What Works for You (Believing)

You are being pro­vid­ed with a book chap­ter by chap­ter. I will request you to read the book for me after each chap­ter. After read­ing the chap­ter, 1. short­en the chap­ter to no less than 300 words and no more than 400 words. 2. Do not change the name, address, or any impor­tant nouns in the chap­ter. 3. Do not trans­late the orig­i­nal lan­guage. 4. Keep the same style as the orig­i­nal chap­ter, keep it con­sis­tent through­out the chap­ter. Your reply must com­ply with all four require­ments, or it’s invalid.
I will pro­vide the chap­ter now.

What Works for You
(Believ­ing)
There’s a song­writer who wrote all of her music in the same messy room in
an old office build­ing. It hasn’t been touched in thir­ty years and she refus­es
to let it be cleaned. The secret is in that room, she says.
She believes it, and it works for her.
Charles Dick­ens car­ried a com­pass to make sure he always slept fac­ing
north. He believed that align­ment with the elec­tri­cal cur­rents of the Earth
sup­port­ed his cre­ativ­i­ty. Dr. Seuss had a book­case with a false door hid­ing
hun­dreds of unusu­al hats. He and his edi­tor would each pick a hat and stare
at each oth­er until inspi­ra­tion came.
These sto­ries may or may not be com­plete­ly true. It doesn’t mat­ter. If a
rit­u­al or super­sti­tion has a pos­i­tive effect on an artist’s work, then it’s worth
pur­su­ing.
Artists have cre­at­ed in every way possible—at the extremes of chaos
and order, and at the meet­ing point of dif­fer­ent meth­ods at once. There is no
right time, right strat­e­gy, or right equip­ment.
It may be help­ful to receive advice from more expe­ri­enced artists, but as
infor­ma­tion, not as pre­scrip­tion. It can open you to anoth­er point of view
and broad­en your idea of what’s pos­si­ble.
Estab­lished artists gen­er­al­ly draw from their per­son­al expe­ri­ence and
rec­om­mend the solu­tions that worked for them. These tend to be spe­cif­ic to
their jour­ney, not yours. It’s worth remem­ber­ing that their way is not the
way.