My typical view of the field during a number of Colt League games Image by Kelsey Vere from Pixabay (though considering this post’s topic, she’d probably wish she wasn’t credited…)
Ah, yes, my glorious days as a Colt League player. Not to brag, but I was probably the 15th best player…on a team of 12. Unless you count game nights, where the lineup might dwindle to 8, if we were lucky. At which point we would troop over to Mark M’s house and drag him away from the dinner table so we could field a complete team. Those nights actually boosted my spirits, as I was then the ninth best player on the team.
Get your writing done first because it’s not easy to crank up the momentum and confidence needed to fill your pages.
After breakfast, I launched into decluttering…even before shaving and cleaning up. Not only did I feel grungy [counterproductive in its own right]
A. I wasn’t writing.
B. I was wasting that precious morning buzz [i.e. creative energy] on sifting through and boxing ‘stuff’.
C. I didn’t crank out that initial ‘first 100 words’ on paper, a practice I started when I homed in on mindfully ‘showing up’ to my creative projects.
D. I was getting annoyed by A. and B and C.
Luckily, choosing to reconnect with a former student and a former teaching colleague, I did get my keyboarding fingers moving and real words [with value, even!] danced across the screen. AND I’ve even resisted the urge to turn on the AFC Championship game. AND I’ve chosen to not answer a text message till today’s words are done. [Thank you, thank you. You can stop rolling your eyes now.]
So, I guess the lesson for today is: Don’t give up hope. You can rise above all kinds of obstacles, even the self-imposed ones, and move forward with your projects.
NOTE: If your word processor offers the ‘Focus’ feature that displays just your text–no distracting menus, programs running in the background–give it a try.
Don’t worry. No fatalities…though running that highway cop onto the median wasn’t my finest moment.
And then there was the burrito cart guy who…well, anyway, yes, making a drive up north and a notebook is on my lap and I’ve gotten pretty good at writing without looking. It’s almost as if I look forward to slowed traffic so I can decipher a few items where the pen [or the mind] went a bit astray.
Some mid-trip observations:
1. The reach-for-popcorn instinct is irrepressible.
2. The reach-for-popcorn instinct while driving and writing is dangerous, especially for those humans with only two hands.
4. James Taylor’s Christmas Album–pretty nice August road trip listening, actually. It came along for the ride during a hurried toss of CDs into the travel bag.
I try to get in 500 words in the morning, but even if I only generate that first hundred, that’s usually all the momentum I need to finish the additional 400 later on.
Also, because I can forget a topic I want to address, I have lately found myself jotting them down at the top of my page, almost as if they’re agenda items…bullet points and everything. Pretty sad, isn’t it?
Rather than go to the trouble of buying and administering tranquilizers to skittish pets on July 4th, how about we track down and tranquilize the mouth-breathers who set off fireworks in the late night?
Not enough? Partial lobotomies or personality transplants come to mind.
“No need to pay a fine, you guys. Just step right in for a quick noise abatement orientation…”
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And while I’m at it, how many of the folks who slap together those fireworks stands for a quick buck are also owners of skittish pets?
Do you listen to music when you write, or do you prefer silence, or something else on in the background?
“…70 percent of the time I will listen to music with headphones so it’s right up in my ear. I will usually make one or two playlists for a book and I will listen to the same playlist over and over and over again…if I find a playlist that I kicked into a flow state with really early on in my process and was very successful I will keep using it because it will keep driving that flow.”
When you’re staring at the screen at 4:00 AM, do you just start clicking away? What’s going through your head at that initial moment?
“Even if the day before was a terrible writing day, I am so fired up to go at it again. I can be an absolutely miserable writer sometimes, but I wake up every day so fired up to do this.”
And finally, to put me to shame with all my finger pointing…
“When I wrote West of Jesus I had spent three years in bed with Lyme disease and I needed to tell that story to open the book, but I thought, ‘I spent three years in bed with Lyme but who cares? Compared to getting cancer or losing a limb, so what?’”
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What’s your favorite music to carry you through your writing sessions?
Word Inventions 