I think we forget our successes way too easily. I have to remind myself of a major success involving fiction writing that happened to me last summer. It amounted to finally discovering an approach for consistently writing and finishing short stories. I finally found something that trumps “writer’s block,” and “I don’t feel like writing,” and all the other crap that repels the muse.

The approach goes something like this: I imagine sitting in a movie theater, seeing the coming attractions of movies, and hearing great music backing the images: the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony; Elgar; Dvorak; Wagner. Oh, man: Wagner.

Before the epiphany, I had been trying to write stories using the aforementioned approach, but minus the music. I would see myself in the movie theater, just as the lights went down and the sneak previews began playing. And ideas would come. I would feel galvanized, enough to sketch out an outline of a complete story, or a single scene to a story. But I couldn’t seem to develop the story further. The juices dried up, no matter how vividly I imagined the setting of the cinema.

I kept trying, though. And then I think the epiphany happened like this: I played Vaughn Williams Fantasia on a theme by Tallis, or it might have been the Wagner piece that opens the movie Excalibur, and I imagined sitting in the cinema.

Anyway, something big clicked. Very big. I wept, I wrote, I had to get up and pace the room the feeling was so intense. I won’t pretend any of what I wrote that day was quality stuff. But it felt real and it felt good. I don’t think what I wrote in that moment was junk. There were gems in there. But the point is, I found an approach to writing that felt right to me. And I used the same approach — great music and thinking of movies — the next day, not believing it would work. But it did. It took me some time to finish the first story, but I did finish it, and another and another. That approach got me to write stories and finish them, and dig the process. I’m still powered by that personal Big Bang of several months ago.