One-hundred writers. Meeting so many creative people reveals both the diversity and the patterns in how people create. This post collects some of the different experiences you’ve shared.

• Divine inspiration: For many people the idea comes all at once, while stimulated by nature, deep reflection, or red wine. Whatever works, use it! Be sure to take good notes!
• Transcription: Perhaps the most common experience reported by writers is that once they get into the zone, they feel they are transcribing their texts.
• End-game: One writer reported that once he knows how the story will finish, he just writes his way there.
• Database: We’ve had several writers who use databases to track characters and events. Some use spreadsheets and others use notetaking programs with automatic linking capacity, like Obsidian.
• Outline and schedule: Some writers perceive the whole text as an argument or journey, make an outline or chapter headings, and then write sequentially, perhaps even scheduling the parts onto their calendar.
• Exploration and impressions: For many writers at the beginning of a project, they feel their way with many small experimental pieces that don’t immediately fit together or have a structure. It’s important to welcome that process spaciously. The structure will come once you have something to work with. If you are producing seemingly-unrelated texts, just be patient.

The point here is that there are a lot of different experiences of how you find your text (or it finds you).

Some of our writers seem deluged, triaging the incoming with a flurry of post-it notes on the walls. Others find their way by experimenting with other genres, dancing, or walking.

In every case it’s so important to trust yourself and give time and space for your ideas to come forth, find their shape. Be patient and gracious.

• • •

Not entirely satisfied with this post, I went out to harvest walnuts. Harvesting anything always brings loudly to mind a phrase from James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance:

… our right to an abundant, self-yielding nature

Walnuts are especially self-yielding. The green fruit cracks open to present a golden shell, an individual wrapper that will keep the walnut in perfect fresh condition for a year or more. You just pick it up like a petit-four from a tray. It’s a rather startling experience.

Not yet realizing this delight, last year I insensitively whacked the tree with the telescopic handle of the pool brush to make the walnuts fall down.

Crude as the pool-brush whacking may have been, it indicated far more attention than I had mustered for the previous two years, in which I didn’t manage to collect the walnuts at all!  (The two trees give about 30 liters of walnuts, which is easily a year’s supply.)

Of course some of the walnuts have already fallen – that’s why I needed to get out there today – and instantly realized that I forgot to ask the boys to mow under the trees! Fortunately I did remember how to feel the walnuts under my feet. If I press and they collapse they’re already hollowed out by another diner, but if they resist, they’re still intact. So my hands follow my feet through the grass.

It’s a lot more fun to take them from the tree, but I didn’t bring the ladder, so I collect everything within reach. I switch between adjusting my eyes to discern the green of the fruit from the green of the leaves, and feeling through the grass with my toes. The whole time, Scott’s line playing through my mind as I feel the contrast between my day of writing and the sensations of wet grass, dirty hands, green smells, and bounty.

What if… creativity is self-yielding? What if it is our abundant nature?

The next morning I bring a net to place under the tree. Stupidly, I don’t bring a basket. Not bringing a basket to the orchard is a bit like going for a walk or drinking a cup of tea without a notebook. Writer John Dunne says “if you don’t have a piece of paper and a pen with you, you’re not really a writer.” (He had notecards made to fit his shirt pockets.)

Falling into the delight of gathering, I feel a bit guilty – a long to-do list waits on my desk. I am also conscious of the delight. I’m not satisfied with my petit-four metaphor. What’s it like? Easter Eggs!

Write like a child hunting Easter eggs.

I pay more attention. What does it mean? Some ideas fall into our hands at the slightest touch. Others can be pried from their shells. Some are just not ready yet.

Not everything is ripe. We need to be patient. And we need to be ready to drop everything when a whole tree reaches its moment in the year – a few days at the center of attention. This is never on the schedule. Nature will demand that we change the plans. Harvest is a full-time job.

It’s a lot more fun to gather the Easter eggs than to dig through the grass, chasing the lump underfoot. I remind myself to keep doing both, to have the humility to give attention to the ground. This reminds me of Tim Ferriss, whose creative production has involved both ambitious, nearly glamorous, inventive projects and humble, vulnerable revelations. The result:  he has effectively reinvented himself for several decades. .

He could have ignored the uncomfortable parts as I ignored the trees for two years. Nature does does not demand that we receive her gifts. This Spring I spent several days clearing brambles from the neglected fig tree where this week I take a bowl of cream each morning for breakfast.

In French they say that plants “push”. If creativity is as nature, it will push. It’s ready to thrive once we clear the brambles. The fruits will come. If you want the riches, prioritize the harvest.

Picking up Easter eggs may be part of the journey. There will be other times to bend down and put your hands down into the tangled grass, push your fingers through a rotting pod in which is nourishment that cannot be purchased.

Keep looking up and keep feeling down.

Postscript

The following day, well-armed with ladder and basket, I devote pleasure-seeking to the tree, but am soon overcome with productivist zeal (in truth, I seem to have always had this problem; as I child I was known for sorting rather than eating the Easter candy). This turned out to be dangerous. I reached too far and nearly fell, I broke branches, I dragged the net out of place with the ladder. I causing the basket to fall onto my head,

I had to sternly decelerate. I brought the ladder to have pleasure, not to take risks. And, lest you imagine your energies somehow crucial to this process, know that the walnuts are coming down, regardless of whether or not you injure yourself chasing them up the tree.

The ladder is not made stable by the act of standing upon it.