Shaking Up Your Writing Routine
This past holiday season, instead of the customary trek to the Midwest from California by plane to visit my parents, my husband Dylan and I opted to stay closer to home. Since Dylan recently switched to a new job, in recent months his schedule had been unpredictable. Also, my December residency for the Antioch MFA Creative Writing program was scheduled later than last year, and finished up just a few days before Christmas. Considering these travel-planning idiosyncrasies, we opted to take a road trip to Northern California from Los Angeles for nine days with stops in San Francisco, Humboldt County, and Napa, in that order.
I recently watched the classic holiday film, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, starring Steve Martin and John Candy, in which Martin goes through a series of mind-boggling obstacles to get back home from a work trip in time for Thanksgiving dinner. It occurred to me while watching the film that there is an element of truth behind that commercial, consumer-driven insistence the holidays are a time of love, family, giving, holiday cheer, and goodwill. If you aren’t taking a plane, train, or automobile to get home for the holidays, anxiety begins to descend; you become an anomaly, a rogue, an outlaw, rather than a family values-oriented kind of individual.
Last Thanksgiving, Dylan and I flew through the designated holiday hoops. We booked a flight to visit my younger sister in Cincinnati, Ohio, and at the last minute because of work, Dylan had to change his to an overnight red-eye. He was awake and conscious in Ohio for approximately eight hours before we flew home to L.A. that Sunday morning. As much as I missed them, traveling to visit my parents in my hometown of Mt. Carmel, Illinois (population 8,000), can be an odyssey of connecting flights, inevitable cancellations, and delays. And then, we would have had to rent a car and drive in the snow and/or ice for a few hours after the flight. On a couple of unfortunate occasions, the travel time because of flight delays has rivaled that of going from L.A. to New York, and then back to L.A.
The obvious, cushier alternative was to stay in California and enjoy sailing through the drive from L.A. to San Francisco, an easy green line to follow on Google Maps the entire way. I was struck by how the holidays were less stressful, once the mind-numbing factor of travel time is taken out. A stern phone call from my mother, you need to be here next year, Erin—confirmed my hunch we had indeed “gone rogue.”
Mixing up my “holiday routine” ended up having an effect on my writing routine. Although I would not say I have a writing routine I adhere to on a day-to-day basis, since I have been in the MFA program, I have been trying to find one. That in itself becomes its own routine—the routine of trying to find a routine. As a writer, I also find getting out of a routine (much like getting into one) is just as beneficial for the creative process. To mix up the ideas rattling around in my head until the best ones make themselves known. Yet, shaking up a routine is hard to do—it wreaks havoc on a comfortable mindset, until some kind of re-ordering or semblance can be made out of new information.
Detouring out of conventional routine—like taking a road trip for example, instead of a tried-and-true plane ride home for the holidays—can also have an effect on the unconscious, as well as the conscious, mind. If, like me, you have read (or at least skimmed) dozens of craft books and writing websites for advice, you have picked up on this well-known tip: keep a trusty notebook on your bedside table. If you have a dream, write it down right away after waking up, or else it will disappear into the night and become a trail of moonbeam and stars. What this advice does not always explain is what if inspiration strikes in the middle of the night, when there is someone else sleeping next to you? Out of good manners, I prefer not to switch on the light and start writing, forcing Dylan to wake up and stare at me in confusion. I try to leave a notebook in an easy-to-find place, so as to avoid rummaging around for it in the dark, sounding like a burglar or small animal. It’s then easier to steal away to the restroom and scribble in the muted hours of the night.
During our trip, I had three dreams. The first dream carried a complex storyline—it was impossible to get it all down in the middle of the night—and took place in first-person point of view. I was startled into waking up, in thinking that the events of the dream were happening to me in real time. After I woke up from the second dream, I was able to render it into a short story the next morning, almost frame by frame. This dream happened in the perspective of third-person point of view. The second dream was more as if I was watching a story unfold, instead of inhabiting it. It was still vivid enough that I was able to have a pow-wow with my unconscious while I was asleep, and decided that I could remember enough information to sleep a little longer and would write it down later. If I had woken myself back up again to retrieve my notebook and record the second dream, I might not have missed details I wouldn’t have missed otherwise. But sometimes, just getting the gist of how a story is unraveling can be productive in the process of writing. Minute details are not always relevant details.
Why did I have story-telling dreams during our trip, vivid enough they could be rendered into fiction? Where does this kind of inspiration come from? In short: getting out of your head (and your routine) might send you back into your creative process faster than you think.
*The third dream happened after we returned, post-road trip, and was the result of watching the Twilight Zone-esque, hyper-surreal British show, Black Mirror, which I highly recommend—although, some of the episodes are darker than others, and can cause nightmares. But, if you are so inclined to the genre, it’s critically acclaimed.
Erin Anadkat is a MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Antioch University Los Angeles. http://www.erinanadkat.tumblr.com/, https://twitter.com/erinanadkat
