This is a behaviour in myself I really wish wasn’t part of my makeup: friends call or drop in or write to ask if they can come stay and sometimes, not always, but way too often, I get…antsy. I feel they’re going to break my stride, stop me from achieving things.

Photo by Rachel de Joode

On the phone I’m too often distracted. When they drop in it takes me a good 15 minutes and some internal self-talk to be cool. And when I have someone coming to stay I have to talk myself down from a mild panic. This is partly borne from working for myself from home – my parameters are very loose and loved ones can forget that my lounge and kitchen is my office and that at 10am, when they want me to hang on the beach with them when they come visit, I’m meant to be at work.

I get irritated. I want the world to just go away in that moment.

I know not all of you work in the same manner, so you might not empathise. But maybe you do. Because you might find personal calls at work distracting. Or impromptu weekend drop-ins annoying when you’re in the middle of a project. Or when you’re stressed, visitors might tax your tolerance quotient. You issue impatient, “Yep, yep, yeps” as they talk.

If you do, you might find comfort in some ideas I came across.

Recently I read Trust the Process by Shaun McNiff, which is seriously a great book for anyone who gets writer’s block or struggles to access their creativity. He writes that

Picasso welcomed visitors to his studio because they recharged his creative energies.

It was these distractions that provided his inspiration for the day. His muses were people who popped by on that day.

Then Stephen King in On Writing said this:

I’m running an occasional series with creative people I admire who have a spark of unique “dive-into-life”-ness that I think we could all learn from.

pic via sandstone flies

This week Kate Grenville is my guest. Kate is one of Australia’s best-known authors, having written eight books of fiction and four books about the writing process. Her best-known works are the international best-seller The Secret River (my Mum’s favourite book) The Idea of Perfection, The Lieutenant and Lilian’s Story, which I reckon every kid of my generation read at school. Her latest book is Sarah Thornhill…you might’ve read it? Her novels have won many awards both in Australia and the UK, several have been made into major feature films, and all have been translated into European and Asian languages.

She shares some lovely thoughts on how she does what she does….

Kate Grenville podcast [ 21:42 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Some points I loved:

* She doesn’t wait for inspiration. She just sits and writes and trusts that this process alone will produce.

* She writes to a routine. She sets the alarm for 5:30 and writes for an hour. She doesn’t care what comes out, but again trusts that some of it will be useable. She then goes back and collates all the bits and pieces and jig-

I’ve decided to start an occasional series with creative people I admire who have a spark of unique “dive-into-life”-ness that I think we could all learn from. There. A long sentence for you.

Image by Tierney Gearon

Wendy Harmer is my first such guest. She is a MASSIVE spirit and her impact in Australia is huge. She’s a comedian, teen fiction writer, memoirist, blogger (you must sign up to Hoopla – smart women contributors talking important water cooler stuff) and…the rest. She’s playful and she creates from a very true and honest space. The best kind. I loved chatting with her about how she does what she does. Her words helped me enormously….mostly because she is so positive and accepting of the process. She plays. She explores.

Anyway, listen in.

8 Things to learn about being creative [ 28:19 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Some of the salient mantras and points I took:

* She used to dive into big new things thinking “everyone will be much better than me”. Over time she’s realised no one really knows what they’re doing…they’re all just trying. “Most people are being average”.

* She always wanted to edit a magazine. So. She created Hoopla. Because now the internet means you just. Can. Very true and good for anyone with dreams they haven’t fulfilled yet.

* When she gets a bit nervous she says to herself: “I don’t have to do this for a living”. Bam. Expectations lessened!

* She works 9am-3pm. Sometimes she only gets 3 paragraphs down. Sometimes she scraps the lot the next day. 500 words a day is about fair, to her mind. Phew…

Oh, you know what. Deep breath. This…

Have you ever done something that’s terrified you to the core?  That you have to dive into with no map, no instructions, nothing to hold onto? Instead you must freefall with no guarantee of where – and if – you’re going to land? Something that you know will change you, but you don’t know how yet…you just know it will, and already has?

For me, that’s what this book I’m writing has been about. This book IS the VERY journey that I’m writing about. I’ve lived out my book, about half a chapter ahead of the writing and so my writing has had to wait for my psychic growth. And my damn psychic growth WON’T be rushed.

Deadline is in seven weeks. I have half the book left to write. I’m Bradley Cooper’s character in Limitless. And I still don’t know what my book is really about.

Freaking? You bet? Fired up? More than ever.

I share this, well, to simply share a moment in “This is serious, Mum” fear. Because we all have these moments.

Don’t we?

I could stare at that photo below for an inappropriately long time. It’s evocative and in-someone-else’s-moment-ish and makes me want to meet a man in trunks.

Mornings. Spent writing. Calmly. Alone. In sun. Yep.

I came across this rundown by Hunter S Thompson of his morning routine. Morning routine’s are key to life, I’ve come to learn. I’ve shared mine and others before. But this ode lifts my spirit:

“I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon;

anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast.

In Hong Kong, Dallas, or at home—and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed—breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive:

This week in Sunday Life I trust the process

I had dinner with a guy recently who dedicated entrée to telling me that all writers are self-indulged w*nkers. “You all go on about the pain of writing,” he said. “Plumbers don’t write about how hard their work is, you don’t read about ‘plumber’s block’.”

I’m a writer. I had to respond. First, I said, with the spine tingle of a good comeback, plumbers don’t write. “Perhaps they take out their frustration on an S-bend,” I suggested gently. “We know about writer’s pain because we read their work. “

Second, writing is a creative process. And any creative process – whether it’s painting or interpretive dancing or inventing a new S-bend wrench – is the expression of the human struggle to share our inner selves. Displaying our inside, or “true”, selves is all about standing out on the farthest limb, exposed and vulnerable, and saying “here!”. We all have, at our core, an important urge to do this, and yet at the same time a primal fear of it. Ergo, creative block.

Funnily, not long after I found myself at the Byron Bay Writer’s Festival chatting to a bunch of writers about the pain of the creative struggle. (Here’s a new collective noun for you: “a writer’s festival of whingers”.) Whether you’re a writer or wrench inventor or embarking on a big, formative project, you know this struggle. It’s an important one. A damn tough one, too.

There was consensus from most of the writers: just start. It doesn’t matter if you produce crap. From the crap, something always emerges.