Process is Pretty Much Piddling

January 27, 2012

What do you do when there's nothing to do?

Pam McAlister, my friend, fellow writer and former student, sent an article from Southern Living with this observation;

“I thought you might enjoy this little piece on piddling. Reminds me of my wrestling with what IS process and   what ain’t…”

Because the author of the article, Rick Bragg, gives such a charming description of the attitude that is at the heart of Process, today’s post consists of the intro above and an enthusiastic invitation to read The Fine Art of Piddling.

After you read the article, I invite you to go piddle yourself. Or if that phrase makes you think you need to invest in Depends, go play with Process.

Here’s my usual invitation to comment: What you do when you’re piddling? Is that the same as Process for you?

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Even More Hands-on Solution to Writer’s Block

January 22, 2012

Sometimes you need an even more hands-on solution to writing resistance than picking up a pen. Sometimes you need to back away, not just from the keyboard, but from words themselves, at least for a while.

Borrowing from the storyboarding technique screenwriters use, Edwidge Danticat starts her novels with collages. After creating several collages, she uses “blue book” college exam notebooks to draft a novel before touching a computer keyboard.

Danticat says “I like the tactile process. There’s something old-fashioned about it, but what we do is kind of old-fashioned.”

Recent brain science explains why the old-fashioned tactile approach can be so effective. Sharon Begley observes “Although most of us think of motor skills and cognitive skills as like oil and water, in fact a number of studies have found that refining your sensory-motor skills can bolster cognitive ones. No one knows exactly why, but it may be that the two brain systems are more interconnected than we realize. So learn to knit, or listen to classical music, or master juggling and you might be raising your IQ.”

Almost any kind of creative play (what I call Process) can have the effect of increasing creativity and other cognitive functions. Take your pick from collage-making, doodling, painting, coloring, dancing, fooling around with a musical instrument, playing with clay or Play-Doh, making models, gardening, photography, quilting, etc.

This as-of-yet-unexplained connection between sensory-motor skills and cognitive abilities can also help explain why clustering and mind-mapping break through mental blocks to deliver creative insight. Sometimes you need the image or the sensory-motor experience before you’re ready to make words flow into sentences and paragraphs.

Stop thinking about your writing problem straight-on and sidle up to it instead. Get your body moving so your mind can wander. Let your hands move of their own volition; sometimes another part of the body has wisdom the brain hasn’t clued into yet.

The next time you’re facing writing resistance, pick up your pen or your colored pencils, markers or crayons. Or your paintbrush, scissors, glue stick, harmonica or guitar, modeling clay, knitting needles or whatever activates your sensory-motor system and makes you happy.

My favorite ways to do Process are coloring and making collages. What’s yours?

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Track Your Way Past Writer’s Block to Writing Success

September 27, 2011

Writing habits trump resistance. If you want to make it easier to write and write regularly, you need writing habits. (I suggest regularly showing up for short sessions of Process, Product Time and Self-care as the basic habits every writer should give her/himself.)

To create or improve your writing habits (or to change any other behavior), you have to Pay Attention.

How Do We Know Attention Is Essential?

Researchers trained monkeys to detect subtle difference in vibrations on a disk spinning beneath their fingers. When the monkeys learned to do this, their somatosensory cortex changed. They literally changed their brains.

BUT when the monkeys were distracted with music during training sessions, their somatosensory cortex did not change. Because they weren’t paying attention, they couldn’t learn the new pattern of vibrations.

When you pay attention, you can change your brain to create the writing habits you want.

Habits Free Your Attention

Once you establish a habit, you don’t have to pay as much attention to maintain it. The behavior becomes, well, habitual. When you give yourself habits that get you to your writing space and past resistance, you’re free to pay attention to what matters most to you: what you’re writing and how satisfying it is to be writing.

How to Pay Attention

One of the most effective ways to pay attention to track your commitments and what you do to honor those commitments every day. Tracking gives you the focused attention you need to build habits. It also makes the weekly check-ins I recommended in my last post so much easier because you have the information at your fingertips.

Students in my Writing Habit class who consistently track their progress are more successful in honoring their commitments and feel more satisfied than students who are haphazard in recording their performance.

You’ll find a tracking form for the Three Habits (Process, Product Time and Self-care) and a more detailed Product Time tracking form on the Around the Writer’s Block Forms page. Modify these to suit you or create your own simple tracking system.

Please let me know how tracking works for you.

 

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Step Away From the Marshmallow Part 2

June 2, 2011

Don't think about the marshmallow!

In more recent versions of the Marshmallow Test, Walter Mischel tells children to pretend the marshmallow is only a picture of a marshmallow or a fluffy cloud. The children who employ their imagination could wait three times longer than kids who didn’t use their imagination.

“Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it,” Mischel observes.

Habits More Powerful than Will Power

In The Social Animal, David Brooks explains that children who could delay eating the marshmallow were able to trigger what he calls “cool ways” of perceiving the marshmallow. He writes “The children who could not [delay eating the marshmallow] triggered hot ways: they could only see it as the delicious temptation it really was. Once those in the latter group engaged these hot networks in their brain, it was all over. There was no way they were not going to pop the marshmallow into their mouths.”

Brooks explains “The implication of the marshmallow experiment is that self-control is not really about iron willpower mastering hidden passions. The conscious mind simply lacks the strength and awareness to directly control unconscious processes. Instead, it’s about triggering…People with self-control and self-discipline develop habits and strategies that trigger the unconscious processes that enable them to perceive the world in productive and far-seeing ways.”

A commitment to show up for 15 Magic Minutes of Product Time five times a week is one of those habits that trigger unconscious assumptions and associations. People who write regularly are far more likely to perceive themselves as writers and to perceive writing time as a necessity, not a luxury. They are more likely to focus on their writing, not on their resistance.

You Can Choose Your Thoughts – Unless You Multitask Too Much

Research at University of Michigan with adults who faced the marshmallow challenge as children shows that “high delayers” (adults who could delay gratification when they were children) are better at focusing their attention on two words they are asked to remember and away from two words they are asked to forget. “High delayers” choose what to focus their attention on.

Frequent multitaskers, on the other hand, are terrible at choosing what to pay attention to. They are easily distracted and attend to whatever is new, whether that is something they planned to notice and respond to or not.

As Stanford professor Clifford Nash says, “They are suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them.”

Researchers are careful to point out that without longitudinal studies, we can’t assign causality. That is, we can’t say for certain whether multitasking causes the decreased capacity to control attention. But I think it’s a safe bet that it does. Research has shown again and again that the brain is plastic and changes in response to what we experience.

When you multitask, you’re looking for the dopamine hit that something new will give you. You are essentially training your brain to constantly shift focus and to pay attention to everything. You lose your ability to sort relevant from irrelevant, meaningful from meaningless. You lose the ability to focus your attention for any length of time, which is essential to analyzing information and making the new connections and associations that are at the heart of creativity.

It's your brain. What do you want to teach it?

Create Your Perception Triggers aka Habits

The best thing you can do for yourself as a writer is to create habits that support you in regular writing sessions where you focus only on your writing. Turn everything else off when you write. Stop trying to slip writing in when you get “extra time” or as you’re doing something else. Give your writing the focused, scheduled time it and you deserve.

Develop the habits, strategies and practice that will, as Brooks says, “trigger unconscious processes that enable you to perceive the world in productive ways.”

Process, Self-Care and Product Time are those kinds of habits. You can learn more about these habits by exploring other past posts (just click on Recommended Practices in the Categories box on the right) and subscribing to this blog. If you want more one-on-one encouragement, support and accountability, I invite you to my Writing Habit and Around the Writer’s Block classes. Or check out creativity coaching with me or another coach.

Find your ways to step away from the marshmallow.

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When Your Writing Is Stuck, Hold On

May 6, 2011

Sometimes you have to hold on!

Pam McAlister (who we met in the previous post When Your Writing Is Stuck, Let Go) was able to let go of expectations because she had assumptions to hold on to. She assumed she would keep honoring her writing commitments, she assumed she had people to rely on and she assumed her writing had purpose. Do you?

Did you wake up this morning and demand “Gravity had better be working today! No more of this floating off in space stuff.” Did you call your senator to tell her/him that you expect the atmosphere to be a mix of 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen?

Of course not. Because we don’t make demands about our bedrock assumptions, the things we absolutely know will be true or present.

In every expectation and demand, there is fear and anger that we won’t get what we expect or demand. “I expect you to be home on time,” is what a parent tells a kid when she/he has broken curfew. “I demand a refund,” are the words of someone who thinks there will be no refund without throwing a fit.

Gravity, the right blend of atmospheric gases to support life, the sun rising and setting, fresh water running out of the faucet when we turn it on are bedrock assumptions we base our lives on without question. That you will show up for your writing, that your writing is part of your contribution to your community, that your allies have your back are bedrock assumptions that satisfied and successful writers base their writing lives on.

First Anchor: Habits

Pam was able to let go of the demand that today’s writing be important in part because she held on to the awareness that because she is a writer, she needs to show up for her writing. She demonstrated that when she wrote “I know that writing crap is better than not writing at all.”

Pam has learned that it’s not what we write that matters, it’s that we write that matters.

Too many writers fear that if they stop making demands on their writing, they won’t write at all. Pam didn’t floating off into a limbo of not writing for months because she has bedrock assumptions about her behavior (i.e. habits) to anchor her.

For over a year, she and the rest of her Mastering the Writing Habit group have consistently made and honored weekly commitments around their writing. They have consistently showed up for Process, Self-Care and Product Time.

They haven’t been perfect, of course. Life happened. They all went through periods when they did less than 100% of what they had committed themselves to, but even then they didn’t give up on their habits or themselves.

Pam recalls, “When my husband had his heart attack and when I had pneumonia, I dropped the habits completely for a few weeks. But as soon as I was able to, I got back in the saddle; in fact I couldn’t wait to do that. That, I think, is more of a testimony to the power of writing habits than perfect performance would be.”

Perfection is not necessary; persistence is. Habits matter. If you don’t have writing habits to anchor you, what are you waiting for? Build them. Choose one small pattern and repeat it until knowing that you’ll do that habitual behavior is a given, like the blind assumption that gravity will still be working every day you wake up.

Second Anchor: Allies

The women in Pam’sMastering group served as each other’s witnesses, cheerleaders and advisors. Sometimes they congratulated each other, sometimes they commiserated, sometimes they offered suggestions, sometimes they “just” listened. Because they had each other to check-in with, they reinforced their ability to hold themselves accountable.

When life didn’t follow the plan, knowing they had allies empowered them to figure out when and how to adjust their commitments to fit the new reality and when and how to adjust reality to keep their writing a priority.

More than a year later, they are still consistently celebrating each other’s success, still consistently making and meeting their goals.

Third Anchor: Purpose

Pam has discovered that what she writes on any given day doesn’t matter, but that she writes, that she shares the information and insight she’s gained in her personal and professional life to help others absolutely matters.

Every time she writes, Pam holds on to the intention that eventually what she writes will help others. At the same time, Pam needs to let of – and keep letting go of – any expectation that today’s writing be anything in particular. It’s not an easy balance to maintain, which is why having habits and allies is so valuable.

Your Anchors

Do you have habits to anchor you? Do you know why your writing matters? (Believe me, it does!) Do you have a compelling sense of purpose? Do you have writing allies to support you in honoring your commitments?

If you answered yes, please share how your anchors – the things and people you’d never let go of – support your writing.

If you answered anything less than a resounding “yes” to these questions, I humbly suggest you strongly consider taking the Writing Habit class or working with a coach to give yourself what you need. Without the anchors of habits, allies and purpose, letting go puts you at risk of floating aimlessly.

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Creative Quick Hits (to Knock Out Writer’s Block)

April 26, 2011

Kudos and props to Laura Sommers (www.wholebrained.com or Laura Sommers on Facebook) for sharing her experience and insight to inspire this post.

Like most of us, Laura has a lot going on: revising her novel, developing creative strategies with her husband to keep their business thriving in a slow economic recovery, keeping up with family stuff, having a life. So it would have been easy to dismiss the idea of making an apron for the friend who was hosting Easter dinner.

“But,” Laura said, “I’ve learned to not ignore these impulses.”

She found fabric she really liked, got a little innovative with the pattern she’d picked out and spent an hour or so for a couple of nights cutting, pinning and sewing the apron. Laura’s friend was delighted and another friend thought Laura should go into business designing and selling aprons.

“Oh no,” Laura immediately and wisely dismissed that idea. “This was a creative quick hit, not a long-term commitment.”

A creative quick hit is something you do for the fun of it for a short time. Quick hits invite you to play with something new and get immediate or nearly immediate satisfaction. A quick hit might be sewing, cooking, gardening, painting, folding origami animals, making jewelry, even blogging. Anything that you could do for Process  can be a creative quick hit; in fact, the two terms are pretty much synonymous.

Because the ego and time investment in a creative quick hit is low (Laura identifies herself as an emerging novelist, not a fabric artist), you’re freer to explore and take risks. Satisfaction can come as much from the experimentation as from the results.

For example, if you’re preparing chicken breast for a routine dinner, why not play with herbs and spices to invent a new marinade or try a fancy French sauce? If it turns out, great. If not, you can always order a pizza. Your quick hit successes show you that creative risk-taking pays off; your quick hit disappointments show you that failure is neither fatal nor permanent and strengthen your willingness to keep playing no matter what (a vital skill when facing writing resistance).

Because creative quick hits are a short-term engagement, you get the satisfaction of completion more quickly and frequently than you’re likely to get from your major project. A novel is not something you whip up in less than a week; an apron is. (The motivation that comes from this kind of satisfaction is one of the major benefits of having a Process habit.)

Best of all, a creative quick hit is a reminder that the process works. Laura divided the apron project into stages (cutting, pinning, sewing, finishing details). Spending time in each stage to complete the project reminded Laura that she has finished several stages in writing her novel and that small investments of time regularly repeated will see her through to completion.

The one potential drawback with quick hits is the temptation to try to make them substitute for the big project that is your true creative passion and desire (and therefore scarier). Quick hits are satisfying, but they’ll never give you the joy of working on your primary writing. As a supplement to your writing, they function exceedingly well; as attempted replacement, they’re just as frustrating as any other “second best” substitute.

I’m curious: please comment about what your creative quick hits are and what benefits they bring you. (For example, one of my quick hits is this blog and comments from readers are part of the reward.) Or if you prefer, use this as writing prompt: What are my characters’ quick hits? Are these effective supplements for their true ambitions or attempts to settle for second best?

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Are You Really Using the Process Cure for Writer’s Block?

March 28, 2011

What I did for Process last week

When I introduce students, coaching clients or readers to Process as one of the three habits that support the writing life and reduce writing resistance, they ask some straight-forward questions and some that are a little trickier like:

  • “Is it Process if I’ve got music or TV on in the background while I’m coloring or painting or knitting?”
  • “Does reading count as Process?”
  • “Is watching a movie or TV Process?”

The answer to the tricky questions is almost always “It depends.”

What brings one writer to a creative and playful state of mind won’t work for every other writer. When an activity is Process for you, you are engaged and focused, but it’s a soft focus, more diffuse and flexible than the intense focus of Product Time.

In Product Time, you have an agenda. Even though you must surrender your expectations about today’s writing (that it will be good or so many pages), you still have a long-range intention that eventually you’ll produce a piece of writing you share with others. Anything that brings you closer to filling that goal counts as Product Time.

In Process, you play just for the sake of playing and create just for the sake of creating. You focus on the present moment, not on a future outcome.

So What Counts?

Watching TV or a movie is not Process (or Product Time) for me because I’m just watching. I’m a passive recipient of someone else’s creative dream. In fact, watching TV is usually a way we “tune out” and numb our awareness.

Screenwriters and playwrights might very well watch TV, movies or plays as Product Time research and professional development. If they can soften their focus from the intensity of studying another writer’s work (which makes it Product Time) and still engage in a kind of creative play while observing, that could be Process for them.

I’m not capable of that myself. When I read as a writer, noticing another writer’s style and technique (like screenwriters/ playwrights digesting a movie/play), that’s Product Time. Recreational reading where I want to get lost in another world is neither Product Time nor Process. When I get lost in reading, I am focused in a way, but it’s much more passive than what I typically feel when I’m doing Process.

So I don’t count reading as Process. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be Process for you, but I caution you to be careful to distinguish when you’re really reading as Process and when you start becoming a consumer of someone’s imagination.

Whether music or TV in the background means you’re shouldn’t call the coloring, painting or whatever you’re doing as Process depends on whether the music or TV enhances or interferes with your willingness and ability to experiment, play and engage in something creative.  

Only you can tell. And the only way you can tell is to pay attention to what happens. If you get so into the coloring or painting or playing with clay that you glance up and are surprised to realize you missed half the show, it’s Process. But if you get so into the TV show or movie that you glance down and are surprised to see you’ve filled half a page with mindless scribbles, it’s not.

Ultimately, it’s a matter of mindfulness. If you’re engaged in playing just for the sake of playing, it’s Process. But if you’re focused on accomplishing a specific end goal, or if at the other extreme what you really want is to just numb out and be mindless for a while; it’s not Process.

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The P-word

March 18, 2010

By Rosanne Bane

I’m reading Play by Stuart Brown, MD. I picked up the book mainly because of its subtitle: How It [Play] Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul.

Brain, imagination and soul are three words that will grab my attention every time.

As I’m reading, I’ve realized that what I’ve been calling Process for over 10 years really could be called creative play or just play. So why did I coin the term “Process” instead of simply calling it “Creative Play”? In part, because I wanted to contrast creating for its own sake (Process) with creating with a specific goal in mind (Product). But I can also see that I wanted to avoid the stigma of “play.”

I’m in good company. Brown discusses Marian Diamond, a neuroscientist whose work showed that rats raised in “enriched” environments were smarter, had bigger and more complex brains and more highly-developed cortexes. What’s an “enriched” environment for a lab rat? One that had a variety of toys and other rats to play with. So why didn’t the research simply say “play” instead of “enriched?”

Diamond admits, “Back in the early 1960s, women had to struggle to be taken seriously as scientists. I was already seen as this silly woman who watched rats play, so I did avoid the words ‘toy’ and ‘play.’”

What a strange prejudice we have against play.

Despite what our Puritan forerunners asserted, play is not sinful. It is not a waste of time that could be better spent doing something “productive.” It is not just an amusing diversion or a reward for hard work.

Play is the natural way to learn, to practice, to rehearse without penalties. Play expands the imagination. Play is essential for creativity.

The brain thrives on play. Play stimulates BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) that stimulates nerve growth.  Play creates new neural connections and may be a key factor in keeping the aged-related cognitive losses to a minimum.

If you’ve been feeling a little stale or completely stymied with your writing lately, play is the prescription. On the other hand, if your writing is going well and you want to keep your momentum, play is your insurance. The more you play, the better your work will be.

So even if you don’t use the P-word, how do you play as a writer? What do you do for creative fun that keeps you fresh and inspired? What thrills and pleasures from your childhood, adolescence and early adulthood could you revive?

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Little Things Matter! A Lot!

February 18, 2010

For want of a nail the shoe was lost,

For want of a shoe the horse was lost,

For want of a horse the rider was lost,

For want of a rider the battle was lost,

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

      – Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac

Forgive the militaristic nature of the analogy, but this is an excellent illustration of how important the little things are. The little things, especially those that you repeat frequently, have far more impact than the once-in-a-lifetime moments (like having a whole day to yourself to get all those things done that you want to do and never make time for).

For Want of a Nail: If you cannot reserve 15 minutes a day for process (creative play just for the sake of play without concern or expectations about the outcome), 15 minutes a day for self-care, and at least 15 minutes for product time for your writing, if you can’t honor these 45 minutes, the day is lost to you.

For Want of a Shoe: If you can’t claim today as your own, it’s so easy to let tomorrow slide, too. And when you lose a couple of days, you may as well bag the whole week.

For Want of a Horse: If you lose a week, you can probably write off the whole month.

For Want of a Rider: When you’ve lost a month, you start talking about getting started next season or next year.

For Want of a Battle: When you’re talking about starting a project in future tense, (“Someday, I’ll…”) instead of present tense, (“Today I am…”), you know, in your heart of hearts, it’s probably never going to happen.

All For Want of a Horseshoe Nail: For the want of 45 minutes today, your life is lived or lost.

Oh, you’re not going to drop dead if you don’t find those 45 minutes for process, self-care and product time. But when you cannot claim even 45 minutes of your day as your own, your life is lost to you.

Are you claiming your life? Or are you claiming you’re too busy to claim your life?

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Announcement: Meet Me at the Writer’s Buffet

February 12, 2010

What counts as Process and why is it so important? How does creative play help me get to my writing? What kind of Self-care does a writer need? How should I structure my Product Time to get the most out of it?

I’ll answer these and any other questions you might have about how my 3 Recommended Practices form the foundation of a sustainable writing habit at the Loft’s A La Carte Conference: A Writing Buffet for Beginners on Saturday, February 20.

Lest you think, “A conference for beginners? That’s not for me; I’m past being a beginner,” remember what Julia Cameron had to say in The Artist’s Way about the grace of the beginner:

“As artists, we are spiritual sharks. The ruthless truth is that if we don’t keep moving, we sink to the bottom and die. The choice is very simple: we can insist on resting on our laurels, or we can begin anew. The stringent requirement of a sustained creative life is the humility to start again, to begin anew. It is this willingness to once more be a beginner that distinguishes a creative career.”

The A La Carte Conference not only features an “appetizer” keynote address on the writing life with Selden Edwards and the aforementioned “entrée” breakout session with yours truly, there are also “entrées” in:

  • Memoir
  • Children’s Writing
  • Poetry
  • Novel Writing
  • Writing for Television
  • Screenwriting
  • Graphic Novels and Comic Books
  • Short Story

Surely you’re not an expert in all these genres. Even if you don’t plan to pursue all of these, you can gain new perspectives and insights from any of these sessions. Think of it as creative cross-training for writers.

There’s also a networking lunch with the presenters and other writers for a side dish (I’m initiating a discussion of what we love about our writing at the table I’m hosting), a panel discussion that will quench your thirst to ask questions and get practical answers, and Next Steps for Writers for dessert.

I hope to see you at the Buffet!

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