What is Your Writing Practice?
Writing takes time and courage. But, is there a sure-fire approach that will maximize productivity? I’m not sure. Unfortunately, I don’t have an organized practice – or even a routine that I can easily describe. Deadlines are always a great inspiration and get me to the desk more frequently than anything else. I know I’m not a morning writer. That’s when I prefer to read. I build up to writing during the day and hopefully start in the afternoon.
It’s easier for me to see what distracts me from writing. Today, I’m feeling dispossessed, as if I can’t settle down and feel at home in the world. I’ve spent most of the day roaming around my house, picking up random books, wondering if I should give some of them to the library book sale. If I can sit down and start typing, I know that I might get through this odd feeling of having elusive, abstract, uncomfortable ideas. I might begin to understand and tease apart my sense of absence and become present. As David Whyte says in Consolations, “we become visible and real when we give our gift and stop waiting for the gift to be given to us. We wake into our lives again…”
Whyte also says that most of us feel besieged: by events, by people, and even by our own imagined creative possibilities. He suggests starting the day with a “don’t do” list rather than a “to do” list so that you have the highest likelihood of getting to your writing.
Life happens – birth, death, an accident, a financial setback – and may take you far away from […]
A Time to Cry and LAUGH: Writing with a sense of humor
Not long ago in a writing workshop, a colleague offered to read a personal essay I had written about a difficult life experience. My kind friend reported back that he felt as if I was dragging him, sad and depressed, to the abysmal end of the story. “I don’t want to feel as if I’m being forced to feel bad,” he said. “Where’s your sense of humor? And you’re not having any fun, either.”
Humor? I didn’t see anything funny about the story of my trip to Washington, DC, to see my husband’s name on the Vietnam Memorial for the first time – but – maybe I was taking myself a little too seriously. Perhaps Colette, the French writer whose husband locked her in a room to keep her writing, was right when she said that total absence of humor renders life impossible. Humor in nonfiction writing demands taking a firm, self-confident position about our “self” and then flipping the situation upside down. Writer Leigh Anne Jasheway calls this creative misdirection; engaging readers by taking them someplace they don’t expect to go, choosing words and metaphors that make readers giggle without knowing why. She says a smiling reader wants to read on even if the topic is inherently sad.
Where was my sense of comic relief? Obviously, I had forgotten that humor creates a bond with readers and cuts down on tension and anxiety. People need to cry and laugh. Humor fosters a sense of immediacy, a close personal connection. There was little to joke about in my essay, but there were some curious ironies that I hadn’t yet dug deeply enough to discover. As Dorothy Parker said in Writers at Work, “There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. […]
Mental Clutter: Organizing the mind for writing
Perhaps it’s the winter season and I think I should be hibernating. Why else do I have the sense that I can’t get myself organized to write an essay? The ideas are there, piling up like laundry ready to be sorted and folded and put somewhere. They fly around in my head, meteors intent to land and make a big splash, promising to be the beginning of an interesting adventure on the page. But – the big BUT – I seem to have turned the lights off on the landing field. My brilliant gems zoom off untethered into the stratosphere. The end result: my mind is cluttered with bits and pieces, words, storylines, plot ideas, and nothing is happening on the page.
Peter Walsh, an authority on organizing the content of homes, believes that organization begins in the mind rather than in our basements, closets or garages. Walsh became famous as an organizer of clutter and cluttered minds on the TV series, “Clean Sweep.” He doesn’t focus on objects (things) when he helps people to tidy up, he goes right to the heart of the matter. He asks his clients: “What’s your vision for the life you want and the home you want?” He works room by room with people, starting with the purported “purpose” of the space. In each area he picks up objects and asks the owner if the thing moves them closer or farther away from their vision of the life they want. If it’s further away, out they go.
Let’s visit […]
