Writers and other creative types aren't immune to the impulse to start anew each time we unwrap a new calendar. I began making New Year's resolutions back in elementary school, and at best, my resolutions, like most people's, were always qualified failures. Yet there's something highly symbolic about believing there's a right time to start again. Give yourself the edge this year... 

To keep readers motivated to turn pages, much fiction contains an element of mystery, even when the book isn't a genre mystery novel. Just as the unknown keeps the reader intrigued, it helps the writer keep writing. To find out more about mystery's role, I interviewed Dennis Palumbo. A former Hollywood screenwriter whose latest book is a collection of mystery short stores, From Crime to Crime, Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist specializing in creative issues.

Though I'm passionately addicted to words, and no doubt grievously under-developed otherwise, I'm aware that there's a whole other world out there. A world of color, shape, texture—all sorts of visual playfulness and exploration—awaits the would-be creative person. To learn more, I recently interviewed Nita Leland, an artist, teacher, lecturer and juror of art exhibitions, as well as the author of The New Creative Artist: A Guide to Developing Your Creative Spirit. We began by discussing how to surprise yourself. . . 

Do depressed poets risk their creativity by being treated for their miseries? Absolutely not. That's a myth, according to numerous poets and other creative artists, as well as those who treat them. One of the latter, Richard M. Berlin, M.D., a psychiatrist who is also a poet, edited Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment and the Creative Process. In our recent e-mail interview, we discussed the odd idea that taking pills may somehow be "cheating." 

You might think it would be a snap to conjure a fine novel out of the elements that were handed to Padma Viswanathan, on a platter as it were, by her Indian grandmother. Padma's grandmother's grandmother was married as a child and widowed at 18 and, due to rigid caste rules, had to spend the rest of her life in extreme deprivation. Still, writing well is rarely that simple, and Padma spent a decade on The Toss of a Lemon. In our interview, she told me how entering flow helped make her novel more compelling.  

Donna Barstow, a professional cartoonist, always thought it would be "neat" to have her own world. She's been creating that idiosyncratic world for more than a decade, with her cartoons appearing in The New Yorker, Sunday Parade, Los Angeles Times, and numerous other periodicals. When we discussed her creative process, she told me, "It helps when I have a narrow focus. The narrower, the better. Otherwise the world is too big!" That's one way she enters flow... 

When I was 11, I was given a little five-year diary with a lock and key. I wrote the usual pre-pubescent stuff in it, a few lines a day, most days. At 14, I began using steno notebooks, and over the next couple of decades I filled dozens with my tormented longings and occasional excited high points. Since I became a professional—and computerized—writer, I've been keeping a writer's notebook. Even as irregular as I am about the process, it's proven priceless for my creative output. . . 

Creating can be an emotional process. But there's good emotional—even when you're sad or the work epitomizes sorrow—and there's bad emotional. That's when your inner critic attacks you, calls you mean names, and causes you not to feel like creating anymore.

Someone once told me he tries to befriend his inner critic, that voice that keeps yelling at him, insisting he writes badly and is terrible altogether. But the war between your creative self and your judgmental self isn't always going to be resolved by friendly diplomacy.

Expressing ourselves creatively—whether in words, wax, pixels, movement, or whatever—can be pleasurable. But often it isn't. We can't face the activity in which we most want to lose ourselves. The very thought of it makes us queasy. What's going on?

You're probably curious as to what this new blog, called "Creating in Flow," might offer you that's insightful or inspiring about the art and science of creative expression. Fair enough. But until I finish the first draft, I'm not going to focus on my audience. To find out why, read on.