Making Time to Write

Time is the one resource that you can’t renew or get back, as the saying goes. We all have the same 24 hours in a day, its how you use it that counts. We have all heard these cliches about time, and yet that is because they are true. As anyone who falls in love will testify, no matter how busy you are, you make time to call or text the person, you plan fun things you want to do together, you daydream about them all the time. You make the time for what you care about essentially. 

In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert said that your relationship to your art must be like that of a secret lover, you steal time away when you can, you think about them and look forward to the next time you see them. It's exciting and passionate. 

Time is also relative. The main reason we think that we probably don’t have time to write is because we think that we need to have “large swathes of uninterrupted time, like bolts of fabric” (Julia Cameron). The reality is that you can write in snatched or stole time, like meeting your lover in the stairwell for a spontaneous make-out session. I’m writing this chapter in longhand on a crowded bus on my morning commute to my day job. In fact, I once wrote half a book longhand on the back of one-sided printed paper during my daily commute to college on the bus, while juggling a full load of classes, a part-time job and several extracurricular actives including being the editor of my college law magazine. I was busy, but I had a commission from a publisher to write the book, and as a fledgling writer, that’s all I had ever wanted. How could I let my dream slip away? With the deadline looming, I spent every spare minute jotting down sentences and paragraphs, racing to get the book done in time. 

As I write this, I am on a bus passing by Singapore’s breathtaking skyline - a picturesque grouping of iconic buildings that feature in every tourist’s photograph album. And yet no one around me has looked up from their phones to give this view a passing glance. If pressed, most people would probably respond that they don’t have the time to enjoy the view. But they are on the bus, captive, which won’t go any faster or slower than it will. Maybe what they mean is not that they don’t have the time, but that it isn’t a priority, it is more important to check that email, send that text or watch that funny cat video. Or maybe its just a habit, to do those things on the bus instead of seeing the view. 

How we spend our time then is a matter of priorities and habits. If you want to write a book (or play or short story), you have to prioritize it, perhaps over other things, at least while you are writing the book. And you have to create good habits that support your writing. 

This post is an excerpt from a book I am working on about writing your first book. I will be posting more installments intermittently on this blog. I would love comments or questions!

Update: This book is now out to purchase on Amazon (or read for free as part of Kindle Unlimited)

What Will You Do For Future You?

I read a blog post somewhere, I think it was on Wil Wheaton’s blog, about being kind to future you. Since I read this near the beginning of this year, I decided that it was going to be my sole New Year’s Resolution. Of course it was cleverly concealing the fact that it was multiple resolutions packaged as one. And of course that meant that not all would go according to plan.

So what does being kind to future you mean? Well in the post, if I recall correctly, Wil said that in order to be kind to our future selves, we would need to do things that may not be palatable or high on the priority list right now, but in the future we would be glad we did it. And sure that includes things like saving for retirement. But it doesn’t have to be our future 90-year old selves who will thank us. It could be as simple as not eating that bag of chips now because tomorrow morning you will wish you hadn’t when you’re feeling queasy from all that grease. Or going for a workout that you don’t feel like now, but will give you energy and make you feel good, halfway through the workout. And of course take you one step closer to being healthy or losing weight, again helping your future self. 

While there are countless ways to be nice to future me, the biggest problem I have is remembering to do this, and prioritizing doing stuff for future me, when present me is taking up all my time. In the moment I have obligations and things to do and instagram feeds to catch up on and tv shows that have new seasons. Where is the time to do all this and also do things for some nebulous future self that I can’t imagine or have empathy for? 

I may not be able to clearly visualize my future self or what she will want. But something that is crystal clear to me - my past self. And in the present, quite often actually, I am pretty vocal in telling my past self what I should have done, or should not have done. I shouldn’t have eaten all those bars of chocolate and those boxes of doughnuts. I should have gone for more walks. I wish I had taken the chance and sent those emails to people I wanted to work with. Or written that short story, or those blog posts. The list of things I wish I had done is long, and repetitive. It always revolves around themes - taking better care of my health, writing more and especially the things I am afraid to write, taking chances for my career, learning skills that could be of use to me now. Its not that hard for me to know what I wish my past self had done. And I am like an annoyed big sister, wanting to slap some sense into a bratty, lazy younger girl who just wants to have fun and not worry about the consequences. 

With that line of thinking, its not too hard to know what my future self would hope I do. What she would appreciate. Less TV now, go to bed and workout in the morning. Write the stories even if its scary. Reach out to those people even if they reject me. Put the chocolate away and grab some fruit. Sure its kind of like a constant nag has taken up residence in my head, but I bet I will look back and be glad. 

This reminds me of a scene or rather a song and a scene from the best movie I saw this year, on 2^nd January. An Indian film, called Dangal. About a female wrestler, a family of wrestlers actually, and how they got to be among the best in the country. And early on in their training, their father and coach set down some strict rules about how they could behave, what they could do and what they could and couldn’t eat. And the girls, being young, naturally rebelled. And there is a funny song about this in the movie. A little later however, there is a scene. Where the girls are at the wedding of their friend, not much older than them, who berates them for being angry at their father for pushing them, for giving them a goal to look forward to. Which is in stark contrast to her, because she is being married off, at a ridiculously early age. And the girls realize, that instead of complaining about their father, they should thank him. He was doing them a huge favor, by believing in them, by giving them something to aspire to.  

And that’s really what being kind to your future self is about. The hard work in the present is a present to your future self, who will thank you for better health, improved skills, greater opportunities that come at the expense of a few missed tv shows, some unhealthy snacks that you forget the taste of minutes after eating, some discipline and new habits that seem onerous at the moment but will seem like nothing when you look back with pride at what your past self accomplished, the life she created for you. 

So whether you are aspiring to be a world-class athlete, or just want to be better at work, or excel at a side business, or want to lose those last stubborn 15 pounds, decide today to do something that your future self will thank you for. 

How To Get (Un)stuck On a Book: 5 Ways to Jumpstart Your Writing

Some months ago I started noodling on an idea I had for a book, and suddenly it started coming together. I was going to cafes to write, and coming home with drafts of entire essays, feeling very smug and happy. This book was coming along fast, and although I knew it would be a short one, I was thrilled because it was something very different to my existing style, and something I really was enjoying writing.

Then something happened. Life got in the way, I had other projects, goals. I decided to up my fitness level and didn’t want to be sitting around in cafes drinking calorie-laden frappucinos. I somehow decided to revise an earlier book I had written, thinking it would take me a few weeks to edit it, at most a month. Then months went by, and every time I tried to work on the book, I couldn’t capture that old easy flow, that excitement of words hitting notes that I could only hear in my head. I kept waiting to be inspired, to feel that old rush, and kept feeling annoyed at myself for not being able to get back to the rhythm. In the meantime, this revision that would only take a few weeks, was turning into a bear, and so much time had passed that I was embarrassed to talk about my work, and started to break down in public if anyone asked me the dreaded question: so what are you working on right now?

So the last few weeks, I have been trying any manner of methods to get me back into the flow, to get my work done and out without compromising quality, and to stop rueing the day I decided writing would be a good thing to take up. And these are a few of the strategies that I have uncovered. Of course none of them are particularly original, and no one strategy seems to work on its own or for very long, but feel free to cycle through and try them out, and maybe if you’re stuck like me, you might find yourself excitedly getting back to the page.

1. Lower Your Expectations

Yup, this is the first one. And I know its not terribly glamorous or exciting, but promise me, this alone might jumpstart you back to work. With both my projects, high expectations has been constantly tripping me up and causing me to waste time. When I first started writing my little book of essays, I was doing it for fun and just to see if I could. Then it started to seem like it would be good, at least to me. And then the voices of expectations started off in my head. This book would show people another side of me as a writer. My friends and family would be amazed at my breadth of ability. I started to write the answers to imaginary interview questions about my work in my head. And obviously, the writing dried up. I couldn’t put down another word no matter how many caramel frappucinos I sacrificed my health on.

I found that lowering my expectations - by telling myself that this was a very very first draft, a zero draft (a term I learnt in law school, and has been very useful since then), I could give myself permission to do it badly, to suck. This is something you read all the time, usually a paraphrase of Anne Lamott’s famous phrase: “write sh*tty first drafts”. The only problem is that for the book I was revising, I was meant to be revising it, making it better, not writing crap drafts. So then I found myself stuck trying to perfect the book in one draft, until it hit me.

I could write many sh*tty drafts, not just the first one. This is also from Hilary Rettig by the way, who advocates many many drafts, and I wrote about this a few posts ago. My process is such that I anyway do many drafts, I even label each document I am working on by the number of draft and version - so this revision was usually Chapter 6 2.2 or 2.3 or whatever. (I know that makes me sound OCD, but whatever works.) But because this was a revision, I was somehow counting the previous several versions as my many, many drafts, and trying to get this done in 1 or 2. When I let go this ridiculous notion, I could give myself permission to just do my best with this draft and move on, knowing I could come back in a few days and improve it. That freed me up to get through my current draft faster, and actually made the work better, cleaner, and the whole process less stressful.

There is another aspect to lowering expectations. Not just for this draft, but for the whole work. Sure, no one wants to write a bad book, or create something that isn’t as good as they can make it. But here’s the thing - the best you can do is as of this moment. As creatives and artists, we keep growing and improving. From one week to the other, one month to the other. Which is why I am revising the book I mentioned, because my ability to write that sort of book has improved, and I know I can make it much better. But that basically also means, that maybe right now you can’t write as well as your favorite author, or even how you initially imagined the work in your head.

This is definitely the case with my little book of essays. I imagined it to be in the vein of some of my favorite humorous writers, whose essays I absolutely adore. I really want someone to chuckle to themselves while reading my prose. But alas, perhaps that’s too much of a burden to place on the very first book of (hopefully) humorous essays I am writing. Maybe by the third or fourth one I will have gotten better. But by putting all this pressure on this book right now, I essentially found it impossible to write a word, strangled all the fun out of the process, and brought it all to a screeching halt. So now I have hopefully learnt my lesson, and am trying to just write the essays for my own amusement, see what happens, see what I can make of them.

2. Do Something Else (Creative)

So you can’t make progress on this project. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything else. Sometimes exercising a different creative muscle, doing something else that also brings together the different ways we think and experience the world on to a specific canvas, can blast away the block on the project we wish to work on.

Work with paints, glitter, washi tape, notes, iambic pentameter, your iPhone camera, Play-doh, the possibilities are endless. Make a painting, a candle, take a photograph, make a 10 second video, write a poem, create something to decorate your bedroom, paint some furniture, cook a gourmet meal, paint handprints on the wall - do something that gets your quirky juices flowing, that gets you doing and not thinking about doing. Something that you can point to and say, I made that. Whether its physical or only exists in the cloud doesn’t matter, what matters is something exists when before it didn’t.

At the very least you would have made something, and remembered what that feels like. As a bonus perhaps, you might have a breakthrough in your stuck book project.

3. Eat In Bite-sized Pieces

The cliche goes - how do you eat an elephant? A bite at a time. And I have found that eating as if you were a hummingbird, taking the littlest, barely visible, tiniest of bites, can remove the fear of tackling even the largest pachyderm.

Maybe there is a small part of your project that you can handle. You can write the introduction or the preface. You can write the scene that you have mapped out clearly in your head. You can write the chapter for which all your research is done. If nothing else, you might be able to write the acknowledgements, or work on the bibliography.

With this revision I am working on, I was finding it difficult to move forward. So instead of focusing on the chapter level, I started to think about each individual section. Some of these sections were only a few 100 words long, but breaking the chapter down mentally meant even when I was stuck on one section, I could complete another one. I made a little map, and kept track of which sections were done, just to generate a feeling of progress.

4. Track Your Progress 

Talking of progress, I find that tracking how much I have done and how much I have left to go is usually incredibly motivating, and serves to jump-start me out of my block.

You could do a very simple-drawn table or just make notations on a spare sheet of paper, or you could be like me and create color-coded and highlighted tables. It doesn’t matter what your particular method is, but I find that what gets tracked gets done. Usually before I track my progress, I bumble along, and try to hold the whole book in my head. I think, oh I really need to work on chapter 6, but then again, hmm I am not sure about the ending. What about chapter 4 - but there is that part in the middle. And I talk myself out of working on it, or open all the documents, stare at them and run away from the computer in a panic.

After I make my detailed table or map (which has the added benefit of taking some time that is clearly marked work, but isn’t writing), I find that it is much clearer to me which parts I can safely work on. The easy parts, the ones I know exactly what to do, are suddenly clearer.

This of course ties in to the previous point - break down your work into smaller pieces, and then track how many pieces you have completed. Suddenly the picture of the elephant will start to fill in. You will see that there is a leg here, and a foot there, and an ear over here. The pieces that are done are increasing, getting sharper and more into focus. And then you find, that the next lot of sections that you can tackle comes into relief.

Use whatever method you think will help you track - I have experimented with stickers, labels, colored highlighters, fancy charts in Excel, OneNote and Evernote. The point isn’t how to do it, but that you do. Remember, what gets measured gets done.

5. Have Some Fun

The final trick up my sleeve? Get away from it all and do something fun. Watch a movie that you’ve been looking forward to seeing, preferably something that sets off your creative senses (for me its usually something with brilliant special effects or an exceptionally good story). Go window shopping at your favorite department store. Share an ice-cream sundae with your best friend or significant other. Go for long walks, or take a dance class. Follow Julia Cameron’s sage advice and go on an artist date. The point is that sometimes we just need to get a little perspective. Maybe your creative well is spent and you need a refill. Maybe you just need to spend more time out in nature, or getting your blood pumping through some vigorous exercise.

Usually one or a few of these activities is all I need to get back on track. The problem however, is that I am stubborn, and I waste far too much time struggling with the book before I am ready to admit defeat and just go do something else. Invariably, I come back from watching Dory find her family, or a long walk along the beachfront near my house, that I found the solution and it seems incredibly simple now, when just hours ago I was banging my head against the metaphorical wall.

So there you go, five tactics that between them usually manage to get me out of my feeling of being stuck or blocked, if I remember to use them. So pick one, try it and get back to your WIP. And let me know how it worked.

The Power of Art

This past week has been so terrible that sometimes I wonder whether thinking about what books to read or write or talking about how to become a better artist is shallow and pointless and meaningless.

I studied law and public policy at university, and I care deeply about these topics. But at the same time I find them depressing and disheartening. Not that I have run away from such topics, or don’t read about them anymore - in fact the book I am revising right now is about the ban on cluster munitions, and full of depressing statistics about victims and landmines and the death of innocent people going about their everyday life. I am writing this book in the hope that I can spread even a small amount of awareness about the landmark ban on these weapons, and encourage countries who haven’t signed it to adopt the convention.

However, I am under no illusions that this is a niche topic. Not too many people are interested in cluster munitions. I know thats obvious, but it only became crystal clear to me when I told people what I was working on and noted their reaction - eyes glazed, polite smile, and crab-like scuttle towards the nearest exit. This isn’t the most scintillating topic to most people.

Not the case about the events of this week and generally the last few months. Most people have an opinion about gun control (or the lack thereof) and terrorism. Most people have the same opinions as me actually, in that most people don’t approve of the murder of innocent people, no matter who they are. Which means that they would be interested in cluster munitions too - if they knew that in many countries, for instance during the Vietnam War, 30% or almost one-third of the millions of these bombs that were dropped into the Mekong region, didn’t detonate on impact, instead remaining for decades just waiting for an unsuspecting child or villager to come across, and get injured or killed.

Don’t worry, this entire post isn’t about cluster munitions. In fact, I hadn’t planned to mention them at all, but then I realized it was a perfect metaphor for what I really wanted to talk about.

The importance of story.

The power of art.

As I said, I worried that maybe I care too much about superficial things, like how many people read my books, and how many words I have managed to write. When far worse things are happening around the world. And then I realized - that the way people are wired, it is hard for us to care about all the terrible things that are happening all at once. Or to understand the impact of every bad thing that happens - every time a bomb goes off killing 100s in (fill in the blank here) or gunfire is directed at (kids, people on the street, in a cafe, in a theater). Or to comprehend what we need to do to stop these terrible things from happening. People complain that the Western media is selective - the deaths of two Europeans or five Americans are highlighted, but the hundreds of thousands of Africans that die of disease or poverty, or the Asian children that suffer from child labor and sweatshops and myriad other problems go unnoticed. While that may be slightly true, I think there is room enough for us to care about all the people who suffer - regardless of where they come from.

But the reality is that we don’t. Some tragedies get more press and eyeballs and attention than others. And that matters because that determines where the attention for solutions go to as well. And this is even more stark for me, as I work on this book, because one of the reasons that the issue of cluster munitions, and landmines before it, got enough attention for the weapons to be banned, was that articles were written about them in the media, and powerful politicians and influential civil society organizations banded together to create change.

And it all started with something simple.

They started with a story.

And this is the point of this post. What can we as writers and authors and artists of all stripes do in the face of such horror and tragedy? We can create art. We can create stories.

They are powerful enough to heal when we are hurting. We can escape into a movie or a book, and forget our problems, forget the pain for a while. When I struggled with periods of loneliness and depression in college, I often resorted to a frothy chic-lit book to escape my issues for the evening - my favorite author and bar of chocolate. While that contributed to my waistline, it also helped me get through that period and to the other side.

So stories can make us feel better, make us feel happier.

When we go to the museum and see paintings full of emotion, depth, mastery of technique and color, we feel the awe, the beauty of not just the talent of the artist, but of the human race. We feel connected to something bigger than us, something eternal, something primal. And that is the power of art.

But that is not all. I want to go back to what I said in the beginning - what can we as writers or authors do? We actually have a lot more power than we know. And as Uncle Ben said to Spiderman - with great power comes great responsibility. As writers we have the power to get the attention of people, to get their emotions involved in the world that we create, to make them see something from a completely different point of view than before.

I read somewhere that Princess Diana’s involvement with the landmine ban campaign was the PR equivalent of a $2million campaign. Why was that? I was quite young then and don’t remember the campaign, but I bet it was because she helped shape a specific story - look at these children who lost limbs, these people whose family members died because of a landmine. Can’t we stop this? The campaign focused on the people who were affected, telling a story that was picked up by news media all over the world, and contributing to a landmark treaty banning anti-personnel mines.

I don’t have any ideas about how to stop the violence. I don’t know what really goes on in the head of someone who decides to deliberately take the life of another, especially the life of someone they don’t know, have never met. Someone who hasn’t harmed them in any way. But I do know that stories are powerful. We may not be running countries and deciding public policy. But we can affect change in subtle but powerful ways. In the stories we choose to tell. In the way we frame the issues.

I know that if I tell someone that I wrote a book about how a particular weapon was banned, they fall asleep talking to me. But what if I told them instead that my book was about how people were needlessly dying from a war that ended decades earlier?  Or that it was a classic David v Goliath story - how a small group of countries and some passionate individuals managed to change defense policy and destroy millions of weapons that were a core part of the arsenal of the biggest military powers in the world?

What if we changed the stories told about climate change? About terrorism? About gun control? About racism and sexism and all the other ways that we hate each other and distrust each other and fail to live and work together in peace?

Like I said, I don’t have all the answers, I don’t have any answers. But I have confidence in the power of one of the oldest vehicles of knowledge in the world. We already have stories about these issues - but in many cases those stories are no longer serving our highest good. Maybe its time to write some new ones?