By Trudy Graham, Tulsa, Ok.

Better yet, expect them. Unless you are a perfect person living in some kind of utopian world, problems are inevitable.

What are some of these problems, and what can we do about them? If nothing else, for us as writers, they are grist for our creative mills. Every writer's instruction book emphasizes the necessity of conflict in our writing. Isn't "problems" another way of spelling conflict? Let's look at some of these opportunities.

CHANGE: As Dr. Spencer Johnson tells us in Who Moved My Cheese?, change is as inevitable as breathing. We must acknowledge it, watch for it, and be prepared to deal with it. And if we look forward to it as opportunity rather than calamity, we can even be happier for it.

EQUIPMENT: One wise computer expert said that there are only two types of hard drives, those which have crashed and those which haven't-yet. I'm not of an engineering mindset and don't understand much of the terminology, but I once went through this with my two-year-old computer. Choices became a new computer OR upgrading the old one. Upgrading became the choice.

The procedure began. Just on the simplest level, it is time-consuming, and you can't use the critter while the upgrading is going on. First, it was an absolute necessity to back up "everything", except programs which must be reinstalled. We goofed up some on this step-another learning procedure. We finally got everything back together but I wouldn't choose to repeat the exercise.

Computers and other technology are wonderful, but possible snafus are a fact of life. Even pencil leads can break. I imagine Shakespeare had a problem keeping a good point on his quill pen and then there was correcting or rewriting all those mistakes.

DEADLINES: Just the thing to keep our collective noses to the grindstone, but Murphy's Law jumps in to keep us sweating them out. The school calls to say that our precious child has fallen over a piece of gym equipment and needs medical attention, the dishwasher goes on a "let's also mop the floor routine," and then the dog gets sick on the newly mopped floor. The efficient, left-brained person says the answer is "mini-deadlines" so you're not swamped with the whole thing the night before it's due. Maybe so.

WRITER'S BLOCK: The best cure I've heard is to have several things going simultaneously, to even stop writing deliberately in the middle of a piece, the middle of a paragraph, even the middle of a sentence. Next time you just have to read back a paragraph or two and off you go.

GOALS: The old story of "if you don't know where you're going, how will you know when you get there." Dr. Henriette Klauser in her book, Write It Down, Make It Happen, says that when you actually write down your goals, sometimes the wilder the better, you signal your brain to begin the search for solutions. Without direction, it just sits there, parked in neutral, never accomplishing anything.

The word "problem" has a bad aura. Doesn't "challenge" sound more positive?

Think of problems/challenges like bowling. Every time you get up to the alley with that heavy ball, you are there to solve a problem, to knock down all 10 pins. Every bowler would like to have a 300 game-that is knocking down all 10 pins with the first ball throughout the entire game. But if a person were to bowl a perfect game every time, wouldn't it soon become boring? Even Tiger Woods doesn't get a hole-in-one on every hole. Each time he steps on a golf course, he is confronted with 18 holes of problems-whoops, challenges.

The equation is simple-no problems, no solutions. That's life and that's also writing.

©Trudy Graham, 2007