I'm not sure what good it does to figure out the secrets of writing. I can't seem to make use of them.
Ritual, I discovered long ago, is one of the secrets of writing. Routine. Rhythm. Getting up at the same time each day, putting in a few hours before starting the rest of the day, getting to bed on time, and then getting up and doing it again. And again. And again. Habituate a practice, and it happens.
Even within the writing session, rituals help. Cue music. Fill water glass. Brew coffee. Close door. Shut down email and web browser. Open research log to see where I've been, where I'm going. Then . . . begin. Draft or sketch notes for 20-30 minutes, whatever else I do, and always end a session by recording what I need to do next.
There was a time when my writing ritual even included a raunchy leather hat from Fetla's.
Problem is, I have a hard time maintaining rituals. And when once my routine gets disrupted, it's hard to return to form. It sometimes takes weeks. I traveled to Amarillo and Reno, NV this past month and all routines fell apart. Lately, maintaining any kind of routine seems particularly hard, maybe because of the general chaos that my personal and work lives are in.
In any case, the challenge isn't the book project itself, but maintaining the habits, the form, that will carve out the time in which the book can finally unfold. So today, I'm starting all over again. Again. Sigh. But despite my apostasy, the routine welcomes me back, nonetheless. I am comforted.
. . . . . . . .
To help think about ritual, I went to Flickr, searched on the word Ritual, and took a fascinating tour of others' rituals. Here's just one, by 3amfromkyoto's photostream:
Last week I took a break from my steady writing schedule, flew to Amarillo, visited my folks, and ran the Palo Duro Canyon 20K trail race. What a wild, gorgeous, lonely, and exhausting run.
I've been thinking about energy management a lot lately.
I'm not sure why I rented "The Devil Wears Prada," a forgettable film. But I found one thing to like about it besides the excellent clothes: Streep's interpretation of her high-powered executive's energy management strategies. Streep's "devil" rules the fashion world, but doesn't lift a finger unnecessarily, doesn't raise her voice or even her eyebrow. She wastes energy on no one. She does, after all, have better things to do.
I think I have better things to do, too. After years of my own failed energy policies, I'm beginning to see why this matters so much. I have this problem: I push myself hard, every day, outlining ambitious "to do" lists even for Saturdays and evenings. I push in my day job, in my scholarship, in my workouts, in my personal life. Full steam ahead, pack it all in. But then, now and again -- and lately, more frequently -- I hit a wall. At these moments, I can't get out of bed in the morning. I lie down, even when I'm not tired, just so I can stare at the wall and daydream.
In the past, I've tended to rail against myself when this happens. Diagnosing the problem as "laziness," I outline a suitable remedy: pour on more energy! I whip up self-guilt, confess to my calendar, and vow greater devotion to the almighty "To Do" list.
But I'm starting to get a clue. Let's suppose that The Wall isn't a symptom of laziness. Let's call it the result of exhaustion. Well, now, that changes things. If the problem is exhaustion, then the remedy is to rest more, more regularly. In essence, to conserve more energy.
As a distance runner, I should have expected this. Endurance sports are primarily about energy management. Distance runners aren't powerful or fast or heroically masochistic in training. We just learn to save energy early in a run, so that we've plenty left 12 miles down the line. But somehow I haven't learned that trick in the rest of my life.
What does it mean to conserve energy, so that I can complete this long-distance project? How do I mange to REST more. Rest, note, is different from play. Resting doesn't mean spending more time in society, or doing sports, or cleaning house. For me, rest requires quiet time, often alone. It doesn't just mean sleeping, but slowing down and savoring the light on the lake, watching a TV show, taking a walk.
I don't know how to do this, frankly. What are the mechanics of energy management? Do I schedule in "rest" time? How does it fit within an otherwise goal-oriented, full schedule? . . . I have a feeling it has something to do with rituals and resting routines -- Sabbaths, say.
If you have a resting routine that works for you, I'd like to hear about it.
54.25. That's the number of hours I spent on research-related work in September. That's up from previous months. My monthly goal is to achieve about 55-60 hours (13.25 a week) until the book is out, but I often fall far short, since I do scholarship on top of a full-time job. This semester, I'm also teaching, so it's particularly difficult. Hence, I take this moment to pause, breathe deeply, and give myself a hearty "atta girl!"
Some writers track words, not hours. But my draft is already too long. I'm in the process of cutting out huge chunks and rewriting others. It's more time that I need, not words, and September gave me both time and a bit of momentum. . . vroom . . . zoom . . . I. can. keep. going. can't. I?
[The photo is from my July mountain climbing trip, and features Tom mid-way through an excruciating descent.]
27.5 hours. That's how much research-related work I squeezed into the week of Sept 7-13. At the time, I was gaining a foothold.
8.5 hours. That was last week. I fell so far behind on my administrative and teaching duties that I couldn't even squeeze out the standard 12 hrs. So, the foothold slipped a bit.
9.5 hours. That's this week, if I push hard through Saturday. It's likely I'll come in somewhere around 6-7, because I continue to struggle to catch up with my workload.
In my post-grad-school life, I have learned that binges are unsustainable. The days when I could hunker down for days on end in a pair of ratty shorts with the blinds half-drawn, ignoring the bills, the phone, other people, personal hygiene -- those days are gone. People keep calling and knocking, meetings keep coming, deadlines roll in, and it's my job to run out and meet it all, every morning.
So: I have replaced excitingly frenetic Binge with the dull and plodding Even Keel. I think I was right to seek one sustained week of more intense focus, but I've been paying for it ever since. For the most part, my gains on this project have to be made daily. Every morning, to be precise. In small increments. Woven into the rest of my life.
The trouble with the Even Keel is that it's just as exhausting as the Binge. Adding in 1-2 hours every morning makes my day tight. Having every moment of every day scheduled to the max eventually makes me want to do nothing. Nothing at all. I sometimes lie on my bed and stare at the wall: such sweet relief.
I welcome any thoughts about how to keep an even keel without grinding oneself into a catatonic state. Anybody figured this one out?
This week I've spent 5-7 hours a day on research. At the cost of my day job and teaching, of course. But this month afforded a little more scheduling flexibility than usual, and next week has room for catch up.
I needed a foothold: to dig into the research just enough to gain some position for the next climb. And it's helping. My mind is back in the game in a way it hasn't been in a while. I've amassed a lot of the sources I need to proceed with the two articles I'm writing. I've completed a conference proposal. I've planned my semester's writing goals. I feel like a scholar. I've got a rhythm going.
So what have I learned? If you're going to putter along at 10-12 hours of research a week, build in an occasional week here or there for more intense work. The occasional double-time week pays off immensely.
Or so it seems for now. Check back with me in a few more weeks.
[Photo: a view of the talus on Mt Democrat, taken on my ascent in July 08]
I've been glancing over this blog, trying to figure it out. I think it has an identity crisis. It's random.
Now that my research and writing is back on, I've been wondering what role this blog can play. I think from here on out I'll use it exclusively to support the completion of my scholarly manuscript. That's my story for the next year, and I'm sticking to it.
So I hereby renew a few vows.
- I'm back to getting up early, writing first thing (after running).
- I'm also cutting out distractions. Eventually, I want a life full of all kinds of interesting goodies: travel, parties, kids, work, the outdoors, the arts, reading, cooking, community service, politics. But for now, I'm stripping it down. I'll still have some of all of these things, but less - UNTIL THE BOOK IS OUT. I want to stay out late and get a little wild. But instead, I go home at
11, so I can get up early and get back to work. I want to start
tutoring math at a local middle school. But instead, I reserve as much possible free time for cranking out the final leg of research and revision. I want to volunteer for the Obama campaign. But I will let the other many willing Austinites take on that role. Once the book is out, all bets are off. For now, I gotta drive this baby home.
- And I'm recommitting to what this blog can do: give me a sense of public identity to support the very solitary work of research and writing as an independent scholar.
So, buckle up. Here we go.
In the midst of my dark month, I escaped for a bit. On Matt's
birthday, we biked out to Hamilton Pool, then tried to find our way
down into Pedernales Falls State Park biking on private ranchland
roads. We never got to Pedernales Falls, but we did meet some very
strange little donkeys.
I've been missing. From this blog, from my writing, from my own head.
Sometimes our lives get very difficult. We all cope in different ways. I tend to go missing. But I eventually have to find my way back. I get lost a lot.
So I'm not here yet. I'm stumbling around, though.
Today I am (trying to be) writing on the book proposal -- again. It's much better, thanks to the sharp insights of my writing group, which is now just one person. But a good person. I'm about to finish up this draft of the proposal. Then I head into the chapter that I managed to reconceive -- just before I went missing. At some point I will have to send out this proposal, but I'm too muddled right now to figure out when that should be. I thought it would be this past March. Now, maybe September? October? I need goals, but right now I'll settle for simply getting out of the woods.
In spite of it all, somehow, last Sunday night I magically wrote a complete draft of a little story. Sitting on my bed, with a yellow legal pad, writing in pale pencil by the dim light of my bed lamp. Add it to the pile of little stories about Amarillo I've been creating. This one is better than the others. I have no idea what to do with these little stories. I like their format, but they aren't quite full short stories, and they aren't really designed to be linked together into a longer piece of creative nonfiction. And they aren't anything great. Solid, I think, but not art. Maybe I'll do nothing with them. Maybe I'll use them to paper my office walls--a trail of words encircling me as I work, reminding me of who I am.
Here's to finding our ways home after we go missing.
I realize that "dentate gyrus" sounds like some sort of sadistic orthodontic device. But it's really a part of your brain that keeps you sharp. It's providing yet more evidence that running helps writing. Apparently running -- and aerobic exercise in general -- causes your brain to produce more brain cells.
Nifty, eh?
Recent research by neuroscientists shows that "after pounding the treadmill four times a week for an hour for 12 weeks, a group of previously inactive men and women, ages 21 to 45, showed substantial increases in cerebral blood volume (CBV)--a proxy for neurogenesis because where there are more cells, there are more blood vessels."
These brain cells are developing in the dentate gyrus, "the very node that [another researcher] has identified as the site of impairment in normal memory loss."
People who do regular aerobic exercise do better cognitively than those who don't, they do better on memory tests, and they have enhanced "neural plasticity, the process by which the brain changes in response to learning." (Read the full article, which appeared in the 19 May 2008 issue of Time).
I must say, I find this thought comforting. My mind's fitness has often tracked my physical fitness, but I always thought that had to do with my thyroid disease. This research takes the connection to a deeper level: my brain feels the miles I pound, and flourishes.
Oh, and blueberries are apparently magical for your brain, too.
