Return to a Writing Routine
Travel really disrupts my writing routine. I know this and still head off to Northern Thailand for Songkran, to Kaua'i for a Bali Hai vacation with my husband, on a road trip to Boise, Idaho to eat a few nice meals, view art in the downtown streets and search, in vain, for fields of potatoes. It's been two solid months of distraction and upheaval thanks to running around the globe, living out of a suitcase. But now I'm back, ready to sit here at my desk, and dive in.
My ritual for getting back to work seems to go something like this:
-- Deal with the piles. Books that haven't been fit into their proper spot on the shelves. Piles of errant paper, everything from receipts I'm saving in case I make money writing this year and can deduct expenses from my taxes to interesting articles clipped from newspapers and magazine. Notebooks, notebooks, notebooks: does every writer have as many as I do. And then the bags -- I swear I've begun to use the totes handed out by everyone from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to Tin House last summer as a bizarre sort of filing system. If only I can remember which project is stashed in which one. So Monday was sorting and filing and re-arranging and finding the top of my cherry desk again.
-- Remember where I left off, whenever that was, wherever that was. What was I working on? What were the project priorities? Where did I think the memoir was headed next? I seem to need to re-group and review outlines and notes and topics I thought were next especially in the memoir project.
-- Clean up file folders. Make sure the words on the labels really reflect whatever is inside. This is a key organizational detail for me whenever I'm in the midst of a big project. I often forget how much work I've already done because I stuff the notes and print-outs and brainstorms in file folders and give them a cryptic label that means nothing to me even a week later when I try to figure out what I'm going to do next.
-- Review all I've done to date, my source material, etc. Even if this is just a cursory overview. It's a kind of taking stock to remind me of how much hard work I've already gotten done. BEFORE I disappeared to fly the friendly skies. Before I drove I-84 to look for some alternative America that included fields of potatoes.
-- Find one small project that's been hanging around forever to work on and finish that. I'm doing that with the poem I was writing, oddly enough, the days in May 2003 when it turned out G was killing himself. I remember being so happy to work on the poem that day, then I set it aside and it had languished through all the events and ups and downs of daily life since then. So today, I'm going to finish it and, at the very least, post it on this blog.
-- Start small on my bigger, longer project, which, right now is The Muse of Hanging. What Annie Lamott in Bird by Bird says to do is simply describe the one-inch picture in a frame. That's all you have to aim for on any given writing day. No more, no less. And in time the words will accumulate.
-- Keep my mornings free and clear, and most of my days to and for myself. My writing seems to flow better when I have these open stretches of time rather than minor, often self-induced disruptions like running errands that really can wait.
