An intriguing collection of unlike things ends up on the New York Times list of 100 notable books each year. A recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review about the blurring of fiction and nonfiction claims that nonfiction is losing its “frisson.” I hardly agree—see my essay in Talking Story—but if you need further convincing, go no further than the NYT’s top 100.

Here is the Connie Cull:

I draw much inspiration from reading about the lives of writers and artists, and this year offers a good crop of such biographies, including Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, by Carol Sklenicka; Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, by Linda Gordon; and Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch. (“Witty, obsessed and almost inhumanly brave,” wrote Joy Williams in her review of this short story writer. “O’Connor was peculiar, her work even more so.”)

Some question whether memoir counts as journalism—or narrative journalism. I tend to include it in the broader category of nonfiction, and scrutinize the credibility of the authors. These two pass muster: City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s, by Edmund White, and Closing Time: A Memoir, by Joe Queenan.

Then there’s the world of ideas, some of the hardest books to write for a lay audience. Robert Wright succeeded in The Evolution of God, as did the every-interesting Rebecca Solnit in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.

For sheer drama—reported tales that read like a novel but tell us something important about our world—my picks are Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers (a pal from the early days of Wired and his then-magazine, Might), The Lost City Of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, by David Grann (my newest favorite writer for his mastery of character and suspense), and The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel. (I’m cheating on that last one: it’s not on the Times Top 100, but I think it should be.)

And then there’s Columbine, by Dave Cullen, which does make the list. Cullen is a Denver journalist with whom I’ve stayed in touch since we both attended a Niemen Foundation seminar. Reviewer Jennifer Senior commends him for resisting narrative cliché (i.e., starting his tale 48 hours before the notorious killing spree of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, stopping the frame just before they fired their guns, and then spooling back to the very beginning, with the promise of trying to explain how the two boys got to this twisted pass). In my book this is reason enough for nomination. But narrative skill takes more than just resisting cliché. About the central surprise of the book Senior writes, “I expected a story about misfits exacting vengeance, because that was my memory of the media consensus — Columbine, right, wasn’t there something going on there between goths and jocks? In fact, Harris and Klebold were killing completely at random that day. Their victims weren’t the intended targets at all; the entire school was. Columbine, it turns out, was a failed attempt at domestic terrorism.”

How’s that for frisson?

A recent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review set me on edge. In “The Rise of True Fiction,” my colleague Alissa Quart writes about a trend she perceives in the literary landscape: “an increase in the blurring of neat and certain categories of ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’ into something that we might call ‘true fiction.’”

I would recommend the essay to anyone practicing fiction, nonfiction, or memoir, with some caveats.

Quart launches her column by discussing The Hurt Locker, a fictional action-movie whose “forensic, formalist style” she writes, aligns it with documentaries or biopics. (The film is rooted in a deeply reported article originally published in Playboy, and its author worked hand-in-glove with the film’s director.) Then Quart mentions books whose authors do the deep reporting, then depart from strict facts in their books—for example, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge, by Josh Neufeld, What Is the What, by Dave Eggers, and Half Broke Horses, by Jeannette Walls. The latter calls her recent book about her grandmother a “true life novel.”

So far, I’m with Quart. The list of writers who report or conduct historical research and then write fiction based on real-life stories is long and broad: in addition to the trio Quart mentions (Orwell, Capote, Mailer), there are Mark Twain (whose reporting set up his satire), John Steinbeck (whose journalism informed The Grapes of Wrath), and contemporary novelists whose deep historical research makes their fiction come alive, like David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars), and Ian McEwan (Atonement). And let’s not forget Shakespeare, whose history plays were based on the lives of English kings and used events like The Wars of the Roses as departure points.

It’s when Quart starts talking about nonfiction that I begin to quibble. Or, in certain cases, quake. She makes the surprising assertion that “the category ‘nonfiction’ no longer has the frisson it once did or the assurance that a book or film will sell.” Tell that to Dexter Filkins, whose balancing of journalistic restraint and downright eloquence found expression in The Forever War. Or to Anne Hull, whose reporting on Walter Reed won her the Pulitzer, among other awards. Or to Adam Hochschild, whose King Leopold’s Ghost hardly disappeared into remainder bins.

(And when has there ever been “assurance” that an important work of nonfiction would find a commercial audience?)

Quart, who is a fellow this year at the Nieman Foundation, where I teach narrative journalism, quotes another colleague, Andrea Pitzer, the editor of the Narrative Digest: “The newshole for narrative nonfiction is shrinking,” Pitzer says. “You have to have a lot of dazzle to get it published at all. Letting the work go over a little to fiction lets it be more salable.”

The newshole may indeed be shrinking, but no editor I know would prefer a piece, however dazzling, that departed from fact over one with startling news or insight. There is a big difference between letting work “go over a little to fiction” and borrowing the techniques of fiction, which is, I suspect, what Pitzer meant. (Full discloser: I was the editor of the Digest for two years; Pitzer succeeded me.)

But since when are those techniques—plotting a drama, crafting character, describing scenes, capturing dialogue, parceling out details to heighten suspense, finding a narrative voice—the province of fiction anyway? Most of us consider them just elements of great writing, any great writing.

Quart says hipster online editor Larry Smith suggests that the graphic novel A.D. is just journalism in a new guise, and she quotes John D’Agata, the editor of the new anthology The Lost Origins of the Essay, who asks “Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art?”

Perhaps the problem is the word nonfiction, which may be so broad as to blur some important lines. I would argue that we indeed read journalism—news stories, whether told in a straight news style or in an artful narrative style—for information, and we want that information to be credible and fair. We read narrative journalism—factual stories told using writerly (not fictional) techniques like plot, suspense, description, and artful language—for information, too; it tells us something important about our world. And we read essays and even blogs for the ideas of their writers. Art—and certainly artfulness—can surface into any of these forms, but the primary reason to read nonfiction is to learn factual truths about our world.

Memoir, one the other hand, is a form that does slide away from reported facts and toward remembered impressions. That, indeed, we read for its emotional rather than factual truths.

In the end, perhaps we blur lines by lumping a variety of genres writing into the binary categories of “fiction” and “nonfiction.”

—Constance Hale

I’ll bet you’ve had your fill this week of the former beauty queen, former mayor of Wasilla, former governor of Alaska, former vice-presidential candidate. I know I have. So while the pundits talk on and on about Sarah Palin, I space out and listen to their grammar.

I have to admit, I was surprised to hear Gwen Ifill and Bob Woodward, on ABC’s This Week, screw up their pronouns when discussing Going Rogue. It was the pronouns “going rogue” in their exchange:

Ifill: “Women will be drawn to her story—and that’s who she’s speaking to…. These are people who are ignored, who nobody counts into their thinking.”

Woodward: “You can be drawn to somebody’s story—and buy their book and read their book. That doesn’t mean you want them to be President, or that you’re drawn to them to lead.

OK, OK, it’s not fair to expect perfect grammar when people are speaking extemporaneously. But c’mon! These are two of the country’s top journalists!

Gwen, it should be “whom she’s speaking to” and “whom nobody counts into their thinking.”

Bob, please. Isn’t one Sarah sufficient? Somebody is singular, so readers can buy her book and read her book and want her to be president and be drawn to her to lead.

Doesn’t Bob Woodward read this blog? I just wrote about Barak Obama’s rogue pronouns a few weeks ago!

A writer/psychotherapist offers his insight on creativity

An old deodorant commercial once proclaimed, ‘If you’re not a little nervous, you’re really not alive.’

Pretty sage advice, even though the only thing at stake was staying dry and odor-free. But there is something to be said for accepting—and learning to navigate—the minor turbulences of life. I’m talking here about common, everyday anxiety. The jitters. Butterflies.

This is particularly true for writers, whose very feelings are the raw materials of their craft. No matter how mundane, the small anxieties can swarm like bees, making work difficult; distractions, like an impending visit from the in-laws, money worries, or that funny noise the Honda’s been making.

Then there are the more virulent writer’s anxieties, shared by few in other lines of work: Your agent hasn’t returned your phone calls. You are three weeks past deadline. You have Act Two problems.

In other words, you’re becoming a clone of the Charlie Kaufman character in Adaptation—bleary-eyed, unshaven, sleep-deprived, staring pathetically at the empty computer screen, hoping for inspiration and yearning for another cup of coffee, and maybe a nice banana-nut muffin. A dozen nagging, self-mocking thoughts echo in your head: You’re untalented, a fraud. You’re getting old and fat. No woman (or man) will ever want to sleep with you again. Your life is over.

These kinds of feelings require work, to be sure, if only to be validated (and then gently challenged) by a supportive therapist, mate, good friend, or fellow writer. These deeply embedded, childhood-derived, seemingly inescapable Dark-Night-of-the-Soul feelings can, in fact, be crippling, regardless of your level of craft or years of experience. When it comes to these writer demons, none of us escapes.

And, as I’ve said countless times to the writer clients in my practice, struggling with these doubts and fears doesn’t say anything about you as a writer. Other than that you are a writer.

Frankly, this difficult emotional terrain is where a writer lives much of the time—in a matrix of triumphs and defeats, optimism and despair, impassioned beliefs and crushing deflations.

And, believe me, this is equally true for both beginning writers and accomplished, battle-hardened veterans.

But there’s another kind of anxiety that emerges occasionally in a writer’s life: the kind of gut-wrenching, dizzying upheaval from within that throws everything you think you know into doubt and that scares you to the very core. A shattering divorce. The death of a family member. A spate of sudden, inexplicable panic attacks. Terrorism. War.

Then, what balm is there to offer—or to receive—that doesn’t seem trivial or woefully inadequate? Catharsis and validation, the foundation of most psychotherapeutic work, feel like mere word games. Medication, while often clinically appropriate, seems at best an armoring against something primal that’s working within you.

What is a writer to do with that level of anxiety?

Use it.

Because when all that’s left is writing, writing’s all that’s left.

What kind of writing? It may be numbed-out and shapeless at first; chaotic and unsatisfying. It may be dark and ugly, or self-pitying and shameless. It may be a blind, angry clawing at the air with words and images.

The important thing to acknowledge, to accept and to make use of is the fact of the anxiety—its weight, its size, and its implacability at this time in your life. It’s there, as immoveable as a brick wall; as deep and fathomless as a sea.

So you must ask yourself this question: Is there a character in the story I’m working on who feels such anxiety; who feels as overwhelmed, as out of control, as terrified as I? 
Is there a way I can funnel my passion into the story I’m writing, searching for the words and rhythms that will give my article new power?

If so, plunge headlong into writing the hell out of whatever you are working on: give that fictional character your voice, your fears, your dreads. Use these anxieties to create dramatic scenes, to animate your language. Use your power of empathy to bring voice to the voiceless.

Play with rants, vitriol, strong words to turn your passions into words on the page. Write furiously. If you are writing fiction, imagine fiery exchanges between characters, letting passions and behaviors emerge that may astound or alarm you; that stretch or distort or even demolish the narrative you’ve been working with. If you are writing nonfiction, put the passion on the page. These explosive sentences can all be edited later—softened, deleted, made more nuanced, or woven artfully into the story tomorrow, or the next day, when you have some kind of perspective.

To be truly in the eye of the emotional storm, to create from a state of anxiety, is to surrender any fantasy of perspective. In fact, in the purest sense, it’s the ultimate act of creative surrender from which, out of the crucible of your deepest pain, you might discover a joyful, wonderful surprise.

If, however, you feel so impotent in the face of your anxiety that you can’t even imagine utilizing it in this way, then write about that feeling, create metaphors, find analogies. Even if you have no characters whose voices you can appropriate, even if you are writing nonfiction, even if your fingers tremble at the thought of making narrative sense out of the inchoate feelings inside you.

Do this: put those trembling fingers on a keyboard, and start stringing words together that reflect how you feel … without context, or narrative, or character. Just raw feeling, in as many vivid, living words as you can call forth.

Then look at what you’ve written. Feel whatever it is you’re feeling. And write some more. Soon, I believe, you’ll have a sense of the logjam cracking. You’ll feel the urgency of creative expression, the palpable release of banked anxiety. Without judging what comes, without needing it to be anything, I think you’ll find yourself writing, even if that’s just defined, for the moment, as putting words down on a page.

Does the idea of this exercise itself make you anxious? Doesn’t surprise me. We’re all pretty scared of writing out of the very emotional space we’d most like to avoid or deny. It’s human nature.

But for those artists who have the courage to embrace their own fears, to stay emotionally connected in what seems like an ever more dangerous world, to co-exist with potentially crippling anxiety and write anyway, the rewards can be significant.

Moreover, when all that’s left is writing… 
Writing’s all that’s left. 
So trust it. Trust yourself.

And write.

—Dennis Palumbo

{Formerly a Hollywood screenwriter (My Favorite Year; Welcome Back, Kotter), Dennis Palumbo is now a psychotherapist, specializing in creative issues. He’s the author of Writing From the Inside Out (John Wiley), as well as a collection of mystery short stories, From Crime to Crime (Tallfellow Press). His first crime novel, Mirror Image, is due out in August 2010 from Poisoned Pen Press.}

The other day I was trying to impress upon a class of writers how cool it is that every sentence in English can be boiled down to one of four sentence patterns. They were having trouble grasping the second pattern, whose main elements are a subject, a transitive verb, and a direct object. That object thing was giving them heartburn.

I remembered a game—The Exquisite Corpse—the Surrealists used to play. In a twist of the parlor game Consequences—and its visual analogue, Picture Consequences—they would string random words together in a certain pattern. The resulting sentence sometimes flirted with rationality, but worked structurally. The name of the game allegedly derives from the phrase the Surrealists created when they first played the game, Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau. (“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.”)

Here’s how Wikipedia defines the game: “Exquisite corpse is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled, the result being known as the exquisite corpse or cadavre exquis in French. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. “The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun“) or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.”

OK, I’ll grant you that we didn’t exactly turn 109 Sever Hall at Harvard University into 54 rue du Chateau in Paris. But following the rule Subject/Transitive Verb/Direct Object we gave the Exquisite Corpse a good try, coming up with:

• The coffee beans sautéed the rooster.
• Vampires borrow snow.
• The conductor kicked the can.

Changing the rule to Subject/Static Verb/Complement, we got:

• The Easter Bunny is upset.
• Santa Claus was a worrywart.

Good enough for Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and André Breton? I’d say so.

A laid-off writer/editor contemplates the challenges of a freelance career

The day I walked out of the newsroom—July 29, 2008—I felt like the happiest unemployed man in America. For nineteen years, I had put out the Sunday Travel section at the Sun-Sentinal in Fort Lauderdale, filling it with stories from journeys around the world (mine and freelancers’), and columns reflecting on—and often poking fun at—the changing state of that world. It was, as I wrote in the book that collected some of those pieces, “a charmed, unheralded life.”

The charm came to an end in 2007, when my newspaper began taking seriously its motto of “local and useful.” While not particularly exciting for the rest of the paper—our erstwhile foreign correspondent wrote one story, titled “Cold War,” about the excessive air-conditioning of offices and malls in South Florida—it was disastrous for the Travel section. My budgets were cut to the bone, and I was, for the first time really, given directives on how to run the section, with more “weekend getaway” articles a wire column on theme parks. Travel, the one part of the paper that always offered a release from the familiar, an openness to the world, was turned into a provincial bore.

So when the first layoffs in the history of the paper took place, I was delighted to be one of the casualties. I was also insulted, experiencing for perhaps the first time in my life a feeling of joyous indignation (which the Germans probably have a word for).

I knew that the great advantage of being a writer—as opposed to, say, being a banker—is that you can always do what you do at home. A real job is immaterial to your professional advancement; in fact, in writing it can be a detriment. Writers are about the only people who can lose a job and gain respect.

Countering the dignity of unemployment is the fact that writing is one of the few trades in which the older you get, the harder the business of it becomes (especially in a culture that glorifies youth). For years, many of my contributors had been telling me about the dismal freelance market. One longtime freelancer in San Francisco wrote plaintive e-mails about having to pay the rent by selling his collection of MAD magazines, issue by prized issue. During his career he had written for Playboy and Harper’s, but had unwisely, if unintentionally, outlasted his editors. And, of course, there were now thousands of unemployed journalists sitting at home typing on computers.

But I was not deterred. I had never completely given up freelancing, and I was looking forward to sending out writing that didn’t have the label of “newspaper travel editor” attached. In my nearly two decades as such, I had published two books and had been included in a few anthologies, and I hoped that these accomplishments might stand out more clearly when disconnected from a branch of journalism somewhat lacking in respect.

Within a couple of months, much as I had done when I began in this business thirty years earlier, I had a list of pieces and the publications to which they had been shopped. I was still, for the moment at least, writing about what interested me and hoping that these pieces would interest someone else. This had earned me piles of rejections as a novice; I soon learned that not much has changed in the interim.

What is new is the technology, though a number of elite magazines still insist on submissions by post. But the immediacy of e-mail rarely translates into prompt replies. Actually, it often contributes to silence, as messages get pushed down out of sight—and, subsequently, mind—by the onslaught of new ones.

I’m being generous. I’d been warned of a new etiquette, or lack thereof, by which editors feel no obligation to respond to e-mails—presumably because they receive so many. The ease of communication has so crowded the field that it has ended communication.

This makes life difficult for any writer, but especially for one who was recently an editor. And even more so for one who was a writer/editor. For nearly two decades, I assigned myself stories, turned them in to my unwavering approval, and then got back to myself immediately regarding publication dates. Being your own man pales in comparison to being your own editor.

Occasional freelancing hadn’t prepare me for the daily uneventfulness, which belies—and is made all the more disconcerting by—the concept of instant connectedness. I used to send something out and then go about my life; now, this is my life. I work at home, without the diversions of traffic and colleagues, and sit for hours at the machine through which news of my success (or failure) will eventually come (or not). It is a maddening ur-connect, with no escape. While writing, I am forever conscious of the potential arrival of a verdict on my writing. No longer do you check the mail once a day; now you can check it once a paragraph. Waiting is now a twenty-four-hour ordeal.

You can log off e-mail, of course, but you can’t turn your mind off the idea of e-mail. Hugely successful writers complain that the demands of fame take them away from their work; today, all writers are distracted by the persistent fantasy of an incoming valentine.

Breaks are more important than ever, providing relief not just from the intense mental concentration of writing but also from the psychological toll of nonstop anticipation. The longer that you are away from your computer, the greater the chance (statistically, at least) of collecting messages on it. What those messages say is another matter.

Rejection is to writers what flies are to cows—a constant annoyance that we somehow attract but never get used to. Being common does not make it any more palatable, in part because it’s always a private, individual affair. Though not personal. Intellectually, all writers know this, and if they forget, the impersonal rejection letter dutifully reminds them. Those that arrive electronically tend not to be form rejections, as that would require too much typing. They are dashed-off one- or two-liners. When I was starting out, I collected my rejections; like war wounds, they seemed a kind of badge of honor. (Nothing says you’re a writer like your first New Yorker rejection.) Now I delete them.

Waiting and rejection are the being and nothingness of a writer’s life. The first begins with an element of hope, but as it drags on the feeling of optimism turns into one of abandonment. The silence, as you sit at your computer hour after hour, month after month, becomes unbearable. You can be convinced that your writing is brilliant, but not that it is being read.

Rejection, if it finally comes, does have the virtue of providing closure. Though even with the more bespoke e-jections, it is not always obvious that your submission received a careful perusal. The dismissal can be a little fuzzy. Nevertheless, it unequivocally kills any remaining hope. It is one of the rare situations in which vague writing has a potent effect.

The combination of waiting and rejection used to drive writers to drink; now it drives them to blog. The blogosphere is an editor-free zone, a lawless, all-embracing realm from which uncertainty, disappointment, and standards have been banished. Anything goes and everyone, it sometimes seems, is there, even the talented, which is proof of the painful universality of rejection. (We all need a place safe from putdowns.) The blogosphere is the hack’s idea of heaven.

Blogs unquestionably have their uses, but finding room for what John Cheever called “a page of good prose” isn’t one of them. Andrew Sullivan’s claims to the contrary, their rise would seem to put artful writing in jeopardy. For what use is nuance in the age of information? What hope has the poetic in a landscape of opinion? When so much is of the moment, is there still a place—and an audience—for the timeless? “I rewrite,” André Gide is popularly quoted as saying, “in order to be reread.” But who rereads on the Internet, that ever-changing screen?

The people who still care about the written word tend to become writers (MFA programs are thriving), which necessarily limits the number of disinterested readers. The practice of writing has always verged on folly, and in a world that craves images it has become more questionable and frustrating than ever.

I’d give it up tomorrow if I could shed my unfashionable belief in its importance.

—Thomas Swick

{Thomas Swick grew up in New Jersey and now lives in South Florida, where, for a cheap thrill, he goes to the Boardwalk in neighboring Hollywood—it’s the anti–Ocean Drive, with no models, no fashion, no pretense, no attitude. He is the author of two books: Unquiet Days and A Way to See the World. A version of this essay was originally published in 2009 in the Oxford American.}

I mentioned earlier that I’m auditing an English class at Harvard taught by literary critic James Wood. We’ve so far muscled our way through Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, V. S. Naipaul, and Henry Green. Now we are reading Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill. It’s an inspiring read in all sorts of ways, but one thing I noticed right away was the Irish-Turk-sort-of-American writer’s use of metaphors.

Take this description, right at the beginning of the book, written in the voice of the Dutch narrator: “It was the kind of barbarously sticky American afternoon that made me yearn for the shadows case by scooting summer clouds in northern Europe, yearn even for those days when you play cricket wearing two sweaters under a cold sky patched here and there by a blue tatter—enough to make a sailor’s pants, as my mother used to say.”

The sky is one of the hardest things to describe in a fresh way. Think of all those “rosy-fingered dawns” and “skies red enough to delight a sailor.”  Yet so many scenes must include a description of the sky! Here are some others that have impressed me:

“More than half the short winter’s day had passed while they were in the warehouse. The sky was a blue so pale that it was almost no color; wooded bluffs loomed above them, beyond the industrial estate, marking the edge of the city. The sun had dropped behind the bluffs already, so that the tops of the bare trees showed up finely spiky, like hair or fur, against a yellow flow of light from somewhere out of sight. While they waited, their breath began to fog up the car windows.” (From the short story “Friendly Fire,” by Tessa Hadley in The New Yorker, Feb. 4, 2008)

“Overhead, the sky is the color of a peacock’s breast, shimmery, nearly metallic blue. Towards the east, the drape of night is beginning to close over us, highlighting the days’ lingering colors. The blue overhead fades westward into a dramatic periwinkle, which in turn gives way to an intense lavender dissolving into a brilliant fuchsia horizon. A few hundred yards in the distance, the great fountain, already lit by yellow lights, glows, the enormous ancient plane tress that line the Cours Mirabeau, in their stark winter nakedness just two days ago, are covered now with tiny buds, like stars in the fading light.” (From “The Provençal Sky,” by Michele Anna Jordan in Travelers’ Tales Provence.)

“In the early evening, high-altitude clouds in the western sky formed a thin yellow wash which became richer over the hour, and then thickened until a filtered orange glow hung above the giant crests of parkland trees; the leaves became nutty brown, the branches glimpsed among the foliage oily black, and the desiccated grasses tool on the colors of the sky. A Fauvist dedicated to improbable color might have imagined a landscape this way, especially once sky and ground took on a reddish bloom and the swollen trunks of elderly oaks became so black they began to look blue.” (From the opening of Chapter Eight in Atonement, by Ian McEwan, published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.)

Three of these four examples are from fiction, but I’d be willing to bet that the authors spent a lot of time looking at real skies and a lot of time figuring out how to put the images into words. Nonfiction writers can do the same attentive looking and the same imaginative reckoning.

Do you have a favorite? Add it here.

My writing mantra

I don’t remember the year, or the name of the artist, or even whether the exhibit contained paintings or sculpture, but I’ll never forget the name of the show years ago at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum: “Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline.” I immediately copied down the words and later pasted them on my bulletin board. There they still live.

“Total risk, freedom, discipline” has become my mantra. Those four words say more about my daily life as a writer than the empty term “process” can begin to suggest.

The third word, discipline, actually is primary. Without discipline the other two qualities are moot. Discipline means showing up every day, early, and staying in my studio at least five hours. It means plugging away at writing every one of those hours, no matter how much I hate staring at the empty page, no matter how much anxiety I feel, no matter how discouraged I am by the latest rejection.

It also means focusing, intently: I often unplug the phone in the early hours; I manage e-mail very carefully, so as not to let it rule me; I discourage friends from calling me during my work hours; I never bring personal chores (doing bills, scheduling appointments, dealing with health insurance) into my writing space.

If I just show up and keep at the writing, things always start to click.

Sometimes it’s not until the last half hour of work, but then I know I have a place to start the next morning.

The freedom part has to do with giving myself free rein, even as I stick to my strict schedule. I often start the day by puttering—watering the garden, sweeping my studio floor, putting on some inspiring music. I try to listen to my thoughts, sensing where I am emotionally. The music helps here: If I’m writing a travel story about Hawaii, slack-key guitar helps me ride the currents of my imagination; other times it’s Mozart, Nina Simone or Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert that helps me tune in.

Unless I’m on deadline, I work on the project that seems most true to where my imagination—or my heart—is. Freedom means the ability to work on what most energizes me in the moment. (Then discipline allows me to see projects through to completion.) Freedom also means taking a break, going and sitting in the sun, walking to a favorite café for lunch, and letting my mind wander. It also means going to the gym every afternoon. I can’t tell you how many brainstorms I’ve had in lane three of the swimming pool, or working up a sweat on a bicycle—or even weeding. Each day, I try to give myself free moments, down time, when inspiration can drift in.

How do I build risk into my routine? Mostly by setting aside time to work on writing that pushes me in a new direction, or writing that is deeply personal. Taking risks can mean writing something that I know won’t sell, or—conversely—trying to make inroads at publications where I’ve not yet published. Sometimes, when I’ve finished one big project but have not yet started another, I take a few days for “risk writing.” Sometimes I write entire pieces on spec, because I want to push myself in a new direction whether or not I have an assignment.

Another thing I do to is to stop midproject and ask myself whether I’m taking the safe route in a piece of writing. Every now and then I try something really “out there”—maybe a daring lead, maybe a particularly musical phrase, maybe something so revealing it makes me slightly uncomfortable.

Once when I was writing a piece and trying to push beyond some of my “safe” habits, I smoked a joint and wrote all night long. (I’m no Faulkner: I always write in the morning, aided only by a little caffeine.) Some of what I wrote made it into the final piece. If an editor doesn’t respond to the risky writing, I can always rewrite.

Freedom and discipline are essential to my being able to be a professional writer. The freedom fuels me, keeps me creative; the discipline ensures that I get it done. But risk goes to the heart of why I write in the first place. It’s artistic, not professional: I want never to stop exploring, finding new vistas, and surprising myself.

—Constance Hale

{A version of this essay appeared in The Writer in January 2009}