There’s no denying the random fortune that may strike, for good or for ill. But catching the lightning in a bottle requires you to already have a bottle, if not a hundred, in place, and having researched and experimented on the best bottle size, shape, placement, composition…

Thus, “Fortune favours the prepared”, also known as the adage “You make your own luck.”

Or, if you prefer something more modern, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

This works even on the smallest scale, all the way down to having words to write. Where do I get my ideas? Same place I get my words.

First, I tame the chaos and stress around me – from making sure that we have all the medical forms lined up in triplicate for yet another round of battling to get a procedure covered, to folding the laundry so I’m not seeing the peaks of Mt. Clean Laundry rising like the Himalayas from the continent of the guest bed every time I walk past the room.

Second, I engage in the world around me, from conversations with friends to listening to podcasts on people doing things I would never do, in places I have never gone. (These usually play as I’m folding the laundry or loading the dishwasher, since that leaves me in one spot long enough to listen. I know other friends don’t mind earbuds and can expand that across the house.) I’ll read books outside my comfortable and familiar, during downtime.

When I look back across books I’ve written, I can remember various conversations with my husband and friends that sparked this paragraph or that mention, from the hilarious double-entendre to the plot point that tied everything together. The last happens often enough that I occasionally wonder if getting stuck merely means the well of ideas is dry and I need to go live in the world and engage more… because the solution usually ties together a recent conversation at a diner with friends, a random aside in an interview I was listening to, a bit of research from years ago, and a meme a friend threw at me to make me laugh, or a chance encounter with strangers in queue at the hardware store.

Third, I make an effort to write down good lines and bits. Not because I ever go back to that notepad to pull things out, but because it makes me think about it, and remember it, with a bit of muscle memory in the act of writing to anchor it. So much of life we go through on autopilot, and you can forget the good bits that make great texture for stories as easily as you forgot what make and model car that was that was slow in the right lane, so you passed on the left, three hundred miles of driving back on Wednesday last week.

Fourth, I show up at the page. I have a notebook that I sometimes jokingly call my handbrain, because it keep observations, notes, reminders to put things on the grocery list, tasks that need to get done but are so minor I’d forget them unless I’m staring at the thing that needs it… and just about every day, after dumping out the assorted pocket litter of the busy mind, it turns to story, and I start writing down notes and blocking out the next chapter or three, in bits and pieces. (That I do go back to, because if I have a chapter roughed out, even if it’s as rough as the stage directions, not e’en the full script, it’s an easy touchstone to get the brain to unpack and the fingers to fly through writing the full scene.)

Do I always get it right? Ah, no, not at all! Given the ever-changing nature of life and the fickle finger of fate, that’s like being able to walk on a curb. When it keeps changing height and direction, and my arms are full. With the occasional passing car too close, and earthquake. But when I do, I can reliably average a thousand words a day!

And that is how I make my own luck when it comes to having words to write.