First Cup of Coffee - November 30, 2018

Friday thoughts on owning your writing process and optimizing the conditions for consistent creative flow. Also musings on left brain and right brain, knowing yourself, and why we face the same problems over and over. The book I mention is My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor 
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/142292.My_Stroke_of_Insight

Transcript

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Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy. And I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Hmm. I started putting a little bit of that Trader Joe's bourbon vanilla in with the mix of the London fog. That's good. Today is Friday, November 30th, last day of November. I'm about a quarter to eight this morning. An illusion that I'm like running ahead of schedule today because I actually skipped running and slept long. Slept a surprisingly long time, almost till seven. For no good reason except that I did that 24-hour fasts fast yesterday. And it sometimes has that effect, which I think is always a good sign. It's um it's part of the detoxing, I think, and part of the clearing of your system. But sometimes when you do that fast the night afterwards, you'll sleep like I did, sort of um deep and heavy and that restorative sleep. Which is a good thing. Um But I'm a little bit uh groggy this morning. And I decide to skip the run because I'm feeling a little um a little croopy, maybe that's why I slept a long time too. So we have a storm coming in. I should see if I can get a picture of it. Maybe I'll try to for the podcast here. Um right now it's all sunny and clear overhead, but in the distance the cloud banks are building, and you can see that there is snow beneath them, the misty snow. It's really beautiful. I've I love that about the Rocky Mountain West. I've lived in the Rocky Mountain West my entire life, with the exception of four years of college in St. Louis, which convinced me I'm just not a Midwest kind of gal. Though I will always have an abiding passion, uh not passion, affection for St. Louis. I do love St. Louis, and there were many things that I liked about that city. Uh, and could see myself living there in some ways, except that I really don't deal with that Midwestern uh well, it's it's kind of claustrophobic to me with all the traits. But um, having grown up in Denver and lived in Wyoming for 20 years and now in New Mexico for 10 years, I I love the vistas. I love being able to see. I love being able to see the weather coming from hours away. Oh, it's uh I don't know, there's something something to that. I give that to my heroines sometimes, of that, the nature of whether they're the kind of person who wants to be, who wants to see a long distance or or who would rather be inside cozy walls. I think it's good to know our own natures that way. Know what makes us happy. Just the same way as in owning our own rotting writing process. Um, you know, we are each individuals in that way, and we bring our own little quirks, our own essential natures to the creative process. And what's most important with writing is to discover what it is that you or I do best, what works best for us. Um, I know some people who like to write in entirely dark rooms. Uh you know, now I'm trying to think of her name. The essayist who did um oh Annie Dillard. Annie Dillard said that she had to write facing an entirely blank wall, or anything else would be distracting to her. And I read that and actually kind of physically flinched because I write looking out of a great big window that looks down the valley of the Galastale Basin to the Ortiz Mountains and Sandia. And I think I would be monumentally unhappy if I had to write facing a blank wall. Which sounds like um one of the circles of hell to me, albeit a more shallow circle of hell. Not the worst, but you know, maybe only the first circle of hell, but still a circle of hell, which is not how you want to feel when you're writing. So yesterday on uh book five of Sorcerer's Moons, I got a little over 3,000 words. I kind of revised my um my schedule for it, my timeline and expectations, which it seems like I do every freaking time. I mean, you'd think at this point that I would, I don't know, be smarter about my process and how I do things. And yet, as much as I give the advice to own your process and do that, I'm always trying to push and stretch it. Uh when I was finishing The Dragons of Summer, the story for seasons of sorcery, I was writing 4,000 words a day on that. And I was thinking, well, after this nice break over Thanksgiving, I could go back to 4,000 words a day. And then I even got really frisky about it and thought, heck, I could do 5,000 words a day, and it won't matter if it tires me out because then I can uh take a break over Christmas. I don't know why I always think I can do this because I'll always say, oh, well, you know, let yourself ramp up, and I think, well, I'll ramp up. I'll just ramp up real fast into four or five thousand words. Um, and so that's forgetting a couple of things. One is that um when I was writing 4,000 words a day on Dragons of Summer, that was after I finished Arrows of the Heart, and I was very much in the flow. I was really well oiled at that point, and the 4,000 words a day was relatively easy. However, anything more than 3,000 words a day, I do pay the price for eventually. And I suspect that's why I kind of did the Thanksgiving shutdown. And while I sort of do this reasoning with myself that, oh, it's okay if I pay the price, I think um, I don't know, that I don't think it's always the best thing. Um it's not like you know, you pay your five dollars for something at the grocery store and then you earn another five dollars later. Sometimes I think that paying of the price uh is a I'm trying to think of how I want to phrase that. It's a more enduring price than that, perhaps. You know, maybe I won't earn that five dollars back, it might be gone forever. It's an interesting way to think of it. So anyway, I found that over and over again I find this that when I was shooting for the 4,000 words a day that I was getting somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 to 2,000, and I kept saying, Well, I'm just ramping up. But once I revised down my word count goal on um, well, even yesterday, if I put it at 3,000 words a day, that's a very doable amount for me. Uh, that's just my sweet spot, and I can sustain that for a long time. And repeatedly I discovered that if I do 3,000 words a day, um consistently, if I do 3,000 words a day, five days a week, which I can sustain, then I overall get I'm much more productive. I get more words written than if I do these short spurts of like 4,000 words a day. And you would think that I would not have to discover this more than once, but apparently I do. Because once I revised back to 3,000 words a day, which means that I'll finish this book only a week later than I had originally planned, um, then it I settled into the story and it started flowing. So for whatever reason, you know, it's very, I don't know, metaphysical in some ways, how that works. Sometimes I think that uh working with yourself, your creative self, is a bit a little bit like um like working magic. I do think it is a magical thing. Elizabeth Gilbert says that, doesn't she? She talks about it as being magic. And I think as much as those of us who write about magic play with putting it into scientific terms, I do think that it falls more into the realm of art. Um I'm trying to decide how I want to phrase this. It's like that the magic, it doesn't follow the physical laws of reality. It's like it adheres to laws that exist in a different universe altogether. And so for me, whatever it is, whether it's uh a law in a different universe or something about uh that works for my emotional and psychological makeup, 3,000 words a day um allows me to perform consistently. So why, Jeffy, are you always trying to up it? I don't know. That's that's gotta be like my conscious self, like driving things forward. Um I'm always trying to do more. I always feel like I should be able to do more. Well, I think often of this book, and of course I'm not going to be able to think of the author or title. Okay, the title is My Stroke of Insight, and I'll have to look up the author's name. It's a fascinating book. It's a memoir written by a woman who is a neuroscientist. Um, I think she was somewhere around my age, too, so I really identified since I started out as a neuroscientist. And she had a right brain stroke, right hemisphere stroke. And oh no, I'm sorry, I take it back. She had a left hemisphere stroke, yeah. And miraculously, and and it was one of those things where uh she had a congenital defect, uh, a weakening of a blood vessel in her brain because she was not very old when she had this stroke, like in her 30s or something, maybe late 30s. And by this miracle, she managed to survive the stroke and slowly regain herself. But it's fascinating to hear her describe the her experience of the stroke, because being so well educated in how the brain works, part of her could recognize what was happening. Um, and she was able to bring in a lot of analytical hindsight to it. But at the time, because the stroke was occurring in her left brain, which is the logical side and the timekeeper and the rule maker, she lost, she kept trying to call 911, but she kept losing the urgency and the incentive and the push to do it because her left brain wasn't working, and her right brain uh was all oh hey, cool. You know, I always think of the right brain as kind of like one of those semi-stoned dudes from an 80s movie, you know, it's like, dude, it's it's all good. Look at the pretty colors. Um, and but that was essentially how she experienced it. And finally, she she did manage to call for help and she survived, but then all through her recovery, it was she became much more in touch with her creative side and the timeless side because her the her right hemisphere of her brain still worked perfectly fine. Uh, but it took as her left hemisphere gradually healed and recovered, she you know could really feel the ways in which she began to understand um time sensitivity and the need to and ambition and things like counting, keeping track of things. So it's and I know I use the phrase it's very interesting. I use it a lot, but it was very interesting, and I do think about that sometimes, the balance of finding the analytical side of myself, finding what works best uh to create the framework for my right brain self, my creative self to then flow and sort of fill inside of that structure. But there's something either that's in my makeup where I'm forever wanting to retool it. So we'll see how this podcast goes over time. But I suspect that it will um that you will hear me cycle through this repeatedly. Uh, I was chatting with um my friend Kelly Robson, who is a writer of fantasy and science fiction, uh Nebula Award-winning author, and also just a really lovely person. And we chat almost daily, and she's one of those people who sort of keeps my daily life um afloat, as it were. God bless the internet for those things. Um and I can't remember what it was when it was, it was like I don't know, months or months back, but I said to her something like, I said, I think I've figured out a way that I could increase my word count. And I had I don't even remember what it was. I had some sort of elaborate plan. And I said, Do you think that this is a new insight, or am I just doing the same old thing of trying to push my word count and I'll figure out I shouldn't? And she said, I think this is the same old thing. And I was kind of deflated because I was like, Oh, I thought this was such a great and brilliant idea. And then I realized she's absolutely right. It was just me going through my same cycle, but you know, that's why you have friends, right? So they could say, Oh no, you're just doing your same thing. I don't know what that is about human nature. It's it's like we sort of are condemned to loop through the same problems over and over again until we finally figure out a real solution to them. You know, it's sort of that uh definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I think we you know always I think that's why they tend to be perennial problems for us, why we find ourselves in the same situations over and over again, because we keep trying the same solution. And that moment when you finally figure out a different solution and one that works, then you don't have the problem anymore. And it's really quite miraculous. You can look back on your life and see places where you did that, where you finally broke yourself out of this cycle of going through the same thing. So I suppose I should try to figure out a way that I don't always go back. I thought I was gonna do that for this year. Uh at the beginning of the year, I had really set the expectation for myself that I would stick at 3,000 words a day and see if I could make the overall year more productive. Um and then I I don't know why I didn't do it. I didn't have a great January and February, and so then I felt behind. So maybe we'll try it again for 2019. So in fact, I'll just say that right now. Here we are with one month left of 2018, effectively, one month and one day. Going into 2019, I'm really going to try to keep it at 3,000 words a day. And if you hear me say otherwise, I don't know, comment and say, remember, Jeffy. I should like write it down and stick it on my computer. So I don't know, or maybe it's just me, maybe it's what I have to do. So I'll go get my 3,000 words a day. I think the upshot of this is that um I will not have Sorcerer's Moons out before Christmas. Uh and I might get it out in December. We shall see. But certainly early January, and then I'm going to go straight into writing book six, and I will get that done. Um, I'm going to see how I feel at the end of book five. I might I might just hold and go ahead and write book six. No, no, don't be upset. I'll write hold and write book six so that I can go back and revise and edit the two of them together. I might not. I might just get it out. I know you all are waiting for it. So we'll just sort of see how the timing works out. I'm I'm trying to be very um 80 stoner dude about this, and it's all good. It's all good. We're supposed to have a snowy weekend, so I'm gonna do a whole lot of my indoor decorating. I think that sounds like fun. I don't usually get my Christmas decorating done so early in the year, but you know, we had that earlier Thanksgiving this year, so it sort of creates one more Christmas weekend, and I like the idea of having all the decorations up. So we shall see. And on that note, I think I will get at it. I hope you all have a great Friday. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I hope that you get to enjoy the uh delights of the season, whether you celebrate Christmas or not. I think that it's still kind of a fun time of year with the decorations and the special uh performance events and treats. And I will talk with you all next week. Take care. Bye bye.