The other day I went to my favorite café for a work session. I took the following materials with me:

• my computer;
• a large notebook, which I use for free associating, creating mind maps, and exploring ideas for new books;
• a three-page letter from my editor, asking for a last round of revisions to my forthcoming novel Backtracked and requesting that I cut four or five chapters out of my manuscript—with a two-week deadline;
• printed comments from the members of my critiquing group, with feedback about a new novel project;
• a print-out of three rejections yet another novel of mine, W.W. Werewolf, received through my literary agent;
• and a letter from a publisher in England asking for an very short story to be submitted to an anthology, again with an urgent deadline.

I laid out my notebook and pencils, opened my computer, and ordered an espresso. Then I nursed my coffee for a long time, watched people at the café, and refused to do anything else whatsoever. I didn’t write, didn’t read any of my materials, didn’t even think much at all.

It’s one of the best exercises a writer can ever do: Put yourself face to face with all your challenges, and learn to do nothing for a while. No reactions, no ambitions, no feelings, no love, no hate, no resentment, no hurry. Niente. Nada.

Once you clear your mind of preconceptions and fears, you’ll be in a much better position to actually meet the challenge. An editor has rejected one of your submissions? Rejections are part of the job, and indeed part of everyone’s lives. Read your rejection letters dispassionately, separate yourself a little from your work, realize the editors in question are turning down your book, for now; they’re not turning YOU down FOREVER.

Your editor wants you to amputate some of the best parts of your book? Calm down. Put her letter aside. Take a few days to think about it. It doesn’t matter how strongly you feel about your book; given enough time and space and intelligent feedback from seasoned professionals, you might quite possibly change your mind and agree with the cuts.

Your crit group floods you with suggestions of all types, complaints, musings, contradictory remarks? That’s exactly what they’re supposed to do. Your job is to use a mixture of intuition and intellect to find some order in chaos, discern those ideas you can and must discard and those you can and must explore—in due course.

Urgent deadlines? As long as you’re freaking out, you won’t be able to work constructively. Take your sweet time to pull yourself together, then you might be able to write that short story in an hour. It was Abraham Lincoln who said, “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my ax.”

My espresso was delicious, the people in the café were friendly and entertaining. After twenty-five minutes of doing nothing, I started working on my editor’s suggestions. She’s absolutely right about those five chapters. They must go.

Writing a story every day can seem like a tremendous challenge before you get the hang of it—just like dancing the tango, speaking a foreign language, or changing a diaper. I mean, I’ve never, ever changed anybody’s diaper in my life. If I had to do it without instruction or supervision or the right tools, I’d probably try to convince the freaking baby just to do it herself. It’d be easier for everyone involved.

Let’s say you’ve decided you want to dance the tango, speak German, and change diapers. And you want to write a new short story every day. Problem is, you have no ideas for a story. None. Zilch. You want the freaking story just to write itself. It’d be easier for everyone involved.

Here are a few suggestions. They don’t involve Q-tips or safety pins or anything smelly. Take my word for it: writing a story is easier than doing the other thing.

1. Give yourself just a few words to start the story with, and open the spigot. Or ask someone else to say something. My wife proposed the following: “Nobody could control him.” I wrote a story about a Hollywood producer who has gone berserk.
2. Write something involving a historical figure or situation. Judas selling Jesus for thirty pieces of silver—as told from the point of view of a Roman soldier who acts as a broker. Winnie Mandela pondering her divorce from Nelson. You meet Jack Nicholson at a party in Los Angeles, and to your surprise he has somehow heard perverse rumors about you. It’s 1957, and you’re riding an elevator by yourself in New York City. It stops on the way to the lobby, and Marilyn Monroe enters it, her hair disheveled, her mascara running. You smell alcohol in her breath. “Could you please help me?” she asks.
3. Find inspiration in something that happened to you earlier today, or that you witnessed. You watched an old woman slip on the icy sidewalk and fall. You received a phone call from a stranger who had dialed the wrong number. You started brushing your teeth, only to realize you had put shaving foam on your toothbrush. Any one thing that has ever happened lends itself to a dramatic invention. It all depends on the connections you create between the event and the psychology of people involved. Conflict is the name of the game.
4. Use a traditional trigger. “X, Y, and Z walk into a bar.” Give yourself a strange set of participants: A peacock, a chicken, and an eagle. A carrot, an eggplant, and a zucchini. A lesbian, a transsexual, and a priest. You get the idea: use a square formula and un-square variables, and your creativity is likely to be tickled. Formulas abound, and it’d be a fine exercise by itself for you to make a list of them. “Once upon a time…”
   
5. Use stereotypes, archetypes, age-old characters: the wizard, the fool, the rebel, the maverick, Santa Claus, Captain Hook, Donald Duck, Prince Charming, Superman. Put one of them in a difficult situation: Santa Claus gets stuck in a chimney, and, well, it’s cold in the house, and the family starts a fire. Superman hates his name, hates the Nietzschean connotations, hates the sound of it. He decides to call himself… actually, you’ll know what exactly once you enter his mind and heart.

In short, all you need is conflict and a character’s voice. “Goo goo ga ga ouch ouch OUCH!” (Guess what this conflict is about, and who's in conflcit with whom.)

It's been a year since I decided to write a short story every day. I’ve succeeded in doing so—including days in which I was traveling from Paris to New York and vice-versa, sick days, busy teaching days, all sorts of days. My wife, a screenwriter, recently asked me how I motivated myself to do it. I thought about it, and here are a few of the reasons I keep doing it every day without exception.

1. I’m very competitive, in two different ways. A side of me is disciplined, structured, ambitious, dedicated, even rigid about following a schedule and delivering a commitment. Another side of me is the slacker ready to go take long naps in the afternoon, the reader of comic books slouching in the sofa, the brainless guy who does nothing all day and calls his inactivity “life.” (You guessed it: I'm a Gemini.) These two sides of me are in permanent competition, but in recent years I’ve tended to side with the disciplined me. And once I take sides, I’m brutal. I want my side to win and the opposition to lose, and I’ll do anything to ensure the right outcome.
2. But I’m also competitive with others, not just within myself. This will sound ugly to you, dear reader, but writing every day allows me to feel superior to other people. I like to wear my discipline as a badge: I’m a pro. I know how to do it, and I can do it. I’m such a pro, I’d write the daily short story sitting on the back pew of a church during a memorial service. Even if I'm the one who's dead!
   
3. Out of the year’s 365 stories, some were astoundingly bad, so much so I’ll never show them to anyone, not even my adoring wife. (Hey, I have a lot invested in that adoration of hers. Why spoil a good thing?) But some of them were touching, funny, surprising—just plain good. Every day I don’t know if I’m going to write a stinker or a gem, and the possibility of a gem coming out justifies the daily effort.
4. Ritual is a necessary part of everyone’s life. The morning coffee, for instance, is a ritual that gets you out of bed and into the swing of things. It’s not just caffeine; there’s the anticipation, the preparation, the appeal to all the senses, your whole relationship to coffee, your memories of having drunk a particularly satisfying cup at Caribou Coffee on a visit to Minneapolis. For me the daily short story adds another ritual, makes the daily life a little more “sacred.” It requires me to stop everything else, clear my mind, and look for the portal to creativity and insight.
5. The skill I developed in writing daily stories has permeated into my other writing activities. I can write first drafts of scenes and chapters quickly and easily; the mind opens up willingly because it does so regularly. And the storyteller’s voice seems to be always ready to speak and sing. I “improvise”  without censure or shame, and often enough the first draft comes out relatively good already. The daily short story, then, pays enormous dividents for a working writer.
   
6. I’ve found ways of speeding up the process for those days when I really don’t feel like doing it. I write rants, a page of nonsense, a page about my own handwriting… Anything goes! You’re the boss! It takes three minutes, literally, to fill up a page with words and call it a “short story.”
7. I’ve used the short story to work through personal issues. To give a banal example, my older brother’s birthday is June 1st, mine is May 31st (that means we were born almost exactly a year apart). Every year we speak on the phone for our birthdays, briefly and awkwardly as befits the state of our relationship. On June 1st I wrote a story about a man who dreads the yearly phone call from his younger brother. The story wasn’t exactly about my brother and me; it was inspired by us but not “written” by us. In an indirect, minor way the story became an expression of my love for my brother, a mini-love letter he’ll never get. I was sad-happy writing it, and the psychological benefits of writing the story added justification to the daily effort.
8. I use short stories to test ideas for novels. For instance, I wrote 30 self-contained scenes of a ghost story over 30 consecutive days. Will I write a novel about this ghost? Do I want to? Is it worth my professional attention? Writing the stories is a good way of finding out.
9. Some short stories of mine appeal to that lazy slacker who slouches all day reading comic books. It’s a win-win situation: I enjoy writing an absolutely stupid story, I can say I fulfilled my contract and proved myself to be a disciplined professional, and the slacker gets his drug and claims the day.
10. Believe it or not, I really, really, really love doing it.

In my last blog entry I riffed on the notion of talent, the gist of my convictions being that everyone is born multitalented. A brave voice rose in the wilderness, pointedly letting me know I’m crazy. Just kidding! The brave voice, who answers to the name of Lisa Marie, makes some very good points. Here they are.

I think there is a problem with the word “talent.” Isn't it used to mean the exceptional thing, the thing that most people don't have? I think one tends to use the word unthinkingly in order to designate that happy (and indeed, rare) combination of qualities and circumstances (energy, enthusiasm, time, a little salutary egoism to enable one to be a bit annoyingly obsessive, good teachers, etc.) and one ends up being mislead by the existence of the word into thinking one is referring to something else, some further magic entity, apart from these ingredients.

And so my more somber version of your “we are all multi-talented'” would be to say “we quite probably all aren't, but that this is a lot less of a problem than we have been led to believe... particularly if it is possible to muster energy, enthusiasm, time, egoism, etc.”

Genius, now that would be something else again, I suppose.

This is my abbreviation of what the brave voice is saying in the wilderness:

“Talent” as people normally see it is a kind of illusion; people do things well because of down-to-earth qualities such as energy, enthusiasm, time, and so on—not because of a magic, mysterious quality, which we might want to call “genius” instead. It’s not a problem to be “untalented” as long as you find the necessary time, energy, and enthusiasm to accomplish your goals.

I see talent as an innate capacity to do something, a biological inheritance that is independent of these down-to-earth qualities but that needs some of them to blossom. So, I do think everyone is multitalented indeed, having many built-in capacities from birth. Ultimately, however, the brave voice is quite right: things happen not by magic but through dedicated effort. Here's the film maker Ridley Scott in a recent interview in the magazine Film Comment: "[My mother] was a real force of nature. [My brother] Tony and I inherited perseverance from her. It's really the thing you need to succeed. I always say it's stamina, stamina, stamina, then perseverance, and last is talent."

As for "genius," I’d like to offer a very specific definition. I see a genius not as someone with brilliant inborn capacities, but someone with an original insight who creates a new paradigm within his or her field. In that sense Claude Debussy was a genius, since he created a new musical paradigm contributing to the development of, among other things, atonality; but Maurice Ravel wasn’t a genius, since his work—however brilliant—hewed to the paradigms, tonal and rhythmic, that came before him. Ludwig van Beethoven: genius. Felix Mendelssohn: not (even though he was an astounding child prodigy). Miguel de Cervantes: genius (he "invented" the modern novel). Jane Austen: not. Mahatma Gandhi: genius (he created a new paradigm, non-violent resistance). The Dalai Lama: not (he embraces a paradigm that was fully formed before his birth). But note that I admire the Dalai Lama unconditionally, and I think he represents humanity's highest ideals. Here I'm using the word "genius" as a technical term, narrowly (and perhaps idiosyncratically) defined.

Given a choice between talent, genius, and stamina, I know which one I would pick for myself and my career. Phew! Writing this blog entry has exhausted the resident genius here, so please excuse me while I take a nap.

In my recent installments of The Naked Beginner I recounted how I used to suffer from the misconception I had no talent for drawing, and how I cured myself from that handicap with help from a fictional character, an imaginary friend, and a dead white male. Here I offer you a little meditation on the notion of talent. Since the meditation applies to all people, I’m posting this blog entry on multiple categories.

1. Everyone is born multitalented; this you can see by watching a few kindergarten kids at play, inventing every sort of game and improvising brilliantly at arts, sport, music, relationships, and anything else. The tragedy is that many of those kindergartners (and I’m talking about you and me and your brother and your sister) will grow to  “forget” how talented they were from the first.
2. You have hidden talents you don’t know about. Every day as you go about your normal existence, amazing things lie inside you waiting to be discovered.
3. Talents are eternal: they are always there, inside you, from birth to death. When the expression of a talent is squashed, the talent itself remains. At any time in your life, if the conditions are right the talent will come right back out.
4. You can be absolutely sure about something and yet be absolutely wrong about it. Wanna bet? The principle is universal. It applies to your feeling certain you don’t have talent for something—drawing, music, computers, managing people, you name it.
   
5. If you’ve tried to do something and failed miserably, you might still have a talent for it; perhaps you just need a good teacher, a good partner, a good environment. Think how many mean and incompetent teachers are out there, and how discouraging they can be.
6. “I’ve never danced in my life! I don’t have a talent for it!” Can you see what’s wrong with these words?
7. Timing is everything. Talent is always there, but sometimes you need to wait until you are good and ready to explore it. And you may not be ready until you’re 13, or 26, or 39, or 52. (Here’s testing your talent for multiplication tables!)
   
8. Talent is immutable; it’s already there inside you, and it’ll always be there as a latent force. But your manner of tapping into it is highly variable. It’s easy to confuse the two. If you go about blindly trying to develop a talent, your failure doesn’t mean you don’t have the talent.
9. You can develop a new skill in intermittent bursts of time and effort, as long as the effort is intelligent and the time well-spent.
10. If someone has a great deal of innate facility for something but no patience to develop the skill over the long term, does he or she really have “talent”?
11. Okay, it’s possible for you not to have talent for something and feel sure that you do. Still, that’d be a lesser problem than having talent and feeling sure you don’t.
12. Talent isn’t contagious, but enthusiasm is.
    

Hey, you talented readers out there: How about submitting your stories about hidden talents, talents snuffed out by mean teachers, talents that have surprised and delighted you as you went about discovering them?

A book becomes good or bad, pertinent or boring, constructive or not depending on how you read it. In fact, no two readers will ever read the same book in the same way. For that reason, recommending books we love for others to read may be tricky. What if you hate the books I live by? What if you resent me for making you read a lousy book? Well, you can always post a comment on my blog offering counter-recommendations. And don't forget nobody made you do anything in the first place!

I suggested that finding a concept for a story is the easiest part of writing one. That doesn't mean it's easy, exactly; it's just easier than some other steps in the writing process. But if you're having a hard time finding an idea, a hook, a portal, a trigger, or what you will, help is at hand in Jack Heffron's The Writer's Idea Book. In a friendly and encouraging manner, Heffron comes up with several hundred prompts to get you going. They are numerous enough for you to find one or more that will trigger your imagination or, more precisely, your unstoppable urge to pour words out.

I wrote about the threatening blank page or computer screen that trips up many writers. In The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear, Ralph Keyes looks at the question of writerly anxiety and comes up with many astute and sympathetic observations. Keyes says, quite rightly, that courage isn't the absence of fear, but the willingness to act despite fear. Ultimately you're better off not getting rid of your fear, but learning how to harness it creatively.

I suggested that one way of finding one's inner courage to write was by entering a trance. Trance is a big subject: there exist dozens of types of trances, each with its merits, risks, and dangers. Milton H. Erickson, M.D. was perhaps the 20th-century's greatest expert on trance states. A psychiatrist by training and a trailblazer in hypnotic techniques and their application to individual problem-solving, Erickson was also a master storyteller and a highly sensitive therapist with shamanic capabilities. Milton H. Erickson, M.D.: An American Healer, edited by Bradford Keeney and Betty Alice Erickson, is by no means a how-to on trance. Instead, it's a collection of essays, anecdotes, photo albums, and interviews that paints a delightful and compelling portrait of a free mind. Reading it might inspire you to free your mind in your own ways.

Rhythm & Flow in a Writer's Career is my own book for writers. It contains many dozens of suggestions and exercises to make you a more fluid, confident, and productive writer. My book has a singular defect, however: it hasn't been published yet! Until it comes out you'll have to resort to the other wonderful books on this page. But if you ask me nicely, I just might post my book's table of contents and a sample chapter on my website.