Challenges of Writing via Huffington

One of the challenges of writing is...writing. Here are some tips that I've found most useful for myself, for actually getting words onto the page:

1. Write something every work-day, and preferably, every day; don't wait for inspiration to strike. Staying inside a project keeps you engaged, keeps your mind working, and keeps ideas flowing. Also, perhaps surprisingly, it's often easier to do something almost every day than to do it three times a week. (This may be related to the abstainer/moderator split.)

2. Remember that if you have even just fifteen minutes, you can get something done. Don't mislead yourself, as I did for several years, with thoughts like, "If I don't have three or four hours clear, there's no point in starting."

3. Don't binge on writing. Staying up all night, not leaving your house for days, abandoning all other priorities in your life -- these habits lead to burn-out.

4. If you have trouble re-entering a project, stop working in mid-thought -- even mid-sentence -- so it's easy to dive back in later.

5. Don't get distracted by how much you are or aren't getting done. I put myself in jail.

6. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that creativity descends on you at random. Creative thinking comes most easily when you're writing regularly and frequently, when you're constantly thinking about your project.

7. Remember that lots of good ideas and great writing come during the revision stage. I've found, for myself, that I need to get a beginning, middle, and an end in place, and then the more creative and complex ideas begin to form. So I try not to be discouraged by first drafts.

8. Develop a method of keeping track of thoughts, ideas, articles, or anything that catches your attention. That keeps you from forgetting ideas that might turn out to be important, and also, combing through these materials helps stimulate your creativity. My catch-all document, where I store everything related to happiness that I don't have another place for, is more than five hundred pages long. Some people use inspiration boards; others keep scrapbooks. Whatever works for you.

9. Pay attention to your physical comfort. Do you have a decent desk and chair? Are you cramped? Is the light too dim or too bright? Make a salute--if you feel relief when your hand is shading your eyes, your desk is too brightly lit. Check your body, too: lower your shoulders, make sure your tongue isn't pressed against the top of your mouth, don't sit in a contorted way. Being physically uncomfortable tires you out and makes work seem harder.

10. Try to eliminate interruptions -- by other people, email, your phone, or poking around the Internet -- but don't tell yourself that you can only work with complete peace and quiet.

11. Over his writing desk, Franz Kafka had one word: "Wait." My brilliantly creative friend Tad Low, however, keeps a different word on his desk: "Now." Both pieces of advice are good.

12. If you're stuck, try going for a walk and reading a really good book. Virginia Woolf noted to herself: "The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw."

13. At least in my experience, the most important tip for getting writing done? Have something to say! This sounds obvious, but it's a lot easier to write when you're trying to tell a story, explain an idea, convey an impression, give a review, or whatever. If you're having trouble writing, forget about the writing and focus on what you want to communicate. For example, I remember flailing desperately as I tried to write my college and law-school application essays. It was horrible -- until in both cases I realized I had something I really wanted to say. Then the writing came easily, and those two essays are among my favorites of things I've ever written.

The Happiness Project book is due out in January. In the book, I describe my experience writing a novel in a month, inspired by Chris Baty's No Plot? No Problem! Yes, you can write a real novel in one month. It was a lot of fun.

* I always find something great on Dumb Little Man.

* If you're starting your own happiness project, please join the Page on Facebook to swap ideas. It's easy; it's free.

On the road dream

Nice (France) Railway Station*

Car, Marijke, Sarah, Belgium, Amsterdam, perhaps Jane Blake, travel, petrol station, many different roads to follow.

M and S are going to Europe. I remember my displeasure that M was going to Belgium and not Amsterdam. I wondered, as I do in life, why she has no active curiosity about where she was born.

We and I am not certain who this we is are in a vast territory. I was driving and went off the road to get petrol and use the Loo.

At the railway station we all seem to converge and I use another route while M is in the Loo.

When I emerge another person who appears to be a friend enters another stairwell and she says, "there you are."

And in the course of this brief interaction, I say it is safe, and she says, "no I'd rather go the 90 dollar route."

For reasons I can't pinpoint, yet, when reviewing this dream a few hours later, Nice's railway station came to mind. I have not been to this station since 1967. Not incidental to this connection is that when I was in Nice I was part of a traffic accident that ruptured my spleen.

Another glimpse of a dream, a message

Newport Bridge, Rhode Island

Cars, Vincenzo, Martin, little children, art work, a bridge, dolls, all appear in a dream that indicated my vision was off.

Three people sitting up front, fog, a bridge, I had to stop, pull over and get my bearings.

Dreams

Babette's Feast

One of loss, another of gain.

One in historic Germany during the Holocaust, the second more local with lots of good cooking, friends and of all people, Rene.

I am wondering how these two dreams tie into or back to my card of the day or my reading or viewing these days.

And the second dream had some interesting twists, much of which I can no longer remember, but the last bit of the dream was a telephone call to the house asking for "abundance" and suggesting Rene said we had so much to offer freebies were being offered.

In this same dream two featured players were young, male and blonde.

As I am a strong believer that all the players, characters, people in our dreams are ourselves, I have to ask myself how these young males play a role in my life.

And when I ask that question I find myself back to my card of the day picks.

Recently I have been pulling coins/pentacles, court cards and Major Arcana. If I took the last cards I pulled and did a spread I wonder what it would indicate.

I think I will try that later today or tomorrow.

Programming

Until this year I never watched a television series, especially not through to its seasonal end. But this year I did, and these left me speechless:

- NCIS I watched on the net the day after its conclusion. The team went to Israel after a Mossad agent was killed by Tony. Ziva stayed behind but at the end we see Ziva bloody and being beaten by Arabs.
- CSI-NY ended with the entire team together under attack and ducking for cover. The after-preview implied one or more of the team would not be back, but they didn't know who would be written out of the series.
- CSI-Miami ended with Eric shot accidentally by Calleigh and missing after trying to save his father.
- Criminal Minds ended after a 2hr special with Hotchner facing a masked intruder with a gun.

Quick Pear Streusel Coffee Cake

Quick Pear Streusel Coffee Cake By Gale Gand From her grandmother on her mother's side, a great baker in the Austria-Hungarian tradition, Gail found this great ample streusel coffee cake recipe in her card files. And here it is revised with a little twist from using pears instead of apples. For the cake: Unsalted butter, for the baking dish 1 1/4c. All purpose flour 2 1/4tsp. baking powder 1/2c. Sugar 1/2tsp. salt 1/2tsp. ground cinnamon One at large egg 1/2c. Whole milk 4tbsp. unsalted butter, melted 2 ripe pears (Bartlett's are preferred,) unpeeled cored and chopped approximately 1 1/2c. For the streusel topping: 1/2c. Sugar 1/4c. All purpose flour 3tbsp. cold unsalted butter, cut up 1tsp. ground cinnamon Heat the oven to 400°F.Butter and 8inch square baking dish. To make cake combine the flour with the baking powder, sugar, salt, and cinnamon in a large bowl. In separate bowl, beat the eggs and then mix in the milk and melted butter. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients, add the pears and mix well. Pour this into the buttered baking dish. To make the streusel, mix with the sugar, flour, cold butter and cinnamon in a bowl by the pinching them together with your fingers until well combined. Sprinkle over at the top of the batter. Bake the cake for 30 to 35 minutes until it is golden and dry on top. Cool in and the pan and then cut into squares. This cake keeps for to four days covered at room temperature Recipe courtesy "Gale Gand's Brunch," written by Gale Gand with Christie Matheson, Clarkson Potter, 2009.

The final poem in Poetry Month

Written Late at Night

Almost all day I sat at the table
And, swapping two pens, wrote letters.
One of them, as a joke, was in gothic script.
I tried to be honest, avoid untruth
As far as the truth about myself and events
In their general contour was accessible to me.
Then a few longer phone conversations
And a short break to read eight poems by Cavafy.
How great! Superb! Who can write like that about desire and love,
Admitting that when they burn out
And the bitter tasting of the body is taken away,
They guide the poet’s hand. In them and only in them
All future incantations.

Poet: Janusz Szuber, Translator, Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough

From: They Carry a Promise, Random House

Sal Mancini, Photographer

NPR: Meals under $10.00

Chefs submitting good meals for under $10.00.

Here is one I found.

Some Different Kinda Books She asks why we always read books about black people. (I spare her the news she is black.) She wants something different. Her own book is written in pencil. She painstakingly goes back & corrects the misspelled words. We write each day. Each day the words look like a retarded hand from Mars wrote them. Each day she asks me how do you spell: didn't, tomorrow, done husband, son, learning, went, gone . . . I can't think of all the words she can’t spell. It’s easier to think of what she can spell: MY NAME IS CARMEN LOPEZ. I am sorry I was out teacher. My husband was sick. You know I never miss school. In that other program I wasn't learning nothing. Here, I'm learning so I come. What's wrong with my husband? I don't know. He's in the hospital. He's real sick I was almost out the room when I hear the nurse ask him, Do you do drugs? He say yes. I say what! I don’t know nuthin' 'bout no drugs. I'm going off in the hospital. He's sick. I'm mad. Nobody tells you nuthin'! I didn't hear that nurse I wouldn't know nuthin'. Huh? Condoms? No, teacher. He's my husband. I never been with another man. II I think he got AIDS he still don't tell me. I did teacher. I tried to read the chart at the hospital but I couldn't figure out those words. Doctor don't say, he say privacy. The nurse tell me. She's Puerto Rican. She say your husband got AIDS. I go off in the hospital. Nobody tells me nuthin'. He come home. He say it's not true, he's fine. He's so skinny without his clothes he try to hide hisself nekkid don't want me to look. I say you got to use one of those things. He say nuthin's wrong. with him. III He stop sayin' that. Now he just say he's gonna die all the time all the time dying. I say STOP that talk, the doctor say you could live a long time my sister-in-law say, he got it so you got it it's like that. I say, I don't got it, my kids don't got it either. Teacher, I need a letter for welfare that I'm coming to school on a regular basis. IV He's in P.R., before that he started messing around again. Over the Christmas holidays he died. That's where I was at in P.R. I'm fine. Yeah, I'm sure teacher. What do I wanna do teacher? I just wanna read some different kinda book Poet: Sapphire Collection: Black Wings & Blind Angels

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Poetry Month: John Hollander

Some Playthings

A trembling brown bird
standing in the high grass turns
out to be a blown

oakleaf after all.
Was the leaf playing bird, or
was it “just” the wind

playing with the leaf?
Was my very noticing
itself at play with

an irregular
frail patch of brown in the cold
April afternoon?

These questions that hang
motionless in the now-stilled
air: what of their

frailty, in the light
of even the most fragile
of problematic

substances like all
these momentary playthings
of recognition?

Questions that are asked
of questions: no less weighty
and lingeringly

dark than the riddles
posed by any apparent
bird or leaf or breath

of wind, instruments
probing what we feel we know
for some kind of truth.

Poet: John Hollander

Collection: A draft of light

...in Pittsburgh ... to Pittsburgh

J.R. Weldin Company; 415 Wood Street; Pittsburgh, PA 15222 This is Pittsburgh's oldest store since 1852. It has stationary, pens and more.


Good Sushi, great pastry, wonderful bread.

Eat out as often as possible.

Suzanne's journal prompt

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
~Helen Keller

Today's Yahoo Prediction

Everything is right in front of you, waiting for you to just reach out and grab it!

Poetry Month: Mark Strand

The Midnight Club

The gifted have told us for years that they want to be loved
For what they are, that they, in whatever fullness is theirs,
Are perishable in twilight, just like us. So they work all night
In rooms that are cold and webbed with the moon's light;
Sometimes, during the day, they lean on their cars,
And stare into the blistering valley, glassy and golden,
But mainly they sit, hunched in the dark, feet on the floor,
Hands on the table, shirts with a bloodstain over the heart.

I Had Been a Polar Explorer

I had been a polar explorer in my youth
and spent countless days and nights freezing
in one blank place and then another. Eventually,
I quit my travels and stayed at home,
and there grew within me a sudden excess of desire,
as if a brilliant stream of light of the sort one sees
within a diamond were passing through me.
I filled page after page with visions of what I had witnessed—
groaning seas of pack ice, giant glaciers, and the windswept white
of icebergs. Then, with nothing more to say, I stopped
and turned my sights on what was near. Almost at once,
a man wearing a dark coat and broad-brimmed hat
appeared under the trees in front of my house.
The way he stared straight ahead and stood,
not shifting his weight, letting his arms hang down
at his side, made me think that I knew him.
But when I raised my hand to say hello,
he took a step back, turned away, and started to fade
as longing fades until nothing is left of it.

Jill Bialosky: 7 April Poetry Month

Jill Bialosky's Intruder is a volume which stretches our understanding of the creative process and the mind behind it, as in "Touch-Me-Nots," given below.

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Touch-Me-Nots She brought a little of the country into the city in the pots of impatiens she had planted. The petals white, pure, the opposite of color. She had transferred the impatiens from the garden, digging her hands into soil two parts fibrous loam, one part leaf mold and peat moss and pushing the roots into the earth. Despite the quality of the soil—its rich decomposition of life— still they would not last. The plants were hardy and tender, with thick stems and dark green leaves, the seedpods inside waiting to release, the air awash in pollen. She looked into the flower as into a pair of beckoning eyes offering sustenance independent of a body, free floating and regenerative and wholly belonging to what was impossible ever to touch.

Dreams, quote

“Dreams are renewable. No matter what our age or condition, there are still untapped possibilities within us and new beauty waiting to be born.”

Dale E. Turner quote

Ruth Padel? 3 April Poetry Month

Like Giving to a Blind Man Eyes

He’s standing in Elysium. Palm feathers, a green
dream of fountain against blue sky. Banana fronds,
slack rubber rivulets, a canopy of waterproof tearstain
over his head. Pods and racemes of tamarind.
Follicle, pinnacle; whorl, bole and thorn.

‘I expected a good deal. I had read Humboldt
and was afraid of disappointment.’
What if he’d stayed at home? ‘How utterly vain
such fear is, none can tell but those who have seen
what I have today.’ A small rock off Africa –

alone with his enchantment. So much and so unknown.
Like taking a newborn baby in your arms. ‘Not only the grace
of forms and rich new colours: it’s the numberless –
& confusing – associations rushing on the mind!’
He walks through hot damp air

and tastes it like the breath of earth, like blood.
He is possessed by chlorophyll. By the calls of unknown birds.
He wades into sea and scares an octopus. It puffs black hair
at him, turns red – as hyacinth – and darts for cover.
He sees it watching him. He’s discovered

something wonderful! He tests it against coloured card
and the sailors laugh. They know that girly blush!
He feels a fool – but look, he’s touched tropical Volcanic rock
for the first time. And Coral on its native stone.
‘Often at Edinburgh have I gazed at little pools
of water left by tide. From tiny Corals of our shores

I pictured larger ones. Little did I know how exquisite,
still less expect my hope of seeing them to come true.
Never, in my wildest castles of the air, did I imagine this.’
Lava must once have streamed on the sea-floor here,

baking shells to white hard rock. Then a subterranean force
pushed everything up to make an island.
Vegetation he’s never seen, and every step a new surprise.
’New insects, fluttering about still newer flowers. It has been
for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes.’

Listen to Ruth Padel reading a poem of Darwin’s boyhood, “Stealing the Affection of Dogs.”

J. D. McClatchy: 1 April Poetry Month

J. D. McClatchy's new volume of poems, Mercury Dressing, brings us fresh tales of the drama of love and its aftermath, exploring figures by turns heroic, operatic, and simply human.

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Going Back to Bed Up early, trying to muffle the sounds of small tasks, grinding, pouring, riffling through yesterday's attacks or market slump, then changing my mind—what matter the rush to the waiting room or the ring of some later dubious excuse?— having decided to return to bed and finding you curled in the sheet, a dream fluttering your eyelids, still unfallen, still asleep, I thought of the old pilgrim when, among the fixed stars in paradise, he sees Adam suddenly, the first man, there in a flame that hides his body, and when it moves to speak, what is inside seems not free, not happy, but huge and weak, like an animal in a sack. Who had captured him? What did he want to say? I lay down beside you again, not knowing if I'd stay, not knowing where I'd been.

John Updike: 1 April Poetry Month

Half Moon, Small Cloud, John Updike

Caught out in daylight, a rabbit’s
transparent pallor, the moon
is paired with a cloud of equal weight:
the heavenly congruence startles.

For what is the moon, that it haunts us,
this impudent companion immigrated
from the system’s less fortunate margins,
the realm of dust collected in orbs?

We grow up as children with it, a nursemaid
of a bonneted sort, round-faced and kind,
not burning too close like parents, or too far
to spare even a glance, like movie stars.

No star but in the zodiac of stars,
a stranger there, too big, it begs for love
(the man in it) and yet is diaphanous,
its thereness as mysterious as ours.