Elizabeth Percer's Blog

Every now and then, I’ll meet someone who comes to a full stop when I tell them I’m a novelist. “What?” they’ll say. “A novelist,” I’ll say, and then, because I’m super helpful I add, “I write fiction.” “Wow,” they’ll say, “Really?” “Really,” I say, trying to will the tics from kicking in. “Have you published anything?” they’ll stutter next. “I have,” I say. “Wow,” they say, relieved, “Good for you! That must be so much fun!”

At which point I usually fail colossally in holding up my side of this particular type of social exchange and make some sort of mildly subversive, slightly dejected attempt to explain how much work being a literary novelist in 21st century America can be.

But what I wish I had the courage to say is this: “Yes. It is fun!”

Because the truth is, it is fun. And that’s an important truth. In fact, it isn’t just the fun of novel writing that inspired me to devote as much as I could to it long before I ever had a hope of being published; it’s the very fact that I do find my work fun (among other things) that proves, in my mind, that it’s the most important work I could do.

So many of us hold ourselves back from admitting how essential fun is to good work. We think of fun, and we think of goofing off, taking valuable time away from work, playing hooky from our real responsibilities. And yet we wonder why we get stuck in our careers, why we no longer generate the great ideas we had when we were young and simply thrilled to have a job, why we obsess so much more over what isn’t working than what is.

Somewhere along the way, I think we made the very grave mistake of conflating dedication with seriousness. We got very fearful of ourselves, and became convinced that if we let loose on a regular basis, we would fall down the slippery slope of being unproductive, slothful, and generally out of hand. Even now, as you read this, I’m sure it’s making you a little uncomfortable. Heck, it’s making me a little uncomfortable to write it. I don’t want you to think I’m encouraging everyone in the world to take their tops off in Times Square and go for broke. But I, too, need to be reminded of the difference between having fun because it’s a healthy and natural part of the human mind’s impulse to be engaged and thriving and thrilled, and a tendency to behave like a drunk teenager on perpetual spring break.

Of course it makes sense that no one will get anything done without dedication, a ton of grit, and a healthy dose of good sense. But by the same token, we can’t expect to get our best work done if we’re not flourishing. After all, is joy really something we need to actively avoid? Is that why we’re wired to seek it? Why it makes us feel more powerful, more flexible, and more creative? And if we’re constantly playing Whack-a-Mole with activities that invite joy, fluidity, and creative fast balls, how can we expect to produce in the age of innovation and invention? A related question: When have personal flourishing and success ever really been at odds with each other?

Where I live, in Silicon Valley, people have a lot of fun. They’re mocked for it regularly; but they keep doing it. Sadly, no one here is doing anything worthwhile or interesting, and we’re all dying early of heart attacks. I miss the Boston that raised me, but sometimes I think I had to come out here in order to really embrace the person I most needed to become; the fullest, most ridiculous(ly productive) version of myself.

The photo I’ve shared with you was taken when I was around three years old. Fun fact: I recently discovered that my family has been showing me only the “pretty” pictures of myself when I was little; much to my delight, I found a treasure trove including this one of me looking like a miniature Latke Gravas on the days he forgot the Brylcream while going through my parents’ storage locker. The truth is, I knew I always had a miniature Latke Gravas inside me, and it saddens me that I ever shut her (him?) up just so I could look a little prettier, appear a little more somber in my family of full professors and widely respected doctors. And for the first three decades of my life, I did manage to fake it in the world of Serious Work. But look at me here, at the typewriter, with my sunglasses upside down, frisbee at the ready -- in my natural state. I see this photo and I just think: Thank God that at least I eventually remembered I was supposed to have fun. What’s more, I suspect we all have such photos in our archives. Where are you in yours? What are you doing? Have you ever felt more genuine or more engaged? Is it really so far from here to there?

Photo here: Every now and then, I’ll meet someone who comes to a full stop when I tell them I’m a novelist. “What?” they’ll say. “A novelist,” I’ll say, and then, because I’m super helpful I add, “I write fiction.” “Wow,” they’ll say, “Really?” “Really,” I say, trying to will the tics from kicking in. “Have you published anything?” they’ll stutter next. “I have,” I say. “Wow,” they say, relieved, “Good for you! That must be so much fun!”

At which point I usually fail colossally in holding up my side of this particular type of social exchange and make some sort of mildly subversive, slightly dejected attempt to explain how much work being a literary novelist in 21st century America can be.

But what I wish I had the courage to say is this: “Yes. It is fun!”

Because the truth is, it is fun. And that’s an important truth. In fact, it isn’t just the fun of novel writing that inspired me to devote as much as I could to it long before I ever had a hope of being published; it’s the very fact that I do find my work fun (among other things) that proves, in my mind, that it’s the most important work I could do.

So many of us hold ourselves back from admitting how essential fun is to good work. We think of fun, and we think of goofing off, taking valuable time away from work, playing hooky from our real responsibilities. And yet we wonder why we get stuck in our careers, why we no longer generate the great ideas we had when we were young and simply thrilled to have a job, why we obsess so much more over what isn’t working than what is.

Somewhere along the way, I think we made the very grave mistake of conflating dedication with seriousness. We got very fearful of ourselves, and became convinced that if we let loose on a regular basis, we would fall down the slippery slope of being unproductive, slothful, and generally out of hand. Even now, as you read this, I’m sure it’s making you a little uncomfortable. Heck, it’s making me a little uncomfortable to write it. I don’t want you to think I’m encouraging everyone in the world to take their tops off in Times Square and go for broke. But I, too, need to be reminded of the difference between having fun because it’s a healthy and natural part of the human mind’s impulse to be engaged and thriving and thrilled, and a tendency to behave like a drunk teenager on perpetual spring break.

Of course it makes sense that no one will get anything done without dedication, a ton of grit, and a healthy dose of good sense. But by the same token, we can’t expect to get our best work done if we’re not flourishing. After all, is joy really something we need to actively avoid? Is that why we’re wired to seek it? Why it makes us feel more powerful, more flexible, and more creative? And if we’re constantly playing Whack-a-Mole with activities that invite joy, fluidity, and creative fast balls, how can we expect to produce in the age of innovation and invention? A related question: When have personal flourishing and success ever really been at odds with each other?

Where I live, in Silicon Valley, people have a lot of fun. They’re mocked for it regularly; but they keep doing it. Sadly, no one here is doing anything worthwhile or interesting, and we’re all dying early of heart attacks. I miss the Boston that raised me, but sometimes I think I had to come out here in order to really embrace the person I most needed to become; the fullest, most ridiculous(ly productive) version of myself.

The photo I’ve shared with you was taken when I was around three years old. Fun fact: I recently discovered that my family has been showing me only the “pretty” pictures of myself when I was little; much to my delight, I found a treasure trove including this one of me looking like a miniature Latke Gravas on the days he forgot the Brylcream while going through my parents’ storage locker. The truth is, I knew I always had a miniature Latke Gravas inside me, and it saddens me that I ever shut her (him?) up just so I could look a little prettier, appear a little more somber in my family of full professors and widely respected doctors. And for the first three decades of my life, I did manage to fake it in the world of Serious Work. But look at me here, at the typewriter, with my sunglasses upside down, frisbee at the ready -- in my natural state. I see this photo and I just think: Thank God that at least I eventually remembered I was supposed to have fun. What’s more, I suspect we all have such photos in our archives. Where are you in yours? What are you doing? Have you ever felt more genuine or more engaged? Is it really so far from here to there?



https://www.elizabethpercer.com/the-w...

Artists and athletes are rarely grouped together. It’s hard to see the similarities between, say, Tom Brady and Toni Morrison. Heck, it’s hard to even wrap your mind around the fact that Simon Biles and Truman Capote are of the same species. But the things artists could learn from athletes could, well, fill a book.

Unfortunately, we are waaayyyy behind when it comes to understanding how to help artist flourish in this country. That might have a little something to do with the fact that most working artists could probably find their entire annual salary in the cushions of Tiger Woods’ couch, but I digress. The good news is that a little education can usually go a lot farther than a lot of money.

To being with, now that we’re well into the second decade of the 21st century, it’s time we unburden ourselves of those hundred-year-old, mis-educative ideas of artistry so many of us are still laboring under. Romanticism is over, peeps. No one works well under the conditions provided by fickle muses, self-sacrificing devotion, glorified mental illness, and/or substance abuse. And while we might all generally understand why these notions don’t work as driving forces behind artistry, we’ve done really little to try to improve on them. And it’s starting to piss me off.

It makes me so angry, for example, when I run into a would-be writer who believes she can’t write because when she sits down to write, it doesn’t go well. Or that she doesn’t have enough time. Or talent. Where else does this thinking work? Would we ever tell a budding football player to give up and go get an MBA if his passes were falling short during practice? It’s past time we all embrace the unglamorous and empowering fact that artistic practice is infinitely more practical and boring than we’ve allowed ourselves to believe.

As a case in point, I spent approximately thirty years waiting for my muse to show up, or my talent to rise to the occasion. Then, after my third child was born, I accidentally started running. I was wrecked from three C-sections in five years, but with my kids (aka three people who couldn’t read) calling the shots, I couldn’t exactly sign up for an exercise class and expect to ever get there on time. So I learned to seize whatever moment came along, lace up my sneaks, and run until I had to come home.
Turns out, showing up for myself whenever I could and keeping my expectations down taught me more in a year than a lifetime of misguided notions about art ever could.

Athletes, I learned, don’t decide they’re talented and unworthy if their training isn’t going well. They just keep training. They don’t give into horrible stories about themselves if they’re one mile into an unusually painstaking run; in fact, they get through the next two miles by recognizing that they’ve got to improve their mental game, or just get out of their own heads. They deal with exhaustion and injury by resting. They know that if they fill up with junk, they’re not treating themselves; they’re undoing their own best efforts. They learn to stay level-headed, to develop mental grit, to appreciate that they are their own best coaches, to remember to breathe even when stretching themselves to their limits. The best of them, in other words, are unfailingly practical and understand that how they treat themselves is directly related to how far they’re going to get.

Similarly, when we show up to our writing practices and see them as practices, we get our best work done. When we politely sidestep the terrible stories we like to tell ourselves when things aren’t going well, when we recognize that both ten pages and ten words of writing represent some kind of progress and drop the self-flagellation, when we recognize that there will be weeks when we need to shoehorn practice in between all the other demands of life and don’t make that into a story about not having enough time, when we see missteps as par for the course, when we remember to breathe – these are all the things that sustain a healthy writing practice.

Being an artist, in other words, is just that: a way of being in the world, not an identity that is defined by abstract things like talent, muses, or the public. It’s much more boring to think of it this way, but it is thousands of times more rewarding. And if you absolutely must keep your eyes on the prize, the wonderful irony is, when it comes to any investment in the heart – whether that be athletic or artistic -- the more we invest in the day-to-day, the more likely we are to realize the truly exceptional.

When my delightful older son was an infant, he was sort of a colicky hot mess. He was big and beautiful and loud and sweaty and hungry and tired and spitting up and screaming about 80% of the time. As new parents with no infant experience, my husband and I found this ever so slightly unnerving. My husband dealt with it by doing whatever he could to soothe the baby, which usually involved coming home from work, taking off his shirt, and walking endless loops around the apartment with our boy sucking contentedly on his forearm, sometimes for hours at a time. But I, who was home alone with the baby most of the time, often found myself at my wits end, undone by the baby’s distress and about to cry myself.

Here's the thing. He only had a few simple needs. For the most part, he was unhappy because he was tired, hungry, in need of a diaper change, or just straight up colicky. And also for the most part, these needs could be simply met. But when I was in the midst of it, when he’d worked himself into a lather (sometimes literally: we were working with a lot of drool), the wiser part of me who could step outside of the situation and see it for what it was got blocked by the part of me who couldn’t bear another hour of crying and just froze.

And because I have such a gift for adding insult to injury, I started to wonder if I just wasn’t cut out for this motherhood thing. After all, the viper inside me reasoned, if I couldn’t remember to do a basic check of my baby’s needs when he was suffering, how could I expect to get him through middle school? It was a real party inside my head, let me tell you.

So I had to work with myself where I was – in the place where there seems to be no discernible learning curve, where you just care too much about what you’re doing to ever fully distance yourself enough from it to come up with some kind of foolproof game plan for managing it – and I made myself a list. It was a very simple list, so I could check it even when my brain was threatening a total systems shutdown, and it went something like this: diaper, food, nap, fever, colicky despair. And I put it right out in the open on my favorite appliance: the refrigerator.

I’ve since learned two important things: one, that there are lots of similarities between how to take good care of someone you love and how to take good care of yourself; and two, it’s oftentimes the situations that you do throw yourself into wholeheartedly that are most susceptible to a total freeze. Think about it: When your heart goes all in, it’s not so easy to pull up and pull back.

Take writing, for instance. Despite all I know and all I’ve learned after two decades studying the art from the inside out, it’s more essential to me than ever, which means I still find myself in situations where I need a note on the refrigerator, particularly when I’m working on a new project. It’s not even that different from the one I put up when I was a new parent: Have you eaten? Have you exhausted yourself? Are your standards too high? Are you working at your writing? Are you, in effect, a hot colicky mess, and do you need to take a time out? They’re deceptively simple questions, and may not look like much here. But oftentimes, I’m stuck because I’m in my own way, and doing even the most basic things to get myself back on track can work wonders. Because when you bring your wholehearted self into a new task, you can both forget the most fundamental rules of self-care -- as a person and as an artist -- and you have never needed to rely on them more.

So don’t expect a steep learning curve as you continue to pursue your writing. In fact, it’s much more useful to expect that if you’re doing things right, if you’re reaching out with everything that you have, willing to fall flat on your face, you’re not necessarily going to be cool-headed enough all the time to remember what it is you need to move forward. But you will. Even if you need a note on the refrigerator. Because just as it’s useful to drop your expectations when you’re writing, it’s also useful to drop your expectations of yourself as a writer. So do whatever it takes to get yourself fed, watered, and optimized for work. The writing will always follow. Maybe not according to your greatest plans or most diligent designs, but what great writing ever does?

I wish I could use this phrase more often. Actually, I do, when I’m alone and talking to myself. Which is fairly often. How else do you think I became a writer?

But I wish I could encourage other to use it, too, because I find it to be one of the most useful pieces of writing advice out there. All too often, I think people lose their way as writers because they’re not watching their language. Either they’re too busy watching someone else’s language – a writer they admire and wish to emulate; an old English teacher who drilled stifling vocabulary lessons into their heads on perfectly good Friday mornings – or they’re just not paying attention to their own. As a result, they wind up allowing voices that belong to others take over their work. And while many people can write passably without their own voices at the helm, there’s a big difference between captaining your own ship and just going along for the ride.

In other words, when we don’t watch our language, we jeopardize the potential breadth and depth of what we might have to say. Yet so few people seem to realize that they have a right to write in a voice that feels natural to them. For example, I can’t tell you how many freshman compositions I’ve seen that are shot through with multisyllabic obfuscations. (Yes, that’s as bad as it sounds. It should probably be considered for entry into the DSM). Or worse yet, essays that are hesitant and bland, clearly written by someone whose personal expression has been beaten into submission.

They even have a hard time believing me when I tell them that every halfway intelligent human being has within her a language that can truly speak to her experiences and way of seeing the world. That each of us has a language that only we hear and speak; the language our loved ones use when speaking to us; the language we use to tell the truth; the language we use to rationalize our most desperate lies. It’s also the language we hear on the streets we frequent, the turns of phrases and diction and pacing and word choice that lets us know we’re home, or at least somewhere familiar.

So how do you know if you’ve found your own language? Well, if you’re just starting out or need a refresher, as so many of us usually do, you can ask yourself some key questions. Are you worrying more about how people will read your work than what you most want to say? Are you writing in fits and starts, getting halfway through sentences only to delete them in hostile acts of keyboard aggression? Are you using words that you think make you look smart, or words that have been on your tongue and in your heart?

This evaluation process is hard, but it’s more rewarding than you’d ever imagine. Because it’s the gateway to your best writing, the kind of writing that only you can generate. Don’t get me wrong – your language will not be entirely unique, but it will have a certain essence, a certain energy that comes from someone who trusts that her life matters. This is far more complex and nuanced than where you’re from, or how you were educated (or miseducated), though those things do come into play. For example, I grew up just outside of Boston, but it would be a real stretch for me to attempt a Southie accent, in person or on the page. But I also grew up listening to more than my fair share of recorded stories – my dad loved radio; my mother folk singers – so I internalized the music of a sung story at an early age.

So it’s not just about how you shape the medium of language. It’s about how you tune into the frequency of your story, those subtle shifts that speak to a truth only you can articulate. It may not be the noblest or most profound truth, but it’s the song your voice is ideally suited to carry. The kind of song that, incidentally, makes the most memorable music.

We all want to blame the writing. When it’s not going well, we scowl at our creations, muttering horrible things about them under our breath and indulging in violent fantasies that involve the delete key and/or the shredder. And indeed, any kind of writing that goes beyond composing grocery lists or taking dictation is apt to misbehave. At its best, writing can be a form of thinking through our experiences and observations, arriving at surprising discoveries and insights along the way. In a way, your writing gives you the chance to encounter parts of yourself that you’re forced to ignore in the service of getting through the more superficial demands of everyday, the busy rabbit part of our brain sending us here and there so we won’t be late and we’ll get dinner on the table and remember our mother’s birthday. But there’s so much more to the mind than scheduling.

Getting to other parts of your mind takes work, though, and not just the kind of work we associate with things like flogging and toiling. It’s more like the kind of work you need to bring to a relationship, because you’re building a relationship to your deeper self and the world around you when you engage in the act of writing. And just as our closest relationships challenge us to see ourselves in new and deeper ways, you and your writing will only flourish when you figure out how to navigate through rocky patches that arise between you. And just as berating our loved ones doesn’t help to improve the relationships we have with them — even when they’re at their most frustrating – your writing won’t really respond if you only respond with rage, self-loathing, and/or despair when it won’t bow to your will.

Oftentimes, rereading my drafts still makes my hackles rise and/or triggers my gag reflex. But if I go with those reactions, I usually just get stuck. If I can manage instead to take a step back and try to see what the writing is doing – instead of focusing on what it isn’t doing – if I listen and notice without imposing my expectations on it, something almost always releases. Maybe a scene isn’t working because the particular intimacy I wanted for those characters has evolved into something else (if I’m lucky, maybe their relationship has developed new complications and depth). Maybe a dialogue is flat because I’ve already decided how I want it to end, or I’m overwriting it, not allowing the characters’ voices speak for themselves. Or maybe a kernel of emotional truth I didn’t even know was there has begun to blossom, and if I cultivate it well enough, I might wind up taking the story in a direction that is much more powerful and interesting than the “reason” why I decide to write in the first place.

Overall, the willingness to learn from the writing even when it’s not going well requires that we trust in more than the final product. It means we trust in what the process can show us along the way, to see it as a relationship that benefits from open-mindedness, patience, and a true desire to grow. So as temporarily satisfying as it might be to pitch a fit and go around slamming doors when your manuscript isn’t doing what you want, your writing will go so much further if you can take a minute to just listen to it. I know this is maybe not the advice you want to hear, but since when are relationships easy? Especially the ones most worth having?

https://www.elizabethpercer.com/thewr...

Every writer has a uneasy relationship to her delete key, sitting there in the Siberia of the keyboard, ready and willing to make everything that isn’t working just disappear, like some kind of literary fairy godmother or hit man. And for those of us artistic, perfectionist types, we can sometimes get into the space where disappearing everything is so much more appealing than any other option.

But we’re not Mob bosses or victims of our muses, sure to turn into pumpkins when they misbehave; we’re writers. Which means that we must be willing and ready to make plenty of messes, and let them sit as messes whenever our intuition tells us they should. In fact, if we’re doing our jobs right, we should be generating at least twice as much material as we ever need for a given project – and oftentimes a lot more. Because good writers don’t write things down like they’re taking dictation. They use the writing process like alchemists, mixing and stirring and watching reactions, using their materials to discover new things for all of us.

When we delete these messes too quickly, we get into the habit of trying too hard to perfect the work while it’s still in the process of developing. This is the creative equivalent of peeking constantly in at the dough, or flipping the lights on while the film is still developing. It may not seem that those misfit ramblings or endless variants on a scene are worth holding onto, but they are. Not because everything we write needs to be clutched onto jealously in the hopes that it might one day prove to be critical to our masterpiece instead of the scribbling it was meant to be, but because for some odd reason, it just works well to let the drafts exist, even if they’re just fertilizing the creative soil you’re cultivating to support new growth.

You don’t even need to look at them. You can file as many versions of your work as you want – in fact, I highly recommend it when you decide to try something new – it’s much less frightening to try a new path when you leave a few breadcrumbs behind. And while you might go back and look at them, what’s far more important is that you give your work the space to sprout all sorts of branches before you start trying too hard to shape it.

How we treat the work along the way is much more important than we generally acknowledge. We tend to get so wrapped up in how close we are to the next step, or how near what we’re producing is to what we want to produce, that we sometimes allow a mentality of better-faster-quicker-more sneak in and railroad an activity that seeks to break the mold. And on the flip side, the more we value the process, the more it offers us in the way of result. That doesn’t mean we mollycoddle everything that appears on our screens, but it also doesn’t mean that we jettison everything before we’ve really allowed ourselves to figure out what we want to say.

It may seem illogical, to hold onto drafts we may never work on again, to leave a record of what we’re moving beyond. But it’s important that we let the process be as expansive and strange as it needs to be, to not spend too much of it wrapped up in concerns about where it will go. And in fact, its oftentimes the oddest journeys that lead to the greatest revelations, especially if we keep ourselves good company along the way.

I’m pretty sure that you’d have to be living under a rock if you haven’t felt a significant increase in fear over the past several months. Actually, I think even those of you under those rocks are feeling a bit insecure these days, peeking out at the rest of us running around like chickens with their heads cut off and wondering when we're going to stop kicking all the dust around.

It’s pretty hard to create in the middle of all this. But you know what’s harder? Not creating. Let me explain.

The darkness is always there. Even when we think everything’s hunky dory, somewhere, it’s just not. This is not a phenomena new to the 21st century, either. If anything, the surge we had in awareness around human rights issues of all kinds in the last few decades was a breakthrough, a huge divergence from the cavemen mentalities so many of us had been laboring under for so long. And whenever breakthroughs happen, there are severe backlashes. That said, no matter how evolved we eventually become – and I do believe that we will move beyond this, and make further breakthroughs – we will always be afraid of what we don’t know, and our knowledge will always be limited.
Wait a dang second, you’re thinking. This is supposed to be a pep talk?

Yes, it is. Because I’m going to go against the grain of the white male patriarchy for just a sec and say that the thing to fear is not fear itself. In fact, if we fear our fear, we just encourage it. Just as a for instance, say we are writers who are too afraid to create because we’ve just had it up to here with fear lately, thank you very much, and we think it’s time to look into accounting. We can do that – it would be a good way to avoid fear temporarily – but we will have done exactly what fear wants us to do to keep it alive. We will have avoided our most meaningful experiences and expressions, thus rendering ourselves even more unhappy and insecure -- opening the opportunity for fear to muscle in just a little bit more.

This doesn’t mean that we won’t feel fear, or that we can expect to get all enlightened and walk through our fears as if we don’t feel how painfully they burn our feet when we most want to move forward. Fear cannot be eradicated. For as long as humans are alive, we will break each others’ hearts. The trick is, I think, is to move forward anyway. Not because we are heartless, but because we are courageous. Courage comes from the French word for heart: Coeur. It means to have heart not just when there are rainbows and unicorns dancing around us, but when someone’s kicking the unicorns and saying rainbows don’t exist. The very moment, in fact, when we most want to turn inward is the moment to turn outward, to stand up and say we are absolutely, 110% terrified, that we are living with an unacceptable amount of fear, and that we are going to live through it and beyond it. Because fear is most dangerous when it festers, when we think it’s more than we or our loved ones can handle, and we try to either pretend it’s not there, or that we can overcome it. Those things are not happening; trust me, I’ve tried both six ways from Sunday.

But something far more astonishing is possible: to be joyous and creative and open-hearted and loving even when your heart is breaking under the strain of, say, simply reading the newspaper, or trying to live through the staggering humanitarian backlash on parade right now. We can live through this fear. We can create through this fear. We can do these things for ourselves, and for others, as a reminder that fear is nothing more than a bully who fights dirty because he knows he can never truly win.

As I sit here writing this, my husband is on the phone talking to his dad about retirement, my fourteen-year-old is cursing his math teacher under his breath while loudly sniffling from the cold he insists he doesn’t have, and my twelve-year-old daughter is making motions I don’t think she should know yet to film music videos on Musically. Meanwhile, my cat, who came in from outside this afternoon with a mysterious bloody scratch across his nose, has been trying to perform a Vulcan Mind Meld on me for the past fifteen minutes so I’ll change his food. Oh wait. He just jumped up and settled his chin across the upper right quadrant of my keyboard, his latest trick. Which is now making my fourteen-year-old stop cursing his math teacher long enough to look up and laugh, and my daughter to gently remind me for the fifteenth time that I promised to play a game with her. But at least my nine-year-old is in the shower! He’s just finishing the fourth Harry Potter book, and likes to give me a blow-by-blow of every development the moment after he reads it.

Let me be clear: I have never been happier, and my family is 95% of the reason behind that. But also, the life I’ve gladly created for myself makes a writing practice just a tiny bit challenging to create.

Usually, I avoid doing what I’ve just done: namely, taking stock of all the distractions in my life that, when added together, clearly point toward my having no chance of having a complete thought until at least 2031. Indeed, when I think of all these distractions, when I let them Mean something, it feels like my writing is going to have to go under for good.

As a species, we have never been more distracted. And of course distractions can sabotage all the best creative intentions. But there’s a big difference between letting them build into a larger sign that your writing practice will never get off the ground, and just navigating them as they come. It’s a subtle difference, but enormously helpful. There are certainly days when no act of God or man will help you protect the writing time you set aside, but on most days, if you don’t let what’s already distracted you affect how you feel when you do get time aside, even five minutes alone can keep you connected to your practice. And you’d be surprised what even five minutes a day devoted to tuning everything else out and visiting your creative mind space can do toward keeping your writing practice – and your writing itself – alive. It might only happen at 11:30 when you’re doing the dishes and thinking through that latest plot twist, but that counts, too. One minute of quality time devoted to a work when that’s all you have is no less significant than one minute of quality time devoted to a work when you have a hundred minutes to spare.

Like any lifelong activity, your practice must be resilient. It must be built up to flourish not only during those mythical weeks of time we all dream of having one day in the unspecified future to write, but in the moments between parenting or teaching or earning the money you need to keep a roof over your head. And believing in its resiliency – not deciding that you can’t write because you have children or a job to hold down or are otherwise occupied in the service of staying afloat and earning your keep – can do wonders to actually make it resilient. So don’t let the distractions or discouragements or roadblocks infect you; just see them for what they are, and get creative about sidestepping them – or using them for the inspiration and humor and life experience that are essential to all great works of art.

Thanks to a five-week jury service and a series of colorful ailments that my children have been generously sharing with each other, yesterday was the first time I returned to my novel-in-progress in a few months. And while I’m a huge fan of letting the fields go fallow every now and then, it’s never easy to return.

One of the not-so-helpful but incredibly stubborn ways I have of coping with opening a document that’s collected its share of virtual dust is to don my good little student britches and get to work. Yesterday, this took the form of deciding to sketch out the novel in its entirety – broad strokes only, of course, even my inner control freak thinks she’s reasonable – AND discovering a new way of sketching out novels in their entirety. I read about note cards and inventive Word documents and Excel templates until I found myself staring glassy-eyed into my new, free-for-30-days copy of MindMapper, a program I’d describe as something Martha Stewart and Spinoza might come up with if they had to tunnel out of prison.

Anyway, it will come as no surprise to any of YOU that once I had my chosen diagram and templates in place, I had no idea how I wanted to fill them in. My creative self was effectively DOA, killed off by the army of Type A code breakers that live in my head.
But as I stared, slack-jawed, at the computer, I remembered a few helpful things. One, no matter how much you know about writing, you will always stumble when encountering new or neglected terrain. In fact, it’s probably a good sign that you’re still willing to be open and vulnerable and willing to be surprised. Two, sometimes structure can be a great way into a difficult arena, but if you’re not careful, it can lock all the doors when you’re not looking. And three, just as you cannot control what goes in or out of a baby, you cannot control how your novel unfurls.

This last point is a little tricky. On the one hand, you will have to organize your novel as it develops, and in fact not doing enough organizing can mean it might wander off without you. Still, this is far better than trying to wrangle it into shape too soon. And further, oftentimes when you’re on the cusp of doing something truly innovative, you really need to beat back those stringent armies who want to come in and deal with that uneasy, thrilling feeling by slapping a seat belt on you before throwing on the breaks.

So how do you tell the difference? Well, you are more likely to seize up unnecessarily around work that is new or newly developing. In simpler terms, efficiency is rarely ever helpful when you’re starting a new creative project. If you clamp down too soon, you might miss out on all those weird and wonderful things your deeper self might want to say once the one that spends half the time on the Internet blows its wad. One exercise I love doing is to write the first line or paragraph of a new book or a new development in a book twelve different ways (thanks, Kenneth Fields!). Not only does this shake me out of my comfort zone, but it has the oddly soothing effect of satisfying those parts of my mind that want to just dig in and get it done.

Another great thing to do is to ask yourself if what you’re doing aligns with why you’re writing. If you’re writing to get rich and famous, this won’t work for you. But if you’re writing for the reasons that most of us write – because you know that personal expression is a gift that sours in the hands – noticing those moments when your energies stray from that truth can be surprisingly helpful.

Either way, the point is that what works in regular life doesn’t always work in the writing life, and that’s part of why writing is so appealing and so frustrating. The trick for me has been to recognize that these two lives will never totally assimilate, but they can certainly grow to inform each other in wonderful and beneficial ways. And as long as you can keep yourself from demanding that your writing follow the paths you set out for it, and forgive yourself when you slip up on this, you’ll be navigating the truly rough and wonderful waters of creativity with all the swagger you’ve earned. Sure, you might be scarred and tattooed and a little wonky-eyed, but no one – especially not you -- will be able to deny your courage.