Goodreads asked Laura Catherine Brown:

How do you get inspired to write?

Laura Catherine Brown I try to write every day. I write in a journal. I was always a journal scribbler but what really jumpstarted me on “journaling” (I hate the verb) was Julia Cameron’s The Artists Way, which I’ve done twice over the past fifteen years. The morning pages became for me, an essential tool; a repository of ideas and observations, of verbal exercises and dream recordings. If I’m stuck in an aspect of my novel, like a scene that feels static or a character who feels one-dimensional, I will free-write in my journal for 3 pages or more if the spirit hits, and the key, I think, is typing the free-writes into my computer, which makes them official and illuminates what I’ve done. Otherwise the gems get lost in all the handwritten pages. I feel far less free composing on my laptop. The journal is like a sketchpad for a visual artist, a place to doodle and have fun. If I’m really stuck, I will open an old journal and cull bits of narrative richness and language and life. I don’t need a prompt to write in my journal though these are valuable sometimes for discovery. I do try to expand beyond my own feelings and reactions; and try to record dialogue and situation and images in a sensory, language-rich way. I like the music of words. There’s nothing more boring to me than to go back through old journals and see that once again, I’m anxious and beleaguered and afflicted with aches, pains and inflammation.

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