My belief is that if you are an artist, and the world somehow prevents you from making your art–in my case it has been the affordability and lack of have a painting studio–the answer is to switch up the method. A person can’t stop being creative just because the resources aren’t there. Over my lifetime, I have switched up my methods a number of times. I went from analog photography, to painting, back to photography in a less expensive digital format, and through it all, I wrote. Artist statements, grant applications, blog posts, short snippets, dream theatre, whatever.

I can’t stop creating because the resources have dried up.

Writing is one of the things I have done throughout my entire creative life. Its limitations come from somewhere else–not the lack of resources. If need be, stories can be started on paper bags with a pen or pencil. In journals, on a stack of paper. These days all one really needs is a computer of some sort. I’ve written part of one of my drafts of my next novel in a text editor on my iphone. Yeah, I see the conflict–one needs resources to purchase a laptop or a phone or a device of some sort–but let’s get back to the basics. Pen and paper.

My process for writing is very similar to my process of painting. Or even my photography. I described my painting process in detail in red carnation’s chapters that find Claire in her painting studio.

Blank canvas to blank paper. Tubes of paint to words. First stroke of the brush to the first words of the first sentence. Allowing the painting to show itself to letting the story flow in real time rather than planning it out.

That’s my process.

The medium is negotiable; the creative impulse isn’t.