Have you ever noticed how sensitive creative people are? Even tough guys and gals who write intense military dramas have to be highly responsive to the way people act and think. It’s how they see things that others don’t.

Suppose you’re at the gas station. Your significant other is pumping gas, watching the numbers whirr by. But you see a mother saying goodbye to her child before she hands her off to a man in another car. It’s November, but she’s loading Christmas presents into the trunk. What’s the story behind it all? Better yet, how can you use it in a story?

Rather than go on a cruise and sleep in the sun, we’d rather eavesdrop on the conversations to get just the right turn of phrase for that one character in our next book. Need a quirky counterpart? Go to your local discount department stores to find lots of idiosyncrasies.

But creativity – that search for just the right word, developing the appropriate scene, creating the perfect character – is stressful. Add in deadlines, partners who don’t “get it,” floundering bank accounts and your creativity runs screaming out the back door (which adds even more stress to your brain).

What if we thought of our creative selves as a bank account? Credits increase or restore our energy and creativity. Wonderful things like:

• Sitting in a café typing merrily away on your laptop, sipping the season’s first chestnut praline latte,
• Or sitting in front of Winter’s first fire in the fireplace, words flowing from your fingers like the rain on the rooftop,

I add credits to my creative account by Skyping every week with several friends who understands what the word, “writer,” really means. (Yes, several. I’m needy that way.) Simply walking into a room filled with authors and writers whom you respect and admire may restore you.

In order to write, our creative credits must be more than our emotional debits. Having family is a huge blessing, but we all know that they run through our emotional dollars like water through a sieve. Other debits may be:

• When your real bank account is so low that you have to eat beans for dinner – all week
• Having a blank page on your screen when your deadline hits today,
• Getting “that phone call” in the middle of the night.

We have to make sure we make enough deposits to offset those debits, even if it means running away to the guest room to finish a post. Or ditching choir practice to meet a deadline. Or sitting in a megamart to find just the right crazy person as a foil our super straight-laced hero.

So, what’s the balance on your writer bank account? The one that resides in your heart and mind. In order to produce, you must maintain a positive balance.

Build your balance daily. Too many negatives and your creativity will be overdrawn.

Writer’s bank account inspired by Chapter 10, You’re Already Amazing by Holley Gerth. http://holleygerth.com/amazing/

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Angie is represented by Joyce Hart of Hartline Literary Agency. She’s working on a novel set in a small Southern town. She and her husband live in a big wood outside a small town in South Carolina. She would love for you to visit her, at angelaarndt.com.