The Busy Time and The Dark Time in The Writer-Parent Life

In our lives as parents we can be over-burdened with the many demands on us: work, schools, children's changing needs, and so on.  The effect is that cannot relax; If our mindfulness had a barometer it would plummet.  Instead, we are trapped in scheduling, worry, and an over-committed life.  There seems to be no room for the life view of Henry James: "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost."  Everything is lost on us during these over-burdened times because we have to serve our many responsibilities, but beyond that, we lose the capacity to make a pause.  We are not able to "turn off" our minds, partly because the buck stops with us, but partly because we are not in control of our own minds, we cannot turn off.

This is a difficult circumstance and we should be kind to ourselves and others in it.  But there is another kind of parent-writer difficulty that is in some sense the reverse of this daily struggle -- it is the time when all these everyday problems and concerns dissolve.  Actual problems remain,  but in ourselves we feel unable to grab hold as we used to.  For a writer who suffers under a mountain of obligations it may seem a cruel fate that a Dark Time is not the balm to a Busy Time.  Now it seems the opposite problems appear: Where there was anxiety, there is lethargy.  Where there was business, there is emptiness.

The Dark Time is a common problem for writers, while The Busy Time is a common problem for parents.  If you are caught in between these two poles as a writer-parent here are some guide posts that I've used in my own practice.

1. Learn to Listen

A common mistake is to give a person in a Dark Time a "positive band-aid" -- or to give ourselves one.  A real salve though has to go deeper.  Because listening to ourselves and others uses the heart, it feels expansive.  A positive band-aid, on the other hand, can feel prickly and contracting because we have to use our mind to keep applying it and "make it true".  For writers, listening can also allow inspiration to come in the back door, since we are story-sensitive creatures.

2. Self-Kindness

Another common tactic to drive-away a Dark Time is willpower.  To be kind to the ugliest parts of ourselves truly frees the creative spirit.  While we can force ourselves to be productive, when we practice self-kindness and teach ourselves to love our very-human flaws, our work is free to flow where it wants to, not where we want it to go.

The greatest thing about a Dark Time is it is like an artistic cleansing fast; A Busy Time is like being kings at a feast.  It's rich and abundant, but can make us sick.  As parent-writers we dwell in this paradox.  Learning to use both skillfully is as much part of our art as wordsmithing.

5 Benefits of the Writer’s Life

Flickr Image via Creative Commons by Fredrik Rubensson

1. When you’re not writing - and are naturally pre-occupied with your quotidian life - you are forced to become present so you can remember it all and write about it later.  Additionally, despite stereotypes to the contrary, a writer is greatly served by improving their mental and physical health.  Living with clarity of mind is one of the hardest, but most rewarding, and overlooked, aspects of the writer’s life.

2. When you’re writing you get to dive deep into a subterranean emotional world, a world of cosmic energies, that normally, people too preoccupied by the maintenance of life, cannot go to.  When you get your writing “right”, you get to make others feel what you’ve felt.  Bridging this gap between self and other, living in this interdependent way, is one of the most thrilling imaginative relationships a writer can have.  (For the extremely introverted it may be one of the most thrilling relationships, period.)  It’s what keeps the chase alive too because it’s so very, very hard to achieve.

3. When you revise you get to be a builder.  Getting in there and tinkering with sentence, moving words around, moving one paragraph to the top and deleting another…it’s like putting together a building, you get to figure out how a sentence is constructed, what the fabric of the building needs to thrive.

4. This is the best bit - you get to read! And better still you become a better reader.

5. And then you start the cycle all over again - it all works in a glorious harmony.

5 Things You Can Do To Get Work Done With Kids

A few moms in my network have expressed an interest in finding out how other creative moms get stuff done.  Everyone has their own patterns, habits, and work flow that is right for them.  Here’s mine:

When I had my first baby I was at work on a PhD.  I quickly realized - shock! - that things were going to be different from now on.  Actually I panicked.  But what came out of that was one simple idea.  

Make A, B, C priorities.  An A priority is something you need total focus for.  Read, when the kids are in bed.  A B priority is something you need partial focus for.  Read, when the kids are watching TV.  A C priority is something you can do blindfolded.  For me that was referencing my work.  It didn’t require any creative thinking just manual labor.

2. Scale Your Practice

Fast forward a couple years and there’s a toddler in the house and a new baby.  Now things really get harry.  At this point I realize I’ve got to scale my practice.  For me, a non-fiction writer, that meant no more long meandering essays.  I started a blog.  I wrote “flash essays” - no more than 1,000 words.

3. Do Only The Work You Love

Fast forward another couple years.  There’s two fully-formed toddlers in the house and now things are just hard.  Now I realize not only do I have to scale my practice I’ve got to install a bullshit-meter in my creative self.  Since I was fortunate not to have to take on paid work at this point that meant doing creative work that I loved.  Yes I allowed myself to do work I loved.  Now I could use the finite energy I had.  Without the added fuel of pleasure, I couldn’t get my butt in the chair and do the work.

4. Learn Your Patterns

The next thing that works for me is not making myself work when my energy is sapped.  For me that means no working at nap times when I’m shattered.  It doesn’t mean making work when I feel like it (Let’s face it, then it’d never get done.)  But it does mean knowing when I’ve got a little juice in me.  For a lot of people, myself included, this is the morning.

5. Self-Compassion is More Important Than Discipline

I’m a fairly seasoned parent now and although I’ve got a background in classical music and that makes me a self-discipline kind of person, I have come to realize that self-compassion is way more important.  I simply can’t afford to go down the existential rabbit holes of comparison, doubt, and insecurity.  This didn’t come easy people.  It is a hard, tough road.  Self-compassion is way harder than self-discipline but it’s also a way more fantastic gift to give to our kids.

Why We Need Beauty To Live (and make) Well

So often I come across the idea that the artist is not the person.  That the one who produces the work is not the same being as the one who lives day-to-day.  

Inner life is mysterious.  Of course it is.  So it’s no wonder our work doesn’t always “click” with our everyday personalities.  But it seems down right wrong to say the two - the maker and the person - are separate beings.  Actually it seems immoral.  Does an artist get a moral “pass” simply because they are making stories, paintings, or songs and not cars, computers, and tables?

An artist is more obligated than the average person to dig-deep.  The reader/viewer/listener expects to find spiritual depth in art. It’s become unfashionable to say, but beauty speaks in a language the postmodern person misses.  Maybe it’s gone further.  We may even have adapted to beauty’s absence.  Art that disgraces beauty is now de rigueur.  Anish Kapoor's art installation at Versaille is a good illustration of the situation.

Beauty has been a huge part of my own life.  The sound of Bach in air at summer music camps.  The mysterious expressions of 17th century portrait subjects seemingly looking into my eyes.  A lemon tree fruiting.  An orchid flowering.  These textures make-up the background of my childhood memories.  

In my 20s I worked in the contemporary art world in London mainly but sometimes in New York as well.  I kept a diary over this time and it records the disorientation I felt.  I expected a solid world of beauty.  I found disruption, dull objects, oblique performances, and government grants that looked to seek more social workers than artists.  

Art was never supposed to be the elitist money-driven pursuit it now is.  It’s not another commodity.  It’s a public gift.  Art is a cultural heritage that ought to be debated in public life.  The public is uninterested for lots of reasons.  But one of them is that artists working now are, like folks in any other sector, often spiritually disorganized.  As a society we’ve given up on the idea that life is a moral and spiritual quest.  A secondary cost to that loss is beautiful, relevant art.

What’s your take on beauty in your practice?  What can artists do about the problem of beauty missing in art?

How Can A Writer Begin A Project?

Image via Suzanne Schroeter and is a Flickr Creative Commons Lisence

“He began watching and questioning his own experience, and writing down what he observed.

At first, this mainly meant following his personal enthusiasms, especially stories from his reading: tales from Ovid, histories from Caesar and Tacitus, biographical snippets from Plutarch, and advice on how to live from Seneca and Socrates.  Then he wrote down stories he heard from friends, incidents from the day-to-day life of the estate, cases that had lodged in his mind from his years in law and politics, and oddities he had seen on his (so far limited) travels.  These were his modest beginnings.”

-How to Live: A life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer by Sarah Bakewell

If my creative life had a mantra this week it would be “contrast”.  On Saturday our family hosted a party for ten children.  Those of you who have party-aged kids will know it was pretty high-energy.  On Wednesday our daughter was part of a neighborhood parade of hand-made lanterns called St. Martin’s Day, a traditional children’s holiday in German.  The week before we’d gone to her kindergarten to help her make a hot-pink dragon with purple glitter.  

Here’s the contrast bit: my writing life is quiet.  Though I don’t know yet what it is, I feel on the cusp of a new project.  Its details are still a mystery to me, but I sense I need a new way of working.

It’s too easy in creative life to be preoccupied with movement of thought.  I read about a book a week.  I keep a podcast on while I’m cooking or cleaning.  And of course I write.  Writing isn’t just about the time it takes to put words to paper.  It’s the movement of thought before-hand.  

But something is missing in that mix.  That something I think is life itself.  Without unfiltered experience there’s no material to write with.  So my creative goal this week is a non-doing.  I will commit to chunks of time when I look as clearly as possible at my environment and experience.  I think of it as a writer’s meditation.  As beautiful as getting to know your life when sitting is, as a writer I’m interested in getting to know the texture of my life as it’s lived.  That’s the grist for my creative mill.  I hope that, paradoxically, quieting my writer’s mind I will unearth the deepest layer of material for a writer: not the movement of thought but the movement of life.

5 Transferable Skills of a Housewife

5 Transferable Skills of a Housewife

Recently I heard Esther Perel on the podcast Emerging Women: Grace and Fire.  She said something that’s stuck with me since I heard it.  Basically she said that the thing about feminism in America is that it said, “We’re just like you, men” whereas in Europe they said, “We’re not like you.  We’re different.  And we need different things.”  The result was completely different.  

In my life in America and Germany I see the contrast first-hand.  Just today I ran into a man on the playground in Germany and he said “I know many men who left their jobs after having children because their bosses did not allow them to work in a part-time or flexible way.”  Can you believe that?  It’s beautiful I think.  To me it says that the feminine spirit is a respected and ordinary part of life just a bit more than in America.  Men can also share the one-year “parental leave” given to a family after a child is born.  But that’s another story.  

What I want to say here is that when I grew up in America I feel, in part, American feminists did me a disservice.  I hardly believe it now, but I really thought I should be - was - just like a man.  So I felt terrible about being a “homemaker”.  It’s only since my new life in Germany that I understood what Esther Perel’s wisdom.  It’s better for everyone all-around.  European life has built into it greater balance. Work and play, home and public life: each is an aspect of life, not the whole thing. 

In the spirit of “We’re not the same but we’ve got something different to offer” - Here’s a post about the wonderful skills a woman gains when she cares for her children and family home

1. Organizational Skills - It’s not possible to “pop out” for an extra ingredient you missed on your first grocery store trip.  There are multiple and differing needs between children.  A single outing requires a long list of necessities.  Each season requires learning new patterns: seasonal clothing, holiday traditions, new recipes

2. Improvisational Skills - After you did miss that one ingredient, you find yourself stuck at home without it.  You’ve got to figure out how to make do with what you’ve got.  Multiply this by 10,000

3. Empathy - In businesses everywhere mindfulness courses are being offered.  I’ll tell you, a mother who has spent time caring for young children has practiced so much one-to-one empathy that the mitigation against distraction coupled with better social skills (read, not on your Blackberry all day) supposedly offered by a mindfulness course is utterly unnecessary 

4. The ability to work under conditions of extreme distraction - To be interrupted at any time is at the heart of the role of “mother”.  Enough said.  Actually I will add that as I write this there is a German disco children’s song blazing from a hot pink CD player on my desk, a child’s drawing of a house at my elbow, and another child climbs on the edge of my desk shouting, “Arrgh Matey” in her best pirate impression

5. Creativity - The obvious one.  The crafting, the recipes, the home decoration, your kids’ fashion, the food your family eats, the holidays you mark.  It’s everywhere!

Care is an Act of Devotion

This week I’ve been thinking about the idea of devotion.  Because of the way our culture is structured, in the Western world we don’t value care.  Individuals might.  But look at policies for families in America and you’ll see a different story.  Reading Anne-Marie Slaughter’s new book Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family has me fired-up about this issue again.  Slaughter revisits her now infamous Atlantic monthly article Why Women Still Can't Have It All with a new twist.  She puts care - whether by men or women, for children or the elderly - at the center of the book’s thesis.  I love how this works.  It takes what’s seen as a woman’s issues and updates it to reflect modern family life.

But that’s not the only thing I want to write.  What I want to do is connect it with is the idea of devotion.  On a recent podcast of Sounds True, in an episode called Beyond Healing, I heard Caroline Myss talking about her perception that American society is populated by people who live in a kind of white noise.  What Myss longs for is a society where people are devotional.  So I got to thinking about the idea of devotion.  She expressed her conviction with so much passion it actually made me a bit wobbly while I chopped up the onions for dinner. 

Basically I wonder this: If American society was fueled by devotion would we have the abysmal support for families that we do?  And on a personal level, what would my creative work look like if it was more devotional and less aspirational?  

What is your Muse? Mine is Life

Recently I had a brief child free moment to listen to the radio and take a hot bath to soothe my neglected and aching feet.  As much as the hot water relaxed my muscles, this programme (on the wonderful On Being) woke-up my brain.  It was an interview of Mary Catherine Bateson who wrote a book about the improvisational art of life which is now winding its way to me by DHL via Amazon.  It’s called Composing a Life.  

I’m sitting now in Starbucks and I’m going to pick up my daughter from kindergarten when I’m done.  Then I’m going to insist we go straight home because I need to check the mail box to see if it’s arrived.  Maybe you’re now wondering what was so revelatory about this wonderful conversation?

OK.  I’m going to have a go at putting down on paper - or virtual paper anyway - what has been swirling in my head since I stepped out of that bath.  

My entire adult life - and perhaps before that - I have been searching for “my subject”.  I have been a classical violinist, a contemporary art curator, a literary academic, even a yoga student.  But none of these cultures has felt like home.  I just couldn’t get excited about theoretical research or Haydn or boundary-breaking gallery shows.  Or I couldn’t get excited enough.  I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to learn these “languages” - literature, music, art.  

But in my experience one needs 110% commitment to these pursuits.  It’s like marriage.  It doesn’t have to take all your time but in your deepest heart of hearts the love simply has to be there.  Not affection. Not interest.  Love.  

I’ve gotten a bit off track now.  But now I’m going to come to the central bit.  What Mary Catherine Bateson said was this: Life itself is the ultimate art.  Mothers have looked at their lives and called it a failure because life seemed elsewhere.  But we must stand-up for life and see that the improvisational art of life-making is beautiful, engaging and requires grit.  

And I thought.  This is it.  This is “the subject”.  Reflecting on life itself: its nuances, its spirit, its psychology, its human dimension, its animal dimension, its aesthetics, its struggles.  The list could go on forever.  I have no idea where my bath time revelation leads.  But I know I’m happy to share it with you here.

In the meantime, I’d love to know: What is your “subject”?  And how did you discover it?

Step 1 in How To Make Your Personal Renaissance: Stop Comparing Yourself

I am reading the beautiful book On Becoming An Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity by Ellen J. Langer.  She writes about her psychological journey in painting.  A Harvard Psychologist she understands the tricksterish nature of creativity.  She writes poignantly about comparison and making mistakes.  These, she says, are the two main obstacles to creativity.  Once you understand the fallacy of comparisons and so-called mistakes, you will be free to make what she calls “a personal renaissance”.  I’m especially moved by her subtle understanding of comparisons.

When we compare ourselves to others we usually do it either to see ourselves favorably or as an act of self-preservation.  If we see a bad drawing, and we are just learning to draw, we might conclude we are good at drawing.  And therefore feel good about ourselves. If we see a good drawing, though, we might compare ourselves less favorably, and consider ourselves a bad artist.  If we are in a self-preservation mode we might put the other artist down in an effort to feel OK about our own attempts.  The problem with these comparisons is that they do not take into account the context in which the drawings were made.  We cannot know what sacrifices were made to make the work.  We cannot know what classes, lessons, or teachers the artist may have had to get to where he/she is.  In short, we do not see the drawing as something made by a person.  We see it instead as simply a product.  If we could put the maker back in the picture, and saw his/her work as a collection of choices, we would be able to learn from their work, and therefore improve our own.  The problem is that in making comparisons we often become paralyzed.  She writes

“We tend to presume that there is a best choice and become paralyzed because we do not know what it is.  If we make the wrong choice, we will seem stupid.”

-On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity by Ellen J. Langer

In my next post I will write about Langer’s equally moving idea of mistakes.  In the mean time, I’d love to know: What comparisons do you make that keep you from living your authentic creative life?

Perfect is a Fancy Word for Fear

“Perfectionism is just a high-end, haute couture version of fear.” -Elizabeth Gilbert

I am reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book Big Magic.  Gilbert is passionate about making creativity light, fun, and exciting.  (I can feel myself squirming in my seat a bit at the mere thought of “just plain fun” creativity.)  She sets out to dissuade you from being a tortured genius, or a tortured unpublished author, or a tortured could-have-been author if only I had the right time/enough money/certain kind of childhood, etc.  (I’m kind of on board with it all.  But I’m also kind of freaked out by the idea of being so darn happy about creativity.)  I’ve got to say though she’s really got me hooked.  Here’s why:

Gilbert says the thing that keeps most people from being creative is not self-discipline but self-love.  Not to get too Oprah-y on you but this was my “aha” moment.  I’d like to think I am pretty friendly with some of the other ideas she presents - like you make work from stolen time - but that bit of advice hit me like a ton of bricks.  I trained as a classical violinist; I pride myself on my self-discipline.  I’ma writer mother.  To wit: I can make work with babies pulling on my legs.  I can make work while breastfeeding.  I can make work while pushing a stroller.  But hidden in that self-discipline is a small devilish creature that is relentless, critical, pushy, and a generally all-around baddie.  And Mr. Baddie’s agenda is to keep you from being kind to yourself because otherwise you will make sloppy work.  Clearly, I’ve got to work on that whole self-kindness thing.  What’s your Enemy-To-Creativity Number 1?

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Having Kids and Making Art

I went to art school.  Then I joined The Real World and thought I needed to pursue a career.  So I set aside my personal work and hand-made a profession out of Arts Management at first and then academia.  Then, at 28, I had my first baby.  My PhD made me miserable.  I couldn’t juggle its demands and the baby.  When my second baby was born I quit.  I felt free.

My children gave me the courage to pursue my own, unique creative practice.  But the paradox is I no longer have the uninterrupted time to do it.  Austin Kleon recently spoke about this on the radio.  He said “Motherhood is about being constantly interrupted.  Making art is about having uninterrupted time.”  At the same time I am so much more organized about getting my work done.  I schedule time - even if it’s just 10 minutes - to write something every day.  I make deadlines.  My previous way of scheduling my time would look like: Wednesday. Write.  Now it’s 7-7:30AM write.  

But I feel like I’m riding a tricycle to China when I need to be on a jumbo jet.  It just feels like it’s going to take so long to get to where I’m going.  But there’s a flip side too because I feel like I have this really full life.  An actual life.  Not just an artistic practice.  Cheryl Strayed wrote - as Sugar on her advice column - in a letter to her 20 year old self, “Stop worrying about your career.  You don’t have a career.  You have a life.”  That pretty much sums up the difference between who I was at 27 before my daughter was born and who I became after her birth.  It’s so much richer and it’s so much harder.

Paradoxically, all the time I spent making a career in art, came at the cost of making my own, personal art.  Now I need to learn so much.  I need to learn about watercolors and drawing, about social media and tribe-building, about writing for an audience, about making e-books.  The list could go on and on.

Every day is an act of hope since I still get to the page however I can.  But my work is always on my mind.  It’s like a TV channel that’s always on in the background.  That, combined with the noise of two kids under four, can be overwhelming.  I’ve gotten used to it.  And I haven’t.  I can’t wallow in what was before.  And in any case I would not want to be career-driven again and I could not have been so organized and passionate about my work without the constraints of motherhood.  

But I’m frustrated.  And I’m especially frustrated because I don’t see many voices out there of mothers who are artists, writers, designers, photographers telling their stories.  I see craft blogs, blogs about how to make animal-shaped snacks for kids, how to get them organized for school.  That bores me.  I’m delighted for those moms for whom it creates a community.  But it’s not my cup of tea.  I want to know how YOU make it work.  I want to know what frustrates you.  I want to know how you overcome the distraction.  I want to know how you balance sleep-deprivation with the need to make that thing that’s been on your mind for God knows how long.  Are you out there?

Writer. Mother. Two Heads. One person.

Image Credit: Kate Hiscock

I’d say Sara Rule’s new book 100 Essays I Don't Have Time To Write is quirky but she has a whole chapter on how she hates the word quirky so I’ll just say it’s really, really good.  And unique.  I read it late last night in one sitting.  She’s got that lovely combination of a really personal voice and something to say.  There’s anecdotes about how she lives with her dual identity as a mother-writer that made me proverbially shout “Me too!”  Here’s an example from a story about when she takes her daughter to an Orthodox Jewish apartment in Brooklyn to get rid of her lice.

    “And I think, as I’m surrounded by teeming life — parasites, fish, and children — I think,         So, you thought you wanted to observe life?  Motherhood shakes her head, clenches her     fists, and demands, No, you must live it.”

Since my daughter was born I have been besieged with questions. I can’t find tiny socks. there is always a diaper to change, a tear to wipe away, a meal to make.  But I seriously did not think I would be capable of living with what sometimes feels like a split-personality: the writer-mother duality.

But I don’t have just two full-time jobs but three. I know it sounds crude, but basically it goes like this: An artist makes their content; they find their audience; they sell their content; they persuade their audience to shut out the noise around them; and then sort of make them fall in love — or at least share the artist’s work with other people.  

When not writing, producing, shooting photographs, designing, or whatever your creative day job may be.  You’ve got to to buy materials.  You’ve got to make phone calls.  You are PR, Marketing, Design, Admin, etc.  In my case, the person one who writes this sentence, and the one who built this website are completely different people — and they’re also both me.  They’re like chalk and cheese.  Or like motherhood and the writing life.

I search for socks.  I watch video tutorials about Twitter.  I write.  I look for the socks again.  We say “She wears many hats.”  I’m not sure about the hats.  I feel like I have many heads — and they’ve all got a headache.

Weekly Round-Up

It's Friday and time for the weekly round-up

1. I discovered Keri Smith's blog.  It's got a lovely hand-made aesthetic and this video is such a sweet way of talking about the little found things in our lives that we can notice and find inspiration in

http://www.kerismith.com/blog/bricolage/

2. OK.  This really worked for me.  I've been handwriting in my diary for over a decade.  It makes me connect up all the different threads in my life.  But I struggled to write for a reader.  I tried to write by hand but it just sort of didn't work.  When I started typing my posts it really clicked for me.  Watch this video to see how handwriting and typing make us think differently

http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/110647355141

3. I've not watched this yet.  I've got to order the DVD - and so should you!  This is an incredible project about the art being a mother and an artist at the same time.

http://www.whodoesshethinksheis.net/

4.  This SO inspired me.  The creativity guru Austin Kleon talks about what he's learned from his kids and his wife.  I was especially excited to hear him say how much he learned from mothers about working on creative projects.  My main take away was that motherhood is in essence a constant state of being interrupted and creative projects need uninterrupted time.  Learning how to live in that contradiction is the art of being creative and being a mother.

http://austinkleon.com/2015/07/30/the-work-of-art/

5. I just discovered Lisa Congdon.  Beautiful patters and colors are new to me.  I choose monochromatic clothes and I love the idea of branching out.  In this post she writes about the pain of the creative process.

http://lisacongdon.com/blog/2015/08/hudson-residency-experiments-in-blue/

6. A creative way to document your pregnancy.  Take a look

http://blog.meredithcbullock.com/in-utero-pregnancy-series/

You Make Terrible Work: Embrace It

Here’s the thing.  Your work is probably not that good. Neither is mine.  But you’ve got to make lots of it and so do I.  There’s an amazing anecdote about two groups in a pottery class.  The first was asked to make one perfect pot.  The second group was asked to just make lots and lots of pots.  This second group would be graded by weight alone.  The first group would be graded on the excellence of the one perfect pot.  Guess who did the best work?  The second group.  They made more creative work, more unique, and more interesting.  The lesson I take from this story is that making work that is perfect is a mug’s game.  What one really needs to do is make a lot of terrible, terrible work.

Ann Lamott, in her excellent book about the writing life, Bird by Bird, calls this making “shitty first drafts”.  She writes, “All good writers write them.  This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts…for me and for most other writers I know, writing is not rapturous.  In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all it to write really, really shitty first drafts.”

Sadly there’s really only one way to get better and that’s to do really badly.  Believe me, I find this infuriating as you do.  I do not want to be exposed like this. I do not want to make this terrible work and I really, really don’t want to share this terrible work (more on that next time).

Maybe because I am a reluctant creative I love the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland.  In it they basically say: Nobody cares about the process by which your work gets made.  They care about the product.  And the only way to improve the product is to make more of it.  And the only way to make more of it is to get used to making bad work.  And the bad work is the golden key.  Because the bad work is the only way you will learn how to make good work.  Because your work is your teacher.

So if, like me, you’ve been up fretting about something at once trivial and really scary and “get-at-the-core-of-your-deepest-fears” type stuff: embrace your terrible work.

Fear of Failure

After graduate school I did something pretty expected for a UK-based arts person. I went to London. I didn’t know it then, but basically I wanted to “professionalize” myself.  I wrote my skills on my Linkedin page.  I went to networking events.  I searched obsessively for opportunities and tried to squeeze myself into the boxes that were out there.  It was normal stuff but it was painful, and it was not at all what I imagined.  When I got to my wits end, and embraced failure I took another path.  And then another.  All these paths began to look like a pattern and I despaired.  Then motherhood intervened and I had some time to think.

So when I saw this video of designer Milton Glaser talking about fear of failure, I was wowed.  Glaser says personal development is antithetical to professional development.  And the only way to do the dance between the two is to embrace failure.  It’s like there are two lines and as one, the professional, goes up, the other, the personal, goes down.  My question now is, how can the two lines go up together?

Like all mothers, nothing compares to the personal growth of this journey.  But there’s a professional cost.  At least that’s how it looks from where I am now.  Maybe all the paths taken and not taken are not defeat but an ebb and flow of personal development.  At its worse, it can feel like paying attention to the personal hurts the professional, and paying attention to the professional, hurts the personal.  In my case, I haven’t specialized.  I haven’t made myself into a “brand”.  And now I’m outside the cut-and-thrust of professional life, but I’ve got a bubbling-over desire to share what I’ve learned personally, I’m wondering how to put Glaser’s advice into practice.

In our hopes and dreams we acknowledge that we want something different, and that we are willing to put ourselves out there to get it.  I really, really hope that it’s possible to live a life in which personal development and professional life are not at odds. For me the fear of failure is what keeps my dreams rattling around in my head.  So what do I hope now?  I hope I can take “professionalization” a bit more lightly, that I can specialize in some things and not others, that having stepped out of the world, I can then step back in.  But of course implied in my hopes is its siamese-twin, failure.  

Weekly Round-Up

Brainpicking's review of A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write by Melissa Pritchard is an homage to the both tender and fierce art of writing

On Being's contributor Omid Safi writes about sacred housekeeping

I discovered this inspiring book of illustrated journals, An Illustrated Life, at the home of the pioneering, extraordinary Norwegian artist and gentle activist Eva Bakkeslett

I'm re-reading Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland: “To the artist, all problems of art appear uniquely personal. Well, that's understandable enough, given that not many other activities routinely call one's basic self-worth into question.” 

How Can You Make Work and Play One and The Same?

It's frustrating being a mother with an arts practice. My kids are still under my feet 24 hours a day, so I have the sinking feeling the thousands of creative plates are a figment of my imagination.  For whatever reason I've always wanted to share this work and that's become so, so much harder to achieve since motherhood.  That's why I've often chosen work like writing over the dishes and laundry.  At times it's been liberating at others an oppressive mix of untended to responsibilities.  But recently I asked myself this question

The question kept running in my mind as I watched my kids play.  They "help" me fold the laundry, they make mud pies, they get dressed, they listen to stories.  All these things seem to happen seamlessly.  For them, getting dressed is an act of make believe as much as mud pies.  That's when the light bulb went off and I said to myself

So that's my question to you today.  When did you learn to draw lines across the many tasks of life?  Who taught you to put work in one box and play in another?  If these questions resonate with you I highly recommend Tara Sophia Moore's book Playing Big.

Make a Sales Pitch to Your Subconscious - In 10 Minutes a Day

This morning I was making coffee and talking to my husband in the kitchen.  The conversation turned to a question we’d been turning over in our minds the evening before as we sat out on our patio enjoying the long-awaited Northern European summer.  (Finally, living on the continent, and not the blustery British isles, nor in the searing humidity of an East Coast summer in a hot-box brownstone in Brooklyn.)  Why is it that working 10 minutes a day on a creative problem has worked for me (and others - since I stole the idea from Joan Bolker, who councils writers at Harvard in overcoming writers block and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Facebook post on the subject)?  

My husband, whose job is intensely demanding and has little time to ponder important issues for a few upcoming commitments in his life, was considering how to make precious time to move his thinking forward.  It sounds trivial, but I suggested carving out 10 minutes a day - maybe on his walk to work - to deliberately turn over a specific question in his mind.  

I had done something similar after my first baby was born.  At the time I was working on a PhD thesis and in a panic I took to talking out loud to my baby about esoterically abstract concepts.  However mad it was, there was something in that desperate effort of the newly-minted time poor mother that worked for me.  It turned out to be totally overwhelming to go on like this but once I honed it down to short bursts - like little sprints - it really worked for me.  I’ve been a devotee ever since.  But why did it work?  

I hadn’t really unpicked this idea.  In fact, I felt a bit self-conscious that I slog away at tasks instead of the more romantic notion of swashbuckling my way through big ideas and taking dramatic risks.  Ten minutes a day is sort of an ugly duckling when you compare it to that.  But as I took another sip of my coffee, pausing to tell my daughter not to put her hand under the scalding tap, I said, “You know, now I really get why the 10 minute thing works for me.”  “It’s because it works on a subconscious level.  It’s not really about the 10 minutes a day.  It’s really about the seed that you plant in your mind.  Once that seeds been planted it’s like your everyday life and even your dream life is devoted to working with this question and sort of figuring it out for you so that when you return to it the next day you’ve made a little progress on it.  And in a way, this subconscious process, is the level on which any creative project gets made.  It’s almost like you have to “sell your concept” to the unconscious.”  

What’s your sales pitch to your unconscious?  Find your ten minutes and find out.

Weekly Round-Up: 4 Readings on Education, Brooklyn, Solitude, and Writing Down Goals

My family has just got back from five weeks in the US and a week in the small channel island of Alderney and is now back home in Germany.  Needless to say there hasn't been much time to write so here's a smattering of what I've been reading this week

1. I am re-reading an old favorite, May Sarton's ever-wise Journal of A Solitude in which she writes, "Suffering feels like failure, but it is actually a door into growth." and "...it is the masculine in a woman and the feminine in the man that proves creative."

2. This article on NPR Ed says writing down goals can help clarify emotional blocks toward one's dreams

3. Higher education is going to look completely different for our kids.  Here's an article from The World Economic Forum on just what that's going to look like.

4. I've lived in Minneapolis, New York, London, rural England, and Germany so I'm always interested to read about how people design their multi-cultural lives.  This New York Times article about Brooklyn Ex-Pats features a few families making the tough decision to move to the suburbs

7 Lessons in Writing Through Early Parenthood

Parenthood.  For the first three years sleep is cancelled.  Gradually, it dawns on you: You have a chronic illness.  You are not affected by the condition of being tired, you and the condition merge.  You are tired.  It’s been said the Eskimo have 50 words for snow.  Parents have 50 words for tired.  When the chronic illness called “parenthood” came into my life, my writing practice had to radically recalibrate.  I’d like to share with you seven of the lessons I am learning on that bumpy road.  

Break tasks down into small, manageable chunks

Ten minutes is actually usable time.  Find ten minutes in your day and stick to it every day.  It adds up.

Work in the midst of chaos.  Don’t look for calm or more time.  Sit down in the middle of it and write.

Be prepared to write in every situation.  Make a mobile office.  Have a notebook next to the cooker.  Have a notebook in your diaper bag.  Have a notebook on your nightstand.  Wherever your “hot spots” are - put a notebook.

Become a skeptic of your own practice.  Ask yourself : Am I too tired to write after the kids are in bed?  Can I write while they eat their breakfast? It will seem tedious at first.  But gradually you will do it without thinking and the result will be a practice taylor-made to your energy levels and lifestyle. 

Scale down your practice.  Don’t write novels.  Write haikus.  You need to get your work done so your work can teach you how to reiterate and make better work.  There must be a trickle of ongoing work.  A trickle is frustrating, but it keeps your work in motion.

Pay attention to your body.  A creative mind is a relaxed mind.  It’s not easy to achieve in the conditions of early parenthood.  But make an effort to relax, sleep and eat.  Do not let the demands of parenting and writing make you crazy; Both are a gift and should be treated as such.