There is a jangle of nerves if I haven’t written for a few days.  It is hard to recover from time away from the desk.  Most everyone must feel this way from time to time, when one can’t quite face the page or the canvas or the instrument after an absence.  The pencil or the paint seem to crumble before being put to good use.  This is why some writers demand and adhere to a strict schedule, a set production of pages for the day, or even just requiring a number of hours in the chair, staring at nothing, if that is what comes of the session.  But that approach seems daunting to me – lengthy numbers of days at the desk prove to be exhaustive.  I need to give the mind an opportunity to recharge via falling into repose, if even for a day or two.  Still, I curse myself once returning to the page after a hiatus.  There is just too much unfocused energy flying around in the mind and dancing through my fingers.  It always takes a while to calm down.  So what are strategies to settle the nerves, if you haven’t punched the artistic timeclock in a while?  Every once in a while, when faced with this need to calm the spirit, I pick up a book that I admire and copy a passage out of it by hand.  Just a paragraph or two is all that is necessary.   A special sort of transference occurs with this process.  The concrete details of the passage – how it is actually constructed – reveal themselves, and somehow guide you to an understanding of how the book was created, phrase by phrase.  The act of sitting down once again and resuming writing after a brief sojourn feels less overwhelming, getting in touch with how a great author pursued her craft, one word at a time.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash