Find your creative spark in 10 minutes a day

It has been a while since I've written a silly, funny picture book. I've written very few new picture books at all, and the ones I have written have been angry and gloomy. 

That's no good.

But what to do? We all know that the very act of declaring, "I want to write a new, funny, awesome picture book" doesn't make it happen. You have to actually do the work.

So that's what I've been doing. The work. And I have remembered that good words are built on bad ones. The act of writing is what leads to good writing, but sometimes it takes a lot of terrible writing to get there.

You might turn your nose up at churning out page after page of not-great stories, but in my experience, that's the way to get to the excellent stories, and the way to get to that flash of inspiration that cracks open my imagination and lets the really excellent words flow out.

Here's what I've been doing: I set a timer for ten minutes a day, and I write during that time. I don't let myself think "oh, wow, this is bad" (though it is) and I don't stop to think about where the words are going. I just keep writing.

Right now I'm working on a picture book that is probably rating a solid 3 on a ten-point scale of excellence. That's okay. It's highly probable no part of this story will ever be read by anyone besides me. That's okay too. I'm remember the process (and trusting in it): words lead to more words, and good words come after bad ones.

Last week there was an interview in the New York Times with a debut novelist named Jessie Greenglass. She was asked "In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?" This is what she said:

"before I start writing something, it really is perfect; the Platonic ideal of the thing I’m going to write. The ideas are there, the imagery is wonderful. As I write it, it inevitably collapses into something that is less perfect but is real (so, ontologically preferable). All the ideas I wanted to put in this book ended up there. It didn’t become fundamentally different, but it went from being abstract notions to being particular, and therefore sort of flawed. I feel like it’s a less good book than the book I intended to write. But that’s a part of the process of making something real."

I love that so much. It's so true. All of us creative people have this image in our heads of the perfect thing -- the perfect story, the perfect painting, the perfect novel. It's so beautiful. But as soon as we try to take that perfect thing in our heads and make it real, it falls apart. It's impossible to make something as perfect as the thing in your head. Except the thing you created is superior to the thing in your head, because it exists. Real but flawed is better than nonexistent but perfect. And your job as a creator is to get that messy, not-perfect thing out of your head, view it in all its flawed glory, and then start the hard work of revising and editing until you get it as close as you can to that ideal that lived in your brain. 

My good friend Lindsay Eagar has an amazing new novel out called The Bigfoot Files. The writing and revising process for her book was incredibly difficult. But she did it. Read this blog post all about how she took a decent-but-flawed book and revised the bejeepers out of it on a ridiculously-tight deadline until she managed, through wit and tenacity and sacrifice, to turn it into a book that was remarkably close to the original perfect idea she had in her head. 

My point is: this is what we do. Creators create. If it's been a while since you created something new, then get to it. You can do ten minutes a day, right? (Or five or twenty -- whatever you can squeeze in.) Go into it with the knowledge that what you create will probably be mediocre and flawed. But it will exist. 

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Two weeks until No Boring Stories is out!

My next picture book, No Boring Stories, will be out in the world on November 6. That's soon! It's all about a bunny who wants to write odd stories, and is having trouble finding a group of writer friends. The other picture book animals don't understand her weird stories. Then she finds a star-nosed mole, a giraffe-necked weevil, a babirusa, and a yeti crab, who are working to write the weird stories they want to read. Our bunny tries to join their group, and it's a bit bumpy. Hilarity ensues. (Yes, it's autobiographical.) It's illustrated by the amazing Charles Santoso, and I can't wait for you all to see it.

From now until November 5, if you preorder No Boring Stories, I will send you a special pencil that matches the cover and a little notebook to write all your own weird ideas in.