You don’t have to worry what to write about…

Neera

Recently, Austin Kleon, author of How to Steal Like an Artist and Keep Going, said in the interview with Madeleine Dore (Extraordinary Routines), “I think routine is so important, especially when you’re getting started creatively, but for me right now, I almost need checkboxes and rituals more than I need routine.”

Currently, his daily checkboxes include:

  • writing in his diary,
  • publishing a blog post,
  • taking a walk, and
  • reading a book.

Austin goes on to say, “I always keep a pocket notebook on me, I diary in the morning, and then create a blog post. Those blog posts will become talks, which then become books. You don’t have to worry what to write about, you just write every day and things begin to develop.”

What a great advice! No brainer! Yes. Do the actions (write, blog, walk, read) and you will become the noun (writer).

I added one more checkbox to it and adopted it as my daily ritual.

Lie to me!

Neera

There is so much to like about the Sydney Writers Festival this year. First of all this year’s theme – “Lie to me”.

This is what the artistic director Michaela McGuire has to say about the theme:

“In the second season of the greatest television show ever made, Buffy the Vampire Slayer learns a hard lesson about who she can really trust. At the end of the episode, as she’s standing bereft and betrayed over a friend’s fresh grave, her most trusted confidant asks Buffy how he can possibly reassure her. She responds simply: “Lie to me”.

How powerful!

“These three words,” says Michaela, “convey so much. They’re an admission of helplessness and complicity; a plea; a dare; a request for a bedtime story in a world full of monsters.”

In four days, hundreds of the world’s most exciting writers will gather in Sydney to examine the white lies and deceptions that are necessary for survival, and malicious lies that are spun with a darker intent. They’ll explore the ways that writing can be used to deceive others in an increasingly post-truth world, look at the lies that we tell ourselves and each other, and those we collectively tell as a country. 

There is an impressive line-up of writers – Markus Zusak of The Book Thief, Leigh Sales of Any Ordinary Day, Graeme Simsion of The Rosie Project (and now of The Rosie Result) and George Saunders the author of nine books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize.

I am particularly interested in Fatima Bhutto (niece of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto), who is doing the closing address and Alexander Chee of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.

The festival is on from Monday, 29 April till Sunday, 5 May a must-go event on any aspiring writer’s calendar.

Do Something…

Neera

I am a self-help books junkie. I have been reading self-help books even before they became mainstream. Which make me a kind of authority on them.

I not only read them but dutifully adopt the idea that speaks to me. That should make me one hell of a self-helped-super-achiever.

But that is not the case.

I am ‘as usual’, ‘forever’, a work in progress.

The moment I adopt a good habit, after painstakingly repeating it day in and day out, I get out of it in a jiffy.

Last year, I have been very regular with the gym. All through the winter months, I was going to the gym six days a week. Then I went away for a week during the Christmas and New Year break and haven’t gone back to the gym since then.

Why is that it is so difficult to build a good habit and so easy to get out of it.

Nine months was a long time to solidify a habit. Don’t they say it only takes 21 days to build a habit? Then how come mine came crashing down within one week. I can pick up my gym bag and go to the gym any day. But I don’t.

I have all kinds of excuses.

It is too hot. Who goes to the gym when the daily temperature is forty-one degrees? I will start once I come back from my next trip. A few missed weeks won’t hurt.

This is where everyone’s problem lies. We can sit there and cook up excuses rather than get up and just do it.

Even though we are fully aware that once started we will not only accomplish the task but also feel good about it. The simple act of ‘doing’ will take us out of misery.

And it is not just about the gym. It applies to everything else we want to do but do not do it. What is it that stops us from taking action when every rational thought in us tells us to do it?

The answer came to me from the latest self-help book, ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F*ck’ by Mark Mason.

Mark writes,

“Most of us commit to action only if we feel a certain level of motivation. And we feel motivation only when we feel enough emotional inspiration. We assume that these steps occur in a sort of chain reaction, like this:

Emotional inspiration → Motivation → Desirable action

If you want to accomplish something but don’t feel motivated or inspired, then you assume you’re just screwed. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not until a major emotional life event occurs that you can generate enough motivation to actually get off the couch and do something.

The thing about motivation is that it’s not only a three-part chain but an endless loop:

Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Etc.”

Your actions create further emotional reactions and inspirations and move on to motivate your future actions. Taking advantage of this knowledge, we can actually reorient our mindset in the following way:

Action → Inspiration → Motivation

If you lack the motivation to make an important change in your life, do something — anything, really — and then harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating yourself.”

Mark calls it the “do something” principle.

The author Tim Ferris relates a story he once heard about a novelist who had written over 70 novels. Someone asked the novelist how he was able to write so consistently and remain inspired and motivated. He replied, “Two hundred crappy words per day, that’s it.” The idea was that if he forced himself to write two hundred crappy words, more often than not the act of writing would inspire him; and before he knew it, he’d have thousands of words down on the page.

Two hundred steps were all I needed to start a lunchtime walk. Tomorrow it will be 200 steps on the treadmill and I will be back to the routine. I don’t feel like a failure anymore.

If we follow the “do something” principle, failure feels unimportant. When the standard of success becomes merely acting — when any result is regarded as progress and important, when inspiration is seen as a reward rather than a prerequisite — we propel ourselves ahead. We feel free to fail, and that failure moves us forward.

Dance…

Neera

“Dance….and for years later you’re dancing around your kitchen with a pint of milk in your hand. The windows are open wide, the neighbours are still awake, and they are watching you fall in love with being alive.” – Morsus Engel

Any time you feel disheartened, dispirited or depressed, ask yourself these questions…

Neera

When was the last time I danced?

When was the last time I sang?

When was the last time I was enchanted by a story?

When was the last time I found comfort in silence?

When we stop dancing, singing, being enchanted by stories or finding comfort in silence is when we experience the loss of soul.

Angeles Arrien, a cultural anthropologist, award-winning author, educator, and consultant to many organizations says in the foreword to Gabrielle Roth’s Maps to Ecstasy: The Healing Power of Movement that dancing, singing, storytelling, and silence are the four universal healing salves.

No matter what you are going through or what you need to do, use dance, movement, art, creativity, storytelling, crafts, writing, and silence to feel more alive, get clarity and to connect with your soul.

We need idle time…

Neera

As the festive season approaches, I am getting busier and busier. There is so much to do before we reach the shutdown period. What I look forward to is the idle time between Christmas and New Year.

We all need idle time.  To wake up in the morning and have that feeling that the whole day is yours. No morning rush. No usual clean up. No tidying up to do.  To slow down. To do absolutely nothing.

Being idle is frowned upon in today’s society. We are so much under pressure to keep doing something all the time that we have forgotten the importance of idle time.

Contrary to the common belief that ‘Idle mind is devil’s workshop,’ the idle mind is the germination ground for ideas. Creativity thrives in boredom.

Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters on Life

“I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spent in the most profound activity.

Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days.

In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot.”

But it is Tom Hodgkinson who has tackled the subject head-on in How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto.

He starts with,

“In 1993, I went to interview the late radical philosopher and drugs researcher Terence McKenna. I asked him why society doesn’t allow us to be more idle.

He replied: I think the reason we don’t organise society in that way can be summed up in the aphorism, “idle hands are the devil’s tool.”

In other words, institutions fear idle populations because an Idler is a thinker and thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations. Thinkers become malcontents, that’s almost a substitute word for idle, “malcontent.”

Essentially, we are all kept very busy . . . under no circumstances are you to quietly inspect the contents of your own mind.

Freud called introspection “morbid”—unhealthy, introverted, anti-social, possibly neurotic, potentially pathological. Introspection could lead to that terrible thing: a vision of the truth, a clear image of the horror of our fractured, dissonant world.”

He goes on to say,

“Idleness is a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. The fact that idling can be enormously productive is repressed. Musicians are characterized as slackers; writers as selfish ingrates; artists as dangerous.”

Robert Louis Stevenson expressed the paradox as follows in

“An Apology for Idlers” (1885): “Idleness . . . does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class.”

He argues, “Long periods of languor, indolence and staring at the ceiling are needed by any creative person in order to develop ideas.”

He concludes by saying, “A conclusion I’ve come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it’s really about making work into something that isn’t drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.”