Writing in the shower

Write in the shower. Get away from what I call "the tyranny of the blank screen."

Thrity Umrigar

Thrity Umrigar

It's rare to find advice for writers at the end of a novel. An interview with the author, yes. Discussion questions, yes. The author's biography, certainly. But advice for would-be writers? Not likely. Yet that's what Thrity Umrigar generously gives us at the end of the paperback edition of The Space Between Us. What's more, it's excellent advice.

Of course, giving advice to would-be writers is something the India-born writer does every workday at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where she has taught writing for a number of years. Here she offers 15 suggestions that those who imagine themselves to be writers might find useful. I won't go through them all now, but I will comment on the one above because it is one of my favorites. I do some of my best writing in the shower. Or while shaving, driving, cooking dinner or washing the dishes after dinner.

This is similar to my own advice for locating something that's lost: Stop looking for it. By putting it out of my mind, I will often find the missing item simply by going about my daily life. Or it will suddenly occur to me where it is likely to be hiding. This happened to me just yesterday. For days I had been looking for some papers I need for my taxes. Last evening while preparing to go to bed and not thinking about those papers at all, it suddenly occurred to me where I had left them.

So it goes with writing. A blank screen or a blank space after your last sentence can be intimidating. The harder we try to find the next sentence, the harder it becomes to think of anything useful. We seem to have nothing at all to say. So we need to do something else, something that requires little mental effort, like taking a shower or washing dishes. Charles Dickens used to take long walks through London at night.

Ideas can come while thinking about something else or while not thinking at all.  Sometimes I imagine myself telling someone else about what I'm writing or trying to write. So often I will find myself going off in a direction that hadn't occurred to me before. Some of my own best ideas come to me, unbidden, at such times.

The only trouble is, it is hard to write down these ideas, before we forget them, while taking a shower, driving a car or taking a long walk after dark.