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I have never experienced writer’s block. As a journalist, I never had time for it.  When I worked for BusinessWeek, I had to write an online story or two each day plus hone a pitch for the magazine–not to mention spend the vast majority of my day reporting. I could not sit and stare at my computer screen wondering how to write the perfect first sentence. I wrote an okay sentence, then another.After I was done, I reworked the lede to be more attention grabbing. I tightened up paragraphs and replaced verbs with more active ones. I stripped out any passive voice. Most of all, I made sure that I was writing the truth as I saw it to the best of my ability.  I write novels in the same way. First and foremost, I do the reporting. I research the topics that I want to explore, write up character psych profiles, back stories, and arcs, outline the plot and themes. I write this all up in a book bible. Then, I start the story. Sometimes, the words aren’t great. The verb choice is bland. The characters sound mechanical. I end up deleting dialogue, scrapping entire scenes. I’ll decide that a day’s work was wasted. But, I never stare at the screen waiting for inspiration of the perfect sentence to come to mind. I believe that my fingers will find the sentence if they just keep moving.  Writers write. And if we can’t think of what we want to say, we write until we figure it out.      

 I love conversations with readers and writers. There is nothing like a discussion about books and words with your people. There are endless subjects, boring to most people, that can go on forever, some surprisingly inflammatory. A topic like punctuation may be a little like talking about religion for others. Let’s just not talk about the Oxford comma.             Only book lovers understand how serious a question about reading habits can be. Do you read more than one book at a time? Does it matter if they are fiction or non-fiction? Do you ever read a book twice? More than twice? And now for the question only asked in a whisper. Do you ever not finish a book?           Not finish a book? Isn’t that blasphemy? For some it is. Many books, particularly those written long ago have a classic was of starting slow and working up into a sizzle. I’m a huge Jane Austen fan. Ever since my English teacher, Danny Dwyer, forced me to read Pride and Prejudice in the last semester of my senior year when it was almost impossible to make me do anything, I have been a rabid fan of Jane and eternally grateful to Mr. Dwyer, who died tragically two years later at the age of 34. For years, I reread Pride and Prejudice as a rite of spring.         Had I not been forced to suffer the first half of the book, I’m not sure I would ever have finished or known the joy of Jane Austen’s other books. Jane is a slow simmer, for sure. But once she gets you, you can’t put the books down. At least, I can’t.        Yet, others disagree about Jane and I respect and understand that. After adoring Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series and another stand-alone, I was so excited to have Life After Life delivered to my Kindle. But when the protagonist died over and over again, I gave up, not willing to read 512 pages just so I could say I endured the latest literary gimmick. It became the first and only book I have returned from my Kindle and I have no regret about it.       I’ve read too many books where I hung in there, certain the author wouldn’t betray my trust and would deliver in the end, not that it had to be a happy ending. But after being entertained by a Barbara Michaels novel while combating the flu, I found myself flinging the book, fortunately a paperback, across the room when the resolution involved someone walking through a door. A closed door. No book has infuriated me more for “hanging in there” with the author than Anita’s Schreve’s “The Last Time They Met.” It would be a spoiler if I told you what caused my wrath, so I’ll leave it to you to decide if you want to read the book, but was I angry? Enough to toss this one through the room and it was a hardcover. A few years later, I heard Anita Shreve tell a crowded room that my reaction wasn’t exactly unusual and I had a chance to tell her how I “handled” the situation. She was very gracious and even seemed to enjoy that her readers were reacting with gusto, and even more so when I told her the book had been given to me by her high school English teacher.     But had I known either book was going to take me where it did, I would have stopped reading long before I hit the end. While I am a writer and a reader and lacking in anything beyond basic math skills, I do know this. There are more books I want to read than time left in which to read them. So without apology, I now say what I hesitated to declare before I was fifty. Too many books, not enough time.     Will I risk not knowing the next Jane Austen because I don’t read to the end? I don’t think so. I trust I’ve learned how to distinguish a deliciously slow start from a book headed nowhere. Do you ever stop reading a book before the end or do you hang in there till the finish?  

 If you think I am going to tell you how to take a room in your home and make it your writing sanctuary, you’re reading the wrong blog. Or at least this blog on the wrong day. Soon I will share the details about how much fun I had turning a eight by ten foot shed into the sacred spot where I spill my words, but not now.            Today I’m talking about space in a more global sense. Many of us are so accustomed to multi-tasking, multi-careers, multi-homes, cars, pets, and multi-everything else, that we have become overwhelmed with the details of daily living. What to take out of the freezer for dinner, which bill is due online, where to be in the morning and how to get from there to the place you have to be in the afternoon, leaving food and water out for the pets, getting the car inspected let alone putting gas in the sucker, who picks up the kid at soccer, is it my day to do the car pool. It’s exhausting. If you’re like me, you make lists everyday and at the end of the week, you highlight what you didn’t cross off, so you can start the list for the next week. I once threw out about fifty notebooks filled with just lists but only after perusing them and realizing my entire life could be chronicled in a compilation of lists.            When do I write, where do I write, what do I write are questions often left to fill in the spaces between what is sometimes referred to as “The Activities of Daily Living” or “ADL.” The stories about writers trying to create space during “down time” when they aren’t consumed by the ADL’s that gobble up your life are legendary. John Grisham wrote on the train while commuting to work. Claire Cook of “Must Love Dogs” fame wrote her first books in her minivan while waiting for her kids at activities. I remember hearing an author at Book Passage (a fabulous book conference at the bookstore in Corte Madeira, California with the same name) recount how she would hide in her laundry room where she was sure her husband and kids would never venture just to secure alone-time when she could write to the humming of the washer and dryer. The struggle to find time and space to write is nothing new and is suffered by New York Times bestsellers (well maybe less once they’ve made the list), mid-list authors, and those praying to be published.             As if the quest to find time and space isn’t enough, add the booming voice inside reminding us, “You must write every day.” I have heard this so often, I am certain there must be a tablet on a mountain somewhere with this inscription. The older I get, the more I hate rules, especially when I realize that the people who break through and succeed have almost all broken the rules. So write every day. If you can. But if you can’t, then write whenever you can and don’t beat yourself up. I couldn’t write every day and still managed to write six full-length novels, two of which have been published.            The constant struggle about time and writing raised different questions for me as I grew older. How did I want to spend the time I have left on the planet?  Was it working as a lawyer twelve hours a day to live a lifestyle where I had to squeeze in time for writing when writing was what gave me the most pleasure? I was living in a ten-room house with a husband, a dog and a cat. The 2015 winter from hell in New England underscored that we basically only lived in three of those rooms. We sat in the living room in front of our fireplace, cooked in the kitchen and slept in our bedroom. Why were we perpetuating an existence that required efforts that no longer rewarded us? For seven vacant rooms and a soul that was beginning to feel withered?            I decided I wanted time and space to write. I downsized my law practice. My husband, already retired, applauded and was thrilled we would have more time together. We began the excavation of our life, emptying and selling our home of thirty-three years. With every item I tossed or donated, I could feel space within me opening up. The dumpsters we filled were replaced by a sense of freedom and lightness. We now live little and light and divide our time between two locations near the ocean, which we both love. I know that for many people with families, jobs, and lists of what they have to do each day, it may seem impossible to discard the things that will create space in your life to write. But if you look over the tasks on your “to-do” lists, ask if they make your life better. Maybe treat yourself to a dumpster and experience what getting rid of stuff does for your soul and your writing.

 Anyone who has ever read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way knows that she is a strong proponent of certain tools to nurture the artist’s spirit. I’d love to write about her first tool, Morning Pages, but will wait for another time because I’ve just returned from the Ultimate Artist’s Date, a two-week trip to Italy.            An Artist’s Date is an excursion, preferably solo, to a destination intended to expand your creative resources. They are intentional and sometimes self-indulgent, but never to be suffered with guilt. You might meander through a yarn shop, even if you have never picked up a knitting needle in your life, just to ingest the colors and textures around you. Or you could visit an old church you’ve always been curious about and sit in the quiet letting the atmosphere surround you, perhaps bringing you to a different time.Playing with finger paints was one of my first artist dates. I was able to return to my childhood and recall the feel of the cool paint on my fingers traveling across the smooth paper. A stationery store near me is the perfect spot for an occasional artist’s date. I can pick up journals of all sizes and styles, feeling the difference in the paper, contemplating whether it is better to write on lines or without them.My trip to Italy was one artist date after another. Certainly, seeing Michelangelo’s David in Florence made for a spectacular one. The Leaning Tower of Pisa, Pompeii, the Sistine Chapel, and the Coliseum all were occasions where I was not only enchanted by art and history, but also able to fill my artist’s well (another Julia term).            Yet, it wasn’t just the extraordinary sites that filled my creative pores. I found the chanting in Assisi soulfully quieting, making me think of how many centuries human ears have been soothed by those same sounds.In Venice, I found myself looking up into open windows where curtains fluttered in the breeze over canals wondering who exactly lived there and what was their story.            On the rides from one location to another, I would observe the laundry hung out on clotheslines and try to figure out how the people whose clothes I was watching lived. I was surrounded by scents and smells from garlic cooking to sophisticated cologne to rosemary the size of hedges to exhaust from too many cars in Rome.            So many stories rose within me during my two-week Artist Date. My senses were continuously pampered and spoiled. I was reminded that good writing comes from indulging the senses and filling the soul with images, sounds, and tastes.            It may be a while before I am able to experience another Ultimate Artist’s Date, but I will not forget that once a week, even a scaled down one fills the artist’s well and soothes the writer’s sorry soul.            Have you been on an Artist’s Date lately, dear reader?

 I’m fighting the battle of the middle arm rest. The man next to me, a very big man who doesn’t quite fit in his economy class airplane seat, is spilling over into my space. We’re shoulder to shoulder, actually touching, but I refuse to yield. I won’t sit folded up like a pretzel for three and a half hours.  Air travel fascinates me. A group of people who don’t know each other are crammed (for those of us denied the luxuries of first or business class) together in a box  suspended 38,000 feet in the air and forced to get along with each other for hours. You sort of have privacy. You stake out your territory with your invisible walls, your bag under your half of the under seat space, your laptop or e-reader or book (yes, people still take these on planes) in front of you like armor. You may wear headphones or earbuds to signal you want to tune out everything around you and be left alone. Some people sleep (or try to in those horrid little coach seats). Some jerks use their electronic devices to listen to music without using headphones. (Yes, you are a jerk if you do this. The entire plane does not want to hear your tunes. Use headphones or earbuds.) Some people chat with their traveling companions. Some people chat, or try to, with the stranger sitting next to them, even when it’s obvious (or should be from the book/headphones/lack of eye contact/snoring) the stranger next to them isn’t feeling talkative. I write. (True confession, tonight I slept. It was 11 pm, I’d been up since 5 am, and I had to be back at work the next morning at 6:30 am.) I get a lot of writing done on airplanes. I have an uninterrupted block of time. Excluding mister music-with-no-headphones, there are few distractions. Just enough going on around me to act as white noise. I’m surrounded by inspiration if I’m stuck for a character: her nose, his ear, his hair, her outfit. Maybe even my next literary murder victim. Hint, hint, Mr. Music. And, yes, I won the armrest battle. What do you do on airplanes?

“Give someone a book and they’ll read for a day. Teach someone to write a book and they’ll experience a lifetime of paralyzing self-doubt.”
Writing my second novel is, apart from going to medical school, the hardest thing I’ve ever done. My first novel was challenging. I had to learn the art of story craft, of how to create characters readers want to stick with for almost three hundred pages, of writing scenes that turned pages. But my first novel came with lower expectations. There was no precedent to live up to. These were brand new characters having new adventures. They carried no baggage.
Book two is different. The characters already exist. They have a history. They behave in certain ways. I find myself saying, “Gethsemane wouldn’t do that” or “O’Reilly would never say such a thing.” The characters have taken on lives of their own and I’m afraid to write more about them because I might mess up, get it wrong. They’ve become canonized  (at least in my head) and woe be to she who violates canon.
Luckily, I have an editor who is patient and holds my hand through my meltdowns. She reassures me I haven’t lost my mind, other writers struggle with the same things, and at the end of the day the characters are mine. I can make them do what I need them to do for the story. I just need to get out of my own way and write.  Has anything you created ever taken on a life of its own?