Category: writers notebook (Page 2 of 4)

Notebook at the Dining Room Table

April 17, 2023 / / 0 Comments

One thing I’ve noticed lately is that my focus during my writer’s notebook (WNB) time has been getting a bit scattered. I usually write in my WNB at my work desk in the mornings, and my computer is right nearby (it’s an L-shaped desk), so as I’ve started writing in the notebook, my brain will get the itch to check some email or internet-y thing, and before I know it, I’m toggling between the WNB and the computer.

Not a great move for what’s supposed to be analog, handwritten, pen-and-paper time. I really value the act of handwriting in my notebook. It uses a different part of my brain; it generates ideas differently than my computer typing does. I sometimes do those mind-map things in my WNB, or I draw charts, so using pen and paper instead of a word processor is suitable. But generally, I just like writing by hand and keeping all my stuff in a notebook.

And yet, when I write at my work desk, the computer is always siren-songing, trying to get me to click on something, and I have little power to resist. The WNB writing becomes hectic and scattered and often truncated.

As things would have it, this morning I wrote in my WNB at the dining room table. And guess what? I wrote a good two and a half pages without interruption. I got deeply immersed in the topic I was writing about, and I felt a lot calmer and more thoughtful afterward. The complete opposite of the scatterbrained, divided self I’ve become at the work desk.

Austin Kleon has talked about his analog and digital workspaces, and I guess I thought I had those two spaces in the two lengths of my L-shaped desk. One side housed my computer (digital workspace), the other a clear, open desk (analog). But they’re not two separate desks, and the reality is that the digital workspace has a kind of foggy aura that creeps from the computer and envelopes the entire desk, both sides of the L. I’m not kidding that the computer is a kind of singing siren. Even if I try to focus on my WNB, the screen is just over my shoulder, a huge shiny-eyed overlord, watching and willing me to turn my focus toward its all-consuming gaze.

At the dining room table, I’m free of the screen’s glare. I can actually immerse myself in the blank page without feeling like some omnipresence is watching me.

That’s the thing about these screens, isn’t it? Even when we’re not using them, when we’ve got them turned off or in sleep mode, or the cover on the iPad is closed, their very presence in our proximity makes us itchy and anxious. Better click on that browser just to see what’s going on… Better open that app just to check…

This behavior is antithetical to what I want from my WNB. Being at the dining room table — surrounded by windows to the outside where the bird feeders are active with songbirds and squirrels — and away from any digital device, means I can focus deeply on the WNB.

Maybe I need to do my notebook writing at the dining room table every morning.

Writing By Hand

December 14, 2022 / / 0 Comments

My writing has been hampered lately by a fear-based mindset. Every time I sit down at the computer to work, I look at my work-in-progress and worry that whatever I write next will be garbage. I’ll ruin the whole story.

This fear is crippling. I know rationally that I can always write a sentence and then change it if I don’t like it. But this doesn’t solve all the insecurities and fears that aren’t rational. It doesn’t address all my doubts.

I sit at the computer and doubt my judgment: Will I have the necessary skill to recognize a bad sentence, a bad plot line, a bad detail? What if my judgment is faulty? What if I write badly and can’t see it? Then I’ll have ruined my whole story. No one will like it. No one will read it. I’ll embarrass myself.

I hate these thoughts. I hate having these insecurities. But it’s very difficult to suppress them. I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of them. I’m looking for ways to overcome them, but I’m not sure what to do.

In the past, I’ve used 4thewords to help me get through these doldrums, but the more I used this online writing game, the more I felt like my stories became a means to an end. I wrote not because I wanted to spin a good yarn but because I wanted to earn points and level up in the game. This is an issue with gamification in general: extrinsic rewards supplant intrinsic ones. When I was using 4thewords to get my stories finished, I ended up thinking of my stories as vessels for earning points. What I wrote wasn’t important, it was just the amount that mattered. I needed enough words to defeat a bunch of monsters, not to tell a compelling story.

I stopped using 4thewords because I didn’t like that it was training my brain to write for points. But I can’t deny that it helped me get over a lot of my fears about the blank page. I’m sure it works very well for many writers, but for me, my brain was learning all the wrong lessons.

What I’d like to discover this time around is a way to get over my fears that doesn’t involve gamification or substituting extrinsic rewards for intrinsic ones.

(Side note: I know I probably need to work on figuring out why I have these fears in the first place and put effort into changing my mindset. I’ve tried addressing my mindset in the past, and while I’ve seen some progress in tamping down my perfectionism and imposter syndrome, I’ve not made enough progress to alleviate writer’s block entirely. One of the best strategies I’ve come across is to switch what I’m working on. I’m kinda doing that now, in fact… writing a blog post instead of working on a story. This old switcheroo is great for getting my fingers typing again, but it creates a problem when it comes to finishing things. If I’m always switching projects, I’m never finishing them. This strikes at the heart of the problem: I haven’t truly addressed my fears. Switching projects might help the initial block, but it doesn’t help my overall perfectionism and self-doubt.)

The only strategy I can think of at the moment is to leave my screen behind and switch to drafting on paper. I love writing by hand and do it everyday in my Writer’s Notebook, but when I’m working on an essay, newsletter, or fiction story, I tend to write on the computer. I can type much faster than I can handwrite. If the ideas are flowing quickly, my keyboard is the better tool for getting words down faster.

But the computer screen invites a kind of formality into the process. I don’t know why it does, it just does. I sit at the computer, stare at the screen, and feel like whatever words I type on the screen are THE words. They are weirdly hard to extricate from the story. I know deleting things on the computer is super easy. One strike of the keyboard and whole pages can be swept into nothingness. I know this, but yet my brain sees those words on the screen, existing with all the other words I’ve already written, and it starts to believe that those words are practically published, practically finished and ready for the reader to see.

Maybe I should blame blogging for this development in how my brain works. After all, I type the words into the text field on WordPress, and with one click of a button, they are published to the internet. How could my thinking not be affected after more than a decade of blogging, of composing words on the computer and expecting them to be published with one click?

But my Writer’s Notebook is different. In my WNB, I handwrite everything. I don’t show anyone my notebook. It’s not meant to be published. If I write something in the notebook that later becomes an essay or newsletter or story, I usually change things when I retype the handwritten words into the computer. A word here or there, adding things, cutting things, etc. The handwritten words are for me and me alone. Only when I type them up do I decide they might have merit for another reader.

Because of this habit, I know my brain associates handwriting with experimentation, privacy, and play. Typing is for “professional” stuff. Handwriting is for me. It’s where I go to enjoy myself. Just as typing up blog posts has trained my brain to associate typing with publishing, my WNB has trained my brain to associate handwriting with joy and relaxation.

What I need to rediscover is the intrinsic reward of writing a story just for the pleasure of writing a story. No more points or leveling up. No more typing on the computer always with an eye towards the “publish” button.

What if I told stories to myself, handwriting them on a yellow legal pad or in my Writer’s Notebook? What if I thought only about the fun and experimentation that comes with writing by hand? Will this free me from the pressure to be “good”? To escape the trap of perfectionism that always seems to creep up when I’m typing on the computer?

Whether this is a quick fix or a permanent solution, I can’t say. I do know that when I think about that yellow legal pad, when I imagine myself scribbling words onto it, I get excited. Handwriting means experimentation. Play. Joy. When I’m writing by hand, the pressure is off. Thinking about that yellow legal pad, about the movements of my fingers as the black ink streaks across the page, I suddenly want to start writing the next sentence of my story. I want to see where my hand will take me. The computer screen feels like a closed, sterile room. The handwritten page feels like a wild and winding path.

Missing Days and Poetry

September 14, 2022 / / 1 Comment

The reading challenge ebbed and flowed. I don’t know if I really succeeded. Some days I read more than others. Some days I fell victim to my own addiction to surfing the internet. The addiction is deep. As soon as I think I’m master of my attention, something happens to draw me back to the “abyss of Total Noise” that is scrolling the web.

What a perfect metaphor. A web. Like flies, we’re caught.

It’s not that I think the internet is a bad thing. I literally would not have met my husband or developed a career as a professional writer and editor if the internet didn’t exist. I might have met another husband or made a career as a writer in some other way, but not in the way I did. I’m grateful for the internet.

But it is a web. A vast web. And that vastness has been a double-edged sword.

Anyway, the reading challenge was a bit “meh.” I wish I had been better about carving out my reading time. But life — always life — intervenes. Children with broken arms. Emergency room visits. Power outages. Deadlines. Exhaustion.

I suppose I can try again with a new challenge, but is that just setting myself up for another failure? I also made a pledge to blog (nearly) everyday, and that has been a bust as well. So many missing days. Weeks gone by and nothing posted.

Perhaps the better thing to focus on is my persistence. Despite all these setbacks and failures and inabilities to maintain a challenge, I have a stubborn inability to give up. Even as I fail at these challenges, I keep going. Maybe there’s merit in that (or some form of insanity!).

I used an old Austin Kleon prompt today in my writer’s notebook. I can’t find anything on his blog about it, but I know I first got the idea from his writings. Here’s a link to elsewhere that explains the prompt: Spine Poetry.

So, these are the book titles sitting on my desk right now: The Sleeping Dragon, The Broken Lands, The Tolkien Reader, Maps of the Imagination, The Summer Book, The Fall of Arthur, The Once and Future King, The Lore of the Land, The Book of Idle Pleasures, Listen to the Echoes.

And here is my poem made from the titles along the spines:

 

Listen to the echoes:

the lore of the land,

the fall of Arthur (the once and future king),

the broken lands,

the sleeping dragon.

 

Maps of the imagination:

the Tolkien reader,

the summer book.

 

The book of idle pleasures.

Tuesday Morning Poem

August 23, 2022 / / 0 Comments

That watery squirt

from the mustard bottle

is the saddest yellow.

Weak and dirty-looking,

like day-old dishwater,

it doesn’t even have the

prickly tang of real

mustard.

 

Yellow must be bold or

else it risks disappearing

into the plate.

 

Not like the yellow of

sunflowers or marigolds,

or even the pale yellow

of that mustard stain

on my shirt, which

may be sad, but it

speaks to happier picnics

and sustenance

and glorious afternoons

under the sun.

Really Wanting It

August 13, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I hadn’t written any fiction for several days — lack of time, lack of ideas, stress — but today, as part of my daily notebook writing, I started visualizing a future in which I made all my income through writing books. At first I just imagined a kind of ideal day: writing in the morning for several hours, doing publishing and marketing related stuff in the afternoon, reading books, taking a long walk, etc. But then I started to realize how my three hours of writing time in the morning could add up to some serious word count totals. Even if I struggled for the day and only managed 2,000 words in my three hours time, that would add up to hundreds of thousands of words if I stayed consistent and wrote six days a week for a whole year.

I was confronted — once again — with the reality that if I wanted to be a full-time author, I would need to commit to writing for several hours per day. Not anything exorbitant — not seven or eight hours — but simply two or three hours. An afternoon, perhaps. Or a couple of hours in the morning. Or at night after the kids are in bed. But I would need to be consistent. I would need to stay motivated.

I would need to really want it.

Yes, of course, I’d really wanted to be an author, from the time I was a kid, but what I was reminded of yesterday is that if I was going to be a full-time, making-money-from-my-books kind of author, I would have to write A LOT more books. A lot more. I would need to commit to those two or three hours per day.

Which means I would need to be desperate for it. Not just wanting it in that dreamy, wouldn’t-it-be-great sort of way, but in a visceral, my-kids’-lives-depend-on-it sort of way. Not that my kids’ lives depend on me writing 2,000 words per day. After all, I can always get a “regular” job (or go back to teaching… heh). But if I was serious about being full-time, I would need to write as if my kids’ lives depended on it.

What would I do if it meant my kids’ survival? I would sit my butt in that chair and write like my hair was on fire.

Maybe even then, maybe after ten or fifteen or twenty books I still wouldn’t be making a full-time (or part-time) income, but I would need to do it first — I would need to seriously try — to know if it could work. I would need to write with a kind of furious determination.

So after that little notebook reality check, I sat down at the computer and hammered out 1,500 words. It took me a little over an hour (and then I had to get dinner ready).

Can I keep this energy going? Can I sit for two hours every day and write with this same gusto?

If I want to make a living at this, I’ll have to. It’s as simple as that.

Reading Challenge Update:

Mostly Pachinko today, though I did read a few more essays from the Sarah Ruhl book. Even though Ruhl is writing about theater, I’m finding a lot to think about as a fiction writer. Good stuff about plot, structure, character, etc. Love the essay on Ovid and transformation! It speaks to the fantasy writer and fairy tale lover in me. Might write more about it for a future blog post or newsletter essay…

The Next Line

August 12, 2022 / / 0 Comments

A Year of Writing Dangerously by Barbara Abercrombie was okay as far as these kinds of writerly books go. I bookmarked a bunch of quotes (usually from other writers whom Abercrombie herself quotes), but what I really liked were the writing exercises at the back.

Fifty-two exercises, presumably one for each week of the year. I’m a bit of a sucker for writing prompts since I started giving my students a prompt every day for their notebook time. I couldn’t possibly make up a writing prompt every day for my students, so I started borrowing (stealing?) them from other sources.

I am no longer teaching, but I’ve gotten into the habit of seeking out new prompts to steal. Sometimes I use them myself, other times I don’t. If I don’t like a prompt from a book or article, I just ignore it. But more often than not, even a prompt that doesn’t instantly thrill me can be fruitful. If I force myself to write something for a prompt — even one I don’t find particularly inspiring — I often end up writing something interesting, maybe even good.

This is evidence of the theory that parameters and boundaries lead to creativity. Total freedom doesn’t always lead to the most creative art (though sometimes it can… I’m not a big believer in absolutes when it comes to creativity, writing, making art, etc. Sometimes total freedom can lead to something wildly creative, and other times not. And sometimes parameters and boundaries are stifling and kill creativity. There are no absolutes).

Anyway, these prompts from the Abercrombie book are pretty good. Short, simple in their directions, but pretty wide in their application and execution.

I started with the first one: “What is your own metaphor for fear of writing that first line? Imagine a landscape or animal or weather or music or whatever springs to mind.”

I did modify a bit. Instead of “fear of writing that first line,” I changed it to “fear of writing that next line,” because for me, first lines are easy. Someone in a setting with a problem. Or something provocative. Or a question.

(Not a literal question, like a rhetorical question or something, but a line that raises a question, i.e.: “The dung heaps were always spouting poetry,” and then the reader is like, “Huh?” and they want to find out the answers, like how is it possible that dung heaps can even spout poetry, and then, furthermore, why would they spout poetry of all things? What kind of poetry? Is anyone listening to it? That sort of thing.)

Anyway, first lines are not my problem. It’s next lines. What comes next after that provocative statement or that someone in a setting with a problem. That’s where I struggle.

Because next lines mean you have to deliver. You have to answer the story questions in a satisfying way, in a way that makes readers oooh and aaah. That is ridiculously hard. And terrifying. All the promise of the first line and then you shit the bed. It’s my biggest weakness, this fear.

First lines are the open road, the horizon off in the distance. There’s the promise of adventure, of revelation, of greatness. But the line that comes after — the next line, always the next line — that’s like finding out the horizon you were heading toward is just one of those Looney Toons landscapes painted on the rock wall. It’s like finding out you’re Wile E. Coyote going splat.

All this time I think I know where I’m going, I’m excited for the journey, and then BLAM! I hit a wall. That feeling of promise, that endless horizon was all just a trick. I was really headed for an illusion, a vision of greatness that, in reality, was the side of a mountain. I’m worse than lost: I’m splattered like roadkill on the rock.

See, lost isn’t bad. Lost means you can find your way. The detour or digression could turn into a fun episode.

But the splat? That’s a total dead end. It’s embarrassment. I thought I knew what I was doing, but that next line is just waiting there to prove to myself and my audience that I suck. What happens when I write that next line and go splat? I slide down like a glob of jelly or a flattened pancake: defeated, ridiculous, a fool. We laugh at Wile E. Coyote, and that’s exactly what I fear. The embarrassment of failure.

Interestingly, the Coyote always runs full-throttle at that painted vista. Time after time after time. He never learns. It’s like he’s immune to embarrassment. Or has short-term memory loss. Either way, the splat doesn’t stop him. Every time, he’s right back at it, chasing the Road Runner down that endless road.

I’m not sure if this gives me comfort or not. But it’s a metaphor for something.

Reading Challenge Update:

Day 7, did more morning reading than evening/night reading today. Maybe this is the start of a trend. Reading at breakfast, before I start my journey downstairs to write and edit. In the past I’ve resisted morning reading because I feared that reading someone else’s work would interfere with ideas for my own work. But if I’m honest with myself, my mind is pretty blank in the morning. I’m often an empty vessel. So maybe morning reading is good: It’s a way to fill up the tank.

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