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Feb 13

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Don’t beat your head against the wall: Try these tips to develop a daily writing practice

A friend once told me that the best way to stop a bad habit was to replace it with a good one. At the time, she was trying to eat healthier and lose a few pounds. She said she found that trying to eliminate certain foods from her diet just made her want to eat more of them. She struggled with losing weight for years.

One day, she decided that instead of restricting her diet, she would add to it–healthy snacks and foods, including a plethora of fresh fruits and vegetables. A few of her goals: drink a green smoothie in the morning, eat vegetables at every meal, eat at least one salad a day, and snack on apples between meals. Read more

Feb 12

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Rearrange your life and write your book faster

Do you feel like you don’t have enough time to do everything you need to do in a day? Who doesn’t, right?

Everyone I know struggles to have a balanced life. They eat lunch in front of their computers, check e-mail constantly, and take work with them when they go on vacation.

Tony Schwartz, a writer and business consultant, says you can actually be more productive by doing less.

In his New York Times Opinion piece, “Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” Schwartz noted research by Florida State University Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues that revealed people perform best by working in uninterrupted cycles of no more than 90 minutes and then taking a break to refuel. Read more

Feb 11

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What drives you to be a storyteller?

In his acceptance speech for the 2007 Moth award in New York City, author and storyteller Garrison Keillor tells how his life in storytelling began after the drowning of his older cousin. Keillor was supposed to be taking swimming lessons that summer after the drowning but, in his first act of defiance, he rode past the smells of chlorine wafting from the YMCA and continued on to the library where he immersed himself in books and storytelling.

Keillor says the purpose of storytelling is to become intimate with strangers–something he has made his life from in hosting the radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion,” for nearly forty years.

What is the need that drives us to become storytellers? Every writer and storyteller has an event or series of events that brought them to storytelling.

My foray into storytelling was triggered by my mother’s descent into dementia in her mid-sixties. I wanted to tell the story of her difficult life that ended with her eventually forgetting all of her life’s experiences, almost as if the forgetting was a blessing for her.

Watch the 8-minute video below of Keillor and ask yourself what motivates you to be a storyteller:

Feb 8

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Try this revision tip: Cut up your manuscript

After you’ve spent months and even years working on a manuscript, it can be hard to see the trees for the forest or the forest for the trees, to use a woodsy, Pacific Northwest kind of saying.

That’s when I go back to a practice I learned from one of my MFA writing advisors. In one of our group meetings, we all cut up pages of our manuscript into strips and rearranged the paragraphs and sentences to see if our stories flowed better.

Genius artist Michelangelo once said about his work: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

I’m currently working on another round of memoir revisions. No matter how long it’s been since I’ve worked on it, I always feel too close to it to be as objective as I’d like. Something about physically cutting strips of sentences and paragraphs and moving them around gives me a new perspective. It also feels different from just reading the printed pages and making notes, although that’s part of revision strategy. Read my last blog post, Critique your manuscript with this checklist, to learn more.

Here’s one way to go about cutting up your manuscript:

1. Save your manuscript as a separate document. This is so that you can revert back or can refer back to the original to compare how it all flows. Read more

Feb 7

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Five ways to quiet your mind to create better art

In my last post, “Practice mindfulness 10 minutes a day to change your life and your art,” I wrote about the benefits of quieting the mind for a few minutes each day in order to become more creative, clear, and present in our daily life. Naturally, doing this can have a great impact on the art we create, whether we’re writers, painters, photographers, dancers, musicians, or any other artist.

But you don’t have to sit in uncomfortable positions (I never could master the lotus pose) or burn incense (I’m allergic to most scented smoke) in order to benefit from meditation.

Here are some other forms of meditation that you can experiment with:

1.  Walking meditation. Check out Meditation Oasis for how to do a walking meditation. Read more

Feb 6

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Critique your manuscript with this checklist

For me, revising a manuscript is like putting a puzzle together — making all the pieces click into the right places. But without a plan, it can be overwhelming.

You’ll find many ways to approach revisions depending on the phase you’re at in the process. Below, I’ve offered tips I’m following as I revise my current work in progress. Maybe, they’ll help you too.

First, I print out a double-spaced copy and take a pass through it, noting where I’ll go back and make detailed changes. This is what I look for:

1. Awkward sentences, phrases. Note with an “AWK” in the margin and circle the sentence or phrase.

2. Vague or wrong words. These could be places where another word would be better or I want to get more specific. Common changes here include the word “some,” non-specific descriptors, such as “beautiful,” and places where I should show instead of tell. Read more

Feb 5

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Practice mindfulness 10 minutes a day to change your life and your art

When is the last time you did absolutely nothing for 10 whole minutes? Not texting, talking or even thinking? Mindfulness expert Andy Puddicombe describes the transformative power of doing just that: Refreshing your mind for ten minutes a day, simply by being mindful and experiencing the present moment. (No need for incense or sitting in uncomfortable positions.)

Puddicombe says we rely upon our mind to be focused, creative, spontaneous and to perform at our very best in everything we do. And, yet, we don’t take time out to look after our mind or nourish it. He says we spend more time looking after our cars, our clothes, and our hair than we do our minds.

Our minds go round and round until we’re so distracted that we are no longer present in the world in which we live.

You don’t have to become a monk, like Puddicombe did, to learn how to nourish your mind so you can be the clear, creative, compassionate soul you’re meant to be.

Practicing mindfulness for 10 minutes a day can change your life and your art: (Tweet this)

To read more about my experiences with meditation and writing, click here.

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