March 6- March 12 2026

March 6–12, 2026 — The Creative Fix

Another full week of work at my day job, and in between the hours there I kept pushing forward on the memoir. What I’m noticing again is that creativity doesn’t come to me in a smooth, steady line. It comes in bursts. There are days where I barely touch the work, and then there are days where I sit down and suddenly several hours disappear without me noticing.

When those slower days happen, I can feel it. If I go a couple of days without working on the memoir, something in me gets restless. The best way I can describe it is that I start needing a fix. A creative fix. It’s the same sensation I’ve had during music projects over the years. When I’m inside a project, I want to stay there. I crave the momentum. And when it stalls, I start looking for a way back into it.

That’s exactly what happened this week. A couple of slow days, and then yesterday I sat down intending to do a little editing and ended up going deep into it. The hours flew by. I worked through a number of passages that had been bothering me, tightened things up, and made real progress.

There’s one small pattern I keep noticing as I work through these chapters. Whenever I get stuck—when I can’t quite figure out how to describe something or how to move a scene forward—I almost always end up falling back on the same solution: the truth. Instead of trying to shape the moment into something clever or literary, I just ask myself what actually happened and what I actually felt at the time. Once I do that, the problem usually resolves itself.

That habit circles me back to the core idea behind the Diane Method. Whether or not it deserves all the credit for the changes I’ve felt over the past few months, the act of telling the truth does seem to solve two problems at once. On a personal level it clears the air in my own head. On a practical level it makes the writing easier, because truth is usually simpler than whatever complicated version I was about to invent.

So for now I’ll keep working the same way: wait for the bursts when they come, follow them when they arrive, and when I get stuck, default to the truth.