Sometimes the most important lessons about creative work must be learned all over again to be remembered.

Last month, I went to Yellowknife for their North Words writer’s festival. Festivals are intense for the visiting writers: we do several gigs or readings in just a couple of days, plus panel discussions and mentoring sessions, plus also trying to catch some readings and sessions that our fellow writers are doing as well. I usually return home feeling a bit like a well-used beach towel – soggy, and wrung out, but full of good memories.

This time, I also returned creatively elated and hungry to get to my keyboard. Mostly just due to one little lesson I already knew but needed to be reminded of. On the first day of the festival, I participated in a session where all of the visiting writers gave short little keynotes designed to inspire the creative spirit in all of us.

Richard Van Camp was there. Richard is a long-time writer buddy of mine, and one of the hardest-working people I know. He said there are two kinds of writers: mechanics and channelers. He said he was a mechanic, which meant that he got up every day, sat down, started his engine and wrote, whether he felt like it or not. The channelers out there, and he listed the lovely and talented Eden Robinson in this category, they sometimes don’t touch their computers for months at a time, but something strikes them, and they shut off all the social media and noise and do nothing but write for months and boom! They emerge needing a haircut and blinking at the sun, finished masterpiece in hand.

I listened to this and thought about it for a minute. As a non-binary person, I am used to not quite fitting neatly into boxes or categories, and later over lunch I told Richard that I had heard what he said, but that I figured I was a little of both. I could be a channeler: I had felt that much-awaited feeling of a story just taking over my head and my hands, and not being able to put it down until it was finished with me, but that the only time that magic had struck me was when I was already deep in the act of being a mechanic: disciplining myself to sit down no matter what else called me away and just writing. It was only then, while working, that the muse would make time to come and sit on my shoulder.

So now, thirty years and 13 books later, I can now look back and say that, after editing, polishing, crafting, memorizing and publishing my work, in the end there is no noticeable difference between the writing that the mechanic in me and the channeler in me managed to get out of this head and on to the page. The romantic in me might wish this was different: I might wish that the work that came through me in those magic, ethereal moments of true inspiration were better, or shinier, or closer to fine than the words I just sat down and wrenched out of myself while sticking to my word-count driven schedule, but that is not the truth of it, not in my experience.

I returned to Whitehorse inspired, and I returned to my manuscript determined. Since the first week of June, I have spat out nearly thirty thousand words on this new draft. This weekend, if I stay on track, I will officially cross the halfway mark of this book. Are they perfect words? Absolutely not. But one thing I know for certain is that I cannot edit the manuscript that I have not written, and I remind myself of that every time I sit down to begin again.

The other thing I am grateful to report is that, several times in the last month, while deep in the mechanics of tuning up or building a new chapter, I have felt the story begin to just take its shape in the ether above my head, swirl there until it I notice, look up, and begin to pluck the words from the air and transcribe them. The words were there for the channeling, but only because there I was, the mechanic, sitting down and doing the work.