Only one way to find out…

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I read an article about the morning pages from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I didn’t have the book at the time but this seemed to be a wonderful idea. Write freely, without limits, with abandon for three pages first thing in the morning.

It was awful.

I poured a litany of upset and frustration onto the page and was thoroughly unhappy before breakfast. There was nothing creative, nothing freeing, just a list of limits, reasons to abandon all hope.

I lasted three days.

Many years later, I finally read the book. It added a bit of perspective to the morning pages and though wary I gave them another try. That began a habit I continue to this day.

I managed to do some of the artist’s dates and various other exercises. I spent ages putting together a little box of scents and images and inspiration. It was a broader approach toward creativity than some other craft books.

With renewed enthusiasm for writing, I began to work on a novel. I planned it by noting the rises and falls of action, the four act plan, whatever seemed to fit. I planned to write it in a month, but by three months I ran out of steam when I hit a busy patch of work. When I came back to it, several gaping holes were evident and I left it be.

Many of my attempts at writing longer pieces coincide with the Novel Fair hosted by the Irish Writers Centre. It’s a competition that gives 10-12 winners the chance to meet agents and publishers at an event held in the Centre. Previous winners have been published to great success. My particular favourite is Catriona Lally, a school classmate of my sister. whose novel Eggshells later won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.

The novel fair accepts entries of a synopsis and up to 10,000 words of a novel in September each year. So I generally begin novels in about the middle of August.

Needless to say I haven’t made it yet.

I’ve tried Nanowrimo a few times, but similarly I begin planning in the last week in October. If I can remember the main character’s name on day 2 I’m doing well.

I signed up for 1000wordsofsummer, run by Jami Attenberg, several times. It’s a two week pledge to write 1000 words per day, with wonderful encouraging mails from Jami. Last year I actually did it, and then did a week-long one in August, missed one in October and did the most recent one in February too. I may have found the trick, just 1000 words, just repeat 80 times or 90 times or 100 times…

Since fully acknowledging that writing is something to do for fun, to relax, I’ve actually written more words then I have in years. I just passed 50,000 words in the shitty first draft of a novel. It’s a little early to say any more, but the writing is already further along that any of my past attempts.

The only job I truly hated was the one day I spent hawking plastic trinkets around a Dublin village trying to convince the people working in various businesses to interrupt their day and buy cheap crap. I was astonishingly bad at it, because I knew it was rubbish that would break before I could get a safe distance away.

The difference with a writer is that they believe in what they sell. They have after all spent months or years working on their book. Once the final book is in their hands, they want to tell everyone about it. When the article finally drops, they want to share widely. But there can be an edge there, a slight desperation when the books have to be packed up again at the end of a talk instead of going home to new owners or the number of clicks have to be counted.

That summer’s day in Dublin we were given a bright peptalk by the kind of preppy guy who probably ended up selling once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunities or second-hand cars when he moved on from cheap torches. And with a heavy bag over our shoulders and samples in hand, we walked into travel agents and butchers and boutiques stumbling over the sales pitch as they shooed us out the door.

For writers there is a myriad list of what to do and not to do and a lot of preppy salesmen with advice for a range of prices. Once again, money goes a long way, if you have the cash and the time you can spend as much on publicity and blog tours and appearances as you wish. Those without the cash must hope for a generous publisher. Your platform should be built from early on in a fully authentic way. But in this busy world full of distractions, some things fall flat and it can be hard not to be disheartened.

And then there are those who think that anyone who publishes must be minted, so it’s ok to pirate their books. Many authors do not make their daily wages from writing, but from teaching classes, doing workshops, lecturing, selling articles, content writing, bartending, stocking shelves and a range of other things.

My trial day as a cheap crap salesperson was on a Friday when they provided a barrel of cans in ice in the evening. I drank enough nameless lager and cider to numb the humiliation of the day and never went back.

Then I found an article in the newspaper that could have been written directly for me. Submissions for pieces written by foreign women living in Turkey. I wrote something immediately and my first book publication was in an anthology where the editors worked very hard for publicity and created a really good buzz around the book. I missed the events as I had a very young baby at the time. You can read my story here.

Writing became important. As I dealt with two young children, it became a way to connect to my essence, the part of me that was not there to respond to everybody’s needs. I probably began reading books about craft and how to write at this stage.

As the children grew, I had an idea for a novel and began planning in great detail, trying to map out scenes and characters and settings. I planned in such great detail, even had a title and a cover that looked amazing, that I ran out of steam before I even wrote a word.

Then I had an idea about a non-fiction project and that just won’t go away.

I had a decision to make at this point. Take the plunge and try to write as a job, a means of income. Or I could use another skill that I was developing to earn some pocket money. Several people told me that I should go for writing, that anything else would stunt my writing and lead to regrets in later years.

They were right about stunting the writing, but not the regrets. From what I know about the business of writing, I was right to use the other skill. It does not involve the uncertainty of writing for years on a project in the hope that agents or publishers or readers will see the value in it, nor the continuous push to publish articles or essays and dealing with the subsequent rejections.

During this time, writing inevitably took a back seat. But it was always on my mind, always there, like a grain of sand in your shoe that you can never quite get rid of.

There is a very real possibility that access to my accounts could be cut off. Of course, there are many VPNs to use to get around any block that might occur, but the ease of access would be gone. So far that hasn’t occurred, but having experienced the throttling of band width during various protests, it’s a distinct possibility, especially with elections due in the next year or two.

Another aspect of social media is ownership. Most social media sites demand the right to use whatever content you put on them, in exchange for publishing it on the platform for all users to see. In many cases the algorithms which determine which content gets seen and which gets lost are not easy to understand, and in a lot of cases they change regularly depending on which type of content is popular. It’s all video at the moment.

Turns out there is an idea called POSSE or post on own site, syndicate elsewhere. This involves posting to your own site first, getting a permalink and then posting the content anywhere else you like accompanied by the permalink to the original location. The inverse is PESOS or post elsewhere and syndicate to own site.

Cory Doctorow began doing this two years ago with his Pluralistic blog. I first came to it through Twitter, where the entire blogposts are posted in threads. I found the idea intriguing, though I’m not sure about sharing a whole blogpost in bits, I do think certain content is more suited to certain platforms. Pluralistic also doesn’t collect any data about anyone or anything. No pageview numbers, no data. I guess that’s the definition of digital privilege, where you’re popular enough not to need this kind of data.

Apart from the larger aspects of access, I’ve been trying to cut down on doom-scrolling on social media. Much and all as this can be a wonderful way to pass time when your brain is too fried for anything else, it does not help mood. At all.

I generally browse on the tablet since I logged out of all social media apps on the laptop a few years ago. So I put timers on the apps there. I have notifications disabled on the phone and have put timers on the few places that catch me there (ok, ok it’s Twitter of course).

It’s all in an effort to try to use social media wisely, not to spend my time without consideration. All of these can be bypassed, but it requires effort to do so and interrupts the scrolling in the process. It’s enough to make me ask – Am I sure this is how I want to spend my time?

Contrary to this drive to scroll less, there is the need to post more. I need to move from being a lurker to actively contributing. It’s not going to be easy to overcome my natural reticence, but once I get started I may never stop…

Things got busy of course, with kids requiring ferrying to and from school exams, and changes to my work schedule and life in general. And when I finally had time to look up, I realised that my motivation had disappeared. Looking at all the neat little plans was like looking at something written by a stranger.

Overall, my target hadn’t changed, what I’d set up was still there and my abilities didn’t disappear, so what was wrong?

Everything was work. I’m sure I’m not the only one feeling like this in the last year. When everyone is home all day everyday, even in the most equal of households everything becomes a duty, a task that must be done. The breakfast, the washing up, loading the dishwasher, putting out the clothes, reminding everyone of their homework, keeping track of class times to figure out meal times, it’s all another thing on the list of things that must be done.

In the normal times, there was an illusion of freedom in that we could ideally head off on a weekend or even midweek and go wherever we pleased and leave home and work behind. That could be a trip to the beach, a drive in the mountains or just sitting people-watching in a cafe.

But for a significant portion of the last year, everyone is home, and the virus has been raging. It’s not helped by the peculiarities of the Turkish response to the pandemic which involved restrictions on people under 20 years or over 65 years going outside apart from a few hours a day, evening lockdowns and weekend lockdowns. In short, any time that was not peak work times were lockdown times. The lockdowns were strict too, you’ were only supposed to go to a shop in walking distance for essentials open certain hours of the day. Of course the enforcement was variable, and there are stories of people taking a shopping bag in hand and wandering at will. If you were working, and have the documents to prove it, you were free to go about your business.

But for us that has meant that over the winter and into the spring any time that wasn’t working time was lockdown time.

I recently read ‘Writing Down the Bones’ by Natalie Goldberg. I’ve heard much about this book through the years but I’d never read the whole thing. So down I sat and the amazing revelation of writing as a practice, as something like piano scales or guitar chord repetitions, slapped me in the face.

With all the talk of ‘platform’ and ‘content’ and the current need to ‘monetize’ everything, from simple hobbies to complicated careers, it can be easy to forget that enjoyment should be a part of the process.

Is the purpose to be a writer? As in someone who writes with reasonable regularity? Or is it to be a celebrity? As in someone who spends more time focusing on social media than writing? Both? Sometimes one, sometimes the other?

There is no wrong choice; they are all excellent ways to spend your free time, or even pursue professionally. I find social media endlessly fascinating but also exhausting. A choice has to be made about what the focus is, even if only for this particular moment.

My feelings about writing are like a kaleidoscope continuously changing and filtering a myriad of tiny particles that tumble into a pattern for a brief moment. Just as I think I have a handle on what I want to do, the patterns change, become chaotic and then settle into something different. I used to feel this was a weakness, an inability to focus fully and to finish fully. But perhaps this is all just practice, and finishing and focusing don’t matter as much as the path taken, the process itself.

But my creative life is not so organised. I have several notebooks in various stages of completion, I have an A4 pad for expansive brainstorming, a morning pages notebook, a creative notebook, a keeping track notebook, a look at this cool notebook notebook. It’s all a bit analogue and I sometimes forget which notebook is which.

I decided to investigate some online to do lists and task management apps. There’s a lot of them out there and many of them are mind-boggling. Most are geared towards group work, allowing you to pass the buck between team members. Some are simple lists, some are based on efficiency methods with funny names.

I first tried a to do list app and added a template for a book project. But then I had a busy week and couldn’t get around to setting it up any further. Every day I got emails telling me I was behind on the 750 words for a book project that didn’t exist. It didn’t encourage me much.

Next I came across the Kanban board. This is basically a board with columns representing different stages of a process with notes representing tasks which can be switched from column to column. So you could have columns for planning, in progress, stalled, and completed and move your tasks from one to the other. It works well for projects with well-defined processes and tasks, but I couldn’t see how to fit my more nebulous projects into it.

Then there was the getting things done productivity process. This involves creating an inbox of tasks and filtering them to figure out how to get through them. It’s a rather involved system involving an inbox, trash can, filing system, lists and a calendar. The stages are capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage. And tasks are completed according to where you are, time available, energy available, and priority.

Thinking back to my workflow on the job, I knew that whatever I chose would have to be able to adapt as my creative projects changed and developed. And assuming all this productivity paid off, I’d have more time and structure to my writing.

There was a danger here too, productivity is an addictive habit. You could spend all your time thinking about how to be productive and actually avoid working altogether. And as I watched various videos of people explaining their productivity systems, it seemed that every one tweaks and changes whatever system they choose to suit their task.

Realising that I needed a more fluid system, where tasks can be included in several projects, have variable priority and where new tasks could be added at will, I decided to try out an app that allowed any system to be set up.

I found an app that is pretty much a blank slate and adding in templates without knowing how you’ll use them can lead to absolute confusion. But it has the option to connect tables so I can see tasks in several ways, from the point of view of what the task is like writing, or what project it’s in like this blog. With both mobile and desktop versions, it’s easy to keep track at any time or place. It’s taken me a few weeks to get a handle on it, and I’m only beginning to fully work by it, but so far it’s proving handy.

I’m trying to create a sustainable writing practice and avoid all the many pitfalls I fell into before. There are a lot. I thought I had no time, but time was an excuse masking fear. The fear is still there, but that’s a topic for another day. I have no desire to get up at 4 am to write and doubt I’d even manage to write meaningful sentences at that ungodly hour. I’ve intended to work in the evenings but by the time the day’s work is done, I just want to read or watch crappy shows or chill. I will sometimes be moved to do some creative work but it’s a blue moon occurrence rather than a regular habit.

The fact is that writing feels like work. There’s a few aspects to that; first, it is work, it requires thought and planning and action. It’s nice to think of it as a process of ‘flow’ where everything else melts away, but I think you can reach that when you hit a certain point in your writing project after the groundwork is laid and the first faltering steps allow you to hit your stride. It isn’t guaranteed. Second, my job involves constructing words into meaningful sentences every day, which makes it hard to separate the same action into writing for ‘me’ versus for ‘others’. That division doesn’t make sense anyway, we all write for someone else, even if it is only the future version of ourselves.

So if my creative writing is work, perhaps I should treat it as such and include it in my working day. But my days are pretty busy so I decided perhaps I should look and see exactly what I was doing and whether there was any extra time available. So I spent a week noting everything I did during my working day.

Well, it turns out that email is the bane of my life.

On one day of the week I spent over two hours on email alone. It finally explained how there were days when I felt I should get the work done in reasonable time, but was racing at the end of the day to make sure it all got done. When I added in other administration and preparation tasks, it turns out my time to actually work is shorter than I think.

So I’ve been rearranging things to acknowledge that I don’t have as much time as I think. Truth be told, this was long overdue. I was lucky enough not to be affected by the pandemic and welcomed the distraction work brought. This led to overscheduling, which will begin to affect the work I produce if I’m not careful.

So now the next question is how to keep track of my creative projects…

The disruption was immense as every road had trenches laid, then pipes and finally filled in. They were a little short of sand to fill around the pipes so they just scooped up whatever dirt was left in the field and dumped it in.

The gas company left at last and we had three solid days of rain. And all the soil from the field turned into sticky gloopy mud and trapped us in our houses.

So then the council arrived to throw a load of gravel on top. Even the backhoe loaders had trouble in the mud on our road. Eventually gravel was laid. But each trench dug for the gas line was immediately obvious as hollows where the wheels of the trucks sank ominously.

So perhaps that was that.

But no, the council arrived again and began to dig more trenches, in slightly different locations. Now it was time to pull the phone line down. They installed a brand new water pipe that’s not connected to any of the houses, and there was another mud and gravel rigmarole to finish off.

All of this emphasises the importance of infrastructure and laying it before you have to dig it all up multiple times. At the moment I’m trying to lay my own infrastructure for a stable writing practice and for my current project. One of the things I need to do is set up a website or two, and plan some writing.

I feel like I’ve left my glasses off at some points as I face some problems that I had no idea existed or were a problem. Some things seem extremely hard, like adding a link to text in a block editor. Well that’s ok once the link is to a website, but if you want to link to a file you can’t do it directly from inside the text, which you could do in previous versions. It reminds me to trust that some things really are difficult (this is a known issue) and perhaps that my knowledge may be out of date.

Things are moving slowly, as my free time is limited and searching for solutions to problems takes time. But I’m avoiding my usual trick of focusing on the one thing I can’t do and moving onto the things I can do.

There’ll be some small changes as I sort things out, and I’m excited to share the new project once I get it up and running.

My infrastructure should have enough flexibility to cope with uncertainty, multiple alternatives in place when one does not work out and the ability to seize the moment when the fates collide and everything works.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood: I’ve read a lot by Margaret Atwood but Oryx and Crake and the following two books in this trilogy stood out for me. The world begins not so different from our own and that makes events all the more prescient. Atwood stated she didn’t include any technology that didn’t already exist and created a nightmare scenario that is all too possible.

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker: This is a tremendous book that  I do not recommend anyone with a young baby should read. It’s full of information about how we sleep and the benefits to our brains and memories as we sleep. It’s a stark warning about what happens when we don’t get enough sleep. And most of us don’t…

That They May Face The Rising Sun by John McGahern: A quiet novel tracking a year in the life of a blow-in couple in rural Ireland. Nothing much happens but the little details of life and the characters in the area are richly drawn with affection. I prefer it to his more famous novel Amongst Women which was a little spare. If you’re interested in similar, he wrote many short stories too.

Beloved by Toni Morrison: This is a chronicle of pain and loss and the deep scars they leave, it is beautifully written and absolutely heartbreaking.  A classic that left me stunned. It’s a picture of motherhood and how slavery cannot be easily escaped.

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande:  A collection of essays about the end of life, how it’s experienced and whether we die the way we’d like to or not. I’ve read several essay collections by this doctor and they are all interesting. This was the most thought-provoking, prompting questions about the type of death I’d like and what’s most likely to happen.

The Iliad by Homer: Living just up the road from Troy I read this in my first year in Turkey. It was thrilling to read it on the spot, trying to imagine where the ships were beached and the battles fought. It’s doubtful Homer ever came here, but then it’s fairly certain that he passed on a collective work from many sources in the oral tradition. It’s a great tale and and exciting read (in spots!).

Middlemarch by George Eliot: This is a book I reread frequently and each time I find something new. All life is here (or at least within the limits of genteel English country life, marriage, relationships, and ambition). At first I was taken by Dorothea and her idealism, then the romance, then the tragedy of Casaubon, the doomed relationship of the doctor. I’m due another read I think!

This was originally a reel on Instagram, my first attempt. You’ll have to visit @CatherineYigit on Instagram to find it.