Meredith asked Julia Glass:

How would you describe your creative process?

Julia Glass In a word, haphazard. Of which I am not proud! My life as a writer defies a lot of the hackneyed dictates fed to fledgling writers. To begin with, I do not by any means write every day--though in a way that depends on what one means by "write." It took me many years not to feel guilty about failing to "add words" to my stories (that is, spend time at the keyboard) on a daily basis. I thank a profile of the novelist Peter Cameron (one of my favorite contemporary writers), which I read while writing "Three Junes," for releasing me from that guilt. I'm going to paraphrase him, but he said something like this: "The lion's share of writing is just thinking." What he meant is that a lot of the essential work of writing fiction takes place when you're living the rest of your life but daydreaming about your characters. I realized that many of the most important decisions I make as a storyteller take place while I'm showering, stuck in traffic, meandering along the produce aisle at the grocery store, walking the dogs. For that reason, I do not carry my cell phone much except when traveling away from home. It drives some people crazy--but having time to be truly alone, incommunicado, is crucial to my writing.

The downside of this nonroutine is that I'm too easily distracted, and at times I have to discipline myself to sit at the keyboard whether I feel inspired or not. I tend to write in sprints--no pages added for three weeks or more and then, wham, I sit down every day for a week and turn out fifty pages. The beauty of fiction writing is that there are no rules. Or maybe there's one: Stay involved with your imagination as you live your everyday life. Do that and your stories will find their way into words.

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