Q: I have a hard time balancing my love of photography and my love of writing. Is there something else you enjoy doing that sometimes gets in the way of your writing?*

A: Um, yes! I had almost exactly the same problem. I used to spend a lot of time with darkroom photography in the days before digital. And while photography and writing are by no means incompatible—indeed, I took a whole class in college exploring the relationship between the two—there is a certain school of thought that says you don’t want to use up your creative energy on anything else but your writing. The poet Mary Oliver writes about how she always chose to do boring, crap jobs so she wouldn’t be too intellectually stimulated (or satisfied) at work. Here’s the quote I’m thinking of: “ I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.”

For me, something was lost in the switch to digital, and when I no longer had access to a darkroom, I more or less let photography go. You can read about my nostalgia for darkrooms here. But that doesn’t mean you have to! See if you can find a way to bring the two interests together. One way is to do writing that complements your photography, another is to use photographs as starting points for writing, still another is to bring in what you know about photography into the world of your stories by making it important to one of your characters.

 *Question courtesy of the National Writing Project·and readers of Figment.com for the National Day on Writing. Read highlights of the event in·this post·or listen to me and four other guests talk about the National Day on Writing for the NWP blogtalk radio program here.

To ring in 2012, I offer you this scene: a Paris Metro car full of people on their way home, their facial expressions ranging from impatient to bored. In the middle of us all, a woman with her amplifier strapped to a dolly, sings into a microphone that lets us hear her loud and clear (whether we want to or not) as she croons "Sway" with a very thick French accent.

At first, I found it a bit annoying to have my eardrums accosted by accordionists, singers, and other performers on the Metro when all I wanted was to get home from work and see my boys. But then I began to really pay attention to these performers. Some clearly were doing it just for the money--the handful of change they shamed or pressured travelers into giving them before they finally stepped off the train and went to inflict auditory torture on someone else.  The instrument they carried was basically just an accessory to their panhandling efforts.

Other buskers were different--well dressed and apparently indifferent to whether or not they received donations.  I have a theory (perhaps totally bogus) that these performers see the Metro as a kind of endless open-mike opportunity. They have a captive audience, after all.

But for my shy self, the proportions of their courage boggle the mind. A captive audience, yes, but a very cranky audience determined not to be moved by their music. Is it the challenge that appeals? And has a Metro crowd ever burst out into applause? I'd love to know.

While I have sometimes wanted to pay the Metro performers money to please, please STOP playing, our little boy Liam is a huge fan of all music, no matter how bad. He'll sway to an out-of-tune accordion, elevator music, or even a cellphone ringtone. So I guess--when he's with us--the buskers can count on at least one appreciative member in their captive audience.

And maybe, with enough courage, one real listener is enough to make it worthwhile. That's what I'm trying to remember this new year, knee-deep as I am in scary, rough-drafting for novel #3.

There is an explosion in my new (third) novel. How do I write it?

It's strange the things we manage to draw on when we're writing. I reckon that the shock I felt when I had a small-scale kitchen explosion didn't measure up to what explosion victims and survivors experienced. But. It's a starting place.

For me, sometimes the best thing when it comes to bringing a scene to life is finding some kernel in my own life that I can write out of, no matter how much I may need to magnify, distort, or otherwise alter the experience.

It's mostly about finding a way to capture an emotional truth, something that feels truly lived and therefore resonates with the reader.

There are a couple of scenes in The Knife and the Butterfly, for example, that I wrote out of memories of being awake after everyone else in a house had gone to sleep. One finds Azael sitting in the bathroom of an abandoned apartment, contemplating a message scrawled inside a cabinet.

Probably it doesn't matter to anyone else how I imagined my way into this scene, but for me finding that link between my life and a character's life is everything. To get Azael to think thoughts he can only have when he feels cut off from the world, I summoned that sense of unbearable silence in my grandparents' house when everyone was asleep. I craved noise--any noise. Movement--any movement.

Maybe my kitchen explosion will be enough to help me tuck myself into my characters' experiences.

Let's say you want to write but you're stuck. Blocked. Nothing's coming out. But you can't just sit there.

So try this:

(1) Get down a favorite book from your shelf. Find a passage you really admire. 

(2) Write it out longhand into your writer's notebook.

See what you see. If nothing else, you'll pay closer attention to words you believe to be great. Or if you are really looking to see how a story is put together, try writing the whole thing out. The task gives you time to think as you write, and rewriting it is an excellent reminder that that permanent-looking text was once an imperfect, sloppy draft.

WARNING: You are NOT to sit there and think about how much better the text is  than anything you will ever write. That is NOT part of the exercise. I will NOT be responsible for you if you choose to think that way...

Here's today crazy idea for creativity in a nutshell: deprive yourself of everything interesting and stimulating to force your brain to generate something interesting of its own.

Before you get too amazed or weirded out on me, let me announce that I cannot take credit for this plan: it comes from Twyla Tharp's book, The Creative Habit. Tharp is a hugely creative person (dancer and choreographer), but she chalks most of that success up to discipline. Here's a bit from Chapter 1 to show you what I mean:

After so many years, I've learned that being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. That's why writers, for example, like to establish routines for themselves. The most productive ones get started early in the morning, when the world is quiet, the phones aren't ringing, and their minds are rested, alert, and not yet polluted by other people's words. They might set a goal for themselves -- write fifteen hundred words, or stay at their desk until noon -- but the real secret is that they do this every day. In other words, they are disciplined. Over time, as the daily routines become second nature, discipline morphs into habit... More than anything, this book is about preparation: In order to be creative you have to know how to prepare to be creative.

For starters, Tharp is not saying that writers should stop reading and learning from great books. Tharp will be the first to tell us that we should attend with great care to works we admire (should like to stop people everywhere from listening to music while they work, for example. We ought to be single-mindedly listening to really honor the music).

But when it's time to create, Tharp advocates an absolute fast, no goodies for the brain. Bore yourself so that you will make something up out of desperation.

Tharp describes not even letting herself read the label on the cereal box, but even if you don't want to go that far, consider scaling back your multi-tasking and entertainment fillers. Instead of texting or playing fruit ninja (guilty, guilty), try using time waiting in line, on the metro, driving, or whatever to cook the project you're working on. What small problem can you turn over in your mind? What small advance can you make?

Especially when I'm in the revision phase of a project, I have to scale my audiobook listening way back to make sure that my brain stays on the job of my book.

So there, go forth and get bored. And then get creative.