Bird by Bird…
What is your day like as a writer?
Some writers get up at Oh-dark-thirty, grab a cuppa’ Joe and sit in front of their computer screen or notepad and write for hours – 2, 4, 8 hours at a time, until they are done. It’s a scheduled ritual, one filled with discipline and goals and benchmarks, whether it is word count, pages, or time. Then, when they are finished, they go do other things – garden, walk the dog, paint, read. Their writing time is over; they have met their daily quota.
I like to think of ideas like little children, each of which need time, nurturing, discipline and attention in order to blossom and mature.
Other writers, me included, get up reasonably early, grab breakfast, coffee and check emails. Then I go onto the internet to check the news and other interesting internet things, like, um, Facebook. Within a half hour I have managed to halfway derail the discipline I had sworn to uphold the night before as I was lying in bed.
So what is the key to sticktoitiveness when you are a right-brained creative type who tends to multi-task? How do you tackle writing projects when you are so distracted by other work, not to mention important things like dog walking, weed pulling, laundry and flyswatting.
…when they are all running around in the same room – my head — screaming at me for attention, they can make me feel scattered and exasperated. That’s when mommy wants to just shut the door and ignore them all.
Sometimes I think writers get diverted because we have so many ideas swirling around our heads. We don’t know where the starting line is and and it begins to feel overwhelming.
I like to think of ideas like little children, each of which need time, nurturing, discipline and attention in order to blossom and mature. But, when they are all running around in the same room – my head — screaming at me for attention, they can make me feel scattered and exasperated. That’s when mommy wants to just shut the door and ignore them all.
Anne Lamott’s wonderful book on writing, Bird By Bird, touches on this. In fact, the name of the book is based on her advice of how to surmount this sense of being overwhelmed by too much to do. As the story goes, Lamott’s older brother had three months to write a report on birds, which he didn’t get around to doing, and now the report was due the next day. He was close to tears, surrounded by papers and books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the undone task. Lamott’s father sat down beside him and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
I think of that simple yet brilliant advice when I get to feeling like there are too many deadlines, too many unfinished pages, too many dreams to follow. In fact, I just recently taped a photo of a bird to my monitor to remind me that all of it can, and will, take flight if I just keep chipping away at it.
What about you?
