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The Writing Life

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Seven Steps to Get Your Groove Back When You’ve Lost Your Writing Rhythm

You know the feeling – you’re writing regularly, feeling the flow of your unique writing impulse. You’re making headway on your project and you feel gooood.

Then life, as it is wont to do, throws a wrench in your rhythm, halting the sweet ratatatat of your keyboard. Events on a scale large and small, tragic or irritating interrupt:

  • vacation
  • honeymoon
  • illness, either yours or a loved one’s.

Once the chaos has settled, you start to hear the sound of your inspiration calling you back. You like this tune and truly want writing back.

But weeks pass and you don’t return to that project you flowed with so well before life intruded on your progress.

Despite our best intentions, life’s distractions can easily derail us from our writing.
It seems all the time we spent finding our writing rhythm and focus was a one-time investment, and we’re forced to learn the steps all over again.

But even though it may feel like it, you’re not starting from scratch. Try these seven simple steps to resume – and refresh – your writing groove.

Draw upon your past successes.
What structures, times or places helped you focus on writing? Resume your Friday afternoon writing date, return to your special writing café, and other rituals can be renewed.

When we consider what worked in the past, we will often get snagged by stories of how our plans fell apart. The inner critic loves to chime in with variations of “Remember what happened last time – it didn’t work! Why bother now?”

We lose trust in ourselves when we focus on what didn’t work. We build something sustainable when we turn a curious eye toward what will work for us.

If there are negative associations with any of those practices, what can you replace them with?

Manage your expectations.

We often set ourselves up to plunge back in, pens raised and charging forward with brio. We expect to spend hours at the work, producing pages and pages of scintillating prose.
But it’s more likely we’ll start slowly and ease back into our rhythm. Instead of letting your high expectations lead to disappointment, use little victories along the way to fuel more successes.

Fend off saboteurs.

If it wasn’t a major interruption but a foggy dissipation instead, what derailed you from your course? Knowing the main saboteurs can help you identify trouble when it shows up next time.

Write down all your naysaying excuses that beat you away from the keyboard. See? Once they’re exposed, they seem to carry much less weight. Keep the list handy for the next time you’re tempted to believe your saboteurs.

Start with a brief rendez-vous with your project.

This is a simple meeting to reacquaint yourself with your work. We’re talking a 15-minute ‘project assessment’. Take notes. Jot new ideas and insights.

If you are starting anew with shorter articles or blog posts, check what you had done before you took your sabbatical. Review your lists of content ideas to spark new posts.

Refresh your deadline.

Deadlines can motivate us, even self-imposed ones. Recall former deadlines. What worked? What didn’t? One of the most common mistakes we make is to be overly optimistic about how long things take.
What do you know about yourself and your pace? Use that to set a deadline that engages, not strangles you.

Keep your cards close to your chest.
Some writers find it useful to announce their intentions publicly. Others find the pressure of others’ expectations counter-productive.

I prefer a middle path. Speak your intention to your writing tribe: your writing buddies, former classmates and teachers, a coach, or your favorite writing forum.

Dial it just right.

When planning the return, people often envision something like this:
“I’ll write five days a week for two hours each day.”

What’s wrong with this picture?

We don’t operate in two-hour time periods. Saying we’ll strap into the writing chair for two hours is a guaranteed way to assure that you won’t do it at all.

Let this be easier by starting small – one or two 30-minute writing sessions per week are much easier to slip into.

Which approaches will you try to get your groove back?

Try any or all of these strategies to slowly but surely ease back into your groove. Focus on building trust, engagement and momentum for this new phase of your writing life.

Notice that these suggestions ask you to rely on yourself. Build a positive and sustainable relationship with your writing that can withstand the capricious fluctuations of life.

Set yourself up to win by choosing steps that are right for you, right for this time, right for your projects.
What has helped you return to your writing groove after losing your step?

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Find Your Edge – It's Further Than You Think

A few years ago, I did a crazy thing: I held the yoga pose ‘horse’ for 70 minutes. That’s right. One hour and ten minutes.
There was a lot of craziness in that situation:
I did it during a friendly yoga competition. Competition and yoga don’t belong in the same sentence, let alone the same practice. Crazy.
The prize was for a Manduka yoga mat. I didn’t need or want a yoga mat – I already had four mats at home. Crazy!
But here’s the really crazy thing: When the contest started and the pose announced, I groaned. The yoga teacher mentioned that the previous year’s record had been 28 minutes.
Here’s what I thought: “I hate that pose. I can’t even hold it for five minutes!”
Right there in that moment, I defined my edge. I had about five minutes holding a strenuous, quadriceps-burning pose. I surely wouldn’t win.
Before I go on with the story, what about you? When and how do you define your edge?

When considering the book you’re writing, what edge do you draw in your mind?
Back to the yoga story. It gets crazier.
Now, I’m strong-ish. Not athlete strong, but I do practice yoga a lot and ride my bike all the time. Still, my mind told me that I couldn’t do this.
But the evidence started piling up against my belief. We’d started with about 30 people. Soon most of them peeled off and we were down to a handful of ‘competitors’.
After 35 minutes the organizers started to get tough, raising the stakes. We were told to lift our heels and keep them lifted. Which meant holding this pose on our toes.
Okay, the four remaining crazy-yoginis took that in stride. Then they called in the tattooed, drill sergeant kind of yoga teacher. He put us through various paces. We hopped back and forth, dipped our upper bodies up and down. Yet we’re still holding this crazy pose.
Frankly, I didn’t even know why I was doing it. But I knew the longer I stood there, the more determined I was to not surrender.
Later, as I pedaled home on noodles for legs, I realized that my edge is way further than my mind thought.
Now I know this without a doubt: I am capable of WAY more than I knew possible.
And because I believe we’re all in this together, I believe YOU are capable of way more than your mind thinks.
Finally, with the spring night falling and patience all around waning, the teachers called the contest, surrendering for the three of us remaining fools who refused to surrender. Instead of awarding two yoga mats, they gave each of us one.
We are extraordinarily resilient, all of us. Yet we fool ourselves into believing that our edges are closer than we think. That we are weaker than we think.
My work as a coach is not to push you in ridiculous ways, but to remind you that you are more, can do and be more than you think. Not as a push into overdrive or straining, but as a way to access and express the infinite potential inside each of us.
But language like that can be vague and cliché. It’s our lived experiences that remind us our capacity is often way, way greater than we think.

What’s your (perceived) and (real) edge?

Consider your own edge-pushing experiences. Times as a parent when you held your patience in the face of a screaming infant. Times as an employee or student when you over-delivered on a project or task.
Borrow from your life experiences to contribute to your power as an emerging author. When you come to your edge with your subject matter and mental fog rises up to threaten your focus and commitment, know that you have it in you to keep going. Not to force yourself, but to stay with the book until it’s done.
I wrote sixteen drafts of Chasing Sylvia Beach in the face of at least triple that number in rejections. I never would have known I had it in me to keep going, to keep improving, to keep growing myself against my edge of what’s possible.
I’m not any more badass than any of you. Seriously. I, too, want to abandon difficult things and go for the low-hanging fruit. But I’ve become addicted to the thrill of overcoming challenges and shooting for the impossible.
Your edges will look and feel different than mine. But know them, and push past them.
What edges can you push past this week?

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How to Organize the Content of Your Book

When we set out to write our books, we grasp for a structure so we have clarity right away about how to organize our book. That makes sense, but the book’s ultimate structure might not be what you start with.
Still, you must start somewhere. Some possibilities include:

  • Personal narrative
  • How-to based on professional expertise
  • Inspirational daybook
  • Book of your art or photography
  • Fiction, either short stories or a novel

The purpose of the book can inform the structure. These coaching inquiries can elicit clarity about the book’s purpose:

  1. Who is the audience?
  2. What do you want them to feel, think or do after reading your book?
  3. What is the nature of your material – essay or instructional?

Answer the above questions in writing.

If you haven’t already, devote one notebook or computer folder to this project. Gather notes, drafts, ideas and images in one place for easy reference. It doesn’t matter how messy the contents are, just that you have one container for your work.

How will readers interact with your material?

When you know the answers to these questions, you’ll see how people will be experiencing your material. You will know whether you’ll be working mainly with text or also with images, videos or hyperlinks.
Depending on your goals, your material could exist in several forms, depending on how people prefer to interact with it.

Your book* could be:

  • Paperback
  • Electronic book
  • App
  • Webinar
  • Podcasts
  • Installation
  • And more…

*We’ll continue calling it a book for simplicity’s sake.

What form will best hold your material? Jot that down. 

Reminder: Use free writing to get your words on the page quickly and easily. No matter what the final form, I suggest free writing as the way to get your first thoughts out on the page. With these preliminary ideas to work with, you can see where you need to add or take away to hone your message.

Organizing your material by developing a chapter template

Okay, have you gotten a sense of what form your book will take you may feel more at ease. Still, you wonder what will actually be in this non-fiction inspirational book.
Here’s what really helps my clients: develop a chapter template. Brainstorm the elements you want to include in each chapter. These could include:

  • Introduction
  • Stories
  • Suggested work for the reader
  • Inspirational quotations
  • Illustrations or images

Once you have a chapter that works, use that as a template for subsequent chapters. Keep in mind that the ultimate form may change, but at least you have something to start with. It will feel great to have a sense of how you want to organize your book.

List the elements you want to see in each of your chapters.

Identify the following elements I want in each chapter and why:

  • Introduction – to be clear on what this post will give the reader and why they need it
  • Lists – to help a range of readers identify themselves in the writing
  • Reminders – I’m going to assume a certain knowledge of (if not regular  practice of) basic writing strategies.
  • Coaching inquiries – to help authors write from and about what’s true for them and their work, not merely from a formula
  • Suggested homework throughout the text and at the end in a list – for readers to do so they’re writing their books along with me

This post is a sample chapter for me. What does it make you feel, think and do?

Draft a sample chapter to see how each element builds upon and increases the impact of your work. 

To sum up: this week’s writing homework, if you choose to accept it:

  1. Answer the coaching inquiries to clarify your book’s purpose.
  2. Choose an initial form – how-to, memoir, image-based.
  3. Brainstorm elements for each chapter.
  4. Draft a sample chapter.

Let me know in a comment below how this helps you organize your book.

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Be More Creative: Less Journaling, More Story

In my online writing group, we huddle together (virtually) every day to write for 15 minutes. The only rules are to keep writing for 15 minutes.

A range of writing and responses come from the group. Many of us are disappointed that our writing still feels like journaling. We use this time to process what’s happening in our lives, to release and understand the stories we’re living.

We’re frustrated that the writing is just showing us our same old stories and not revealing anything new, exciting and sparkly. Where’s our creative genius?

It can take time and effort to shift from journal writing to ‘creative’ writing where stories and lyrical writing fill your pages.

To advance toward more ‘creative’ writing, try these approaches.
[Read more…] about Be More Creative: Less Journaling, More Story

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The Disclaimplanation – Don’t Do It!

You’re at a concert of your favorite band, Abba. They come onstage and spend 5 minutes apologizing for not putting out an album in the last 20 years. They shrug and moan a bit, announcing that they may be a bit rusty, and that they hope you don’t mind.

Finally, they get into what you came for, swinging into a hot new version of ‘Dancing Queen’ that has you and your friend grooving like you’re sixteen. The concert goes on, dancing and merriment is had by all, and the awkward bit at the beginning is almost forgotten.

Almost.

Disclaimers leave a slight smudge on the space. The energy subtly wanes and your passion for the artist turns toward pity.

Don’t do it. Don’t disclaim.

Do you disclaim? [Read more…] about The Disclaimplanation – Don’t Do It!

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Finding Your Writing Form

You’ve wanted to write for years, and now, yes, now, you finally step up to the pen. You’re ready to go.

But what to write? You have some ideas but aren’t sure about the form. Blog post? Personal essay? Poetry, or perhaps a novella?

I remember this confusion when I embarked on my writing life in 1994. I felt the desire to write but had no idea where to start.

Luckily, I discovered Natalie Goldberg. The free writing method allowed me to get my words on paper first, then figure out what form they’d take.

With that freedom, I explored:

  • Poetry
  • Personal essays
  • Survey articles
  • How-to articles
  • Performance pieces
  • Plays
  • Screenplays
  • Novel

Almost every newbie writer I’ve encountered has this same dilemma. I encourage them to start with free writing and let the content inform the structure. [Read more…] about Finding Your Writing Form

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Why We Don’t Create

You don’t have time.
You have too many ideas and find it hard to focus.
You don’t have a supportive community.
You don’t have the right space in which to create.

These are all the reasons you and I don’t create. All are true and valid. And, that’s only the partial truth.

The truth is, you don’t create because you’re scared silly. You’re afraid you don’t have anything original to say. You’re afraid that despite your creative urges, you’re not good enough. You’re afraid that if you share your work with the world, you’ll be exposed as a talent-less loser.

How do I know? Have I peeked into the deep recesses of your creative unconscious?
No. I know because these are the fears that lurk in every writer I’ve ever coached, myself included.
Creating is scary. The original impulse of an idea is fun, energizing, exciting. The actual path to executing and completing that idea is fraught with our very human fears.

I’m feeling pretty terrified these days

As I approach the publication of my novel Chasing Sylvia Beach (2012), I feel more and more fear. I’ve been working on this book for twelve years and it means a lot to me and my work.

I find myself having to fight off deep, deep fear at every step of the way. It starts in my chest, seizing my heart and rooting in my gut with an acidic and painful grip. The fear saturates my blood and rushes to my brain, convincing me to abandon the mission and go hide somewhere dark and safe.

I swear if I didn’t have coaching skills I wouldn’t be able to talk myself off the ledge of quitting. Luckily, I know how to soothe my nervous system and squelch my fears.

I also know that fear will accompany me every step of the way. If I didn’t care so much, I wouldn’t be afraid.

I believe that our creative work transforms us, and that these fears arrive to help us delve deeper, grow further, understand more about our own unique process. Sure, you can work with a therapist to help you overcome your deeply rooted psychological issues (and I recommend you do) but adopting a creative course will give you much the same insights and opportunities for growing yourself as a person.

Keep going despite the fear

Our passion and fear come in equal measure. How to keep going despite the fear? Connect to your bigger mission, surround yourself with creative allies, and trust your creative impulses to help stay on track.

Here are a handful of books that have helped me choose commitment to my art over fear:
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

Enrolling allies

Coaching helps me and my clients continue on when the fear is too great. Sure, I help them arrange their schedules so they can write. I guide them to choose the projects that hold the most meaning for them, and to enlist help from creative allies.

But much of our work together revolves around eradicating fear enough to get the words out. I honor the brave souls who recognize that the external barriers to writing are only part of the reason we avoid creating.

 

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Enough Measuring Up

How many subscribers do you have? How many people are your friends on Facebook, your followers on Instagram?

How do you measure up?

The world at large, including publishers and agents, demands that we deliver our statistics to prove our worthiness. We get caught up in counting our followers, our subscribers, our word count. We concern ourselves with how long our posts are.

I’ve seen countless clients and students (myself included) get caught up in this. We fret over how much, how many, how big.

But does it really get us anywhere? Sure, you may feel some satisfaction in knowing that you have 1,000 Facebook friends, 500 visitors to your blog each month and 1,400 subscribers to your newsletter.

But how does that actually help you do a great job of writing or making art?

Measuring has traditionally been important when we need to show others how great we are. Like name dropping, measuring allows us to flaunt our status. It’s the kind of social proof we need when we’re pitching our work, writing our book proposal, or asking for a review copy of a book.

These numbers can be useful to show the reach of our influence. The good news is things are shifting and isn’t as necessary as it has been. We can self-publish our books. We can write articles and post them on our blogs. We don’t need the approval of editors and publishers to get our words out.

If they’re powerful and you’re brave enough to share, your words will be read and people will be influenced.

Check your analytics, measure your numbers, then get back to the real work: focusing on creating the best work you can.

Give yourself a break from measuring up and just write. Join me in The Devoted Writer. The early registration discount ends today!

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If You Listen, the Forest Speaks

Sitting near an incredible six-trunked tree in Ireland where Yeats once sat and wrote poetry, my friend Tonja led me in a meditation to connect with the trees, and then invited me to write from the quiet, still place she’d guided me to.

In the mossy forest at Coole Park, I resisted the writing. There was no reason or sense, just a slight disinclination to put pen to paper. Then I felt the voice of the tree, heard a few opening lines, and let my pen lead me.

What emerged surprised me: a brief passage, sweet and rich and evocative of the timeless sense I felt there in the forest. The words flowed, I felt rooted, and without worrying whether the writing would be good or serve a purpose, I penned this:

All the winds that hurry through, and the drops of rain that smatter on their rush to ground, the people passing by, their feet clopping along the stones making the ground a hard path, the clouds above painting the sky a moving pillowed landscape, the insects that hop along my bark, the birds make of my branches a stage upon which to gossip and chatter, and I, among my colony of upright peers, stand nearly still, growing imperceptibly taller and wider, so slowly that you might not even know I’m moving, but I’m busting through, stretching beyond my barriers.

My bark splitting into rivers, a long weeping groove of tracks from the tops of my branches to the roots of my toes, each branch bigger than the next, splaying out wider than my years, who knew I’d last this long certainly not me, holding roots for moss and twigs and poets and sky.”

Afterward, I relished the freedom and creativity that I’d allowed to flow through me. Inspired, I felt re-connected to the writer in me who loves to create magical, fictional voices. After years of writing my novel and inspirational articles for Original Impulse, I felt the stirrings of my ‘creative’ writing again.

These are the rewards of turning yourself over to your pen and notebook without agenda. Of releasing the need to control, look good, or know where you’re going. When I first began free writing in 1994, these were the kinds of writings that emerged: stories of people I’d never known, tales of magic and discovery, and emotional landscapes that allowed me to feel and live more deeply.

You can do this kind of writing in The Devoted Writer. This online writing workshop offers a simple invitation: write every day for 15 minutes for 31 days, using the prompts I’ve created. Participants from around the globe give themselves this precious time, and together we pen our way to our own unique voices.

As a leader of this course, it’s my pleasure to see writers of all ilk relish writing in a new and liberated way. As a participant, I add ink to the many pages I’ve written over the years, to contribute to the bank of unpublished writing that has made me the writer and woman I am.

Join us to see what’s waiting in your pen. 

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Brave New World: Move Your Writing Beyond the Journal

You’re journaling regularly, doing morning pages or free writing. Your notebooks and pages begin to stack up, and you feel good about the writing habit you’ve created.

Still, you yearn for more. You want to move beyond the journaling stage, but you don’t know how. This leap in the writing process can be daunting. Without direction and focus, you can stay in journaling mode forever. Which is fine, unless you have a different vision for your writing.

It seems simple, but my clients and students have used this to graduate from journaling to writing polished, publishable pieces.

Ready? It’s super simple: choose a specific project to work on.

I know. It’s too easy, right? But we often need a nudge out of the safe privacy of our journals to take our writing to its next phase.

So, choose a project. An essay you want to write. A nugget of an idea that you discovered in a journaling session. An idea for a story or play or poem – you may not know its form yet, but you know it’s a good idea and you want to develop it.

Once you’ve chosen a an article, short story, essay or poem, follow these steps:

  • Commit to developing the idea.
  • Give yourself a deadline.
  • Give it a stab.
  • Assess what help you need to develop it.
  • Drive past the fears that will show up when it’s 80% complete.
  • Don’t stop until you’re done.
  • See what you’ve learned and how you’ve grown as a result of going a bit further.

What has helped you go from journal to finished pieces? Share your success stories in a comment below.

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Take a Creative Getaway

You feel it in the pauses of your days. Between picking up the kids from school, getting your work done and taking care of the house, the urge to get away pecks at you.

You imagine yourself in a cottage by the sea, or perhaps a cabin surrounded by trees. There, you feel a spaciousness you don’t find at home. Away, you’re able to finally focus on your writing.

This is a common urge for creatives, this desire to escape the daily demands of life and slip off somewhere secluded. There, we are sure, we will finally be able to focus and write the masterpiece we know is inside us somewhere.

I have felt this urge, and many times I’ve been able to honor it. Two months house sitting in a remote French village, a week here or there house sitting in the mountains, and now, this sojourn I’ve embarked on in Paris.

Get away without leaving home

While it’s true that time away can give us the focus we need and want, we can also get that focus at home. I know, because I’ve often felt the urge to get away. I’ve known, very sincerely, that if I just had a month away, I could finish my novel.

But that month away wasn’t available for me, and there will be a lot of times when it’s not available for you, either. How to focus anyway? Here are a few suggestions.

Master the art of the mini getaway. An hour, two hours, three hours away from home in the library, a park, a friend’s house while she’s at work, a quiet bookstore or a café can give you the sense of getting away. Toni Morrison used to check into hotels to focus on her novel.

To make it feel more like a getaway, turn off your phone. Go offline.

Go somewhere new, a place where you’re not known.

If you can’t get away from the house, write in a room you don’t normally frequent. If you’ve got a one-room home, turn your chair in a new direction.

While it’s largely a question of changing locations and stepping away from our obligations, my clients have found that they can do this with a few small adjustments at home.

Practice the art of the mini getaway until you can take a real getaway.

Planning for bigger getaways

Your real getaway may take a whole year to plan and save for. Mark the dates on your calendar.

Figure out where you will go. Estimate the costs, and start saving.

Plan what you will work on while there, and know that it may take you a day or two to settle into your focused zone.

This doesn’t have to cost a lot, be far away, or be complicated. I’ve often house sat, saving money on accommodations.

The point of a creative getaway is to focus, to release yourself from your other roles, to set aside distractions so you can write.

What works for you to get away, even when you can’t escape your daily routine?
What have mini or big getaways done for your writing?

Share your getaway tips in a comment below.

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Creative Risk Taking

I’m sitting in front of my typewriter, in my apartment in Denver. It’s 1994, and I’m embarking on my writing life. Working on an article, I fervently hope that an editor will accept it.

Things sure have changed for writers, haven’t they? Fast-forward seventeen years, and we’re seeing writers freely publishing on their own and others’ blogs, and writers of all genres succeeding at the game of self-publishing. As creators, we’ve never had more power and more access to our audience than we do now.

Taking risks for writing

Creating anything for others is asking them to take a risk on your work. Buying a book, spending precious time reading a blog, getting a ticket to a movie – they’re all risks we take. Minor risks, most of them, but with so many things vying for our time, energy and resources, we must be choosy with the risks we take.
[Read more…] about Creative Risk Taking

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Following in Sylvia’s Footsteps to Paris

In 1919, young American Sylvia Beach moved to Paris and opened a bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. She’d been to Europe with her family as a girl and as a young adult, yearned to live in Paris.

When I read about this pioneer in Noel Riley Fitch’s Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, I found a female role model for living an unconventional life. A bookish woman who moves to Paris to live a literary existence – that’s my kind of heroine.
[Read more…] about Following in Sylvia’s Footsteps to Paris

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This Writer’s Life at a Crossroads

We’d like to think that things move in a steady trajectory onward and upward. That in life and art we steadily improve, increase our skills and capacity, and ultimately arrive, fulfilled, at some better place than where we started.

But it seems the real path is circular, a spiral that moves forward but can bring us back to where we started. Or maybe it feels more like a squiggly Picasso line.

When clients come to me, ‘stuck’, they worry about their ability to move out of a rut. I assure them that ruts are a normal part of the creative cycle. It’s normal to arrive at a need to renew and refresh your commitment to your art.
[Read more…] about This Writer’s Life at a Crossroads