I have always been a writer. It wasn’t really an ambition so much as a way of living, thinking, and experiencing the world. I’ve written friends letters by hand, sometimes ten or even twenty pages long. I’ve written poems for myself and for others, and essays, technical documents, presentations, screenplays and even advertisement copy.
Some time after my novel was accepted for publication, I started getting questions about my “process.” How often did I write? How did I write despite a full-time job? How long did it take me to write a novel?
I started answering those questions, but soon realized they weren’t the right ones. What works for me isn’t going to work for someone with children, or a morning person, or someone who wants to make a living out of writing, or pretty much anyone who isn’t me.
So instead I started telling this story.
Around 2007, I had been out of college and working in tech for two years, and already I was starting to miss having time to read and write. I joined a Masters program in the hopes that it would inspire me, or at least force me to read, but I only wound up even more exhausted than before. Several people tried to console me, telling me they too had unfinished novels and abandoned writerly dreams, but that only made me panic. I was not okay losing that part of myself, and so I went on unpaid leave.
For three months I dallied around Europe, reading books and visiting museums in Germany and Italy, and then went to Oxford for a three week summer program in creative writing. Until then, I’d been on an expedition rather similar to the Dharma bums and beat poets of a different age, seeking to “find my muse” in the Old World. I’d been inspired at Oxford before, surely it would happen again.
But instead I was confronted with a different situation entirely. I was to wake up every morning (already not in my comfort zone), grab breakfast and sit down to a long, painfully analog writing session. There would be writing prompts, reading prompts, exercises and discussions, but I was suddenly “writing” for more than eight hours a day.
There were many days, particularly in that first week, when my brain simply wouldn’t function, never mind take flights of imagination. All I wrote for a prompt on chocolate was “I love chocolate. I love dark chocolate. And chocolate sauce, especially with wine.”
By week three, though, something had shifted. Writing had become a habit. I could reliably produce five hundred words of not-utter-crap on any prompt. What I’d realized was that I had to let go of the idea that some Muse would visit me with inspiration. Instead, I had to put myself in the mood, find ways to inspire myself, and accept that writing something was better than writing nothing at all.
I wrote Driving by Starlight in hotel rooms and airplanes, on business trips and weekends. I went on retreats to remote hostels with writer friends, so I could spend time with the people I loved but still write. I started to collect favorite books, music, art or landscapes, and started to engineer moments of inspiration. I ensured my writing instruments worked for me ergonomically and aesthetically, so that I could sit for six hours a day, even ten sometimes, and write.
Below: Lime-green LAMY fountain pen with matching Gustav Klimt notebook, on a flight out of Vienna.
A doctor friend once told me that every med student had to accept the inevitability of “butt time”—if you wanted to become a doctor, no matter how intelligent you were, you had to spend several hours in a chair, studying. The same is true for anyone who wants to become a writer. A few people will luck out, of course, but for most of us, the only path to success is to write, and write, and write some more.