Catching Up On Email - Stuff On Writing

 Maybe someday I will finish all that I want to read and also what I want to write. That seems unlikely. I feel that I have two choices, get through all the emails at one time - which gets tiring very quickly The other is to get things balanced - and that does not feel it is happening (and has been out of whack for about a month) as I have not been able to get at my pretrial detention journal. That was planned for November, so maybe the problem extends back further than I first thought.

Particularly, I have been putting off K.M. Weiland's advice posts. I decided today that enough was enough.

I have been snoozing K.M. Weiland's blog post 14 Do’s and Don’ts of Time Management for Writers (from a Recovering Over-Achiever) for over a week at this time. Probably more than a couple of weeks. I thought it was a video and I do put those off, and podcasts I rarely indulge in. Maybe I did not want to prod my conscience (is that not the main cause of procrastination?). I mention conscience because it feels thoroughly kicked about by what I read. 

She writes on Six Don'ts - these I suggest you read in full, so click on the link above. All I will say about them is that from experience ignore 3, 4, and 5 at your own peril. Your mental health is at stake.

Of the Do's, here are my highlights. 

Of #1 "List Your To-Dos So You Can See Them All in One Place", I could say by scheduling my novel writing and my story submissions on Google Calendar I do this; only Google Calendar is not always open and that lets it be ignored.

I do not have anything but one writing task at this time, so #2, "Create `Batches' of Related Tasks", I cannot see having any application. The same with #6, "Schedule Writing Tasks and Writing-Related Tasks Separately", and maybe I should pay more attention to #7 "Create a Quick Warm-Up Routine" - I just flop down happy to be home from dishwashing.

Of #4, "Schedule Downtime Relentlessly" I want to say I wish I had this advice in my old life - I took three vacations in 23 years and thought nothing of working 7 days a week. Right now, I take a lot of downtime without planning. Like I watching Barbie (worth it).

The one that I saw and the light bulb went off: #8 "Write in Fifteen-Minute Spurts."

I want to highlight this, having experience of overdoing the multi-taskign when I rather younger than I am today and it helped wear me down into depression:

3. Multi-Task (With Care)

Multi-tasking is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can undeniably help you move through multiple projects at a quicker rate. On the other hand, the growing amount of research on the loss of productivity associated with multi-tasking is sobering. Even though all that busyness can make us feel super-productive, the actual metrics don’t always weigh out. Use caution and consciousness when adding multi-tasking to your schedule.

Ms. Weiland also sent an email touting her short video (8:30 minutes), What Are the 3 Types of Character Arcs? This will give you a few things to think about.

The Rumpus published There’s Reality in Other Places: A Conversation with Kelsey Norris, which has very detailed responses to questions about writing short stories. Having read the same collection, this felt necessary to quote and remember:

I can remember picking up Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell at a bookstore—it must have been in college, home for a break—and in the stories in that collection, have structure-play and strange premises in them. And yet the humanness—the emotional quality of them—is not strange. Finding that familiar human element in such a strange world was really permission-giving for me. Like, you can write weird and still write emotional stories, and maybe they’re more emotional because they’re weird. I love leaving a story being like, “I can’t believe they pulled that off.” That often has to do with whatever the weirdness was of that story. Life’s weird. There’s reality in other places. I really like fiction and media that play with that strangeness.

Call it a bias of mine, that I think humanness is a necessary quality of writing. If we cannot connect through our shared humanity, then we might as well not write a word. 

Finally, I feel it necessary to add these paragraphs - from a sense of solidarity, of furthering everyone's education by publicizing other writers:

Rumpus: What other writers or collections do you feel have given you permission to write the kind of stories you’ve wanted to write? You mentioned Karen Russell earlier.

Norris: I started early by reading Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, which has some spectacular sentences in it. Reading “Car-Crash While Hitchhiking” was one of the first times where I stopped in my tracks because of language. That was really important early on. Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties has stories that are thematically linked and are strange, structurally and premise-wise. That, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black were really exciting. They were instrumental, like: “You know, I want to write that kind of book as well.” AndI love Salt Slow by Julia Armfield. It has the weirdness—it has these crispy, beautiful, flowy, goopy sentences.

This blog is my memoir, all in first drafts, and I do not usually read memoirists, “Intimacy in the Telling”: A Conversation with Maggie Smith from The Rumpus is an exception becuase of this exchange:

The Rumpus: I wanted to start by acknowledging how much I appreciated the nonlinear, plot-refusing narrative structure of your memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful.

Maggie Smith: Sometimes life refuses us plot. Almost all the time.

Translating an autobiographical detail into fiction has been hard for me - recognizing how the fact needs reshaping into the story. If nothing else, I have had to reevaluate its meaning to make sense of its place in the faction. I have also had a different experience - acquiring a new understanding of things for myself.

sch 12/25