“Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.”

~Winston Churchill

Solitude. Noun. “The state of being or living alone, seclusion. Remoteness from habitations, as of a place; absence of human activity. A lonely, unfrequented place.”

Lonely? Unfrequented? I respectfully disagree, Dictionary.com. Most writers I know feel anything but lonely inside their busy, populated stories. When I look at the word solitude, I see sol, or “light of the sun.” Seclusion is the power source on which my writing depends. Solitude connects us to the light within where our stories reside. PS. Dogs asleep at your feet, even better.

As we saw in the previous chapter, writing communities matter, but there’s a time for connection and a time for seclusion. Storytellers need to hear themselves think and thus require plenty of peace and quiet. Even extroverts, party people, who get their best ideas and do the bulk of their research out in the world, must go within at some point to tap into their inner light.

It’s a challenge, chasing solitude.

Godforsaken peace and quiet. That’s what we were going for when we’d moved from Paul’s estate to our rental home in Studio City.

It took years to shake off the residue of having lived in Hollywood. The morning the Sunset Strip turned hellish as shotgun-wielding citizens surrounded our car at the start of the LA Riots. The grief following the tragic accidental death of Brandon Lee on the set of The Crow while I was taking care of his Siamese cats.* Fighting with loved ones over the Nicole Brown Simpson murder, a woman Jesse and I were just getting to know, in a town suddenly hotly divided in the glaring spotlight of the world’s largest media circus.

Amid all the noise and craziness, the protective mother in me longed for a more peaceful place to raise our boy—and my book baby, too.

Steven Pressfield

The artist’s journey is a dangerous one. That’s why we avoid it. Like the mystic and the renunciant, the artist does her work in an altered state of consciousness. She’s seeking herself, her voice, her source, and she has to enter that dark forest alone. It’s in this forest where the rules are different, the hatters are mad, and the principles inverted. But not going in will make her totally crazy. It’s hard. I mean, Hemingway blew his brains out, right? You can go in too deep.

But the great thing about being a writer or an artist, as opposed to, say, a football player with bad knees who’s out at forty, is that you can do it for your whole life. Even failure is just another step on the way to success. You can keep going, dust yourself off, and write another one.

I purposely ignore my [Malibu] ocean view and turn my writing chair toward the wall. We’re all working inside our heads. If we’re writing War and Peace, we’re seeing Napoleonic battles in our mind’s eye, so we don’t need a view.

Rob Bell

[As a writer] your mind is elsewhere. You have to surrender the obsession with metrics and data. Because for many people their work is directly tied to tangible outcomes. They work this many hours, this many clients were served, and this many deals were transacted. When you enter into this kind of territory, all you know is you spend eight hours figuring out how the blue shoes related to the stepdad and the Toyota. You’re trying to figure out that theme or that chapter. It’s just a totally different kind of work.

Sometimes, I’ll be trying to come up with language to describe something and it’ll turn over and over and over and I will realize, “Oh! Other people get done with work and go home and don’t even think about it.” This is just what I do. It exists in some other category. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. If I keep looking around, trying to figure out why my work happens to be this way and why this tires me and this energizes me—I think I just died to the need to make sense of it. At some point, it got too tiring. I’m going to let it be whatever it is. But yes, I like [the word] obsession. I think I’ve made peace with it. It feels a lot less obsessive because this is the work. This is what it takes.

Patricia Cornwell

We all know what it’s like when you’re at the end of that first real draft. My rule is: I do not allow myself to operate dangerous machinery. I’m not kidding! Like a helicopter or a fast car, or any car. You’re not yourself! I always say that you’re kind of Alice going through the looking glass when you write a book or do any art. You’re channeling something. You’re transporting, going somewhere else. And then you come back. It’s kind of like the astronauts. They’re not used to gravity for a while.

Tosh was finally napping as I sat at my desk, a blanket mummifying my middle. Jesse was at his SAG-AFTRA softball practice. A paragraph I’d edited nine times clicked into place. Deep breath.

Just then, our neighbor’s ear-splitting leaf blowers fired up and a cacophony of dogs—ours and everyone else’s—barked in unison. As I raced to shut our windows, Tosh popped awake, eye rubbing.

I had no sooner quieted Little Man after the tornado of dust and decibels—where did I save that file again?—when a UPS truck pulled up across the street, catapulting the dogs once more into a high-alert bark-fest. Add to that the seemingly daily sirens, car chases, and police helicopters chopping over nearby Ventura Boulevard, and I was stressed. Writing sessions aborted. Again. But this was Studio City, an enclave of the Valley, known for its grassy parks and outdoor cafés! How could our picturesque residential street be so disruptive? If I couldn’t write here, what hope did I have for any semblance of a healthy sleep schedule?

Sabaa Tahir

With things like the UPS driver ringing the bell, I kind of love those interruptions because it’s this beautiful reminder that I ain’t shit. Makes me work harder. When I’m really in my feels, and I’m deep in the story, and then my son calls and he’s like, “Is there any pizza left, or did you finish it all?” with that accusatory note in his voice, or my mom is calling to yell at me about something, I’m reminded that I’m just a person.

Ultimately, it connects me deeper to the humanity of my characters. One of the things I think about writing these books is that you forget that it’s not all bad. You can be writing through awful things, and your characters are still going to laugh and have crushes and fall in love and be annoyed with the person they love. I feel like those life interruptions, for me anyway, are a great reminder of the rhythms of life.

Tim Grahl

I actually do the opposite of what Steven [Pressfield] does in turning towards the wall. I have a business to run. If I come into my office and I sit at my desk, I want to run the business. So, I tend to write at coffee shops. Having people there helps me.

I have tried to come into my office to work, but I start to feel lonely like the walls are closing in. In coffee shops, I put on headphones and block out the world. Something about being out while I’m writing allows it to flow for me in a way sitting at my desk doesn’t. I usually only spend about half the day at my office. I’ll find a coffee shop, or I’ll sit outside somewhere—anywhere, where there’s action that allows me to focus.

Every once in a while, I’ll be at Starbucks, and a friend will come in, and I’ll say hi, and then, “All right, I’ll talk to you later.” Like, I’m not here to talk. I’m here to get my work done. We can talk later. Of course, this is in [Steven Pressfield’s] Turning Pro, this decision of, “If I’m going to do this, there are no half measures.”

Following Guru’s directive, I was now meditating daily. And a regular visitor had been showing up: a Native American man with long black braids, tanned leather skin, charcoal eyes, and a red bandana. Every time I closed my eyes, there he was. I’m not going anywhere, just so you know.

I hadn’t the foggiest idea who he was. But when my sister’s boyfriend, Bill, told us about a medicine man by the name of Thomas One Wolf, I got chills. He’d met Thomas when actor Lou Diamond Phillips brought him to authenticate depictions of Native Indians for the film Sioux City.

“Tell Linda he’s the real deal,” Lou said. “If she can get to him, he’ll give her the interview of a lifetime for her book.” Only problem was, getting to him. For starters, Thomas didn’t have a phone, and he lived in a forest somewhere in northern New Mexico off a maze of unmarked dirt roads. Plus, he was “really private.”

I was getting used to forgoing sleep to write in the middle of the night. But what felt oddly urgent was that I finally understood Jesse’s desire to move out of town, to start over somewhere simpler. It broke my heart watching his dehumanizing auditions. In rooms of forty men who looked just like him, my husband waited anxiously to hear his name called to go before the Hollywood firing squad: casting directors and producers sitting stone-faced, daring him to do something fantastic or just hurry up and die already. After Jesse yelled at an old lady for glaring at our dog, who was crapping on her lawn, by the way, it was clear. All that memorizing and schmoozing and driving only to sit by the phone (literally, before cell phones), to hear that, yet again, someone else got the part, was breaking him.

What scared me even more, however, was that I’d started feeling disconnected from Jesse in flashes at home. Our everyday togetherness felt increasingly worlds apart, as I entered the addictive and bustling realm of my book—an unknowable and unreachable place for Jesse, no matter how much I tried to involve him.

So, when the Northridge Earthquake threw us out of bed at 4:00 AM, killing people in a nearby apartment complex, I packed up our car and the pups for a visit to New Mexico. Lou said that Thomas One Wolf had land for sale. His property, where he lived “close to the earth” in a cabin on raw land at the base of the Rocky Mountains, sounded exactly like what my hubby and son, with their Cherokee roots on Jesse’s mother’s side, needed. At the very least, I hoped our road trip could be a reset for our family. And, if Thomas happened to grant me an interview for the book while we were there, my accountant said we could use the trip as a write off!

When I told Diane about how Thomas had cobbled together a community of like-minded sweet city transplants on three thousand acres of raw land, with residents only too happy to relinquish their garage door openers and swimming pools for a kind of solitude they’d never dreamed existed, she was horrified.

“You’re kidding, right?” Di said. “You’re writing a book based on celebrity interviews and thinking of leaving Los Angeles for the middle of nowhere? You’re out of your mind!”

“Maybe so. But Jesse’s Chevy spots are paying the bills. We’ve got to try, Di. He’s going to lose it here. I can feel it. And I need trees.”

Martha Beck

I wrote an allegory [Diana, Herself] about a brown baby found on a trash heap. She ends up going to a forest and gets lost there because she has to be outside of culture to find out who she is. That retreat to the forest is something I’ve done. I started only doing seminars in the African bush or in the mountains in California. It came to me at a certain point that if I was around people, I couldn’t know who I truly was. I’ve spent the last three years in the woods. And it’s been incredible. I want every woman to find a forest where she’s away from people, away from even the vibrations of people, because there’s that little telepathic thing happening—we all need a forest inside our mind, our house, our heart—a forest where we can go to be away from culture and find out who we are.

Charles Sailor

For your work to be as pure as possible—whether you find yourself in a secluded mountain cabin or a busy restaurant—I always recommend you listen to classical music, whether you’re a fan or not. The pieces are so emotionally driven that classical music will help drive your story. Find pieces that you enjoy—with no lyrics, for background music. You don’t want to listen to anything with lyrics because it will get into your head and keep you from composing. I like to think of writing as if I’m scripting a symphony. The words should sing to your reader; they should crescendo. I have a group of about thirty classical CDs I’ll alternate through, depending on the type of scene I’m writing.

Arielle Ford, bestselling author of many books, including The Soulmate Secret and Wabi Sabi Love. Former book publicist to Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, Wayne Dyer, and Neale Donald Walsch.

I get my best ideas while taking early morning walks on the beach in La Jolla. Brian, my husband, jogs and talks with homeless people and feeds the birds while I dream up blog posts or story lines in whatever book I’m working on. I have to live near the ocean. The sound of the waves and the smell of the sea clears my head.

“I can’t wait to get out of here!” Jesse exclaimed as we headed east on the I-10 in our eco-tin can with Brodie and Peanut curled up in balls asleep next to Tosh. The farther we got from the city, the happier we became. Driving through the sprawling deserts of New Mexico with the windows down, we felt like wild horses cut loose from ground ties. As we wound through the mountains outside of Santa Fe, with its blue skies and white puffy clouds and red mesas rolling on for miles, we sang along to Bad Company at the top of our lungs, our spirits renewed.

“Pull over!” I squealed, three miles from the Tres Piedras diner where we were scheduled to meet Thomas One Wolf. I bounded up a hill overlooking the valley, the tail end of the majestic Rocky Mountains in the distance. An ocean of sage rippled before us like waves on what was once a seafloor. Hundreds of thousands of acres of forest surrounded us.

I took in a deep breath of pine, outstretched my arms with palms to the sky, and yelled: “This is it, Jesse! We have to live here! This is our place!” Jesse and the dogs beamed beside me.

When we pulled up to the diner, Thomas One Wolf stepped out to meet us. Oh my God. Long black braids, tanned skin, charcoal eyes, and a red bandana. Exactly as I’d seen in my meditations.

“Welcome home, Brother! Welcome home, Sister,” Thomas said, hugging us. Then he turned to Tosh. “Well, Little Dude, you and I are gonna have some big fun while you’re here!” Tosh swelled like a balloon.

We followed Thomas One Wolf’s truck through miles of dirt roads, past abandoned stone cabins from centuries past, across dry creek beds up into a thick swath of pinyon, traversing the land he’d secured to save from future “unconscious development.” After a lunch of beans and tortillas prepared by his wife, Sheri, in their simple cabin amid tens of thousands more acres of protected Bureau of Land Management trees, Jesse and I were already making plans to build a modest cabin before the first snowfall.

That night on the land, a trillion stars twinkled down on us through the skylight of a borrowed trailer. We slept like hibernating bears. We’d come home. The next day, leaning against an ancient cedar, I made more progress on my book than I had in the previous twenty.

Laura Munson

I live in Whitefish, Montana, near Glacier National Park. Thirty years ago, if you had told me I’d raise two kids here, I would have said, “Are you kidding? I’m a city girl!” But it keeps me on my knees in humility. We’re on the food chain here. There are grizzly bears wandering around in my backyard! Montana feeds my muse, and it won’t let go.

You know how a grove of aspen trees is one organism? That’s how I feel taking a walk in the woods. Something always happens in the form of inspiration, awareness, and connection. You can look out the window, sure, and still feel connected. But I try to take walks in the woods every day. It makes me (and my muse) feel new and inspired to go back home to write.

Our frontier life at an altitude of 8,600 feet in New Mexico was our Little House on the Prairie. Stunning campfires under the Milky Way. Outdoor cookouts and sing-alongs. Nature walks. Vision quests. Sweat lodges. Our community went to bed with the sun and woke up with the sun. With virtually no human-made lights visible anywhere at night, our star-scape was more entertaining than anything on TV. We went our first year without ever plugging ours into the wall.

Peaceful? You bet. Not a leaf blower, UPS truck, ambulance, or helicopter in sight or within earshot. Tosh and his five-year-old little face with missing front “toothisus” would call out to me in the mornings, even though Mommy was always in the same spot: sitting at the kitchen table, outlined by the picture-window view of another stunning desert-sky morning, blissfully immersed in her writing. I loved stealing the last moments of quiet time before my family would bound out of bed for another day of chopping wood, building forts, cooking, cleaning, reading, drawing, and playing with my growing blue-eyed snuggle bug.

Townsfolk called us “Hollywood.” As in, “Hey, Hollywood!” because to them we could seem like a pretty big deal when they saw Jesse on TV. But they had no idea how not-Hollywood we really were, or how much we appreciated how chill they were and that we could now raise our boy in a place where he didn’t have to dress a certain way or keep up with the rich kids. Heck, in these parts, he was the rich kid!

Playing frontier woman filled a gal’s days. We had a cabin to finish. Locals to meet. Groceries to fetch (Taos was a two-hour round trip). Abandoned puppies to raise. Meals to rustle up (notice my country drawl)—on a wood stove, no less. Jesse became a volunteer fireman, and each morning, I helped out at Tosh’s two-room schoolhouse, where kindergartners shared a room with eighth graders. Writing time was mostly relegated to the middle of the night and pre-dawn hours when my family was asleep. What else was new?

Surprisingly, Diane was wrong; moving out to the boonies was the best thing I’d done to woo interviews for my book. Thomas One Wolf, with his wise ways and sweat lodge ceremonies, was quite the attraction for those who had everything but still felt a nagging sense of emptiness. A steady stream of Angelinos braved our backwoods dirt roads to sit at his feet, my family and I front-row attractions in the exact right circus.

People who paid others to do their chores respected me for my wood chopping, water carrying, and outhouse-ing. As I served them my chai tea at one of our “Feast Ways” (Thomas’s version of a good old-fashioned potluck), they seemed to take me more seriously. “Hey, check out this chick who chops her own wood. She really walks her talk!”

I looked up to Native Americans, even as a young girl, and fantasized I was one. Dad said that perhaps I had been, in my “last life.” I’d been a church-loving kid, even going by myself, but I’d never felt more connected to God and my creativity than in an ancient sweat lodge ceremony. This being the early nineties, the term cultural appropriation wouldn’t mean anything to me for many years. But I did worry from the start about going where I wasn’t welcomed, stepping into sacred places that weren’t mine to step in. I didn’t want to anger or offend anyone, especially not native ancestors.

But Thomas One Wolf and Grampa Pete Concha (Thomas’s adopted father and the Consique, or spiritual leader, of the nearby Taos Pueblo) would have none of it. They were in a growing camp of Native Americans who believed that their sacred traditions were precisely the thing that could help bring healing to the plighted land and “all two-leggeds.”

“No weaving is strong with too many dropped stitches,” Thomas would say. “All beings are equally vital to the Universal blanket.” As the times were dire, Mother Earth’s healing demanded that the entire human family rise to a level of unity and cooperation we had never before seen. “Besides,” Thomas declared, “Ceremony does not need me to protect it. Its Truth will pass through time unchanged by man.”

I just thanked my lucky stars for being included. The community they’d built allowed me a greater sense of peace than I’d ever known. With the right amount of neighborly support and family interaction, with loads of seclusion, where no one knocked on our door for days at a time, my heart was happy, and my writing was thriving.

Dani Shapiro

In the years since Devotion came out and I was on Oprah, the pace of things has picked up. It becomes up to me to say, “I need to go back into the cave. The writing has to happen inside the cave.” It’s easy to come out of the cave. You blink. It’s bright out and a lot of fun—all sorts of things to see and do! It’s harder to go back in the cave. The longer you’re out, at least for me, the harder it is to go back in.

The last time I was in LA, I was staying at a friend’s guest house, where the conditions are ideal. I got a ton done. No one to bother me. The phone, if it rang, was not for me. Finding ways to make time sacred is hard. Lack of interruption is essential, but uninterrupted concentration is harder and harder to come by. Coming up, I know I have most of the months of April and May off. If I don’t schedule anything—if I don’t accept invitations and just say no—no matter how enticing—and create quiet around myself, I will be able to accomplish an awful lot. The work has to be the central thing, and then everything else can arise out of it.

Ann Patchett

My husband, God love him, is a doctor who gets up in the morning, puts on a suit, leaves the house at seven o’clock, and comes home at seven o’clock. When I am working every day and deeply engaged, I’m a terrific wife. I’m so glad to see him. I do not wish to travel or sequester myself. I’m done by four o’clock, I don’t ever write at night, and I am thrilled to go downstairs and make dinner and share it and be with him. I’m so grateful he takes me out of my head and grounds me, loves me, and all of that.

When I hate him, and when I am a crummy wife, is when I’m not writing. Because when I’m not writing, and I want to be writing, I blame him. If it wasn’t for the fact that I had to make you dinner, if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m doing laundry, and getting the gutters fixed, and making your life so easy, I would be writing a brilliant novel. That’s when I’m a bitch.

So, this my friends, is the universal lesson: When I am happy with myself, I am happy with others. The older I get, the more I realize that it’s the journey inward that counts. It’s Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz. If it was never in my own backyard, I’d never really lost it, to begin with. If I never get on another plane, if I never drive more than five miles from my house, it is fine because I’m on the journey inward.

Life in nature was grounding us, reconnecting Jesse and me. I did worry, though, about discontinuing my sessions with Guru Singh. Guru’s influence on my confidence had been profound, and, convinced he’d be a game-changer, I was so glad to have been able to connect the gals from my support group with him before we left town.

Fortunately, moving didn’t mean Guru and I would lose our friendship. Quite the opposite. Instead, he and his beautiful wife, Guruperkarma Kaur, began camping on our land and even bought their own eighty acres!

New Mexico was a sanctuary. Without TV, I was free to see my goals rather than the endless stream of media images that once distracted me. And just as I’d hoped, it was infinitely easier to hear my book in the woods. After each nightly writing session, before getting into bed, I’d look at my list of chapters to edit upon waking and know precisely where to go next. I would finish my manuscript in this peaceful spot, with a more singular focus than any I’d ever had or would again.

Terry McMillan

I’ll tell you how I find seclusion. I close the bathroom door.

I lived in Wyoming, for a year, and wrote a book. The snow helped me a lot. I liked the sound of snow.

I now live in Pasadena. It’s pretty quiet. But I don’t care where you are; there are people who live in New York City and write. You can block out the outside world if you’re inside the world you’re writing about. I’ve been doing it for years. I did it when I had a baby. With one ear, you’re listening for him to cry, but for the most part, when you’re in the zone, you’re in the zone.

I lived in Brooklyn, and let me tell you, the trash guy could be going by, dogs barking, but when you’re in your world, you’re lost in it.

But I’ll look for reasons to get interrupted. Am I thirsty? I think so! Especially if I’ve written something that’s perplexing or a little painful, or I don’t understand what’s happening, and psychologically, spiritually, and emotionally I don’t know if I want to go there. I can think of a reason to walk to the refrigerator! By the time I come back, I’m poised again. I can go back and pick up where I left off. I love stopping in the middle because I can tell if I’m bullshitting myself. If it’s lost, it means I was bullshitting myself. Sort of like sex.

Not everyone requires actual seclusion in nature. Some writers simply cannot create in total quiet; they find it deafening. They need the chaos of the coffee shop, the thrum of music playing, the laughter of children nearby.

We all have to find what works for us, our way of tuning out the world to tune into our inner light. Never in a million years would I have guessed that in living as far from the LA lifestyle as I could imagine, we’d be introduced to incredible creatives to interview. Or that by leaving town, we’d suddenly find ourselves on Hollywood party circuit guest lists (not that we attended many), cementing for me the fact that we don’t have to have everything in life “figured out.” We just have to keep following the good-feeling gumdrops through the forest. It’s like that idea from Frozen II, or recovery, that Glennon Doyle talked about on one of our podcast episodes: the idea that you just have to do the Next Right Thing. For me, that next right thing was taking my man to a place where he could breathe and where I could hear.

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*Brandon was, incidentally, best friends with Carol’s then-boyfriend, now-husband, Bill Allen. A longtime actor and author, Bill’s written about Brandon in his fabulously irreverent and mystical memoir, My RAD Career, and is helping to make a documentary about his life.

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Seduction of Seclusion

Where Writers Find Their Peace