Dailyness

Photo by iheartlinen

It's a lesson I have to learn over and over. When I write every day, I stay connected with my project and keep moving forward, however slowly. As soon as I miss one or two writing days, I sink into anxiety and it's that much harder to start again.

Sometimes I feel ashamed of aiming for tiny goals like 15 minutes or 300 words a day. "A pro writer would never settle for that! You can't write a book in 15 minutes a day!" I push myself to try for an hour or two, 1000 words. I might keep it up for a few days and then I fall apart. The hurdle is so daunting that I stop trying, stop writing for a week or more.

This happened to me in October. Even Shawn could tell that something was Not Right. For a week I had been ignoring my novel, feeling a growing sense of misery, like everything in my life was wrong and out-of-place. In desperation one afternoon, I took my laptop to a coffee shop and worked for a few hours. Maybe the caffeine helped, but suddenly I felt on top of the world. The energy sparked by that writing session carried over and knocked five things off my to-do list that night. I'm going to carry an emergency prescription attached to a Starbucks card: For use in case of malaise and despair.

I've been reading Chapter by Chapter, a great book by Heather Sellers on "discovering the dedication & focus you need to write the book of your dreams", and she explains it so well:

It takes about as much time as you were away to get back to where you were. Knowing that, knowing how painful it is to write through these bad days, is what makes me very motivated to not miss many days. My friends say, 'How do you do it, every day? You're so disciplined."

I am not disciplined. I keep working in order to avoid painful consequences.

I know how much I have to write in order to write fairly smoothly, without angst and drama--two hours a day, missing very few days. Noticing this rhythm has helped me to get unstuck and stay unstuck for longer periods of time.

Strange but true, aiming for tiny goals actually helps me write more. It keeps down the barrier to entry, so that I go to the keyboard more often and stay there longer. And isn't the mark of a professional knowing her rhythm? Knowing what works and sticking to it instead of trying to meet the standards of others?

Working every day, working morning and evening, thinking about the work when I'm not doing it, keeps me connected to desire.

Thinking about the meaning of my work, the "why?" questions and "what world do you want to build?" helps too. Getting published is not meaningful enough. Building a career is not meaningful enough, nor is making money or checking off goals on a list. Figuring out how to make people happy, in an interesting and believable way? Inspiring people to make their own happiness? Now that is an attractive reason for me to keep writing.

Every fricking day.

Trip of a Lifetime

When I told my hair stylist about our trip to Beijing, he called it a "trip of a lifetime," which made me think, "I hope not! I want to have lots of these trips in my lifetime!" But I do have a sense that this trip is very special: the first extended stint abroad, an experiment to see what it's like to leave home for three months with our kids.

The writer in me wanted to capture the experience on paper, partly to process it for personal reasons, and partly to have a record in case I wanted to write some fiction or essays down the road. I pictured myself jotting notes for a few minutes every night before bed.

But several weeks into our trip, I had hardly journalled anything. I bought a notebook with a kite-flying panda and the slogan "I believe I can fly," but I only filled a few pages with half-hearted notes. I turned over in my mind what I wanted to remember--the untethered sleeplessness of the first week, the joy of our first restaurant meal, walking through the neighbourhood and sharing my sense of dislocation with Shawn, which somehow made it easier. But I didn't write much down.

At some point, I realized that I didn't want to journal about "My Day" every evening because it was Boring. I'd just lived through it and rehashing it felt tedious, especially by hand in pen (so slow!). Plus I didn't have enough distance from the events and images to know what was important or what it meant. The material wasn't dense enough.

I was also working from the assumption that I wanted to capture my trip for posterity. But who am I kidding, I rarely look at old photographs or read long-ago journals. I don't need to chart every up-and-down emotion, every little meal and shopping trip. I just need the highlights, the major turning points.

I signed up for Cynthia Morris's Free Write Fling in November to help me capture and share what's important about this trip. Every day this month I'll free-write in my journal or write in my blog about our time in Beijing. I also got Cynthia's newest e-book, The Graceful Return, which is ostensibly about coming home from a long journey, but has great suggestions for how to turn my trip into art in interesting ways. Even something as simple as making lists of people I've met here and memorable meals has kick-started my journalling.

A major theme in my life and writing journey right now is simplifying: words, possessions, to-do list, computer desktop, email inbox, daily routine. Asking "Why is this here?" and then ditching it if the answer isn't "Because my life/novel/family would collapse without it!" Now I feel like I'm capturing the essence of my Beijing time, no more, no less.

Building Worlds

Right now I'm taking Advanced Creativity Coaching with Eric Maisel, and our lesson this week had us comparing our art-making to world-building. In this course we often deal with the nitty-gritty of creation so it was nice to take a loftier view and consider what kind of fictional universe we are trying to construct. Here's what I wrote:

I want to build a world where everyone is happy. I see people (a friend, a stranger, myself) unhappy and struggling, and I want to create an alternate reality in which they find a way to be happy. The structure of fiction dictates that their happiness is won only at the end, after a self-determined journey through conflict. To satisfy me, their happiness must be something that they take action to create, and it must come from inner transformation and insights, not from material changes in the world around them. In this world, people wake up and recognize that they make their own suffering, and that they don't have to. Their happiness might be small or intermittent or temporary or ironic, but it must be genuine.

Hey, what kind of world do you want to build?