“I’m a doodler. This has never gone over well. In high school, it convinced teachers I wasn’t really listening, and in my various jobs over the years, it has convinced bosses that some part of me is still in high school. Which is true, obviously, but that’s hardly the point. The point is knowing what works for you.

The thing is, I think better when I’m dragging a pencil across the paper. I always have. And with fiction, doodling is my way back into the story. Sometimes when I’m stuck with words, I’ll start fixating on something small that I know is somewhere in the scene at hand: a key ring, a toy car, a crumpled phone number written on a wrapper. I will shade and erase and refine, and I know it is working when I start seeing the lines before I’ve drawn them—a light trace on top of the paper that I know can’t really be there but I follow like faith. Soon enough, the words will start coming: snatches of dialogue, a single sentence that has to be written down. And even if it’s just the smallest bit, I know that it’s something I can come back to and fill in, something that will get clearer and more defined with every pass.”
—Mira Jacob, author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (Random House, 2014)