Productivity
How to keep yourself on track when your muse goes AWOL.
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What Were You Thinking???
More often than not, when writers start writing about a subject, we have no clue what it is we plan to say. “I write to find out what I think.” ― Stephen King “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” — Joan Didion Sure, we can put together an outline that gives us a rough roadmap, but until we actually sit down and start the ideation process, we can’t possibly know what our thoughts are until we have them on the page or screen in front of us. Only…
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Breaking the Procrastination Habit
First, let’s see if we can figure out what procrastination is and why we do it. Where does it come from? What purpose does it serve? Procrastination has been described as “a voluntary delay of an intended act despite the nagging awareness that we’ll pay for it later”. Even though we know avoidance is a self-defeating coping mechanism, it feels better in the moment to turn our backs on what we know to be the right choice in favour of something that’s less emotionally challenging. Procrastination and avoidance act as short-term mood improvements. They’re immediately gratifying. They allow us to escape the proposed task and its associated…
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Perfectionism and Writer’s Block — It’s All About the Baby Steps, Baby!
This week, I’ve been trying to come up with a riveting blog post idea and I’ve spent nearly two hours dithering, avoiding the problem. Rather than picking one of the hundreds of topics I’ve collected for times like this, I logged onto Joseph Michaels’ UnChained Writers, my favourite online chat group for writers, where I knew I would find others who’d understand and commiserate when I whined and complained about how stuck I was feeling. “Why do we do that to ourselves?” I said, and gave myself a little pep talk…“Okay, goofball! Just pick one and run with it. Something will come out of it, even if it’s not…
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Autobiography vs. Memoir
What’s the Difference? Autobiography? Biography? Memoir? Story? Creative Non-Fiction? Personal Essay? All too often, when a writer decides to “write their memoirs”, they are thinking about an autobiography — the story of their entire lifetime. Calling it a memoir is a misnomer. Autobiographies and Memoirs are not the same. So, what is the difference? Autobiography “Auto”, from the Latin, means “self”. “Bio” means “life”. So an autobiography is your own life story written by yourself. A Biography, on the other hand, is a life story written by someone else, like a ghostwriter. “Bi” meaning two or dual. An Autobiography is an author’s complete life story,…
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What Comfort Zone Can I Step Out Of Today?
On a Jim Fortin podcast this week, I heard the phrase, “What comfort zone can I leave today?” This really resonated with me. To leave a comfort zone means we need to change, and that’s not an easy thing to do. We like our status quo. It’s comfortable. We understand it. It’s not challenging or painful or hard. We love our routines. I’m reminded of the hermit crab. This little guy carries around the empty shell of another creature as his home and his protection, but whenever he grows too big for his current shell, he must find another, larger one and take a leap of faith that he’ll be…
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Daydreaming as an Art Form
“Idle minds are the devil’s research-and-development department.” — Robert Stacy McCain Daydreaming, a definition: noun The activity of thinking about pleasant things that you would like to do or have happen to you, instead of thinking about what is happening now. Daydreaming appears to be the brain’s default setting when no other external task is occupying its attention. For years, those of us who spent hours inside our own heads were considered time-wasters, dreamers who couldn’t live in the “real world”, unsuited for the practical requirements of daily living. We were called Procrastinators and we were taught to wake up and smell the coffee, stop dithering, get back to work and all the other sensible, pragmatic advice that goes along…
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Creative Writing, Productivity, Structure and Plotting, Theme, Purpose and Outcome, Training, Lessons
How to Focus your Blog Post
Start with the End in Mind Recently, a reader asked me, “How do you write a story with the end in mind? How do you know what the end is before it’s written?” He was responding to a blog post in which I wrote about using constraints to spark creativity. One of the points I made was: “Writing with the end in mind applies especially to writing memoirs. When you first apply a life lesson, a theme, a psychological or theoretical point to the memoir as its raison d’être, you don’t need to think about everything that doesn’t fit the point. “But if you don’t…
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Creative Writing, Organization and Research, Productivity, Prompts, Structure and Plotting, Theme, Purpose and Outcome
Less Is More
This morning, I went into my writing group completely unprepared to write. I had to show up at 11:00 a.m. and I’d been doing something else when the timer startled me with its petulant beeping, reminding me to get online immediately, if not sooner! Now, most times, when I go into the group, I know what I’m going to write — at least I have some idea or framework for the words I’ll be putting down — but for some reason, this morning I had completely forgotten that I had to write this blog post, so when one of my writer friends asked me what I’d be working…
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Creativity, Productivity, Thoughts, Opinions and Philosophical Discussions, Training, Lessons, Writers and Writing
Are you a terrible writer?
Have you ever suddenly decided halfway through a writing project that it’s all crap? That everything you’ve done up to this point is garbage and you’ll never be a “real” writer? Do you habitually reach a point in your drafts when you convince yourself that it’s not good enough, it’ll never be good enough, and you should throw it out and start over, but you desperately try to stick with it, even though you have an overpowering urge to delete your work and start again with a different style or P.o.V. or…anything? Welcome to the world of the frustrated writer. Anyone who’s any good at all…
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The Evils of Comparison
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” ― Oscar Wilde The saints are the sinners who keep on trying. — Robert Louis Stevenson Do you think you’re a crappy writer? Why do you think that? Did someone tell you that your writing sucks? Where did this belief originate? Whose voice do you hear in your head? Was it a teacher in the third grade or the fifth or the tenth, telling you that you’re not good enough to be a writer? I call bullshit! You’re not being fair to yourself — You’d never ask a child to paint like Rembrandt, dance like Nureyev, or sing like Pavarotti,…