Home » Blog » Page 16

Category: Blog

How I find time to write

How I find time to writeDo you struggle to find time to write? I know I do. One of my resolutions for the New Year was “to write until I finally feel like a ‘real’ writer” — so with that goal set for 2015, I’ve been taking a hard look at how I spend my time.

Because the fact that I had to make this a goal means that I clearly haven’t been focusing enough on finding time to write.

Plus, it’s not just writing, is it? It’s everything. It seems like everywhere you look these days there’s someone with a time problem. You don’t even have to throw a stone anymore to find someone whinging on about all the things they’d do if only they had the time…. Our national time crisis is so bad the Economist bothered to publish an article about it.

So in the face of such time-scarcity, what’s a writer to do? The bad news is that sometimes desperate times call for drastic measures. The good news is that you probably already have more time than you think you do.

Here are seven strategies I use to find time to write:

Hint: These strategies won’t just help you find time to write! They’re relevant for anything project you’ve been struggling to find the time for.

1. Get up early. 

This is a habit I’ve only just started it this past week, but so far it’s going great and I’m actually really enjoying it — I haven’t been up this early since college and I’d forgotten how quiet the world is before sunrise. Getting up early is a bold move and one I’ve been pondering for at least a year, but it wasn’t until my new resolution got me focused and I stumbled across this highly motivating blog post that I finally decided the time had come. As of this week my alarm goes off at 5 am, and I’m writing by 5:30 am. This gives me an hour of distraction-free writing time before I have to get up and go about my day. It’s early days yet, but so far the results have been remarkable.

2. Find the time when you’re at your best. 

Sometimes you can’t increase quantity but you can increase quality — if you can’t find more time in your schedule, is there a way you can rearrange things to take advantage of your most creative time? For me, getting up at 5 am does this. I’m always exhausted when I get home from work and don’t have much creative mojo left in me. If you’re a night owl, maybe staying up late to write works best for you. Maybe your best hours are right after lunch. Find whatever works for you and rock it!

3. Lose the distractions.

It’s taken me just about two years to win this battle (bad habits die hard!), but I’m pretty much there these days. Distraction means different things to different people — for me the worst offenders were my Netflix subscription, a handful of TV shows I’d been watching for years, a rampant blog addiction fed by Feedly, and a bad habit of getting sucked down the black hole of Google. These days I’ve cancelled my Netflix subscription, I don’t watch a single TV show, and I’ve massively pruned back the number of blogs I subscribe to (via RSS or email) . The goal here is to keep the focus on quality, not quantity. 

Also, if you’re struggling to wean yourself off of distractions, do NOT keep them open in tabs in your browser. If you’re done with Facebook and it’s time to write, close it down. I also think disabling your wi-fi before turning your computer off for the night would work great for early morning writers (so far I haven’t needed to, but I’ll start if I have to).

4. Streamline anything and everything.

Aka, your slow cooker is your best friend. Cooking is something I like to do, but it can also be a huge time-sink. Between menu planning, grocery shopping, and food prep, cooking for the week ahead can pretty much kill an entire day of my weekend. This strategy is about finding ways to spend less time on the things you need to get done, without sacrificing the quality of the result, and the slow cooker is my best weapon — an easy way to make a week’s worth of nutritious meals, literally while I sleep.

5. Kill your social life.

I wish I jested — but I’m actually serious. Or at least I’m mostly serious. As writer Dani Shapiro so astutely points out life is the stuff of art, just as art is the stuff of life and so you can’t really have an art without a life. But these days there’s a lot of opportunities to waste your time in the company of people, and speaking personally, I’ve found that in my life there’s simply not a lot of room for both. Again, my best recommendation is to choose quality over quantity. Do the people you spend time with energize and nourish you or do you leave their presence feeling drained?

6. Leverage your commute (if you can).

This is my least favorite option and I rarely practice it. The reality is that I spend 10 hours a week on a bus and which is a lot of hours I could be using for writing. Unfortunately the reality is also that I get so self-conscious writing on the bus that I pretty much can’t string words together into meaningful sentences. The only way I’ve found to make it work is on my phone (the screen is too tiny for me to read — let alone the person sitting next to me!) — but writing on one’s phone, while possible (I’ve managed at least 2 pages/hour in times of desperation) is generally incredibly slow and frustrating. If you can write with someone sitting next to you and have the time to do so, then I wish you godspeed. Personally, I’ll stick to the company of my Kindle.

7. Take your writing on vacation.

This is an option I’m planning to try out this year, but which I haven’t done yet. It seems to me like planning a writing retreat for yourself would be a fun (and budget-friendly!) way to vacation. Whether that’s as part of a formal writer’s retreat, a rented cabin in the woods, or an AirBnB flat in the city of your choosing — I think it sounds like a pretty fantastic way to spend a week’s vacation!

That’s what I’ve got for now — If you have any other ideas, feel free to share them in the comments!

I’d love to know: How do you make time for the things you love?

Some thoughts on why I write

“I don’t think the right words exist already in your head, any more than the characters do. They exist somewhere else…” — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

There’s an idea I’ve been playing with for a while now, ever since I first wrote this post on how meditation and writing might inform one another. Its an idea about where the words come from when we sit down and write our best work. It’s an idea that’s been coming up for me over and over again, both in my reading and in my writing practice, as each day I sit down and confront the blank page. It’s an answer to the question of why writers write.

What if our best writing comes from Wordlessness?

In her book Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, Martha Beck defines Wordlessness to be “a core aspect of your true nature. It connects your consciousness with the deep peace and presence that is the essential you.”

It is my growing belief that it is from Wordlessness that the very best writing comes. That it is only when we let go of rational thought and feel our way into our characters that the magic happens. That it is only when we pause and make space for  the language to flow through us rather than trying to marshal the words from some limited place within us that we manage to write things that are so true they manage to surprise us.

It is for those moments of crystalline presence that I find myself returning to the pen, returning to the empty page. It is for those moments of clarity and breathless grace that I keep seeking — reaching for the edges of something that seems to be nearly infinite.

Because it is in those moments of stillness that I return once more to myself, shedding the weight of worlds and the worries of the day. It is in those moments that I pick up the pen and write.

To quote Anne Lamott once more:

“This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small bordered worlds. When this happens everything feels more spacious.”

How does this goal impact what we write?

It’s a question I’ve been grappling with — especially as I’ve turned my attention more fully from poetry to stories in recent weeks.

For me, poetry is easy — it’s painting with words and it doesn’t have to have a why (although, admittedly, it often does). To my mind poetry is a bit like a literary attempt at flying — exhilarating and terrifying and over too soon — it leaves you feeling breathless and wonderful.

But stories are different, stories have to do more than dazzle the reader with a moment of brilliance. Stories have to connect and compel and propel us forward across pages and pages of words — they have to grab the reader by the hand and pull them forward until the reader laughs and cries and yields and feels giddy with the thrill of it.

It’s a thing that’s not easily done and something I’ve been forced to confront as I’ve begun to work toward what it means to write a really good story.

Which means that though I’ve turned my attention to stories — I find I’m still struggling a bit with the why.

Now it’s your turn! Why do you write? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

 

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This does not affect your price.

A poem for beginnings

Welcome to 2015! I’ve been sheltered away in my dreaming cave for the past few days, thinking about what I want my 2015 to hold. And, naturally, I want the coming year to hold many things, some of them more probable than others, but most of all I want 2015 to hold time and space for writing. And, of course, to get to share that writing with you. 🙂

Here’s my wish for you (and me!) in the new year

 

MAY WE

 

In honor of this wish, I’ve written a poem. Happy (somewhat belated) New Year, everyone!

 

A poem for beginnings

I begin.

I begin with a breath, with a cough, with a scream.

I begin cold and naked and shivering, thrust into a future I could never have dreamed of.

—

As a child I began to babble, to crawl, to stand.

As a child I first lay and then sat and then danced on my tippy toes, held securely in my father’s hands.

As a child I dared to stand alone and I crowed with achievement.

As a child I stood and then fell and I wailed to have failed so unexpectedly.

I grew taller and I hit the ground harder whenever I first leapt and then fell.

I collected small failures in the shape of bumps and bruises from where my growing edges had knocked against door jambs and chair backs and counter corners.

I collected larger failures in the shape of cracked teeth and sprained ankles and near-misses with cars.

As a child I was small and fragile and I didn’t always understand that life could be dangerous.

But I knew that falling was a necessary part of standing and that a few bumps and bruises were survivable.

As a child I knew how to cry and wipe my tears and stand back up again.

—

As a teenager I learned a different kind of lesson.

A lesson about not-crying and not-falling and not-trying.

A lesson about grades and how sometimes just trying isn’t good enough.

A lesson about the importance of being right instead of being brave.

I learned that doing it differently is dangerous and that to be myself was both risky and dangerous.

I learned that different was often lonely and my heart ached with the weight of that realization, of that emptiness.

I learned that most of the time people look without seeing and that when people looked at me they saw not-me but rather my list of achievements, of accomplishments, of activities.

I learned to let these things define me, until I became not-me, until I became them-instead.

And so I buried that little girl with her daring and her dreams and her failing and I learned to do what other people expected.

I learned to be bland. I learned to be boring.

I learned to be invisible.

—

And so I’ve come to here, to this moment, with a blank page before me and a brand new beginning and the only thing I know is that I’ve never been more scared of falling.

I’ve never been more scared of failing.

I’ve never been more scared of becoming, once more, that little girl.

The one who dared to dream of the impossible

The one who wasn’t afraid to fall down, cry, and still keep on trying.

 

What are your dreams for 2015? Let me know in the comments below!

The only trick you need to beat overwhelm

How to beat overwhelmWith the holidays nearly upon us, it seems like a good time to take a step back and think a little bit about overwhelm. Because overwhelm is the secret schedule-killer just waiting to derail your holiday plans.

It’s easy to let the hustle and bustle of the holidays and all they entail (gift shopping, cooking, baking, party prep, traveling, mandatory socializing…) to out-compete our every-day to-do lists and leave us feeling that we’re running about haphazardly — like frantic chickens in a panic.

I know I’ve definitely been feeling the pressure for the past week or so.

(Where did December go?)

But, it doesn’t have to be so overwhelming.

Yes, I know you’re looking at your to-do list right now and it’s probably a mile long and so you’re asking the obvious question: How is this not impossibly overwhelming?

And of course, you’re right — it is overwhelming. But it’s overwhelming for a reason, and the reason is that you’ve allowed to-do list madness to take over and now your list is running you, rather than the other way around.

Here’s the trick you need to beat overwhelm.

It’s easy. There’s just a few simple steps.

  1. Take a deep breath and try to stop panicking. The panic doesn’t do you any good. It clouds your head, scatters your thoughts, and makes you less efficient at getting sh*t done. The panic isn’t helping so it’s time to step up and take control.
  2. Throw out the to-do list. The list isn’t helping either. It’s making you feel more overwhelmed, not less. So rip it out, tear it up, chuck it in the bin, burn it — whatever suits you, really. Just make sure it’s gone.
  3. Realize you already know what needs to be done. This is why you need to throw the list out. You already know what you need to do. But the list has grown out of control and now it contains all sorts of things that you don’t need to do, but which would be nice if you got to. Put aside those superfluous tasks.
  4. Figure out the most important thing has to get done. What is it? Probably the answer is screaming at you. I have nothing to eat! I’ll have no clothes if I don’t pack! My mother will never forgive me if I don’t bring the Yule Log! What are your mission-critical action items? Stop thinking about all the things you need to do — the real question is what can’t you do without?
  5. Now that you’ve figured out the most important thing — go do it! (Why are you still reading this blog post?)
  6. Repeat. You’ve finished your most important task! Congratulations. What’s the next most important thing you could be doing? Do that.

The beauty of this simple method is that it totally eliminates overwhelm. It takes your list of10,000 things you “need” to get done and reduces it to one — the one most important thing you can do right now.

And then the process snowballs. Instead of falling into overwhelm and to-do paralysis (that thing that happens when your list is so long that you don’t know where to start), instead you figure out what needs to be done right now and then you do it. Finishing one task builds momentum and suddenly you’re jazzed about your progress — you’re on a roll.

Game over. You just beat overwhelm.

And you packed your socks, too! Double win! And that’s not even the best part.

The best part is that if you really go for it with this strategy I guarantee you’ll achieve way more of the things on your to-do list than you’d have thought possible back when you were still staring at all 6 miles of it and wondering how on Earth you were going to manage.

It’s basically magic.

 

I’d love to hear from you! How are you keeping things sane with the holidays looming? Let me know in the comments.

This is what I’m thankful for

Happy almost-Thanksgiving! It’s a time when the internet is flooded with musings about two things: turkey and gratitude. And since this isn’t going to be a post about turkey, I thought I’d better make it about gratitude — enjoy!

This is what I’m thankful for

Ten toes tighten in cold sand and I feel the grit scrape against my skin as I’m chilled. A gloomy November sky glowers overhead and the cold Pacific ocean swirls about my toes and sweeps me out to sea and I’m freezing but my heart soars because it knows that this means I’ve come home.

Fingers hover over smooth plastic keys and the cursor blinks at me in a way that should be disconcerting — my wordlessness made comical as the cursor counts the seconds ticking by, each a moment wasted without the writing of a single word. But instead of anger there is stillness because the words are stirring and somewhere deep inside me I know they’re waiting — waiting for the moment I find quiet enough to finally hear their whispers.

The house is cold and I’ve not felt my toes in hours but the water is piping hot and the steam curls up from the mug, dampens as it condenses on cold fingers cupped over the warmth of rising water vapor. I hold the cup in the palms of my hands, raise it to my lips, and sip. I taste the essence of a smile.

Two arms wrap around me strong and warm and I burrow myself into the press of body-upon-body and bask in the rhythm of a heartbeat I know almost like it was my very own. I close my eyes and tighten my grip on the family I hold so very dear.

The first flakes fall and I know it’s winter because the ground goes white and frosted and perfect. The sky opens up and buries old hurts under a fresh new blanket — scrubbed clean and whitewashed, we are made-up and re-created in this moment. The season of imagination looms near, when snow and darkness wrap each house in muffled quiet and dreams of sugarplums come dancing near.

The dawn breaks and night’s grip weakens as the sky is brushed back from black to ever-lightening grey. When I woke the stars still shone, marching ever westward in their dance across the sky. Each light winking out now, as the sun rises to greet the turning of the Earth. A new day dawns and I yet live to see it.

The fragile strength of lungs expands my ribcage, bends soft bones outward until I am larger than the me I was half a breath ago. The poetry of a breath lies in the stillness that awaits — pounding like a heartbeat into the silent passage of air, whispering through the body.

Now, I’d love to hear from you. Let me know what you’re thankful for in the comments below!