It is my pleasure today to interview Joanne Tailele, whose debut novel, Accident, is a gripping story about a woman who makes a tragic mistake that irrevocably changes her life—and the lives of the people around her. Here she talks about “moral fiction,” why she can only write fiction on the sofa, and what writing advice she’d like to see on a bumper sticker.

Q. When and why did you first become a writer?
A. I wrote my first short story at about 10 years old in blue-colored pencil: “The Mystery of the Missing Marble.” I still have it in a metal box I have saved with the tons of prose and poetry I have written over the years. I did not think about writing commercially until about four years ago, when I saw an advertisement for NANOWRIMO and thought, “Why not give it a try?” That is where my novel, Accident, was born.

Q. What other work have you done, and how has it impacted your writing career?
A. This is my first novel and attempt at commercial work. In the past, my writing was for my own enjoyment and therapy.

Q. Do you have any special time or place you like to write?
A. I have a small notebook computer, and if I am writing my book or doing something pertaining to writing, I like to sit with it on a lap desk on the sofa next to my husband at night or early in the morning. When I need to change hats to be a realtor, I pick up my notebook and move to my desk in the office. Funny, but I rarely do writing on my desk and real estate from the sofa.

Q. Who are some of the authors whose work you admire the most, and why?
A. My all-time favorite author is Jodi Picoult. The other day I read an interview with her where she called her novels “moral fiction,” and I thought, “That is it!” Like Jodi, I do not expect to change people’s minds about subjects. I just want them to think about tough current events that most people would rather pretend do not exist.

Q. What was your first published book? How did you first create this story line?
A. Accident is my first. Currently it is only available as an e-book, but I am working with an Indie publisher to get trade editions printed. Although the story line was completely fictional, the loving Swedish grandparents are a combination of my parents and my grandparents.

Q. Do you have another manuscript in progress? If so, can you tell us a little about it?
A. Yes, I am working on a novel called Town Without Mercy. This book has several underlying themes, but the biggest one is how a town can turn on a couple and blame them when their child does something unthinkable. It just so happens that they are a lesbian couple and their child opens fire on her fellow students. I hope to entice conversations about gay marriage, gun control and better mental health services.

Q. What inspires you to keep writing when you’re feeling down or less confident than usual?
A. I follow a lot of blogs and listen to how other authors struggle and conquer the same fears. That helps to remind me that I am not alone. I also have great support through our local writers’ group.

Q. What marketing techniques have you found to be the most useful?
A. I have not really done any marketing yet since my book is only available as an e-book. I did pull it from Smashwords and put it on KDP Select with the hope that will increase sales.

Q. Do you have any special writing techniques you rely on to keep going?
A. I have to work with an outline, even if it strays way off the path during the process sometimes. It helps me keep the plot moving forward and tie up endings to subplots. I also do pretty extensive character profiles to get into the heads of my characters. Oh, and I simply could not live without my excel spread sheet, which keeps dates straight and the ages of my characters consistent relative to time flashes.

Q. If you’re self published, would you do it again? If you’re traditionally published, would you ever consider self publishing? Why or why not?
A. I loved getting my book out there right away on Kindle and Smashwords and getting the royalties (as small as they are) direct to me is a plus. But I feel like I gave up too soon in trying to find an agent. Next time around, I want to go the traditional route if I can have the patience. That is my biggest fault – no patience. To publish traditionally, that is a huge shortcoming.

Q. If you had to create a bumper sticker with one sentence of writing advice, what would it say?
A. Write till you drop.

Recently, I took my mom to see The Great Gatsby. As we watched the scene where Nick is asleep on the couch, wan and pale and surrounded by manuscript papers, Mom leaned over to whisper, “I bet that’s how you looked when you finished your novel.”

She was right. I looked that bad. My poor house looked even worse: there was a Rocky Mountain Range of clothing heaped on the laundry room floor. The tea cups were scattered around the house. I found a strand of uncooked spaghetti in my computer keyboard.

What is it like to finish a novel? Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, probably said it best in this past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. For her, the best thing about writing a book is “The moment, at about the three-quarter point, where you see your way right through to the end: as if lights had flooded an unlit road. But the pleasure is double-edged, because from this point you’re going to work inhuman hours, not caring about your health or your human relationships; you’re just going to head down that road like a charging bull.”

Oh yeah. That’s it exactly.

Before that snorting headlong rush, though, there’s a lot of stopping, staggering, and starting over as you confront various ornery character developments, unfortunate descriptions, and tangled plot mazes. As you’re writing a book, you inevitably hit a roadblock (or six). You chew your nails. You eat too much chocolate. You swill coffee and tea. You take the dog on too many walks even for the dog. You can’t imagine how you’ll ever pull things together.

Then, quite suddenly, you see the way forward, and that’s when you reach Mantel’s sublime state of mind.

What is it like to finish a novel? The first time you do it, you feel utter euphoria, and you should. You have actually written “the end” on something that somebody, someday, might somehow read. (Yes, there are that many “some’s” and even more “if’s.”) Tell the whole world. You might even hold a book party to celebrate and show everyone the manuscript.

Unfortunately, what follows isn’t always instant acceptance by an agent, an editor, or even your beta readers and friends. Usually what happens is the calm before the calm, a big yawning hole of deafening silence as you wait for somebody, anybody, even your mom, to please please please read the book and tell you what they think.

Meanwhile, you experience doom-and-gloom sentiments: “What good am I? I can’t even pick up the living room!” Maybe you think, “The novel is dead. Why do I bother? Nobody reads anymore.” Or, “I’m not earning money doing this. In fact, I’m costing myself money! I should quit before my family has to live out of the car!”

Most of all, you feel bereft, because the characters you’ve been living with for the past nine months or nine years have stopped living in your head. The voices are quiet. Gardening and housework can help ease the pain of saying goodbye to those people you came to know better than your own friends. So can reading—because it brings you back to that place where you can marvel at other people’s sentences instead of gnawing over your own.

Eventually you realize that, after finishing a novel, life is just the same as it was, only you’re extra tired.

The exhaustion passes. And then what? You’ll hear back from your agent, your editor, your beta readers. Even your mom will have comments. Finally, you happily begin the tough process of restructuring, revising, revisiting your prose as you sort out the next draft (or six) of your book. The voices are back in your head, even if they’re not quite as loud as the first time through the story.

And what then, after you’re really, finally, totally done with your book?

There will be another story to write. That’s just the way it is: Writers can’t help ourselves. We know the housework can—and should—wait when there is a book to write. The world needs stories now more than ever.

A few years ago, there was a period in my life when I was flying to South Carolina every month to help my mom care for my grandmother and my father. My grandmother was blind and completely dependent on my mother; my dad was on oxygen full-time and becoming frailer by the day.

Then Mother Nature delivered the punchline to her joke: my mother, too, became ill. I won’t go into the painful details. It is sufficient to say that, for one particularly difficult stint, my mother was in one hospital and my grandmother was in a different one, about an hour apart, with my father attached to his oxygen tank at home. I stayed with him and drove every day between the two hospitals.

I am no hero. Every one of us has cared for sick relatives—or, if we haven’t, it’s just a matter of time. My father and grandmother have now passed, but my mother made it through.

The gift I took away from this wrenching experience was the knowledge that we must all be able to find sanctuary within ourselves. It’s easy to become so mired in your daily responsibilities—whether you’re caring for children or elderly parents, meeting stiff deadlines at work, or worrying about global news headlines–that you lose yourself in the shuffle and become unable to function because all you do is worry.

During that bad stretch in South Carolina, I discovered a beach between the two hospitals. This particular beach wasn’t the nicest one in the area, but it had a parking area between two condominiums and it was virtually deserted. I’d visit my grandmother in the morning, drive to the other hospital to visit my mother, and then stop at the beach to walk for twenty minutes–ten minutes up and ten minutes back–before going home to fix dinner for my father. The next day, I’d get up in the morning and do it all over again.

That daily barefoot walk in the stinging air was enough to get me through a bad stretch, and I have kept that habit of walking every day, not for exercise, but as a way of literally walking into a calmer place. Every morning, I drive my son to school and, before I go to my office, I stop and walk the dog somewhere between the bus stop and our house.

It doesn’t matter where I walk. It is only essential that I do it—and that I leave my cell phone in the car. If I have errands in town, I walk there. Other days I hike along a river or through the woods. Today I stopped by a farm and took a trail leading down through their growing fields to let myself be amazed by the fruit trees in bloom.

Twenty minutes of peace and motion: that’s the surest way to find sanctuary within myself, to feel prepared to open my heart to whatever life brings to my door.

Seven years ago, my husband and I bought a house that we dubbed Big Red because everything about it was exactly that: Red siding, red shutters, red doors, red trim.

The house is a classic New England Colonial, circa 1790, and it had a classic New England couple living in it for nearly 70 years before we bought it. Larry and Ann were true Yankees, doing everything themselves. My own husband, Dan, is a lot like Larry. Tall, bespectacled engineers, these men are the sort who fix their own plumbing problems, wire their own houses, and always have piles of spare wood and metal “just in case.”

I, however, am nothing like Ann. Ann was a skilled seamstress – her curtains still hang in our family room – and she was highly regarded around town for her flower gardens. I don’t sew. I once tried to knit my husband a sweater, but it would have fit the Hunchback of Notre Dame, that’s how much bigger the back was than the front. And gardening has put me off since growing up on a Massachusetts farm where I had to help bale hay in the back fields, despite the fact that hay makes me sneeze and swell up like the Elephant Man.

My grandfather, who lived with us on the farm, was an avid gardener. Also a Yankee, he grew cabbages bigger than my head and flowers in neon colors. My mother’s favorite command to me was, “Go out there and help your poor grandfather before he keels over in the cabbages.”

I’d trudge up and down the dirt rows to do my grandfather’s bidding while he supervised, always wearing suspenders over his flannel shirts and smoking a pipe that smelled like cherries. He was a task master, commanding me to deadhead blossoms and pick up slugs, turn in compost and pluck dead leaves. I hated every minute of gardening and swore I’d never do it again.

So, when we bought this house, I focused my attention indoors. There was plenty to do those first two years: stripping wallpaper, plastering cracks in walls, painting, pulling up layers of shag carpeting and old linoleum, replacing bathroom tiles. Dan and I worked with our five children to make this house our own and ignored the yard altogether.

Ann’s garden grew increasingly overgrown as we finally exhausted ourselves in the house and turned our attention to the Civil War era barn out back. We intended to renovate the barn at least enough to get it to stand up straight. We devoted that third year to the barn, hiring contractors to do the foundation and roof repairs, then shingling the exterior ourselves. We also added a screened-in-porch to one side.

It was the porch that brought me face-to-face with Ann’s garden again. I stood on that porch and looked at Ann’s garden good and hard, despairing over the tangled vines, crooked trellis and broken fences. I couldn’t face it.
Days went by. I kept looking at the garden, watching it from my secret vantage point on the porch, as if something might come out from that green jungle and grab me.

Finally, something did: A small tree. I didn’t know what kind of tree it was; I only knew that I liked the shape of its bare branches, and that it was being choked by vines. I didn’t have to garden. But I could at least save that poor little tree.

To get to the tree required hacking a path through thigh-high brush. Some of the plants I recognized as things I’d seen in other gardens, but I had no idea what they were. Most were strangled with weeds; I imagined them reaching up their little stems for help as I waded through the mess to get to the tree. These vines were the stuff of nightmares, curled dozens of times around the branches. It took me nearly three hours to hack, trim, and yank them off the tree.

As I stood back to admire my handiwork, I stumbled on something hard. I looked down and parted the weeds around my knees. When I yanked up handfuls of plants, I discovered a small raised bed surrounded by stones.

How long would it take to free that flowerbed of weeds? After all, I was already here. I might as well just do it.
And that, of course, is how any addiction begins: You think you can stop any time, even as you get yourself drawn in deeper. Once I’d freed that first flower bed, I saw faint traces of more stones. I was like some mad dog that couldn’t stop digging. I had to follow the trail.

It was slow going. That summer, I managed to clear a single flower bed and two paths. This was back-breaking work; it took days with a pickax to chop away the topsoil and thick clumps of tall grass and myrtle that covered the paths. I got poison ivy and had to paint my arms and legs pink with Calamine lotion. Every night, I went to bed every night so sore that it felt like somebody had pelted me with stones. Now it seemed to me that my grandfather must have been some sort of magician, producing those gorgeous bouquets of gladioli and delphinium, tulips and roses as easily as if he’d pulled them out of his hat.

I learned to wear protective clothing in the garden – long gloves, tall boots, and a bandanna – an outfit that made me look like Johnny Depp in drunken pirate mode. My perfume of choice became bug repellent. I washed with a special oil to prevent another poison ivy mishap. My muscles grew stronger.

Slowly, Ann’s garden reappeared. The tree I had freed from the clinging vines turned out to be a Rose of Sharon with papery white blossoms. Secret flagstones emerged from beneath the topsoil that had accumulated on the garden paths. I pulled down the old fences and left only the trellis. Now the garden space was more inviting, yet still separate from the yard.

There was, I discovered, a sense of peaceful purpose in gardening. It felt like work but it was joy, too. Most people – especially my kids – steered clear of the garden, because every time they came near me, I barked at them to help me dump a wheelbarrow of this or haul a bucket of that. I was left blissfully alone with the worms and beetles, admiring the leaves that had so many different textures and shapes.

What the heck, I thought at the end of that third summer. Now that I had created some open space, it needed a few plants to become a real garden.

I drove to a garden center a few miles away. I had never been to one before. This proved to be yet another step down the road toward a serious addiction: Ooh, pretty plants! Tools! Statues! Bags of mysterious magical substances! I spent a fortune, only to discover that plants crowded into a car cover very little space in the ground.

A friend took pity. “Bulbs,” she said. “That’s the secret trick to an affordable garden. And ask everyone
you know to give you some plants for Mother’s Day. Don’t be afraid to divide your plants, either.”

The very next weekend, I went to the hardware store and bought netted bags of bulbs. I had no idea what I was doing, but I dug around in the dirt and haphazardly tossed in bulbs. The bags promised that these alien, oniony stones would one day become narcissus and irises, day lilies and daffodils. It was the same rush of adrenaline as buying lottery tickets, only more work.

The third winter went by. A cold one, lots of snow. I forgot all about my garden/archeology project out back. I moved my efforts indoors, where I painted another bedroom, had curtains made for the dining room.

Early this spring, I wandered outside with a bucket of compost from the kitchen and discovered that I’d won the lottery: My first bunch of daffodils had bloomed like a row of little yellow suns. I dropped the compost bucket and ran over to greet them by name, forgetting how I’d promised my husband that I’d never become one of those crazy women who talks to plants.

Dan caught me at it. “You’ve almost got a garden here,” he said, laughing. “I never thought you’d stick with it.”

Stick with it? I couldn’t quit now! I watched those daffodils like they were rare orchids in the Royal Botanical Gardens. Tulips and irises soon joined them.

This summer, I began hoeing more overgrown beds and found rocks that looked as though they’d been imported from other places. But how? And why?

“Larry and Ann must have traveled,” Dan said, examining one smooth black stone with me. “This is some kind of volcanic rock. Maybe Hawaii?”

The rocks were souvenirs, I realized, carefully placing the black rock in a corner of the garden bed near the daffodils. The former owner, Ann, had been married to her husband for sixty years. They’d raised children together and she had buried him before leaving this house to live in a nursing home. I glanced over at my husband and wondered if we’d be here in our eighties, too, fixing shingles and separating lilies, trimming bushes and feeding roses until death parted us from one another.

Ann had earmarked her travels with Larry by bringing rocks back from their various vacations. My grandparents had done the same thing until my grandfather died in his seventies. I went on a serious search, then, and discovered more stones that didn’t belong, many of them smooth with age. I placed them carefully along the edges of the garden beds and used them as markers to help me remember where I’d seeded certain plants.

The next time I went to visit my brother in upstate New York, I brought back a rock to add to the garden. Another time, I brought driftwood from a trip I took to Prince Edward Island and laid it out around the base of my Rose of Sharon like bleached white bones. As Ann’s garden became my own, I began to understand the passion that we humans have for transforming the earth with our bare hands, not to grow food, but to hold our memories. This is our way of putting ourselves into the earth.

Right now, my garden has roses in bloom, as well as delphiniums, dahlias and lilies. A serene looking Buddha statue that my husband gave me for our wedding anniversary sits beneath a hydrangea – a tiny bush of twigs when I bought it, now lush and knee-high. I’m going to bring back another rock when I visit my cousins in Ohio soon. Meanwhile, Dan is helping me lay landscaper’s cloth and my youngest son is dumping wheelbarrows of stone along the paths.

“This is hard work, Mom,” my son complained recently as he shoveled stones and raked them out.

“It is,” I agreed. I bent down to pull a handful of violets from between the lilies, digging deep in the sun-warmed soil.

I love hearing authors read aloud, especially when they talk about the genesis of their work or the craft of writing it.

This past weekend, I was lucky enough to hear a presentation at the Newburport Literary Festival by Barbara Shapiro, author of The Art Forger, a bestselling novel based loosely around the art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. Aside from enjoying Shapiro’s lively reading from her fast-paced, clever suspense novel, what really kept me riveted were her writing tips, two of which struck me as the best advice I’ve ever heard on the subject of writing fiction:

#1: Don’t Let Your Research Show

As someone who holds a doctorate in sociology, Shapiro is an avid reader and researcher; fortunately, she also has a writing group that critiques her work and is always poised to shout: “Your research is showing!”

No matter what kind of story you’re writing, you’re probably doing some background reading as a way of gathering information to infuse into your novel. In my new book, The Wishing Hill, for instance, I have flashback scenes set in a snuff mill—snuff is a powdered tobacco sniffed up the nostril rather than smoked—and, before writing those scenes, I researched how snuff was manufactured, where it was sold, what it was like to work in a mill, etc.

Did I need all of that material? Heck no. I just needed to layer in a few details, like what color the snuff was and what kinds of containers it was packed in, to give an accurate feel for what it was like for one of my main characters to work in a snuff mill. Other than that, anything I put in there about manufacturing snuff was just going to clog the narrative. It took me three drafts to finally take out the extraneous passages, but after hearing Barbara talk about this, I’m sure my readers will be grateful I did!

#2 Avoid Eye Bumps

Shapiro also tries to avoid the “eye bump,” her phrase for the moment your reader is happily immersed in your fictional world, trotting along nicely until she stumbles over an awkward narrative section that is too dense, too long, or too detailed, leading the reader to pop out of the story and bump her head on the real world.

The whole point of storytelling is to draw your reader in so deeply that she forgets entirely about the world outside, that pesky place filled with children who need lunch money or a job with deadlines or a husband who really ought to pick up his own socks.

So, if you do have a lot of research or back story that really is essential to your book, don’t lump those more static, informational passages together. Instead, scatter them throughout the book in smaller chunks so your reader can have a smoother journey and absorb the material more easily.

Thanks to Shapiro, tomorrow I’m going back to page one of my work-in-progress to see if my research is showing—and to ensure that my poor reader doesn’t get jolted out of the world I’m creating.

A week ago, I did something stupid: I ran upstairs carrying an armload of laundry and a cup of hot tea while talking on the phone. Yep, efficiently multitasking. At the top step, though, I tripped and went flying headlong into the door frame at the top of the stairs. I got a nasty lump on my head but didn’t pass out or vomit, so I figured I might have a skull fracture but wasn’t concussed.

Then, four days after the accident, I woke up with a black eye. Here’s the thing about nasty lumps on your head: the bruising migrates. In this case, the blood seeped downward and collected around my left eye. It was pretty terrifying to look at—violent blue at first, then magenta, then green and violet. Right now it’s green, plum, and yellow, a true shiner, like the kind they would have put a cold steak on if I were a boxer in the 1950′s.

I still didn’t bother seeing a doctor or going to the ER, since I didn’t have any brain injury symptoms—no vomiting, no dizziness, no double vision. And I’m a working mom, so hey, who has time for the ER anyway?

Besides, I was headed to Maine on a writer’s retreat to finish my new novel in a town where I knew no one. For three days, the only times I ventured away from my desk were for food, a walk, or to browse in a couple of shops. Oh, and once I went to a corner store for some pain reliever because my head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, or maybe blood, and my eye was puffy.

Now here’s the interesting thing: Not one person asked me how I got the black eye. Not the waitresses or the bartender, not the clerks behind the counters in the shops. Certainly not the gas station attendant. Nobody asked. In fact, most people just kept their eyes averted from my face.

Well, it’s Maine, I decided. This is northern New England, home of stoic people who don’t mind ten months of winter. These people don’t ask and don’t tell. Surely, I thought, when I go home to civilized Massachusetts, people will ask why my face is bruised.

At home this week, I’ve done the usual routine. I drove my son to and from the bus stop, went to the grocery store, did volunteer work at our local library. And you know what? Only one person—one person in the three days since I’ve been back from Maine—has asked about my eye.

All of this made me remember another time, years ago, when I lived in a different neighborhood and frequently took walks with another young mother. A few times, I noticed that she had a black eye or bruises. I never asked how she got them. She seemed happy and we were busy talking about other things.

We lived half a mile from each other. I invited this woman into my house a couple of times, but she never once invited me into hers. Her husband worked at home, she explained, and he couldn’t concentrate when there was noise. I understood. “I like to work when it’s quiet, too,” I told her.

Then, one day when I stopped by, my friend was gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Weeks later, I finally found out from another neighbor what had happened: my walking companion had been beaten up so badly by her husband, she had to be rushed to the hospital. The beatings had been going on for years, but it was only after that man put her in the hospital that she got up the courage to leave him—and the country.

“It’s never good manners to comment on a woman’s appearance unless you’re going to compliment her,” my grandmother taught me. “That’s just bad manners.” Yet now, walking around with my own black eye, everyone has such good manners that I feel invisible. And I wonder what would have happened if I’d asked my neighbor about her bruises.

Maybe she would have lied and said she ran into a door. Or maybe, if I’d asked, she would have said she needed help.

The next time I see a woman with bruises, I will not let her be invisible. I will say, “Are you all right? What happened?” Then I will offer a hand if she reaches for it.

My daughter was scheduled to leave for California the day after the bombings in Boston. We live about forty miles north of the city; my son works in downtown Boston, so my daughter and I drove down to have lunch with him before she left to fly across the country.

It was a beautiful day, springlike, finally, with daffodils blooming and just enough sun so we didn’t need to zip our jackets. We took sandwiches to Paul Revere Park and watched dog walkers, moms with strollers, joggers, and the traffic rushing over the bridge above us.

The only off notes were the police and news helicopters circling, circling, circling overhead, reminding us of the events the day before, of the Boston Marathon, typically one of the most joyous international events, so sadly marred by some crazy group or individual or collective that decided creating bombs out of pressure cookers would be a terrific way to cause a stir.

A stir was caused, for sure. People died: an eight year-old boy carrying a sign for peace, a young restaurant worker, and a Chinese graduate student from Boston University. Others had limbs amputated or nails and metal embedded in their limbs from the blast.

There can be no possible explanation for an act like this, yet acts like this occur all over the world, nearly every day. It has gotten so we put our children on school buses with fear that some whack job will jump onto the bus and shoot the driver. We glance over our shoulders as we enter movie theaters, schools, malls, and airports, wondering whether we’ll come out again.

We tell ourselves, as the Boston authorities are doing already in discussing next year’s marathon, that we’ll impose new gun laws or do a more careful sweep of perimeters for events like these. We tell ourselves that we’ll catch all the bad guys and maybe even kill them like they killed our friends, our neighbors, or our sons and daughters.

Violence perpetuates violence. That’s my biggest fear: that our children will never know ordinary, boring days, but will always wait for planes to fall out of the sky or explosives to go off under their feet. That they will never know joy without fear, and that peace will be unattainable because we are all too busy exacting revenge for past acts.

The only solace we can find is in each other, in the men and women who acted selflessly to rush forward to help the wounded, in the onlookers who saw that marathon runners were without their cell phones or clothes and helped them find what they needed for comfort. We hope that we will rise as a community, as a strong entity against evil, against whatever dark spirit caused something like this to happen. It won’t be easy to do this without wanting revenge, but we have no choice but to try. We must forgive, and forgive, and forgive again, for that is the only way forward to peace.

We must pray for our children not to arm themselves, but to live in community, joyfully and without fear, having picnics in the park, still, even with helicopters circling overhead, taking note of the daffodils and the dogs wagging their tails, and yes, the babies being born into this world, knowing nothing, yet, but love.

I love working on the porch behind my house on Prince Edward Island because there are sheep on the farm below. There is something so simple and pleasing about the way the sheep graze together, drifting in a slow white cloud across the grass, that my mind literally feels like it’s opening up windows to blow out the cobwebs in my brain.

In the past few years, I have been trying to pay more attention to my work space and its effect on my productivity. Whether I’m working in an office, my house, a hotel, a library, or a cafe, I can literally feel where the creative energy is greatest. You can, too.

I cannot, for instance, work anywhere in our dining room except in the chair by the windows overlooking the side yard. I can’t work in the downstairs living room or the family room, but words flow out of me like the Colorado River whenever I write in the upstairs guest room.

In my barn office, I knew at once that my desk had to go in the far right corner, angled slightly so that the front of the desk faces the French doors. Likewise, on the porch I had to put my writing table in the left front corner facing the perennial garden, rather than facing the back field or the asparagus garden.

I still don’t fully understand why.

I am not a particularly compulsive person. I tend to shove clothes into drawers rather than neatly fold them. I don’t alphabetize my books. My computer bag is a lost-and-found of pens without caps, paper clips, and crumpled receipts.

Nor am I especially mystical. I don’t subscribe to feng shui beliefs, meditate, chant, or do yoga to tap into my creative reserves. I don’t rely on noise-canceling headphones or a special ritual when I start writing. Kids chattering, dishes clattering, dogs snoring? Fine.

But the energy of a place can really affect my work. I knew at once, when a friend introduced me to the Bates reading room in the Boston Public Library, that the energy was right. I have a great time writing in the Diesel cafe in Cambridge, as long as I sit toward the back and face the pool table. I loved writing on the side porch of the cabin I rented in Mendocino. I had to set up my card table in a certain corner of the back bedroom while on a recent writing retreat in Rockport, because nothing else felt right.

Is this all in my head? Or is there really more creative energy in certain places than others?

Consider this: the universe is made up of energy and so are we. Socrates believed that the energy of the soul is separate from matter, and quantum physicists have shown that atoms are like miniature tornadoes emitting waves of electrical energy. Our bodies are made up of atoms, and those atoms are constantly giving off and absorbing energy. This energy can even be measured outside the body. So why wouldn’t certain places contribute to your creative energy more than others?

Check it out for yourself. If you have an office, try putting your desk in at least three different locations in that room. Spend at least two days working in each part of the room to see what happens.

If you typically work at the kitchen table or in the dining room, try setting up a different table in another room—even a card table will do. Test every room to see which one helps increase your creative energy instead of draining it.

As you go from place to place—and this is true whether you’re drawing, designing a garden plan, or working on a novel—you’ll discover certain places where the creative energy flows better than others. Notice where you typically sit in your favorite coffee place and deliberately try a different table. Do the same thing in your library and on your patio or porch.

Really pay attention to how these places make you feel, and you might start to observe certain things all of these positive creative places have in common, like the amount of light or the orientation of your back to the door, etc.

Each of us has an infinite store of creative energy within. It’s just a matter of finding the medium we’re passionate about and the right environment for channeling that energy.

Yep, I know this sounds woo-woo bonkers to some of you. But try it and let me know how it goes.

Meanwhile, I will keep tuning in and channeling the energy wherever and whenever I’m lucky enough to find it—like this back porch, watching the sheep.

My husband just came up to the spare bedroom I recently started using as my office to ask a question about taxes. He took one look at the bed buried under my books and papers and raised an eyebrow. I held my breath, waiting to hear what he had to say.

Dan and I are opposites. He’s a quiet, meticulous software engineer and I’m a noisy writer who has trouble matching her own socks. One of the first times Dan ever cooked for me, I cleaned the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher. I should have known the road to paradise was strewn with boulders when Dan promptly unloaded the dishwasher and reloaded it, explaining about the directionality of spray, the importance of like goes with like, and why you should only fill the soap compartment halfway.

“Huh,” I said, admiring Dan’s capable hands and broad shoulders, but ignoring everything else. After all, I was thirty-eight years old, divorced, and a single mom with two kids. It wasn’t like I was going to marry the guy or anything.

A year later, Dan and I were married in a tent behind the house we’d just bought together. With four young children, two from each side, we knew we were walking into a six-ring circus. But even more difficult than parenting each other’s kids was the challenge of pairing my devil-may-take-this-job-and-shove-it housekeeping approach with Dan’s need for order.

Dan is a serious cook who has more cookbooks than Barnes & Noble. When we moved into our first house, he created a spread sheet for the kitchen to show me the proper places to put the knives, dishes, and pots. He alphabetized his spices and saved every glass jar “because it might be useful when I’m making chutney.” He created flow charts for holiday meals and weekly shopping lists that included what to do with leftovers.

When it’s my turn to cook, it’s usually taco night. With the kit.

We shared an office, and the battles there were no less fierce. “Do not use my tape unless you put it back where you found it,” Dan warned the kids. And me, too, the first seventy times I forgot. He had tiny containers of paperclips, sorted by size, and plastic tubs of rubber bands saved from old newspapers. He filed every receipt and kept up accounts on his computer.

Whenever my bank account became too untidy, my solution was simple: I opened a new one and let the old account straighten itself out over time. When I work, I keep manuscripts-in-progress, along with every other piece of crap, in stacks, piles, and cloth bags.

Somehow, though, we have found a way to live together. He thinks I’m worth it and the feeling is mutual. Eighteen years later, I know where the garlic press lives. Dan taught me to hang my keys on a hook above the kitchen counter, and I’m delighted every time I find them still there. Wow! It works!

Dan, for his part, has learned to relax about certain things. The laundry? He knows I’ll just lay the T-shirts on top of his dresser because I can’t fold them into those little military squares he likes. He appreciates the fact that I’ll suggest a hike instead of housecleaning on Saturday morning.

Now, looking at the bed in the guestroom covered with my files and papers, he even gamely names my organizational style: “I see you’ve become a horizontal filer,” he says, and smiles.

That’s what marriage is: A complex dance where you and your partner don’t just mirror each other’s moves, but embrace the challenge of making up new steps as you go along.

It’s easy to feel insignificant. That’s what I was thinking when I was asked by a local library to speak with authors Myfanwy Collins and J.R. Reardon this past Saturday about women writers in honor of Women’s History Month.

Actually, my very first thought when the librarian contacted me to ask if I’d be willing to talk about what it’s like to a woman writer was, “Uh, why? Who would want to hear that?”

My own life as a writer is, essentially, a pretty boring one. I spend hours a day on the computer. I rarely get out of my pjs, unless it’s time to walk the dog or pick up a kid, and then I might slip on some sweat pants. Sometimes I skulk in a cafe to avoid the dust buffaloes roaming my floors at home.  It’s an indulgent sort of life, making up stories, as I do when I write fiction, or telling other people’s stories, as I do when I write magazine articles or work on other people’s memoirs as a ghost writer.

Writing doesn’t seem like a very important job when you’re doing it. You think, will anybody read this? Why do I bother? Or you think, “Gosh, I could be putting all of this energy into teaching kids to read or fighting fires or staunching blood in a ER instead of writing these crap stories.”

Plus, what’s so special about being a woman writer? I define myself as a writer, yes. I even write fiction and essays that appeal mostly to women. But I haven’t ever once thought to myself, “I’m a WOMAN writer.”

But, once I started to think about the topic, I realized something kind of startling: maybe I’m less insignificant than I thought. Writers are, by definition, cultural historians, in the sense that we are recording history by observing the people and events around us and writing about what we see, feel, hear, taste, touch, and do. As writers, we play a significant role in human history, however long or short our tenure on this delicate planet might be.

Writers write because we can’t help ourselves. It is what we love to do more than anything in the world. I came to writing relatively late in life, after giving up the idea of going to medical school, after majoring in biology in college and taking one creative writing class to fill an elective. (You can imagine how happy my parents were when I told them THAT career plan.) I swore that I’d get sensible and go to medical school if I didn’t get published or famous in one year. Neither happened, but something else did: I found my voice.

And that’s what writing is, whether you’re writing your own stories or somebody else’s, magazine articles or essays or memoirs: writing is the act of giving voice to ideas and emotions on the page.

And, getting back to the whole “woman as writer” topic in the context of Women’s History Month, that’s where women really matter, because we are cultural historians in a way men simply can’t be. Through the ages, female writers have struggled to be taken seriously, but the fact remains that their work has illuminated corners of the world that men can’t, or won’t, go in the same way.

Writers like Mary Woostonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, brought feminist discourse into the public arena. She was also the mother of Mary Shelley, who showed us that women can write horror as well as men do, when she created Frankenstein in 1818.

In the early 1800s, Jane Austen showed us the good, the bad, and the ugly of what it was like to try and marry a man of means, while also showing us that it’s possible to have your own voice even when society would rather you were seen and not heard. By the 1900′s, Simone de Beauvoir was analyzing the status of women in The Second Sex. During World War II, Anne Frank wrote what is still probably one of the most riveting anti-war documents of all in her diary.

Contemporary women writers continue to inspire us. They cover the spectrum from the heavy hitters like Toni Morrison, who has won both the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes for her uncompromising stories about what it’s like to be black in America, to our so-called “beach reads” like Jodi Picoult, who takes topical news stories about things like teen suicides and school shootings, then turns them into gut wrenching stories that move us in ways news headlines sometimes can’t. Nonfiction writers like Joan Didion and Susan Orlean inform and inspire us with essays and books about everything from what it’s like to lose someone you love to why people around the world covet orchids enough to die for them.

Whatever subjects we choose, as women writers we are cataloging historical and cultural events in ways that go far deeper than the two-dimensional stories told by photographs. We get into the heads of our audience in ways that movies still can’t. And, yes, as women, we offer unique firsthand perspectives on what it’s like to be mothers and sisters, war brides and widows, lovers and victims, nuns and queens.

I count myself lucky to be a woman writer, living a life of the mind that I wouldn’t trade for any other.