Author: Neera

Ten days with Master Ping Xiao Po

Neera

For the last ten days, I have been drawing Mater Ping Xiao Po of the movie Kung Fu Panda in the cartoon drawing course I have been doing since August this year.

After a week of drawing just circles, we moved on to animals (pig, hippopotamus, dog, and teddy bear) and then spent four weeks on Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy, Sally, and Linus. Although the initial days were challenging but spending a month on Peanuts’ characters brought me to the comfort zone.

Ping Po was a challenge. For a start, he was a 3D character with no distinct lines like Snoopy or Charlie and his friends. A lot of facial features were depicted by shading. And each figure had different facial expressions which I was not able to replicate. After day three, I was a lot behind the other participants who were posting proportionate and expressive Po on Instagram.

Then Master Ping Xiao P himself came to the rescue and taught me his three favorite lessons.

Believe in yourself he said.

If you want to succeed then don’t compare yourself to others. You have to make your own journey, getting disheartened by others’ progress will not make you any better. I got his message. Rather than giving up and going back to my comfort zone, I slowed down.

There is no secret ingredient, it’s you.

There is no shortcut, no secret recipe just plain hard work, and focus. It’s you and the hard work that will help you grow and learn. Nothing you can achieve overnight and gain mastery in.

I focused first just on the face, getting the muzzle right. Eyes were next, I was able to align them so that they looked in the same direction.

Anything is possible when you have inner peace.

Ping Po said in Master Oogway’s voice, “Your mind is like this water, my friend. When it gets agitated, it becomes difficult to see. But if you allow it to settle, the answer becomes clear.”

Slowing down allowed me to see the alignment of the eyes and head better. I started shading around the muzzle and the side of the face. The result was remarkable.

Sticking with the Po, for two weeks, drawing each day without giving up was a lesson that nothing beats daily practice. I only spend half an hour on the drawing each day, sometimes I even break it up in two sessions of fifteen minutes each.

I need to do the same with blogging. It is easier to write a blog post every day and then twice or three times a week. Improvement will be worth the effort.

Write about what?

Neera

When I was new to writing I had a question that puzzles every newbie writer.

Write about what?

Anne Lamott got asked this question a lot, and her advice to her students was – anything, just write about anything.

But her students wanted her to be specific, so she said- okay write about sandwiches.

Sandwiches! what can one write about sandwiches?

But she insists and then sits with them and write about sandwiches.

Your sandwich was the centerpiece, and there were strict guidelines. It almost goes without saying that store-bought white bread was the only acceptable bread. There were no exceptions. If your mother made the white bread for your sandwich, you could only hope that no one would notice. You certainly did not brag about it, any more than you would brag about that she made headcheese. And there were only a few things that your parents could put in between the two pieces of bread. Bologna was fine, salami and unaggressive cheese were fine, peanut butter and jelly were fine if your parents understood the jelly/ jam issue.

Grape jelly was best, by far, a nice slippery comforting sugary petroleum-pocket grape. Straberry jam was second; everything else was iffy. Take rasberry, for instance…

Bird by Bird

Who can write like that? That was Anne Lamott, and she can make a paragraph on sandwiches sound like a literary piece. Rather than inspiring me it frightened me even more.

So what did I write about?

Me.

Most of my early writing was about myself. My feelings, my emotions, my aspirations, my observations. That was the only topic about which I knew most and continued to learn more. I filled diaries after diaries writing about myself.

But the problem of writing about yourself is that no one else is interested in reading it.

Helen Garner says she loathes reading people’s inner talk or self-analysis in their diaries. What she likes to read and what she writes about is – who you met, what they said, what were they wearing, what were they thinking?

She used to go to interesting places to find stories. Once she was asked to do a three-part article on life, marriage, and death. She had no idea what to write about such broad topics. So she went to a birthing-center, a chapel, and a morgue and even watched a body burning in the furnace to get the first-hand experience.

That is what professional writers write about. Their experiences and their observations.

It is our experieces and our observations that make our writing come alive.

According to a new U.S. scientific research, a human brain gets bombarded with 34 gigabytes of new information every day. So much so that our mind doesn’t register most of it and discard it. But there is something, each day, which does pique our curiosity and sticks to our minds. Our job is to capture that one thing and write about it, whether it is an experience, observation or information.

Today’s post is based on the following paragraph I read while going through a collection of papers.

In Thornton Wilder’s classic play, Our Town there’s a powerful and moving moment at the end when Emily returns from the dead to say goodbye to the things she’d taken for granted when she was alive: clock ticking, her mother’s sunflowers, freshly ironed dresses, food and coffee.

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?” she asks.

Realizing life is what writing is all about.

How to write funny

Neera

Comic writer John Vorhaus says in the book The Comic Toolbox that you don’t need funny bones for comic writing, you need tools.

The one tool he recommends is – break rules, write in a passive tense.

Here is an example:

The room was walked into by a man by whom strong, handsome features were had. A woman was met by him. The bed was lain upon by her. Then the bed was lain upon by him. Clothing was removed from them both. Sex was had. The climax was achieved. Afterward, cigarettes were smoked by them. Suddenly, the door opened by the husband of the woman by whom the bed was lain upon. A gun was held by him. Some screams were screamed and angry words were exchanged. Jealousy was felt by the man by whom the gun was held. The firing of the gun was done by him. The floor was hit by the bodies. Remorse was then felt by the man by whom the gun was held. The gun was turned upon himself. And the rest, as they say, is forensics!

I had a go at it with some random paragraphs I picked from an old diary, exaggerating it and writing it in the past tense.

  1. Late waking up was done this morning. Mucking around was not held. The efficiency was experienced by achieving more in less time. The problems of the world were not contemplated upon while sitting on the throne.
  2. A meeting was held between me and the acting boss. This week’s action items were discussed. The disagreement was reached over tiny matters. The tempers were lost. The voices were raised. Desperate attempts were made by both sides to hold their grounds. The moods were spoiled. The swords were drawn. The throats would have been slain had the meeting not gone over time. Lives were saved due to time constraints.
  3. The gym bag was forgotten at home. A detour was made. The gym bag was picked up. The car was driven to the gym. The gym clothes were put on. The exercise was done half-heartedly. Machines were used to lift weights.
  4. The neighbor’s doorbell was rung. The door was opened by the neighbor with work clothes still on. A piece of paper was given to her with our phone number. A verbal invitation was extended for dinner at the house owned by us. A dinner promise, made to each other fifteen years ago, was fulfilled.

Letters for a project

Neera

In 2013, novelist Jon McGregor invited strangers to send him a letter in the post.

He was taking up a creative writing teaching job at the University of Nottingham and he wanted to encourage the students to think about writing in ways that didn’t involve blank sheets of paper or screens.

He wanted them to think about other people’s writing before they started to think about their own, and decided that a good way of doing this would be to set up a literary journal and have the students produce it; reading the submissions, making selections, putting each issue together.

The Guardian reported that the scribbled notes and love letters are still landing on his doormat.

From all those letters, he started the Letters Page, loose-leaf reproductions of the original handwritten letters, alongside an illustrated booklet of transcriptions. And several more later on.

Here is one such anthology of letters.

https://youtu.be/AikT0eb7bHE

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

My not-to-do list

Neera 2 Comments

I am a list maker.

All my life I have been making lists. To-do lists, to-read lists, to-learn lists, bucket lists (in other words travel destinations list), but I never made the most important list of all.

A not-to-do list.

Our lives are a constant struggle of fitting things in a day. We constantly complain that we don’t have enough time to do all the things we want to do and yet we keep piling up more. There are so many things that demand our time and attention. Since we can’t do them all we prioritize and leaving a pile of unfinished things for later. Constantly doing that leave us in a state of discontent.

That is what I have been experiencing at the moment.

I have a huge pile of things that I was keeping in the ‘when I retire bucket’. As I did ‘retire’ (or ‘finished paid work’ as I like to call it) I thought I will have all the time in the world to do them.

The trouble is I am getting even less done.

Even with an extra eight hours on hand, I still find I don’t have enough time to follow my passions.

Rather than doing one thing at a time, I have been trying to do them all, making schedule after schedule, allocating blocks of time to each hobby, each activity, each thing I ever wanted to do.

Until today.

I was rushing through the day when I stopped long enough to ask myself why I am doing this.

Why I am making my day so stressful by packing so much in it.

It was not long after when a fellow blogger, Melyssa Griffin, reported a total burnout. Her doctor told her to slow down or bear lasting damage. Already a successful blogger and solopreneur at a very young age, Melyssa was fighting back her feeling of discontent and unfulfillment by adding more work to her plate. She thought she needed better time management skills.

While I am nowhere near where Melyssa was when she took six months to break, but I am beginning to understand that I need to manage my own expectations.

Many times we are harder on ourselves than we are on other people.

The way to treat ourselves with kindness and compassion is to get in touch with our inner-self and find out what really matters to us.

I did that by creating a not-to-do. The things I will never do from now on.

Are there things which you don’t want to do? They don’t have to be about your workload. They can be about your choices in your life.

A not-to-do list can bring more clarity in your life than a to-do list.

Try it. It might be a life-changer.

Why I am not intimidated by a blank page and why you shouldn’t either?

Neera

A few years ago I lost two jobs in a day.

I resigned from a job with a very reputed IT Company to take up a six-month contracting role only to realize at the Exit Interview what a mistake I was making.

I went back to the contracting agency saying I was not joining. The same day I told the reputed IT company that I was not leaving. The problem was the IT company said that they can’t guarantee whether they can give me my job back. The contracting agency said their client might have offered the job to someone else after I refused to join.

You must be thinking what this has got to do with me not being intimidated by a blank page.

I am coming to that soon.

This was all my doing. I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been. I had to sit at my desk and pretend to work for the rest of the day and wait. The whole time I felt helpless, angry and lost.

When nothing could calm my nerves I took a pen and a pad and started writing everything that came to my mind. My hands were shaking and my heart was pounding. But I kept writing. I scribbled every feeling I was experiencing. I wrote what a fool I was, how could I make so many mistakes, how unjustified and out of character my behavior was and how I should be punished. I filled three pages before I lifted my head.

All of a sudden I started feeling good.

The problem didn’t seem that big. I became hopeful that some solution will surface.

That day I discovered two things. One, stream-of-consciousness-writing (also known as free-writing) is an excellent way to calm your mind.

Second, freewriting is a great way to overcome the fear of a blank page.

I had filled three pages without stopping.

I was not worried about how good my writing was, or whether it was making any sense, or how rich my vocabulary was. I was just writing my worries away.

Many a time our most fluent and uninterrupted writing comes in the moment of despair when our inner-critic is pushed aside. Whenever I have gone back to read my diaries, I have found that it is the most logical, intimate, and touching writing I have ever done.

I don’t think “writer’s block” actually exists. It’s basically insecurity — it’s your own internal critic turned up to a higher level than it’s supposed to be at that moment, because when you’re starting a work — when the page is blank, when the canvas is open — your critic has to be turned down to zero… The point is actually to get stuff on paper, just to allow yourself to kind of flow.

– Philipp Meyer

Why do we have fear of a blank page?

That blank page became a phobia because you begin to think that whatever you wrote on it was not good enough. I didn’t wake up at four in the morning to write crap, you start saying to yourself, I want it to be good, at least my best, if nothing else.

Right?

Wrong.

Most of the time what I write is rubbish. It is what I do with that crap later on that makes it worth publishing. From the rubbish comes the useful material.

Many people when they can’t write good enough material in the first draft or can’t extract useful from the rubbish quit writing altogether.

That’s it.

All that desire and big claims of being a writer one day gone at the first sign of failure.

You got to write rubbish in order to get better and you ought to write a lot of it.

Jennifer Egan captured it perfectly in her advice on writing:

“You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly… Accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.”

If you persist, over time, that blank page becomes an invitation.

Margaret Atwood recalls a definitive moment from English author George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘1984’, where the hero of the book purchases a notebook, which draws him in.

She feels that this is descriptive of how the blank page affects a writer:

“There’s something compelling about the blank page. It beckons you in to write something on it. It must be filled.” 

— Margaret Atwood

Tools can help

I love the sight of the blank page on 750Words, an online writing app. It is a digital way of writing ‘morning pages.’ If you don’t already know what ‘morning pages’ are, it is an exercise first suggested by Julia Cameron, in her book ‘The Artist’s Way.’

Since the very first time I used the site 750Words I liked it. It has a friendly white space that is soothing to the eye, an Arial font that is big and not intimidating and 31 boxes at the top for each day of the month that gets crossed when you write 750 words precisely.

The site has a reward system too where you get badges for reaching milestones. It gives you word count at the end of the page and an analysis of your writing speed and mood.

It is a very effective way to make you write every day.

To me the blank page on this site an invitation full of possibilities. I can write a poem, a story, a blog post or the things that are worrying me.

It accepts anything and when I finish it gives a word count for the day and a ‘cross’ in the box.

And to finish off the story at the beginning, I learned through the contracting agency that their client hadn’t offered the job to anyone yet and would take me back thinking of my rejection as ‘having a bad day.’ Which indeed I was having.

From something bad, comes something good. Isn’t it?

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash