There I was, sharing a cup of hot chocolate at Panera with my friend Graham, relating the challenges a published author faces—I was not whining—when he casually observed, “You need an outlet.”

I hopped into the Wonder Tundra and drove to California and back a couple weeks ago, with his advice ringing in my ears. What did he mean? Six thousand miles later, I have a Clue.

Once upon a time, I was an aspiring musician. I wallowed in music and got a sense of competence and confidence from my increasing skill, and a lot of joy from indulging a personal passion. Then I started supporting myself with my music, and… the game changed. I had to worry about what to play for this ballet class or that class reunion, I had to chop down some repertoire to fit into perfect eight measure phrases, I had to simplify pieces to be able to handle them up tempo, and so on.

Love became tempered by the need to eat.

When I became a mother, I adored my newborn child and got up five times a night to tend to her smallest whimper, and I delighted in doing so. A few years later, love had to be tempered with boundaries, or nobody in the house was going to be functional for very long.

When I rode horses, I did so out of sheer love for the beast, and the saddle was my happy place. I again enjoyed a sense of competence and confidence from growing (though never very impressive) skill, and when I was on my horse, the big, bad world, with its unfairness and bigotry, violence and injustice, did not touch me. I cannot afford to ride like that any more, so alas, that happy place went on hiatus.

But I still had the writing… another happy place, where for hours at a time, I could fashion worthy characters, big challenges, and a reliable Happily Ever After, which I badly needed after a day in court.

Except the writing now has to be tempered too. I need a little thicker skin for when reviews that are not just critical, but downright mean, come raining down on my parade. I need discipline, because deadlines wait for nobody’s mojo. I need marketing savvy, because the publishing industry isn’t merely changing, it’s in outright revolution. The sense of growing confidence and competence I had as an aspiring writer is tempered with caution and humility. Nobody gets published without an entire village behind them, even if it’s the publisher’s village on salary whom you never get to meet face to face.

So…tempering makes things stronger, and I hope as a writer I’m being tempered by wisdom and experience.

And yet, Graham was absolutely right: I need an outlet. A place I go to out of sheer love for the things I can do and experience there. A place free of judgment, and full of good will and the pleasure of growing skill. Maybe I’ll take up knitting, maybe I’ll write some nonfiction, maybe I’ll join… a book club (do not laugh, please).

Or maybe—radical thought!—I’ll open the lid of the piano that has sat silently in my living room for ten years.

What about you? Where’s your happy place, and how did you find it?

Beginnings of romance novels are supposed to be easier—less difficult—to write than ends or (cue ominous music) middles. There is a great deal of business to transact at the beginning of the book. The dramatis personae must strut, mince, waltz, thunder or crawl onto the stage; hero and heroine must Meet and perhaps even enjoy or suffer through their First Kiss; external conflicts must be strongly hinted at if they don’t get center stage; secondary characters and subplots have to get some mention; the requirements of setting must be appeased.

At the beginning of a book, the issue of what to write about is subsumed under all that busyness, and yet sometimes, even the beginning of a book eludes us. The first line won’t present itself. The first scene keeps developing a limp. The Meet has no chemistry. The hero and heroine have too much chemistry and all of it is bad. The secondary characters are too charming, witty, or intriguing to serve in their intended roles. And sometimes, we get into those dark, miserable corners where no words come at all.

We are beginning-less, and then we become very prone to endings. When the beginnings won’t come, we fret that they’ll never come and our writing career is over. We polish and buff and read over old material until we’re no longer polishing, we’re sanding it down to something dull and boring. We consider our own big black moment—quitting.

I attended a panel discussion at a Georgia Romance Writer’s conference on the topic of “When the Words Won’t Come.” Four published authors all discussed very frankly what it’s like to be without any beginnings at all. The room was nowhere near full, almost as if mention of the topic itself had the power to shut down our creativity. In the course of the discussion though, one panelist lead us through the creation of a first sentence, one word at a time. It took better than an hour, while we listened to each writer explain what had robbed them of their beginnings, and how they recovered the gift of starting a book.

Beginnings are fragile, it turns out. They are not easy at all. They take hope and courage and the ability to withstand significant anxiety about middles, ends, and more beginnings. Beginnings can require that we have physical and mental health or financial stability firmly in place. They can demand that we see the end even before we start. They can seize our joie de vivre and creativity and throttle them within an inch of their existence.

I developed a new respect for beginnings at that panel discussion. So the next time a single sentence pops into your head worth exploring, rejoice. The next time a scene occurs to you while folding the laundry, give thanks. The next time your secondary characters have the decency to politely hint they might enjoy having their own book, be grateful. If nothing else has come clear for me, it’s that a beginning–of a book, a relationship, a project, a life– must not be taken for granted, and is a terrible thing to waste.   reprinted with the kind permission of the Sourcebooks Casablanca Author blog

Abraham Mazlo was a smart dude (who spent a lot of time around books and libraries growing up). He posited the idea that we have a hierarchy of needs, with physiological needs—breathing, food, water, sex—coming before security needs like physical safety, job security and consistency in morality, family and property rules. After those came the needs associated with love and belonging: sexual intimacy, friendship and family. Then come the needs fulfilled by esteem—of and by others, of self. Confidence goes on this tier as well.

At the top of his hierarchy are the self-actualization needs: problem-solving, creativity, individual morality, and lack of prejudice, among others. Maybe this is the arrangement of needs best suited to individuals whose priority is perpetuating their genes rather than their ideas, or maybe Mazlo didn’t study too many of the kind of people I meet. In my legal work, I come across people who are so fixed on the need for sexual intimacy or approval, or some other “higher order” craving, that they jeopardize their very lives.

Unless and until they get their emotional needs met, they can’t fashion a life where physiological needs are met. Some of these people are attorneys whom we would call “successful” in the traditional sense, some are convicted felons, and some are the victims of those felons.

In my literary travels, I came across a book called, “Kabluna.” This is a work of nonfiction written by a European who was sojourning among First Nations peoples of the Canadian far north between the World Wars. They referred to him as “kabluna.” The author of this tome met up with a missionary serving in the Artic north, a man who lived more or less in an ice cave eating little besides raw fish. On a calories in/calories out basis, the fellow should not have been able to sustain life, much like many distance runners. The author posited that the missionary was so beloved by the locals, so thoroughly sustained by the meaningfulness of the role he fulfilled in the community, that earthly nutrition was secondary to the spiritual banquet he consumed daily.

I am not now nor have I ever aspired to be any kind of missionary, but I am a writer. My hierarchy of needs dictates that even when food, water, and sex (for God’s sake, Mazlo was a smart guy, but still a guy) are in short supply, I have a need to notice my surroundings. I watch people, I watch animals, I watch myself. I watch the sky and the land, I watch traffic. I watch my thoughts. When my livelihood has been jeopardized or my health threatened, I’ve watched that too.

This is not a dissociative tendency, this is not denial, this is having the mind of a writer. I watch, and I ponder. When I’m driving to work, when I’m falling asleep, when I’m supposed to be dwelling on my gratitudes, my little brain goes off on one frolic and detour after another. This is not Attention Deficit Disorder, or lingering post traumatic stress symptoms. This is having the imagination of a writer. If somehow, somebody got into my mind and prohibited me from watching and pondering, my identity would be jeopardized.

When I’ve watched and pondered for a while, I must synthesize what I observe with my experience and beliefs, and I call that writing. Maybe these are just manifestations of something Mazlo had different names for. They are activities I must pursue to be who I am, and they go on whether I’m fed, loved, housed, befriended or not. And because I do them and others are apparently drawn to do them as well—observe, ponder, synthesize and express—we have what Mazlo placed under only individual morality in his hierarchy of needs: creativity.

I call it culture, somebody else might term it wisdom. Someday, I will reflect on why Mazlo’s pyramid seems to be the inverse of what some Asian philosophies say is the path to spiritual enlightenment, but it seems to me there’s more than one pyramid. So my pyramid might be upside down compared to old Abe’s. Perhaps yours is as well, or inside out, or both. The point is to understand what the levels are on your pyramid, and set about meeting those needs that define you. Maybe you’ll call that writing too.