Chicago Writers Association Conference

The Chicago Writers Association Conference was last weekend.  I was my first writer's conference, so it was pretty exciting.  The things I learned will probably take a few weeks to explore, so today I'd like to tell you about the most immediately beneficial parts, which are the meditation and mindfulness practices of Kelly Harms.  Here are some things that I found helpful.

1. "Deep work" is when you get in the flow of writing and it's all pouring out of you.  This is opposed to to trudging through the writing bog for hours and hours.  You can get the same amount of work done in a shorter amount of time if you do deep work.

2. The way to get into deep work is to separate it off from your other activities.  It's the "don't half-ass two things.  Whole-ass one thing" idea.  If you sit down to write, but you're still thinking about your day job or your e-mails or you kid or whatever, that distracts.  So start writing time with a beginning ritual like meditating.

3. My beginning ritual (I made it up.  It works for me) is that I lie down (if I'm at home) or sit in lotus pose in my chair (if I'm at the library) and listen to five minutes of rain sounds through my headphones.  While listening to that, I imagine that the sound is the sound of all the tension in my muscles and the distractions in my head pouring off me.  I go through my major muscle groups and release the tension I'm holding.  I let go of any thoughts that crop up other than the sounds of the rain, my breath, and whatever muscle group I'm relaxing.  Then, when I'm all nice and emptied out, I imagine that the rain is gold--the color of creativity (your rain might look different)--and it's filling up all the hollows in my body emptied out when I let all the tension drain out of me.  And then five minutes is up and I'm get some really solid writing done.  It's a little counter-intuitive to spend the first five minutes of your limited time not working, but when I only have an hour to work, taking five minutes to get in the zone means I get more done in those remaining 55 minutes than I usually do in a couple of hours.

4.  It's important to tell your body how much time you're going to write and then stick to it.  If you tell your body that you're going to write for two hours, and after a half-hour you get interrupted, your body stops trusting that you're going to have time to write.  I talked to Kelly Harms about this after her talk, because most days my free time is during nap time, and who knows how long that'll last.  Her advice was to err on the shorter side.  Tell your body you're going to work for half an hour and then do it and feel good about yourself.  If he's still asleep when you're done, you can work longer, but don't promise anything.

This is really working for me.  A lot.