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I started to think of my own writing of fiction in a comparable way. I need a certain amount of quiet, a room of my own, a mental state in which my own concerns are not too pressing, and then in my writing I can enter into the life of a literary character about whom I am writing. In doing this, I think I become better able to understand both others and myself. I can’t always achieve a state of apartness but, when I can, the idea of putting aside my own concerns and entering reflectively into the life of another seems an apt description. I can sometimes lose myself in a novel or short story I am writing. In Eastern meditation, thoughts are allowed to enter and move through the mind without one becoming attached to them. Writing isn’t non-attachment. Instead, thoughts of a certain kind, for instance those of a character in a novel can become central. They are pursued, expanded, and can find their way onto the page.

Time is a hard-won tool, but once a writer earns some time they can spend it when they please. Some writers are larks, arriving at their desks before dawn; some are owls and can only work when everyone else is in bed. Some prefer to write just after the lunch rush at their favourite coffee shop. Writers can work at midday or at midnight; at dawn or dusk or only between 3pm and 6pm. Time, once earned, is flexible.

The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination is an organization whose name is also an apt descriptor. Within you’ll find a link to a YouTube video (embedding is not allowed) of a roundtable discussion of the title topic that was moderated by David Shields and features the participation of Barbara Browning, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), John Cameron Mitchell, Rick Moody and Fred Tomaselli.

Si on simplifie, outrageusement, ce portail de la littérature, on peut ainsi penser qu’il ouvre sur deux voies, apparemment contradictoires : chercher à inventer, chercher à dire la vérité. Mais heureusement il existe beaucoup d’autres approches, d’autres théories, parfois sur-utilisées, dans les cours de création: l’Oulipo et les différents exercices auxquels se sont adonnés ses membres, par exemple. Le ludisme littéraire.

Biff Mitchell and Kent Fackenthal answered this survey separately. Not in separate rooms with a gauzy divider between them… in the manner of psychic studies where one was forced to guess whether the other was holding up a card with a star or three wavy lines or whatever… but at different times and spaces. Perhaps in their homes, perhaps not. Their findings are still under study.

Jeannine Gallant and Mike Nason don’t know each other and didn’t answer these questions together. Or wait, maybe they do know each other, after all Fredericton is a small town. And they are both musicians. In retrospect it is completely probable they know each other. Still, they in no way collaborated on the answering of these questions. So far as I know. After all, why would you? Really.

(12) When you are not physically performing the act of writing do you have any places, things, activities you use to help coax out inspiration?

Not really. Anything else but the writing time coaxes inspiration. I mean that in the sense that my guilt builds exponentially with each beer I drink, or each step on the exercise machine, or every chicken ball I eat. The essay is always there.

For a while, I bemoaned the fact that I couldn’t find time to write everyday, which is something that at least makes you feel as though you are a writer. But then I found a copy of Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home-actually a first edition (for fifty cents!) in excellent shape at a local library sale-and read it cover to cover. On page 147, I read this: “The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time.” Plath’s aim at around this time was to have 20 pieces out at magazines. That gave me a wake-up call, as a writer. I would stop bemoaning and start producing.

Then I make sure I have at least one Fast Wordscraper or Lexulous (Facebook scrabble-type games) going, and this seems to have become a critical part of my writing routine. You may think that playing one of these games while writing is a distraction, but I am here to tell you it isn’t: it helps. I start writing a flash story, using the set of prompts I have found, beginning with one word or phrase, seeing where that takes me, and then, whenever I need to, I grab another prompt and put it in. Something about using prompts puts me in that kind of dream-like zone where i am not thinking logically about what I am writing, I am letting it flow. And when I get to a stopping point where, if I carried on, it would be the logical mind and not the creative, I go to Wordscraper, play my turn, distracting my logical mind while the creative keeps whirring. And then I go back to the story.