The author of this past weekend’s Lives essay shares an insight about writing.

The best writing advice I ever got was to get lost.

I spent many years as a journalist for newspapers and magazines, including a dozen writing feature stories for a national weekly magazine. Though I enjoyed the work, I had dreams of a different kind of writing — more creative, more personal, more from the heart.

So I took a creativity workshop. Thirty of us — would-be authors, visual artists, dancers, actors — met one evening a week in a room off a New Age bookstore in West Hollywood. We created collages. We brought pictures of our “inner critics.” Sitting on white plastic lawn chairs, we shared our dreams and visions.

One of our assignments was to start every day with three pages of unstructured writing — whatever came to mind. No agenda. No outlines. No editing. No reading what you wrote. Just writing.

I dutifully rose each morning before work, sat at my dining-room table and wrote in ballpoint pen on a lined pad. I didn’t find it difficult. I was accustomed to writing on tight deadlines for demanding editors, so dumping my thoughts onto a legal pad was a breeze. What I didn’t understand was why I should do it.

After just a few weeks, I had accumulated 80-some pages of random thoughts, recollected dialogues, stream-of-consciousness to-do lists and the occasional cogent observation. At the fifth or sixth session of the class, the instructor, an upbeat and effusive woman named Kelly, asked if anyone had a reflection to share about the writing we had been doing.

I raised my hand.

“I don’t mind writing three pages a day,” I said. “I’m just not sure where it’s leading.”

She asked what I did for a living, and I told her. “When you write an article for the magazine,” she said, “you probably know what you’re going to write before you even start, right?” She had a point. Editors always had ideas of what a story should say, and then there was the reporting, which made its own demands. “This is different,” she said. “In the creative process, the work of art comes from the process.”

In other words: The best writing emerges from . . . writing.

As I nodded, letting that simple insight sink in, Kelly gave me marching orders: “You need to learn to get lost.”

The more I did that, the more the writing led the way. Some random scribbling about a neighbor’s Prius led to a satirical essay about a car that ran on eggs. A few pages about an outing to the zoo with my son became a magazine piece and, in turn, a memoir. I found that my best sentence of the day almost always came after two or three pages of drivel. But I needed the drivel to get to it.

Now, when I feel stuck in a writing project or simply run out of ideas, I don’t panic, nor do I start trying to plan. I just sit down and start writing, confident that if I stick with it, I’ll lose my way and find my story.