Dateline>City of Angels

I’d like to say it was a desire to live to be 100 that drove me to spend more time in the garden, but really it was a nasty case of writer’s block.

After gleefully telling the world I’ve finally entered the drafting stage of my book on the Feliz Curse, I got exactly 3,225 words into the prologue, when the real curse — the dreaded Blank Page Syndrome — suddenly struck.

There’s nothing more common (or more insidious) for a writer than those painful periods when the muses fall silent. Go to any writer’s blog, chat group or forum, and you’ll find us idling for hours on the topic as we commiserate and offer each other tips for restarting our engines, all the while ironically avoiding doing just that.

My surefire solution has always been to force myself to jot a single phrase — any phrase, no matter how nonsensical. Most writers find that once they put something down on paper, they can’t stop tinkering with it, and soon one sentence sparks a second, then a third, and so on. (We’re fairly compulsive that way.)

This time the strategy failed. Hitting a difficult transition in the chapter, I just found myself editing and re-editing the same few pages I’d already spewed out and feeling about as productive as a hamster on a wheel…

A friend advised grabbing my laptop and getting out of my home office.

“I can’t write in a coffee house, I’m not that much of a Bohemian,” I insisted. “And libraries are too sterile. Besides, I like the view from my office. You can see Griffith Park.”

My friend remained unmoved: “Don’t go any further than the backyard,” he urged. “Set up a table, chair and market umbrella, turn on the fountain, and write from your garden.”

I’m fortunate enough to live in Echo Park’s Elysian Heights, a neighborhood that I maintain is one of L.A.’s best-kept secrets — an edgy yet unexpectedly serene oasis just a few miles from the heart of the city. Most houses on my street are situated on deep lots, with commanding hill and canyon views. My immediate surroundings are filled with rustic eucalyptus, oaks and cactus, with scores of early-1900s character homes dotting the hillsides. The downtown skyline looms just southeast of me. In the evenings, there’s the glow and roar of Dodger Stadium the next ridge over.

Call it rural Los Angeles. Even with all the “evil gentrifiers” like me moving here from Silver Lake recently, you can still hear roosters greet the sunrise — and occasionally even spot a goat gnawing its way up a ravine. On weekends the quaint strains of ranchero music can yet be heard dancing off the hillsides.

Feeling I had nothing to lose, I took my friend’s advice, made a pitcher of ice tea, set up a makeshift outdoor office, and let my two Dobies romp at my side as I fired up the laptop. (They follow me everywhere and seemed as inspired by the change of venue as I was.) After mere minutes in my nearly forgotten urban paradise, the words were suddenly flowing again. It was magic.

Ahhh, the life of a writer. But even more charmed is the life of an Angeleno writer. There’s a reason so many of us live and work here, and this week I rediscovered it.