Create instead of wait: Your writing is urgent

I’m thinking about time—and how much more I want to write. Some of the most motivated writers I know and work with keep a sense of urgency pulling them forward: Someone close becomes gravely ill. A parent dies. A car swerves into their lane on the way home and crashes into the timeline they’d envisioned, that long life full of days to spend thinking about what they might get around to next year or the next.

Time shifts. It loses its the slipperiness that lets us imagine it into any dimensions we choose and reveals itself to be bracingly finite. Precious.

‘I’m an artist. What else would I do right now but this?’

A friend from the gym is 81, and her cancer’s back. Gloria’s optimistic, and intensely focused. “I’ve been tired,” she told me, “but I’m almost done with my children’s book, so I’ve been at my computer working on it.” A week into chemo, she brought the book in to show me, the tale of a mouse—“not a Disney mouse, but a wild one”—who joins the circus. “I’m an artist,” she says. “What else would I do right now but this?”

Gloria's book is full of encouragement as it traces the intrepid rodent’s journey to the big top: Take a chance, the story line suggests. Have an adventure! Try again when something goes wrong during the show! I’m listening to all of that, letting the art seep in as I let Gloria’s clarity about the importance of this work we do—even when it’s “just for ourselves”—reinforce mine.

 

The art of making our best work urgent

You’re probably familiar with the distinction Steven Covey, the late business guru, makes between what’s important and what’s urgent. Urgent tasks, he says, are the sometimes inconsequential ones that make lots of noise and, with their deadlines or importance to someone else, tend to crowd out truly significant priorities that don’t have a screaming boss, finger-drumming client or child attached.

He advocates focusing on the important, in our case the novels or stories or essays or poems that no one’s paying us to write or expecting from us by a particular date. I’ll be filling the coming year with a stream of prompts, pushes, and practices to keep my own important projects sanely infused with a sense of urgency over the long haul.

Some of that will involve setting deadlines and creating time-based containers for work—five poems in five days once in a while, for instance—and some will no doubt mean making and keeping promises to someone else, because there’s magic in contracts and commitments, unsexy as those words sound.

I’m not envisioning a yearlong sprint or even a fast start. Just a walk-run steadiness that builds intensity, eases off and builds again, filling growing stretches of time with writing, with presence. I’ll share what I’m doing along the way. Maybe you’ll come too?

So, are you game?

I hope you will join me in trying to marry your truly important work with a sense of urgency. Urgent comes from the Latin for “to press or to drive,” and in tapping urgency, we unleash its driving energy, channeling the push to create instead of wait.

It can feel like wind at your back.

Looking ahead to the next 12 months, what’s the slightly scary, undeniably important-to-your writing goal you could elevate to urgent by announcing it to the world (or us) and moving toward at a solid walk-run pace? If you’re feeling bold, declare it in the comments below, and I’ll tell you mine. We can support each other as we go.

If you want concentrated help to get you going, check the “Work With Donna” page. And feel free to use the Contact page if you want dream up other ways we can work together.

(Clock image by Zorin Denu via Flickr.)

P.S. A tracking tool I like

I’m not a big believer in starting a new project or renewed push with a new notebook (see this post if you’ve got the starting-gate stationery fetish), but I do like toys and treats, so I’ve been playing lately with an app called Chains, available at chains.cc. It’s another of the tools based on the old Seinfeld idea “don’t break the chain” of days on which you stay true to a chosen habit. I’ve been using the desktop version, but there’s also an iPhone app (nothing for Android mobiles yet).

In Chains, you can track multiple habits, and each time you click a date to indicate you’ve, say, done your writing practice or made time to work on your fiction, you activate a graphic (you can choose among several) that changes in surprising ways as your “chain” gets longer. Currently, I’m tracking the growth of a yellow crayon, a flower in a pot and a rugged-looking iron chain.

If you liked gold stars, you’ll enjoy this century’s variation. For support (or competition) you can form or join groups of people tracking similar habits/commitments. You’ll find many writers and readers in the Chains community. If you’d like to play with this in the company of other Let’s Write This writers, let me know below and I’ll set up a group.

The art of beginning: Getting to 'escape velocity'

Lately I’ve been obsessed with the idea of escape velocity, the amount of energy it takes to break free of gravity and launch yourself into space—or, in my case, the writing of a book.  I’m starting a new one, and as I return to the blank page, it’s as though almost everything I know about constructing a project like this is a hindrance instead of a help.

This new thing is a book, yes, but it won’t resemble the others I’ve done in voice or structure. It will tell me its shape if I have the patience to keep engaging it—that much I know from experience—but I also know that the routes I’ve used in the past won’t lead me to the core of this one.

So the past few weeks have been full of attempts to lure the book into view. I’ve baited it with metaphors and research and paragraph after paragraph of beginnings—or, when that was too difficult—with tangents.

And then there were penguins...

I got the wild notion that the subject I’m trying to write about is like a Venn diagram with ten circles and went off to find out whether such a thing exists (yes, sort of). I fell into rabbit holes as I checked to see how other people have written about my topic, then crawled away certain I had nothing to add. I was surprised to find myself, at one point, reading about penguins.

I realized I’d gone off the deep end, and it occurred to me that my book will likely contain neither Venn diagrams nor Antarctic birds, though a poem I write someday might. I went back to figuring out what the book is really about.

I read and reread my notes until they began to feel more abstract than concrete, as though I were repeating the word “shampoo” until it lost its meaning. My screen filled up with lather, and my mind seemed to be circling. Was it making connections? Apparently not.

I made yet another start, and paragraphs kept accumulating in precarious, teetering stacks as the commentary in my mind insistently labeled them “not it” and “a little lame, don’t you think?” But on the next try, or the next, the accumulated facets of this mysterious new thing, the book, began to collect themselves into a shape. Something distinct and alive started to move in a direction of its own, leading me.

With persistence, clarity sets in

That little shift is what escape velocity feels like, and it’s less stomach-dropping rush than a whoosh of clarity that comes from staying with what’s difficult, elusive and unknown. That clarity is the necessary starting point for a project, a sense of its core, its heartbeat. It’s the payoff for deciding to persist, and to keep persisting. And yes, it feels very, very good.

There’s an old formula in physics—I think I saw it on Wikipedia—that goes something like “escape velocity = curiosity + desire x (words committed to paper + concentrated time in the chair).” There’s nothing in there about magic or inspiration—though curiosity and desire are plenty magical. The formula hinges on the energy of actual doing, and in my experience, “concentrated time” provides an intense push.

If you’ve been stuck, dreaming of writing something ambitious, or longing to finish a big project that’s drifted into the realm of “someday, maybe,” give yourself the gift of reaching escape velocity. Here's how:

Seven steps to reaching escape velocity

* Create a container for your “launch.” Decide to devote a month or six weeks to fully beginning or re-engaging with your project. For that period, return your focus to the project as often as you can.

* Clear time to do the writing. If you’ve already created a small-burst writing practice, you might be able simply to lengthen your regular writing periods. Or you may want to schedule all new ones. Defer watching “Game of Thrones” for a month and gain hours there. Write through your lunch hour. Tell your friends/partner/kids that you’re diving into your book, and you’ll be less available for a while. Stake out evenings and weekend time Use your well-practiced time-stealing tactics and steal more.

* Write without judging. Take wild stabs at it. Think you have a lousy draft? Interesting. Keep going. You can edit later. For now, write. Listen for what surprises you and pulls you deeper. Tweak. Try something else. Call what you’re doing “the big experiment” and be curious about what’s happening.

* Write more. Then write more. Repeat.

* Persist. When you find yourself off on a crazy tangent, make a note of it, then go back to the task at hand. Praise yourself for persisting.

* Get help if you need it. Check in with someone. Make promises to someone else that you’ll feel honor-bound to keep. Report your progress. Use the Twitter hashtag #amwriting to give the writing world brief updates. Or let me help you in one-on-one coaching, where we can set workable goals, make course corrections and find out what conditions allow you to persist while having a life.

* Feel the work starting to talk back to you. Enjoy the feeling of liftoff.

Do you have tricks for reaching escape velocity? Share ‘em in the comments.

(Image by StormPetrel1 via Flickr)

The question that stalls us: "How will it all turn out?"

Practically all the conversations I’ve had with writers recently—and a good number of the little talks that have gone on in my head—have somehow circled back to the question of certainty. Before the first word is written, before a playful desire has had a chance to riffle through the closet and try on a top hat or tutu, before a single tiny seed is dropped from cupped palm into waiting soil we want to know: How will it all turn out? Will they make fun of it? Will it be good? Will it sell? Will it make me safe and loved and successful? And what about that Nobel Prize?

One client wants to start a blog because she wants to spark a conversation about her ideas. And because blogging is how you get a job—employers want to see that. “But who will come?” her mind races on. “How will I market it? How popular will it be? Can I turn it into a book? What if it’s a tree falling silently in the massive electronic forest? What if I don’t get the job?”

That’s a wee bit of pressure, darlin’.

I’m all too familiar with that racing mind. It’s the voice inside me that demands a payoff before it makes an investment. The clenched part that wants some kind of guarantee. It doesn’t look kindly on messes and experiments. It only wants results.

It’s also the part of me that imagines the project, whether it’s a poem or a book or a play, as enormous. So massive and important and Pyramids of Gaza vast that it’s hardy possible for a mere human to construct.

Back to body, breath, and now

It’s not easy to start (or continue) when the stakes seem so high, the imagined competition so stiff. So when I notice those thoughts running loose again, I take a few deep, slow breaths and come back from the unknowable future into the room/the car/ my body/the page in front of me. If I feel prickles of anxiety in my neck or shoulders, I imagine pulling them off like thorns. If there’s a heavy weight on my chest, I lift it off and put it on the ground. I take another deep breath.

Back in the present, a little lighter, still breathing, I start small.

What’s in front of me, right now, that I can bring to my writing? (A green glass bottle of water, filled with reflections.) What are my senses taking in? When I look or listen closely, what’s’s right here, alive to my attention? What small detail can I bring back?

The mantra: small, small, small

I return often to the word “small” when I think about writing—and when I sit down to write. Small is disarming. It doesn’t come with big expectations. It’s allowed to be fragmentary or rough or nonsensical. It’s allowed to play.

This week, I brought my writing a lemon, “a Meyer lemon so recently pulled from a branch that its skin was delicate as a petal and infused with the scent and memory of blossoms, and then mine was too.”

What will that lemon become? Or the hand that held it, or the woman who sat at the kitchen table, absorbed in gold and perfume, marveling over the way the flower had never disappeared from the fruit?

I don’t know yet. I don’t know how it all turns out.

But I do know that the lemon still breathes in me, and it’s the beginning of something, if only a glass of lemonade. I know, too, that I can keep asking questions to go deeper: How else does that lemon haunt me? What does it remind me of? When I slip back into that experience, that boat with a bright yellow hull, where does it take me?

The wonder cure

It’s not so hard to pay close attention to something in your life for just a few minutes during the day. To be with it, deeply experiencing it, and then to write a line or two. If you take on that practice, it’s yours, guided by you. You get to focus on whatever you want, to swoop toward something shiny, to be fascinated by whatever hooks you. If you’re working on a project, you can keep tracking  aspects of it with your open, curious presence. What did you notice? What color were its eyes? What happened inside you? You can ask and answer and go deeper, moment by moment.

Fascination. Curiosity. A sense of wonder and wondering about what’s here to be found right now. They’re the antidote for “How does it all turn out?” And they’re right here, waving you over, inviting you to play.

(Image by Chris Hunkeler via Flickr.)