Tag: Writing Tips

January 22, 2015

How I find time to write

Do 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?

January 15, 2015

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.

January 2, 2015

December 2014 Book Reviews

We’re a few days into January 2015 already — and I’m having a hard time believing it! Welcome to the new year when everyone fumbles dates for months and sometimes that pesky “2014” creeps in even as late as June or July. I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and are geared up and ready to tackle a brand new year.

Here are December’s book reviews. Once again it’s a smaller month than usual (although I’m part-way through several books) so the page count comes to 1232.

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.

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

As a scientist, I’m leery of speaking on topics religious, but I kind of think I’m on to something writing-related that’s potentially fascinating…

Months ago, I wrote this blog post on how meditation might inform one’s writing practice. And then I didn’t ever follow up on that — but I’ve been pondering it in the wings ever since and I really think there’s something to it. Something that has to do with how to connect with your very best writing, your own most powerful poetry. In light of this tantalizing realization I’ve been doing some reading on meditation and enlightenment.

The basic thesis of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment is that the way to enlightenment is through harnessing the power of Being in the Now. It’s not a revolutionary thesis — that one should focus on the present, not worry about bad things until they actually happen, or allow painful remembrances to taint the enjoyment of present bounty. It all sounds like rather common sense.

And then Tolle takes things a step further. The state of complete presence in the Now (Being — his word for God), is sought to dissolve attachment to the unalterable past, to the unavoidable future, and to the egoic consciousness itself (that thinking “me” voice that lives inside your head).

I’m not going to tell to you read this book — do if it tantalizes you, don’t if it doesn’t. But I think Tolle’s state of Being, is perhaps not so different from what happens on the really great writing days(just on a different scale). Call it what you will — the Power of Art, perhaps?

In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen

This might be the most interesting book I’ve read this year. In Paradise: A Novel by Peter Matthiessen is a short novel and a quiet one. It’s the story of Clements Olin an American academic (of Polish extraction) who attends a meditation retreat at Auschwitz, a gathering of souls from around the world “to bear witness” — to what the assembled group is there to bear witness to, Clements Olin is not so sure.

The gathering of this disparate group of witness-bearers is itself witnessed from the perspective of Olin, a man remarkable perhaps only in his unremarkableness. And yet as Olin comes to terms with the history of the place and the ways in which it penetrates his own personal history, he cannot remain unchanged.

One part history, two parts poetry, and one part mysticism — this is a bittersweet book that I might just return to again some day.

The Desire Map by Danielle Laporte

My pick for reading in preparation for the new year was The Desire Map: A Guide to Creating Goals with Soul by Danielle Laporte. Along the line’s of some of Martha Beck’s advice on setting goals, Danielle Laporte’s position is that instead of thinking about what we want to achieve, we should first concentrate on how we want to feel. By first getting really clear on what she calls the “core desired feelings” (the way you in particular most want to feel), this allows us to focus on creating intentions which will create these core desired feelings.

In theory this approach circumvents common problems with goal setting:

The mid-goal meltdown. By setting feeling-driven intentions and working toward our goals in a way that honors our core desired feelings we try to avoid the problem of quitting when the goal-seeking going gets tough.
The post-goal let down. By clarifying core desired feelings first we try to eliminate the problem of setting goals that don’t turn out to be everything you thought they would be.

As someone who’s done a lot of New Year’s resolutions in the past and actually achieved a grand total of — er — none of them, I’m hoping that by setting “goals with soul” in 2015 I might actually have a hope of making just a few of my dreams come true.

Let me know in the comments below — what are your dreams for 2015?

December 18, 2014

The only trick you need to beat overwhelm

With 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.

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.
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.
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.
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?
Now that you’ve figured out the most important thing — go do it! (Why are you still reading this blog post?)
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.

November 6, 2014

Are you saying No enough?

When I graduated from college, five years and two degrees later, I entered the workforce. A temporary summer internship obtained through my Master’s thesis advisor turned into a full-time position and more than a year and half later I’ve found myself inexplicably and unexpectedly a cog in the nation’s corporate wheel. And while I’ve come to really like not being in school, it has honestly been the biggest adjustment I’ve ever had to make. Much bigger and harder than the adjustment required after leaving home and moving from California to Boston to attend college in the first place.

While moving across the country and starting college is often portrayed as the defining transition of a young life, what I’ve learned in retrospect is that school is still school. College was not so different from high school except that my parents were no longer a daily presence in my life — and the math was harder. In college your every move is scripted and choreographed, your every moment booked. Sure, you defined the context of your motions in picking your major and deciding which (if any) extra-curricular clubs or sports you will participate in. But after those few decision are made each semester, the next three months unfold largely beyond your own control. Assignments are due not when you decide to finally finish them, but rather when your professors decided they should be due.

College was an exercise in discovering how much Yes I could handle.

Yes, I can study for this test in 12 hours. Yes, I can write this essay in 7. Yes, I can write three sections of my thesis (amounting to some 40 pages) in less than a day. Yes, I will do these things even if I must drink so much tea that I make myself sick.

And, yes, today I still don’t think I have any regrets. College was a time of learning my boundaries, of measuring the length of my ability to stretch beyond the limits of my expectations.

But when I graduated I had to learn how to start saying No.

It was a tricky lesson because I had un-learned how to sit still and I had un-learned how to manage my time and I had learned how to fill my few free moments with hollow comforts (yes, I will watch that latest episode of White Collar now).

I needed to re-learn how to excise the habits from my life that were no longer serving me. I needed to re-learn how to say No to all the things that I had spent that last five years so happily saying Yes to. I needed to re-learn what it could mean to have free time.

I’d spent 5 years of my life being too-busy for the things that really mattered to me: for writing, for taking walks, for exercising, for cooking really good food. And because I was too-busy for the important things, the only things I felt I had time for were the really unimportant things: time for TV, and for surfing the internet, and an infinite array of other possible ways to kill 3 minutes here and 14 minutes there. Each of these activities helping to ease the resentment of having yet another assignment that I didn’t really want to do by providing the illusion of freedom.

I suffered from learned busyness.

The way out meant learning some hard lessons in saying No. And perhaps the worst thing was that I didn’t have to learn to say No to other people. It wasn’t like my life had become a dizzying array of commitments from which I desperately needed to disengage. Instead, I had fashioned a cage of my own making: a web of behaviors that helped me to forget how bored and alone and tired and empty I felt.

And learning to say No to myself, to break the chains of the time-wasting, soul-sucking habits I had so gleefully acquired during the years in which those same habits had felt like giddy misbehavior was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

In the past year I’ve finally managed to turn things around

I’ve given up a lot: I’ve said goodbye to pretty much every TV show I used to follow religiously, I’ve cancelled my Netflix account, I’ve drastically pared down the number of blogs in my RSS feed, and I’ve even starting doing my cooking all at once on Sundays to free up hours on weeknights.

These new-found hours were difficult to manage at first: I traded TV for online learning through EdX and then for online teleclasses, but with each trade I’ve moved one step closer to spending those hours on the things that really matter to me.

So that I can say today that I don’t think there’s all that much that’s still in need of pruning.

Today, I can say with absolute honesty that I’ve written each of the last six nights and I that fully intend to make that number seven.

I don’t remember the last time I managed that.

Now, I’d love to hear from you! Are there places in your life where you should be saying No more? Is saying too much Yes impacting your ability to achieve your dreams? Let me know in the comments below.