“The muse has to know where to find you.”

Billy Wilder

Writing may start in your head, but it has to come out of there, onto the page or the screen.

For that to happen, you have to sit down with a pen and notebook or in front of a computer.

Not everyone recognizes that.

Jericho Brown, a poet and head of the creative writing program at Emory University, posed this question to a class the other day: if you show up for other people—for dentist appointments, making sure kids get to school on time, etc.—why can’t you show up for yourself, to write?

Some might say laziness, but that’s a facile explanation. More likely, it’s resistance, the fear that there’s no point. I have no ideas, you think. I don’t know how to keep going. I’m just no good.

They’re understandable worries, but you have to fight them.

Whatever the reasons, you have to turn up. That’s the only way you can come close to achieving your dreams. It takes discipline, as even the most successful writers have learned.

“I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning,” says Anne Tyler, whose discipline has produced 22 novels. “If I waited till I felt like writing, I’d never write at all.”

Tyler doesn’t wait for a muse, that mythical source of inspiration for the creative artist. Like other successful and productive writers, she turns up.

“I go to the office every day and I work. inspiration itself is not something I have any control over.”

Nick Cave

“I go to the office everyday and I work,” says musician Nick Cave. “Inspiration itself is not something I have any control over.”

Depending on the needs of your family and your work life — if writing is, as it is for most, a second job — you may not be able to write every day. Sometimes a few days or a week may go by, although the longer between sessions, the greater the chance of losing momentum.

To turn up regularly, you’ll need to find—or steal—writing time when you can. An example from my writing life can show you one way.

When I had a job that demanded 10-12 hours a day and a family with a toddler and twin infants, the only time I could write was first thing in the morning when the house was asleep.

I would brew a cup of strong tea and make my way downstairs, careful to avoid squeaks that might awake my sleeping family, to the basement where, crammed into a corner, I had installed a desk and chair.

I usually had less than an hour before I had to get ready for work. I would make notes, draft passages and revise on my desktop and hit save.

I then took a Metro subway to the National Press Building in Washington DC, where I worked as a newspaper reporter. The ride was just 30 minutes long, but I decided to take advantage of that time as well.

I had been inspired to do so after reading that Scott Turow finished his best-selling crime thriller, “Presumed Innocent,” on his commute to Chicago where he worked as an assistant U.S. attorney.

“I wrote 26 to 28 minutes a day,” he told an interviewer after his success. “It doesn’t sound like a lot, maybe, but if I hadn’t done it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“I wrote 26 or 28 minutes a day. It doesn’t sound like a lot, maybe, but if I hadn’t done it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Scott Turow

At the time, I had been working, without much success, in my pre-dawn basement sessions, on a short story about a sports-challenged mother thrust into the role of coach one Saturday at her daughter’s Little League game.

I don’t have a clue where the idea came from, except for the fact that I am sports-challenged with a boyhood history of humiliating days on the baseball field.

But drawing on those experiences, and armed with a legal pad, I found myself drafting with ease as the subway made its subterranean way to my day job. Perhaps because it seemed less permanent than words flickering on my computer screen.

There were mornings when I had to use my commute to keep up with work, but I managed to finish a complete draft in a few weeks. I then spent a few more weeks revising it, marking up a printout I carried in my briefcase. Turning up to write was paying off.

After I finished the story, I sent it to magazines.

Soon, I had a tidy pile of rejection slips. I assumed I had exhausted all the possibilities.

Then a friend, Rick Wllber, who writes sports fiction, among other genres, told me about Elysian Fields Quarterly: A Baseball Review.

Long story short: they published “Calling the Shots.”

“I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning. If I waited till I felt like writing, I’d never write at all.”

Anne Tyler

The experience taught me a vital lesson about my craft that I hope you’ll take to heart. It doesn’t matter whenever, wherever, or for how long you write. At dawn. On your lunch break. Before bed. On a park bench. In a coffee shop or your home office. Or the subway.

You don’t have to write for very long. But you must stick with it. Try not to miss a day, or you’ll lose momentum. Very soon you’ll have a draft you can revise and that book chapter, essay or story will be that much closer to completion.

What’s most important is that you never stop turning up to write. As often as possible. That way “the muse” knows where to find you.

CRAFT QUERY: How do you make sure you turn up to write?

May the writing go well.

Using a tape recorder has taught me my most important lesson of interviewing: to shut up. It was a painful learning experience, having to listen to myself stepping on people’s words, cutting them off just as they were getting enthusiastic or appeared about to make a revealing statement.

There were far too many times I heard myself asking overly long and leading questions, instead of simply saying, “Why?” or “How did it happen?” or “When did all this begin?” or “What do you mean?” and then closing my mouth and letting people answer.

People hate silence

It took a long time but eventually, I learned an important lesson: people hate silence. It makes them uncomfortable. And when they’re being interviewed, they’re especially sensitive to a reporter’s behavior. They’ll answer your question and then wait for the interruption that almost always follows. If you don’t butt in, they will keep talking.

There’s a great scene in the 1976 movie, “All the President’s Men,” when Robert Redford, as Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, is asking a Republican businessman how his $25,000 check ended up in the Watergate money trail. It’s a dangerous question, and the source is skittish. “I know I shouldn’t be telling you this, he says.

Woodward remains silent; you can almost see him praying, “Tell me, please.” But he restrains himself and, suddenly, the man blurts out a damaging truth and then can’t stop. Before long, he’s implicated a top Nixon campaign official in the coverup. The moral here: To get people to talk, we need to learn the power of silence and master the art of listening.

Effective writers know they need to get their sources to reveal themselves, to provide the information they need for their stories, and, most important, to offer the human voices that bring a narrative to life.

“Silence opens the door to hearing dialogue, rare and valuable in breaking stories,” says Brady Dennis, of The Washington Post.

Two types of quotes

James B. Stewart in “Follow the Story: How to Write Successful Nonfiction” draws a distinction between “contemporary quotes — the journalism staple, spoken in answer to a reporter’s question — and “narrative quotes,“ uttered as dialogue or snatches of a character’s speech.

Contemporary quotes have their place. In many cases, the only way reporters can get a quote from President Donald Trump is to ask a question and capture his shouted response over the din of whirring helicopters of Air Force One.

Narrative quotes are much more revealing and require a reporter’s listening ear that is capable of snatching the butterfly of dialogue as it floats through the air. Good stories combine the two types.

In a story about a two-car collision that killed two Alabama sisters traveling to visit each other, Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times used simple quotes that illustrated what the Roman orator Cicero called brevity’s “great charm of eloquence.”

“They weren’t fancy women,” said their sister Billie Walker. “They loved good conversation. And sugar biscuits.”

Just 11 words, in quotes, yet they speak volumes about the victims. That’s a powerful contemporary quote, but Gettleman also listens for narrative ones, too.

As the service closed, relatives walked slowly back to their pickups. Gettleman captures a four-word narrative quote that reflects the region’s dialect and the minister’s concern for his flock.

”Y’all be careful now,” the pastor said.

Learning to listen

“Learning to listen has been the great lesson of my life,” David Ritz wrote in The Writer.“

“You can’t capture a subject or render someone lifelike, you can’t create a living voice, with all its unique twists and turns, without listening. Now there are those who listen while waiting breathlessly to break in. For years, that was me.”

Ritz learned to embrace the idea of “patient listening, deep-down listening, listening with the heart as well as the head, listening in a way that lets the person know you care, that you want to hear what she has to say, that you’re enjoying the sound of her voice.”

That’s what an effective interviewer learns to do.

Shut Up!

For decades, historian Robert A. Caro has been convincing people who knew and worked with the notoriously private President Lyndon B. Johnson to open up. His secret: silence.

“In interviews, silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it,” Caro writes in “Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing,” his illuminating book about the reporting methods behind his magisterial biographies of LBJ.

Caro employs a strategy other interviewers would be wise to adopt.

“When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write “SU” (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of “SU”s.”

During your next interview, ask your question. Then:

• Shut your mouth.
• Wait.
• If you have trouble, count to 10.
• Write “SU!” in your notebook.
• Make eye contact, smile, nod, but don’t speak.
• Let your sources do the talking for you.

You’ll be amazed at the riches that follow.

May the interviewing go well.

Comment question: How do you get your sources to open up?

Photo by Ocean Biggshott on Unsplash

Adapted from “News Writing and Reporting: The Complete Guide for Today’s Journalist,” by Chip Scanlan and Richard Craig.