Book of Your Heart

In the crazy, sometimes frantic world of publishing, it’s easy to get caught up in the “must get it done now” mentality — especially with the pace of change these days.

“If I don’t get this book finished by the end of the month, my editor will kill me!”

“I have to get these revisions done so I can upload to Amazon ASAP!”

On top of that, most writers are perfectionists, and strive to make their stories better, more marketable, more interesting with each plot twist and character development.

It’s not surprising that we react to the pressures, both real and perceived, bearing down on us as writers these days.

Inspiration

But what happens to our inspiration when we’re struggling to go faster and get better? The same thing that happens during any panic attack or frightening experience — we forget to breathe. And when we do breathe, our breaths are shallow, filling our lungs only partially.

Hardly useful for keeping oxygen flowing to brain and blood and muscles.

But consider inspiration, from the Latin words “in” and “spirare” — to breathe in.

You can see that “spirit” also comes from the same Latin root, spirare, meaning to breathe. Our inspiration, our spirit, is synonymous with our life-giving breath.

So when’s the last time you took a mere 5 minutes to do nothing but breathe?

My own experience is that spending a small amount of time each day in meditation has increased my creative capacity.

What meditation is — and is not

Read a hundred meditation books and you’ll get a hundred different ideas about it.

For me, by “meditation,” I don’t mean plotting, thinking about my book, or pondering something I read in a spiritual writing.

Instead, I follow the breath from deep in the lungs and out through the nose, rest in that brief pause between breaths, then follow the breath back through the nose and down into the lungs again.

During this practice, I’m not trying to do anything in particular. I’m just breathing and putting my attention on that process. My mind will stray — the brain is a thinking machine, after all — but when I realize my mind is puzzling through a plot point or imagining a scene, I’ll gently bring my attention away from that and put it back on the breath.

It’s just a way of letting other parts of my mind explore and play with and work through the writing while my conscious attention is turned toward in-spirare – the breathing in.

You’ve probably read about how meditation is a great stress reducer and can calm the nerves, but there’s another great reason to commit as little as 5 minutes a day to it — it eases the mind and allows the brain to resolve those writing challenges in a different and usually more creative way.

Solutions that seemed out of reach are suddenly obvious. The “answer” to a difficult plot question will frequently present itself without any real effort on my part.

Listen to anyone who tells you that an idea occurred to her while in the shower or gardening, and you’re hearing someone who was tapping into that state of inner quiet.

So next time you’re stumped, try doing nothing. Better yet, cultivate a practice of doing nothing for a short period on a daily basis to keep the creative juices flowing!