steps for staying "tuned in" for what you need

"Once you're into a story everything seems to apply -- what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story. I guess you're tuned in for it, and the right things are sort of magnetized." - Eudora Welty

Good source material for our writing is around us all the time. I think we are most "tuned in" to it when we are actively working on a writing piece. The following steps may help you stay "tuned in" for what you need for a writing project:

1. Make and stick to a writing schedule as much as possible. Neglecting your writing work leads to distraction and lack of focus. When we are not focused on our work, it's harder to "tune in" to the fabulous source material that surrounds us every day.

2. Be observant. Watch others and be attune to your surroundings. What does the day feel like? How does someone react to stimuli, to others around him or her, to conflict?

3. Listen carefully and with purpose. Catch and write down as soon as you can overheard conversations you think you can use later. Note an interesting or provocative turn of phrase. Notice the construction and syntax of spoken language.

4. Keep your writing project in mind as you go through your daily routine and living obligations. Working through scenes in your mind ahead of time will make it easier for you to write and to incorporate the source material you've encountered as it fits into your work.

5. Keep a notebook for each writing project, as well as a general notebook or journal to keep ideas and scraps of phrases and observations from your surroundings. Don't worry if you'll ever use anything you record or when you'll use it: just get it down. Write it down as soon as possible. We always think we'll remember that cool phrase or idea the next day, the next week, the next month. How soon we forget when we fail to write it down.

Keep the literary faith, friends. And keep writing!