2020 Is Your Teacher

One of the most useful tools I’ve discovered in working on developing a healthy writer mindset is re-framing challenging situations by simply asking:

“How is [ fill in the blank ] my teacher?”

This is mindfulness for writers: Viewing everything we do with attentive and kind curiosity so that we can get under the hood of our process and practice. It is only through this dogged effort of inner work and flexing our emotional intelligence muscles that we position ourselves to do our best storytelling.

When you begin working with this concept, you’ll see how this simple question works wonders in all life situations, from a difficult boss to an illness to the loss of a loved one.

Curiouser and Curiouser

When we get curious about the tough stuff—rather than resentful and frustrated—we pave the way for real workable solutions (and avoid a lot of unnecessary stress and pain through needless worry-on-a-loop). When we begin to see challenges as teachers, we take an active, rather than passive role, in our story.

• A publisher with terrible author care could teach us how to better advocate for ourselves simply by being so awful we MUST get over our fear of confrontation or risk our books not getting the visibility they need to reach our readers.

• A scathing review or critique partner’s critical notes could be our teacher for any number of things: teaching us how love ourselves and not care about outside approval, or how to grow a thicker skin.

In the above situations, we don’t usually think about what we’re learning, and how these happenings are invitations to growth. No, we freak out, call our best friends and narrate the drama, take to our beds and consider quitting writing altogether, or we turn the anxiety inward, which can result in plummeting self-confidence, depression, and a dry creative well.

Asking how challenging people and situations can be our teacher is more than seeing the silver lining. This questions isn’t about listing the things to be grateful for, such as the loss of work enabling you to have more time with your partner or kids. When you ask, “How is 2020 my teacher?” you’re seeing how the events of this year (and your responses to them) are shaping the person you are, illuminating parts of yourself that might need some work, and challenging you to grow.

A Case Study

Let’s say you didn’t write at all this year. You just couldn’t, not with the world being a dumpster fire. For many writers, this would be a cause for guilt, shame, increased self-doubt—you name it.

Writer A might respond by quitting altogether, or forcing themselves into a punitive writing practice to make up for lost time. She is, of course, side-eyeing all those assholes on Instagram who finished five books this year and also managed to learn how to make sourdough bread from scratch.

Writer B might list all the other important things they did and recognize that it’s okay not to write when the world is upside down. Perhaps they’ve already forgiven themselves and they’re not sweating it—they’ll try again next year. They felt that self-care was paramount and that meant not doing anything that required plots and action scenes.

But if Writers A and B were to ask, “How is 2020 my teacher,” both may draw the same conclusion: 2020 showed me that when there is chaos in the world, my writing is the first thing to go.

The takeaway lesson for Writer A might be that she recognizes that when she lets writing slide, she feels awful. Her mental health plummets, she loses her connection to self. So 2020 taught her—by showing, not telling—that in order to avoid losing her writing when she needs it most, she’s going to have to dig deep and figure out just what it was that caused her to let something so precious slip away. Maybe, after some deep journaling, she realizes that 2020 taught her that if she doesn’t have a dedicated time to write each day, the words won’t get written. Maybe it’s also teaching her she has to look at the weird guilt she feels when she wants to write instead of make dinner for her family. Why does she deny herself writing time, but protect the “me” time of her loved ones? Curiouser and curiouser.

Writer B might realize that she’d needed a break from writing and that only a pandemic would have broken her iron resolve to publish or die trying. Maybe before COVID, she’d been obsessed with her career, no longer caring about the heart of her stories so long as she could get a book deal. Maybe her relationships with her family—and herself—suffered and she was miserable all around. Perhaps 2020 revealed to Writer A that her true priorities aren’t book deals but being an active character in her own story. In 2021 it’s imperative she strike a balance between the two (writing and family) so that she can show up fully for all of her life.

Working with This Question

When you ask how something—2020, creative dry seasons, a particularly challenging book—are your teachers, you’ll want to have a journal handy. Note that while this is deeply helpful to work with while you’re experiencing a situation, it’s also very useful after the fact. I’m sure we’ll be feeling the ripple effect of 2020 for years to come.

1. Think about the last challenge you faced. How did you react in the moment? What was your takeaway after the fact?

2. Note the usual reactions you have to tough, stressful, challenging situations. Do you usually call someone immediately to rant? Do you take a run to clear your head? Do you indulge in a vice or two? Perhaps you have the anxiety on an endless loop. How does that make you feel? Is it workable? Is it a skillful use of your creative bandwidth?

3. Now, pause. Take a breath. Then ask, “How is [fill in the blank] my teacher?” 2020 would be a great thing to go with. You could also ask about your WIP, your writing in general, or your self-doubt. Your inner critic. Your fear or jealousy.

(Spoiler alert:

everything in the cosmos is your teacher.)

4. Journal: writing and writing and writing until you come to some of the lessons you’ve been given. Of course, like any good teacher, the lessons will reveal themselves over time. But there’s likely at least one or two things right off that you know you’re learning about yourself, your place in the world, your desires, your shadow side.

Snag my free Get Clear Workbook to do a deep dive into your process, practice, and goals.

5. Lessons don’t mean a thing unless we take them to heart and put them to action. So to really integrate the knowledge you’ve gotten, you’ll want to think about what steps or actions you might take. For example, if 2020 taught you that you can’t write when there are people around, it might be a good time to clear out that guest room nobody’s using and turn it into an office—with a door that closes and locks.

Professor 2020

No one will deny that 2020 was a shit year. For many writers, this year could be marked as a wash, as a lost year.

But whether you wrote a whole book or a single word, I know there is much that this year taught you, all of which you will be able to put into practice in 2021 and beyond.

• What did it teach you about the kinds of stories you want to tell?

• What did you learn about your relationship to your writing?

• What did it teach you about the importance of story in our lives?

• What did it show you about the kind of writer you are…and the kind you want to grow into?

• What did it teach you about your desires, hopes, and dreams?

• What did you learn about boundaries—with yourself and others?

Whether it’s getting clarity on your real priorities, on the kinds of stories you want to tell, or your relationship to your work, let this be the year that acted as a refiner, burning away what’s not working in and around you, and leaving behind a writer who is ready to put words that do right by the miracle into the world.

And that is how the student becomes the master.

Why Purging Is Good For Your Writing

Meditating on the beach during autumn, Bournemouth, UK

“You are the creator of yourself, honey. ”

— Ven. Robina Courtin, Buddhist teacher

This month, my guiding word is PLENTY.

Rather than asking myself and my writers to do yet another gratitude practice, I’m instead offering an exploration into the shadow side of the harvest season:

Where are we hoarding, cluttering, over-indulging?

What’s clogging up our creative drains?

How are we hustling for our worth instead of resting in the fact that we are already enough, just as we are?

(Any Bridget Jones fans giggling?)

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in a purging mood lately. A lot of women I know have been telling me the same. Yes, there’s a seasonal change and yes we’re all stuck in the house more than ever before, but I think it’s more than that. I think we’re seeing the ways in which clutter—physical and digital—is keeping us from our best work as creatives.

I often think back to when I was leading my annual retreat at Highlights (insert very big sad face re: COVID) and how one of the chefs there, a German woman, would stand behind this incredible buffet of food—a veritable cornucopia—and tell us not to eat too much. I loved that. While she acknowledged we were there to nourish and treat ourselves, she reminded us that when you’re overstuffed, your creativity suffers. She’s right: It’s not often I get up from a heavy meal (with wine, no less) and go write an amazing scene. This reminds me of the best practices in Zen, where you’re encouraged to only eat until you’re 80% full: again, to keep that mind clear and sharp.

I won’t go on a rant about capitalism here or ask you to go figuring out what sparks joy.

Instead, I’m going to encourage you to get very quiet. To sit in some silence. To whisper to yourself, I am enough. I have enough.

I’m going to ask you to look at your scarcity complex—and to work on banishing it.

Mindfulness For Writers

Mindfulness for us writers is the same for everyone else—paying attention in the present moment, really showing up for our lives. But it’s also essential because we can’t afford to get all muddled and cluttered.

We can’t afford for two months out of every year to be one of manic frazzled holiday insanity, where we run ourselves ragged trying to be festive. (Raise your hand, fellow introverts, if you would be totally okay with all holiday parties being cancelled in a post-COVID world too).

The more cluttered our lives, the more this will show up on the page and the more it will absolutely trigger our Inner Critics.

De-Cluttering for Creative Boosts

Below are a couple of ideas to de-clutter your digital space, which—especially these days—is probably affecting your creative wellness more than anything:

• Unsubscribe Like It’s 1999. Even if it’s my newsletter. Get off any lists that don’t add to your life in ways you know are healthy.

• Turn notifications off on your phone, especially social media. (This will change your life).

• Delete Facebook. I just did and it felt freaking great. You’re an artist. Your bandwidth is everything. I’ve yet to meet a writer who feels like Facebook fills their well and is a place of great artistic insight and joy.

• Delete any emails that you’ve been meaning to get to for the past six months. You’re not going to email those people back or do that thing and all it’s doing is taking up bandwidth. If this makes you anxious, you can create a folder titled SOMEDAY or whatever and stick them in there. I did that and never looked in it and nothing bad happened to me.

Now, you’ve got a little extra time to be quiet and contemplative and do some of that all-important inner work, as well as get a breather if the hustle-and-bustle of the holidays and NaNo is ever-present for you…


Meditation is a great way to begin.

Inner Stillness

Ursula K. LeGuin says, "To hear, one must be silent." Join me in a meditation on sound in order to access your inner stillness to hear your characters, your muse, your stories. This is a relaxing meditation to help increase flow, creativity, and focus in your writing practice.

Here’s to a season of PLENTY-

The Space Between Breaths: Transitions In The Artistic Life

This post was originally written in March 30, 2017. I’ve re-posted this with some fresh insights at the end.

A Writer’s Creative Dry Season

For the past year, I’ve been going through a transition, floating in a space between. It’s been three years since my first book came out. There was the before publication life, when I’d yet to sell a book and was dreaming hard. Then there was the after, where I struggled to learn the ropes of being a published author, yet still managed to write and sell one to two books a year, hustling like a mother. During that time there were aborted projects and disappointments, but I focused laser-like attention on my work and career, with little time for much else. Sometimes that paid off, and sometimes it didn’t. One thing it resulted in was a near-breakdown, spiritual and creative depletion, and an increasing existential dread that followed me around to the point where I felt like Edward Snowden, always looking over my shoulder.

This was unsustainable. A life of waiting for the other shoe to drop is not a good life. And a writer who doesn’t write, or who writes but finds no joy in it, does not a happy writer make.  It also, incidentally, makes it hard to sell more books. The nervy you feel about a project somehow winds itself through the text, an X factor that makes or breaks a book. My books were breaking. I was breaking. So began my year of transition, which began in July 2016, an awakening of sorts that’s still very much in progress. This wasn’t intentional, not something I planned as a great experiment. It just sort of happened. Out of necessity and desperation and a nameless need.

A Year Of Transition


This year of transition actually started in Spring 2016, though I had no idea that this was what was happening. I started devouring books like I used to, back when I wasn’t writing three of them at a time. I literally bought and read every single JoJo Moyes book I could find (okay, I’ve saved a couple because it’s too depressing, a life without a JoJo book to look forward to), after discovering Me Before You on a Barnes and Noble table. I was working—I had revisions and copyedits and submissions. But when I sent in the last thing that was due, in mid-June, I unwittingly gave myself a for-real break. It was on accident—I didn’t realize I was taking a break until the month of July passed with me having written only a handful of words, most of them non-fiction. I got ideas, I threw ideas away—I briefly considered learning Russian and moving to Moscow.

The bulk of my writing was for a residency application I never sent in, as well as the occasional blog post or lengthy email. I began meditating, reconnected with my spiritual side, read lots of books, treated myself to copies of Vogue, discovered the delights of the French 75 cocktail, and took a poetry class. I basked in sunshine and visited with friends and family. There were still stressful writerly moments: two rewrites gone bad, dismal royalty statements. But for the first time in years, writing was not the most important thing. The most important thing was me. It was as though my soul had given me one of those piercing looks and said, My dear, you are the canvas.

Eureka!


I followed my curiosity, each urge a trail of will-o’-the-wisps that led me deeper into my inner landscape, with its turbulent sea, floating glaciers, and craggy mountains set against endless dunes (yes, somehow my innards resemble Morocco, Ireland, and Iceland).

In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert says: I believe that curiosity is the secret. Curiosity is the truth and the way of creative living. She’s absolutely right.

I found such joy poking around in New Age stores and going down the Wiki hole of Romanov research and planning a trip to Prague. I delighted in the plethora of self-help books I kept hearing about, got into essential oils, and finally took a Pilates class. I bought strange rings and drank beer and even started liking kale. I got a Reiki treatment and bought my first deck of Tarot cards and I campaigned for Hillary Clinton. I bought a Nasty Woman shirt and protested with thousands of women all over the world, reigniting that little Marxist-Anarchist activist that has been hiding inside me since the Bush years. I made a few big life decisions, some quite seismic, some still in progress. I grieved, felt confusion, wonder, awe, gratitude, love, solidarity, despair.

I probably drank more wine after November 8th than in the rest of my life combined. I cooked my first steak. I began living according to these wise words from Elsie De Wolfe: I am going to make everything around me beautiful. That will be my life. Fresh flowers scattered about the house. Crystals lined up on windowsills. A skirt with red roses splashed across the fabric. I see the changes that all this adventuring has wrought everywhere: in my home, my body, my mind, my spirit. And yet, the writing will not budge.

I am still trekking up a damnably high mountain, hoping to reach a summit and praying there’s a nice little valley on the other side of it, with cool spring water and long, fragrant grass I can lie in when I look at the stars. Alas, creativity is uncharted territory—ever ineffable, a tricksy landscape complete with quicksand, dark forests, and, well, you get the metaphor. I confess, there have been a few occasions in which I actually uttered the phrase, Why am I doing this? Or I don’t want to be a writer anymore. I’m not sure if I meant it or not. I suspect maybe I did. It sounds ever so wonderful to leave work at work, to have boundaries between oneself and what one does for a living, to not be in constant artistic torture.


The election and its aftermath was a huge blow that I’m still recovering from. I don’t think I realized how much it affected my ability to be creative until quite recently, when I realized I have to rewrite a boggart of a book I’m working on for the third time. I cannot overstate how unlike me this is. I’ve never spent two years after selling a book trying to rewrite it. It’s madness. Maddening. But when I began to connect the dots, I could see that the bulk of the problem began in the beginning of 2016—a coincidence? I think not. As I said in an email to the book’s editor: I’m sorry for being the world’s shittiest writer. I blame Trump. 


I blamed my mental health and my infernal inability to understand how time works. I blamed New York City for being so goddamn expensive and loud and distracting and fabulous. I also blamed myself, for not taking my own good advice that I give to my clients and that I myself know works. I only give advice when I’ve learned something (usually the hard way), when I know that something is tried and true. As a creativity coach, I tell my clients that each book is a different beast, and that’s true. And also that writing is a marathon (not a sprint), that you will never be a master, that you will always be learning, and that you should trust the process: the not knowing, the frustration—these are just hazards of the job and an essential part of the process. But each time I find myself uncertain creatively, these lessons are hard to remember. A girl has to eat, you know.

Mindfulness For Writers


One thing my meditation teachers like to talk about is the space between breaths. In mindfulness meditation, you focus on the inhale and exhale, using it to anchor your mind in the present. Between each round of inhalation and exhalation, there is a pocket of pure being, where your body has a moment to bask in its existence, where nothing is required of it. It can’t last very long because your lungs need air, but for just a sliver of time, you are infinite. Free-floating. This is also a space for transition, much shorter than my year of transition, but equally powerful. You can discover things there, though it may take you years, or even a lifetime to figure out. You might even see what you’re made of.


This is an essential part of the meditation process. These pockets of no-breath are not simply a bridge between breaths, links on the path to nirvana. They are teaching moments, rich in the kind of knowledge that lives deep in your bones. And this is where meditation for anyone becomes meditation and mindfulness for writers. These transitions in meditation practice are similar to the transitions in an artist’s life.

Transitions In The Artist’s Life

The space between projects, between ideas, between inspiration and creative wastelands—this is, paradoxically, where the good stuff lives. Transitions are opportunities to grow, to heal, and to change. They give you space (whether you want it to not) to reassess your work, your craft, your goals. These sometimes involve dark nights of the soul, real reckonings that bring who you are and why you do what you do into sharp focus. Sometimes you won’t like what you see.

Transitions, from an artistic point of view, are absolutely necessary. Think about the period when Bowie fled to Berlin, intent on getting clean and reconnecting to his art. He called his cocaine years in Los Angeles, where he embodied the Thin White Duke persona, “the darkest days of my life.” Despite being a rock star, he was going broke and Berlin, at the time, was a cheap place to live while he was in recovery. In Europe, he began visiting galleries, working on self-care through literature and classical music education, and, of course, kicking his cocaine habit and exploring Berlin’s music scene. His roommate was Iggy Pop, and I like to imagine them sitting around late at night, trading notes and blowing each other’s minds. What resulted was the Berlin trilogy, a rich artistic period and a turning point in his life.


Of course, not all transitions need to be so dramatic, and I’m still trying to figure out what this one means for me. When I look back, what will I call this year (or, God forbid, years)? Will I look on it fondly, or shudder, grateful that it’s over? I can’t imagine not being thankful for it. Already, I’m seeing my interests in what I want to write expand in unexpected ways. Adult fiction, young adult nonfiction, historical. I’m not quite sure where I’ll land. I’m getting ideas, but am wary of investing too much in anything. I think I’m still getting my sea legs.

Self Care For Creatives

Meditation, exercise, and healthy eating habits are helping. As is travel and working with my clients, who inspire me every day. I’m taking lots of notes because I suspect that as much as I’m learning right now about what it means to be an artist in transition, I suspect there’s even more to glean from this time later, when I can see how all the dots connected.


Being a creative doesn’t suit our modern world, not if you’re an Artist with a capital A. Because art needs quiet, time, space, privacy. All things that are hard to come by these days, especially in Brooklyn. I stopped using my private Facebook account, rarely leave the apartment, and turn a deaf ear to industry chatter. It’s been a long time since I finished a project. Everything I’m working on is in a different stage and often ends up being cast aside or totally reworked. So of course the age old question of how to make a living as an artist rears its ugly head. If you aren’t producing, you aren’t getting paid. So while artistic explorations sound great on paper, in reality, it’s the paper itself you start worrying about.


The Balancing Act of Livelihood

It’s becoming increasingly hard for artists to make a living—just take a look at Trump’s budget proposal, with threatens to cut the NEA out of existence. It’s especially difficult for writers because of the plethora of content out there. Jesus, how many blogs and websites and articles can exist? With newspapers and magazines folding left and right, writers are forced to make some pretty tough choices. These concerns are ever present, and they will be for the foreseeable future.

Of course, being an artist has always involved financial acrobatics. Chekhov paid the bills through a medical practice, and Tolstoy had to self-publish War and Peace. I’m in good company. I’ve very much begun to appreciate Elizabeth Gilbert’s words in Big Magic about how your job as an artist is to take care of your creativity, not the other way around. It’s been interesting, cobbling together an income that all leads back to writing, but isn’t necessarily writing.

Teaching and coaching and editing allows me to talk about what I love—writing, the artistic process, and creative living—and to help my fellow writers on their own journeys. It also gives me the chance to take care of my writing, rather than requiring it to pay all the bills. I’m already seeing the seeds I’m planting blossoming. For the first time in a long time, I’m allowing myself to consider alternative ways of living and alternative approaches to my writing. Maybe I don’t publish a book every year. Maybe I don’t only write in YA. Maybe I play a whole lot more in my creative process. Maybe I take time to take care of myself.


The journey continues, endless and exciting and horrible and wonderful, an adventure I’m honored to have. I take a breath, exhale, and rest in the transition, looking forward to whatever comes next.

No Mud, No Lotus

Editor’s Note: September 29, 2020

It’s been over three years since I wrote this post, and the joy of it is seeing all the ways that period led me to where I am now, with projects I’m incredibly excited about and having published work I never knew I would have. That woman ended up living abroad for a year, coming back, changing course again and again, proving the point that we never really arrive. We just keep our eyes on that North Star.

I’m grateful that I was able to lean into the discomfort (then and now) and then when I was writing in spring 2017 didn’t see how bad things would get in these Trump years. I see all this pain I experienced then, and the frustrations about making a living as a writer that I still have in my post that went viral around this time last year. I certainly never could have foreseen that.

I’m thrilled that Heather did follow her curiosity and write that nonfiction she was curious about (Code Name Badass, coming out in September 2021). That she’s working on an adult novel, and is discovering new ways to be in this world.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the Trump presidency, as well as the 2020 presidential election, has asked me to take a good look once again and where I’m at and where I want to be. Who I want to be, and how I want to show up for my fellow humans.

It’s been challenging to navigate balancing the uncertainty of a creative’s livelihood with a world that feels more uncertain than ever. To work with so much individual and collective emotional turmoil. To keep the metaphoric - and literal - lights on.

It’s tough right now. Understatement of the year. But here’s the thing: reading this post I’d written in Spring 2017 has shown me that I am capable of weathering the storms. That even at times when my creativity felt imperiled, I am not seeing the fruits of that labor of love toward myself, my curiosity, and my work. Proof pudding.

As Thich Nhat Hanh says, “No mud, not lotus.”

And so:

The space between breaths has become ever richer and each transition is an invitation to being right here, right now, working with what is on offer and letting all of it be fertile soil for my creativity.

I’m here for it.

Come what may.

Write In The Slow Lane

Above is a picture of me in Lyon, France, taking it slow, enjoying the moment. See that look of utter contentment on my lady face? It's not just from the delicious meal or the wine or France, or even the company (my beloved). That is my face when I give myself permission to just BE. To relax. To take a freaking knee. And until pretty recently, that wasn't happening on the regular. If you read nothing else in this post read this:

You need to be taking a sabbath once a week.

One of my new big commitments to myself is to take Saturdays off. Every week. No email. No errands. No chores. No phone. No appointments. Nothing scheduled at all, even if it's fun. No clocks. No fucks given.


NO WRITING. (Even if I'm on deadline. Seriously. NO WRITING. And the world still turns...)


On Saturdays I bask. I read books I want to, not ones I "should." I wander around my house and look at things that strike my curiosity - a photo book on Patti Smith that is always just decoration, the way the light slants through the trees in the back yard. I read poems and take walks and I don't cook unless it sounds fun, which it only is if I'm making soup.


What this has done in just a few weeks has been nothing short of astonishing. New book ideas come to me. I have a deeper connection to my creativity. I laugh more - not just on Saturdays but ALL THE DAYS. I am more mindful, catching myself during the week when I'm revving (multi-tasking, getting in that near-manic place of crossing things off lists and non-stop doing).


The best thing is that I have this delicious treat to look forward to every week, which is a balm on the hard days. I know it's there, waiting for me like a promise. I've been talking to my clients about this more and more: How can we unearth some delight? How can we give ourselves permission to really fill the well by doing absolutely nothing? How can we stop feeling guilty for just allowing ourselves to be alive and to wonder and muse and lollygag?

Mark me, friends: Your creativity needs this. And it will suffer without it.

I'm getting huge creative dividends from this combination of mindfulness, creativity exercises, and the deep inner work required of anyone who wants to write anything worth reading - I hope you are all benefitting from the Rough Draft and the meditations, too.


When you're ready to get back out there after your sabbath, you can check out my piece on how to set boundaries around your creativity.

One of the things these sabbaths have clarified for me is who I want to work with in my coaching. While I love writers of all stripes, the ones I'm drawn to working with the most are the ones who feel a deep yearning to flourish in their creativity, but just can't seem to figure it out.

If you're curious about this work, you can head over to my brand new coaching FAQ to learn more.

In the March 2020 Rough Draft, we're getting into ways you can write in the slow lane. Where are you pushing yourself too hard? How can you slow down? What would be a delicious way to bask and loll and delight in your creative self? We've got a writing exercise that Erin Morgenstern (The Night Circus) uses too. This one’s all about filling the well and being good to your writer self. Finding inner quiet. Yum, right?

You can access all archived Rough Drafts now on the Inspiration Portal, so even if you’re catching this post well beyond March 2020, I’ve got you covered. (Newsletter subscribers have the password to portal. Not a newsletter subscriber? We can fix that.)

Cheryl Strayed recently gave this piece of advice to writers, via an interview on the Beautiful Writers podcast: "Write in the slow lane." Spring is a great time to explore slowing down after all the intention setting and holiday recovery that happens in the early part of the year. It's a time to feel the bliss of rain on your face, to reach for the sun, to stretch deep into the earth and bloom.

Who's with me?

3 Ways To Set Boundaries Around Your Creativity

If you’re someone who does creative work, unless it’s bringing in a reasonable paycheck, you probably treat it like a hobby. Is it really a big deal if you didn’t write today? Your family needed clean laundry. So what if you didn’t paint this afternoon? Your sister called to vent about another crisis at her corporate job. Sure, you wish you could have gone outside and shot some photographs while the light was fantastic, but your kids were fighting and you needed to intervene.

We hear a lot about setting boundaries — in families, in friendships, and in the workplace. So what makes us think we can neglect them when it comes to our creative time? We often devalue any work that doesn’t earn an income, and what’s more, we assume talent is all that creative work demands. “The one thing creative souls around the world have in common is that they all have to practice to maintain their skills,” writes choreographer Twyla Tharp in her book The Creative Habit. “Art is a vast democracy of habit.”

If you set and hold healthy boundaries around your creativity, you’ll be growing the conditions for your best art to bloom. Here are three ways to establish perimeters that work for you.

Schedule your creativity and make it nonnegotiable

You wouldn’t cancel an important doctor’s appointment because you just weren’t feeling it and your best friend invited you to coffee, right? Make your creative time nonnegotiable, meaning not up for discussion. You schedule time, you turn down invites, you reserve the room (read: the kids don’t get the den to play in for the time you need to be in there to work), you hire the sitter. And then you hold the line. You do not cancel this date with the muse for any reason unless you are on your deathbed, the house is on fire, or your city has been attacked by extraterrestrial terrorists.

You may be surprised to find that the person who breaches your boundaries the most is… you. When you make your creative time nonnegotiable, you stop bargaining with the part of your brain that would much rather binge watch Peaky Blinders or get a quick dopamine hit from knocking a few items off the to-do list. In a recent Tim Ferris interview, writer Neil Gaiman says that when he’s writing, he’s allowed to do two things: write or stare out the window. No matter how difficult the writing is, eventually, he says, staring out the window gets to be boring. So he writes.

Your action item: Look at your schedule and find all the possible pockets of time for your creativity. If you have a partner, roommate, kids, or anyone who might push up against this boundary, let them know this is your creative time and that it’s nonnegotiable. Find someone to hold you accountable. A fellow creative or your bossy friend will ensure you keep your promises to yourself.

Reframe the word “no”

As a writing coach, I often work with people who are struggling to prioritize their creative work over doing dishes, running errands, or returning emails. If I had a nickel for every time I heard one of my clients say they’d frittered away writing time because they “feel guilty,” I’d own an island. The reasons for the guilt vary, but it always comes down to this: They’ve put others’ needs above their own. In these cases, we reframe the situation. What if saying “no” to someone (or something) isn’t a negative? What if this “no” is actually a “yes” — to your vibrant, flourishing, life-giving creative force?

To stand your best chance of forming a lifelong creative habit, Tharp suggests building a metaphorical bubble around yourself — and then staying in it. “Being in the bubble does not have to mean exiling yourself from people and the world,” she writes. “It is more a state of mind, a willingness to subtract anything that disconnects you from your work.”

The more you respect your bubble, the more others will, too. If you’re quick to give in every time someone knocks on your home office door, or say “yes” every time you’re invited to a spontaneous dinner, you’re telegraphing that you’re not, in fact, very serious about your creativity — so why should they be?

Your action item: Write down what your creative bubble might look like. Then list all the unhelpful habits keeping you from living in it. (Pro tip: See how much screen time you’re logging on your phone). In getting rid of those habits, don’t think of it as depriving yourself, but rather saying “yes” to possibility.

Get resourceful about overcoming obstacles

It’s all too easy to give up when the conditions for creativity aren’t ideal. But unless you’re constantly on an idyllic retreat in the woods, they never will be. Here are some creative ways to overcome the obstacles of life:

• One writer I work with is a mom who does her writing at all the grocery stores and local gyms that offer free childcare while customers shop or work out. Genius, right?

• Another client swaps creative time with her partner, watching the kids while he works on his music so that he’ll watch them when she works on her novel.

• Many of my clients bring their laptops to their cars and work while waiting for school pickups and other obligations.

• When I needed to get out of living in chaotic, loud, expensive NYC, but didn’t know where I’d go, I embarked on a nearly year-long housesitting adventure, writing my novels in beautiful locations all over the world — and only paying for the airfare to get to those places.

Your action item: Consider: What resources are available to you that you’re not utilizing? Who can become a co-conspirator? Are you wasting your commute? (Subways are great places to write!) Is there a little-used conference room at work you can sneak into to fine-tune your sketches after hours? It’s time to get imagining so that you can get creating.

*This post was originally published in Medium’s Forge publication.

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