The artiste at work

Here’s how any writing project starts for me:

Irrational Jennifer: Ok, I have to write something. But I don’t know where to start! Oh no, it’s going to be terrible! I have absolutely nothing to say!

Rational Jennifer: But you always feel this way, and you always come up with something eventually.

IJ: Yes, but I torture myself for days before! I’m insane! I can’t do it!

RJ: Why don’t you just jot a few ideas down?

IJ: But that’s just procrastinating! I need to WRITE. I should be able to draft brilliant, witty posts instantly. Otherwise, the world will end! Aw, fuck it. I’ll just go watch TV.

RJ: Why don’t you just jot a few ideas down?

IJ: I guess I can manage a few words. Hey, that’s not too bad! I could actually use that! I have so many brilliant ideas! This is going to be great! Why was I so nervous? I’m clearly a genius.

RJ: Now maybe write the first sentence?

IJ: Oh no, I can’t do that! It’ll suck! I don’t know where to start! I’ll just take a little break. I suck and I’ll never write anything again.

RJ: Just write the first sentence…

And so it goes. Over, and over, and over.

I’ll get going for a while, then stop. A few weeks will go by, and then, after much self loathing, I’ll manage to talk myself into writing for a few more minutes. Maybe I’ll actually have a deadline, which will make me finish something. The written piece will turn out great, and I will feel like a moron once more.

This post was begun precisely 11 days ago. I wrote down lots of ideas, and even came up with the beginning. But then I stopped, and I’ve been stewing about it ever since.

This time, I’m using a technique I learned from my new guru, Mark Forster, which he calls “little and often.” I spent precisely 19 minutes writing this. Spending time on this post was on my list of things to do today, and by God I did it. Tomorrow I will spend another 15 minutes and elaborate on Forster's idea, which recommends timed bursts of activity on “high resistance” tasks. I sure know about those.

Writers Rooms

Check out this series of photos and essays by British writers about their offices. So many of them write by hand first. Will Self uses Post Its. This quote from A.S. Byatt hit home:

I write fiction by hand, hence the absence of a computer in the picture. I write better since I put the computer in a separate office - partly at least because I am less tempted to play Freecell when I can't think of a sentence.

Fragmentation

Read this.

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I could have written that post. When I read Hawk's Pile of Index Cards web site I got very inspired and ran out to buy myself a whole bunch of 3x5 cards and a box to hold them in. I bought little carriers for them and a Circa Hipster PDA. I was writing on index cards all the time, in the car, on the couch, in the bathroom. There were stacks of them everywhere. I had my whole GTD system on there too.

Then one day I got sick of shuffling through the cards and made a to do list on a regular notepad. I got so much done that day! Somehow seeing everything in one place really helped, so I gave up the index cards and moved to a notebook and online documents that are searchable.

But I still love index cards and I wish I could find a good way to use them. They make me think of about fragmentation, and tearing things down into pieces and rearrange them into new configurations.

Like....
- blogging
- Twitter and microblogging
- GTD's "widgets" and breaking projects down into smaller tasks
- mind mapping/sweeping
- MP3s and the demise of albums
- wikis
- RSS feeds
- YouTube
- Wikipedia
- Circa

All these things have helped open my mind to the power of fragmentation and collection. My tendency is to create systems and bring information together (like I'm doing in this post). The idea of tearing it apart intrigues me.

The world is breaking down into smaller, more flexible pieces, without gatekeepers to tell you how they should be arranged. That's a good thing.

Commonplace books

In case you don't know what a Commonplace Book is, here's an interesting article. As a note-taking fool (see below) it's a concept near and dear to my heart.