Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life

Take a walk or a drive. Book a window seat on a plane. Sit outside—in your backyard, on a park bench, at a café. Or make sure your writing desk (or reading chair) is next to a window with an appealing view. Take notes as you move through your day, or imagine what the speaker, narrator, or character might hear, smell, taste, or touch: the birds chit

Sensory imagery is what makes the reader feel like they’re there, so don’t skimp on it.

Specifics are “sticky.” They’re like little burrs that attach to the reader and hold on. Don’t we all carry images, lines, snippets of dialogue, and bits of description from books we’ve read? Some memorable details have lived in my head for decades, even though the characters’ names, plot points, poem titles, or even authors’ names may have long ag

May the poems keep coming to meet me in the clearing, and may I not scare them back into the woods.

My hope is always that the new work feels at the same time like a natural continuation of the last book and a departure from it.

With my memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, I wrote the vignettes one by one and later assembled them into a structure that felt intuitively right to me.

you’re a writer, you know what I mean: There’s the you that lives, and the you that chronicles the life.

Taking care of yourself is taking care of your creativity. Taking care of yourself as a whole human being is taking care of the writer in you.

If I don’t have paper handy, I might type notes into my phone or record myself talking so that I don’t lose the language or the idea.