You sit there

It is my considered opinion that one reason you are not writing is that you are allowing yourself to read in the time set aside to write. You ought to set aside three hours every morning in which you write or do nothing else; no reading, no talking, no cooking, no nothing, but you sit there. If you write all right and if you don't all right, but you do not read; whether you start something different every day and finish nothing makes no difference; you sit there. It's the only way, I'm telling you. If inspiration comes you are there to receive it, you are not reading. And don't write letters during that time. If you won't write, don't do anything else. And get in a room by yourself. If there are two rooms in that house, get in the one where nobody else is.

-- Flannery O'Connor
in a letter to Cecil Dawkins dated 12 November 1960,
in "The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor"

This is a rule I have been breaking lately, to good effect. I want to get in my mind a certain voice and I am stealing it from someone else. I know there is really no chance I will end up sounding like that other famous writer. I merely want to be charged by his energy.

But as for the advice to just sit there, that's good advice. And I would even say: Tell yourself that you're just going to sit there. Your mind will get bored pretty quickly and start singing like a 10-year-old in the principal's office.

Or if not -- the technique I most often use is to make notes on what I want to write, asking myself questions about the characters and the action. Sometimes all it takes is half a page of this, done in a separate Notes file, before I realize I actually do know how to get myself going.

But what struck me about O'Connor's advice was how close she is to describing meditation: you just sit there.

technorati: Flannery O'Connor, writing, writing techniques, meditation