Tag: motivation

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Unpause

Pavowski6 Comments

*Coughs a little*

*Turns the lights back on*

Man, did I really let over a week pass without posting something around here? I don’t think that’s happened since I started the blarg almost two years ago.

Back then, a lapse like that would have scared the hell out of me. To be honest, it still scares the hell out of me, a little bit. Having started so many things in my life — running, writing, keeping a clean house, staying organized at work, keeping good financial records, NOT leaving evidence of my victims out in plain sight — only to have them grind to a halt a few days, weeks, months later when the initial push wears off, I know the importance of momentum. As a good friend of mine once told me (and I think it may have been a quote from somebody else, but I always attribute it to my friend Dorian), “the more you do, the more you can do.”

Writing 1000 words a day on the first draft of a novel only works if you’re doing it every day. If it’s just something you try to do when you have time, well, you’ll never have time. If going for a thirty-minute run is something you do when you have the energy, you will find yourself suddenly devoid of energy most of the time. If you clean the house only when it gets dirty as opposed to cleaning up little things as they happen, well, the sharknado gets overwhelming pretty fast, dunnit?

So to take a break of over a week from writing (anything, really, not just the daily-ish drivel I spew around here) sorta scares me. I’ve had the feeling more than once over the past week of “gee, I should really write something, just a quick little post about something the kids did, or maybe one more rant on the new Star Wars movie (both of those are coming, by the way).” But I let it slide, consciously so.

Partly to make sure I was spending the time with my family that they deserved. Partly to give my thoughts time to settle. (It’s been a good long while since I just kicked back and let my thoughts ferment a bit, and I’m feeling lots of ideas — for books, for stories, for the blarg — taking shape as a result). Partly, though, just for the break itself.

We work so hard in our day-to-day. Some harder than others, but everybody believes that they are working hard, and it’s true to some degree. Whether it’s the CEO working from dawn til dusk, the teacher taking home reams of papers to grade outside of work (HAHAHA not that that’s me, but those teachers exist), the stay-at-home mom who waits hand-and-foot upon the tiny humans she must teach to be good people… even the unemployed guy who hangs around and plays video games works hard in his own way. These things take stamina. These things tax the spirit.

I’m fortunate that I work in a profession with these built-in respites from the grind, that I get two weeks off for the holidays to spend time with family, to forget about work for a while, to recharge. Which is what it’s been all about for the last couple of weeks.

A big, giant pause button. Which I was glad to hit.

But I think, now, I’m even more glad to unpause and get back to work. I’ve got novels to edit. Short stories to draft. Other things to do stuff to.

Starting with cleaning these spiders out of the corners around here. Where is John Goodman when you need him?

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

I Write Like Awesome Writers

Pavowski4 Comments

I was recently directed to a neat little corner of the web: a textual analyser designed to scratch the egos of fledgling writers everywhere by informing them that they write like this or that famous author.

Now, obviously, only James Joyce writes like James Joyce, but it’s fun to pretend. And testing a few of my samples in the machine, I got results that pleased me mightily.

First…

I write like
Douglas Adams

I Write Like. Analyze your writing!

Which just makes me smile, seeing as he’s absolutely, full-stop, make-no-exceptions my favorite author. But then, just for icing on the cake, I tried another sample and got this one:

I write like
Neil Gaiman

I Write Like. Analyze your writing!

At which point I stopped, because why keep playing when you’ve already won the game?

You can check it out at I Write Like.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Cloistered In

Pavowski14 Comments

When a nun pledges her life and her various other parts to God, she goes to live in a convent. Those convents have some fairly archetypal architecture, like what you see below:

File:Cloister of the monastery Unser Lieben Frauen Magdeburg.jpg

This covered walk is called a “cloister”, and this particular feature of religious buildings led to the expression of something being “cloistered”, or shut in and closed off from outside influences.

We won’t be going, today, into the particular irony of a religious institution requiring its most devout believers to live such a cloistered existence, or the fact that such an idea itself comes from religious ideology.

Rather, the metaphor of the cloister. It’s an important one, a powerful one, because so many of us live cloistered lives. We wake up at the same time, drive the same roads to work, see the same people, eat the same things for dinner. Our own footsteps mark the boundaries beyond which we dare not tread.

And there’s something to be said for that. Routine is important, and not only to the writer. (Just try moving naptime up by an hour on your three-year-old, for example.) But as much as time inside the box is vital for our comfort, well-being, and peace of mind, so too is time outside the box critical to keep us from living life in a rut. I realized the other day that I have some co-workers who are almost friends (as close, I guess, as a co-worker that you only ever see during work-related functions can come to being a friend) whom I have not seen in months. The reason? Their classrooms are on the other side of the building from mine.

You can find the cloister as deep down as you care to drill. I write at pretty much the same time every day, even down to the weekends. I park in the same parking spot at work, even though we don’t have assigned parking. I run the same routes over and over when it’s runday funday. We even try to have the same meals on the same nights of the week, just to cut down on that tiresome discussion: “well, what do YOU want to eat?”

It takes effort to break out of the cloister. We’re so closeted in with our routines, with what’s normal and easy, that we resist doing anything else. Our cloisters are climate-controlled, with blackout curtains and indoor plumbing. If we don’t make the effort to leave them behind now and then, they can and will swallow us whole.

So, how will you break out of your cloister this week? This month? This year? (Don’t wait to make a New Year’s Resolution — start today.)

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image above is from the user Chris 73 and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cloister_of_the_monastery_Unser_Lieben_Frauen_Magdeburg.jpg under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license.

The Weekly Remotivator: The Mission

Pavowski8 Comments

We all suck starting out.
There’s an old saying about nothing worth doing being easy. That may be true, but I’d wager that a lot of people trying something new for the first time never get far enough to find out just how difficult the thing is. You pick up a guitar, plunk out a few discordant notes, maybe plug away for a week or two until your fingers get sore; then you listen to Freebird, realize you’ll never shred like that, and suddenly the guitar is gathering spiders in the attic. You lace up your shoes to give running a try, and you manage to power through some really painful stumbling outings; then it’s a few weeks later and you just can’t bring yourself to head out in the eighty-degree heat, and once you miss a workout, missing the next is easy.
You set out to write a novel, thinking (rightly) that anybody can do it.  You pound the keys for a good solid month before you realize that your characters are boring, your setting makes no sense, and your plot is as dead as a shark that doesn’t swim. Then your manuscript goes into the abyss of unfinished novels and you maybe start over, or you maybe just quit.
When you start something new, people say you should have a goal. Something to work toward, something achievable. And that’s well and good: you should have a goal. But there comes a point, when you’re up against that wall where the thing goes from hard to STUPID hard, when you need something even more than a goal.
You need a mission.
The difference is subtle.
A goal is something clearly defined that you want to accomplish.
A mission is something clearly defined that you MUST accomplish.
With a mission, failure is not an option. With a mission, obstacles are unable to stop you; they can only delay you. With a mission, it’s success or death.
The Blues Brothers were on a “mission from God.” NASA’s headquarters for space missions is called, unsurprisingly, Mission Control. Failure is not an option.
So, the next time you try something new, don’t set a goal.
Set a mission.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Stuff of Substance

Pavowski6 Comments

I was going to write about the stuff-focused holidays we have here in the States (Christmas of course, Thanksgiving with its frankly embarrassing piles of food, and Black Friday, a de facto holiday with a surprisingly adversarial focus on buying as much stuff as you can’t afford) with this week’s prompt, but the moment I started kicking it around, I realized that even I couldn’t take any more of my bitching about holidays and special events… between my tirade about NaNoWriMo, my grumbling about Daylight Savings Time, and my sermonizing about the war on Christmas, I’ve sure been slinging the negativity lately.

That said, the picture is unrelated.

Today, a positive bent, a return to what I like to use SoCS for: to ruminate on writing.

I’m giving myself a break from Big Writing Projects lately — through the Christmas season, really, by the time all is said and done — and as a diversion, and to keep the grooves nicely greased, I’m working on some short fiction instead. You haven’t seen it around the blarg. It’s a SECRET.

Or rather, it’s in progress, which for writers means it may as well be as secret as the Coca Cola formula — we don’t like people sticking their fingers in our pies until we’re good and ready to have our pies finger-stuck.

Anyway, I went and enrolled in a free short fiction writing workshop hosted over at Holly D. Lisle’s site at How to Think Sideways. She lays out a three-step (with multiple embedded sub-steps, but y’know, that’s not as flashy as saying “3-step”) template to writing flash fiction that doesn’t suck. And what I quickly realized is that a lot of my stories kind of suck. Like, most of them have decent ideas at their cores, but they lack any sort of follow-through or intelligible raison d’etre. (I don’t actually know what that means, but I heard it before and it sounded fancy.) In short, stuff happened, but lacking were the reasons for said stuff happening, or an appreciable understanding of the consequences for the stuff happening.

And with the five stories I’m workshopping, there is a real focus on meaning and significance through brevity. It’s been eye-opening, like that air freshener commercial where they blindfold people in squalid rooms, wave air fresheners under their noses, then remove the blindfolds so they see the cloud of actual sharknado they’d been inhaling.

Anyway, I’m not going to detail the … well, details of the course. They’d be tiresome if you’re not interested, and if you are interested, it’s worth your time to roll over to Holly’s site and sign up for the course yourself. Suffice it to say that while this has been some much-needed down time from my big projects, I’ve not been idle, and that feels nice. Momentum matters and all that.

Which is, I guess, the point of the post this week: writing is something you can only ever get better at by sitting down and practicing at it. And a tremendous obstacle for many would-bes is the simple but enormous leap of faith that it takes to even start screwing up a perfectly good blank page with your awful, stupid words. There’s something to be said, then, for the virtue of just sitting down and banging out words week after week. But there comes a point where you feel safe enough in the habit, and you want to actually start refining your craft. I think, a year and a half into this adventure, I’ve more than established the writing consistently part, and it’s time to start worrying more about writing stronger, smarter, sharper stories. Stories where the stuff that happens is stuff that people will care about.

Stuff of substance.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.