Before anyone has hurt your feelings

I almost skipped right over the Fresh Air interview with legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola when it came up on my podcast list. Filmmaking isn’t a major interest of mine, and I knew there were other podcasts in my iPod queue that would be of more immediate interest to me: a conversation about Thanksgiving cooking with New York Times food writer Mark Bittman; a discussion on the shortage of drugs to counter ADHD; a review of Tom Perrotta’s newest novel.

But the Francis Ford Coppola interview was what came up when my run began, and sometimes it just seems like too much of a hassle to take my iPod out of its armband case and start fiddling with the controls to get to the next podcast once my run is under way. Besides, I reminded myself, even if I wasn’t particularly curious about the topic of filmmaking, I’d almost certainly learn something about it. And even when I don’t leave a Fresh Air podcast retaining any information about the subject, I always learn something new about the art of interviewing.

What I didn’t expect was to find it laugh-out-loud funny, but laugh out loud I did when Coppola was discussing the importance for filmmakers and other artists of practicing their writing with great frequency, and gave this specific instruction about daily writing: “The important thing is: choose the time that's good for you. For me, it's early morning because I wake up, and I'm fresh, and I sit in my place. I look out the window, and I have coffee, and no one's gotten up yet or called me or hurt my feelings.”

What made me laugh was the ingenuity of Coppola saying he needs to write before anyone has hurt his feelings. I too write first thing in the morning every day, as soon as I get out of bed, and I never thought about it that way, but he’s right: at that hour, no one has yet hurt my feelings (though sometimes I’ve already been mocked a little, given my tendency to talk in my sleep and my spouse’s propensity for teasing me about it in the wee hours). First thing in the morning, my emotions are still as untainted as they are likely to be all day, and I suppose in some ways that’s the best time to write.

Of course, it also tends to be the most innocuous time to write. Sometimes, as I sit in the comfortable arm chair in the corner of our bedroom at 5:30 a.m. with the house dark and silent around me, I find myself at a loss for what to say in my journal: nothing’s happened yet, and the events of the previous day have faded into uniform banality.

But most of the time, this isn’t a problem. Most of the time, the events and emotions of the previous day are still present in my mind enough to record, even if my brain may feel a little fuzzy at that hour.

Still, no one has yet hurt my feelings at 5:30 a.m., and Coppola is right: that counts for a lot. I am indeed best off writing in the grayish drowsy haze of early morning, when no one voice takes precedence in my writing only because it is the voice of the last person to have spoken to me.

In an ideal day, of course, no one hurts my feelings at all, and I don’t say things I regret, and I don’t make bad decisions, and I don’t take out my iPhone while running and accidentally drop it on the pavement and crack the screen (not to dwell too heavily on my weekend).

But these things happen, sometimes, in the course of a day. And it was somehow reassuring to hear from someone as highly accomplished and highly regarded as Francis Ford Coppola that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to do your daily writing when your thoughts and emotions still seem to be your own, in your voice, freshly hatched, before you’ve been distracted by people hurting your feelings.

Facing down blog ennui

Kate Hayes coined the term “mid-blog crisis” in a post earlier this week on her blog, Adventures in Parenting, to explore her feelings of ennui, which she likened to a midlife crisis. I know just how she feels.

Like Kate, I’ve been looking at my blog occasionally and thinking “Why do I do this again? Does it matter to anyone? What would be the downside of giving it up?”

I’ve been blogging for 17 months now, ever since I signed with a literary agent who was willing to represent my running/parenting memoir. I was very new to social media at that point; in our first phone conversation, my agent urged me to put together a website, start a Twitter account, and blog regularly. I did all three, and for many reasons I think her advice was excellent. I really like having a website up; I get a lot of enjoyment as well as occasional professional reinforcement from Twitter; and the blog has been a fantastic exercise in regular writing.

But when I say regular writing, I have to take a moment to stop and roll my eyes. For reasons I cannot to this day re-create, I somehow decided when I launched my blog in August of 2009 that I should blog five days a week, every week. Even though I knew of plenty of other bloggers who posted just a couple of times weekly, I had the idea that for me it needed to be like a job: show up at that blog Monday through Friday. And like a job, since that time, I’ve taken only national holidays and two weeks’ vacation per year off from blogging.

Other people who know me will probably roll their eyes at this. I know: Another daily obsession? The mile-or-more-of-running and the 1000-words-of-journaling a day aren’t enough as far as the diurnal rituals? Well, in all fairness, the blogging one isn’t quite as severe: the running and the journaling are seven days a week, and the blogging one is only weekdays.

Still, like Kate Hayes, sometimes I stop and remind myself of just how little it matters. Plenty of friends and acquaintances mention reading my blog in passing, but even more people tell me it’s hard for them to keep up with it. Really, reading my blog is not supposed to feel like a chore; you won’t miss a thing if you take a day or two off now and then. So I have to admit that the majority of my blog readers would probably be happy rather than disappointed if I stopped posting every day.

And yet here’s the advantage of blogging every day: unlike when my essay writing consisted of one or two newspaper pieces a month, I no longer maintain a seemingly endless backlog of story ideas that I’ll probably never get to. Now I get to everything. After all, I need a new idea five days a week. That enables me to burn through a lot of ideas, rather than stockpile them the way I used to. And it also reminds me that you don’t need to sit down with a great idea already formed in order to write a good piece. Many of my favorite blog entries – which went on to become published pieces in commercial publications – unfolded on days that I thought I had nothing to write about. Writers are fond of the phrase “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”, and never is this more clear to me than when I’m fulfilling my daily blogging requirement. Even if I thought I had nothing to say, I often (though not always!) prove myself wrong.

My agent’s reason for urging me to get a blog up and running was that she wanted me to build an audience for the eventual publication of my book. But my book has been out for two months now, and when I run the numbers on who the purchasers are, I don’t necessarily think the blog has had much of an effect. What I do think it has had an effect on is the quality of my writing. Daily practice at anything simply makes us better at it. And while I’ve had a daily journaling habit for nearly two decades and in the past would have said the same thing about the merits of that – it’s a daily practice that improves my abilities every time I do it – blogging pushes me one step farther in terms of quality control. Unlike when I write something for the Boston Globe, I don’t spend a great deal of time judging the literary quality of what I write every day in my blog, but unlike when I write in my journal, I try to ensure that at the very least it’s coherent and not too lengthy for even my most committed fans (Hi, Mom!) to be willing to read.

So despite my incipient blogging crisis, I’ll persist, and I hope Kate Hayes will as well. As I always say about daily running, the single best reason to blog every day is so that you never have to take time to decide whether or not it’s a good day for blogging. Good entries, bad entries, and all that fall between: I’m not ready to give up yet.

Old journals: Archive? Toss? Recycle? Pass on?

Journalist/editor Lylah Alphonse wrote here in her blog, “Write. Edit. Repeat.,” about how she is in the midst of a big decluttering project and is contemplating what to do with old journals. I know the feeling.

Like Lylah, I have a series of media on which are stored four decades of my most personal reflections: floral cloth-bound books from junior high, quaint marble-covered tablets from high school (even then I found them quaint; I just liked the way they looked), plain white typing paper from my college years, yellow lined legal pads from my twenties, and then, like Lylah, I progressed from paper to electronic journals. Also like Lylah, mine somewhat reflect the march of computer technology: floppy disks, then CDs, then thumb drives; and yes, I too know that the technology no longer exists – except maybe in computer museums – to read the files on some of those 1980’s-era floppy disks.

But it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t expect anyone to read any of these journals. Not the handwritten notebooks, not the reams of typed pages, not the computer files. They’re just too boring. How do I know this? Because I myself find them too boring to read. And I figure if anyone is going to become engrossed in my thoughts, memories, musings and experiences, it’s going to be me. It’s very hard to imagine anyone else caring. Even if some of the experiences briefly caught someone’s interest, there’s an awful lot of chaff with the meat.

But that’s okay. It’s my journal; it’s supposed to be boring. In effect, since I’m a writer by profession, my journal represents the cutting room floor. The interesting parts make it into my published articles, essays, columns and (arguably) my blog; what never gets past my journal clearly doesn’t deserve to see the light of day.

So the boxes will stay in the attic, because I cannot picture in my mind’s eye the person who would ever wish to read them. Someday my children might open them up and take a peek, but I think they’d quickly get bored. My journal is where I ruminate, analyze, argue, debate, complain. Who would want to read thousands upon thousands of words like that?

When my sisters and I were young, we found an old diary of my mother’s. We loved the fact that we’d found it, and with my mother’s (possibly grudging) permission, we read it cover to cover. But this was the diary of a 12-year-old, one who to my knowledge was not particularly interested in prose. She used it primarily for narrative purposes. Unlike me, she didn’t analyze or postulate: she briefly summarized the events of her day, and that part stayed interesting a generation later. From my mother’s diary, I learned that going to movies was something kids her age, at least in her community, did weekly if not even more often. Since movies were just an occasional treat for us, I was surprised to learn how common it was for her, and I formed the idea that it might have been because there was so little on TV at that time.

In the same way that I read about my mother going to the movies, I suppose it’s possible that a future reader of my journals might find some kind of historical interest. But really, I don’t expect there to be any future readers. The value of journal writing, as I see it, is in the process, not the product. I reap the rewards of a daily writing practice; what happens to the output really doesn't matter.

So I’ll keep writing daily, and I’ll be grateful that attic space is no longer an issue; unlike the bulky notebook days, it would take centuries, not years, to fill up a carton with the thumb drives on which I now store my journal files. And if my children or anyone else is ever tempted? As long as I’m not here to have to answer their questions about content (“Really, Mom, why did it matter so much that Daddy didn’t empty the dishwasher?”), I’m fine with it. But they should be forewarned: it’s pretty boring stuff. And I promise already that I’m not insulted if they take a look and then decide to forego the rest.

Keeping a journal: Two perspectives

Columnist Beverly Beckham wrote in yesterday’s Boston Globe about keeping a diary. I always read Beckham’s columns not because I find her ideas particularly profound but because I really admire her simple, direct way with language. She has a talent that I do not for expressing her ideas with un-self-conscious clarity. As Strunk and White would say, she uses subjects and verbs. As some one who struggles with a surplus of adverbs and adjectives, I envy Beckham’s ease with the written word.

I wrote a few months ago in this blog about my writing streak, but that entry focused more on how to write regularly than why to write regularly. Reading Beckham’s column, I realized I hadn’t given that much thought recently. Yes, I’ve kept a journal regularly since I was in sixth grade and daily, with my 1,000-words-a-day streak, since late 1994. But why?

Beckham ends her essay with this typically eloquent statement: “My journal makes me remember. And that’s why I write.” Interesting, I thought when I first read it. Because my journal doesn’t make me remember at all, for the reason that I barely ever reread it. My journal is for me a process, not a product. It doesn’t matter what I’ve written; the act of writing it was what mattered. In writing one thousand words a day, I process certain thoughts so that I can then move on and, ideally, get to other, fresher thoughts. Or maybe not; maybe I keep dwelling on the same few thoughts. I wouldn’t know, since I don’t re-read except on very rare occasions.

But within Beckham’s essay is a very good explanation for why she and I differ on this point. Her journals sound like small works of art, with ticket stubs, postcards and emails pasted on to the pages. She spends considerable time choosing the actual vessel for her journal, too, perusing Barnes & Noble’s journal shelves with an eye toward color, size, materials and cover design.

Not me. In fact, my journal doesn’t actually exist. Not in any form that I can paste ticket stubs and concert programs into, anyway. And the color of the cover certainly isn’t a factor. My journal has been solely electronic since about 2000. First, of course, as a girl in the 1980’s, I wrote longhand; then in college I typed (with my little portable electronic typewriter, a long-gone precursor to today’s laptops; my roommate always said that I looked like Schroeder from the Peanuts comic strip bent over the piano). In my 20’s I started writing on computer but printing out. Not until about a decade ago did I question the point of printing out the entries. I was filling up a lot of attic space with binders – this was private, after all; not something I’d be displaying on my living room bookshelves – and the printing and filing was somewhat labor-intensive.

So now I simply save to an electronic file. And yes, I do back up those files. So if I really need to look back at something, I can find it with a mouse click. But that hardly ever happens.

If not to remember, then, why do I write? Because writing what’s on my mind every morning frees up metaphorical desk space on my metaphorical hard drive – the one inside my brain – to think about other things. And because I believe that thinking is circular whereas writing is linear. When I mull over a problem, I keep circling back to where I began; but when I write it out, I tend to progress from point A to point B. I’m also a believer in the “Write it down, make it happen” credo: many days I write rambling breakdowns of tasks I need to accomplish during the day, believing that recording in my journal increases the odds it will get done.

Both journal systems – electronic and ornately designed, shelf-worthy hard copy – are worthwhile, and both of us have reasons that make sense. Beverly Beckham and I are both writers; we feel better when we write. Neither of us expects our journals to matter to anyone but us. But we write anyway. To remember. Or to forget. As practice. As process. To commemorate and to move on. For so many reasons, we write.

A room (or booth or carrel or pew) of one's own: Where to write

Location, location, location.

It’s one of the tips I give when asked to talk about daily writing practice and how to implement the habit: Vary your venue. Try writing in different places and at different times of day. Test out a little of everything to see what works best.

For the most part, of course, continuity and regularity are important in establishing a habit. Same time and same place every day may seem like the best choices to make if you want to establish consistency in a habit, whether it’s writing or exercising or getting to bed at a particular time.

But I think it’s also beneficial to try out different writing spots. Six o’clock in the morning, at my desk in my home office, gazing out at the trees and watching the sky very slowly brighten, is my usual. But three in the afternoon at Starbucks can be nice too. As can lunchtime at the public library, or midafternoon on a Saturday by the side of the pool while my kids are swimming.

Having written daily nonstop for fifteen years, I’ve tried out a lot of locales. Cafes and bookstores by the dozens, of course. But also playgrounds. Beaches. Restaurants. Airports. Airplanes. Parking lots. Parking garages. Church. Yes, I journaled in church. Not during a service; during the rehearsal for the Christmas pageant when I had nothing else I needed to do.

First of all, it’s just fun to see what it’s like to write in different places. Not surprisingly, the varying scenery and ambience can inspire your writing in so many different ways: the aromas at the coffee shop, the overheard conversations on the beach, the parade of people passing by at the airport. And a good cup of coffee or pastry can make you feel like you’re rewarding yourself for taking the time to write. Plus it’s motivating sometimes just to feel like people are watching you. “Oh look, a writer,” you imagine them thinking, and then you tell yourself, “I’d better keep my fingers moving or they’ll suspect I have nothing important to say.” Even better if they are people you know: you tell yourself “Oooh, they see I’m writing. I’d better not stop and open up that magazine.”

And you don’t necessarily need silence to write. Not for journal writing, anyway. While it might be difficult if people are talking directly to you, ambient background noise can be great. I like busy coffee shops for just this reason: sometimes I can write at my best when there are baristas bantering and espresso machines whirring, just as I sometimes do my most productive thinking while listening to the BBC, which I’m afraid tells you something about my ability to grasp world events presented with an intellectual spin.

For the sake of maintaining the habit, it’s not bad to pick a few standard times and places around which to center your writing habit. But be flexible, too. Try a little of everything and see how it changes what you write.

Why I bother to blog every day

The BubbleCow blog for writers posted an entry recently titled “You should blog every day.” Good, I thought upon seeing the headline, because that’s just what I do. Now tell me why.

My blog is almost exactly six months old today. Since launching it at the end of August 2009, I’ve posted five days a week, skipping only major holidays. (And yes, it’s possible that come June you’ll hear me argue that Arbor Day is a major holiday. But so far I’ve been honest, taking off only the major ones.)

I can’t remember exactly where I picked up the idea I should post every day. But I’ve maintained that standard diligently. Occasionally when I check my numbers, though, I have that slight tree-falls-in-a-forest feeling. If only a few people visited my blog on any given day, do I still need a new post the next day? Who’s going to know?

Whether or not it matters to anyone but me, I do post something new every day. One reason I blog every day is the same reason I run every day (as I wrote about here) and write in my journal every day (as I wrote about here): because it’s easier to maintain a daily standard than to spend time every morning debating with myself as to whether or not it’s an appropriate day for a blog entry. As with running and journaling, I fall back on my trusty “Just do it” standard. It’s easier for me to blog than to engage in an internal debate with myself.

I also love the workout it gives my writing skills. Coming up with a cogent theme five days a week is an awesome and often thrilling challenge. While it’s true that I’ve been journaling one thousand or more words every day for more than 15 years, that’s a different kind of artistic discipline. I give myself permission to be boring and stupid in my journal. I give myself permission to write about how there’s nothing to write about. I give myself permission to vent circuitously without letting my words lead me to any conclusion, punch line, sound bite.

But while some of my blog entries may be trivial and others really trivial, I still attempt to tease out a theme or topic every day. And I love that part of the exercise, finding a theme worth covering every 24 hours. Going running. The kids’ homework. Watching my daughter sled. Re-reading Little House on the Prairie. Dealing with an email hacker. A trip to the dentist.

Worth writing about? Really? Sure, why not? Therein lies the challenge: finding a reason to write about any of those things.

Making myself write about something, anything, every single day means that I’ve abandoned my old habit of “stockpiling” ideas. Before I started my blog, I would think of things all the time and tell myself, “I’ll write an essay about that…someday.” Then when it was time to submit my monthly column for our local newspaper, I’d inevitably have forgotten all those ideas – or, even if I’d bothered to make a note of the ideas, lost sight of why it seemed like an important topic to me – and I’d be once again waiting for inspiration to strike. And I’ve discovered over the years that waiting to write until inspiration strikes means one of two things: facing a deadline with a very, very blank page or staying up until two in the morning to capture what suddenly seems like the most compelling thesis in the world.

These days, every idea gets tested out. Some merit further revisions and submission; others get their 24 hours on my blog and then disappear, not to be revisited. But blogging daily is like holding a regular brainstorming session with your own muses: you get the ideas out there quickly and regularly, and then you can go back and see which ones are worth hanging on to. Earlier this week, I faced a monthly column deadline and turned to my blog to see what I’d written that I might want to further develop; I was surprised to find an entry from weeks ago that seemed to me like it merited further consideration. I grabbed it, revised a little, and sent it off not to our community newspaper but to my editor at the Boston Globe, who wrote back within the hour saying she wanted to use it.

So, encouraged by BubbleCow that it really is worthwhile, I’ll continue blogging from Monday to Friday. As I see it, now that I’m exclusively self-employed, it’s part of my job. And even if the output doesn’t end up mattering a whole lot to anyone, as with running, I’ll keep doing it daily just for the workout.

Maintaining a daily writing habit: Here's what works for me

I’ve been invited to speak to a local women’s group about keeping a journal, so I’ve spent some time over the past few days trying to pull my thoughts together around a topic that for me feels largely intuitive, and yet still merits articulation once in a while. Daily writing: Why do it? And if you want to do it, how?

Though I make a big deal of being a daily or “streak” runner, I hardly ever think about the fact that I’m a streak journal-keeper as well. It’s become such a habit that I don’t even acknowledge it most of the time, but not since late 1994 have I missed a day of writing in my journal, when I finally realized it was easier to write every day than to skip days and then have a sense that there was “catching up” to do. As I frequently say, journaling is so much like running or any other kind of exercise: the longer you go without doing it, the harder it is to start up again, so it’s easier and certainly more mindless to just set out with a pre-defined commitment – which could be every day, but it could also be every other day, three times a week, even once a week – and stick to it rather than begin every day with a “Should I or shouldn’t I” question.

When I was younger I wrote before bed, summing up the events of the day just gone by. When I was in college, sometimes it was very late at night, well into the wee hours of the next day in fact, but I often felt like I couldn’t go to sleep until I’d processed the events of the day in writing. It was almost as if the day hadn’t officially happened until I’d made note of it.

These days I follow the method set out by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way and The Right to Write, which Cameron calls Morning Pages. The idea is to write three fast pages the minute you get out of bed in the morning. Three pages doesn’t work well for me as a benchmark since Cameron is talking about longhand and I always keyboard, so I use one thousand words as my minimum goal. Back when I was writing longhand, I used ten minutes as my framework. I don’t think it matters, though, whether you go by word count or duration or physical pages; it’s just a matter of getting yourself to stay with whatever measuring stick you’ve chosen.

And the reason I think it’s important to choose one of these benchmarks goes back to the idea of never having to decide whether or not this is a good day for writing. If you’ve committed to ten minutes, as I used to, then on those days when you feel like you have nothing to say, you’ll find something. You won’t revert to the all-too-easy “Nothing much going on” entry, or if you do, you’ll write past it. I employ a lot of journaling techniques that delve into the abstract or hypothetical. For example, if you find yourself writing “Not much going on today,” you can then pose the hypothetical statement: “But here’s what I wish were going on.” If you find yourself writing “I don’t feel like writing today,” use the rest of your ten minutes to take that next step “…because this is what is distracting me and keeping me from wanting to write.”

Often, I just write the same way children keep diaries, describing the here-and-now of the previous twenty-four hours. Finished an article; talked to my sister; went on a three-mile run; can’t wait to pick up that new novel at the library. Mundane, everyday events fill the pages of my journals, and have for years. I almost never re-read them. The point for me is the exercise: keeping a daily journal compels me to process my thoughts and feelings (or face the fact that I am avoiding them), and, just as with running, it keeps me at a certain “fitness” level. When I have to write something fast for work, it never seems like a strain, since I’m so accustomed to sitting down and writing, whether I have anything to say or not. Faced with an article assignment that I have no idea how to begin, I do the same thing as with my journal: I just start writing anything, to see if I can get through the mental static and make my way to the point.

Key points if you want to write regularly:

1) Find the time and place that work best for you. It might be 6 AM in your home office, which is what I do; it might be 3 PM at your local coffee shop or library; it might be 9 PM after your family has settled down and the house is quiet. It might even be in your parked car for ten minutes before you go into work. Experiment with different possibilities.

2) Choose your target benchmark for minimum output, whether it’s word count, duration in minutes or number of pages.

3) If you feel like you have nothing to say, write about nothing. Write about not having anything to say. Write about what you wish you had to say. Write about why you don’t want to say what you have to say.

4) It takes three weeks to build a habit. Decide your frequency goal, whether it’s daily or a certain number of times per week, and commit to that for at least three weeks.

5) Have someplace you can jot down thoughts that come to you during the day that you want to write about, and turn to that list when you next sit down to your journal.

As the late writer Donald Murray, a published poet, UNH writing instructor and Boston Globe columnist, often said, “Nulla dies sine linea – never a day without a line.” Ultimately, it’s easier to just sit down and write than to put off writing. And it only gets easier with practice.