Photo by hamedmasoumi

I often blame my temporary inabilities to write on my surroundings. Sometimes I can’t think when it’s too quiet and other times, I can’t concentrate if I’m anywhere but a library. Other days it has to do with the day of the week. Although I have the time on weekends, all I want to do is stay in bed and watch bad television. On the weekdays, when I’m super charged with energy, I have to concentrate on other responsibilities. It’s a lose-lose situation. When I think about the fact that I have to compromise my writing for the time or the place, I feel sad. I wish I could think of a more eloquent synonym, but it really makes me sad that that’s what it’s come to.

I often think that the only way I’ll be able to write anything worthwhile is to go hide away in a cabin for months until I come up with something that I find fairly decent. I need the quiet, the change of atmosphere, the scenery to inspire me, to make me come up with ideas that the concrete jungles of Los Angeles are  stifling.

Writing habits are an interesting topic and I’m not entirely sure if I’ve discovered mine yet. I tend to write ideas down and dwell on them for a long time. I’ll write the title of a story I want to work on and save it, or I’ll see something on the news or hear someone having a conversation and realize how great it would be to include that in a story. Mostly, I think my inspiration comes from life, from relationships, from what people say and do, to what they don’t say and do. I try to draw from reality as much as possible because for me, reality is just as entertaining, if not more, than fantasy.

I write everywhere. I write on post-it notes, notebooks that I haven’t used for years, scraps of paper, the notepad I use at work, I even take down notes on my iPhone. I’ve tried to buy fancy notebooks so I can keep my thoughts in one place, but they always seem to escape me. These days, when I do write in somewhere other than a centralized place, I take my post-it notes and my scraps and everything else and tape them in my main notebook.

I tend to write bits of ideas on paper and then expand those ideas on my computer. I like writing while I’m sitting on my bed, with a cup of tea, especially when it’s raining. My dream would be to have one of those window-sill type ledges where you pile up pillows and read or write.

I stumbled across a blog, Rodcorp, that highlighted some of the work and writing habits of some of my favorite writers and people. I echo a lot of their sentiments.

Jonathan Safran Foer, who is best known for his 2002 novel, “Everything is Illuminated,” has habits that sound like mine:

I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch, and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand. Essentially, I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance.

Stephen Fry seems to have encapsulated my fears:

As a young writer–I was then contemplating how to move forward after my first effort–I felt so enthusiastically and agonizingly aware of the blank pages in front of me. How could I fill them? Did I even want to fill them? Was I becoming a writer because I wanted to become a writer or because I was becoming a writer? I stared into the empty pages day after day, looking, like Narcissus, for myself.

Virginia Woolf does what I feel I must do:

I don’t take another job. I don’t do anything. I go up to my house in the country and pull out all the plugs, virtually. I just do it nonstop until I’m finished. I envy writers who can write on planes and take a break for a week and then get back to it. I have to get into a sort of zone. [...] With writing, I don’t know what it is. I just have to get into a complete world. It has something to do with an inability to concentrate, which is the absolute bottom line of writing.

I’m hoping to get a better sense of what I’m capable of in terms of writing and also my habits this year.