Seeking Time: A Sort of Hiatus for Original Content

I'll be cutting back on blogging for probably the next six weeks while I help out a couple of family members. I have two blog posts in progress that I want to finish up and publish, because they are somewhat timely, and this cut back may lead to a Seeking Time post this summer, because what doesn't lead to a Seeking Time post? 

For the immediate future, though, I want to use what work time I have for nonblogging activity.

Looking forward to beginning here again.

The Reading History Project: What Are We Doing for Mother's Day? Mothers as Activists!

Mother's Day, in my humble opinion, can be fun if you have young children. Otherwise:

1. It's an opportunity for a lot of marketing.
2. It causes stress for moms over whether or not their kids will remember to observe the day for them and stress for kids, adult ones, anyway, over what they should do to observe it for mom.
3. It's a grieving time for many people who have lost their mothers or are in the process of doing so.
4. It's one more reminder for mothers who have lost children of what is gone from their lives. 

For some people, Mother's Day doesn't have a lot to recommend it.

The History of Mother's Day

Yesterday historian Heather Cox Richardson tipped her readers off to the fact that the originators of Mother's Day were interested in something else. She's supported by The History of Mother's Day: From Global Peace to Greeting Cards at The Smithsonian American Women's History Museum.

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, responding to the American Civil War that had ended just a few years earlier and the Franco-Prussian War that was then being fought in Europe, tried to create an annual Mother's Day for peace. In the early twentieth century Anna Jarvis was successful in creating Mother's Day to honor her mother, Ann Jarvis, who just happened to have been involved with a mid-nineteenth century public health movement. She organized Mother's Work Days to, among other hygiene-related activities, collect trash. 

Mother's Day came out of reform movements.

Bringing Mother's Day Back to Activism?

Though a number of states allowed women to vote in local school elections in the nineteenth century, they couldn't vote on the national level. They had to find a different way to have a voice and did so by becoming involved with reform movements, the most prominent being abolition, suffrage, and temperance. 

I'm sort of over Mother's Day, myself. I feel it's a young woman's game. But this idea of Mother's Day and reform or activism brings a whole new level of interest for me. 

From now on, I actually will be thinking about doing something for Mother's Day. It may not be with any kids, though.

 

Seeking Time: The Unit System

Very early in my seeking time journey someone told me about an article in Poets & Writers by author Ellen Sussman in which she described something she called the unit system. 

She said she worked for 45 minutes of an hour, then spent 15minutes doing something that wasn't work-related. Then she'd go back to work for another 45 minutes. And repeat. The benefits, she said, were: 

1. During the 45 minutes that she worked, it was easier to stay on task when she knew she'd have a break in another X minutes
2. During those 15 minutes that she wasn't working, her "unconscious thought" could often continue working on a writing problem, which was helpful when she went back to work.

She had some science to support this work, research related to graduate students managing time for writing. 

Again, all you did was work for 45 minutes, break for 15 and then begin writing again for another 45 minutes. Later I would realize I am a minimalist. I love how minimal this work method is.

Like the Unit System

Over the years, I kept stumbling upon articles supporting working in what might be described as sprints or short units of time, like Sussman's plan.

• A study suggested recognizing "that you have a finite attentional window––and structure your workflow to be congruent with that capacity. This speaks to how we’ve talked about how work is a series of sprints––and to be our most productive and most creative, we need to unplug throughout our workdays." 
• Tony Scwartz recommends working in 90-minute blocks because at the end of ninety minutes, "we reach the limits of our capacity to work at the highest level." Then we need to renew. At his blog, Schwartz referred to the work pattern he suggests--90 minutes of work, followed by a break--as "mental intervals." Like the unit system but different.
• The fairly well-known Pomodoro Technique recommends working in 25-minute units of time, taking a 5-minute break, then going back to work for 25 minutes. Like 45-minutes but different.

All the above involve simple strategies. 

The Value of Small Units of Time 

For years I used the unit system daily. I will admit, the 45-minutes on, 15-minutes off system has failed for me the last few years. I still embrace small work periods, though, even without following a work, break, work, break pattern, for two reasons.

First, the idea that we should work in 90-minute, 45-minute, or even 25-minute units means we have accepted that we can do something in small amounts of time. We don't need to have a summer to write. We don't need a formal retreat, a three-day weekend, a day.  

In The Heartbreaking Ingenuity of the Mother-Writer at Literary Hub Olivia Campbell quotes author Alison Stine:  

"You can't be precious about writing if you have kids. You can't be fastidious or fussy. You can't always write at the cool coffee shop. I applied for a NEA grant at Burger King: They had free wifi and an indoor children's playground...I wrote my most recent novel draft during my son's remote school Zoom meetings. My first novel, Road Out Of Water, I wrote at the local skatepark, where my son belonged to the skate club."

Stine recognized that she could adapt small units of time to use for writing. It's not unusual to read of mothers who write working like this.

Additionally, psychologist Kelly McGonigal has talked about the what-the-hell-effect, in which people give up on a project because they feel bad about their lack of success with it. As in "It's 2:30, and I haven't written yet. The day is shot. What the hell. I'll try again tomorrow." With the unit system, we don't have to feel bad about ourselves for not starting work yet, because we realize at 2:30 we have two and a half hours before dinner to work. Or we have an hour before the kids get home. Even a half an hour can be helpful.  

I like the psychological impact of the unit system. It isn't just a way of managing time. It's a way of thinking about it. The thinking aspect becomes part of our view of ourselves and how we work.

That's the part that's kept me using it and maybe even kept me writing.

 

Friday Done List May 8

 A good week. At least, it feels like a good week.

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• Truly worked on a humor piece.
• Finished a blog post that is going to become an essay.
• Worked on an essay for a project.
• Took a workshop on literary submissions in preparation for submitting a new short story.
• Finished reading an excellent history book for The Reading History Project.
• Started reading another history book for The Reading History Project.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Published a blog post. Will publish another this weekend.
• Promoted said blog post. 
• Spent way too much time reading on social media about Mac Barnett, whom I hadn't heard of this time last week.

Goal 3. Submit Book-length Work to Agents and Editors 

• Received a rejection. Rejection means you're working!

The Story Behind the Story: Minimum Word Counts

Frontier Myth vs. Frontier Reality was published this weekend at Books Are Our Superpower after a request for editing because the publication has an 800-word minimum for its essays. I believe the essay I sent was originally in the low 600s or 700s. It's up over 900 words now.

As far as short nonfiction is concerned, I've become a bit of a minimalist writer. I like the traditional essay in which writers begin with a thesis statement and describe the support they'll be discussing for it later on. 

My impression is that the Medium platform, itself, favors longer writing. (You may not be able to read all that article. You'll have to trust me.) Up over a thousand words and more, which, actually, isn't outrageously long. However, a lot of medium writers are new to writing, and they may not be that knowledgeable about how to put an essay together. They take their time getting to the point and the more words they use, the longer they take. 

I'm also a minimalist reader. I like writers to get to the point sooner rather than later.

The point I'm getting to here, is that in spite of my being a minimalist writer, I feel the revision I did because the publication asked for more words was better than what I originally sent them. Why is that, Gail? Well, in order to add words, I:

• Added details that supported the point of one of the paragraphs.
• Included a thread relating to "our history" that wasn't originally there.

I felt both those changes enhanced the essay. So what I'll try to do in the future is consider whether I've gone so short on the word count that I haven't included important material

Friday Done List May 1

I read an article about a woman who tracked every hour she spent writing for six months. What she found out was that a lot of the time she wasn't writing, she was doing writing-related activities. My first response was, Oh, no, I am never tracking my writing. That is asking for misery. But now I'm thinking, wait. There is a lot of writing adjacent work that writers need to do. No judgement!

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• An essay submission I'd made last week came back requesting edits. Essentially, it was too short. So I did a rewrite that increased the word count. I think the essay was actually better afterward.
• The essay above has been approved for publication.
• I finished two blog posts that I plan to revise to submit as essays.
• I set up some files for the essays I plan to write from blog posts.
• I took a workshop yesterday that wasn't what I was expecting. However, I came away with some thoughts regarding the short story I recently finished and made a couple of changes to it today.
• I did just the tiniest bit of work on some humor pieces.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• I published a blog post last Saturday, which I also promoted.
• I wrote and published another blog post, which I also promoted.
• Read an article about AI and another about marketing books, for what good that will do me.

Goal 4. Begin Some Writing on the 19th Century Novel Idea

• Made some notes on this.