or love, or time, we made myths to contain these truths so we could hold them up to the light and examine them outside ourselves. This helps us navigate the complexities of our own experience. 

But what if a story has a truth to tell that we don't yet know ourselves, as its writer? 

Here are some things we can do when we realize our story has outrun us:

• Take a break. This is a timeworn strategy, but worth remembering. If we step away for awhile, we might gain perspective that will open the dams again and let the story rush back through.
• Research. Even if your story is not history or science driven, even if it is in your home town on the same timeline as your life, you don't know everything about it. If you did, you wouldn't be writing it in the first place - we write to explore a problem, to get resolution. Look at the medicine, the geography, the different expectations of genders and ethnic groups, the urban legends, the "normal" of your story's world and people. 
• Is there a character you don't like? Read blogs and memoirs by people who have similar traits and learn what it's like to be them. These characters you dislike often have something to teach you, but they won't tell you your secrets knowing how much you hate them. Find a way to care about them, even just a little, and see how they suddenly explode into complex, breathing souls. You can still write them as unlikable, but now they will be multifaceted and believable, more capable of illustrating the core of the story.
• Is there a character you love too much? Oh, dear, this is hard. But we have to let them hurt, and we have to let them hurt because of their own flaws. If you work to hard to protect your character's image, no one will believe them anyway, and this perfect character, just like your villain, will stop talking to you. If you can't love someone, warts and all, they know better than to show you their warts. 
• Work on multiple projects at once. If you've taken a story as far as you can without doing the research and work above, it helps to take out other projects and give them more of your energy. In May, Joli Jensen wrote a fantastic article in The Chronicle about how to manage multiple projects according to your schedule and energy levels. Remember, in cases where deadlines aren't involved, it's OK to shift between which projects receive your strongest commitment when your A story goes silent on you. 
• Treat your stories like friends. Stories, like people, sometimes need space. Keep coming back to check on them, but respect the relationship. You can have more than one friend at a time, but it's unlikely you'll be engaged in deeply focused, intimate conversation with more than one or two of them in the same moment. Enjoy the time you spend with each of them, and invite the others over in their turn. Maybe one will teach you something that grows you enough to understand the truth in the others that you weren't ready to receive when it first came to you.
• Examine your demons. Even though most of my characters and their circumstances are not much like me, I often find them facing similar internal challenges to mine. Sometimes when I'm stuck, it's because I need to do some soul searching of my own before I can write a character honestly through their flaw. If you think this might be the case, I recommend doing some guided journaling. Many 12-step programs use the tool of a "fearless" personal inventory that can be adapted to addressing our demons as writers so that we can write our characters honestly as they address theirs.

What about you? Do you have other strategies for making yourself ready for the story that wants to be told? 

Last night, my husband and I went to a Florence + the Machine concert. I'd bought the tickets back in February as an anniversary gift to him. He likes Florence OK (I love her), but I really bought them because of the opening act. He loves Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats. 

When we got to the arena, there were signs posted apologizing that the Night Sweats wouldn't be able to play, and thanking Grace VanderWaal for stepping in to support the tour. 

Before I talk about the young Miss VanderWaal, the reason for this blog post, I have to tip my hat to my husband who shrugged, smiled, and stayed as excited for the show as if one of his favorites were still playing. Kidney failure and losing 100% vision will turn many people bitter, but my husband has never lost his love of life. In fact, I think it's increased.

OK, back to Grace. 

Before last night, I'd heard only one song by her, but I'd heard it a lot. She's featured in the Google "2016 Year in Search" ad below. For over a year, I taught an essay lesson focused on ad analysis, and this was one of the ads most commonly chosen by my students. Grace's "Light the Sky" is the first sound of hope in this ad, and even after reading hundreds of essays and rewatching the ad over and over to inform my grading of these essays, I never got tired of the moment her voice breaks the silent pause that turns the tide of the ad. 

Video source: ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIViy7L_lo8

​So even though I don't know her work well, I was happy for the chance to know it better.

And then there was her band on the stage - three adult musicians rallying the crowd to usher this tiny 15-year-old out to hop around with that ukulele in her glitter eyeshadow and flowered dress, singing in this otherworldly voice that was at once knowing and vulnerable. They made her look older. They contoured her cheeks and put a bow-tied scarf around her twiggish neck, and she looked like she might actually have the life experience - almost - to back up her grown-up singing.

And then she spoke. She was as self-conscious and uncertain as any kid would be in front of tens of thousands of people. She was sweet and grateful and stumbling when she spoke, and didn't know what to say past thank you, and I hope you like it. And I realized she's younger than my daughter. And it kind of broke my heart. 

It's not that I wanted her not to have this beautiful world of possibility. It's that I kept thinking, does she ever get to hang out with other kids and just be a kid? Does she get to have sleepovers and go to the movies and have to figure out how to pool the fifty cents she found in the couch cushions with her friends to order pizza? Does she get to hate school except for that one class? Will she be able to date without the world scrutinizing her as she figures herself out? 

I found myself worried that the music industry would feed her uppers and deny her food to keep her peppy and thin. I found myself praying that someone was looking out for this sweetie, the way I'd want someone to look out for my daughter.   

I examined the band with parental suspicion. Maybe I was projecting (I'm sure I was projecting), but I think they felt protective over her, too. And I watched the crowd - you couldn't find a more loving, considerate crowd than the one at a Florence + the Machine concert, and I felt grateful for this tiny person that she was singing for people who were for her, even those of us who came to see someone else. Everyone wanted her to succeed. When she stumbled through lyrics to one of her new songs, nobody flinched, and we cheered all the harder when she opened it up and made it perfect in the next verse. 

There's a lot of mess in the world. We're all so fragile. But maybe there's hope. If people like Florence Welch and Grace VanderWaal keep drawing crowds, and if each of us in those crowds live out the message of hope that these ladies bring, maybe someday the world will be a safe place for talented children to share their light. God, look over this little girl and her big, beautiful voice. 


More from Grace here: https://www.gracevanderwaal.com/

And more from Florence here: https://florenceandthemachine.net/

Also, Get Well Soon wishes to Nathaniel Rateliff.
​

I am planting. I've added golden dewdrops (the flowers are purple - go figure), purslane, Texas sage (not edible), to the back yard. Really, it's just a patio, but it's open to a large green space with a view of trees and the dilapidated golf course that stretches through my neighborhood. In the front, I've decided I'm up for a challenge, and planted gardenias. My husband's grandmother used to grow them, and he misses the smell. He lost his eyesight in 2016, so there's some significance to this. I also added an orchid because my friend Dawn says they're ridiculously easy, and I want something pretty out there if it turns out I'm not ready to level up to the high demands of gardenia bushes.

I am planting. I started teaching screenwriting in December, and so I am writing screenplays now. Short ones. I've written a few scripts before, but now I need to pull them into my wheelhouse rather than treating them as side adventures. Over the past three weeks, I collaborated with a colleague to write an 8-page script that we hope the film department will produce for the festival circuit. I am sending out my most polished novel to agents, and I am writing short things - poems, flash, threads of story for a novel with an ensemble cast. 

The soil is fertile now, but it's been a long winter for us - three years of increasingly fallow living as we journeyed through my husband's illness. He has Type 2 diabetes, and a year after losing his eyesight, he lost his kidney function. Everything extra fell away from our lives, along with some of the essentials.

Our weekend adventures - we used to take meandering road trips. 

Living in our downtown home - we have moved to a suburban townhouse.

My daughter - she moved in with her dad when the stress of living with terminal illness affected her too deeply to stay.

Some losses have measurable value. Others spread their bleeding emptiness through every layer of our being. 

In January, we were blessed by a generous friend who gave Felix a kidney. While this hasn't brought back his eyesight, it's stabilized everything else. Felix is healthy and beginning to enjoy cooking and small adventures again. He and my daughter have laughed together a handful of times this year.

Without the 3-7 weekly medical visits involved in kidney failure, or the 30-mile drive (120 miles for two round trips daily) to and from my daughter's magnet school, I am left with time.

​And a heap of compost.

​Dead things that have collected in my soul over the past three years. 

Sometimes, the smell overwhelms me, and I lay in bed and cry at all the loss. 

​But on good days, I sew handfuls of my decomposed life into the soil, and I write, and I wait for the gardenias to bloom. 

So here we all are, a week and a half into NaNoWriMo. Do you have 16,670 words written? I don't. I think I have about 3,000 words. And I feel successful AF. Here's why, and some things that might help if you're feeling less than successful today:

• Like kids, not all novels grow the same way. They learn to walk, talk, climb, and consider consequences at different times. There's a general expectation for these developments, but even kids who don't fall into the norms charts have something very special to offer. I once worked with a five-year-old whose piano teacher had given up on him at the age of two when he was able to transpose sheet music to a new key in his head and play it instantaneously. She said he was more advanced than she was, and she had nothing left to teach him. Why did I work with him? He didn't know how to interact with other five-year-olds. Let your novel grow at its own pace. If that means you don't have the same word count as you expect, figure out what you do have and rely on that strength to grow your draft. Wait till revisions to worry about the other stuff. 

 

• I knew from the beginning that I'm not a word count writer, so I didn't try to write by word count. My goal for this month has been to find entry points into a story that was too big for me. I've found three entry points already, and these characters' individual stories are growing beautifully. While I don't have 16,000+ words on the page, I do have some of the biggest challenges of the book solved already. On November 1, I did not. What do you have today that you did not have on November 1? How can you build the rest of the month around the way you do write instead of the way you don't?

 

• Jessica Wunder, one of my writer friends, says her goal this month is to keep pushing the story forward. She knows she lets herself nitpick, so she's forcing herself from scene to scene, and this is getting it done. I am the opposite. My novels don't grow from point A to point B. They are more like cell division: one cell becomes two, become four, become eight, and so on. The different bits grow simultaneously, so I grow my work by going back and expanding what exists. How does your work grow? Forward? Backward? By prompt? At the cellular level? If it's not growing, it may be because you're expecting a kind of growth that isn't natural to you or your work. Pause and consider when growth spurts have happened before. What do those look like? How can you create similar conditions for your writing now?

 

• Another writer friend, Leslie Salas, says she always leaves something unfinished at the end of a writing session. If she doesn't complete the scene, her brain will naturally pick at it while she's away from her writing, and it takes less time to warm up to the work the next time she sits down. If she finishes a scene, she makes sure to get a few sentences or questions into the next one before closing up shop for the day.

 

• If you're stuck, there are a few things you can do to take the pressure off and get unstuck. One is to step away from the work. Take a walk, bath, drive, whatever. But do something that gives your brain a break. If you're stuck because you don't know a character or setting or some other part of the book, open a new file, one that will never show up in the novel, and brainstorm. Write out scenes you don't intend to use. Write an interview with your character, or with three characters that aren't important to the book, but who know your character - one who likes them, one who doesn't, and a third of your choice. Ask yourself what scares you about the story. If nothing scares you, that's the problem. You're writing safe. That will bore you and the readers. Find a theme or idea that scares you and let your character wrestle with it. 

 

• Sit down next to another writer and be anti-social. Instead of visiting with each other, write. There's nothing like hearing another writer tapping away at their keyboard to get you motivated to tap away at yours.

​
These are just a few things that I've found that work for me in writing in general, not just for Nano. If you have more tips to add to the comments, please do! 

NaNoWriMo is fast approaching, and if you're a fiction writer who wants to get a novel out of your system, you may be wringing your hands over it. NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, happens every November as a communal push to get a novel on paper. The idea is simple: the average novel has 50,000 words, and November has 30 days. If you write ~ 1,667 words each day of the month, you'll have a first draft by the end of it. (If you want to know more, check out NaNoWriMo.org.)

I don't see myself as a word count writer. When I try that, it feels like I'm missing the relationship with my characters that I so love. I write to go deeper with people, to understand places I've never been, to open myself up to the possibility that I don't know everything. (More a fact than a possibility, but it's so easy for so many of us to forget this.)

And, I write out of order. The Former Lives of Buildings, the novel that I'm currently shopping around to agents, happens on four personal timelines of a character with memory problems, and was the first project where I fully embraced writing different threads of story and weaving them together in some kind of sequence later on. But all of my longer writing projects have jumped around as I've written them, leaving me to fiddle with scenes like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle during the revision process.

So, again, I don't see myself as that kind of writer, one who can just write the first 1,667 words one day and then sit down to write the next 1,667 words on the following day, for 30 consecutive days.

And, as a result, I haven't tried NaNoWriMo before. I have used the month to do a mad dash on revisions for novels, and that's worked well. But drafting a novel always seemed like a silly thing for me to try in this manner. 

But the world is crazy right now, and I need to create something while we're in the midst of all this destruction. I don't even care if I have a whole novel at the end of this. I just need to make something. 

So, here's what I'm going to do. The novel I've been researching for the past year has an ensemble cast spread across the globe, and it's felt too big for me to sink my teeth into all this time. But I've written a bit from this character, and a bit from that one, and I guess I have about 20 pages of bits. And that, I think, is how this book needs to get birthed: bit by bit. 

I'm going back to the classroom for this - I know consecutive, consistent word counts don't work for me. But prompts, the mainstay of the creative writing classroom, do. I am gathering articles, character prompts, inspiring photos, and other materials that can work as entry points to get at different characters in the book. Each day in November, I'll write from one of these prompts. I have a good feeling about this. I think it will give me all the threads I need to sit down and start weaving in the months that follow. 

What about you? Have you done NaNoWriMo before? Are you considering doing it for the first time? How have you prepared? How have you kept going in the midst of it? I'd love to hear about your experience.

​It’s been a year since my husband’s kidneys failed. I was prepping the conference room at HD Counseling for a painting workshop. People would start arriving in about ten minutes. My phone rang, and our friend Jen told me that Felix was waiting on an ambulance. They’d been seeing a movie, and he couldn’t breathe.

 It was so close to the start time that people would already be on their way to my workshop. I wouldn’t be able to cancel until everyone had arrived. Jen passed the phone to Felix. He didn’t want me to cancel. Jen promised to give me updates, and I promised I would meet them in hospital immediately after the workshop was done, sooner if he needed me.

For the next three hours, I served coffee and tea and painted with a roomful of lovely humans who were ready to pack up at any moment if Felix took a turn for the worse, and ready to keep me laughing and enjoying the process of creating for as long as he did not.

After cleaning up, I stopped by the house and grabbed the hospital essentials - toiletries for both of us and a week’s worth of strategically interchangeable outfits for me. My husband is newly blind. I don’t leave him alone in hospital. I followed Jen’s final text to his room number. Thanks to the painting session, I’d never been more at peace on my way to an emergency.

Over the twelve months since then, the shape of our lives has continued to change, funneling through dialysis clinics, our daughter’s high school programs and the very real needs that can push a teenager toward a confident adulthood or lifelong insecurity, moving house in order to nail down a more constant budget, the erosion of my stepdad's memories, the odd circumstances of the death of my Aunt Sandy, health issues in our extended family, issues with my own health, seismic changes in family structure.

It’s been a cataclysmic year for us.

I am worn down to my threads. I peck at a chapter here, a painting there. I forget thumb drives when I go on writing retreats, research themes too big for me (but that are somehow easier than sitting in the mottled present tense of what is my real life). I find myself drifting. Longing for beauty.

And this is why we need art. This is why we need story. This weekend, my despair was so great I couldn’t sit alone. My husband was so exhausted from having his blood artificially cleaned and pumped back into him that he had no energy to distract me. So I gobbled up What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty. Someone had mentioned it after they asked what my novel, The Former Lives of Buildings, was about. My protagonist, Like Moriarty's, wakes in the hospital having forgotten important events. I intentionally waited until my own book was finished before reading Moriarty’s (I’m currently shopping TFLoB around to agents). Alice's forgotten years helped me forget my losses for a day.

Last week, I spent some listless time walking around Adjectives Market, a co-op type shop filled with vintage, upcycled, and original ephemera. Sometimes, when I can’t stand being in my own head, I think about which room I’ll paint next in our new place.

I’ve temporarily stopped offering workshops. I haven’t hosted Artist’s Way groups in months. I am still hosting my writing circle because I don’t think I will survive these waves of loss without  the collective writing experience for a few hours a month. But otherwise, I have let go of most of the peopling part of my art life.

But the part where I get to leave my life for a moment by living in the head of someone else - whether it’s my character or another author’s, the part where the overlap of red oil paint just past the edge of the white strokes of a bird’s feather, even the capture of real forget-me-nots in a drop of glass  on Etsy - these quiet offerings of beauty keep me breathing, in, out. They ask nothing of me across a year that has already stolen far too much.  Beauty asks nothing. It just exists alongside all the ugly and lets us notice it, or not.

Make art. We all need to breathe.

Photo by Gabriela Pinto. Used under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

​In forty-five minutes, the United States will inaugurate Donald Trump as our next president. I am not hoping for disruption during the ceremony. I am not wearing black as a signal of mourning. I am not planning to march with the women tomorrow, though my heart goes with them.
 
I am also not watching the inauguration – the timing of my sitting down to write this is deliberate, to the minute. I will be finishing it as the ceremony begins.
 
I have been on the right side of the fence. I have been on the left. I have dear friendships with people on both sides.
 
I am watching them yell at each other across the fence.
 
I am watching them yell about the other side to those on their own side of the fence.
 
I am watching both sides believe that the other side is full of false media, ulterior motive, and manipulative posturing. I am watching both sides assume the media they trust is correct about the other side. I am watching both sides get upset when people on the other side rely on their own trusted media.
 
Both sides believe the other is nefarious in its desires. Both sides get angry when the other side does not recognize the complexity of their opinion.
 
Both sides are treating each other exactly the same way.
 
The language is different. The means of calling the other side out is different. But the treatment is the same.
 
Of course I have my opinions. Of course I am not neutral. On some issues, I think the right is correct. On other issues, I think the left is correct. On most issues, I think it will take a complicated blend of both approaches to find the true solution.
 
This is my protest.
 
I protest the division. I protest the name-calling, the posturing, the unproductive way that we are pushing each other further and further away. In doing this, we are pushing each other deeper into the opinions we disagree with. In doing this, we are making productive compromise less likely. In doing this, we are ensuring that no one on the other side will ever listen to our side.
 
This is my protest.
 
I commit to building bridges. I commit to listening to people who disagree with me. I commit to treating them with dignity, even if they do not afford me the same dignity. I commit to being a conduit to productive conversation.
 
I am not neutral. I have very strong opinions, and seeing people who don’t seem to “get it” makes me as angry and frustrated as anyone. And this is why I need to build bridges. Because their opinions are just as complicated, just as based in their own life experience and knowledge and careful reflection as mine. Their opinions are based on the information they have access to, just like mine are based on the information I can access. If I shout, why would they listen? If I call names, why would they trust my good intentions? If I treat them without dignity, why would they treat me or my ideas with dignity?
 
I will do my best not to allow my own behavior to hurt the progress toward what I believe is good and true and right for our country.
 
As long as no one is listening to each other, we allow the political machine to progress unchecked. We may think we’re resisting injustice, but the other side believes they are resisting injustice, too. All of us want justice. That’s our common ground. Our biased press allows each side to forget this common ground. Our definitions are different, but perhaps not as different as the press wants us to believe. Our means of achieving it is different, but combining the best of both sides will work much better than dismissing anything good from across the fence just because it’s part of a complex idea that involves some things we don’t like.
 
Neurologically, the right is concerned with protecting the self; the left is concerned with protecting others. The truth is, we must have both protections. Giving everything out until there’s nothing remaining leaves us unable to protect anyone. Hoarding all protections for ourselves keeps us from advancing by endangering those who might have important contributions. We must have a balance of the best of both sides.
 
This administration threatens just about everything I believe is essential to maintaining what is good about the United States. I will protest it. I will protest it by recognizing that the people who voted this into being care deeply about our country. I will protest by refusing to deepen the divide. I will do my best to recognize and speak balanced, impartial truth in order to protest the way the press on both sides has usurped our ability to speak with each other by prioritizing ratings over balanced, impartial truth. I will recognize that no one, including myself, is completely impartial, and I will make room for others to broaden my ideas and understanding.
 
Shouting my deepest beliefs from the rooftops will not convert a single soul. No one likes an evangelist unless they already agree with the sermon.
 
I will honor my own convictions by doing the hard work of building bridges. I can say what I believe while leaving space for what others believe. Perhaps I will grow through this – is that so scary? And perhaps my opinions will evolve into something even more complex – I am open to this. It doesn’t threaten my understanding of truth when facts come together outside the party line. I will seek the good, the true, and the beautiful in each person I encounter. And even if they refuse to show it to me, I will doggedly believe that it is there, anyway.
 
I protest this divide. I invite you to join me.

Some scenes take longer to write than others. I don't always know why, but this time I do. My characters are discussing something that I haven't completely dealt with myself.

My own feelings about the subject keep mucking up the space that the characters need in order to breathe their ideas and life into the matter. A lot of what they need to say makes me angry. And then, as a writer, I am compelled to interfere and manipulate, to write their conversation and body language to show how small and wrong they are. But that leaves no room for their truth. It turns them into cardboard cutouts instead of pulsing, believable souls. 

A writer I admire once brought a story from the point of view of a pedophile to workshop. The child in the character's fantasies was the same age as my daughter at the time. The writer had gotten inside his character's head masterfully. So much so that I had a hard time separating the author from the narrator and, out of respect for the author, stopped reading. This was a colleague who'd been to my house and met my child, and his writing was so good that I needed to put it down in order to continue the friendship. I learned later, through another writer, that he'd written the story to be able to deal with how deeply disturbed he'd been by having met a pedophile. 

Out of all the pieces I've critiqued and had critiqued, I've learned the most about writing from this one piece that I chose not to finish reading. I rarely despise my characters. In fact, I think I have never hated a character I've written. But I've hated some of their ideas. When this happens, I have a choice. I can push my own agenda and cheapen the writing, gold-plating it. Or I can spend some time listening to what my characters want, who they are, how they have become so, and make space for their history on the page. Even if I don't tell the whole history, even if I sketch them in only one or two lines of dialogue or description, they deserve to have their own truth show up in that sketch. They deserve to be seen for whatever metal they are. They deserve my compassion, just like my colleague's pedophile needed his in order to be truly alive, truly human, truly revolting, and truly pitiable on the page.

My job today is not to speak through my writing, but to listen through it. 




​.
Image credit: Robert Young, used under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic License

As a creative person, you’ve probably questioned the value of continuing to make whatever it is you make at some point – or multiple points – in your life. Sticking with your goal when it all hits the fan is less of a personal decision when your goal is, say, managing the quality control department for a packaging company. By contrast, when your life gets turned on its head, it’s a lot easier to give up on your career if you’re building a recording studio, taking the time to revise a novel, working on an independent film just for the resume credit, or developing a group of paintings that you need to complete before beginning to show. Each of these takes significant time and investment before you see a financial return.
 
I’ve recently been fortunate enough to join Full Sail University as an English professor. This is just one of an array of pursuits on my professional palette. In addition to teaching, I also write fiction and memoir, paint, and offer resume writing and creativity coaching services through a counseling center. This week, I launched my first product line of fair trade clothing. And, I’m a mom of a serious young musician who just started high school.
 
One assignment my students write is an essay about persevering in a creative career when the going gets tough. It’s been an encouraging assignment to grade since, for the past year, the going has gotten tougher by the month: My husband has been going blind since last September. This puts a significant amount of pressure on my need to earn greater income while also being more available to chauffer my family. This would, in short, be a reasonable time for me to use my resume writing skills to fashion myself into a corporate trainer or project manager, and give up on revising the novel that likely won’t see an agent’s desk until next year, along with the creativity coaching, painting, etc. All the things that I love to do. So in a spirit of solidarity with my students, I’ve decided to take some time to write a bit about persevering while developing a creative career. If you’re watching the debris of a recent crisis rain down on you and your art, here are some tools that I hope will help.
 .
1. Dedicated space – Between my husband’s last two eye surgeries, I was feeling empty because I wasn’t writing. I pulled a table into my studio space (the breakfast nook in our kitchen), and decided that the only thing I’d do there is write or make art. I’m sitting there right now. And, I’m writing. Whether it’s an all-out studio or a Sheldon Cooper style favorite spot on the couch, dedicate a space to your creativity. In this space, do nothing else. Do not check email; do not complete at-home work; do not hang out with friends; do not research mechanics for your broken car; do not do any activity unrelated to your creativity. Visit this space at least once a day, even if it’s just for five minutes of sitting alone promising yourself that, as soon as you can, you’ll actually make/write/mix/play something here. Visiting frequently makes the promise more real, and when you do have that stray 30 minutes, you’ll know exactly how you want to use it because you’ll already be in the habit of considering that project. You won’t waste those precious seconds sitting there wondering where to start. 
.
2. A calendar that works, with permission to say, “f**k it” – I am a digital immigrant, born before the internet, raised without it, and introduced to it as more of a concept than a useful tool in late high school. Digital calendars don’t work for me, though phone alerts help me keep appointments. I have a beautiful, hardbound author’s calendar from Barnes & Noble with profiles, birthdays, and awards of different writers throughout. It works for me because I still think on paper. It also allows me to look at my life, see at a glance how crazy it is, and know that if I wanted to kill an enemy slowly, I could just make them do everything listed on time with no exceptions. Since I’d like to live happily, I let myself move things around, and, as long as it doesn’t affect something truly important, I skip things sometimes. I also have one day a week where I schedule exactly nothing. Keeping my calendar with me gives me a visual aid when I need permission to say no to commitments that might threaten my health and sanity. 
.
3. Good music – Life is better when you’re listening to what you love. Develop playlists for different moods, creative projects, gentle reminders that you’re human and deserve sleep, and suit-up-for-battle-because-it’s-going-to-be-another-16-hour-day days. Don’t have time to develop a playlist? Get on Pandora. Or Youtube. Or whatever the kids these days are using to find pre-packaged playlists (remember, digital immigrant here). Heck, if you’re me, pull out some of your old mixtapes and a cassette player. There’s nothing like nostalgia music to make you feel like everything is possible.
.
4. Symbaloo - This free web tool was originally developed for teachers to curate curriculum for their classrooms, but I've found it works as a way to organize websites that relate to multiple creative projects. It's basically a bookmark organizer, and it allows me to quickly save something I know I want to come back to when I have time. It's also great for when I've been away from a project for a while, and want to get inspired again. I go to the project tab and read a few of the articles that got me excited in the first place.
 .
5. Give yourself a break – You won’t paint/write/sing/dance every day when life throws real crisis at you. Don’t get wrapped up in the drama, but do give yourself time to experience the situation at hand. It’s OK to take a week or a month off. Visit your creative space for a few minutes a day so that you remember who you are at the core, and then walk back into the rest of your life and live it. Because, ultimately, that’s where the best art comes from. If you have nothing to challenge your way of thinking, you won’t have very interesting things to say in your work. Give your life the time it deserves. 
.
6. But then come back – And come back gently. When I’ve been away from a novel project for a while, I can’t just jump back in. The characters are too complex and, often, there are too many pages to review in order to catch up with the story. And my writing muscle is out of practice. Trying to start the next chapter the first writing day after a month away will inevitably shut me down and make me feel like a failure. Instead, I write stream-of-conscious schlock (those of you familiar with Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way will know this as morning pages). I do this for several days, sometimes weeks. When it has become a habit, I then move on to writing from prompts. This gets me thinking like a writer again instead of being my own therapy patient on the page. Once I’ve started to produce some paragraphs that I feel good about, I pick up the last chapter or two that I worked on and read it to begin to enter the novel once more. And, after that, I begin writing. The process takes time, but it can result in unexpected gifts. Two weeks ago, I ended up with a flash fiction piece I never planned to write. 
.
7. Remember, even the quality control manager at the packaging company started somewhere - It's easy for us to listen to the naysayers who want us to believe that we'll never make money in a creative career. But most professional careers take time to cultivate. A doctor did not launch her own practice the day she got her bachelor's degree. She had medical school, an internship, a residency, and ongoing specialized training before she finally got to that level. Depending on the area of medicine, this may take 8-10 years or more. Most professional careers take a long time. Your art deserves the same kind of deliberate and thorough cultivation. Some creatives will have sudden success, and that's a fantastic thing. But many of us will have to put in years of hard work before seeing a comfortable income. And that's OK. It's no different from any other professional field, so it doesn't make sense to give up if we're not raking in the dough early on.
.
8. Start a group studio session – As the resident artist and writer for HD Counseling, LLC, I host an Open Studio session every Saturday. Artists and writers bring their current projects and we work in the same space for about three hours each week. Many of us find that when we frame them as a commitment to others, we’re more likely to honor our creative endeavors. 
.
9. Ask for help – You do not have to go it alone. You might ask friends or family to help out with chores, cooking, etc. while in crisis mode. Often, they’ll be glad to contribute. If you don’t have this kind of community, there are still ways to get help. I recently got a Shipt membership. For less than $10/month, they deliver our groceries every week. With the internet, more services like this are popping up. If you’re strapped for cash, contact a nearby college and see if any of the clubs/students are looking for volunteer opportunities. 
.
10. Have a partner or friend who knows you’re a beautiful unicorn – I mentioned my husband has been going blind. One reason I’ve stuck with all of my creative pursuits instead of consolidating my earning activities into one miserable corporate position is because he would be devastated and furious if I stopped doing what I love in the name of helping him. He believes in every potential project I consider. He roots for every possibility. He recruits our teenaged daughter to don blanket capes and goggles and take a super hero stance with him to make me laugh, and then gets her to change the cat litter so I have time to paint. Not everyone in our lives gets us as creatives. But we choose our friendships. Choose at least one person who does get it, and nurture and love that friendship above all others. If there's no one nearby like this, join a creative group on Facebook or another social media outlet. Because the person who gets you needs you to be yourself just as much as you do, and, though you may not always see it, you need them to be themselves, too. When you connect with someone at the creative level, you feed each other. Blind or sighted, caped or in a business suit, it doesn’t matter. We all need our heroes.