Twenty+ Ways To Be More Writerly

Adapted from C.M. Mayo. I'm not so great at these and might be posting them here mostly as a reminder to myself. Do as I say and as I try to do.

Distractions

Give up TV and social media. I'm 80% on this. Maybe 70%. I am less healthy in every way and write less when I'm regularly watching TV and checking social media. This I know.

Turn off phone notifications. The only notifications my phone makes are for texts and actual calls. Pro tip: shut off mobile data and you'll hardly ever look at the phone when out of the house. Even better, leave the phone home. My phone is more than a time-suck.

Avoid drama and gossip. I work in a dramatic school. Often, standing in the hallway, I hear gossip begin, wait a moment, then say something like "oh, I forgot," rush back into my classroom and look busy doing something so I escape that nonsense. Gossip is bad storytelling and a terrible writer's habit.

Ignore the news (more drama and gossip). I subscribe to two newspapers and should switch to weekly magazines, but I am weak. I'm trying to check the news no more than twice a day, but not succeeding. The news doesn't give me good ideas for writing.

Choose sports wisely. Go to sporting events, don't watch them on TV. Good Lord the commercials suck out my will to live and write.

Read and answer email twice a day. Checking email more than twice a day is crazy. And yet I've probably checked it a dozen times today. More fool me.

Minimalism & Organization

Attend to piles. Set a timer. Piles of bills, mail, articles, and magazines are obligations that suck energy and time from writing. Set a five minute timer and be ruthless at recycling and throwing away, then go back to writing.

Use a paper planner. It's flexible, doubles as a writer's notebook, and isn't a phone.

Minimize possessions and wear the same things. My older daughter is teaching me how to declutter. I'm okay wearing the same basic uniform to school daily. Easier than picking out clothes.

Stop shopping and spending. Ann Patchett turned me on to this. I'm reading Cait Flanders The Year Of Less and have kind of slipped into this. I write more if I spend less because I'm not so tied to a paycheck.

Everything in its right place. No searching. Keys and wallet in the drawer, watch and pen on the stand, phone on the charger, Radiohead song stuck in my head. Keep the house picked up too. Yeah, I need more work on this.

Health

Drink only with friends. Every glass of bourbon signals my brain that I'm done writing for the day. Since I have a day job, I can't afford to give up my night writing times. Sometimes I still do.

Drink water. It's the quickest and healthiest thing. It's also inexpensive out of the tap. I'm terrible about this. I like water while I'm drinking it but want anything but water when choosing what to have.

Cook meals as a break. Crank the music and bop around the kitchen. Totally enjoyable. Also saves money and, if I make lots, is lunch for the next couple days.

Get good sleep. Early to bed, early to rise really is the best advice. Sleep when the sun is down and rise in time for sunrise. Mornings are ten times more productive than evenings for me.

Thinking & Feeling

Let go the past unless it's fodder for writing. Yeah, I suck at this. I ruminate on things and obsess about what has already happened. Total waste of time and a drain of my energy. Lots of work to do here.
Let go the future. Plans are for suckers. Goals are for losers is a good idea even if Scott Adams is a turd. Do things instead of planning them. I have a lot of work to do here too. Too many plans for writing, not enough writing.

Run your own race. Don't envy other writers. Also, though it's fine to try and emulate others, I have to accept who I am and how I work.

Be Writerly

Use the commute. I'm listening to podcasts on my short commute. I haven't tried audio books but that's the next step. One more way to surround myself with writing.

Always carry pen, notebook/planner, and a book to read. Duh.

Do Morning Pages. For me, nothing beats starting the day writing. Nothing. It makes me more likely to think, see, listen, and act as a writer.

Morning Pages: Good Times, Bad Times

There will be mornings when life intrudes and you have to made decisions. These are the days that will test your system and shape it. They are bound to come. I'm having one this morning.

I'm at the kitchen table instead of my basement office. It is ten past eight instead of ten past five in the morning. I'm home late instead of going into my job. My younger daughter is asleep on the pullout couch instead of her bed. Yesterday she stepped on a board through which protruded two inches of drywall screw, an inch of which she drove through her shoe and the tender flesh of her foot. This all happened before seven last night. She, her mother, and I were came home from the emergency room close to one in the morning, all of us worn out, one of us still in a lot of pain. We made her as comfortable as we could on the pullout couch, my wife fixed up a terrible bed for herself on the love seat, I got out my computer and wrote lesson plans for a substitute teacher to give my class and then went to bed. It was after two before I slept.

This morning my wife and I were up before seven, groggy and stunned from all that had happened. A child's trauma becomes a kind of trauma for the parents and though this is minor compared to some of what I saw and heard at the hospital last night, it is still troubling and has knocked us off balance and out of our routine. No surprise. I came downstairs, emptied the dishwasher, but then instead of making coffee and taking it to the office with my pen to write Morning Pages, I picked up things in the kitchen, looked over the discharge papers, made a list of what I would need to do today to care for our girl, paid a bill that would soon be due, and tried to keep quiet enough to allow her to sleep. I greeted our older daughter and talked quietly with her, watched my wife get her work things together, scooped the litter, did whatever else seemed to need to be done. Other than my Morning Pages.

Getting out the computer, I opened my email and composed a message to family and friends telling the story of the night before. It took time to remember everyone to whom I needed to send the message. I wrote it, edited and revised it, then hit send. My first written words of the day were typed and not three pages long.

My older daughter caught a ride with a friend to school. I hugged her goodbye and watched her go. My wife packed her lunch and then said she was taking the dog for a walk before having to go to a training an hour away. I had expected to be walking the dog, but she insisted and took the dog with her outside. My younger daughter slept on in the den and I went to my living room desk, took three sheets of paper and my pen from there, brought them to the kitchen and sat down to write my pages.

Morning Pages are always the first thing I do each day and certainly the first writing of the day, except when they aren't. That happens only two or three times a year now for me. Over time doing my pages has taken precedence over almost any interruptions save emergencies of which I'm blessed to have very few.

Had I still been busy with the emergency this morning instead of just tired from dealing with it last night, the writing would have been pushed back. Still, even as I pushed it and dealt with the emergency I would be on the lookout for a time to begin writing. I see these things as breaks in the routine but not disruptions of the system, the way in which I now live. The process is resilient. It can withstand interruption. When my wife said she was taking the dog, my time was upon me and I started immediately. The process resumed. I went toward the comfort of Morning Pages.

In times of trouble I use the pages for reflection, solitude, peace in the storm, a return to normality. I wrote every day following my father's death. I wrote throughout my wife's cancer treatments. That's not moral fiber or dedication, so much as a selfish need to provide myself with the therapy of pen, paper, and routine.

There is no obvious, immediate return on writing three pages this morning. I'm more tired than when I started. My daughter's foot is still injured. There are still so many things to do. I wrote near the end of the third page the following: "I've maybe produced a draft of something for later, but who knows? And if someone cares about that, it isn't me. I'm in it for the long haul and to keep the process going come hell, high water, or drywall screws."

I keep to the daily habit, even when life intrudes and gets in the way. Good things come from that eventually. Some days almost right away.

Inbox Control (or lack of same)

Minimalism is a pursuit. I'm in the back of the pack. Working to clear my inbox I found myself opening tabs willy-nilly and seeming to get nowhere. Marie Kondo would be ashamed.

Getting my email read this morning has been an hour's work and then some. Part of it is to be expected. I'm home with my daughter who hurt herself yesterday and am happily distracted by her. That and almost every message either deserves a response or inspires me to think of things such as writing this.

Paul Jarvis's newsletter says that he treats work like driving: he doesn't text or get distracted while driving. I like that. I like it a lot. But in the middle of this paragraph I got up to get my girl ibuprofen, put dishes in the machine, and check two messages that came in on my phone.

I have several other newsletters in the inbox. They are like issues of The New Yorker piling up, leaving me gasping for time to read them all instead of just skimming the cartoons.

I need some kind of systematic approach. There are eighteen emails in my inbox. I'm alloting fifteen minutes' work on that while chronicling the results here. Can I be both efficient and thoughtful?

I begin with an email leading to a comment from Jerry on the blog. I posted this reply: I'm writing about going through my email inbox, trying to be efficient, maybe ruthless, but also thoughtful and open. Your comment here, for which I received an email notification, has led, as so many things do, not to a completed task but a happy desire to read more. It's almost like I'll never be done. Hey, there's a good idea for a bit of writing.

A message from Syracuse Stage said I'll soon receive information about the upcoming season. There's thirty seconds of my life lost. Archived.

Austin Kleon's newsletter led me to one of his posts and, God help me, a long article I want to read. I opened post and article in tabs and archived the newsletter.

I archived Syracuse University's note about post-season tickets knowing another will come tonight. Buh-bye.

Also archived was a note from my wife about which we argued this weekend. We've archived the argument too or snoozed it for later. We only argue about important stuff and often take weeks to work through. Thankfully, we don't hold grudges for long and I finally learned it's possible to be angry and still feel deep love. She knew that all along.

Next was the copy of my own newsletter. I posted a link for that to Twitter, though I'm not sure why. I closed Twitter before I lost myself to it.

I resisted subscribing to receive a Zen Quote Of The Week after enjoying one my friend sent. Isn't less more according to Zen philosophy?

Instead of fifteen minutes, I took eighteen and went from eighteen messages to eleven but have eleven tabs open in my browser. I'll take fifteen minutes to clear some of those.

I closed Android Messages and my copy of the newsletter within fifteen seconds.

The Austin Kleon post was one I read earlier this week. I'm grateful for the Vonnegut quote, James Martin's three simple ways to be kind, George Saunders quote about kindness, Roger Ebert late post, and more, and could linger with that post for a long time. It would be nice if my posts were as useful. I closed it and moved on.

I closed my blog post to which Jerry had replied by quoting Thomas Merton. Then I sent Jerry a link to an Alan Jacobs post about Merton and closed that tab too.

Then tabs left were all long pieces. I started with the Brainpickings article Jerry suggested. It includes this:

...that the things we pursue most frantically are the least likely to give us lasting joy and contentment, but there are other, truer things that we can train ourselves to attend to in the elusive pursuit of happiness.

My time was up then and good thing since I'm rethinking the idea of cleaning my inbox, closing all the tabs, being done. It's almost like I'll never be done. Hey, there's a good idea for a bit of writing.

Living is a series of complications. There is time to be ruthless, efficient, and dogged. There are times to let the river go by. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio."

It turns out that I have my dream inbox anyway. Not inbox zero, the completely organized and productive life, but one that is filled with the messages of friends and strangers that have me wanting to know more, to keep going, to respond in kind. I have eleven messages still waiting, calling to me from my inbox and three tabs waiting for me to work through those articles. It's okay. This is the good stuff.

But you know what's the great stuff? It's my daughter calling to me, asking me to come sit with her while she recovers from injury. It's the easy way in which I abandon the quest to be done and remember to go live my life.

Isn't It Romantic?

Alan Jacobs is a good thinker. In this post he's describing the decline of baseball's enjoyment as the game becomes much more efficient and business like. This is Moneyball, pure and simple. Jacobs isn't demanding that Major League Baseball go backward, and he doesn't use this word, but I bet he'd be okay with a lot less business and a return to romance.

I was reminded of this New York Times piece by Tim Wu, "The Tyranny Of Convenience" in which he questions the notion that convenience is even a good thing. I like that he uses the word tyranny in that title. Again, we sacrifice romance for convenience, profit, and efficiency. In the process, more often than we might like to admit, we lose.

Romance? Really? That's what we're after?

I know, I know. It sounds hokey, but consider for a moment the best things in our lives and they will all have to do with romance and romantic notions. All our higher order ideals are romantic, characterized by, or suggestive of an idealized view of reality. Jacobs is admitting that players, owners, and the league itself are all within their rights to want more money, but there's nothing romantic about that idea. Wu understands the desire and need for convenience, but the romantic idea it would free us from drudgery and lead to utopia is belied by the convenience of email, texting, and Slack. No romance there and certainly no utopia.

Yesterday I wrote about my desire to be a writer. Not a teacher who writes or an anything else that also rights, but a writer. There might not be money in it and the process will be inconvenient as hell for my family. But I'll tell you one thing: it's romantic as all get out and I'm in love with that.