Writing on the Run

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Love the life you live. Live the life you love.

~ Bob Marley

I have done a lot of driving this past month, and I have more trips coming. My shoulder is sore–one of those side-effects of aging, I think–and driving aggravates it. More important, being on the road disrupts my writing schedule. Knowing that I have a trip coming up is a kind of block to progress, a mental roadblock. I get tense. I feel as though one day of writing isn’t enough. Wouldn’t it be nice if I had two days in a row? Or a week in a row? How about a month of writing days in a row! Yes!

This is not to say that I don’t plan these trips myself. This is not to say that I don’t consider it my privilege to see my mother and take her to the doctor and shopping and out to lunch. (Besides, she buys my lunch.) This is not to say that fetching my 20-year-old home from Bellingham on Thursday doesn’t sound like a good thing.

But it is what it is. It’s funny that I never have any trouble wasting time — playing Spider Solitaire (crack cocaine for writers, Heather Sellers once told me), or getting stuck watching Reality TV with a daughter because the behavior of those people is just so weird. 

What I have to remind myself of, is that I don’t need scads and scads of time in which to write. I need 15 minutes. Lucky me, this morning I had several 15-minute blocks.

Lucky you. You have them, too. If you hear yourself saying, “I can’t,” I recommend that you go straight toward that can’t. I recommend that you embrace whatever it is that you’re resisting. Don’t use anything as an excuse to avoid  the pursuit of your passion.

Technically? All you ever have is now.

Puh-puh-procrastination…

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I sometimes give students a “how-to” assignment in which they get to write an essay teaching me (and the rest of the class) how to do something they are really good at. It’s surprising how many students write about procrastination. It’s surprising and funny. Ironic! I seriously doubt anyone can teach me anything about procrastination. I am a master-level procrastinator.

One way to procrastinate on getting writing done is to drop everything and read about procrastination. I recommend Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. He has an entire section on “Resistance,” which is procrastination by another name, and he says cheeky things like this:

“Creating soap opera in our lives is a symptom of Resistance. Why put in years of work designing a new software interface when you can get just as much attention by bringing home a boyfriend with a prison record?”

Another source I am happy to recommend is Roy Peter Clark’s chapter, “Turn Procrastination into Rehearsal,” from Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. 

cabin4And where am I on my project? Despite messing around with the blog for quite-a-long-time yesterday, I hit the 5,000 word mark in typing up the various scraps from my notebooks. I wrote 7 new pages, longhand, in a new notebook. And (perhaps most important) I had dinner with my friend Janet, who over the last few days reread the manuscript of Acts 1 and 2, and told me, as pleasantly as possible, that I must stop messing with what’s working.

More tomorrow.

How Old Is a Writer?

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How old do you have to be to write? I recommend that you write, right now. You are the age you are. It’s too late to start young. And it’s too early … well, you get the idea. Here’s a quote I came across yesterday:

“Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.” -Samuel Ullman

If you are wondering what has been going on with the site today (it’s gone through about 4 transformations), I believe it’s called PROCRASTINATION. Which I will write about … tomorrow. See you then.

Why We Write

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In my quest to blog every day in November, I thought I should add a reminder of why we write. I’ve loaned out my copy of Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing, but here’s Martha Alderson on the same topic:

“My most important insight is this: All of us face antagonists and hurdles, hopes and joys, and by meeting these challenges we can transform our lives. I have come to believe that every scene in every book is part of a Universal Story that flows throughout our lives, both in our imaginations and in the reality that surrounds us.” (Introduction, The Plot Whisperer)