One Thousand Words a Day: Taking Your Writing to the Next Level

We are what we repeatedly do.

Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

Aristotle

“How much do you write a day?” I get asked often at writer’s conferences and booksignings.
“Do you want to know how much I type or how much I think–because writing is thinking,” I usually answer. And that’s true, but I’m a bit convicted by that question. Writing and creativity coaches such as Dr. Eric Maisel and Carolyn See recommend the thousand words a day rule. That’s four double-spaced pages. First thing in the morning is often suggested–before life takes us down the river and dumps us out that evening, exhausted and blurry-eyed from our too-busy days.

I write all day. I write emails. I write blogs. I spit-polish an article. But do I work on my novel(s), short stories, or creative nonfiction every day? I don’t type/work on them every day, no. And there is my conviction. Writing is a muscle. It gets stronger and more supple with consistent use.

Don’t feel like it? Have nothing new to add? Stuck? Avoiding?

Flannery O’Connor said that she showed up for the page every day at 9am sharp–whether inspiration showed up or not (obviously paraphrased).

Big-time writers–seriel writers–they have publishers waiting, contracts signed. They rise early and hit the page hard. It’s a job for them. Most creative types don’t like to connect the word “job” to art, as if that takes away the holiness/whole-ness of creativity, but perhaps we’ve gone too purist for our own good.

If I consider writing my chosen profession, my career, daresay my calling, then I would get up and get dressed and get busy–because of a paycheck and/or the belief that someone needed what I had to say. I press the alarm clock at 6:30 each morning and watch my engineer husband dress by bathroom light. He’s an engineer. He gets up and goes to work. Feeling like it isn’t a daily consideration.

I have to admit I’ve been kind of a binger when it comes to writing. When I’m really working on a novel I’m stuffing my face/my thoughts/my day, and I’m pulling 12-15 hour days on a novel revision. Yes, at times, that’s needed, but it’s time to get back to the daily-ness of taking my writing to the next level.

It’s not that I don’t write–often–it’s that I’ve been using my thinking excuse a bit too much. Thinking is writing, that is true, but typing is writing applied. I can think about cooking all day, but I can’t eat thinking come dinnertime. Same-same.

So, it’s time to recommit–again.

I kiss my engineer hubby goodbye and I settle in–first thing. Not to email. Not to blog.

To write. A thousand words.

Struggling to Finish? Writers and Artists Explore What It Takes

Finishing a novel. The last brush stroke of a painting. How do you know when you’re done? How in the hell do you make/force/cajole/trick yourself into absolutely completing a project? Writers, artists and musicians struggle with this dilemma more than most. Yes, there are deadlines, gallery openings, contests, and commitments, but sometimes even they don’t work. The creative process can be elusive, if not downright maddening.

The devil don’t care how many miles you make

just as long as you don’t make that last one. “

~My Mama

My southern fundamentalist mama pretty much said it all. Except I’ve kind of learned that blaming the devil is a cop-out.  It’s me. I’m the one. I avoid. I sputter and stall. I go into zombie land and forget how important my art is to me. How can I do that? Why do I do that?

I blame fear (another name for the devil, I’m guessing by now) It’s as if I’m afraid of finishing. If I finish it won’t be there any more. If I finish I’ll have to really risk myself and submit the dang thing. If I finish it can be rejected.

Now I’m getting somewhere. (nothing like a bit of self-therapy)

I love that art allows me freedom and yet in that freedom is aloneness and loneliness. When I’m afraid I don’t want to be alone. I need a buddy. An attagirl. I need a hard kick on the backside to tell me to stop whining and finish the damn thing already.

Creativity Coach, Dr. Eric Maisel wrote something to consider in Coaching the Artist Within.

• Make plans and train yourself to honor them.

That’s it. Nothing magnanimous. Maisel reminds me to turn down the voices in my mind and act like a professional, suck it up and do it. Sounds harsh but rings true. I simply cannot indulge my fears. It does no good–not to me or my art.

I call this keeping my word to myself.

Some time ago I heard some self-help guru say that we do far more damage to ourselves by not keeping our word and following through than anything our parents, ex’s, or bad bosses ever did to us. It rang so true that I never forgot it. Since really getting this concept I’ve been a bit better about stepping up to my own artistic plate. Then I read Maisel’s version of the same thing:

“First comes the dream, the desire, the inner compulsion, the passion, the obsession. Next comes the testing in the real world, the sweat, the phone calls, the revisions, the disappointments, the committment to more effort. the dream is the helium balloon, and reality is the string.

A wise creator joyously fills up his balloon but keeps the string firmly in grasp.”

I read these words and take a deep breath. Yeah, I really do love I do. I love to write. I love telling stories. I love creating worlds. I love the torment of revision. I may not love being rejected but I love when I understand something I didn’t get before now–and sometimes that comes by what an editor or publisher says when they say no. And I try again. And I get closer. And I love that, too.

And I’ve found that if I do this enough (writing, submitting, teaching, speaking, marketing) that I get to enjoy a modicum of success.

I still wrestle with the fears. Okay, sometimes a lot, but in the end I know that I don’t want to keep letting myself down.

I will take
up my pencil, which I have forsaken in great discouragement, and I will go
on with my drawing, and from that moment everything has seemed
transformed in me.”

Vincent Van Gogh

This is the where Vincent was taken immediately after his ear incident in December of 1888. The courtyard is just as it was--serene.

Where and When Do You Create? Artists and Writers Studios: A Limit or a Haven?

Does where you create contribute to your art? Do you find your studio inspiring–or stifling? Would you rather write at a cafe–or paint plein air? I don’t know about you, but sometimes I just don’t want to go to  my work space even though I dreamed of having and creating this place. Why do I avoid it? It’s a great office/studio, decked out with all my books, my inspirational quotes, my bounty of supplies, a decent view–but sometimes I just can’t get in the groove of work.

Creative space is a haven, something most artists yearn for–and yet it may not be a necessity–not in the era of laptops, portable paint supplies and the ability to get in your car at any given moment.There is something about a desk to center you, give you a place to come back to. Previous authors had typewriters (among other things)that kept them tethered.

Many great writers and artists have had to deal with limits whether they liked them, felt they needed them, or not. Some limits were self-imposed. Others born of disease or just plain on life exacting its toll. Vincent Van Gogh and many others dealt with mental illness. He removed himself from the party life of France to paint in Arles and the South of France, and when he got really sick he checked himself into a mental asylum and wrote, “I fear that I no longer can live independently.” There, at St. Paul de Mausole he created some of his most beloved masterpieces such as Starry Night–130 in a year–all while batting suicide attempts, seizures, and crippling melancholy. Guess I have little to complain about compared to all that.

Still, creativity can be rather elusive. Discipline helps, and while showing up at a desk at the same time every day can help carve the neural pathways to make it conducive to lure creativity to come and nest, it’s not a guarantee. Many authors and artists swear by the early morning hours, that other-worldly, half concious, half dream-state time to write. Others swear by late nights and a  couple of shots of bourbon, although that would really put me in lah-lah land.

I do know that a certain amount of avoidance or un-productivity comes in tow with the creativity process, at least for most of us. After some circling (hours, days, weeks…who’s counting?)  I usually settle in and once I’ve found my zen state I try my best not to break it. I let the popcorn bags stack up, don’t answer the phone, stay in my writing clothes (aka pj’s or sweatpants) and keep going as long as the vein is flowing. Even sleep is optional at some point.

If that’s a limit, then it’s a good limit. Too many choices for an artist is the equivalent to standing in the toothpaste aisle in a near zombie state trying to figure out the difference between a whitener and a brightner and if I need pro-enamel and gel, or paste, or extra strength, or…or….

I’ve learned that when too many options might not be a good thing. They just confuse and overwhelm me. Sometimes I have to shore up my own walls and place my own limits. Breathe. Keep it simple. Go with what’s least complicated.

Trust.

Creativity will most likely come out to play when it feels safe.

From this window at St. Paul de Mausole in St. Remy France is where Vincent Van Gogh painted Irises in May/June of 1889. He was hoping the doctors would allow him paint outside and while he waited he found his purple muse in the courtyard below.

Papa Hemingway’s desk and typewriter in Key West

Flannery O’Connor’s desk and bed at her farm, Andalusia in Milledgeville, Georgia. She was crippled by lupus and spent much of her time here, in this room.

Artist, Writers, What To Do With That Dirty, Nasty, Inevitable Word: Rejection

I have muscle memory of past rejections and every time I get another one I feel the history of all the others ganging up on me.  Me, standing at the mailbox ripping open that envelope, my mind and heart reeling from the blow. Me, reading and re-reading the email that starts with: Thank you for your submission…but. Me, in the bathtub with a bottle of wine in hand. Me, not even capable of sharing the bad news aloud with other commiserating artists because it hurts too much to say the words: It’s not for us.  We like it but don’t love it (agent’s/editor’s new favorite line) Rejection feels like you’ve slammed into a wall while speeding at 100 mph. Blam! Complete and immediate dead stop. No matter how much you’ve prepared or think you’ve prepared it still hurts like hell.

Here are a few big-time authors we all know and love who received their fair share of rejections along the way:

• Rudyard  Kipling was told “you don’t know how to use the English language” by San  Francisco’s Examiner editor.
• The  Diary of Anne Frank was of course, rejected and the editor said, “The girl” (Anne) doesn’t possess a  special perception of feeling.
• William  Faulkner‘s publisher said, “Good God, I can’t publish  this!”
• William Golding’s Lord of the Flies–“an absurd and uninteresting  fantasy,”
• Sylvia  Plath, poor thing, was told she didn’t have enough genuine talent
• Stephen  King’s Carrie and George  Orwell’s Animal Farm were both told that their books contain topics that just won’t sell.

(Read more at Suite101: No Writer Escapes Rejection: The Lighter Side of Being Told No Way | Suite101.com http://www.suite101.com/content/no-writer-escapes-rejection-a41587#ixzz1TtB5UyAD)

Well, that makes me feel a little bit better. It also makes me want to smack a few editors around–to think that I might have never read these authors or their stories–because they were passed over–that makes me sick!

The worst part about rejection isn’t the rejection part. It’s that it’s a tapeworm feeding on every doubt and fear we ever had. It gobbles up hope. It usually halts our creative juices, at least for a while. It makes us want to give up.

And yet there’s no way around it, I guess–other than to not submit, not to try at all. All artists, actors, musicians, writers, painters–anyone really, anyone who creates, who takes a risk faces this. Perhaps if you work for a corporation a rejection feels more communal and you don’t have to own it all by yourself, but if you’re a free-lance artist or writer then that “NO” is all for you. No one to share the pain. No one to share the blame. No one to crawl into the bathtub and share your bottle of whine (intended).

I won’t turn this into a how-to article. I won’t offer helpful hints on how to move on.

I’ll just sit with you for a moment. We’ll sit in silence while you catch your breath.

If you want to throw something–I’ll duck.

If you want to curse like an Irish sailor (and believe me, they can really let ’em fly), then I’ll cheer you on and add a few colorful word choices of my own.

If you want a drink, I’ll pour. And pour.

Taste the bile.

Add that rejection to the pire.

Feel it in every bone.

Cause yeah, it’s inevitable.

Comes with putting yourself and your art out there. It is what it is.

All I can do is allow rejection to flow through me.

I choose not to hold on to it because that hasn’t worked out so well in the past.

When I grip it to my chest I become bitter and cynical. I give up and say really nasty things about agents and editors and publishers and my mother and the dog–anybody’s fair game and then nobody wants to be around me.

I don’t want to fight/push against it because that only prolongs the suffering and that hasn’t worked out so well either.

Yeah, I know rejection has something to teach me, but when you’re really hurting you don’t want to be reminded of life lessons when your teeth are knocked out.

Just allowing is enough–for now.

Most editors are failed writers – but so are most writers.  ~T.S. Eliot

Writers, Artists, What Are You Afraid of? Facing Your Creative Fears

Fear. What a nasty word. It conjures monsters. It diminishes us into cowards, fumbling, running, sniveling wimps–rather that’s how we perceive ourselves.  When it comes to creating the monsters are more internal than extermal–voices of doubt and accusation that ping like pin balls between our ears. You don’t know what you’re doing–you don’t even know where to begin. Why do you think this project is such a good idea? Who’s going to buy this bungled mess? You always start things you can’t finish. You don’t have enough drive or talent. How long has it been since you produced or sold anything? We’d fire, kick them to the curb or break up with anyone else who talked that way to us, and yet our inner voices bludgeon our esteem until our souls are bloody.

In the classic Art and Fear, authors Ted Orlando and  David Bayles  talk about the two basic fears writers, artists, musicians, and all who dabble in creativity face–fear of others and fear of self.  And it’s true. Most fears slide into one of these categories even if they don’t appear to at first glance.

And yet standing up to our inner bullies is exactly what a creative soul has to eventually figure out how to do.

Facing Creative Fears, a few techniques that might help:

• The mantra, just do it.  It. Do it crappy. Do it half-hearted. Do it with no intention of selling it. Do it out of spite. Do it for no reason at all. Don’t Overthink. Just Do It.
• Rebellion. Most artists loiter on the fringes of normality, the fringes of society and its rules. We spray a bit of graffiti in the middle of the night and run. We balk at 9-5ers. We like our swagger. So use it. When you hear those “You’ll never finish/this is a bunch of crap/who are you to paint, to write? ” That’s when it’s time to say, “Oh yeah? Screw you! I’m doing it anyway!”
• Keeping my word to myself. I had this revelation a few years ago that occurred to me right about the time I stopped blaming my parents (and my birth parents and being adopted/poor pitiful me attitude) for all things crappy that had ever happened to me and realized I had inflicted far more damage on myself than anyone had ever done to me–by letting myself down all the time. By heeding the voices and giving up and giving in and not finishing and talking myself out of and so I realized that the person I needed to be most loyal to–was me.
• Just for 10 minutes….that’s how I bait myself into working on a project. Just a few minutes and then you can go play, drink, watch tv, nap–whatever it is that you believe you’d rather be doing. Just go in and dabble and then if you want to go you can go.  Usually, once I hit that zen moment I stay–but if I’m antsy then I give myself permission to take off.
• Create every day. No matter what. That’s my vow. It doesn’t have to be monumental. It doesn’t even have to relate to the project I’m working on. Just play with the water-color pencils. Sketch the basic composition for your next painting. Write two pages–double spaced–even if it’s not on my novel. Just keep that muscle working.
• Thinking is creating. Kind of sounds like cheating but it’s not. People ask me how much I write a day and here’s my answer, “You want to know how much I type or how much I think about writing? Because if writing is thinking then thinking is (or can be) creating. Therefore (the old if/then statements of Philosophy 101) thinking is creating.  Huh. Maybe this isn’t as hard as I’m making it out to be.
• Allow the avoidance tactics. I have to allow myself to clean out my junk drawer while calling a girlfriend–instead of creating. If I need to avoid for a half hour or half day, then so be it. It’s the only way I tend to get my chores done and a certain level of cleanliness and order is a good thing, right? Avoidance is a part of the process. I incorporate it into my life. I’ve stopped believing that “real artist” don’t avoid. Of course they do! So clip your dog’s toe nails, but while you’re at it think about that next scene, that next verse, that next marketing call you know you need to make. And yes, sometimes I have to call my bluff–avoiding for a half a year is an indulgence and I’m learning to reign that in and be my own taskmaster at times.
• Accept that creating isn’t an arrow aimed at a target. It’s a winding journey with an intended destination–and even that can change on you before you get there. I facilitate a lot of writer’s groups and I have to smile when someone tells me their novel will be completed in three months–start to finish. It’s not that it’s not possible (in an alter universe) it’s just that it’s far more likely that your novel is trying to teach you something, and to do that it needs to take you somewhere–somewhere unexpected.
• Admit how much you love this (sometimes) creatiive-tortured life! Art, even when it’s not coming, even when it’s mucking up, even when it’s rejected–it still feels damn good to get an idea and to take that idea to pen, to paper, to clay, to paint, to guitar strings, to voice, to hands–and even on the crappiest of days there’s something pure and wholly (misspelling intended) about the act of creating. Even when it hurts I love it. Even when I want to give up, I can’t. It’s like a lover I can’t do without. No matter how much I try to stop, to avoid, to let go, I find myself in the back alley making out.
• Write a fear list. List them all–from what will my great Aunt Tildy think to a full out lawsuit and public hanging–to facing an audience of guffaws and mockery, to panhandling on the side of the highway. List them all. Fling them on the page or into the air. Let them hang out like splattered paint filled balloons. Look at them. Live with them. Most of them will start to seem pretty ridiculous. Others have a smidgen of merit and to those–talk–and listen. Ask them what’s under the surface? Peel back the layers. Don’t try to solve or fix them. Just allow them to exist in the open. Like most monsters, they dissipate in the light.

These are just some of the tactics I employ to get in and through my fears. Do they work? Do I hum along every day barrier/monster/fear free? Hell no! But they help. Most times.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

Vincent Van Gogh

Any other suggestions? Hope you’ll share.

St. Trophime, Arles France

Carol D. O’Dell

www.caroldodell.com

Author, Creativity Coach

Director of Chat Noir Writer’s Circles

How Do You Make Meaning? Creativity and Art Explored

Creativity Coach Dr. Eric Maisel asks the question, “How do you make meaning?” As a writer and artist I’d never heard it stated this way, but I had stumbled on my version of this question years ago. I’ve always said, ‘I figure out life on the page.” When I’m lost, angry, hurt, questioning, celebrating, straining to understand myself or someone else or what has happened, I turn to words and I turn to color. The page comforts me, allows me the space to sort and examine. It’s how I process and how I express all I have to learn.

A creative block is the wall we erect to ward off the anxiety we
suppose we’ll experience if we sit down to work.

                                                                                              Eric Maisel

For others, meaning is found in music. Someone else, film–or in the creation of a meal or a pastry or the design of a house or a room, or a tapestry or tatoo. I deeply believe that we’re all meant to create–whether that’s a computer program, a sailing route, or an engine. Creativity is bound in every cell. We seek to give our life and our work meaning. We aim high. We fail and we try again. We are most fulfilled when we create.

And yet, just about every artist, writer, poet, painter, sculptor, musician, architect, programmer, and mechanic hems and haws, sputters, avoids, chucks the work and starts for the umpteenth time, or makes a million excuses as to why he/she hasn’t started and may never start. For something we’re meant to do, love to do, have a burning passion to do–we sure do have our issues with it. That’s the nature of the creativity beast, I suppose. Just because we long to make meaning doesn’t negate the fact that we still struggle to make meaning.

I’m in the middle avoiding a project now. I have a new novel outlined. I’m excited about the concept. I have a good feeling about it…and yet…here I am writing a blog about creativity instead of creating.

So I’ll share first:

• I’m waiting on another novel to get picked up by a publisher and if it does it’ll be time to pour myself into marketing
• I really should be working on the sequel to that project
• I really should clean my office/work room
• I have a client waiting on me to finish reading their project outline, and work should come first, right?
• I haven’t written something like this before and I’m not quite sure how it should go
• The details bog me down
• I have too many people around to concentrate
• I need to make money, not more unfinished, unsold books

I bet you have a similar list.

What helps me is to debunk my own myths. I take every argument I’ve listed and I argue the other side of it. I’m my own devil’s advocate. Sometimes I delve into the cleaning, look for jobs online, or check off something else on that list just to get that monkey from chattering in my ear–and that’s when I realize…I’d rather be writing..I’d rather paint. What am I doing? Why am I avoiding the thing I love most–to do things I love less, or downright loathe???

Sometimes it works. Other times I have to circle the creativity mountain a few more times. I now consider just a part of the process and try not to dwell on it. It is what it is. It doesn’t mean I’m not a writer or an artist. In fact, it may mean that I am. It’s like breathing..guess it means I’m alive after all. Avoiding my art doesn’t mean I should be truck driver or dermatologist instead, or that I can’t also be a truck driving dermatologist. It’s just part of the whole. When I stop fighting the urge to avoid eventually subsides.

I can’t help but think of my guy, Vincent Van Gogh, in St. Paul de Mausole Asylum. He voluntarily committed himself after writing in the ledger, “I fear I can no longer live independently.” Struggling with temporal lobe epilepsy, a severed ear that left his head pulled toward his shoulder, rejected by the citizens of Arles and asked not to return, and not having sold a painting (he eventually sold one) he arrived in May of 1888 and within a month had painted Irises (sold for 54 million back in 1987) from the bars of his bedroom window. He painted because that’s how me made meaning. He painted because that’s who he was. He was a painter. He had already stepped into that revelation and he lived it out regardless of circumstances.

What I do know is writing, speaking, acting, painting, sculpting–this is who I am. This how I figure out life. This is how I make meaning. Even when I hate it, avoid it, I need it. I love it. It’s who I am.

Creativity is the marriage humanity makes with eternity.

                                                                                                           Eric Maisel