February 2023

It’s the end of 2016, and I’m living in Sheboygan, WI. I’ve spent about two years researching my novel about a global pandemic (oops), but I cannot write. I’ve read all about the transmission of diseases from animals to humans, bird flu, how vaccines are made, the Spanish Flu, cytokine storms and more. I have a huge stack of index cards with scene ideas on, but when it comes to sitting down and actually writing, nothing comes out. Words form in my mind but evaporate before they get to my fingers. 

I am in a deep funk. 

Subscribe now

All of my creativity has left me. I don’t even want to read about pandemics anymore, and my high-concept airport book of a novel feels like an impossible thing to write. I’m scared of getting the science wrong and looking like an idiot. I’m scared of focusing too much on the science and ending up with flat, soulless characters. I’m scared that it’s going to be too depressing and that I won’t find hope amongst the sea of bodies. I’m scared that I’ll never finish it. 

(I was not scared that I’d get gazumped by a real pandemic and have an unsellable doorstop on my hands. I should have been.)

I’d been living in Sheboygan for 18 months and was really enjoying it. We had a lovely house with lots of space – it was the biggest, nicest house I have ever lived in – and we were going out and making friends. My business was doing well and I’d just paid off the last of the massive debt I’d accrued when a previous business went under. I had the most financial stability and the highest disposable income that I’d ever had.

Every duck was aligned. I should have been feeling extraordinarily creative. Instead, I was creatively dead. The world had gone to hell in a handbasket and I was feeling, to quote myself from back then, ‘demoralised and unhappy’. 

Then, at some point in December 2016, I realised that I had only two choices: Give up or Jedi mind trick myself into a better mood. 

So, on 29 December, I launched Creative 2017 – my plan to spend ten minutes every day doing something fun. Ten minutes felt like a doable commitment. I could (almost) always find ten minutes, no matter what my day turned into. 

January was spent playing around with a brush calligraphy set that my husband had bought me in Singapore in 2015. I was terrible at it, spending days doing lines, squiggles, dots and little triangles. But such repetitive work rapidly put me into a state of flow, fully immersed in what I was doing. On Day 18, I wrote: 

I think one of the things that is so delightful about this project is that there’s no pressure at all. I’m not doing this for a reason. I don’t have an end goal. I’m just doing it because it’s there, because I find it enjoyable. It’s been ages since I’ve been creative for the sake of it, without thinking about whether there’s something to hang on the wall at the end of it, or whether the end result is going to be good enough to give as a gift. 

By the end of January, I had learnt a valuable lesson: 

Well, firstly, that there’s a lot of joy in doing something for the sake of it, without having a goal or any pressure. I’ve also learnt that you can improve rapidly with just a small amount of time devoted every day. I’m actually surprised with how much my basic skills have developed since Day 1. It’s really rather satisfying!

February was crochet month, during which I learnt a new stitch every day. March was cat month and I sketched our cats either from life or a photo. I loved that month. I’d like to do that month again. 

In April, I worked on world-building and planning for my novel. May was a month of general blogging, which was a way to handle a bout of travel that precluded regular crafting. That might sound like I slightly betrayed my premise, but it was a sign that the Jedi mind trick was starting to work:

As I said at the beginning of April, I started this project to try to get my brain back into a more creative mode, and it has worked amazingly well. I used that month to work on my book, a non-bloggable project, and I’m happy to report that I am continuing to find time to work on that almost every day. And I’m still incredibly excited by it, more so than any writing project I’ve ever worked on.

June was round hand calligraphy, July and August were both embroidery with some crochet. Then Ada Lovelace Day came knocking at my door and the blog posts and the work on my novel fell away as I got busy with that. But the lapse wasn’t permanent. Rather, the whole plan had worked. My final post, on 6 December 2016, explains: 

There was always an ulterior motive, though, to this whole project, and that was to try to get my authorial juices flowing. In that, the year has been a spectacular success. I started work on my current project in earnest a couple of weeks ago, and am really enjoying myself.

Over the year, I had done three important things: 

1. I created the habit of giving myself time every day to do something creative.

2. I associated that time with fun and joy.

3. I nourished my creative mind until it was ready to write. 

Sometimes, with all the best will in the world, we’re not writing because there are other things we need to do first. And I don’t mean the world-building or the research, I mean feeding our creative selves with flow and bliss and delight. Reminding ourselves that we deserve to take time just for us, for our projects, for our enjoyment. And once we’ve refreshed ourselves the creativity arrives, not without work or effort but after we’ve put in the right work and effort. If it takes a Jedi mind trick and a year to do that, well, so be it. Whatever works, works. 

Leave a comment

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Stock Image Woman knows that she can write whenever she damn well pleases.

Sitting at my desk yesterday afternoon, I found myself staring at my computer screen, mulling over whether to write or not. I didn’t really feel like it, but nothing on my To Do list was on fire and I’ve promised myself that I’ll make the most of this work lull to get my six-part TV series scripts finished.

I had the opportunity to write.

I didn’t feel like writing.

There was nothing else more important to do.

I wrote.

And, of course, as soon as I put my fingertips on the keyboard I became completely absorbed and ending up having a very productive hour in which I solved a fairly large issue with the episode I’m currently working on.

There is no mood

I can’t count the number of times I’ve complained to my online friends that I’m ‘Just not feeling it today’ and then gone on to get loads of words written. If I’m honest with myself, it’s because ‘I’m not in the mood’ is nothing more than an excuse. It’s a convenient way to let myself off the hook, even though I know I don’t actually need to be in any particular frame of mind to write, I just need to sit myself down and get on with it.

Indeed, the idea that writing well depends on ‘being in the mood’ is a pernicious writing fallacy which stops people being consistently and persistently creative. It plays into the extremely wrong idea that writing, and particularly creative writing, is a gift bestowed by the gods only on the most special of people at the most special of times. It rarifies the act of writing, turns it from an everyday activity into something anomalous, something exceptional. Only those blessed by the presence of a Muse can gather together those ethereal threads of inspiration and weave them into poetry or prose.

Slaps forehead with back of hand and swoons.

Well, bollocks to that.

If you want to write, I promise that you do not have to waste time waiting for Calliope or her sisters to show up. You have it in you to write whenever and wherever the hell you like.

Why do you think you need to be in the mood?

If you feel like you have to be in the mood to write, but you’d like to get rid of that unnecessary restriction, the first thing you need to do is ask yourself why. I don’t believe that laziness exists – there’s always something else going on. Have a dig and ask yourself what is preventing you from writing.

Perhaps you don’t feel very confident and worry that putting words on the screen will prove to yourself how bad you are. Whilst you’re probably much better than you think you are, it doesn’t really matter because we are all learning with every single word we write. Writing is a process. So is editing. Embrace it.

Maybe you don’t have much time, so you feel that you’ll just get frustrated if you start, get into your writing, and then have to stop before you want to. Every book was written one word at a time, so if you only have time to write one word, that’s still one word less to write later. Use even the shortest scraps of time to write and celebrate the fact that you have to leave your writing whilst you still feel excited and have more to say. It’ll be much easier to pick it up next time.

Or possibly you just don’t know what comes next. This is almost always down to a lack of preparation, so instead of writing words, spend the time working on your outline, background research, characters or world-building. There’s always something constructive to do that will move your project along. After all, writing isn’t just typing.

There are many other reasons you might not be feeling in the mood, but once you’ve identified what’s really going on, you can acknowledge the problem, solve it or set it to one side, and then sit down and write.

All words are equal

I’ve heard people say that if they don’t ‘feel it’ they produce lower quality work. Now, it’s true that writing is sometimes a breeze and sometimes like pulling teeth, but how it feels as you write has nothing to do with how it reads back later. What I write on hard days reads no differently to what I write on easy days.

But if you want to prove to yourself that there’s no difference, here’s an exercise:

1. For a week, write at least 50 words a day on a single project. It doesn’t matter whether it’s something you’re already working on or something you’re doing just for this exercise, as long as each day’s work follows on from the last.

2. In a separate document, make a note of what you wrote and how you felt at the time. Was it easy? Hard? Painful? Excruciating? If you happen to have an easy week, keep going until you have a couple of days where it’s hard, and if it’s all hard, keep going until you have an easy day.

3. Give your work to a trusted friend and ask them to make a note every time they notice the quality of the writing change. What reads well? What doesn’t? If you don’t have a trusted friend, set the work aside for a few weeks and re-read it yourself.

4. Compare notes. The chances of your friend’s notes matching up with your self-reported experience of writing are next to nil.

How we feel as we write is influenced by a whole host of factors that have nothing to do with our creativity. Are we tired? Rushed? Excited? Just had an argument? Hungry? Thirsty? Just had a pleasant surprise? All of those things influence our mood, but they don’t influence how our creativity functions so they aren’t reflected in our writing.

There’s always editing

If, after doing this, you still believe that you produce better work when you’re ‘in the mood’, remember that there are no words that can’t be edited, except those you haven’t written. Writing when you’re not in the mood is a skill you can practice. The more you practice it, the easier it will become. And the easier it becomes, the less you have to frogmarch yourself to your desk and sternly force yourself to write.

Soon, you’ll be writing whenever and wherever you like and getting a lot more done.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

With several creative projects on the go, plus a mortally wounded business to rescue, I am currently finding it a little challenging to get moving of a morning. I’m so used to my To Do list being on fire – with too many tasks that should have been done yesterday or, preferably, last month – that this current lull brought on by the end of Ada Lovelace Day is proving difficult to navigate.

So I’m going back to basics and looking at ways I can create some clarity and structure that will help me make the most of my time.

Refining my To-Do list

To-Do lists are possibly the oldest productivity tool we have and many words have been spilt about exactly how best to maintain them. There are countless apps and websites to manage them, a lot of which let you set an incredible level of detail for each task such as allotting it to a project, adding a deadline, and defining multiple statuses that each task might progress through.

The dirty truth is that it doesn’t really matter which app you use or whether you prefer to rely on pen and paper, so long as you actually keep your list up to date and refer to it regularly. Equally, amongst all To-Do list tips, there’s only one that’s genuinely essential:

Each to do item must be a single, well-defined task that can be executed without requiring further clarification.

So ‘Write report’ is not a task, but ‘Draft report structure in bullet points’ is. Quite often, if you’re looking at your To-Do list and feeling overwhelmed by it all and unsure where to start, it’s because you have written down a list of projects, not a list of tasks.

Luckily, the fix is relatively easy: rewrite your list and make sure that each item is a single action that you have clearly defined and could begin without needing to think further about what it means.

My recent switch in focus has meant that I have had to throw out my To Do lists from last year because they were mostly ALD-related tasks that no longer need to be done. I have a single To-Do list for each creative project, and they look very, very different to my business list (fewer flames for one thing). It’s really quite discombobulating. But my lists are doing their job and that’s what counts.

Urgent vs Important

Rare is the person whose To-Do list isn’t, to all intents and purposes, infinite. As soon as you finish one thing, something else pops up to take its place. Equally true is that not all of the tasks on your list are actually worth doing. But how can you tell what you should focus on and what you should ditch (or get someone else to do)?

Once you’ve written your To-Do list, you can use the Urgent vs Important Matrix, or Eisenhower Matrix, to prioritise it. List your tasks in a two-by-two grid, classifying each task by whether it’s urgent or not urgent, important or not important.

Your main priority should generally be those tasks that fall into the urgent and important quadrant in the top left. Tasks that are not urgent but are important are next in line, or should be scheduled so that they don’t become urgent. Tasks that are urgent but not important need a bit of interrogation: Why are they on your To-Do list and what would you gain by doing them? Can you delegate them or not do them? Anything in the not urgent and not important quadrant just needs striking off your list completely.

You might not be surprised to read that I find this process much harder when I’m sorting through my creative To-Do list than my business list. For decades being creative was something I did when I had time, not during my work day. But now that I’m prioritising a creative life and, indeed, getting paid for it, I’m having to upend a whole lot of routines and mindsets that no longer serve me well. The biggest change is that it’s now OK for me to write my script or research short films or read writing advice books during the day, because that’s my job now. Crikey!

The Pomodoro Technique

On days when it’s really hard to get started, the Pomodoro Technique is perfect. Named after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer – pomodoro means tomato in Italian – it is possibly the simplest way to force yourself to get on with your work:

• Decide what you’re going to do.

• Set a timer for 25 minutes.

• Start.

• Stop when the timer goes off, and take a 3-5 minute break.

If I am really struggling with focus, I set the timer for 15 minutes – even I can focus for 15 minutes and quite often once I’ve got started I find it much easier to keep going.

The official technique, which was developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 80s, includes more details around counting pomodoros, which is what each bout of productivity is called, into sets of four, recording each completion with a tick, and taking longer breaks after sets. But ultimately, it’s really about just putting a timer on and not allowing yourself any distractions until you hear that alarm go off.

Buddyworking

For challenging days, I buddywork with friends on Slack. We have a channel for it, and I’ll state my goals for the next half hour and then check back in at the allotted time to report on my progress. Holding myself accountable like this is very effective when I’ve got particularly tedious or gnarly tasks on my list that I really don’t want to do – telling someone what I’m going to do creates a commitment strong enough to push me through the difficult task. And my friends will nag me if I get distracted!

Time tracking

One thing that’s easier than losing time to social media, chatting, or making cups of tea is not recognising when you’ve lost time to social media, chatting, or making cups of tea. And worse, if you’ve had the wrong kind of busy day, full of unanticipated or involved tasks, it can be easy to feel as if you haven’t done anything.

The best way to tackle both of these problems is to track your time so that you know exactly how much time you spent doing what. There are quite a few time trackers available, although I use Toggl’s free plan. Using it to track work on particular projects or type of task gives me a clear idea at the end of the day of just how I’ve used my time.

I don’t get too specific with my tasks, so “Admin”, “Email”, or “Newsletter” are sensible categories, but “Sending an email to Scrooge McDuck” is too specific. I am scrupulously honest with myself and turn the tracker off when I check Facebook or go get a glass of water. That way, I know exactly how I’m doing. I aim for five hours of productive work each day, and I always know when I’ve reached that target.

Once you’re in the habit of tracking your time, you’ll gain a useful insight into how your days unfold. Are you taking a longer lunch than you should? Or losing time when you’re switching tasks? Or spending more time on social media than you imagined? A time tracker will help reveal these gaps in your day so that you can make adjustments, such as maybe moving your lunch earlier so that you get a clearer run in the afternoon, or giving yourself a defined break mid-afternoon so that you can regain a little clarity for the last part of the day.

(This post is based on one I wrote for the Finding Ada Network, thus forming a bonus tip for you: Reduce, reuse, recycle! A wise marketing guru once told me to use every piece of content three times – you put the effort in to create it, so make sure you get the most out of it.)

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

January was a month of some hardcore adulting. I did a host of things that I’d been putting off: Getting a dental appointment to check that the root canal and synthetic bone graft that I had done in Mexico at the end of December 2021 had healed properly and that the ache in my jaw was indeed, as I suspected, just tension. Renewing my driver’s licence photocard and booking a lesson to get me driving again after a 25 year gap. Getting an appointment with an optician. Seeing my physio.

I might sound like a hypochondriac, but this list of worries and ailments has accumulated over the last few years. It’s all stuff I’ve put off because either I was scared (driving), or because I was in the wrong country (physio), or because last year’s transatlantic move got in the way (everything else). But it’s also all stuff that has lived rent-free in my head for all that time, taking up space and taking focus away from other, more important things.

I once read that the point at which you overcome procrastination is the point at which the pain of not doing something becomes worse than the pain of doing it. The stress of not getting these health issues checked out has been eroding my energy levels for months. I’d wake in the middle of the night worrying about them, despite knowing intellectually that they were likely all benign and solvable problems.

The knock-on effect of that was not just disrupted sleep. It took up time I could have spent doing more constructive things and it literally wasted my energy. Thinking burns calories – the brain takes up about 20 percent of your daily energy usage – so every thing I worried about was draining my batteries. More to the point, absolutely none of these chores were as big of a deal as I had built them up to be and most were sorted quickly and painlessly. All of that worry was for nothing.

Now, I know this sounds like a very longwinded way of saying ‘Clear your head’, but we’re not talking here about clearing your head the way that you might half-arsedly clear a table. You’re not putting things on the kitchen countertop and ignoring them, you actually have to do the washing up.

I’ve had this sporadic dull ache in my jaw for three years and, despite several X-rays and a CT scan, I’d still managed to build it up in my head into something it wasn’t. Stress will do that. Getting it looked at again wasn’t so much about a medical diagnosis, but more about getting the worry out of my head, hopefully permanently this time.

Clearing your head means being honest with yourself about the things that are worrying you, (even if those things seem small or silly or irrational), gathering the strength to address them, and then putting them behind you. It’s about recognising the pain of not doing something and then getting it done, sooner rather than later.

Obviously some stressors are not easily dealt with. If you’re short of money, for example, or stuck in an awful situation, you can’t just fix that with a bit of willpower and a spare half hour. But you can start taking steps: See a debt counsellor, make a plan, or even just outline the issue. Actively addressing a problem can help you feel more in control, and that helps clear your head.

Clearing your head is important because it literally makes room in you brain for other, more creative thoughts. It really is that simple.

I have so many ideas when I’m lying in bed or walking into town or in the shower. Ideas don’t generally come when I sit down to write, they need time and space to incubate before then. But they won’t get the opportunity to sprout and grow if my brain is constantly ruminating about my achy jaw or getting the cats’ yearly vaccinations booked.

Life admin sucks, no doubt about it. But keeping on top of it and clearing those worries out of your head is essential if you want to have a consistently creative life.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }