Real Words

I tend to be pretty open about myself. I don’t really keep secrets or try to hide aspects of who I am. But there’s something about me that most people in my life probably don’t know. I have a secret place in my heart that loves country music.

I think that the reason that I adore this genre of music so much is because I look at it through a writer’s eyes. Some of the reasons that I end up loving country songs include:

• So many of the lines are so simple. With every other type of music that I listen to, there is a lot of nuanced language and metaphors. That’s great. But I think there’s value in being able to just say what you want to say in a straightforward way. That’s what you get with country music.
• The surprises make me smile. I love writing that catches me off guard. Occasionally, you do get a complex metaphor thrown into these lyrics and it’s shocking and usually amusing.
• The topics are so basic. Country music songs are only really about a handful of different things. And yet they find new ways to say the same things over and over. Maybe this is true of other genres too but I think it’s truer of country music.
• It rhymes. What can I say? I love that I can easily learn the words to a song the first time that it’s played because it rhymes so obviously. It’s basic poetry at its best.
• Personality shines through. The character that is singing really pours out his heart to you. A good writer does the same thing. I love it.

Incidentally, I don’t actively try to keep this a secret. I just don’t ever end up really playing my own music around other people so it’s not something that ever comes up. Truth is, most people who know me probably wouldn’t be at all surprised by it even though they didn’t know.

I love quotations. I love finding those phrases that someone else said which I wish that I would have said myself. I take comfort in the words of other people when I can’t quite say what it is that I want to say. And I enjoy sharing quotes with others who feel this way about writing.

The problem is that I’ve never really been very organized about keeping my quotes written down so that I could return to them. I’ve tried to keep quote journals off and on but I always stop writing in them sooner rather than later. I’ve tried to keep an ongoing Word document filled with my favorite quotes (which is great because I can then search easily through them to find things I’m looking for) but I always stop this too. I’ve also done some wackier things in my lifetime like writing my favorite quotes in Sharpie all over one of my bathrooms and emailing quotes to myself so I’d have them in my inbox.

None of these things really worked. These days, I do a combination of things. I write down quotes that I really like and make collages around them which I keep in a notebook. I blog quotes and post them on my social networking sites so at least they’re online somewhere that I can access them. But it’s still pretty disorganized.

Do you have a good method of organizing your favorite quotes?

I think that it’s important for writers to rely on writing rituals. This is what keeps you getting up and writing every single day even when you really don’t feel like it. There are many different writing rituals that you can do to keep the writing flowing.

My ten favorite options for daily writing rituals are:

1. Journaling. I happen to think that keeping a daily journal is the best thing that a writer can do for himself or herself. This is how you get to know yourself, comment on your own ideas and keep track of your progress from one goal to another.
2. Poem per day. A great creative project is to commit to writing one poem per day. It’s a way to get your thoughts flowing. If you’re actually a poet, you can edit these later but you can also just use it as an exercise to make sure you get words down every day. Check out the daily Twitter poems by @dragonblogger to see a great example of how to stay inspired to write a poem every day.
3. 1-page repetitious observation. With this project, you study the same thing every single day and write one page about what you see. I’ve done this before with writing about the couch that sits across from my bed. It’s a great challenge to see how many different ways you can write about the same thing.
4. 5 Questions. Create a list of five questions that you want to ask yourself every day. These should be questions like, “what did I dream about?” or “if I could do anything I wanted today, what would I choose?” or “how would I describe myself to a stranger?” Answer 1-5 questions daily in writing.
5. Describe a photo. Choose one photo or image each day and write about it. This challenges you to put your visual ideas into words.
6. A daily blog. If you like putting your words out there for everyone else to read then you can commit to writing daily on your blog. As long as the focus is on the writing and not on the blog development itself then this is a good writing ritual.
7. Pull from the dictionary. Open the dictionary and pull out a random word. Right twenty different sentences using that word.
8. Pull from a book. Open up any book at all and take a sentence from it. Use that sentence as the start of a short short story. Write one super short story per day.
9. Fortunately, unfortunately. Write a line that starts with “fortunately” and then write a line that follows it that starts with “unfortunately”. Continue this pattern through an entire page of writing. You often end up feeling silly which makes your writing feel fun again.
10. Do a writing exercise book. You can also find books that have different daily writing exercises. The Artists’ Way series is my favorite creativity book (which can be used for writers) but there are lots of others out there.

Each of this writing rituals can be done in less than an hour (sometimes a lot less). You can commit at least that much effort to your writing each day, can’t you?

We’ve all dealt with writer’s block. I find that professional writers deal with it less than casual writers just because at some point you need to just write in spite of it if you’re going to pay the bills. In my opinion, learning to do this is primarily done through learning about the root causes of writer’s block so that you can just deal with the problem and move on.

The most common cause of writer’s block for me is one of two things. In relation to the work that I’m doing for a living it’s usually that I am burned out on writing. I need to acknowledge this, step away from my writing for a little while and then come back to it when I’m not exhausted of writing anymore. In terms of my creative writing, the problem is more often that I get into the middle of the thing and don’t want to keep going. In this case, the solution for me is to keep writing anyway.

As you can see, the different causes of writer’s block can cause solving the problem to haev radically different approaches. Pushing through the work when I’m burned out isn’t going to get me through writer’s block. Taking breaks every time a creative project gets tough is going to cause me to avoid it completely. To know what to do, I need to know myself and what’s going on with me.

Learn more about my thoughts on dealing with different kinds of writer’s block.

Last year I wrote an article with 25 mantras for writers. These are just short little sayings or affirmations that I believe writers can focus on to stay on track with their writing. Some of them are about being kind to yourself as a writer and others are about honoring your creative drive. The idea is that if you tell yourself that your writing is good and you deserve to write then you’re going to be a more driven and open writer.

These mantras gave gained a lot of attention around the web since the time that I wrote them. Most recently they were re-printed by Write4Kids.com. I’m excited about this because it means that my writing will be shared with people who have children and who write for children – a part of the world of writers that I don’t always get to interact with.

One of those writers who just came to my attention is Susan Heim. She was inspired by the post and decided to write her own set of mantras for parents. I encourage you to check them out as they are also inspiring and affirmative. She emphasizes the fact that it’s okay not to be a perfect parent and that the joy of parenting comes from continuing to try and from enjoying every moment that you can with your kids. Great stuff!

I’d also like to remind you that College in a Suitcase is still doing an elaboration on each of the twenty-five mantras in a series that expands on the thoughts in those mantras and applies them to the author of the blog. It’s also good stuff and worth checking out.

Thanks all for reading! I’d love to know if these mantras have done anything special for you or if you have some of your own to share with my readers!

I wrote an article last week about how to celebrate national poetry month. There are a lot of little things that you can do to bring more poetry to your life in the month of April. What I’ve been thinking about since writing that post, though, is what poetry really means to me. I think that poetry really helps you to focus on all of the different senses that you have … and that got me thinking that maybe we should spend National Poetry Month trying to approach poetry with each of our five main senses.

1. Sight. There are so many different ways that we can “see” poetry. The most obvious is to read poetry that has been written down for us in books or online. However, we can also see poetry in the sense of looking at things around us with a poetic eye and imagining poems based on those sights. Yet another option would be to read a poem and then to go out with a camera and to capture images that remind us of that poem.
2. Sound. Sound is an easy one when it comes to poetry. We can have someone read poetry to us or we can read it aloud. We can listen to poetry on tape or online. Better yet, we can go to a live poetry reading.
3. Smell. How do you smell poetry? By going to a used bookstore and taking in that scent of books in the poetry section. By focusing on the smells described in different poems or writing a poem about our favorite smells.
4. Taste. We can taste poetry by writing or reading poetry about different tastes. We can focus on the tastes we are enjoying and think of poetry in our minds as we indulge in these tastes.
5. Touch. Poetry is a means of connecting with other people and so is the sense of touch. A great thing to do is to trade massages with someone while simultaneously reading poetry together or listening to it on a CD.

How else can we use our senses to enjoy National Poetry Month?

April is National Poetry Month so I thought I’d share ten great quotations about poetry as a way to celebrate:

1. “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” – Audre Lorde
2. “Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.” – Edward Abbey
3. “Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you — like music to the musician… — or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their nots and explanations.” – Fitzgerald
4. “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” – Sandburg
5. “Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.” – Aristotle
6. “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” – Shelley
7. “Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.” – Mary Oliver
8. “Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.” – Frost
9. “Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” – Don Marquis
10. “Any healthy man can go without food for two days — but not without poetry.” – Baudelaire

What is your favorite quote about poetry?

I have written here in the past about my struggle to decide whether I should soldier on with projects started many years ago or whether I should just let them go in favor of starting something new. The answer I always come back to is that I will continue to sporadically work on old projects if something inspires me to do so but I’ll also leave myself plenty of room to start new projects.

I am thinking about this again today after just reading a post on the Gypsy Girl’s Guide blog. The author writers about how she has studied the work of a photographer who captured in images the growth of her cousin and sister over a ten year period. Thinking about this, the author writes:

“In my humble opinion, to build something continuously for ten years is a most admirable task, don’t you think? … Time brings the work a certain maturity and intimacy, that most definitely comes through in the final product.”

I don’t know if this is true for all of my long-term projects but it is certainly true for some of them. I have been able to go back to rework old ideas that started with only a glimmer of true understanding about the topic but have now grown because of more immersion in the topic over time. And I don’t just mean more research … I mean that there are pieces of writing that I started but hadn’t yet had enough life experience to clearly understand the emotions I was trying to convey and more time in life has given me more time to develop both the experience and the ability to articulate the experience that I didn’t have when launching those projects.

Is it the same for you? Do you like projects that drag on over the years or do you like to pick something, finish it and move on?

Are you feeling uninspired as a writer right now? Do you need to do something to jumpstart that free-flowing spill of words onto the page?

Here’s a list of fifteen different tasks that you could do immediately to inspire your writing today:

1. Grab a headline from the news. Go to your favorite news site, pick a headline and start writing about whatever it makes you think about.
2. Go for a short walk. Walking gets our bodies moving and also makes our brains start working better. Many great pieces of writing began as thoughts on a walk.
3. Read a poem or short story. Reading a piece of writing that we wish we’d written ourselves is a great way to get inspired to do more writing.
4. Send an email to a friend about what you are working on. We often present our projects in a flattering light to others which can inspire us to actually work on them some more.
5. Grab your camera. Spend twenty minutes shooting digital photos of whatever things around you are interesting right now. Even the dishes in the sink can look interesting in the right light. This non-writing burst of creativity can inspire your writing.
6. Take a shower. If you haven’t showered yet today, go do that. The shower is a great place for developing random thoughts.
7. Write some affirmations. Sometimes we just need to remind ourselves that it’s okay if what we write today isn’t perfect. Sit down and write ten times, “what I write today is enough” or “I am filled with creative potential” or any of the other mantras for writers that exist.
8. Write a blog post. If you’re a blogger then you may want to add a short fun post to your blog today. Make it stream-of-consciousness, different from what you usually write and just fun. You should get some interesting responses that may inspire you.
9. Color. Get out a box of crayons or colored pencils and spend ten minutes just coloring a page. Then look at your page and write the first ten words that come to mind. What does it make you want to write next?
10. Do one task mindfully. Mindfulness is the focus of our full attention on the task at hand. Make your bed with a focus solely on the feel of the sheets and the smell of the room. This clears the mind of all of its clutter which means that you’ll be able to write better today.
11. Write a letter. Handwritten letters are some of the most creative things that people write but we rarely do it anymore.
12. Listen to music that you love. A little bit of music goes a long way towards making your creative juices flow.
13. Ask for inspiration on forums or social networking sites. Just post to your Facebook that you’re seeking suggestions on what to write about today. People will respond and you may find yourself inspired.
14. Make a date with yourself for later this week. It’s important to take time to go on dates with ourselves that are all about being fun and silly. You might not be able to take one today but you can set a date to do that and it may make you feel better.
15. Brainstorm a list of things that you could do today to feel more inspired. What else could you do right now to inspire your writing?

In the past I’ve written a lot on this blog about being a greener writer. I’ve written about determining how green you are as a writer, fixing your bad un-green habits as a web writer and using green social bookmarking. However, I have not written a whole lot about green reading.

A great article on ways to green your reading that I just saw made me realize that I was remiss in not addressing this specific topic since most writers are also readers and that’s definitely another area of our lives and work where we can all stand to be a bit more green.

The article mentions three great ways to green your reading – using Paperback Swap sites, using Kindle and reading eBooks instead of regular books. The main goal with all of these methods of greener reading is to reduce your consumption of new books because this reduces the need for more trees to be cut down to make those books.

When choosing these methods, there are some things that you need to take into consideration. You need to consider the energy usage of your computer and Kindle reading so that you don’t waste energy here and reduce the greenness of the act. You need to think about the materials that you use when shipping books for a swap because if these aren’t green then you aren’t being as green as you could be.

In addition to greening your reading in these ways, there are other things that you can do to be a green reader. Make sure that you read up on green topics. Try to buy books made from sustainable or recycled materials. Make sure that you give away or recycle books and never trash them. Buy used as often as possible. Buy from sellers that are concerned about green issues. Only buy books that you actually might want to keep and keep going back to. Use the local library - and walk there instead of driving! Use a low-energy reading lamp instead of the light in the room when reading in bed.

The important thing is to think about your consumption of books and how green it is (or isn’t). Then come up with creative green ideas for making sure that your life as a reader is greener tomorrow than it was today.