Sleeping Adventures

My plans to bring structure and routine into my day haven't been very successful till now. I decided to take it slow, concentrating on my ONE big project, to bring focus. Next, I decided to structure my day around what I wanted to do, rather than what is demanding my attention. To flag that off, last week, I created a strict sleep schedule. After analysing my sleep patterns for a month, I realised I needed around 6 hours of undisturbed sleep to coherently function.

Perfect Sleep: 11.30 to 5.30 with a 20 minute nap in the afternoon.

Feb 24: Success! I did it. Woke up with my alarm and managed to go to bed at 11.30 I didn't even need a nap.

Feb 25: I went to bed at 11.30 but had to wake up once in-between to tend to Aaru's cough. He had to given water, carried around on the shoulder for sometime before he went back to sleep. I switched off the alarm in the morning and dozed away for an extra 30 minutes. I couldn't find any time for a nap.

Feb 26: An unexpected dinner party with my dearest friends. I wouldn't have missed a minute of it. I went to bed at 3 am and woke up at 6 am. I had to get up to get the kids ready for school. I slept for another 4 hours in the day.

Feb 27: Hubby wanted to catch up 'The Theory of Everything'. We had already missed it the last time it was on theatres. So, by the time, I hit the sheets, it was 1am. I woke up at 7am (my precious 6 hours fulfilled) and napped for another 20 minutes in the afternoon.

Feb 28: The kids were bored out of their wits by the English movie and they begged and pleaded for a Tamil movie. We couldn't refuse them and once again, it was past 1 am by the time I went to bed. At 3 am, I woke up to the sound of retching. Before me and hubby could save the sheets, the job was done. Four pillow cases, a huge double sheet, my T-shirt, Sanju's clothes, the entire bedroom flooring and the bathroom had to be cleaned up after washing up Sanju and administering some medicines to him. Me and hubby went back to sleep at 5 am and I woke up at 9 am. (Thankfully, it was a Sunday!) I slept another 2 hours in the afternoon.

Maybe, routine and schedules are not for mothers. Do any of you, writer moms, have writing schedules/strict time slots for writing? How do you do it? Please enlighten me.

Focus

I have this little placard on my table that reads,

"For him who has no concentration, there is no peace." - Bhagavad Gita

Peace has not been on my possessions list for sometime now. Sadly and painfully, I have come to realize that I have too much on my plate and that is leading to this current phase of indigestion. I have two first drafts that never went beyond that, non-fiction pieces calling for my attention, some children's fiction that I have been penning in-between along with a craving to draw on Adobe Illustrator using my new Wacom. Entwined with all this are my tuition classes, anthology submissions, erratic blogging and a never-ending reading list.

This see-sawing between tasks and flitting from one to another is not serving any purpose now. It is time to focus. I have promised myself to choose one pivotal task every month. Everything else will orbit it and only one of them (pre-determined!) will get my attention when I want a break or a change. Till I complete that pivotal task, none other will get it's spotlight.

Let's see how this goes.

Zentangle Challenge 201 #MSAD15

I had recently started Zentangling and I've been loving it so much. So, when the Diva threw across this challenge in support of Moebius awareness, I decided to give it my all. So, this is my way of telling the Diva and Artoo that I'm so proud of their efforts. And yes, I'm wearing purple today in support of Moebius awareness Day. Are you wearing purple too?  #MSAD15

Mastery by Robert Greene – A Summary (Part V)

Chapter V Awaken the Dimensional Mind: The Creative Active

“…Several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainities, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…”

-          John Keats

In childhood, our minds were completely open, and we entertained all kinds of surprising, original ideas. Our heads teemed with questions about the world around us. Not yet having commanded language, we thought in ways that were preverbal – in images and sensations. This is the ORIGINAL MIND. We cannot help but feel nostalgia for the intensity with which we used to experience the world.

We no longer look at things as they are, or wonder why they exist. Our minds gradually tighten up. We become defensive about the world we now take for granted, and we become upset if our beliefs or assumptions are attacked. This is our CONVENTIONAL MIND.

Masters and those who display a high level of creative energy are simply people who manage to retain a sizeable portion of their childhood spirit despite the pressures and demands of adulthood.

Masters not only retain the spirit of the Original Mind, but they add to it their years of apprenticeship and an ability to focus deeply on problems or ideas. This leads to high-level creativity. Some people maintain their childlike spirit and spontaneity, but their creative energy is dissipated in a thousand directions, and they never have the patience and discipline to endure an extended apprenticeship.  Others have the discipline to accumulate vast amounts of knowledge and become experts in their field, but they have no flexibility of spirit, so their ideas never stray beyond the conventional and they never become truly creative. Masters manage to blend the two and create the DIMENSIONAL MIND. This mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.

The Dimensional Mind has two requirements:

1)      High level of knowledge about a field or subject

2)      Openness and flexibility to use this knowledge in new and original ways.

To awaken the Dimensional Mind, we need to follow these steps and avoid the following pitfalls:

Step 1 Choose the right Creative Task

Creative activity involves the entire self – our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds. It needs time and effort. It entails years of experimentation, and the need to maintain a high level of focus. We need to have patience and faith that what we are doing will yield something important.

The emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated directly into your work. To aid in this process, it is often wise to choose somethingthatr appeals to your sense of unconventionality and calls up latent feelings of rebelliousness. Keep two things in mind:

1)      The task you choose must be realistic. To reach your goal, you may have to learn a few new things.

2)      You must let go of your need for comfort and security. If you are worried about what others might think and about how your position in the group might be jeopardized, then you will never really create anything.

Step 2 Creative Strategies

The mind tightens up over time because of two reasons:

a)      We entertain same thoughts and ways of thinking for sake of consistency, familiarity and reduced effort.

b)      Whenever we work hard at a problem or idea, our minds naturally narrow their focus because of the strain and effort involved.

This means that the further we progress on our creative task, the fewer alternative possibilities or viewpoints we tend to consider.

A.      Cultivate Negative Capability

The ability to endure and even embrace mysteries and uncertainties was called by Keats as Negative Capability. We must be capable of negating our ego. Truly creative people in all fields can temporarily suspend their ego and simply experience what they are seeing, without the need to assert a judgment, for as long as possible.

 

In the arts and letters, your thoughts will congeal around political dogma or pre-digested ways of looking at the world, and what you will often end up expressing is an opinion rather than a truthful observation about reality. To Keats, William Shakespeare was the ideal because he did not judge his characters, but instead opened himself up to their worlds and expressed the reality of even those who were considered evil. The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces. And so it is best to keep this in mind and not grow too fond of your ideas or too certain of their truth.

 

B.      Allow for Serendipity

The brain is constantly searching for similarities, differences and relationships between what it processes. Feed this natural inclination by letting go of conscious control and allow chance to enter into the process. When we are in a more relaxed state, our attention naturally broadens and we take in more stimuli. Serendipity are the chance associations and discoveries that we were not expecting. To allow this to happen:

a)      Widen your search. Look at more than necessary in research stage. It may seem tiring and inefficient but you must trust this process.

b)      Maintain an openness and looseness of spirit. In momrents of great tension and searching, you allow yourself moments of release. You take walks, engage in activities outside your work (Einstein played the violin), or think about something else, no matter how trivial. “Chance favours only the prepared mind” – Pasteur.

Serendipity strategies can be interesting devices in the arts too. Writer Anthony Burgess, trying to free his mind up from the same stale ideas, decided on several occasions to choose random words in a reference book and use them to guide the plot of a novel, according to the order and associations of words. Once he had completely haphazard starting points, his conscious mind took over and he worked them into extremely well crafted novels with surprising structures.

To help yourself cultivate serendipity, you should keep a notebook with you at all times and note down idea/ observation the moment it comes. Keep notebook by bedside to note ideas that come during fringe awareness. In this notebook, you record any scrap of thought that occurs to you, and include drawings, quotes from other books, anything at all. In general, you must adopt a more analogical way of thinking, taking greater advantage of the associative powers of the mind.

C.      Alternate the mind through “the current”

The Current is an intensification of the most elementary powers of human consciousness. Most often in our culture, on one side, people run rampant with speculations never taking time to entertain possible explanations while on the other side, people, particularly in academia or in the sciences, accumulate mountains of information but never venture to speculate on larger ramifications of this information or connect it all into a theory. They are afraid to speculate because it seems unscientific and subjective, failing to understand that speculation is the way to see the invisible. Scientists must have a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination, says physicist Max Planck.

 

D.      Alter your Perspective

Creative people are those who can look at a phenomenon from several different angles, noticing something we miss because we only look straight on. We should not rush to generalize and label. We should subvert the following patterns:

 

1)      Looking at the ‘what’ instead of the ‘how’

If the book we are creating is not working out, we focus on the uninspired writing or the misguided concept behind it. Although we think we are rational when we think in this way, most often problems are more complicated and holistic; we are simplifying them, based on the law that the mind always looks for shorthands.

 

To look at the ‘how’ instead of the ‘what’ means focusing on the structure – how the parts relate to the whole. With the book, it may not be working out because it is organised poorly, the faulty organisation a reflection of ideas that have not been thought out. Our minds are a jumble, and this is reflected in the work. Thinking in this way, we are forced to go more deeply into the parts and how they relate to the overall concept; improving the structure will improve the writing.

 

Our minds naturally tend to separate things out, to think in terms of nouns instead of verbs. In general you want to pay greater attention to the relationship between things, because that will give you a greater feel for the picture as a whole.

 

2)      Rushing to generalities and ignoring details

Immersing yourself in details will combat the generalizing tendencies of the brain and bring you closer to reality. Make sure, however, that you do not become lost in the details and lose sight of how they reflect the whole and fit into a larger idea.

 

3)      Confirming paradigms and ignoring anomalies

We routinely look for patterns that confirm the paradigms we already believe in. we must turn ourselves into a detective and deliberately uncover and look at the very anomalies that people tend to disregard.

 

4)      Fixating on what is present, ignoring what is absent

The ability to alter our perspective is a function of our imagination. We have to learn how to imagine more possibilities than we generally consider, being as loose and radical with this process as we can. This pertains as much to inventors and businesspeople as it does to artists.

 

As you work to free up your mind and give it the power to alter its perspective, remember the following: the emotions we experience at any time have an inordinate influence on how we perceive the world. So, if you are experiencing a lot of resistance and setbacks in your work, try to see this as in fact something that is quite positive and productive. These difficulties will make you tougher and more aware of the flaws you need to correct. In physical exercise, resistance is a way to make the body stronger, and it is the same with the mind.

 

E) Revert to Primal forms of Intelligence

 

While language is a good thing, it has made us lose our connection to the senses – sight, smell, touch – that once played such a vital role in our intelligence. If there are no words for certain concepts, we tend to not think of them. And so language is a tool that is often too tight and constricting, compared to the multi-layered powers of intelligence we naturally possess.

 

“The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be voluntarily reproduced and combined.” – Albert Einstein.

 

As opposed to words, which can be impersonal and rigid, a visualization is something we create, something that serves our particular needs of the moment and can represent an idea in a way that is more fluid and real than simply words. The use of images, diagrams, and models can help reveal to you patterns in your thinking and new directions you can take that you would find hard to imagine exclusively in words. To Leonardo da Vinci, drawing and thinking were synonymous.

 

The German writer, Friedrich Schiller, had a drawer full of rotten apples in the desk from which he worked. He found the stench delightful and he found that he did his most creative work while inhaling the fumes. When doing his deepest thinking about the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein liked to hold on to a rubber ball that he would periodically squeeze in tandem with the straining of his mind. Writer Samuel Johnson had a cat and a slice of orange on his desk whenever he worked. These sensual cues stimulated him for his work.

 

These aids to the creative process are related to the phenomenon of synaesthesia – stimulation of one sense provokes another. What this means is that this smell/ touch gets them ready to alternate ways of thinking, creating and sensing the world. They allow themselves a broader range of sense experience.

 

Step 3. The Creative Breakthrough – Tension and Insight

 

The feeling that we have endless time to complete our work has an insidious and debilitating effect on our minds. Our attention and thoughts become diffused. Faced with the slenderest amount of time to reach the end, the mind rises to the level you require. If you don’t have such deadlines, manufacture them for yourself.

 

Emotional Pitfalls

 

The 6 common pitfalls when we arrive at the Creative-Active phase in our career are:

 

1)      Complacency (constantly remind yourself of how little you know)

2)      Conservatism (make creativity rather than comfort your goal)

3)      Dependency (don’t look for approval – develop internal standards and a high degree of independence)

4)      Impatience (don’t hurry to the end or warm up old ideas – enjoy rigorous practice, push past your limits and resist the easy way out)

5)      Grandiosity (work must motivate you not praise – don’t allow ego to inflate)

6)      Inflexibility (be naïve and optimistic of your capability while you keep doubting your achievements and subject it to self-criticism)

How to make Resolutions that you can keep

The book you resolved to complete or the 10 kgs you promised to lose in 2014 didn't happen. So, you just shifted them on to 2015. Did you take a moment to understand why the well-made plans went astray? Simple. Your brain considered this a huge challenge, you get overwhelmed and gradually, you lost hope, focus and track. There is a simple way out of this.

1) Make resolutions you can achieve quickly. Rather than resolving to lose 10 kgs in one year, make a resolution to exercise for at least 30 minutes everyday.

2) Focus on one thing at a time till it becomes a habit. Instead of deciding to remove all junk food from your diet, resolve to remove fizzy sugary drinks in January, then add potato wafers in February and build it up.

3) Focus on things within your circle of influence. Do not aim to get your book published this year. Instead, resolve to write/edit 1000 words everyday to complete the book or to pitch the book to 20 different publishers by the end of the year.

4) Break up tasks to know what to do when. Continuing the above examples, the resolution would now be to write 1000 words in the WIP every day and not a blanket resolution that just states complete the book.

Just before the new year dawned, I decided to do something different and decided to sketch out my resolutions for 2015.

The illustration did get me super-motivated but I realised it didn't have any crystal clear actions to follow. After this, I jumped into the January Jumpstart Challenge at www.sparkpeople,com for health and fitness, joined up My 500 Words #my500words to get me to write a fresh batch of 500 words every day and resolved to edit at least 3000 words of my first draft every week.

Suddenly, things cleared up and it was super easy to follow up. I was making progress and it made me feel that I have achieved something every single day. Believe me, there cannot be a better motivator than that. So, what are your resolutions for 2015? What are your plans on achieving them?

Regimenting Life Again

Results = Regimentation + Repetition + Ritualization

- Amir Siddiqui (Check him out on FB https://www.facebook.com/amirofthebody/posts/816216408438322?fref=nf&pnref=story )

While he was talking about training in the gym, isn't the same true for training in writing too? To see any results in writing, we need to have to regiment our day, repeat it everyday and have a ritual that spurs us on to write. Read http://www.copyblogger.com/writing-rituals/ to know more about some popular writing rituals.

"Rituals that bring us together and that help us map out the patterns of our days are far more vital than you’d think. Without mundane time-milestones like breakfast, lunch, dinner, weekends, a yearly vacation, and a periodic raise, we can go crazy. Those who suffer from structure deprivation fill the emptiness of chaotic hours with alcohol, gambling, compulsive shopping, compulsive eating, and even with compulsive picking at every micro-hillock of skin their restless fingers can find and try to pry loose." --- Howard Bloom

I hated being regimented during my childhood. My mother had these strict hours she followed (and made us follow) everyday for meals and sleep. Our study time and TV time were fixed and unchangeable. This bled into the weekends too. While we fought and argued about it with her many times, it did bring in big results in my life and my brother's too. For starters, we were toppers in school and college all through our life. We were healthy and happy. We had various family rituals of togetherness, festival rituals and vacation rituals which are a part of our most cherished memories now. As the years sped by, these rituals became habits and they remained so till we got married.

Suddenly, we were no longer in the military rule. We were completely free. We could sleep in the entire day, have a bath at any odd hour, no one will ask us to switch off the television, we can order in any day, any time we like and we could eat anywhere (even on our bed) at anytime we please. Since my brother and I are self employed, this also means we can goof off as no one monitors the hours we work. This seemed like the ultimate bliss. I did live by this laissez-faire approach for a few years till I realised babies thrive on routine. Either you create a routine for them or else they would create one that might not be so pleasant for you. Rituals and routines came back into my life but were never regimented like before. If they had been, then my writing would have been on another plane now.

I sorely miss the order and routine my mother had got into my life. My brother and I had such perfect habits as children. We woke up at the same time every day, we watched half an hour of television at the same time every day, we studied for the same number of hours at the same time every day irrespective of whether we had exams the next day or not and we went to bed at the same time too. (We got an extra hour on weekends!)

I think it is time I regimented my life again. The last experiment I had tried was to write every day, at least a 100 words, in the current fiction project on hand and I have been successfully pulling it off for the last few months. The mental peace and emotional satisfaction from this achievement have been awesome. Now, the next challenge is to take it further. I'm planning to have a daily routine and structure, that will be followed with strict discipline, for all those mundane every day activities like sleep, meals, etc. so that my time can give way for those life-changing dreams like writing, a fit body and knowledge. I'll keep you all updated on how it goes.

Meanwhile, do you have daily routines, writing rituals, etc.? Share them here to inspire me.

Lessons learnt from Nanowrimo - Wordcount Obsession

 

‘What is this obsession with wordcount? Does wordcount count?’ I have wondered many times. Did Shakespeare think of it? Did Doris Lessing count her words every day? Does Jhumpa Lahiri do it? Is NaNoWriMo actually making a big difference in the lives of innumerable writers? Are we sacrificing quality for quantity? With all these questions haunting my mind, I picked up ‘Ernest Hemingway on Writing’ yesterday. It has a place right in the front of my bookshelf because I pick it up often, open any page randomly for a dose of inspiration. You can compare this to taking a cowboy taking a swig out of the whisky flask just before he kicks off on his horse. This time, I got this…

“I loved to write very much and was never happier than doing it. Charlie’s (Scribner’s) ridiculing of my daily word count was because he did not understand me or writing especially well nor could know how happy one felt to have put down properly 422 words as you wanted them to be. And days of 1200 or 2700 were something that made you happier than you could believe. Since I found that 400 to 600 well done was a pace I could hold much better was always happy with that number. But if I only had 320 I felt good.”

-          Ernest Hemingway

Then the prolific Stephen King says in his book ‘Stephen King on Writing’,

“I like to get 10 pages a day – amounts to 2000 words – only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2000 words.”

Suddenly it struck me that R.K.Narayan also says in his book ‘My Days’ that he sticks to 1000 words a day every day. Nanowrimo asks for just 1667 words a day. It’s just that we have days when we skip it, laze it and then end up doing 5000 – 10000 words to catch up. When we skip these goals in our everyday life, there is no Nanowrimo to hold us accountable. We should have a Nanowrimo every month.

Writing is a lonely profession with no fixed salaries, recognition or instant credit. It is easy for one to lose focus on the way and go astray. It is easy to grow lazy and hard to overcome the tedium. Every November, a jolt hits us, shakes us up, gets us writing and reaffirms our faith in ourselves. Even today, I had to force myself to say ‘no’ to an outing with friends. Writing needs to shift from my back seat to my front seat. In fact, I think I should allow it into the driver’s seat and take my life in the direction that it should actually be going.

“If you have the opportunity to live an extraordinary life, you have no right to keep it to yourself”

-          Jacques Cousteau

December has now dawned on us – the month of revisions and editing. I wonder what the new year is to bring and I pray and hope that it is writing, writing and more writing with a bit of publishing (*fingers crossed) thrown in.