Make Your Art

I got an itch the other day. An itch to transform my writing studio so that when I sat down in the morning after ferrying kids to school and making coffee and filling bowls with dog and cat food and other mundane miscellany, I would immediately be transported to the book world I was currently spending time in.

Well, why not? thought I. Let’s try it and see.

So I went on a Pinterest hunt. I picked out pictures that made me feel like I was flying. Pictures that made me feel like I’d traversed the infinite space-time continuum (or something) to arrive in the exact spot my characters occupied. I printed out said pictures and pinned them to the wall; nothing fancy, easy peasy. But guess what? It worked.

This is what I see when I sit down every morning:

And it absolutely puts me in the mindset I need to be in. Sometimes, when I’m feeling especially procrastinate-y, I’ll twiddle my thumbs and sigh and sit back in my chair and look at my haphazard wall of pictures. And i’ll instantly know what to say next.

The pictures speak to me, in a way. I think it’s especially cool because they were created in the same way I’m creating my words now, by an artist holed up in her own studio somewhere, working in the absolute quiet of an empty house, wondering if anyone could hear her at all.

I want to say to her, I hear you. Make your art. Because it helps me make mine.