Inspiration: What's On Your Desk?

Here's a trick I stole from Ray Bradbury (hey, if you're going to steal, steal from the best). It's great for those slow-start mornings when you need to do a little freewriting to grease the gears before you begin work on today's project.

This idea works best for those who believe in the phrase often printed on proudly-displayed workspace placards: "A neat desk is a sign of a sick mind." Here's an opportunity for you to capitalize on your desktop chaos.

The exercise is simple. Pick an object on your desk - doesn't matter what - and write about it. The specifics are up to you. Try any or all of the following:

1) Characterize it. If your pencil caddy were an animal, what animal would it be? Describe the feeding habits of your desktop pencil caddy.

If it's an animate object, it may be time to finally tackle that cleaning you've been putting off.

2) Place it in a dramatic context. In other words, a scene. Create a couple of characters and let them fight over it. Relax and flow. Just lob a couple of names onto the page and roll. Stay loose. It's an exercise. No pressure, no expectation.

3) Describe it. Do a "still life" with words. Use the exercise as an opportunity to practice describing color, light and shadow, the emotions your subject conveys.

These are just suggestions. Do what you want. Follow your intuition. Have fun. Be silly if you feel it, serious if that comes. The point is to kickstart the part of your brain that likes to make things up - the part that often wakes up slowly, even after large quantities of caffeine.

If you're one of those people whose desktop is immaculate (that's me), grab something from your knick-knack shelf, bring it over to your desk, and write about it. Or write about the desk itself. The point is to get from point A, which is staring at the blank page thinking, "I don't feel like writing today," to point B, about 500 words later. "I do not like writing," Dick Francis has said. "I like having written."

Once you have written 500 words, it's a little easier to write the next 500.

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