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Carol Shields
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
There are days I don't want to do it. I don't want to pick up that pen, it feels so heavy, or get myself onto the word processor. And like every writer, I have tricks that I do to get me into that flow. My favorite trick, which seems rather eccentric, is I have a huge dictionary in the room where I write, and I open it at random -- you know, the way people used to open the Bible for inspiration, they just open it -- and I read a page of the dictionary. What that reading does is it puts me into that cool, quiet place of language. Because the problem with being a writer and having a busy life is that it's not just finding the time to write, it's finding the time around the time, where you can be calm, and where you can re-enter that fictional part of yourself. That's one of my tricks. Most writers have a handful of them to get to that place. After 10 minutes, 20 minutes, I'm into it, and I can then proceed into the day of writing. And often that day -- five or six hours, I have much more time now in my life -- it'll seem like 30 minutes. Your whole idea of time becomes distorted, and you know when that happens that you're having a good writing day.
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