As President of Winston-Salem Writers this year, I feel obligated to attend each and every event, program, and workshop that we sponsor. This month’s membership meeting was “Your Creative Year: Transforming Ideas into Action.”

I don’t need an action plan; I need more time to write. I could have been writing instead of attending a workshop about how I should create a plan to write. But there I was.

We were given a handout on which we were to write down our dreams. The first question was, “If you weren’t you, who would you want to be?” I wrote, “Helen Mirren.” What the . . . ? Why not Alice Munro? Or Emma Donoghue, or Jill McCorkle? No. At the time, try as I would to think of a more appropriate woman, the only name in my head was Helen Mirren’s.

When “sharing time” came – not my favorite activity, but I felt obligated to speak up and to do so cheerfully (Are you seeing a certain thread here?) – I babbled something like, “I’m really quite upset at choosing Helen Mirren. At 81, I thought I had come to terms with the fact that my performing days were over. Maybe it’s because I admire her courage. I saw the premiere of a film in which she dared to be naked, in her 60s, making beautiful, but horrible love.” (The title of that violent film is missing from her filmography and my memory.)

I always get something positive out of fulfilling my self-imposed obligations. This time an English-born workshop member loaned me his complete set of Helen Mirren: At the BBC. I didn’t need to watch more than the beginning of Disc One to find good reason for having chosen her as a role model.

Mirren says that what’s important in good theatrical writing is the time between sentences. One sentence leads logically to the next because the character has time to think of what else she wants to say. Yes! I’ve taught actors and singers this for years – “I don’t care what they call it in Canada, a period is not a stop. What’s important is what goes on in that little white space after the period. That’s where you carry the audience forward.” – but Mirren led me to think about sentences and white space from a writer’s point of view.

White space isn’t empty for writers, either. Kevin Watson, at Press 53, says that poetry needs to breathe. He uses lots of white space when he designs a book. Poets seem to understand space, perhaps because they expect their work to be read aloud. They insert an extra space or two between words, or move a phrase off to the right. Time to breathe; time to think.

Decades ago, I wrote a few paragraphs in Virginia Woolf style as a class exercise. My sentences tumbled from clause to clause with seldom a period in sight. I was criticized in post-Hemingway fashion for “run-on sentences,” but that was exactly the effect I was looking for: running, running, with no time to breathe until the end of the paragraph and the relief of double-space white.

Mirren also gave me a new perspective on freedom. She believes we need to learn to be intuitive, which she equates with being free. I had believed that intuition, or freedom, was inherent and merely needed to be released and used. I was wrong. The caged bird may sing, but when the door is opened, how terrifying to contemplate flying.

As writers, we need to learn to be intuitive, to free ourselves from the rules and assumptions that have caged us, whether imposed by ourselves or others.