About 15 years ago, right around this same dark, slippery, and snowy time of year, I was driving in my truck down an icy highway, lonely on tour in Ontario, listening to CBC Radio. I was trying not to let the snowflakes that were space warping towards my windshield mesmerize me too much. Anna Maria Tremonti was interviewing Kay Ryan, the sixteenth Poet Laureate of the United States on The Current. Anna Maria asked her what so many journalists have asked so many artists before, Kay, where do you find your inspiration?

This was radio, so I couldn’t see the poet’s face, but I wish to this day that I could have. There was a pause, just a little more than a breath of space, and Kay Ryan spoke, and said something that made me immediately pull my truck over to the side of the road, and scramble for a pen. I needed to write down what she said exactly how she had phrased it, so I would get it right, and never forget it. And I never have. In fact, I memorized every word of it that day, and I have repeated it hundreds of times since.

“Inspiration?” Kay Ryan said. “Oh, I don’t depend too much on inspiration. I depend on starting. On willing myself to start.”

Over the years these words have become like a prayer to me, recited to invoke a state of readiness to write or create that always helps me just sit down and get to work. I am currently working on three projects right now: my fourteenth book, my seventh theatre show, and my first kid’s book, and I still repeat Kay Ryan’s quote to myself every time I settle my ass down into my chair, and it still works. And it apparently works for Kay Ryan too. Three years after I first heard her speak those words, she won a little old thing called The Pulitzer Prize.

So, I share them with you.

The single most important thing I have learned about my own creative practice over the years is that it is just that: practice. Just like the weightlifter quaking through the tenth rep of their third set, or the guitar player picking out a scale with calloused fingertips, for me, it is about just sitting down and beginning. And then sitting down and beginning again.

I cannot wait for magic stars to align on a perfectly clear night when the house is clean and I have no chores to do, or family obligations, and no new episodes of my favourite show to watch to sit down and write. I must not wait for creativity to strike me, or it never will. For me, creative spark is not a magic firefly that must be captured in a special jar without damaging the dust on its wings. Creative spark arrives only when I am already in the process of practising the act of creating.

I have learned that I must sit down and open my computer or notebook and depend upon starting. I must will myself to start. Once I have stretched out a few sentences and clumsily strummed a few word chords, then I can dare to invite the muse to visit me and make room for it to land on my shoulder, and whisper in my ear what might just happen next.

If I am listening. If I am already writing. If I am ready when inspiration comes, then I can open the door to it.

But I don’t depend too much upon inspiration. I depend on starting. On willing myself to start.