Welcome to Writerhead Wednesday, a weekly feature in which a brilliant, charming, remarkable author answers three questions about her/his writerhead…a precious opportunity for looky-loos around the world to sneak into the creative noggins of talented writers and (ever so gently) muck about.

I met today’s Writerhead–Laura Harrington–on Twitter after I witnessed a flurry of tweets about her new novel Alice Bliss. Turns out Laura is not only a much-buzzed-about debut author, but also an award-winning playwright, lyricist, and librettist. Yowza! As you know, I’m a sucker for lovely, oozy creative lava, so I just had to know about Laura’s writerhead.

In addition, I’m giving away 5 copies of Alice Bliss today (whoop! whoop!); be sure to leave a comment to enter. Guidelines below. (Laura is also setting off on a terrific bookcrossing.com adventure.)

And now, Laura’s writerhead…

1. Describe your state of writerhead (the where, the when, the how, the what, the internal, the external).

Writerhead, for me, is both very mysterious and perfectly mundane. On the one hand, I don’t usually talk about it because it feels so personal and occasionally weird. It can also feel a little bit like magic. On the other hand, it’s really pretty simple.

I have different kinds of writerhead for different kinds of writing. For lyrics I like to walk. I wrote almost all the lyrics for Lucy’s Lapses, my first musical, while walking in the rain in a suburb just outside of Portland, OR. I’m sure I looked crazy as I would walk, then stop, trying to get the bill of my baseball cap to keep the water from leaking onto my tiny notebook. The rhythm of walking helped me connect to the rhythm and music of the words that would become song.

Revising a lyric is another kind of writerhead all together. It’s initially very prosaic: lists of words, of phrases, the thesaurus, the rhyming dictionary. I’m surrounded by pieces of paper, scribbled notes, scraps of ideas, dictionaries, often Bartlett’s book of quotations. It’s a big mess. And then, in the midst of that stew I get very quiet as I try to find that phrase, that perfectly musical phrase where the words begin to combine with a pulse, with a life force, with an ease that belies all the hard work evident in the mess around me.

And then there’s writing a novel, where I begin by sitting quietly until I start to hear my characters. It can be something as simple as a phrase. Henry appeared completely unexpectedly in Alice Bliss with the phrase: “There’s no accounting for Henry.” Why not? And who’s Henry? I follow that phrase and the questions it provokes wherever it leads me. The fact that a character can appear nearly fully formed with something as simple as a phrase is amazing to me. It’s as though the phrase is like a line of code, encompassing an entire human being.

2. What happens if someone/something interrupts writerhead? (a spouse, a lover, a barking dog, an electrical outage, a baby’s cry, a phone call, a leg cramp, a dried-up pen, a computer crash, etc.)

Mostly I like interruptions; sometimes I crave them: a walk, a swim, hanging out the laundry. Interruptions create time to think, to reflect, to reconsider, to listen to a character’s voice, to listen to the promptings of my better—or worse—self; both of which are useful. I even like crazy-making interruptions because I’ve learned, like an improv actor, to use them.

I was traveling to NY on the train once, working on a play—a comedy—about Civil War re-enactors. Two guys were in conversation on a park bench—a lost truck driver and a chubby re-enactor, taking a break from a long hot day on Pickett’s Charge. The guy in the seat behind me on the train got a phone call in the middle of my scene and talked on and on and on. At first I was totally ticked off; I couldn’t concentrate on or even hear anything but his voice, which was so loud and so insistent that he filled all the space in my head and my characters were silenced. Until I decided to use the interruption and have my character, Chuck, get a call on his cell phone from his six-year-old. Great moment: a guy pulls a cell phone from the pocket of his lovingly created Confederate uniform, filthy with dirt and crusted with sweat and fake blood. Nothing could have juxtaposed the world of the battle, the mind of the re-enactor, the parallel universe that is re-enacting, colliding with the “real world” in quite the same way.

3. Using a simile or metaphor, compare your writerhead to something.

Writerhead is like getting to be a seal or an otter for a little while. Playful, joyful, buoyed by the water around you, living in a medium that feels like perfect freedom, aware of unexplored depths and the light above you, at one with the physical world, aware of the possibility of a spiritual world, breathing, playing, grateful, in awe.