Breathing your way back to writing

My mind won’t settle down. A wind sets it spinning and I hesitate to write what scatters through: thistles in a dog’s coat. Seeds strewn by a machine, some rolling into tilled earth, some onto pavement. Dust weeping from an eye. What ants and beetles push and carry.

Sometimes it’s hard to find a way into a day’s writing. Nothing seems to cohere, and the cursor blinks and blinks over the next white spot on the page. Today, restless, I get up, search the shelves for a book, one of my favorites—David Abrams’ brilliant “The Spell of the Sensuous” —and flip through it to rub against the words, drop myself into the order of another mind. What catches my eye is a moment in a section on “the progressive forgetting of the air—the loss of the invisible richness of the present.”

Abrams writes of a loss of a deep connection between the body and the aliveness of the world that begins with “forgetting of the air, the forgetting of this sensuous but unseen medium that continually flows in and out of the breathing body, binding the subtle depths within us the fathomless depths that surround us.”

In the smallest of steps toward remembering, I draw a slow breath, and another, returning to the room, the telling still life of the desk (crumpled tissue, empty cereal bowl, blue tincture bottle labeled “inspiration”…). The carpet is soft under my bare feet.

I know this feeling of returning, of grounding myself in the body by breathing, then noticing, once more, the world outside my mind. It’s the core practice I use, and recommend, for daily writing: Breathe, observe just one thing closely, intimately, and write what you see.

Remembering the way back

I know how valuable this process is for me, and yet I let myself push it aside. “You’re writing about the past today,” my rushed mind says, getting ever more bossy the more desperate and frustrated it feels. “You don’t have time to stare at a leaf or the stupid reflections in a water bottle. What does that have to do with anything?”

Given its way, it would probably say breathing is a waste of time as well: “Forget the air. Just be creative, okay?”

Stressed or tired or feeling my confidence dinged, I sometimes respond automatically to that inner voice (you probably recognize the Inner Critic’s inflections in it) and act as though it’s got my best interests at heart. It takes effort to shake off its trance, to come back to myself.

So I learn and relearn, forget and then rediscover.

I think we all do, beautiful writer person. The trick is noticing we’ve forgotten what works for us, and beginning again.

Reminders help. And serendipitous contact with voices like Abrams’ when I most need them. When I return to the past later today, I’ll begin in my body, breathing, paying attention to what’s right here and making room for the possibility of binding the subtle depths inside me to those fathomless depths that are as near as the sky and the birds outside the window.

It’ll look for all the world as though I’m just gazing into the palm of my hand but I'll be going as deeply as I can, following its map of lines: head, heart, life.

(Cloud image by Horla Varlan via flickr)

 

Writing about conflict? Here’s a tool for you.

I thought of you, beautiful writer person, when I heard a guided meditation on conflict this week.

It was offered as part of a program for mediators and others who regularly step into the midst of disputes, but as I listened, I realized that it was an excellent door through which you might step into scenes from your life that could deepen your story or memoir or poem.

The meditation is led by Zoketsu Norman Fischer, a Zen priest based in Northern California, and it’s available here. There’s no religious or even philosophical orientation, just an opportunity for entering an inner space and exploring what’s there.

 

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.)

Feeling the sensous pull of summer? 25 ways to let it draw your writing into the dreamtime.

I’ll be away for a while this summer, not on vacation or at some retreat but in a staring-at-the-ceiling (or the stars) reverie, re-entering that space where identity and time are fluid, if just because nights are warmer and something in me knows that a summer night is one long dream.

And I admit, there will be small … side trips. I’ve been thinking of how some summers when I was young were a series of obsessions: learning to type, and then making newsletters. Or going out in the dark to filch roses from nearby bushes so I could fill jars with petals that never quite dried. Or playing Monopoly until no one could stand it, and moving on to Scrabble or tag.

So many games and adventures began with a ringleader saying: Let’s. Let’s sneak onto the golf course and pick up balls. Let’s see how many Popsicles we can eat. Let’s hide in a crawl space and play cards till someone finds us.

What does this have to do with writing? Nothing and everything. Some part of summer’s expansiveness has to spill into the way we write, and maybe it’s time to let sensuality and imagination overtake us and see what happens.

So let’s. Let’s experiment. Let’s pretend the list below is a treasure map—or a series of writing prompts. Three, two, one… Go!

 

Let’s all:

Climb to the top of a grassy hill and roll down.

Get up at sunrise on the solstice to watch the longest day of the year  begin, then linger outside as sunset becomes twilight and watch till the final drop of daylight disappears into the dark.

Lie on our stomachs in the grass and watch the intricate rituals of ants.

Sit outside whispering in the dark.

Let's write aerogrammes to imaginary selves that live in Paris or the South Pacific.

Listen to waves and wind.

Or drive with the windows down and the heat turned up to a place where the stars are too thick to count.

Let's make up stories about our past lives and write them in locked diaries.

Let's dye our lips and tongues blue with berries.

Go barefooted all day.

Sit under trees and listen for wisdom.

Let’s write love notes to ourselves and our cats and our books and our favorite places.

Throw wildflower seeds on bare patches of ground.

Stop to admire dandelions growing up through sidewalk cracks.

Let's walk around the block backwards.

Make forts out of card tables and blankets and go in and write.

Let’s take our laptops out to the patio or porch or park and transcribe the language of night.

Let’s buy packs of index cards and write a word we love on each card, then shuffle them into poems.

Pretend we know we’re being spied on and find private places to write, out of the reach of  recorders and cameras, even our own, even the ones on our phones and computers, even the ones we trust.

Let’s write in the margins of books and on our hands and on cocktail napkins.

Let's write in invisible ink and code, as if our secrets were precious.

Let’s sip mugwort tea and dream.

Let’s read with a flashlight under the covers.

Let’s fill ourselves up and write each other letters about what we've tasted.

Let’s write like it’s summer, like it’s play.

And if you’re in a part of the world where it’s not summer, come join us anyway, in your sweaters and hats.

Enjoy! 

(Grass image by sundaykofax, patio image by ahdummy, cocktail napkin by Listen Missy!, all  via Flickr.)

At the heart of the workday: art—and the trickster that wants us to notice

I’m researching a short book about cataracts, in my “working writer” guise. I’m no scientist, but I’ve been reading technical papers to pull out details of the quite amazing world packed into the lens of the eye. The task, I admit, is daunting at times.

Simply getting oriented among the crystallin proteins and the clear, six-sided strands they form can feel a little like traveling into an Italo Calvino landscape of incomprehensible architecture and half-understood words. The going is slow.

Once, I might’ve grumbled about having to spend so much time away from the poems I’ve just begun, the project I hope to build over the next dozen months. I was in the habit of seeing my day jobs—and their demand that I focus on subjects I may not be naturally drawn to—as a distraction, some kind of barrier that stood between me and my real work. But I’ve come to appreciate just how much my writing has gained from my immersion in unlikely worlds, and topics or environments that chafe.

Like everyone I know, I’ve done a lot of things to pay the rent. I’ve dispatched construction inspectors, worked to master the counter-clockwise (or was it clockwise?) swirl atop a Dairy Queen cone, fed SpaghettiOs to the kids left behind by a motorcycle gang, written about bad mothers, hauled hoses and painted houses, edited reports on electromagnetic metrology, and wrangled the minutiae of stories on runway fashion and baseball.

'Soul-killing'? Maybe. But maybe not.

I’m sure I described that work as “soul-killing” more than once at the end of a day when someone yelled, something went wrong, my body ached or I just couldn’t get my mind around the task at hand.

The longing I felt through it all was for a writer’s life that was insulated from demands that I pay attention to all those details  that I might not have cared about if someone weren’t paying me. And even when the work was good and interesting and rewarding, I had the lingering sense that I’d been abducted from my real home in some alternate universe, where I could spend my days writing, filling my brain with the names of birds and reading mythology in the original Greek. Instead of scraping the peeling paint off splintery window frames or staring into a computer screen for the 10th hour of a workday, trying to find something interesting to say about face cream.

 

The exotic, embedded in the ordinary

Increasingly, though, I’ve begun to marvel at what’s right in front of me, the personalities and stories and vocabularies that my working life funnels into my writer’s brain. Today, I looked up the term “cytosolic scaffold,” and my mind rolled the syllables around, then conjured up a clear, liquid ladder, an icon from a dream. The bureaucratic language of corporate memos, the mortise and tenon connections of furniture-building, the haiku sales pitches of shopping websites—extracted from the sea of the workday they’re like household objects set in museum vitrines: exotic, strange, even beautiful. I've begun to see it.

So much flows through a workday, begging to be noticed by the part of us that writes—and used for our own writing. When I can dial down the feeling of “I should be writing a poem right now” and instead allow my workdays to feed my writing, I find myself resenting much less—and pausing to take notes. It used to be that I felt invaded by ideas about the work I do for others. Lately, though, I’ve seen that what was popping up offered images and language and themes for my own work. I just didn’t understand that the gift was for me.

What if our trickster brains are always flying through our workdays and stealing treasures for our writing? Life begins to feel much less fragmented, at least for me, and less conflicted, too. On long workdays, I’m keeping a notebook and a computer file open to see what the trickster brings.

Photo by Edward Dalmulder via Flickr

P.S. Some 'don't-miss' reading for you

A great piece on habits: I've long wanted to write at length about habits, in particular the enticing, life-changing simplicity of "tiny habits"—exceedingly small actions that can form a powerful foundation for much larger change. I've tried and been impressed by the techniques developed by a Stanford researcher named B.J. Fogg, who cheerfully encourages people to "Keep it tiny!" as they commit to, say, flossing one tooth.

Tiny habits and micro-quotas work in a way that grand resolutions never could. And because now is a great time to see for yourself, I highly recommend taking a look at  this article, which explains just how habit-formation works. You'll quickly see how it could change your writing life for the better, and get the lowdown on how B.J. Fogg and others lay out the behavioral  science.

It's the piece I'd envisioned putting together someday, and I'm delighted that Gregory Ciotti at sparringmind.com did it.

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.

Elephants in tutus: What I learned about writing at the barre

A little over a year ago, a woman I instantly began thinking of as “the crazy Russian lady” showed up at my easy-going morning exercise class and announced she was the new teacher. Exuberant and kinetic, Zhanna spends much of her life teaching Zumba, but we'd be learning a gym-friendly version of ballet. And she assured all of us— the weak, the semi-motivated, the too-stiff-for yoga—that none of those adjectives mattered. We'd easily pick up the basics she'd learned from her teachers in Russia. Eyebrows rose. Us? Ballet? I pictured elephants in tutus.

“Ballet,” as far as I could see, consisted of long, long sets of rapid leg lifts alternating with stunts that involved balancing on one leg while swinging various other body parts around. Through it all we were instructed to “up your chin” or “make leg like dog at hydrant” as the Zumba tracks blared and the crazy Russian lady yelled “nonstop, nonstop!” anytime we began to flag. Which was often.

But the impossibility of it all was weirdly compelling. What were people like us doing in a class like that? And why did she keep acting as though we could do this thing we clearly weren’t cut out for? It was a mystery. It was also sort of fun. I think we kept coming back to find out what would happen.

My expectations were so low I counted any progress as a victory. The way I saw it, I could only get better. At first, I stopped every time my mind said: “I can’t do this” or “I’m too tired,” but I started to realize that that was practically all it said—so I began to ignore it and just pay attention when my body announced it was time to take a break.

There was a lot of laughter and eye rolling in that class in the early months. Just look at us, the smiles would say, as we wobbled and shook. All around the room, bodies were relearning how to stand, tipping and flailing and falling, trying again. How could it possibly take so many muscles in so many places to stay upright on one leg?

 

What pulled us forward? A sense of play.

We kept showing up twice a week for an hour at a time, getting imperceptibly better at “upping our chins” and remembering to “straight our shoulders.” When someone brought her two young ballet-student daughters to class, their supple grace set our teetering stiffness in relief. We could see what our moves would look like performed by dancers. We clapped and cheered the girls. No one was going to wave a wand and make us nine years old again. All we could do was enjoy their beauty and our own stubborn persistence. We’d be there at the next class. It was something we did now. For the heck of it, just to play around.

All these months later, progress seems to be sneaking up on us. None of us is doubled over panting five minutes into the class anymore, and all of us are stronger. Weeks and weeks went by when it seemed as though nothing was happening, but every once in a while I’d realize that standing on one leg was no big deal anymore, or notice we all looked taller.

The unintended side effect? Somewhere along the line, the “throw yourself in there and see what happens” approach began to spill over into my writing practice. There was something about the experience of being a beginner that my writing longed for.

The perks of writing as a beginner

* As a beginner, you get big points just for showing up and trying. No one expects you to be perfect. You don’t expect you to be perfect. The victory is in returning to the effort.

* When the going seems absurdly hard, a beginner is likely to laugh and say, “This is absurdly hard!” The laugh is forgiving, accepting. Of course it’s difficult—you haven’t done it before! You’re figuring it out!

* A certain delight comes with beginner status. You don’t know what you’ll discover or how your small efforts will add up. So when you suddenly see yourself do something difficult with more ease, or recognize that you’ve used a move you hardly realized you had, or pulled an image that’s apt and beautiful out of the air, there’s surprise and pleasure in the accomplishment. Wow! That was me! (Beginners, you may have noticed, get a large supply of exclamation points.)

Every time we write, we’re beginning again. And approaching the blank page by asking, “I wonder what’ll happen today” brings a pleasure and freedom that’s all but blotted out when when the “serious professional” in us, the competitive part concerned with outcomes, asks: “I wonder if people will love this. Today's writing is only worth it if it's good.”

Just as an experiment, try letting yourself be a beginner when you sit down to write this week, beautiful writer person. Find the fun in taking the first awkward steps toward something new—dialog you've been wanting to try. A different kind of voice. A writing schedule you've been afraid to commit to. The story you're struggling to finish. Stay with the process of diving in, adjusting, trying again. The pirouettes and denouements will take care of themselves.

(Photo by David 23, via Flickr.)

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.)

5 easy ways to trigger a growth spurt in your writing

How’s your spring going? This season feels like the real start of the year to me, with all the bursting, blossoming and waking from the inwardness of winter. It caught me in its gusts recently, and launched me into the kind of writing I’d been missing—unexpected and interesting to me and, most of all, fun. What brought on the big jolt of creative energy besides the season itself? I've been tracking the path that led me out of the black hole of my desk, where the mantra is often "deadline, deadline, deadline," and into the more playful realm that nourishes the poetry and other "non-work" writing I do. Looking back, I can see the power of following small impulses, the nudges to push out of routine and make something new.

Today's impulse?  To write another poem. And to share this list of ways to trigger the growth spurt that's aching to surge through your writing life.

1. Throw yourself into the path of the writing and writers you love.

That can mean reading, of course, but it's never been easier to put a favorite (or new) writer's voice in your ear. I've been listening back through the rich and diverse readings and conversations given in recent years—and collected in podcast archives—at the  New York Public Library, the Los Angeles Public Library and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. (Each of those links will take you to a list of podcasts.) Beyond that starting point, a quick search will turn up worlds of literary podcasts (the Scottish Poetry Library is my newest discovery). I sometimes turn on readings the way I used to turn on the news—for background noise or company—and find myself drawn into the music of the language of Zadie Smith, say, or Paul Auster. It's hard to hear that music without starting to hum.

2. Hang out with your tribe.

 Go to real live readings at real live bookstores and libraries and other venues. Spending a half hour in the company of other writers at the back of a bookstore recently reminded me how comfortable it is to be around my people, the ones who are constantly finding ways to make art of experience and to pull that art to the center of their lives. It's easy to lose that habit of just hanging out, comparing notes on books or quirky places to look for inspiration, if you're not in a writing group, or haven't been writing. But don't fret—renewing contact is as easy as venturing out of the cave. Your people will recognize you and draw you in.

3. 'Not writing' is a habit. Imagine what life would be like if you broke it.

 Writing used to be what you did in response to inspiration or disappointment or a memory or an image you just couldn't shake. It was a habit. If you were in the habit of writing right now, what would be different about your day? What conversation with yourself and the world would you carry onto the page? What would it be like to do some writing right now? How would it feel? What would it be like to remember how much your soul craves that feeling?

These questions sound simple, but I mention them because considering them pushed me into writing. I could remember the feeling of being with my writing intimately and regularly. I stayed with my longing for that instead of ignoring it or pushing it aside. And the only thing to do in response was to write.

4. Finish something.

Nothing blooms in the netherworld of work left hanging. But finishing releases the energy furled tight in buds. Take out the paragraph you gave up on before working through its problems. Pull out an unfinished story. Find one sentence and then another to polish. You know how to do it. Pick it up. Reach the end.

5. Take a step, any step.

If all the items on the list seem obvious to you, great. Choose one simple, obvious action and actually take it. Spring forward, beautiful writer person. It's time to bloom.

(Peony photo by Sarah's Yard via Flickr.)

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)

This writing business could get messy. (It’s supposed to.)

If you’re making notes daily, observing the world and writing ten or fifteen minutes at a time, your collection of lines may not seem like much at first. You may have a glowing jarful of fireflies when you look one day, and swear the next that all you’ve got is sweater lint. So hold off on labeling for a while and just keep going. Look for what draws you in, what sends a tiny jolt through your mind or memory. And keep paying close attention to the ordinary. You can’t know, early on, how your wild, random collection of observations will be (or has been) orchestrated by the part of you that writes. But as you go, you’ll begin to see patterns, and doors that call you through them as you keep feeling your way through them. You'll begin to notice where your mind wants to take you.

Standing in the shower at the gym last week, I found myself studying the tile in front of me, a light mauve square pale mottled by mist, layers of condensation and the faint trails of splashes and drips. As I stared, it became the fabric for a summer dress, delicately patterned, or perhaps slightly ruined, then a canvas I wished I could paint, then a bathroom wall that my mother and I had scrubbed once for a wealthy family on the other side of town. I ran my finger over it, bringing myself back, and got out to search for paper.

In paying attention to what's in front of you, you'll find what's inside, as well. Look carefully. Enter what you see. You’ll discover where you’re going by going; meaning will find you.

It's there for you to discover

Enjoy the messiness and loopy trains of thought that string your notes and observations together. There’s a story in there. A poem. A scene. I’ve always been amazed at how much has grown from what I'd initially despaired over as “false starts.”

Patience and persistence, beautiful writer person. Stay with it. Tell me in the comments what you discover.

(The fabulous Sally Schneider at The Improvised Life, has a great archived post on the messiness of creating here.)

Image by Jamelah e. via Flickr

Tech tools for a 10-minute writing practice: Evernote

For years, Evernote, the note-taking/organizing program, was on the edge of my consciousness. I scanned articles about it, heard people rave about it, and then ignored it. Anything with whole books and websites devoted to its nuances, I figured, was probably more trouble than it was worth. But it turned out to be exactly what I needed for key writing tasks: keeping my notes together, collecting inspiration and retrieving what I’ve gathered and written.

Evernote, which is available free as an app for phones, tablets and and desktops, uses the metaphor of the notebook as an organizing device, and you can create one or many notebooks for your work. Label one “daily writing” or “my book” or “the novel” and you can open it to write a new piece, play with old ones or see research and inspiration you’ve gathered.

Helpfully, you can install a “web clipper” on your browser that will copy web pages, images, PDFs or whatever you come across in your web travels into the notebook you choose. I’m working on a poetry project that has to do with the history of zero and the making of Persian carpets (among other things), so my notebook for that contains background articles, museum images of carpets, which I turn to when I’ve got a few minutes to write and need a starting point. The notebook also holds a growing number of lines and paragraphs from my daily writing.

If you’re so inclined, you can tag items for easier searching (I could, for instance, create a "knots" category).

Capturing notes on the run

Using the program to type notes on your phone and send them to a notebook, or write within the notebook itself, takes the impulse to text yourself a bit of writing and improves on it by putting your lines in a place where they can commune with each other. You can feel your writing grow when it hasn’t disappeared into a stream of unrelated text messages. If you’ve started, say, tapping lines into your phone after your workout at the gym, Evernote’s a handy place for them.

You can dive in and learn as much as you like about the program; it’s apparently got a million uses. I'm a minimalist. I spent a few minutes labeling notebooks, installing and trying out the web clipper, and tagging a few things for practice. And that very basic level of familiarity is all I really need. You can find more detailed information here and here.

One downside: I recently got a note from the Evernote folks saying they’d been attacked and that I needed to change my password. If you use a web-based program for your writing, be sure to back up your work and take the usual precautions to protect your privacy and online security.

Have you tried it? How'd it work for you. Let's compare notes in the comments.

P.S; If you're an early adopter, you may also want to try Google's brand new Evernote-like note-taking program, Google Keep, reviewed (and compared with Evernote) here.