A little while ago I brought forth the idea of what I’ve called “Practice Notes” — personal practical experiments in various areas of creativity and spirituality.
The point in these “practices” is to try to embed them into my life where I have otherwise previously avoided them, due to my own resistance, fear, and anxiety.
The first two practices have been . . . interesting.
[Read more…] about Shifts in the path
NOTE: I sketched this some years back, essentially writing what came to me as I listened to a piece of improv from one of my favorite bands, Phish (a rather elegant candle-lit ambient “After Midnight” jam from their Big Cypress festival). This is what I “saw” upon deep listening, and so, I sketched that scene. I should note that I’ve posted this in some form on previous incarnations of my blog/site, and I felt now was a good time to resurrect it.
Flickerlight in glass while the black backdrop fades into poor visibility. Mad scientist at the keys, bald head except for the sides, a man in front weaves six threads along a stitched thin neckboard and the flickerlight continues. Oh, they dance along to the midnight rhythms that hint at something, something’s at play, yes yes, there’s no one here to watch, they see all but none see them, and the speckled cotton shirt comforts the front man’s skin as it protects him from chafe, then to the left, another, mushroom-haired one jerks his head about along with the flickers, his fingers pop along thicker weaves, and only five threads for him, and he stands still, but the first, the six-thread weaver isn’t weaving anymore . . . he’s writing, using a short thin pen, flat and ink-less, but he’s writing nonetheless, the words printed in the void, the pageless page.
[Read more…] about They spoke after midnight
You’ve finished a story, an article, a poem, a blog post, an email, a text message. You’re ready to hit the “Post” or “Publish” or “Send” button, but . . . wait. Did you take another look at this work before you moved forward?
Whatever it is, you should proofread that thing before doing anything else with it.
I realize that, with many writers taking part in National Novel Writing Month (aka, NaNoWriMo), right now, the last thing you need to be doing right now is catering to the inner critic and editing your work as you go. That’s not what I am hinting at here — because with that NaNo work, you’re not at the proofread or editing stage yet. You’re at the unearthing stage, the part where you tell yourself the story and write for consistency and volume. And in reality, you may not be (and in many cases will not be) done writing your novel come November 30. What I’m talking about is what you do once you’ve finished that first draft of your work. It’s a simple process that works well for shorter pieces of writing, but can be applied to any first draft (or, really, any draft).
I recently realized that exhaustion is my drug of choice.
Well, not drug, that’s probably the wrong way to put it. But it’s certainly a goal.
And why? What do I mean by exhaustion? Why do I strive to be exhausted?
Before I answer, let me clear something up at the outset: I do not mean burnout. I cannot emphasize this enough. Burnout is nothing I endorse or condone, it’s the result of exerting oneself beyond one’s capacity, usually for something that doesn’t speak deeply to that person’s soul or life. I experienced burnout several years ago as part of work that, while starting as incredibly fulfilling, ultimately led down a road of meeting quotas and simply following a formula with no end in sight. There was no rest with this type of burnout, no start and no end, simply a looping cycle of work. And the result? Anxiety, irritability, heightened stress, poor diet, lack of sleep, poor mindset, panic, etc.
I also don’t mean exhaustion to the effect of “burning the candle at both ends.” This too, inevitably, leads to burnout. Rest is absolutely essential to the body and mind and should always come following the exhaustion I’m about to discuss. (I’m also, in a sense, talking about exhaustion metaphorically here, so bear with me.)
There is a story in the initial pages of Pema Chödrön’s book Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears that relays the tale of a man who tells his grandson that he has two wolves fighting in his heart. One wolf is filled with anger, the other filled with kindness. When the grandson asks which one will win the fight, the man says the one he chooses to feed. (I’m paraphrasing this story, of course — you can read an excerpt from the book here, which provides more context.)
I love this story. It’s the perfect metaphor for describing that what we give our energy to, thrives.
Another way to think about this is fueling the right fire. We all have multiple fires burning within us. Fires of passion, of rage, dwindling flames of grief, sparks of humor.
Indeed, the types of fires within us are endless. Great blazes, smoldering embers, spark-lights, and flickers — a wide variety, large and small. And we can always choose which ones we want to keep burning.
A few weeks back I read a pretty interesting piece in Psychology Today that highlights the importance of handwriting in the digital age. That’s a lofty topic, and I won’t digest the essence of the piece beyond that point, but I feel it’s something all writers should read and think about.
Needless to say, we live in a world that inundates us at every angle with a screen. More than ever before we have the ability to do almost anything we want with most of the devices we have access to. This includes writing. It’s possible now to write on our phones and then sync that work with what we have on our computers. It’s hard to deny the efficiency of this process.
But it doesn’t mean that everything needs to be written on a device with a screen. There’s still value, I feel, in the analogue way of writing, longhand, in a notebook. And, as the Psychology Today piece notes, there is a direct stimulation to the brain when you actually write this way.
I tend to hold myself back thinking there’s one right way to do something, when that’s rarely ever the case. Such as it is with writing — be it scribbling longhand with a pen or tapping away at the keys.
But it’s important to understand that journaling with a pen is not the same as journaling on a laptop. Neither is better or worse than the other. But if a main piece of writing (such as a book or an article or a blog or anything of that nature) is done with a keyboard, I don’t believe putting ideas that flow into that work onto a page will at all slow the process down. It more likely will fuel it, and give it a different and powerful form of energy. Writing longhand is a conversation with your notebook. The mouthpiece is the pen (or pencil or chalk or crayon or whatever it is you find helpful).
And regardless of the approach, I do welcome and appreciate writing on a computer. I love it, and enjoy working on my laptop. I love typing away and have been fortunate enough to become a pretty competent typist over the years. It carries for me a sort of rhythm, not at all unlike playing an actual musical instrument. I write articles and blogs on my laptop, and most of the fiction I’ve written, and will write, has been done on the computer.
But alongside all of that, when I want to get messy (or when I want to pour my paint-splattered mind onto the page), I open the actual pages of my worklog (i.e., journal i.e. logbook i.e. notebook) and start writing away.
Lists. Sketches. Notes. Mind maps. Thoughts. Affirmations. Goals.
These days, I personally use a composition-style notebook (the bagasse ones from Staples, to be specific) for my main logbook and journal. I’ve implemented a Bullet Journal-style approach, which I’ve customized a bit, because I don’t really follow all the Bullet Journal “rules.”
I’m also experimenting with smaller notebooks (currently using a stack of Moleskine cashiers journals) for specific projects — at the moment, my manifesto. I’ll do the same thing with another small journal for my novel, which will be what I’m working on after the manifesto is done and into the world. I’m not talking about creating character bibles or anything like that (though these little notebooks will undoubtedly contain character-related details), this is more of a set of field notes that I hope will guide me through these specific works of writing. Indeed, if the book or project warrants it, I’ll pull together several small notebooks as needed for a project (which actually makes more sense, now that I write this out).
The mind is a myriad of patterns and there’s a lot of beautiful value in filling page after page with ink, as much as there is filling page after page with text on a screen. They both matter, and complement one another.
And although it’s easy to look at a paper notebook as a primitive “device” in this day and age, analogue itself is not a primitive means of writing. It is a natural form of it.
So, use the pen, I say. Scribble and scratch away. Then move to the computer and play us a song in the key of words.
One additional perk to the paper notebook: it has unlimited battery life.