Tag: Writing

A case for standing up while creating

Neera

Standing desks at workplaces are becoming increasingly prevalent. Despite complaints about aching legs and strain on spines, more and more people are choosing them. The pay-off is just not in health benefits but also in productivity.

An average person sits for approximately twelve hours a day. The doctors are warning that sitting is the new smoking.

In the most clicked article on standing desks, Cia Bernales writes that she used to have tight shoulders, lower back pains, and bad posture. Now she is not slouching, walks around the office more, and is more productive.

The advice to make sales calls while standing up has been around for a long time. Now there are calls for stand-up meetings and stand-up schools.

According to Andrew Knight, Professor at Olin Business School, groups are more creative and collaborative when they work standing up.

“The participants wore small sensors around their wrists to measure “physiological arousal” — the way people’s bodies react when they get excited. When a person’s arousal system becomes activated, sweat glands around the feet and hands release bursts of moisture. The sensors pass a small current of electricity through the skin to measure these moisture bursts.

Knight and Baer found that the teams who stood had greater physiological arousal and less idea territoriality than those in the seated arrangement. Members of the standing groups reported that their team members were less protective of their ideas; this reduced territoriality led to more information sharing and higher quality videos.” 

Science News: Standing up gets groups more fired up for teamwork

“Seeing that the physical space in which a group works can alter how people think about their work and how they relate with one another is very exciting.” — Andrew Knight. 

Many artists are known to express themselves better while standing up. Violinists, guitarists, and trumpeters all perform while standing up because you are holding your instrument upright when you’re standing. You are connected, expanded, tall, wide, round, inflated, supported, grounded, and free!

Ulrike Selleck, a classical singer, says standing is the best position to create beautiful, strong, and resonant sound because you are rooted in the earth through your legs. You stand like a tree, immovable throughout the storm, or the scales or coloratura or high notes or low notes, or interminably long phrasing, swooping melodies, or intricate lyrics.

Comedians perform standing up, and artists draw and paint standing up, then why don’t writers write standing up? 

Most of us struggle to stay up with new ideas when we sit in front of the computer after a day’s work. 

Our bodies in sedentary mode give the shut-down signal to our brains.

One way for writers to unlock creativity and break out of the too-tired-to-write routine could write standing up.

I will certainly test the theory next month, writing 1667 words a day (50,000 in a month) while participating in NaNoWriMo 2020.

The more I read, the less I write

Neera

Reading and writing are two integral activities for writers. A writer must read and she must write. But lately, I have found that the more I read, the less I write.

Why is that so?

There are a few reasons for that.

One, I get carried away, one article leads to other, one link has ten more, and by the time I am through I have used all the available time reading other people’s writing rather than creating my own.

Two, reading and writing engage two different parts of the brain. Reading is inherently a passive activity, while writing is an active occupation. Although, reading prompts writing if I don’t stop mid-sentence and pick up a pen and a pad, thoughts disappear pretty quickly.

One blogging guru once advised, “If you want to write good posts, stop reading other people’s posts (at least for some time).”  

There is a lot of truth in this advice.

As a writer, you first need to write what is in you. That could be utter nonsense, incoherent, good-for-nothing content. But it comes from the core of you and represents how you understand things.

After getting that on paper, you can research and find evidence in contradiction or in support.

It is possible, now that you are more informed, that you will change your mind. That is fine. You can do so. In fact, it will give your writing more authenticity if you can explain what made you change your mind.

It is also possible that other people have explained certain things much better than you.

Great. You can include their writing as a quotation in your own. This will strengthen your argument and give your post a boost.

You need to allocate separate time for reading and writing.

I write best first thing in the morning. As soon as I brush my teeth, I plant myself in my bed with a pen and a notepad and write. I don’t even make a cup of tea or coffee. I know fully well that if I go to the kitchen, the trance will break. Those two hours in the morning are gold.

Science supports my morning bout of creativity.

Studies have proved that soon after waking when the prefrontal cortex is most active, creativity is at its highest while the analytical parts of the brain (the editing and proofreading parts) become more active as the day goes on.

There are several writers who swear by their morning writing routine. But then there are a great number of night owls as well.

Charles Dickens was a lark. He would have finished his day writing (by 2 pm each day) by the time Robert Frost would just about getting started and often going late at night (and waking up the next day around noon). What each of these famous authors lacked in synchronicity, they made up in a routine. The daily schedule of writing is almost as important, if not more than the human body rhythm. 

I believe the same goes for reading. You need to set up a time for reading as well. Whether it is at night or during lunchtime or commuting to and from work. Allocate one to two hours each day to reading and stick to those. You find that you can go through a lot in that time.

Without realizing it, we give too many hours each day on the internet and TV. All you need to do is to claim them back and give them to your actual passions—reading and writing.  

Have a linear goal…

Neera

I was going through one of my old journals when I found one of my favorite quotes:

“Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading nowhere.

But the work of building a path was a living sum so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow.

A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there’s nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end.

The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make?

It is not proper for man’s life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him–man’s life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station…”

– Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged (Emphasis and line-breaks are mine.)

We all need linear goals in our lives to rise above the monotony of circular lives. That is the only way we have to show something at the end of the day.

Twenty years ago, I chose to write as my linear goal. It has not only kept me sane through the madness of the daily grind but also has given me a purpose in life.

Initially, I had little goals such as writing childhood memories, remembering those sounds, smells, and scenes from the past, and learning to describe them. Soon I started attending courses. The first one was a Life Story Writing course. An offshoot of that was a writing group that still has been meeting in my home for the past fifteen years.

I joined another writing group and practiced reading my writing to others.

Encouraged, in 2014, I joined a novel-writing course A Year of Novel at ACT Writer’s Centre. Five of the writers from there continued to meet after the course to continue working on our novels. We are still meeting and critiquing each other’s work.

In between, I won NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) twice, wrote several short stories, and started two blogs.

With writing as my linear goal, I am achieving little milestones just like Ayn Rand said in the below quote:

“[A] man’s life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station…”

Creativity on demand

Neera

Lately, I have been lamenting that I do not have time for creativity.  

My excuses are: it is winter, it is too cold, days are shorter, I am too tired, and I need to wind down after coming back from work. Blah! Blah! Blah!

In Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, John Robinson, a sociologist, in an interview with the writer Brigid Schulte says:

“It’s very popular, the feeling that there are too many things going on, that people can’t get in control of their lives. But when we look at peoples’ diaries, there just doesn’t seem to be the evidence to back it up.”  

She has nailed it. Time is not the issue. There are so many other factors at play. Lack of prioritization, the tendency to procrastinate, and preoccupation are to name a few. (There are tons more, I just picked some starting with the letter ‘P’)

What is the solution?

In one of my previous posts, I talked about the four stages of the creative process where an idea needs to go through preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification.

Creativity takes time.

But what if you can take ideas through these stages quickly so that there is something tangible at the end of the process? Something that gets your creative juices flowing.

Well, I found this technique by William Burroughs, which has been around for ages.

In the mid-twentieth century, William S. Burroughs, one of the most adventurous writers, famously employed the cut-up method to override the inner critic.

In Burroughs’ own words:

“The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 … one, two, three, four. Now rearrange the sections, placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different–(cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise)–in any case, you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Hearsay, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like.”

This is one way of doing it. There could be infinite ways to do it. I cut short paragraphs from four different articles and then put four of them together to make a story. It worked like magic.

Now it can be creative on demand.

Here is the video on William S. Burroughs you can listen to:

10 Tips on finding stories in everyday life

Neera

For the last two weeks, I have been talking about everyday stories. Here are my tips on finding stories in your daily lives.

1. Become a collector of stories. You will not only find enjoyment every time you read them but also will learn how to write them. Stories are all around you, in newspapers, magazines, books, TV, internet. Austin Kleon wittily points out that you might be able to write a popular brain book with them.

“Here is a recipe for writing a hit popular brain book. You start each chapter with a pet anecdote about an individual’s professional or entrepreneurial success, or a narrow escape from peril. You then mine the neuroscientific research for an apparently relevant specific result and narrate the experiment, perhaps interviewing the scientist involved and describing his hair. You then climax in a fit of premature extrapolation, inferring from the scientific result a calming bromide about what it is to function optimally as a modern human being. Voilà, a laboratory-sanctioned Big Idea in digestible narrative form. This is what psychologist Christopher Chabris has named the “story-study-lesson” model, perhaps first perfected by Malcolm Gladwell. A series of these threesomes may be packaged into a book, and then resold again and again as a stand-up act on the wonderfully lucrative corporate lecture circuit.”

2. Learn to observe like Martha Sweeny or Jean Georges in my earlier posts: A story that will touch your heart and Evoke the senses with your writing. Both stories are about life’s little moments captured by writers’ keen observations.

3. Talk to people. In shops, at community places, in libraries, or wherever you can find them. Ask specific questions and you will find they are more than willing to tell their stories.

4. Go looking for them, like the one below, which I wrote about once walking through the woods.

“At about two-thirds of the hill, I had a perfect view of the dried Lake George, now covered with brown grass. The tall windmills on the surrounding hills stood as sentries as if guarding the lake’s treasure now that it was bare.  The slop at the back of the hill, from where I was standing, was covered with trees and broken branches. It was new terrain, quite unfamiliar.

The path I was following was covered by yellow leaves shed by nearby trees. A butterfly came and sat on my cheek. I jerked, and it flew away. I should have stood still and felt the touch of its tiny legs. Moments later, a tiny lizard blocked my way. This time, I stood still. It stood there for a moment, looking at me. I held my breath and waited. This was her domain. I was an intruder. I had no right to be there uninvited. She moved her head at an angle, had a final look, and then disappeared under a nearby log. I took it as a sign of acceptance. From that point on, I felt I was part of the landscape, as much as that tiny lizard was.” 

5. Use triggers to access stories in your memory bank. Like the story, my father’s hands triggered.

6. Look for a change in your life—wherever there was a change, there is a story waiting to be told.

7. Interview interesting people. A blogger made a very interesting blog by interviewing women she met in her local shopping center.

8. Talk to old people, they are walking repositories of stories.

A grandchild playing with his nana pointed at her wrinkles and said, ‘They are ugly.’ Nana laughed and said, “Oh no! Each one has a story.” The child hesitated and then shyly pointed at one of them. ‘Tell me about that one.’

9.  Listen to TED talks, subscribe to sites, and read about men and women who inspire you.

“Michelle Obama, a symbol for women, has successfully balanced the needs of her family and herself. Sky-high popularity, comfortable in her skin, now struggling against, not caved into the nation’s expectations. Smart as Eleanor Roosevelt, glamorous as Jacqueline Kennedy and devoted as Nancy Reagan, with pitch-perfect fashion sense, genuine smile, and fierce intelligence, not striving for perfection but by embracing her own authenticity. Every bit of her is saying, I am going to try to be honest, hopefully, funny and open, and share important parts of me with people.“

10. Research them. Every achievement, every invention, and every successful event has a story behind them.

Personal stories are all about change

Neera

Phillip Berry Osborne said:

Ultimately, the key to personal-experience stories is change. Where our personal lives are concerned, in fact, change is probably the biggest single challenge we all face and share.

That’s why the best personal stories explore our transition in life—if only to encourage us to accept ourselves in some new context or as we’re becoming.

Such transition or change is vital to storytelling since it’s bound up with the overall message that underscores any good story – and yet, too often, writers fail in this one key area of change and, especially the message that comes out of it.

Without a message, a story is like an egg without a shell.

Many of us, as writers, neglect this fundamental requirement.