The process of creating a story can take many forms depending on the proclivities of its creator. Some writers have the discipline of writing down to a science in their consistency. They have a space and time that remains constant and there they barricade themselves in to be alone with their alternate universes. How blissfully convenient that must be.

I don’t create that way because, simply put, I am a consistently inconsistent person. I have a space but it is not just for writing. It is also covered in bills, paycheck stubs, junk mail that should be relegated to somewhere else, exercise ideas and plans that will probably never see fruition, extra clothing should said space become too cold, various doohickies,  half read books, and at least one cat. My schedule changes day to day, some days I work 12 hours at a different job, some days only 7 hours, and I have a couple of days off. So far, the discipline that I see in other authors that I admire simply eludes me.

So my writing inevitably occurs in fits and starts. My characters do not wait patiently in the wings for their scheduled entrance. They pop into my head any damn time they please, and I try, sometimes in vain, to remember what ever nugget they left behind and write it down. The pulling over in the car and writing it down on pieces of leftover receipts from my purse rarely works. For some reason, as useless receipts, they are always easy to find, but as valuable tidbits of writing, they somehow get lost. Go figure.

With every new writing assignment, every writer, no matter how seasoned, copes with the deep seeded insecurity that they won’t finish. That they will finally be found out as a fraud, and they just don’t have it in them to create one more sentence. All they have is the faith in the almighty process.

That is also where my faith lies. The reminder that I have done this before, and that I will do it again, hopefully better than the last because part of the process is learning what works, what doesn’t, learning to let go, believing in the depth of your characters and the resonances of their stories with readers. I will doggedly write on, word by word, line by line, scene by scene, chapter by chapter. You get the point. Now if I could just learn to leave a pocket in my purse exclusively for those darn receipts.

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