How a night owl got an a.m. writing habit

This is how you change your writing life: You do something differently.

I know that’s no great revelation. Still, I can forget it in an instant, swept along by my routines and the slick thought loops in my head.  My mind must hold a record for the speed at which it can bounce from “I want more time to write,” to “There’s no way to do that!” to “I think I’ll check out ‘Orange is the New Black’ on Netflix.”And then do it again. Repeatedly. For weeks.

Sometimes, though, I wake myself up by moving the furniture. More than once I’ve dragged the bed into the living room to make space for a writing studio. And recently, I did the mental equivalent by shifting my schedule to find room for my poetry project.

This time, didn’t make a spreadsheet or even look at my calendar. My computer and filing cabinet are littered with fancy renditions of a “perfect schedule,” color coded and neatly printed, with time slots for everything including the 10 glasses of water I’ll drink and the 23-minute power nap I’ll take. I love the exercise of creating those visions of efficiency, but once they’re done, they make me twitchy. And by the time I get to Day 2, I feel like a failure.

What’s working? Can you copy that?

So I started with a different question, one I think we don’t ask nearly often enough: What’s working for me now? Not “What rotten habits do I need to break?” but “What's making me happy and giving me the results I want?"

The answer was easy. Some time ago, I got into the habit of rolling out of bed and going straight to the gym. I had never been that person before, and could go for months—years!—without exercising. But I started going to group classes and found that I liked the Follow the Leader aspect, the too-loud music, the endorphins, the crazy Russian lady teacher. I didn’t have to think, I just had to show up and put my right foot in, or shake it all about, when someone gave the cue. You didn’t have to be fully awake to do it—who knew?

Perhaps best of all, for the rest of the day, I didn’t have to think about that exercise I meant to squeeze in, or feel defeated when I didn’t get around to it.

What was working for me? Crossing “exercise” off the list before the day roared off the blocks. I got great pleasure out of knowing that no matter what else happened, I had a tiny accomplishment to show. I could definitely use more of that. I could tack my writing onto that routine.

It made me happy to imagine walking into my working hours having already spent time with my own thoughts, my own words. Without a lot of angst or drama, I decided to try it. Mostly, I was curious to see how it would feel.

Let's just pretend it's night...

It took me a few days to set my alarm an hour earlier and see what it was like to open my computer to a writing file without looking at e-mails or news or anything else. It helped that I was too sleepy to care much about what anyone else was doing at that hour. I’d been snoring just moments before. I typed the date on the top of the page, dimmed the brightness of the screen so I could pretend it was still night, and let myself write.

I’ve learned that it’s not good to stare too long at a blank document without moving my fingers, because my body’s apt to slide back into a snooze. I’ve pointed myself to writing prompts when my mind doesn’t find a foothold or pick up where it left off the day before. I'm still learning what works.

I’ve been surprised by the images that wind up on the page, the stories that bubble out of sleep. And I've been struck by this unthinkable twist: It’s possible to be a confirmed night person and a person who writes her way out of dreams before 7 a.m.

Guilt and self-blame vs. desire

This “first thing” writing is an ongoing experiment that may well be replaced by another. But it feels like a keeper, and I’ve been trying to figure out why. I'd been resisting this for years.

There seems to be a difference—a big one—between setting out to fix something broken (“I’ve failed because I can’t make enough time to write!”) and deciding to build on something that makes you feel good. The first seems to come straight from the Inner Critic. And the second seems rooted in those natural magnets, pleasure and desire.

The magic is in following the pull. 

(Image of moon at dawn by Babu Kantamneni via Flickr.)

A snapshot of where the time really goes

Writers are always talking about time. I wish it were because we’re a metaphysical lot exploring the multiverse. It’s true, some of us are, but most often, we're time-obsessed because we’re looking for ways to gather up enough minutes to work on our projects.

We’re busy, right? That’s clear enough. But how busy, really?

Here’s a toy to play with for a day or two, just to give you a true picture of your days. It’s an ultra simple (and free) time tracker called Toggl. Visiting the website will give you an immediate sense of how you use your minutes. A click to the welcome screen starts a timer labeled: “Reading Toggl.com.” That's your life in real time, ticking past.

Launch the application—on a small desktop window or a mobile app—and the screen asks: What are you working on? Label your activity, press the start button, and press stop when you’re done. Do it again with the next activity and the next.

When you use the desktop version, a “timeline” feature, activated the day after you sign up, automatically records the time you spend on the Web, and tells you where you went.

Spend a day, even an afternoon, gathering raw data showing how you use your life, and you’ll probably see missed more than a few opportunities for creating what you want to create.

This moment is what we have to work with, beautiful writer person. It’s our opportunity to see and feel and connect with what’s most important. And the choice we make about what we do with it is the difference between seeing minutes or days filled up with “worried about not writing” and filling up pages. Writing our books. Knowing our creative selves.

Pay close attention to the way you use time this week. Track it, even. Then take some of it back for your writing.

A simple trick for winning the war with distraction

Here's a quiz. You hit a snag in something you're writing at work. Do you:

a. Power through and keep going? b. Get up and walk around? c. Click away to your e-mail or the Web?

I'm guessing C. That quick and easy avenue of escape is so pervasive it's part of the rhythm of the day. Type, stall, click away. Type, stall, click away.

You bend the idea you’re trying to shape back and forth like a paperclip wire until there’s a tiny snap. Okay. Enough of that. What’s on the web?

Many minutes later, Facebook checked, the great and powerful Google oracle consulted, e-mail scanned, you’re back. Same spot, same task, just a little bit farther behind, a little more stressed. The enemy—distraction—is winning. Sometimes there’s hardly a contest.

Maybe it’s always been like this, but getting stuck was probably more fun when people typed their attempts on paper, looked at them with a shake of the head and then yanked the sheet from the roller and wadded it up. (Typewriter talk is so visceral, no?) A ring of big white wads around the desk was some kind of measure of time and progress. And when the pile got big enough, you could shoot baskets into the trash can.

Now, we just silently click away from what we’re doing, sometimes many, many times a day. And there’s not even a satisfying mess to show for it.

The clicking would make sense if we were lab rats getting a food pellet. Or the fresh inspiration of a real break. But no, what we have here is a time suck. More info bits crammed into a brain that seriously doesn’t need another status update. And now there’s even less time to write the important stuff—our own.

Distract yourself with .... yourself

But here’s a secret: You can have your distraction and your writing too. The trick? Don’t fight distraction, don’t declare war and don’t stop. Just do it a little differently. Distract yourself with yourself.

The truth is, you need a balance of breaks and concentration to get your work done, and you’ve worked out a way to do that. You push a browser button that takes you somewhere far away and creates the illusion of a break. It just doesn’t wind up feeling like one.

So here’s something to try: Click away to yourself. Create a button for your browser toolbar that takes you to a file you create for your own writing. Google docs works well for this. And if aesthetics is a hook that will keep you coming back, try a serene setting like Ommwriter (on a Mac) or Zenwriter on a PC (more on those soon).

What will keep you distracted by yourself? If you’ve been away from your writing for a while and the blank page does not make you squeal with glee, type a prompt onto your “distraction”/”vacation” page when you create it. (There are dozens of prompts here  and some wild ones here.) Or take a few lines from the last interesting work you did—an old poem or essay or story. Just a taste to remind you of what you sound like. You, the real you, the one who writes.

You might get hooked

Then, keep clicking back to that page. Stuck? Distracted? Fine. Leave the problem for a minute or two or five or ten. Click away to yourself. And let your mind tinker with your own thoughts, your own writing.

You’ll recapture the time that’s been dribbling away. And you’ll be seeding your own work daily. Even hourly. Do it for a day. Then for another, and remind yourself if you forget.  I’ll bet you get hooked.

As for the work you’re supposed to be doing? You know that’ll get done. It always does. But alongside it, you’ll be building a writing life of your own. All with “distraction,” and stolen time.

Are you battling distraction? What works for you? Let's chat in the comments.

Image by turinboy via Flickr.

Running dragons, and other mascots for a busy life

There are stories that keep me coming back to my small-scale writing practice in busy times, rather than "waiting till things calm down." One comes from the wonderful poet Marie Ponsot, who shook me awake in a workshop at the 92nd Street Y when she described how she continued to write during the years she was rearing her children—six boys and a girl. I picture her with a pen and a scrap of paper, baby balanced on her hip as she tries to calm a 4-year-old who’s chasing a toddler, the ambient chaos of blooming, moody, needy beings filling her household. That’s the rough version of the scene, if you double the number of little ones.

In the midst of this, she wrote in a Chinese form called "running dragon," which uses two- and three-line stanzas, small bursts of description as the “dragon” leaps from stone to stone. She built her pieces two or four or six lines at a time.

'It's easy to keep writing ... in whatever time you have.'

Ponsot wasn’t visible to the publishing world as she was tending her tribe, but she was writing all the while. Here’s a bit of a 2003 interview she did with Bomb magazine :

Bomb interviewer Benjamin Ivry: “There was a span of a quarter century in which you didn’t publish a book. Obviously you were very busy taking care of your kids and working, teaching English in the SEEK program for disadvantaged students at Queens College as well as translating and scriptwriting.”

Marie Ponsot: “I was very busy. It’s really that I was entirely out of all those professional poetry loops. That’s worth saying, because it’s easy to keep writing without tremendous agitation in whatever time you have. If you don’t imagine yourself as a career poet but rather as a person who writes poems, you can just go on doing that.”

We writers with busy lives are all “people who write novels” or “people who write memoirs” or “people who write poems,” and all of us can tap the wise impulse to keep writing in the time we can grab. Small scenes, “sudden fiction,” bits of dialog or description—they’re all available to us in short spans of time. And from there, we build, no tremendous agitation required.

I summon my own form of “running dragon” during weeks like this one when I’m spinning in busyness—starting projects, nudging others along, doing research for what I hope will become a book one day, oh, and doing my taxes. In the midst of it all, I grab 10 or 15 minutes and make notes, do my observation practice and write down lines, or shape a couple of paragraphs.

The dragon keeps running. The work takes shape.

(The Bomb interview with Ponsot is full of treasures for poets, fans of the Beats, women looking for inspiration and writers who occasionally fear that “it’s too late to start now.”  The blog item that describes the running dragon form is also rich with insights from Ponsot. And if you missed them, you can see suggestions for trapping wild bits of time here, and tips for making good use of them here.)

Image by Alias 0591 via Flickr.

10-minute writing excursions

So you've found a small slot in your schedule for writing, a bit of "transition time" between activities that will give you a foothold as you build a writing practice. How will you switch gears from life or work craziness to “writer’s mind”? Try this. * Start by closing your eyes and taking a few slow, deep breaths and exhaling completely. That can help you come back to your body when your mind is whirring.

* Shift your focus to your own voice.

If it’s one of those, “I’ve got nothin’” days, fill yourself up by closely observing one thing, whatever your eye lands on or your ear picks up, and describing it in as much detail as you can. That requires actually soaking up those details, and directing your mind to the challenge of finding words that evoke them. It’s an easy way to break a thought loop and wind up in the present, seeing.

(That’s why I mention it so often. If you’re feeling distant from writing, one of the great fears is that the basin is empty, that you’ll dip in and come up dry. Knowing that you can replenish yourself with what’s at hand can be a great relief.)

If you’ve got an Internet connection, you can click to a place like http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/ (that may take a subscription after a certain number of visits) or http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/ or http://news.yahoo.com/photos/ and click through a photo gallery until an image resonates. It shouldn’t take long. Fall into a photo and write from there—a description, a list of questions or a few lines of a caption that reflect the story you see or would make up about the image.

If you’re collecting the lines you’ve been writing in one place (a good idea), you can pick up where you left off, or begin to connect images or voices or impressions. Rearrange words. Make something new.

If you’re developing a piece, you can go there and spend time with it. Add details or questions. Look at it. Keep it in front of you and your mind will keep working on it. Tinker, add what comes to you, and don't forget to play.

Do you need and want longer stretches for writing? Sure. But if all you've got are tiny windows, why not check out the view?

Stone soup: The act of crafting something from 'nothing'

I’ve been writing a lot lately in my guise of “person who writes for other people,” and my brain is packed with details from their projects. Once, not that long ago, I might’ve made that my reason for not working on writing of my own. No brain space. That expression often feels literal, as though the mundane has displaced the mythic—or anything vaguely interesting—from the imaginal realm. Daily, though, I’ve been rescued by the seemingly rote, even mechanical, practice of choosing one thing in my environment to study closely, pore to pore, then writing down what I see. It can be a 10-minute practice, done anywhere, and I suggest it to you repeatedly because it’s such a simple way to restock your well of images, and connect your inner and outer worlds.

You’re standing at the back door, gazing into the twilight after the kids have gone to bed. Pick one shape out of the gathering darkness—the swing set, the hose coiled against the cement base of a wall—and start there, with the colors draining away, imagination pulling you to the messy wet spirals pressed onto the concrete, the sculptured brass curves of the nozzle that's dripping onto the grass.

Stored in a touch or a scent, doorways to endless stories

In such moments, you might be memorizing the world, its scents and shapes, what breezes across the skin. The moment is full enough, immediate enough, rich enough to bring you back to your body, to the page.

Being present to what moves through you might pull you to another set of sensory images, a scene from the past, perhaps. That’s what happened to me today. I was—mechanically—choosing something to write about. How about that potted plant! It sounds unpromising, I know, but I lost myself in the unfurling corolla of leaves and in the loose soil I rolled between my fingertips.

My feet and fingers suddenly remembered the powdery dirt beneath the tall, scraggly pines of a canyon where my father took us once for a picnic. How smooth, almost slick that dirt was, even with its tiny pebbles. We dug our toes in, the way other kids might play in mud. I looked up from my feet and could see my father’s friend, in his now dusty black leather shoes and rumpled “office clothes,” curled on a blanket on the hillside above us, sleeping. An exhausted greyhound. He’d been up for days with my father—nowhere in the picture—trying to squeeze a few dollars out of a losing gambling streak.

All of that was there for me in the dirt.  What might sense memory hold for you?

A vehicle for conjuring & exploring the universe of a story

A client of mine began using her writing practice to travel through her mother’s kitchen, taking her own as a starting point. Pulling open a cupboard, she remembered her mother’s appliances, lined up like mechanical soldiers, a simple image that could be a doorway into character and a cascade of memories.

Ten minutes of writing, of seeing, of letting the body experience this moment and the mind connect it with the sense memory of other moments—ten minutes can be vast.

Even on the busiest, craziest, full-to-the-gills day, you have ten minutes, beautiful writer person. Today, open a cupboard, lift a cup, trace the edge of a leaf, run your hand over the carpet. The moment, this moment, is full of details, starting points, entryways. From “nothing,” a universe can bloom. Observe just one thing. Experience it with all your senses. Write. 

(Doorway image by runran, via Flickr.)

Your writing's trying to tell you what it wants—tales from George Saunders and L.A. spring

It’s the equinox as I write this, and I’m caught up in the way this moment in Southern California tips us into full bloom. Last night I walked through a friend’s front yard while he gave me a tour of the “orchard” set against two side fences. It was a scattering of trees, some mere twigs dotted with blossoms, one already heavy with grapefruit that reflected back gold in the flashlight’s beam. “That’s a pomegranate, and this is a peach,” the friend said, pointing to a couple of newly planted sticks (to use the fancy horticultural term). A few weeks ago, there was nothing to see. Just bare wood too slight to hold up the word “trunk,” and a few twig-like branches. But something happened, a swelling of buds and petals and scent. We knew it would come. And with luck and cultivation, we’ll see the pomegranates and lemons and first-year peaches later on, too.

Those predictable rhythms don't hold for people and pages, though it would be handy if they did. What we see, sometimes for long periods, are fragile-looking twigs stuck in the ground. They’re the projects we tuck into stray spaces and build from the words left at the end of long days of trading our energy and imaginations for money.Time passes, sometimes a lot of time, before what we have looks like much, or we notice the nubs of buds on what we feared might stay dormant for good. At our best, we persist, staying in conversation with the work, pushing it, then letting it lead us.

George Saunders, talking to a stalled story

In L.A. last month, the fiction writer George Saunders mentioned just that process.

Once, while waiting for a bus across the street from the barber shop in his town, he decided to take on the barber.

“He was one of these guys who checks women out fearlessly—and even after they bust him he keeps looking,” Saunders remembered. “We had just had two daughters, so I was a new feminist and I thought, ‘What an irritating [jerk].’ My first idea was, ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna write, but I’m gonna nail that guy. So I did.

“I wrote what I really thought was some fun inhabiting of this perverted guy…. I did that for about a year, and I had some pretty funny bits, but the story stalled, and I think it was because I knew too much about him. I was going to crucify this idiot. That was my plan.

“The story said, ‘All right, go ahead, but you’re not gonna be interesting doing that. So at some point about a year into it I went, ‘You know what? I’ve gotta somehow make this guy more sympathetic because as this story stands, it’s just kicking him. So then it’s the magic moment when you go, okay, how do I make this [jerk] more interesting?

“Well…  Hmm…. And then you start titrating in bits of yourself, which you were already doing, but now you’re being a little more sympathetic. Not being the most subtle writer, I said, ‘Oh yeah, he doesn’t have any toes!’ That was my way of doing it. But that did the trick … and suddenly it came alive. So I didn’t know that I was out to humanize him, but the story teaches you that. The story’s very stubborn. And it will say, 'Go ahead, write as much as you like, but I’m not movin’ until you show a little sympathy.' And that can happen again and again.”

‘A year later…’

There’s so much to love in how the process evolved, from the original mission (“I’m gonna crucify that guy”) to the more complex (and toeless) version the story wanted. I’m sure Saunders says that often his students: “The story teaches you.”

What struck me most, though, were the toss-away words: “I did that for about a year….” He repeats them, too. “So at some point about a year into it….”

The process can—and often does—look like that: chipping away, experimenting and keeping the conversation with your work going for weeks and months and years.

That doesn’t happen when you simply put the manuscript away and “think about it,” which usually means “wade through guilt, bemoan not having time to work on it or feel flattened by the soul-crushing, 5,000-pound boulder it’s become.”

It doesn’t happen either when you keep ideas locked in your head without making a move to get them on paper where you can start the exchange, however slow, that will move you forward and bring blooms to those awkward little sticks.

Time to amp up the conversation, don’t you think?

One writer I know felt dogged for more than a year by stories she wanted to write. When we talked about them, and she gave herself some “getting reacquainted” sessions to feel her way into the work, she realized that she was actually excited about an entirely different project. And she wouldn’t have known unless she sat down to reach toward the vague shapes in her imagination and pull them into the light.

My guess is that she just would’ve stayed frustrated and blocked and cringing whenever anyone said, “So how’s that writing going?”

The speed of the work you do isn’t important, but the constant conversation and tending are.It’s spring, beautiful writer person—such a fertile time. Feed your work. Talk to it and consider what it wants. Do a small writing practice daily. And as always, let me know if I can help.

(If you want to revisit the George Saunders story in context, you can hear it here, courtesy of the wonderful Aloud program at the Los Angeles Central Library. The photo of blossoms above is by Sterlic, via Flickr.)

Steal time for your writing in 3 easy steps

The writing life isn't always serene and idyllic. They move up the deadline.

The workday turns out to be 15 hours long.

The kids get the flu.

Dad backs into a mailbox.

It's a birthday. A holiday. Your turn to host the book group.

Everybody needs something.

The day is gone before you know it.

Time can easily blur into a long stream of interruptions and exceptions and emergencies that seem to leave no room for your creative work.

In stretches like this, it helps to simply acknowledge that yep, things are crazy. You’re not on sabbatical. The genius grant people haven’t yet tapped your shoulder with their magic wand. You’re in the thick of your life, and this is what it looks like.

So where will you find the writing time? The mental space? You need a plan. Not a huge, sweeping overhaul-it-all plan. Just a structure that guides you  into your writer’s mind for even a few minutes so you can add a twig or a feather or a shiny bauble to the nest you want to keep building, the psychic space that supports your writing.

Here’s one way to start: 

1. Use “transition” time as writing time. 

Scan your schedule for the times when you’ve disengaged from one activity and you haven’t quite begun another. Could you steal time in the gap? Try looking in spots like these:

* Bathroom breaks. Really. Even the busiest people take these during the day. They get up from their tasks, walk to the restroom, walk back. Try stealing five minutes, or ten, for writing afterward, as soon as you return to your desk. (Will anyone miss those minutes? Probably not.)

* Commuting. Use you use your transit time to observe something closely, or let your mind wander to your own writing. Then jot notes when you reach your destination. If you're able (and not driving), write while you ride.

* Post-meal time. Delay the dishes for 10 minutes and write then. Or write after you feed  the dog.

* Post-exercise time. You’ve taken your run or class or walk and cleaned up. Right there, in the space before whatever usually comes next, can you take 10 or 15 minutes and write?

Tucking bits of creative time into these odd nooks begins to weave writing into the pattern of your regular activities and integrate it with your life.

Choose one "transition" and co-opt it for writing.

2. Actively remind yourself that you’re stealing this time.

At first, you’ll need to tell yourself often, and in vivid ways, that you’re adding something new to your routine. By vivid ways I mean putting notes in the bathroom—or on your hand. Sticking a notebook in your running shoes. Posting notes in the kitchen or sticking them to your coffee cup or dinner plate or cereal bowl. Leaving a roll of toilet paper on your desk with a pen or notebook on top.

Make it hard for yourself to ignore that you are making this small shift in your routine.

Tell someone what you’re up to, and let them remind you. (If you’re ready to make a serious shift, and you want daily reminders, plus help with the  bigger picture of your writing practice, contact me here and let’s talk! I can help.)

3. Repeat daily.

Just how up and do what you can. A little is good. More is good, too. See what makes you feel like your writer self. Maybe it’s a 15-minute stretch. Or 30 focused minutes. And maybe for a while it’s five minutes of texting yourself some lines as you sit in at your desk right before leaving work at the end of a too-long day.

Everything counts. You can build from a tiny foundation. You will.