writing

There are 4 posts tagged writing.

Reverb 10 – Days 2&3: Writing and Moment

I’m participating in Reverb10 and reflecting on the year 2010 as well as preparing for the year 2011. If you want to join this initiative, take a look at Reverb10’s website and sign up!

In this post, I’ll write on the prompts for Day 2 and Day 3: Writing and Moment.

Day 2: Writing

What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?

From January to June, I worked on the Artist’s Way as well as the Vein of Gold. One of the main exercises in these books is the morning pages — as soon as you get up, you write down whatever that comes to your mind for 3 pages. When I was good, I simply woke up and grabbed a pen and a notebook placed right next to my pillow and started writing my morning pages.

But I don’t write morning pages these days.

Now, I tend to take some time to start writing after I get up. This warm up time doesn’t contribute to my writing that much, because I know from my morning page experiences that I can wake up and start writing without any warm ups. In fact, the morning pages can serve as a good warm up for the day.

Let’s eliminate unnecessary warm ups, such as e-mail checking and coffee making, and bring this habit back again.

Day 3: Moment

Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

There were some beautiful moments that made me feel alive this year. I’m grateful that I experienced them. But I will choose not to pick one moment and describe it in detail. There are two reasons for this: 1) I want to keep those moments private, and 2) I simply can’t choose one moment among those moments.

Instead of picking and describing one moment, I want to describe some common features that underlie those moments.

  • When a beautiful moment comes to me, it feels as though time freezes. All I need to do is to ask that moment to stop for seconds and to dance with me.
  • When I experience that moment, I feel warm and connected with the world in one way or another. Yes, that was the case even when I was all wet and frozen on top of Mt. Fuji.
  • Shortly after I experience that moment, I often think that my future self will randomly remember this moment. This thought makes me feel great as well.

I’m keen on experiencing such beautiful moments again in the year 2011 as well. I will focus on minimizing stuff and maximizing experiences more and more next year.

Are you part of Reverb10 as well? If you are, give me a yell in the comment section below and point me to your blog so I can read your stories! Even if you are not, I’m curious about your experiences in relation to the prompts above or this post in general. Tell me about it!

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If you enjoyed reading this post, please share it with your friends. You can subscribe to this blog via RSS or e-mail, too. I’m looking forward to connecting with you!

Photo: Kyle Kruchok

On writing a novel, one word and $1,052 for $97

NaNoWriMo 2010 is over and…

I finished writing a 5,0270 word novel for NaNoWriMo. I was happy, glad and calm when I finished writing the last sentence of my novel. I knew I could do it, and I did it! To write a +5,0000 word novel in a month was an interesting experience, because it taught me some new things. You can read my thoughts on NaNoWriMo in my previous posts.

What I learnt from finishing the novel is the following.

  • I can write more than 5,0000 words in a month.
  • I can write a novel.
  • I can write a novel without any outline.
  • I have stories inside me.
  • Sometimes characters play by themselves without my directions.
  • I wish I had developed my characters more throughly. I had read Bird By Bird byAnne Lamott and knew it was important, but I think I understood what she meant better by writing a novel.
  • I feel like writing about 30,000 words on different topics every month so I can clarify where I stand on these topics.
  • I need to work on my fiction writing skills.
  • Writing is fun.

In short, it was worth it.

One word for 2010 and one word for 2011

Here’s the Reverb10 prompt for 1 December.

Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?

I experienced a lot of changes this year. It all started with working on the Artist’s Way, and it seems to me that creativity was a big theme for me this year. Apart from the Artist’s Way, I took the online Ars Amorata program, and it helped me clarify my vision as well. I wonder what would be a word that encapsulates the year 2010 for me. To be honest, I feel like I spent a lot of time preparing myself for the next stage this year. The word ‘preparation’ might suggest something inactive, but what I did was definitely an active preparation.

If the year 2010 was about preparation, then I think the year 2011 will be about blooming. I would like the word ‘blooming’ to capture the year 2011. In 2011, I will explode as flowers bloom.

How about you? What word encapsulates your 2010? Which word would you like to capture your 2011?

$1,052 for $97

Adam Baker and Karol Gajda are doing something crazy. They are putting together 23 business courses from 23 successful entrepreneurs and selling them for $97 only for 72 hours. If you bought these courses separately, it would cost $1,052. It’s an amazing deal if you are interested in running a small, online business and want to learn from those who are successful in this area.

I bought Chris Guillebeau‘s Unconventional Guide to Working For Yourself more than a year ago, and it gave me some good insights on running the kind of business Chris does. So, I can recommend this guide to you. But if you are going to spend $79 for Chris’s guide, then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t pay extra $18 to get other 22 courses with it.

I was keen on quite a few of the 23 courses and it would cost more than $97 if I bought them separately. The ones I am especially interested are the following:

  • Guest Posting Guide by Chris Garrett – $17
  • Location Independent Lifestyle Guide by Lea Woodward – $37
  • Zero to Business by Johnny B. Truant – $297
  • Write for the Web&Beyond Bricks and Mortar by James Chartrand – $54
  • How to Live Anywhere by Karol Gajda – $97
  • Minimalist Business by Everett Bogue – $47
  • Beyond Blogging by Nathan Hangen – $47
  • Networking Awesomely by Colin Wright – $20

I chose to get on board with this super sale and I believe I made a good decision. If you are curious, check out the sale page here. At the time of writing this blog post, it’s only about 24 hours to go till the sale ends. I hope you can manage to get it if you are interested!

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If you enjoyed reading this post, please share it with your friends. You can subscribe to this blog via RSS or e-mail, too. I’m looking forward to connecting with you!

Photo: aussiegall

Brief updates – 24 Nov 2010 Edition

This brief update will be about two web initiatives, NaNoWriMo and Reverb 10, as well as my favorite post on relationships written in my new favorite blog.

NaNoWriMo

I am not fisnished with NaNoWriMo yet. Right now, my novel is around 40,000 words and I believe I can manage to write another 10,000 words by the deadline. I learnt more lessons from NaNoWriMo since the last time I talked about it.

I’ve been using this novel to talk about my ideas and experiences. These ideas and experiences are expressed as dialogues by characters or monologues of the protagonist. I did a similar exercise for Julia Cameron’s Vein of Gold, but somehow I’ve been exploring my internal stories with this NaNoWriMo business more than with the Vein of Gold. I guess the thing is that this novel I’m writing is partly fictional, while a piece I wrote for the Vein of Gold was factual.

It might be the case that great novelists did the same thing for their novels and I was the only person who didn’t know about it. In any case, it’s great that I learnt about this benefit of writing a novel by actually writing one.

It’s easy to write down my ideas in the form of monologue or that of dialogue as a first draft. In fact, I used my novel as a draft for some of the blog posts I wrote during November. I let my characters talk about the core ideas behind these blog posts, and I’m very happy I did that. I might use this technique for future writing as well.

Another thing I learnt is how long I can concentrate on writing for. Provided I use this great application called JDarkRoom and there’s no distraction and I have a vague idea of what to write, I can keep writing at least for 40-50 minutes without taking a break. Indeed, I found that this chunk of time suits me most, unless words are flowing from my creative brain and there’s no reason for me to stop that flow.

I procrastinate a lot, too. But once I get myself going, I can get into writing. So, it seems the best way to beat my procrastinative habit is to start writing anyway. In fact, it amazes me that I came this far without any plot. All I did was just to write without caring too much what I was writing.

I believed I could manage it, and it is great to see that I am actually managing the situation.

Reverb10

After I finished with NaNoWriMo, I plan to keep writing everyday during December as well. I am going to participate in Reverb 10, organized by Gwen Bell.

Reverb 10 is…

“an annual event and online initiative to reflect on your year and manifest what’s next. The end of the year is an opportunity to reflect on what’s happened, and to send out reverberations for the year ahead.”

The participants of Reverb 10 will do both. If you want to spend this December reflecting on your 2010 and getting ready for 2011, Reverb 10 can be a great way to do it. Join the fun!

By the way, I originally got to know about Gwen via Chris Guillebeau. In the early 2009 Chris produced Unconventional Guide to the Social Web and Gwen wrote the main guide in this product. I bought it, liked it, and started following Gwen. When she briefly came to Japan in the autumn of 2009, I met her in person, at a tweet-up organized by Sandra of Japandra (also known as @sandrajapandra). I love the way Gwen is and I totally recommend you to check out her website.

Farnoosh Brock on Why Relationships Matter

I found Farnoosh (@prolificliving) on twitter. I looked at her blog Prolific Living and it became my new favorite blog. In one of the latest posts, Farnoosh writes on Why Relationships Matter. I enjoyed that post, and I recommend you to take some time to read it. The part of the post I particularly liked is the following:

The length of a relationship is not a good measure of its depth or its meaning. Instead, remember the nature of your interaction with the other person, the simple exchange of your mutual understanding, and the lasting impressions you left behind. Let those mark your measures of success when it comes to relationships.

This part resonates with what I believe. If I wrote what I believe without an explanation, it would sound as though it’s in conflict with the above. I believe that great relationships last forever. I don’t mean to say that we keep those whom we have great relationships with physically close to us forever. What I mean is that we keep memories of them and let them live in our hearts; in that metaphorical sense, I believe that great relationships last forever. When it comes to the amount of time we spend together, these relationships may be brief. There might be only an hour of interaction between you and the person you build a relationship with. But, if that interaction is deep and meaningful and if that interaction creates amazing moments for two of you, that relationship is a great one that will last forever.

I will live my life as if those who let me create beautiful memories with them are like gifts to me. They help me create my art, after all.

I will write more on relationships and related issues in this blog as well. Let’s make this world more romantic together.

Photo: Pseudo Victor

6 things I have learnt from NaNoWriMo so far

I’m participating in NaNoWriMo. There are six things I learnt from NaNoWriMo so far, and I want to share them with you.

1. There’s no reason why I should spend time and energy on kicking out my inner critic. While it would be great if he could leave me alone forever, I bet it won’t happen. Rather than spending time and energy on getting rid of him, I’d focus on what I need to do: writing.

2. If you don’t know what your aim is, you can be driven by your inner critic. So, make it clear to yourself what your aim is. For me, it’s simply to write 50000 words of something. Yes. Something. In fact, it’s more like a playground for myself rather than a novel for someone else to read, really.

3. My inner critic tells me that what I’ve written so far doesn’t make much sense, but that’s fine. I’ll keep writing anyway. I’m happy to let my storyteller of this novel be imperfect. We make mistakes and forget things sometimes when we tell stories; why should we expect our storytellers to be perfect?

4. By “focusing on writing”, I mean what it means. I will do no editing when I write or during November. So, it’s pretty much as though I’m splashing words inside me onto a digital scroll of paper so I can have fun spotting something actually nice and pretty on it.

5. Discipline is important. I have been writing everyday, but I need to have a better discipline. For example, I’m writing this blog post on a text editor, and I’ve got 8 tabs open on Firefox; they are completely unnecessary and irrelevant to this post. I tend to do that when writing for NaNoWriMo as well. If I had a better discipline and focus, I would be able to focus more on writing.

6. It’s fun to spend my time on writing. I used to think of stories and wrote poems when I was much younger. I spent the last 8 years on academic writing, including my honours thesis and master’s thesis. Writing these (philosophy) theses helped me sharpen my writing skills in English, but I hardly wrote for fun. I came to love writing through this blog as well as NaNoWriMo.

At the time of writing this post, I wrote 6009 words. I’m slightly behind, but I’ll try my best.

If you are part of NaNoWriMo, how are you going with your project? I’m sure you have something you learnt no matter whether you are a first timer like me or an expert. What did you learn so far? I’m curious about your experiences!