Almost all writers are in love with quotes. Some of us are drawn to the most famous quotes that always crop up in literary circles. Others of us like to find our own top quotes every time that we read. We share them with other writers in our blogs, letters, emails and social media accounts. But, most importantly, many of us post them where we can see them on a regular basis.
Why Post Quotes
There are many great reasons to post quotes. For example:
- Quotes inspire our lives.
- Quotes inspire our writing.
- Quotes help remind us of our goals.
- Quotes celebrate the hard work of other authors.
- Quotes celebrate what we love - WORDS.
- In the front pages of your journal. This is a favorite place for me.
- Inside of your favorite books. Write them on bookmark size pieces of paper and you have inspiring, creative bookmarks. Keep blank ones and you can add quotes from books as you read them.
- On desks and laptop stands. This is where you probably do most of your writing.
- On your laptop or laptop sleeve. Adhere them to the outside of your laptop or the sleeve you carry it in.
- On your computer as wallpaper or screensaver.
- As artwork on your walls. I enjoy making collage art and adding my top favorite quotes to it. Then I hang the art around the house.
- Inside of a dresser drawer. Choose a drawer you use daily such as your sock drawer. Read the quotes each day to inspire you.
- In a purse or wallet. Preferably inside of something that you take with you most places that you go.
- Inside of your mobile phone. Add a favorite quote as your phone’s screen saver. Store other quotes inside of the phone as SMS message drafts.
- Taped to the coffee maker or tea pot. Many of us writers fall prey to the need to drink coffee or tea while we do our writing. Since we’re using those machines anyway, let’s make them more useful by adding quotes on to them.
This is a guest post from Alexis Bonari, a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at onlinedegrees.org, researching areas of online universities. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.
Recently, my life as a freelancer was turned upside down. Granted I had slightly over nine months to plan for this lifestyle change, but nothing quite prepares you for how your life will change when you have a child. If you’re a freelance writer, organizing your work schedule around the needs of a baby and keeping ahead of deadlines is a surprisingly challenging experience. While I’m sure I’ll have to update my strategy as my daughter grows (she’s only 3 months old and isn’t yet mobile) here are four helpful tips for transitioning your freelance career when you’ve just had a baby:
1. Take advantage of any help you can get from your partner.
Understandably, not everyone has a partner who can devote their weekend or evening to watching the baby so that work can be done. If you do have such a person in your life; take advantage of it. Nobody is an island. Freelancing for a living is a full-time job. So is taking care of a baby. Four hours of completely uninterrupted work in the evening, and some extra time on the weekend, can make a huge difference in your overall productivity.
2. Look into a childcare exchange with another freelancer or another mother who wants some time off.
There are many mothers who want part-time childcare and are unable to find it for a reasonable rate. Find another mother in a similar situation and offer to trade childcare. As I already mentioned, a few uninterrupted hours can make or break your project.
3. Work around the baby’s sleep schedule.
This may seem obvious, but it often isn’t. It is not uncommon to fall behind on housework and laundry when you first have a baby. This is even truer when you have both a baby and a full-time job. Resist the urge to clean or do other household chores when you have a deadline coming up. Even though you’re at home, you’re on the clock. Schedule specific times for any housekeeping/cooking and stick to them. Otherwise, try to get through as much work as possible while the baby is sleeping.
4. Accept that it will take time to adjust to your new schedule, and that’s okay!
Go easy on yourself. Your life just changed in a very real way. There are many advantages to working from home when you have young children. That said, it’s not as straightforward as working set hours with no interruption. Enjoy your baby and slowly increase the amount of work you take on until you find the perfect balance for your life.
As a full-time writer/blogger, I spend most of my day working on a computer. Although I frequently hear reasons why I should work primarily on my desktop computer, I have to confess that I’m more likely to spend time on my laptop than at my desktop. This isn’t to say that I don’t use my desktop computer since it definitely has its benefits. It’s just to say that I think it’s worth it for full-time writers to invest in high-quality laptops since they can be so important to the work that we do.
Benefits of Laptops for Full-Time Writer
Some of the core reasons that I’m on my laptop more than my desktop are:
- Portability. Obviously a main benefit of the laptop is that you can take it anywhere. Since I work from home, I get stuck in the apartment a lot if I’m limited to my desktop. Conversely, I can throw the laptop into a laptop sleeve and head to the park or the coffee shop if I need to be around some life to work. And, of course, with a few of the right laptop accessories, I can easily work from anywhere in the world with my laptop which is definitely ideal.
- Comfort. I find it a lot more comfortable to work on my laptop than at my desktop. I do have a good desktop chair and the right setup for my keyboard and all that but frankly I don’t feel comfy sitting at a desk all day. I like to be able to curl up, move closer to a window, get under the blanket on my bed, etc. A desktop doesn’t provide that comfort.
- Better posture. It may not be as comfy but I do tend to sit more upright when working from my desktop computer.
- Multiple screens. It’s easier to have research on one side of the screen and the document I’m writing on the other when I’ve got the big desktop screen to work off of.
Michelle Rafter recently wrote a terrific article offering ten suggestions for freelance writers who are interested in launching their own businesses. The suggestions range from the obvious (train others in what you do) to the truly creative (launch a customized wire service).
One core reason that these suggestions are so important is because entrepreneurs are making the money when other people aren’t. A couple of years ago, I wrote a very basic article on things you need to do if you’re looking for a job. The article has gained hundreds of comments from unemployed people who are desperately struggling to find work. While I can sympathize with their plight, I have to confess that there is a part of me that wants to suggest to these people that they try to find creative ways to launch their own businesses rather than waiting for someone to hire them.
In the recession, nearly all of the people I know who are managing to do decently for themselves financially are people who are going out there and making their own jobs. I know people who have gotten laid off and used that opportunity to launch photography businesses, grow their writing careers and work in foreign countries. I realize that not being able to find a traditional job in your field is terrible but going out and making those opportunities for yourself is a creative and productive approach to the problem.
Freelancers who are struggling to make ends meet with traditional writing jobs can take their already-independent way of working and really make it work for them. The suggestions in Michelle’s article are a great start for that. And of course getting creative and launching a fresh new idea of your own would be even better.
And even freelancers who aren’t struggling may want to consider making this type of business move. It keeps your work fresh. It stops you from stagnating. It allows you to explore your limits, push your boundaries and challenge yourself in the work that you are doing. You don’t have a boss to promote you so you really and truly have to promote from within!
A Better Woman : A Memoir of Motherhood
The book is the story of a woman who chose to have children later in life. She suffered some serious complications from the process and underwent some difficult times with her physical health as a result. That’s sort of what the tale is about.
However, what it’s really about is how this affected her writing. How motherhood affected her writing. How, as a writer, you are the mother to your creations and when you become a mother to a living being it greatly affects your ability to mother your creative works into being.
Author Susan Johnson has some poignant insights into what being a writer means and these are sprinkled all throughout the book. A few examples taken from her text:
“I believe now that I wrote myself into life. Before I learnt how to do it I lived as if blind, forever raging against the dark. Learning how to write illuminated life itself for me, letting me see fully for the first time its shape and dimensions. Before I learnt to write I did not know who I was.”
“I was forced to acknowledge all over again that writing is not life, or even truth, but merely fragments of both, imperfect reflections. There will always be moments and emotions which refuse to be caught, dark undertows which will never break the surface. Life will always exceed the writer’s inadequate grasp, no matter how radiant the genius.”
“All the while I have been writing, my story has been uncurling. Like your own, my story is still being told, and I am living the telling as I write it, breathing, trusting in the dark. I am writing backwards but I am living forwards, blind to my own end.”
I almost didn’t get out of my pajamas on Friday. I lingered in bed for awhile, doing some of my work there from my laptop. I moved to the living room for awhile and worked on my computer. I went back to bed and did some reading that I was able to justify as research for an article that I was working on.
This is the kind of life that my friends say that they envy. They always say that if they could work from home like I do then they would never get out of their pajamas.
Usually, I disagree with them. I think there are a lot of good reasons for freelance writers to get up, out of bed, showered and dressed at the start of each day. Some of the reasons that I do that include:
- I feel better about myself. Maybe some folks feel comfy and cute in their pj’s. I prefer to wear cute clothes. I feel better about the way that I look if I’ve put on something besides what I slept in.
- I feel better emotionally. The days can really blend into one another too much if you don’t separate them with basic rituals like showering, dressing, changing into pj’s at night. When this happens, I just don’t feel good.
- Getting up marks the start of my work day. I do linger in bed each morning. It’s a luxury I enjoy. I read, I journal, I answer email. But when I actually get up, my day has begun. I’m ready to work. Or sometimes I’m not ready but getting up helps to signal my body and mind that it really is time.
- It’s good to be able to leave the house at the drop of the hat. There are times when you need to get out and interact with the world even if that means just doing your work at the local coffee shop or co-work space. It’s a lot easier to do that when you’re already ready to go.
My big writing project for 2010 is to go through all of the old writing that I’ve been meaning to go through for years. I have tons of projects that relate to this. I’ve got old files on my computer that need to be organized, some of which can be deleted and others that can be re-worked into new articles. I have an entire box of old scraps of writing that date back more than ten years. I have several poetry and fiction projects that were started and have been ignored. It’s my goal to go through these, save the stuff I’m actually going to use, mine some insights wherever I can and then toss the rest. The goal here is to clear out the old writing (either by using it or tossing it) in order to make room for new writing.
What I’ve discovered is that it’s not easy to accomplish this task (which is why I’ve been starting and stopping it and putting it off for so long). But I think I’ve found a system that works for me. Here it is:
Identify all of the writing to go through
The first step for me had to be to get organized enough to know what I wanted to look through. Then I needed to prioritize. The main things I want to look through are computer files, that box of writing and my unfinished projects. I prioritized them in that order.
Define clear goals for what to do with the writing
My biggest problem with going through my writing has always been that I don’t really know what to do with it as I’m going through it. Sure, there are some scraps that I clearly just need to toss but mostly there’s a bunch of stuff that may or may not be useful to me in some form. Defining exactly what I’m looking for as I go through my writing makes it a lot easier to actually sort through it. For me, the goals are:
- Repurpose any work that can be used somewhere else. This goal needed to be even clearer so I had to set specific things that I was looking for such as writing to use in my personal blogs, writing to repurpose for clients, writing to turn into magazine articles for specific magazines … By defining this, I am able to do a much better job of organizing existing writing for new uses.
- Look for any insights into myself. Much of my writing, especially on those scraps of paper, reminds me of things about myself that I had forgotten. That’s why it’s so hard to get rid of some of it. What I’m doing is setting aside anything that provides specific insight and then journalling about it now before I get rid of those original pieces of writing.
- Save any great lines. Usually there are only one or two great lines of writing in a whole stack of papers. I’m learning to look for those and then set them aside while getting rid of the rest of the writing junk that is there.
- Computer and physical files. For the work that I want to use somewhere else, I’ve got files labeled “blogs, clients, magazines”. There is a file on my computer for each of these so that I can drop other files into each of them to get organized. I also have physical files for each of these which is where I’m sorting the paper stuff in the same manner if I plan to use it in a writing project.
- Stack for journalling. If something seems like it gives me some real insight into myself then I place it in a stack for journalling about later.
- Highlighting. The few great lines that I’m coming across are highlighted and then stacked together. I’ll be going through these highlighted portions later and copying them into a journal or computer file - a sort of inspiration packet for myself.
When I first wrote up my personal statement for my application to law school, I struggled over every word, trying desperately to fit the nuanced details of a life full of changing decisions in to what amounted to a five-paragraph essay. In the copy of my first draft of the paper which I have tucked away in to a scrapbook, there is a bulleted outline of my working life. It reads:
· Age 15 – began full-time employment at daycare
· Age 16 – receptionist at civil engineering office
· Age 17 – dropped out of high school, certified in massage therapy
· Age 18 – traveling portrait photographer
· Age 19 – founded non-profit working with incarcerated adults
· Age 21 – developed literary magazine for said non-profit
· Age 22 – group home staff worker
· Age 23 – completed manuscript about group home staff experience
· Age 23 – certified in therapeutic in-home foster care
· Age 24 – finished four year college degree in two years of full-time school
I remember staring down at that piece of paper and thinking that all it looked like was a litany of, “I started and then I quit, I started and then I quit”. I hadn’t even bothered to list the numerous bookstore, barista, babysitting and bartending jobs I’d begun and then backed away from off and on and off and on throughout the duration of my short life.
Staring at the list, I put my pen to the page and began to scrawl. I wrote lines and lines about why I had left each job that I had started. It was probably the most cathartic writing experience I had ever had in my life. I learned, through a close look at my own ebbs and flows, about the motions of my own internal alterations. And what I saw when I looked at the final pages summarizing my life was that I was not someone who always started and quit things. Instead, I was a girl who was not afraid to say that something wasn’t working for me anymore and to move on to something else which might. I was a girl who was interested in having as many new experiences as she possibly could and being okay with letting one lead in to the next.
In the end, I sized that multi-page self-realization in to a concise description of why I would be able to meet the challenges of law school with an efficiency and dedication which would wow the school’s staff and make marks upon the world around me. The funny thing was that despite those layers of self-knowledge I was staring at, I had completely convinced myself that law school was the right path for me. I was certain that I had finally figured out what was exactly right for my changing life, sure even that I could continue to change within the boundaries of that profession without compromising my own free spirit.
I began law school with the kind of gusto with which I begin all of my endeavors. I fell head over heels in love with legal language and buried myself happily in books as children will bury themselves in the sands of beaches. This experience was going to be just another step on the boardwalk of my life and I was excited about the chance to wind my way along the coast of this new career.
But, alas, the excitement was short-lived. I liked law school well-enough, but I have never been a woman suited to a life of structure. I was fine on days when I had no class and I could linger in coffee shops, reading my books and working on cases. But on days when I had to go to class, it was a struggle to force myself to conform. Every fiber of my being fought against my logical insistence that it was just class and that I could go; I felt weighted down by my own insistence that I stick to the plan.
Lying in bed one day when I was supposed to be attending a seminar for my contracts class, I came across that life list in my old scrapbook. I remembered the fervor with which I had crafted every word of that essay. And I remembered that what I had always wanted to be was a writer. I wasn’t certain what that meant. I didn’t know what I would write. Or for that matter, how I would pay my bills without the security of a law firm check coming my way every two weeks.
But I knew one thing for certain: every time that I had quit something in my life, I had left behind an important chapter of my personal story to move on to an even better selection. My life is not a book with a neat and tidy plot, a single climax and an ultimate ending. Instead, my life is a library full of books. That day, I walked away from a law school career as easily as I had walked away from the bartending jobs that hadn’t even made the cut on my life list of career-ending decisions. Today, I am a writer. In total, I have about ten years of professional writing experience behind me from various positions. I’ve been a full-time professional web writer and blogger for nearly five years now. So I can confidently say that I won’t quit this work anytime soon. But who knows? I’ve never regretted quitting anything yet!
As a professional blogger I have a number of steady clients who I have been blogging for over the course of several years. This year a couple of them have already sent me Christmas bonuses via PayPal. Totally unexpected and so sweet!
I am happy about this for three reasons:
- The money is nice of course. But this is actually a small reason compared to the other reasons this makes me happy.
- It makes me really feel like a part of the team. I work every week for these clients. I do all that I can to promote and build up their website and blog traffic. It’s nice to know that I am considered a regular “employee” deserving of a Christmas bonus even though I work remotely because it really makes me feel like I’m recognized as an important part of the company’s team.
- I think this is a hint that things are shifting in the world of freelance and independent contracting work. More and more people are doing this type of work. I think that there are more “freelancers” who are really functioning as work-at-home employees for specific businesses. The Christmas bonus is one sign that this is beginning to be recognized. Another sign was a recent announcement by oDesk that their freelancers can start getting group health benefits through them. This recognition of the difference between true freelance work and work-at-home independent contracting is important and I think it suggests bigger changes to come.
There is an episode of Sex and the City which I only vaguely remember where the girls talk about what they have in the “goodie drawers” beside their beds. They are talking about sex toys, of course, and I recall Samantha joking about how she has a whole goodie closet.
I bought a new bed frame for myself over the summer. It has a bookcase headboard and it has drawers underneath the mattresses. I, too, have a goodie drawer. It is the drawer closest to where I lay my head at night and the drawer which is easiest for me to reach in the morning. It isn’t sex toys that you’ll find in there, though … it’s journals.
I have been keeping a personal journal off and on since I was about ten. Writing in this journal is an important part of my regular routine. I used to hide the journal to make sure that no one would find it. These days I tuck it away so that it’s not tempting to the curious eyes of people who happen to be in my house but I don’t worry much because I don’t think that anyone I let in my house would actually violate my privacy by reading my journal. It’s one of those journals that wouldn’t be that interesting to others anyway; it’s filled with the banalities of life and my thoughts about nothing much. It’s something I do just for me.
This isn’t the only journal that I keep these days. I also try to keep a gratitude journal in which I regularly note the things that I am feeling most thankful for. I don’t do this daily (although I once did and think it’s good to do so) but I do it steadily enough. And I have a journal for affirmations and a journal for writing exercises. I certainly have plenty of private things that I could keep in my goodie drawer but it’s these things that end up being most important to me.
And of course then I have the bookcase headboard which is filled with the latest two dozen books that I’ve gotten out of the library and may read voraciously or may not read at all. I can see them there and be motivated to pick them up and do some reading though and that’s why those are left out in the open instead of tucked away into drawers.
What do you have in your goodie drawer? Where do you keep your private writing?
