I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
In her writing handbook Write for Life, Julia Cameron advises that you, in so many words, “let go and let God” when you write:
And so, I struck my bargain. (“Okay, God, you take care of the quality, I’ll take care of the quantity.”) Over my ego’s objections, I began to write freely. A scene at a time, I wrote what wanted to come next. My ego didn’t like it, but my spirit did. I was obedient to my hunches. My writing improved. Without straining to be clever, my craft became less crafty. Without trying to be brilliant, I found myself more clearly communicative. Other people remarked favorably on the clarity of my writing. I discovered when I finished a rough draft that there was very little “rough” about it. Laying track worked. The writing had a mind of its own, and a smart mind at that. I need only obediently write my daily quota, nothing more.
Laying track, the trick is to keep moving gently forward. Each day’s quota builds on the previous day. And so we write our first draft straight through, without rewriting. Over my many years of writing, I have learned that the writing itself has wisdom. If I simply write down the ideas as they come to me, the ideas themselves will have a form. By laying daily track, I discover it, rather than invent it.
Recently I’ve been up in the air about what I am doing here, both here on my website and here in my life. I thought of doing a personal finance podcast and advisory for Gen Xers getting ready for retirement. But that soon felt overwhelming and uninspiring to me. The one thing I can count on myself to do is write almost every single day. So I decided I’m going to focus on writing.
If you asked me, “what one thing do you still want to do with your life, Anne?” it would be to write and publish a book that feels authentic to me and valuable to the world. I did write a book before, and it was published, but it wasn’t a book I really felt strongly about, and I don’t think it provided a lot of value to the world.
So now I’m focused on writing, not just here each morning, but writing a book that I want to get published (whether through a traditional publisher or by myself).
I realized I don’t have to build up my own audience to eventually promote a book; I can promote it to communities that are already built that may be interested. I can find my way onto other people’s podcasts, write guest posts for other people’s newsletters, get written up in media venues, and so forth. That doesn’t sound any easier than building my own audience but it sounds more comfortable. It also means I can dive into writing the book rather than messing around with social media right now.
My next task is to develop the habit of writing in the afternoons and evenings. Right now, I write every morning, here on this blog. But I usually have morning activities that prevent me from putting time into my book project, and then I tell myself, “morning is my productive time—too bad it’s already gone so I can’t write more today!” That is a poor excuse not to write, not to lay some track.
Cameron has something to say about this too:
It’s twilight. I am meeting friends in half an hour, and it would be easy to say there’s not enough time to write. But I have learned that writing requires the barest sliver of time, and so here I am, taking pen to page, writing about an important writer’s trick, which I am practicing: grabbing time.
“All I need in order to write more is to have more time. Why, if I had a year off, I’d be able to write a novel.”
How many times I have heard this sentiment. One of our most damaging myths about writing is that it takes great swaths of uninterrupted time. I have been writing since I was eighteen, and I have never found a great swath of time. Instead, I found snippets. I found that writing could be done quickly. All that was necessary was to “grab” the time I actually had.
Today I’m going for a hike with Bo and M, then M and I are going to work on some home improvement tasks together. I may not get a chance to write until mid-day. I can grab some time then. I might even be able to grab a bit of time now to work on an essay for my book. It’s called “the mathematics of love.” Are there mathematics of writing? I think there may be. The mathematics of writing is based on how infinitesimal bits of creative effort (of daily track) can be integrated into something valuable: a book, a work of art, a contribution to the world.