Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind

Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind

Edited by Jocelyn K. Glei

My husband gave me a book for Christmas that he heard about on the Chiot's Run organic blog, Manage YourDay-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your CreativeMind. It's a collection of essays on the topic, edited by Jocelyn K. Glei. I’ve been reading a bit of it every day.

Just as the title suggests, the articles in this book focus on building a good routine, and focusing while using creativity to your advantage in the workplace, or building your creativity in any area of your life. They are short and easy to digest. There are some great reminders and good information.

Just the simple admonishment to do the thing that is most important first in your day instead of trying to get all the other little things out of the way first, is so obvious and yet counter to my typical thinking. I tend to think that if I get things tidied up or cleaned in the house first, then I’ll be better able to concentrate, but then something always seems to come up and the creative work keeps getting pushed aside. It really has profound implications for all areas of my life – my work, my child and my writing.

The article on Harnessing the Power of Frequency by Gretchen Rubin really spoke to the heart of my writing dilemma. It helped me to realize that the key to my writing productivity is going to be writing smaller amounts more frequently.  There is just no other way in my current schedule to make room for writing.

Building Renewal into Your Workday by Tony Schwartz was a good reminder too. My boss is always saying that we are given vacations and breaks for a reason. If you don’t take them then you are doing yourself a disservice and you will become less productive over time.

The article on multitasking, Banishing Multitasking from Our Repertoire by Christian Jarrett, really echoed my thinking. I’ve been hearing that multitasking is counterproductive for a long time but he put it in a different light that I appreciated by explaining that there’s really no such thing as multitasking, just switching between tasks really fast.  However, there’s always some lag as your brain switches gears and you do the tasks you are switching between more slowly than if you had just focused on one to begin with.

The articles are organized into sections on ROUTINE, FINDING FOCUS IN A DISTRACTE WORLD, TAMING YOUR TOOLS, and SHARPENING YOUR CREATIVE MIND from a multitude of authors. Honestly, there is so much in the short articles in this little book that it took me a while to digest it and I’m sure I’ll be returning to it again. I highly recommend it.

Benediction by Kent Haruf

Benediction

By Kent Haruf

I just finished reading the novel Benediction by Kent Haruf.  My initial reaction is mixed.

I chose this book because the subject matter, life and death, have been on my mind a lot lately. The first week of December, on a Tuesday night, I got the call that a dear friend and surrogate grandmother had passed away. Wednesday morning I received an email that my uncle had passed. Finally, my father has stage five terminal cancer, though he is doing fairly well at the moment. You would think that would make me run from the story of a father dying of terminal cancer but all of this drew me toward it.

I’ve done a lot of writing considering all of this and I’m still looking for answers. I am the youngest of five at age thirty-nine. At this point in my life, I feel less certain about whether our consciousness survives after death. I was once secure in my faith and beliefs but now I’m not so certain.

There were a couple scenes in Benediction that hit me hard and really moved me.

Dad Lewis has just been told he is dying of cancer, and it’s going to happen quickly. His wife, Mary, is wearing herself out taking care of him all alone and she passes out. When he gets down on the floor beside her, scared for her, I cried. The prose is sparse and honest.

He got down on his knees beside her and felt her head. She felt hot. He pulled her toward him and slid his arms under her, propping her up against the couch. Can you hear me? I got to call somebody. I’ll be right back. She made no sign. Is that all right with you if I leave a minute? I’m coming right back. He hurried out to the kitchen and called the emergency number at the hospital. Then he returned and got down on the floor again and held her and talked to her softly and kissed her cheek and brushed back her damp white hair and patted her arm and waited.

Another scene was when the preacher gets up in front of the church and tells the congregation that Christ’s sermon about turning the other cheek wasn’t just a metaphor but something that we need to live even in these turbulent times.  The majority of the congregation don’t take that so well.

But then he was abruptly halted. Someone out in the congregation was talking. Are you crazy? You must be insane! A man’s voice. Deep-throated. Angry. Loud. Coming from over on the west side of the sanctuary near the windows. What’s wrong with you? Are you out of your mind?

Now, this was only the second book that I’ve read from the modern era that did not use quotes to set off dialogue. It wasn’t totally foreign to me but to be honest I wasn’t aware that there were a number of authors doing this.

I thought the lack of quotation marks was difficult to follow at first in Benediction but I was soon okay with it. It gave the book an internal and even timeless feeling, as if looking at events that happened through frosted glass.

I wondered why someone would choose not to use quote marks to delineate dialogue so I did a quick search online and found an article from Lionel Shriver on the Wall Street Journal. Apparently a number of modern authors, including James Frey, Kent Heruf and Cormac McCarthy are popularizing the trend.

Shriver contends “By putting the onus on the reader to determine which lines are spoken and which not, the quoteless fad feeds the widespread conviction that popular fiction is fun while literature is arduous.”

I also came upon a discussion by authors on this topic that pointed me to an interview Cormac McCarthy had done with Oprah some years ago in which he said that, “If you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.”

Here’s one of my prime problems with it. I have no problem reading dialect and dialogue without quotation marks. I’m a very fast reader and can adapt. However, I know people that cannot read dialect at all, can’t read Mark Twain. Their brains simply don’t translate the written word into sound in their head. Writing is about communicating. Anything that gets between the reader and the story inhibits that communication. Now, I know that not every book is for every reader but my goal as a writer is to make things more understandable, not to obfuscate.

I asked my writer’s group about this last night. One of the group said that a good story will not be brought down by poor grammar or punctuation. Another member said she wouldn’t be able to get past the first few pages. Yet another threw something on the floor in disgust and said that it was sheer laziness on the author’s part.

I think I’ll continue to use quotation marks in writing dialogue but I won’t reject a book right away if the author doesn’t use them.

Honestly, after reading the ending, I set down the book and thought, what the hell was that? The ending really just didn’t seem consistent with the rest of the book to me. I’m going to have to puzzle on it for a while longer, but I did enjoy the book. It was about life. Death is part of that too. I didn’t find any answers, but I did enjoy the time spent on it.

The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

By Julia Cameron with Mark Bryan

I first bought a copy of The Artist’s Way in my early twenties and read through it but it didn’t really speak to me. I certainly didn’t use the book the way it was intended.

Nearly a decade ago, when I was starting to seriously write, I took the book off my shelf and opened it again.  I didn’t remember it but as I browsed through it, it occurred to me that I could do this as a course, since I couldn’t afford to take any writing courses at the time.

I started reading one chapter every Sunday night. I wrote the three longhand morning pages every day. (Did I mention I was out of work, single and had no children? Way too much time on my hands.) As suggested, I picked the exercises at the end of the chapter that appealed to me most, or that I most resisted, and wrote them out. I had to get creative with the artist dates because I didn’t have money to do anything that would require it.

I would now say that this is one of the three books that changed my life the most. It opened me up to writing in a way that nothing ever had. It taught me a lot about myself. It also got me writing every single day.  It was a wonderful experience.

I’m looking forward to starting this again with the group I’ll be teaching at our library in Corning starting January 9th. Hopefully it will help me get writing daily once more.

As I’ve begun reading again, I’ve already found certain passages leaping off the page at me. Different things than the last time I worked through it, I think.

The “basic tools” are the morning pages, the written exercises at the end of the chapter and the artist date. The morning pages are three pages of long hand writing done in the morning to let go of the worries and burdens for the day. I think of them as writing meditation.  You just write everything you are thinking down as fast as you can.  It usually takes me about 20 minutes. I guess it depends on how big your writing is, how big your paper is and how fast you write.

The exercises are very short and directly relate to the subject of the chapter that week. It may be as simple as making a list. This is where I definitely learned some things about myself. For example, some of the exercises deal with giving yourself a sense of permission to be creative or artistic by uncovering the messages that you received at some point that you can’t or shouldn’t. I ended up remembering all the positive messages that encouraged me over the years. That was very helpful for me.

One of the great things about this book is that it is not just for “artists” but rather for anyone who wants to be more creative in their thinking. Every aspect of your life can benefit from a more creative approach – work, parenting, partnering . . .

This isn’t just a book, it’s a workshop in a book.  Give yourself the gift of discovering your creative self through this book.