No choreographer wants to stand in an empty white room with nothing. No dance, no idea even, and a deadline looming. It's a similar issue staring down the blank screen for a writer, which is one of the reasons that The Creative Habit, though written by choreographer Twyla Tharp, is useful across creative disciplines.

I admit I likely would not have picked this book up without the recommendation (read: homework assignment) from my semester mentor but found it well worth my time. The essence of the book is on fostering your own creativity. Tharp discusses rituals of preparation used by creative professionals in many different fields, ways of determining what rituals might work best for you according to your "creative DNA," methods for "scratching" out new ideas,and how to avoid ruts as well as extend grooves where the creative juice is flowing. Many of her ideas I found I was already using but the discussions helped me understand exactly why those ideas were important.

I'll be reflecting on this book this week as I work on my assigned essay on it, but here's a few quotes in hopes they give you something to think about as well.

• On acquiring skill: “I know one novelist who taught himself the craft of fiction by retyping the stories of his favorite authors. The act of typing someone else's words – rather than simply reading them – made him stop and think about how the author chose words, constructed sentences and paragraphs, arranged dialogue, and structured a narrative...If there's a lesson here it's: get busy copying. That's not a popular notion today, not when we are all instructed to find our own way, admonished to be original and find our own voice at all costs! But it's sound advice. Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else's footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.” (Tharp 66)
• On finding ideas: “Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature – all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you'll find out how big a prize you've won.” (103).
• On luck: “Your creative endeavors can never be thoroughly mapped out ahead of time. You have to allow for the suddenly altered landscape, the change in plan, the accidental spark – and you have to see it as a stroke of luck rather than a disturbance of your perfect scheme. Habitually creative people are, in E.B. White's phrase, “prepared to be lucky. The key words here are “prepared” and “lucky.” They're inseparable. You don't get lucky without preparation, and there's no sense in being prepared if you're not open to the possibility of a glorious accident.” (Tharp 120).

Comparisons are a writing staple; they're a great way to get across a lot of information in a single sentence. Here's a example from a craft book that's a fave of my fellow Swoon author Jenny Elliott, Noah Lukeman's The First Five Pages. You could write: "The man had a long, drawn-out face. He was very pale. His forehead ran straight across. He had large dark circles below his eyes..." Lukeman carries the example much farther, but the basic point? This man "looks like Frankenstein." (Lukeman 61). This comparison gives a strong mental picture and saves a lot of the reader's time.

Now there are some cautions to this technique. You must be sure your audience understands the comparison. If your reader doesn't know who Frankenstein is, now he or she is only confused. A good comparison will be original without needing explaining. That being said, I'm about to break all the rules.

If I say VCFA (Vermont College of Fine Arts) is like Hogwarts, I hope you get the picture that VCFA is an intriguing and beautiful place where magical things happen. In the interest of fun, though, photos and explanations below.

Yesterday's residency programming featured a tribute to Walter Dean Myers. We remembered him with anecdotes and readings from his work. Walter Dean Myers first touched my life when I shared Sharon Creech's novel in verse, Love That Dog, with my fourth grade class while student teaching a poetry unit. In the novel, a boy is inspired to write poetry in part by the first stanza of Myers's poem entitled “Love That Boy.”

At the end of my student teaching, a mother of a boy in my class came to me and presented me with a gift of poetry books to use with my future classes. “I don't know what you did with my son,” the mother said, “but now he wants to go to the library all the time and he checks out stacks of poetry books.” Myers's words had woven their way from him to Sharon Creech, from Sharon Creech to me, and from me to my students and their parents.

Thank you, Walter Dean Myers, for the many lives that have been inspired by your work and for leaving us a library.

Move over sci-fi and fantasy, the highlight from today was a great lecture by author Coe Booth on world building in contemporary novels - six pages of notes! As a teen, I embraced my inner geek in many ways, one of which was in mapping out imaginary towns and imagining the lives of the people who lived there. I had no idea that what I was doing was an integral part of creating story, but think about how many ways your life has been shaped by the neighborhoods you grew up in.

Coe created an imaginary New York neighborhood called Bronxwood for her Tyrell novels and she provided us with various levels and questions to help us go about the process ourselves. I'm excited that I gleaned a couple character memories from the exercises that will improve my draft of Kiss and Cry.

If you're in the mood for your own writing challenge, I've posted a slide show of pictures below that you might use to imagine character memories as connected to a place. The pictures are from downtown Montpelier, but don't limit yourself to that. What kind of characters do you think live in a place like this? How do they feel about living here? How do they interact with each other? You can also take a walk through your own neighborhood and think of some of your own connections to place as well.

 P.S. I love almost everything about Vermont but the internet connection in the dorms leaves a lot to be desired. As a result, these posts are drafts and I apologize in advance for typos or the occasional nonsense post gone live...

Specifically, Vermont College of Fine Arts. It's time for summer residency in the Writing for Children and Young Adults program and residency kicked off today with a great lecture on public readings by faculty member Alan Cumyn. Alan is the author of many books including Tilt, which is on my TBR list after this afternoon's lecture. Other highlights from today included listening to (and seeing Alan's advice in action at) faculty readings by Kathi Appelt, Tom Birdseye, Susan Fletcher, A.M. Jenkins, and Rita Williams-Garcia.

What happens in Vermont stays in Vermont (the professors' lectures aren't mine to share), so I won't be going into details but I will be checking in to share some of the craft topics we're delving into during residency. If you have little experience in doing public readings, here's some links to check out to get yourself started thinking about this useful author skill:

10 Tips for Successful Public Readings (basic information)
How to Read in Public (important considerations)
10 Tips for Writers Reading in Public (a humorous and real essay)

I also recommend reading your current works in progress aloud to yourself. It's a great way to hone your public reading skills while also helping you revise, as there's nothing like reading aloud to help you see words and phrases you are overusing or areas where your work might need tightening.

I remember being told in school that if I couldn't think of anything to write, to just go ahead and write exactly that. As in: "I can't think of anything to write. I can't think of anything to write. I can't think of anything to write. I can't think of anything to write. I can't think of anything to write..." (Okay, you got it, I know.) Eventually, I was told, this would help me spark an idea. Or...not. I've been on the teacher side of that fence a time or two. Or four. Or, well, way more. I sympathize as well, then, with the teacher's frustration. It's hard to build from nothing.

Blank pages, though, have this way of mimicking brand new books. (Yes, I smell books. They're like calorie free chocolate!) Just like the tantalizing aroma of a new book, the blank page has the fresh, pristine possibility of being the greatest next thing EVER. There is then, in that potential, all the stress of making it perfect. Oh, bring on the stress balls, the worry stones, and (of course) the chocolate!

I confess to watching a little too much Frozen lately, but it is time to let it go. In fact, when I begin a new writing notebook, I purposefully record something messily right away. It gives me mental permission to let go of that need for perfectionism. Fellow author Sandy Hall (A Little Something Different) posted "tips for writing scenes" on her Tumblr recently and the last tip said to rewrite about 200 times. Exaggeration, yes, but not in principle. You will need to rewrite and rewrite. You won't need to write, "I can't think of what to rewrite, I can't think of what to rewrite..."

Just get something down. The names of characters in a scene. A description of how someone looks. A sensory image from the place where you're writing, even if it's an annoying hum of fluorescent lights. Repeat and repeat again. Think of the blank page not as needing to be filled with perfect but with possibility, lots of possibilities.

Of course, just like athletes, those who practice daily find the words begin to come more easily. For me, nothing kicks me into writing gear better than a daily word count goal. Want some online accountability? Camp NaNoWriMo (the summer version of National Novel Writing Month) kicks off its July session today and you can get some virtual cabin mates to hold you to your word count goals as well as lots of tips for making word count. Visit https://campnanowrimo.org/sign_in to sign up!