The Artistic Process

I find that a few things help me to feel more creative and productive when it comes to writing. Diet and exercise are important not just for general physical health, but for my creative health as well. My physical and mental states are very intimately connected (as above, so below) and keeping myself in some semblance of working order proves crucial for the creative faculties.

There's also a certain room in my home where good ideas consistently come into being. No, this is not my office. I'm talking about the bathroom. More specifically, I am discussing the shower. For a while I found myself on a quest for those bathtub soap crayons used to scrawl on shower walls without damaging the paint and which can be scrubbed off easily. Do you know what I discovered? Both local toy stores and craft stores carry rows and rows of various crayola crayons, but not one of them carried these bath tub crayons. Ordering them off of the Internet seemed gratuitous at the time, so I made do without them. Now I just streak out of the shower to scrawl things onto my office whiteboard or get them out directly into my computer. *

This is precisely what I did this evening, incidentally, as the missing pieces for a short story idea fell into place while in the sacred water temple that is my bathroom. Now I have a skeleton for the short story and I just need to sit down and knock out that first draft, which I intend to do this week. Then it will be editing for the short story and the prologue for the website serial.

*I am thinking of putting whiteboard markers by the bathroom mirror so I can negate the running-across-the-hall urgency on my mission to record ideas or bits of inspiration.