So I got home about 6:00, after fighting my way through rush hour traffic, and what’s the first thing I feel compelled to do?

Write.

Wouldn’t you think that after a frustrating day, a day when every accomplishment, every task was completed with much virtual hair pulling and screaming, wouldn’t you think that after a day like that I’d crave nothing more than a big glass of wine, a huge box of chocolates, and my easy chair?

Why in the world would I come to the page after a day like that?

“We should write because writing is a powerful form of prayer and meditation, connecting us both to our own insight and to a higher and deeper level of inner guidance,” says Julia Cameron, in The Right to Write.  “Writing is good for the soul.”

While I don’t necessarily think of writing as cathartic, I do believe it helps me make sense of my world and myself.  There are times when a striking truth about my life suddenly appears before me on the screen, complete and utterly honest, coming straight from my spirit through my fingers and onto the page.  For a writer, there is a great connection between the heart, the mind, and the pen.  The act of setting words on the page seems to open a door directly into my writer’s soul, letting me in on the secrets that are stored there.

Perhaps that why writing is such a restorative act.  “Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises,” Anne Lamott writes in Bird by Bird.  “The actual act of writing turns out to be the best part.  It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony.  The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”

Indeed, there was a sense of relief, of reassurance, to come home, kick off my shoes, and curl up in my easy chair with my virtual pen and paper – my little laptop perched precariously on the chair’s overstuffed arm.  I admit, there was wine involved too, but the comfort and relaxation which flooded my body had more to do with the words flowing from my fingertips than from the alcohol flowing past my lips. 

Writing replenishes my spirit, it rejuvenates my mind, it relaxes my emotions.

And that’s why I come to the page.

How about you?  What brings you to the page, and why?

I’ve been procrastinating several writing projects for a couple of weeks, finding every way I could to keep myself from getting started on them. Part of the reason was feeling insecure about them – both were in rather new territory for me, and I was unsure of where or how to start. When I don’t feel confident, I have a bad habit of retreating into a corner rather than trying to get help or risking a possible failure. The other reason for my procrastination was a general malaise that’s come over me this month. Call it the January blahs or missing my Grandson or general age related apathy, it has affected my writing practice.

Whatever the reasons, I’ve been putting off writing.

A funny thing happened this week. I spent a morning rehearsing with my handbell group, and things were going really well. We were making good progress on some very difficult music, working out tempos, figuring out dynamic changes, analyzing the various paths of melodic and harmonic lines. I came home really energized from that rehearsal, sat down at my desk, and hammered out everything I needed to do to complete one of those projects.

The creative energy from my musical rehearsal had a positive after effect on my writing. I was no longer putting it off, but really getting it on!

How about you? Have you ever had a positive transference of energy from one creative endeavor to another? What helps you get back in the groove when you’ve been putting off writing?

But I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people that publication is not all that it is cracked up to me. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do – the actual act of writing – turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward. ~Ann Lamott in Bird by Bird

People write for all different reasons, and lately I’ve been struggling a little bit to determine my own. I’ve been reading a lot of blogs about writing, people who’ve managed to parlay their blog writing into successful businesses, people who have published successful eBooks based on their blogs, people who teach writing. People who spend a lot of time promoting their work on all sorts of social media sites.

Honestly, it’s made me feel a bit like a slacker. Like maybe I’m being lazy, just sitting here contentedly writing my little blogs every week.

Like I’m missing the boat.

So when I’m feeling confused about my personal writing experience I turn to some of my favorite “teachers.”

Like Ann Lamott. She says that sometime when we think we need the tea ceremony for the caffeine, all we need is the tea ceremony.

Do I need caffeine? Do I need to put myself out there for the big payoff? Or do I just need to write – about life in general and my own in particular, about the books I love and hope you’ll love too, about this writing life that I try (on my best days) to live?

I suspect I’m more of a ceremonial person than a caffeine oriented person.

Not that I don’t want to work at writing, to get better at it- because I do.

Not that I don’t want other people to read my writing – because I do.

But writing is a very personal means of expression for me and being able to set my thoughts and ideas on paper is hugely rewarding. I don’t need to worry about blog stats or Facebook “likes.” I don’t have to “follow” a zillion people on Twitter.

All I have to do is write. That’s the payoff.

And it’s fine for me.

How about you? Do you go for the caffeine in your writing life, or are you happy with the ceremony?

I’ve been cleaning out closets and drawers all over my house, muttering the words “be ruthless” as I try to decide what stays and what goes. As of yesterday, my hall closet is a mere shadows of its former self. For the first time in umpteen years, I can get a pair of gloves off the shelf without having a virtual storm of hats and gloves and scarves raining down on my head. And the towels and cosmetics in the bathroom linen closet all have their own separate and pristine stations.

Today I’m tackling my “office” – the room I call my own for reading, writing, meditating, and occasionally sleeping (when my husband’s snoring gets out of control). The winnowing process in this room could be painful – after all, this is where my books and notebooks and folders with ideas jotted on scraps of paper all end up.

How do I decide what’s worth keeping and what should be consigned to the circular file?

“The relationship between clutter and creativity is inverse,” wrote Jeff Goins, in a recent blog post titled Your Clutter is Killing Your Creativity. “The more you have of the former, the less you have of the latter. Mess creates stress. Which is far from an ideal environment for being brilliant.” 

Does mess create stress for you?  I know it does for me. Because my personality places a premium on neatness and order, my brain gets fatigued in cluttered environments. When I’m surrounded with haphazard piles of papers and books, I can feel my mind go into a frenzy. Where do I start? What do I look at first? Should I clean up this stack, file these documents?

These kinds of thoughts adversely affect the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the area in charge of executive functioning – the way we apply our thoughts to the completion of goals. When the goal is writing and creative thinking, it’s wise to keep this area of the brain as clutter free as possible.

So I’m off to put my prefrontal cortex to work on a system of organizing and ordering all the creative objects floating around my office space.

How about you? Do you think clutter affects your creative ability? Or do you thrive amidst artistic disarray?

But we all have a Christmas story of our own, and while it may never become the stuff of legend it might be  important to understanding who you are as a person and as a writer.

My childhood Christmases were idyllic. Although I’m an only child, I had many cousins who lived nearby, so our quiet, family-of-three centered Christmas mornings turned into huge extended family blowouts on Christmas afternoon and evening. The day was chock full of fun, food, presents, and all around excitement.

Years have passed, my cousins are scattered hither and yon and holidays have sometimes been lonely for this only child (who married an only child and raised an only child!)  I started dwelling on loss during the holidays, rather than on possibilities. I found myself thinking too much about what used to be, rather than appreciating what was, or looking forward to what could be. As a result, I sometimes dreaded the holiday, found only darkness in it, rather than hope or light.

But our Christmas story changed  in a big way this year, thanks to the birth of a baby – our six week old grandson. Hope was born again, so Christmas this year – though not the huge festive event of my childhood – regained a similar sense of excitement and anticipation.

Our writing stories might undergo similar transformations during the course of our lives. We get stuck in cycles, afraid to try new things, afraid to take risks. We lose the joy in putting words on the page, are unable to anticipate the finished product, or plan for the future. Like so many of my Christmases past, writing becomes stale and unproductive, something to dread rather than time to look forward to.

Creative stories can be rewritten, just as Christmas stories can. Like my grandson’s birth, new inspiration arrives or new success infuses your writing with hope, making it sparkle and shine again, giving it a renewed sense of purpose.

May you find that for your writing life this season.

What’s your Christmas story? Does it impact your writing life in any way?

The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what–these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. ~William Zinsser, On Writing Well

Be concise, I advised.

Just the facts.

That was valuable advice for my new medical writers, and it’s just as valuable for writers in all genres. When I go back to revise a blog post or an essay, I’m always dismayed at the amount of hyperbole. I tend to use two words when one will do, or add another clause to a sentence when the first one would have sufficed.

“Strip every sentence to its cleanest components,” Zinsser advised. Not an easy task in any form of writing, and even more complex when the writer aims to write beautifully as well as to tell a good story.

To do it, you must know exactly what you want to say with pinpoint precision, and you must not fear the sharp point of a red pen.

If you can accomplish it, you’ve created a masterwork.

Note: My friend Andi is hosting a writing contest that will test your skill in this department. It asks that you write about the Best Gift You Ever Received in 75 words or less.

Reading this novel has set me thinking about the way our sense of place effects our writing.  Russo also  wrote about small town life in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel Empire Falls, so it’s clearly something that preoccupies his writers’ mind.  His view is not the idyllic scene made popular by writers like Jan Karon in her Mitford series.  Russo’s characters  often seem stuck in place, as if their location were quick sand sucking them under.  They suffer, with their unfulfilled hopes and dreams tied like albatross around their emotional necks.

Writer’s are often advised to write about what you know, and I imagine this refers to locale as well as subject matter.  Certainly it’s possible to write effectively about places you’re never lived, although to do it well would require much research and surely some personal visits.  But I think we are drawn to write about the places that have touched our hearts, that dwell within us, sometimes more deeply than we even know.  I think we develop a realtionship with the place we live, it’s geography, it’s society, it’s history, and that relationship is reflected in the way we write about place, in the location of our stories, and the environments we imagine.  Our readers will feel this deep relationship, and it will transport them more directly into the setting about which we write.

I lived my entire life in the midwest, in the suburbs of Detroit, surrounded by working class people who live comfortably, but don’t have a great deal of “extras.”   Although my physical roots are here in the midwest, I also have spiritual roots, places that seem to call to me even though I’ve never spent much physical time in them.  The American south, home to my maternal ancestors, holds a great fascination for me, and I occasionally feel a surprising longing to be amidst the great Smoky Mountains, or wander barefoot through cool Kentucky bluegrass.  And the three weeks I spent traveling in the South of England, staying in little towns scattered throughout Kent and Sussex, felt oddly comfortable, as if I were returning to a place I’d once lived rather than visiting a foreign country for the first time.

It makes me wonder if our spirits have a memory, if the places we’ve come from over time become engrained in souls.  Toni Morrison wrote, “You know they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage.  Occasionally the river floods these places.  “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding, it is remembering.  Remembering where it used to be.  Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.”

In her book, Writing Begins With the Breath, Larainne Herring asks “What does your piece of the earth talk about? What stories are hidden in the houses? The unpaved streets? The rusted mailboxes? You don’t have to travel the world to find your landscape.  You’ve grown up in one, and whether you connect with it or know without a doubt you’re in the wrong place, you’re still affected by it.  We’ re all people.  It’s the place we’re living in that shapes our behavior, attitudes, desires, and activities.”

How about you? How does place figure in your writing?  Do you feel comfortable in the place you live, or do you feel at odds with your atmosphere? Do you convey that in your writing?  What stories does your location have to tell?

Write On This:  

“The loss of a place isn’t really so different from the loss of a person.  Both disappear without permission, leaving the self diminished, in need of testimony and evidence.”   Bridge of Sighs, Richard Russo

Write about a place you’ve lost….

The breakfast table was beside the window, and the sun caught the facets of the glass butter dish, setting them aglow. The butter on the toast melted in puddles, the shape of continents. The minute hand on the clock clicked from one designated minute to the next. It would go on like that all hour, all day. This is what happiness is, thought Nancy. And while so much of what she thought and felt went into her writing, she knew she’d never make use of this moment. It was hers to be remembered, hers alone.   ~from The Writing Circle, by Corrine Demas

Yesterday afternoon I spent almost an hour in the rocking chair, my two week old grandson cradled in my arms, rocking him and singing softly while he gazed raptly at the multicolored lights on the Christmas tree. As much as I love words and believe in their power, I don’t have words within me to adequately describe that kind of happiness.

There are moments in life that defy written description. But the sensation of those moments becomes indelibly impressed on the writer and inform her senses and her emotions. While she may not consciously “use” them in her work, the way they change her experience is likely to be conveyed at some point in her writing.

My experiences with my grandson in the past two weeks have been deeply emotional and profoundly personal. While I may never write about them in detail, they have left a mark on my heart and in my soul that will change the way I see the world.

And the way I write about it.

How about you? Are there moments you’ll never consciously “use” in your writing, but that will nevertheless have a huge impact on it?

The novice should try some fairly easy dish that requires long cooking. The novice should consult several recipes and read them over a few times until he or she has gotten them straight in his or her mind. And the novice should call up the best cook he or she knows and listen to what that person says. And then the novice should stick to it. ~Home Cooking, by Laurie Colwin

Since my “retirement” I’ve had the time (and inclination) to dabble with Cooking. I mean, of course, the kind of cooking that’s more complex than the standard recipes I’ve relied on for the past three decades of homemaking. To inspire me, I turned to some well known food writers for their insight and experience in the art of food preparation and enjoyment. Home Cooking, by Laurie Colwin, was mentioned as one I should read.

Life and art intersect all over the place, so it’s not surprising that Cooking would have things to teach the Writer. Colwin’s advice to the novice cook jumped off the page and set me thinking that it served just as well for the person planning their first novel as preparing their first dinner party.

Should the novice writer jump right in and begin the magnum opus that will make their name in literary history? Probably not. “Some fairly easy dish that requires long cooking” would certainly be more appropriate. Start out by writing a journal in which you describe events that happen to you, characters you know well or chance to meet in coffee shops. Write a little bit every day for a long number of days (maybe forever), write easily and freely and don’t worry overmuch about getting it perfect just yet.

Consult other writers and teachers of writing. Learn the rules of grammar and composition. Read about writing and how others go about the process until you get it straight in your mind.

Call up the best writers you know by reading their books over and over. Study the way they put sentences together and string those sentences along on the page. Listen to the rhythm of their words and learn what works. Find other writers around you and have a conversation with them. Listen to what they say about how they prepare meals of words.

Most importantly of all, stick to it. Determination and patience are the keys to perfection, in the kitchen or on the page.

How about you? What’s your recipe for writing success?

“We want our playing to take the black and white notes off the page and bring them into full color,” she would say. This was achieved by careful attention to dynamics, phrasing, melodic  and harmonic lines, and overall visual presentation, so the group was “as much fun to watch as it was to hear.”

I’m well acquainted with the musical practice of analyzing each line of music, looking for the climax of the phrase, searching out the melody notes which might be hidden amongst the inner voices and the leading tones in chords. I know how to emphasize notes in order to make the music more meaningful as well as more pleasurable to the listener. It’s a painstaking task, looking at a piece of music line by line, analyzing, dissecting, listening and learning to feel the best possible interpretation.

I never thought about applying this process to writing until this morning.

Beth Kephart, is one of my favorite writers and blogging friends, an author well-known for extraordinarily lyrical and descriptive writing style, the very embodiment of the “writing in color” idea. Beth  is hosting a sentence challenge for NaNoWriMo participants. She is seeking  ”a single sentence as it was first written in the heat of a NaNo moment, and that same sentence after it has been reconsidered, revised.”

As  examples, she shows us “before and after” versions of  sentences from her own work in progress. The first example is perfectly functional, grammatically correct, and clearly conveys its meaning. But the revised sentence reads as smoothly as warm dark chocolate, leaving a satisfying aftertaste in the readers brain. The first sentence is a clearly black and white while the second jumps off the page in living color.

Beth has said she can spend hours, days in fact, getting one sentence just right.  ”I care perhaps too much about language,” she writes in a blog post. ” I want to take risks with it, yearn to push it.  (…) because I think we have a responsibility as writers not just to tell stories, but to try to tell stories artfully, with originality and daring.”

I never fully understood the possibility of such an undertaking, but I’m beginning to.  Crafting colorful sentences requires the skillful combination of vocabulary and grammar but also that unexplainable “X” factor which allows you to recognize when the words appear in living color. Like any skill, it takes practice and committment plus careful and thoughtful study, particularly study of other writers who are successful with this concept.

Each writers voice brings a unique style to their sentences, just as a musicians touch does to their instrument. Beyond  basic good writing skills the best writers will take an extra step to compose sentences which transcend black and white ink on the page and develop into vivid colors in the reader’s mind.

That’s really writing in color.