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Since I’m the one who used to live in Brooklyn, I was the guide on a recent trip to NYC with my husband. When it was time for dinner, I led us by subway to Union Square and then meandered toward the East Village. I had no idea what to eat, but was just meandering.

“Where are we going?” My husband asked.

I said I just wanted to show him the street of Indian restaurants, and sure enough, soon found one Indian restaurant after another. He asked if I wanted Indian food.

“Not exactly,” I said, although I supposed it would do.
Then suddenly I had a whim, a hankering for Ethiopian food.  “I wonder where an Ethiopian restaurant is,” I said.We walked, I kid you not, a few feet, and my husband chuckled.
“Right here,” he said. “How did you know that?”
And right there, was Awash, an Ethiopian restaurant where we had a delicious dinner (red honey wine is very sweet).

Back home and back at work I’ve struggled desperately to impose control on  a novel I’m revising. It’s not the first novel I’ve written, but you’d think I’d never even read a novel from how befuddled I’d become. I felt lost and went to all the rules you read about and the checklists people suggest and the “must-haves” from teachers and workshops –  in other words, I applied all the logic I could think of. In the process I became more and more confused and overwhelmed and it showed in my revision.

Finally, I had to let go of all those helpful hints and tips and tools and remember my story, trust the story, and trust someplace deep inside me, where, after all, the story came from to begin with. And I remembered the shape of my story.

I say trust your instinct when writing.
With a caveat: Trust informed instinct. Something in me knew to where head for Indian food.

I visited the Morgan Library and Museum in NYC a few weeks ago where I saw the Charles Dickens at 200 exhibit. Among the displays were pages from Dickens’ manuscript of Our Mutual Friend, handwritten with pen and ink, in small, crowded cursive. Words, sentences and paragraphs had lines drawn through them. New text was written over, or in the margins, or below. It was a reminder that one of the most prolific and successful writers of the English language did it by hand.

But more to the point, the manuscript survived—flaws and all—some 150 years later.

Back when I started writing with an eye to professional markets, I used a computer, and took heed of the advice to back up everything. I copied my manuscripts onto the most advanced technology of the day: floppy disks.

I no longer own a machine that can read them.

Fortunately I have always had a Luddite streak, and I print out anything I really want to keep. As for what I haven’t—well, then it’s gone, or will be when the next advance in technology takes over my most recent electronic back up system.

Does it matter? I’m not Dickens, after all. Should a future generation ask me, “What did you write?”, I’ll be able to point out the books that were published on old-fashioned paper and, of course, the paper copies that I’ve kept. My archives.

Don’t get me wrong. I could pay someone to have my floppy disks converted into another format. And then arrange to have it converted to yet a newer one, when my current one becomes obsolete. Or I could invest in a cloud archive—where my information is kept by some other entity, safely I am told. Let them worry about the formats.

But that’s work, time and expense. And I am not convinced that 150 years from now any of these methods will still be in use. Paper, on the other hand, can still be read. And if it’s lost, well, I’m not Dickens, after all.

Is this true? I don’t know.
But even if hard work doesn’t make us lucky, it does make us better writers…
don’t you think?

If you could write your own fortune for 2012, what would it be?

And how will make your fortune? What’s your writing resolution for 2012?