One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

It's really frustrating always playing catch-up. Always running out of time. Yeah, I like to talk about time management and scheduling things so everything gets done, but sometimes, it's not about the time. The time is always there, it's the energy, the motivation, and the creativity that don't always show up.

Photo by: Melanie Davies, Flickr

I'm one of those people who gets really excited about something, and gives up on it or forgets about it really quickly. It happens with my writing, it's happened with this blog, and a million other things. It's mostly a lack of discipline, something I've been hard at work to change over the past year or so, but there's a point at which discipline can't overcome the block. Discipline can push through low energy or fatigue, discipline can even push through a lack of creativity, but if it's motivation that's the issue, discipline can often get beat down.

Motivation is the driving force. If you don't have it, you're SOL. You gotta want it. Anything you don't want gets put on the back burner. Right now, I want to work on my new writing project for Camp Nano. I don't really want to write up my review for Pacific Rim for my other blog. I don't really want to write blog posts for my wellness blog (even though I already took two weeks off), and I don't really want to sit down and apply for jobs.

While I technically have the time, energy, and ability to do all those things, the motivation isn't there. Or, perhaps more accurately, the motivation isn't strong enough to beat out the reasons why I don't want to do those things. I don't want to write a review on a movie that I didn't really want to see in the first place, even though it was quite good. I don't want to keep putting time and energy and thought into blog posts that nobody reads. I don't want to sit there and customize applications and responses to job postings when I know I won't get a call-back or even the courtesy of a canned email response to let me know I didn't get it on 99% of them.

I don't want to project the idea that I've lost hope. I haven't. It's just really frustrating to keep putting myself out there, with my writing, my blogs, my resume, and otherwise, and getting no response. Hardly even a negative response to any of it. Just apathy. Ignorance. Indirect dismissal. And silence. Even with this blog, I know not very many people actually sit down and read it, let alone care about what I have to say, but the writing is cathartic. The honesty of how stuff affects me perhaps more so.

What's most frustrating is that feeling of being stuck. Stuck in yet another job I don't love, stuck writing stuff nobody reads, stuck trying new things and ideas that don't pan out, stuck financially. I always think of that saying "If you don't like your (job/life/body/etc.), change it." It's supposed to be inspiring, but mostly it feels like an accusation. Like I'm not trying to change it. Or worse, that I did try and failed to make a difference.

It's not easy initiating and following through on big life changes. It takes time. And maybe I'm just impatient. I have made progress on some changes, but it's really difficult to apply that level of discipline and focus to all the changes I want to make, and all the goals I want to achieve. Too often, I feel like I have too many goals, too many things I want, too many balls in the air. I need to lighten the load and make my to-do list more manageable. The only problem is I don't know what to cross off the list.

When life gives you lemons, egg life's house.

Because payback's a bitch.

Losing Time Or Making Time

  My dad likes to say that age is nothing but a number. I think that's something older people say because they don't like to feel old. I think age is a lot more than a number. Sometimes it can indicate maturity, legality, and other times, it's just a social identity that shows we relate to our peers.
    I feel distinctly old today, being it's my birthday. While 24 isn't a very big number to some people, it seems pretty big to me. I'm leaving my early twenties for my mid-twenties, and I feel like this is a milestone in my young life. 23 seemed young enough to still play the college-aged young person card, and 24 seems like the real line between youth and adulthood.
    I have been really struggling with the desire to become independent and self-sufficient and the desire to remain somewhat innocent, footloose, and fancy-free. On the one hand, I want to be financially independent, but on the other, I would really enjoy having a little more free time than a full-time job allows. Not so I can go to the brewery every day or watch TV even more than I do already, but because there are things that I want to do that I don't have time for right now. Like this blog.
    I want to have more time to write. I want to have more time to read. And yes, it would be nice to have more time to go to the movies or watch them at home. But it's more than that. I want to have time to cook for myself, shop for groceries more than once or twice a month. I want to take walks and do yoga. I want to spend time with my friends and my family. Plus a million other things on my to-do list. And I feel like right now, I'm budgeting my time as thinly as I'm budgeting my money.
    I feel like I'm missing out on some of the things I should be enjoying, some of the things I think I have a right to enjoy, because I don't have time to enjoy them. Most people would diagnose this as having my priorities mixed up. If you have your priorities straight, you can always make time for everything. I don't think this is always true. There are a finite number of hours in a given week, and there is only enough room for a portion of everything you want to accomplish. We end up sacrificing so much of what we want to do in favor of what we are obligated to do.
    It isn't easy juggling your wants with your obligations, especially when time or money is the constraint. But the only way to achieve your goals and make your wants become a regular part of your schedule is to say yes to yourself and those wants instead of no, procrastinating and making excuses why you can't. You still may not be able to get all of them in every single time, but you can at least make the effort.

Coulda woulda shoulda.

5 Reasons To Do NaNoWriMo Next Month

  For anyone who even remotely considers themselves a writer, and who doesn't know already, November is National Novel Writing Month. This means that for 30 days, crazy people all over the world will be fiendishly writing into the wee hours of the morning to finish 50 thousand words by midnight on the thirtieth.
    I have done this, twice now (and won, I might add), and it's a lot of fun. Not the way that going to the movies is fun or playing pool is fun, but it's fun in that it's a challenge. It breaks down to about 1,667 words every day. When you think about it, that's not that much. It's like 5 double spaced pages of whatever you want. It doesn't have to be Shakespeare, and it doesn't even have to have all the commas. (You won't find me as Constant Writer on the Nano website, though. I was doing Nano long before I was doing Insistent and Persistent ;)

    The purpose of all this writing is to crank out a draft of a novel that you've been thinking about without worrying so much about getting it perfect. No first draft is perfect (you may know this as pretty much anyone who's taken a writing class will have read "Shitty First Drafts" or parts of it), but for some reason, we all manage to convince ourselves that it has to be. And this fear of writing something that isn't totally mind-blowing and amazing right out of the gate is what prevents us from actually writing something.
    So, what keeps you motivated for thirty days to actually keep writing? Stats. If you have any competitive streak, you can make friends through the forums and battle each other with your word count. One of the important things to the process is that word count matters, not page count. So it doesn't matter how big you make your font or how wide you make your margins, it's the number of words that count.
    This isn't just a numbers game, though. There comes a satisfaction that is indescribable when you cross the 50k mark. Even if you have more to say, once you hit that point, the pressure is off and you have such a wonderful sense of accomplishment.
    If you like to write, or if you're just feeling a little crazy, check out the Nano website and sign up (they help you track your stats) and get ready for one wordy month!

Word Nerds Live Here.

**UPDATE** SOOOO I totally forgot that I had put "5 Reasons" at the top of this when I started it and realized driving home that there may or may not be 5 separate reasons. I will try to enumerate them in the comments, but it wasn't a completely thought out plan, so, apologies, dear readers ;)

Have you written a novel? A short story? Some piece of writing that you're proud of?
What's your favorite part about writing?
Share in the comments below.

When Writing Gets Ugly

  Everyone has had a moment where they looked back over something they wrote and went, what the hell was that supposed to be? Sometimes it was just gibberish; other times you just ended up with a completely ungrammatical sentence; and still other times, you managed to mangle a word so badly with your 120 WPM skills that the auto-correct didn't even know what to do with it. I do that last one frequently due to the dyslexia my brain seems to pick up when it's trying to get something written in a hurry. Except my WPM is far from 120.
    But ugly writing, though it may seem useless and frustrating, considering you have to go back and fix it later, is not a bad thing. It's a start, and for those who write compulsively or regularly (and not compulsively), a start composed of crappy writing is WAY better than a blank page/screen. But that ugly writing isn't going to get pretty on its own, and revision, for some writers, is almost a dirty word.

"What? I didn't write it perfect the first time? 

You've got to be kidding. 

That is 100% quality prose right there." 

    Once we put our egos in check, however, there's a rare occasion when everything comes out brilliant and with no revision necessary the first time around. So while I love editing, I love it only as long as it's not my writing. I am pretty good at giving constructive criticism on other people's work. But when it comes to my own writing, I procrastinate to an obscene amount. If it's shorter, like an essay or a poem, or a blog post, I can do it because I know it will be quick and relatively painless. Every blog post is at least a second draft. And every 2 or more page paper I've written in the past eight years has been a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th draft.
    But the truth is, it can always be better. The question we must ask ourselves is: how much time do we want to/are we able to commit to making it better? To this end, I'm currently enacting a new strategy in my creative writing project, though I didn't set out to do things this way. I wrote--a good 2500 words or so in a day--and then steadily tacked on a few hundred words a day until I got blocked. I suddenly found myself writing the story into a corner (forgive the mixed metaphor) and I stopped. I thought about where I had gone wrong and made notes about where to fix it. And then I did. It took me about two weeks, off and on, to do the rewrites and the make the changes, but I think it's improved. And it's put me back on track. On a track I didn't realize I was going on, but a forward moving track that is not headed for a corner, or dead end.
    Revising 3500 hundred words or so is a lot easier than writing upwards of 30 or 40 thousand words first and then trying to go back and revise all of it. It's a lot of ground to cover, so much ground that it seems impossible not only to try to reread all of it, but to do more than fix a couple commas here and there.
    So, whenever writer's block sets in, going back and revising (and revisiting) what you've written can get your brain unblocked. It may not be pretty, looking at how far off topic you've gone or how ridiculous that string of dialogue sounds (people don't talk like that, do they?), but it helps. It is one day, or one set of however many pages/words you typically write in a day, at a time. Get through it and you can move on in a direction that may be even better than the one you originally had in mind.

Even the ugly duckling turned into a swan.

Motives, Reasons and Productivity

What an amazingly unproductive weekend! I finally got my hair cut, which I've been meaning to do for about a month. But when I sat down to do homework, I worked out how much each assignment would take me, approximately, and discovered I had about 11 hours of homework to do this weekend (though not all of it is due Monday, I will probably not find eleven hours during the week to complete it). This was so overwhelming, it may have set me up for the procrastination that followed. I started off with the assignment due soonest, and it managed to put me to sleep after five pages of reading. When I woke up about 45 minutes later, that pretty much shot my motivation on the homework front. I spent the rest of the day writing and watching hockey. But I did get back to my exercise routine for the first time in weeks, so that's all right.
    Today was much of the same. Went out to breakfast, ate way too much of several things that did me absolutely no good with regard to my healthy eating plan. Watched more hockey. Headed to a birthday BBQ at my boyfriend's family's house. Did no homework once again, despite being REALLY far behind now.
On the other hand, it was quite productive personally, if not scholastically. Hair cut: check. Writing: check. Hockey: check. IHOP: check. Exercise: check. Plus, I got my first birthday present. A TV. Yeah. Totally blown away. it is a couple years old and previously owned, but it's quite an update for me. I'm still using the tube TV I got for my brithday about ten years ago. So, in that light, it was quite a productive weekend, aside from the whole homework fiasco.
    Productivity is so closely tied to motivation, but motivation is a tricky thing. It depends on so many different factors. Motivation to do something may depend on money, how afraid you are of the consequences of not doing it, obligations of various kinds, the thing you're doing could be a means to an end, or you could just be motivated to do something because it makes you feel good in one way or another. Sometimes one type of motivation isn't enough to make you do something. Sure, I feel obligated to show up to class, but I do also enjoy my class, so I'll go to it. Exercise is good for me and will help me lose those stubborn last 5 pounds, but it also makes me feel good afterward, even though the during part is somewhat strenuous and un-fun. But even with the proper motivation, sometimes we still avoid actually doing things.
    While some productivity is good--the kind that helps you be a better, healthier, more intelligent, more prepared person, or the kind that pays the rent--other kinds of productivity can be bad. Working 80 hours a week may make you money and get you on good terms with your boss, but it's going to wreak havoc on your sleep schedule and your social life. (Like it or not, positive human interaction is a necessary part of your physical and psychological well-being.) So, even if you do have the right practical reasons to do some things, there are always further considerations to be made.
    Surprising how we managed to get from not doing homework to healthy forms of productivity so quickly, but that's how it seems to go when we do a sort of stream of consciousness writing. I probably could have spent more time going into the difference between reasons and motives, but being aware that there is a difference, and knowing when you have both or neither, can be a useful decision-making tool.

Having motivation is not equivalent to having a reason.

"But I'm Not Wrong"

Everyone always thinks they've got it together more than someone else they know. "That friend of mine is always getting lost"; "Man, I am such a better driver than she is"; "I think I'd go nuts if I was as disorganized as that woman is"; "I could write a better headline than that in my sleep", and so on. Are we just being condescending and self-important? Maybe sometimes. But most of the time: we're not wrong. We do have a good sense of direction, we are organized to the point of being nicknamed OCD, we do have a better sense of what sounds good and what doesn't. It doesn't mean we're great at everything and better than everyone else. We're just right about this. [Note: Headline taken from Bill Maher's stand-up show. We must give credit where credit is due, and sometimes when it's not.]
    Should we tolerate others' faults or should we try to correct them? That's a tricky question. Some people are so set in their ways that it would take a meteor through the middle of their house to get them to change anything. Others might respond to a little gentle constructive criticism. Trying to correct people is something that often comes into play either in a relationship or between teacher and student (and I mean the latter to be in a very broad sense--parent and child, mentor and mentee, elder and younger, etc). While this isn't always a good tactic, often resulting in hurt feelings and insecurities, if it's a serious issue, like fire hazard or risk of life kind of serious, of course it should be addressed. In all other cases, you pick your battles, I suppose.
    Consider: Why do we get so upset when other people aren't as good at something as we are? For me, it's usually because they're interfering with my ability to fulfill my obligations and responsibilities. For example, X's disorganization is causing me problems because she procrastinates, so I can't do what I'm supposed to do until X does her part first. It's frustrating, certainly. We hate being put on hold, getting there on time when everyone else is running late, being ready to do step 5 when everyone else is still working on step 3, or feeling like we have to fix other people's mistakes because we can do it better. It's exhausting feeling like the person who's always on the ball when everyone else seems to be sleepwalking or slacking off.
    While I'd like to say, in the spirit of being neighborly, that we should be a little more forgiving of these people. Sometimes, WE'RE the ones who are running late, or falling behind in our work, or making a mistake that someone else has to fix. But we have excuses, and because we find them more valid than those that others give to us, it's easy to forgive ourselves doing for something wrong.

Is that hypocritical? Probably.

    Still, if we are on the ball 90 percent of the time, compared to other people having it together only 20 percent of the time, it's fair to feel better about yourself for not being like them, those underachievers. Just because we slip up from time to time doesn't make it wrong for us to accuse them of the same thing, because unlike us, they do it all the time.
Nothing enlightening today. Just a little outburst. Even though we do the same thing sometimes, it doesn't make us wrong to point out that the underachiever does it all the time. It's OK to let your ego swell a little bit in cases like this. A boost in ego may prevent you from voicing your frustrations in a less than subtle way. Just don't let Ego take over.

You think I'm harsh? Fine. But I'm not wrong.