I love guided meditations or hypnoses. Drop into the words, and your mind creates images, places, makes discoveries. As in sleep, our ability to conjure asks for no research or certain knowledge. We bloom story, or at least the full, embodied elements of story.

Visualize your writing time, your pleasure in it, the bubbling up of what it is you want to say. The satisfaction of the activity itself and after, when you can spend your day happy, knowing writing lies at the foundation of it.

Visualize your story. Tell it to yourself as you are falling asleep. Let it well up in advance of your pen.

Afraid? What if nothing comes?

Take a minute, a single, exact minute. Set a timer. For that one minute, empty your mind–no people, no desires, no memories, no flashes of the future, worries or fantasies, no pictures or thoughts. One minute. Go.

You can’t do it. Oh, enlightened one, find the image that insists on itself. Stay present with it. See it, touch it, taste, hear, smell. Now write it down.