In my lifelong work as a writer, I’ve discovered some methods to help me maintain a healthy and free-flowing channel of words. They aren’t foolproof, but they are reliable much of the time. In general, I try to find and cultivate four traits: creativity, stamina, curiosity and focus. I don’t ask myself to tap into all of them at any given time. But if I can tap into even one of the four, that supplies enough juice to get some writing done even if the other three are absent.
Stamina is a workhorse. I usually need it for anything that goes beyond about 100 words. By the way, I just passed that hurdle in this paragraph right here, so now I have momentum too!
I spent most of my career writing short pieces as a communications professional in the public and private sectors. Stamina has helped me meet many thousands of deadlines, and it has also helped me hew to a high- quality finished product.
Stamina is also an exercise in mind training. I ask my mind to accept little nudges of the finish line: a couple of paragraphs more, a little tidying up before I take a break. Over time, that increases my capacity for a long-term aspiration, without making me feel overwhelmed and inadequate.
When I first started the research for my book Courage Says “Keep On,” the trait of stamina, and the related mind training, sustained me during many episodes of doubt. Doubt whether there was a story to be told, doubt whether I could tell it. Stamina manifested itself in a simple idea: forward momentum as an antidote to that crippling uncertainty. There were several subsets of that. Mental stamina to do a thorough research job, find the missing pieces of the story and create a strong narrative thread. Emotional stamina to talk about the project to friends, family, editors and publishers. Physical stamina to find the time and energy to visit libraries, conduct interviews 2000 miles distant.
Each time I undertook a research/interview trip, I received an enormous boost of energy and joy, and that was like a long-acting dose of medicine. Sometimes it was a couple of years between trips, but getting my feet on the ground in those places that were important to the narrative—that was powerful beyond imagining. I would come home from those in-person experiences energized and inspired for the long dry stretches ahead.
Even now, I return to those moments and re-create them in my mind. Despite a recently cancelled book promotion tour to the “power places,” the down-deep connection still pumps energy into my stamina tank. Above my desk is the poem by W.B. Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Yeats so eloquently describes a place of sustenance far away:
“I will arise and go now, for always night and day,
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
As I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
Stamina means I might be waiting a while for the next infusion of energy and joy into my deep heart’s core. But in the meantime it gets me where I need to be: moving forward.
