Friday Done List July 3

While I am well aware the world isn't waiting with bated breath for my done lists, they are very helpful for me. In fact, after around 5 weeks of aiding a family member, two weekends of my own upper-respiratory illness, a houseguest for three nights, prepping for a John the Baptist Day gathering for 17 people, and a 48-hour trip that involved visiting a couple of historical sites, two woods walks and a quick visit to a dam, as well as a stop at a garden and arboretum, I am having trouble wrapping my head around what I want to be doing. 

A done list should help a great deal with that.

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

• At least two of the five blog posts I've done since mid-May should become essays I'll be submitting or publishing somewhere else.
• I did write and submit an essay that was published at Books Are Our Superpower.
• I submitted three pieces of flash fiction to a site that accepted up to three pieces per submission. They were all rejected within days. Such efficiency!
• I created something called a junk journal that has cleaned up my desk and may have organized my life some.
• I did a lot on my Market Research Spreadsheet that I'm using to keep track of journals I've checked out, whether I'm interested in submitting to them or not. Knowing you shouldn't be submitting to a publication is useful information. The spreadsheet has a place for planning and for keeping track of submissions. And rejections, too, of course. 
• I requested a just published history galley from NetGalley. They rejected me. So I requested a different book today! Also, I looked at my NetGalley profile. The information about where I share material about my reading had disappeared. Fixing that might improve my chances for being selected as a gallery reader.
• I finished revising a chapter of one of my unpublished books into a short story and just submitted that.
• I've started a couple of essays for a series I'm planning to publish directly to Medium without submitting to publications. More about that another time.

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

• I'm in the early stages of planning a big website and work revision. I've looked around at some writer websites as research.

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

• I have a page long list of agents in my junk journal that I am slowly going through to see if any are appropriate for me to submit my adult books to. So far, not many. 

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

• I started reading a book dealing with a historical element relating to my novel idea. The book is not very good.
• This past week's historical visits on our mini-vaca were all about the 19th century novel idea.

The Reading History Project: "Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed History of America" by Michael Harriot

In Thinking About History Sara Maza writes that "The skills and temperaments of good research historians are very similar to those of successful journalists: curiosity, ingenuity, patience, and doggedness. And like journalists, good historians know how to put a story together and make it understandable to a wide range of readers." The similarities between historians and journalists may explain why Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed History of America by journalist Michael Harriot is so good.

This marvelous book is more than an account of traditional American history from a Black perspective, which is what I expected when I bought it. It covers a lot of material I didn't know about. Additionally, Harriot's position is that the history of America is the history of racism, a premise I haven't read about before. He does a good job of supporting his argument.

For instance, his contention is that Africans made the plantation system work not just with their labor but with their knowledge. In the Carolinas, Africans had the knowledge and ability to grow rice, what Harriot calls "America's first edible cash crop." He writes of the ineptitude of the original British settlers at Jamestown, saying the colony was saved because of the arrival of slaves. 

In case you haven't heard anything like this before and are wondering if this guy is really talking about whitewashing or just doesn't know history, culinary historian Michael Twitty writes of Africans being brought to America to grow rice in The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South. In The Story of America: Essays on Origins historian Jill Lepore says of Jamestown, "They brought the wrong kind of settlers: idle and indolent English gentlemen, who spent their time bowling in the streets." Harriot is also not the first to have written that Lincoln was primarily interested in preserving the Union, not freeing the slaves and that Franklin Roosevelt did nothing for Blacks. He's not the only writer who doesn't have a lot of positive things to say about Woodrow Wilson, either. 

So, yes, Harriot has read some history. 

I appreciated Harriot's covering the history of political parties in this country, something I've never been clear on, and describing how the Federalist and Democrat-Republicans evolved into the parties we know now. And how racial attitudes passed back and forth between them.

He also makes clear the incredible openness of the violent racism during the Jim Crow era. I missed learning much about the Jim Crow period in my schooling, and I've taken a few history courses in my day. That's something to consider when talking about the teaching of "our history." How much of "our," meaning everyone in the country's, history are we exposed to?

But don't think that Black AF History is just the heaping on of one grim event after another. Though, it kind of is. It is also entertaining. Harriot brings in some memoirish elements to introduce sections, describing his family. Uncle Rob, who appears a few times to take over the narrative, is a standout. "Racist Baby" also appears a number of times, interacting with Harriot's narrative voice so Harriot can provide the little one with some info that his racist parents most certainly will not. 

Harriot's enthusiasm for Black historical figures who have been lost to the general public is, well, touching or heart-warming, not terms I would expect to use regarding a history book. He particularly embraces Black women from the past. I swear I had heard of Ida B. Wells. I just hadn't heard enough.

To wrap this up, I will say that Black AF History is a great combination of content and presentation.

The Story Behind the Story: More Than a Revision

I have been making an effort to reuse blog material in other ways--primarily revising blog posts about books for essays appropriate to submit to a Medium publication. Usually this involves the essay becoming a more sophisticated version or being developed around a different angle. But I recently wrote about Make Believe by Mac Barnett in two very different ways, once here at Original Content and then at Books Are Our Superpower. 

Here at OC, I wrote about hyperbole and what it had to do with the Make Believe blow-up last month. This was part of a recurring feature here on humor writing.

At BAOS, I did more of what I'd call a reader response. This was inspired as I was reading the book when I found that while I couldn't get into the outrage it caused, I also couldn't embrace it the way reviewers and many of the posters I saw on BlueSky were. I found Make Believe to be neither as bad nor as good as others did.

In both cases, I thought I had something new to say about Make Believe, things I hadn't seen before. 

Jane Yolen's On-line Journal: An Appreciation

Jess Bailey on Unsplash

Recently I noticed that I hadn't seen anything from Jane Yolen on Facebook in quite some time. Long enough to realize that that wasn't a good thing. So I wasn't surprised when her family announced that she died yesterday. The news made People Magazine, because she was, is, and will continue to be Jane Yolen, but the Locus obituary is much better.

Once upon a time, Jane Yolen kept an on-line journal. It hasn't been available for a while now, so you'll have to take my word for it that it once existed. At the end of July, 2004 I first wrote here about it. 

"I've noticed that Jane Yolen has started an on-line journal. It doesn't seem to be a traditional blog, but a traditional journal maintained on-line. I admire what she's doing, but I don't know if I'll be reading it much because...she does too much work. Her work habits are far better than mine, and I don't want to keep reminding myself.

On the other hand, maybe this is just what I need."

In just a couple of days, I was hooked.

"I believe I owe this surge of creativity and ambition to my personal writing coach, Jane Yolen. Though we have never met--though she, actually, has never even heard of me--her online journal with its descriptions of her superhuman work habits shames my "inner Jane" and makes her work harder.

Hey, Jane, there hasn't been an update in a couple of days. I'm going to crash and burn here if I don't hear from you soon."

 By September, I was obsessed. 

"My many, many, many fans know that I am somewhat obsessed with Jane Yolen's On-line Journal, mainly because Jane is a maniac for work and I, well, I'm not. I hoped that reading Jane's journal of her work life would inspire me to make a greater effort. If anything, it's made things worse. The time I should be spending working, I'm spending reading about Jane working."

I sometimes called her my "writing coach." I sometimes called her my "spiritual advisor." I sometimes called myself her "stalker." In 2005 I was worried about her husband's health. Over time, I was more than a little freaked out that in addition to, say, knocking off a few poems, receiving some rejections,  and meeting with her agent on the same day and having multiple books published in a year, she was able to have people over to eat or meet them at restaurants or go shopping and she was able to maintain a second home in another freaking country.

My obsession continued until the beginning of April, 2007. 

"I haven't been reading Jane Yolen's journal the way I used to. In the past, I found her impressive work ethic and output inspiring. Now reading about what she's doing just makes me feel like a layabout. A lazy, disorganized, self-centered, kept woman."

And then I went on for a couple of paragraphs about what I'd just read at Jane's journal about editing. 

Gail and Jane in the Real World

I did meet her briefly in the carbon-based world a few times.

 Soon after my first book was published in 1996, she gave a talk at the University of Connecticut, and I asked her a question about how she had managed writing when she had young children. She said she had two things going for her. 1. Her husband was a professor and was available to take on parenting tasks more frequently than other fathers might be. 2. She'd started publishing before she had children and thus thought of herself as a writer before she thought of herself as a mother.  She wasn't saying she put work first but that she didn't have to create a writer mindset or identity after she had created a mother mindset or identity. It was natural for her to fit her kids into her already established work life instead of having to fit work into an already established mother life. Believe me, I totally understood what she was saying. Being a mother while being a writer or being a writer while being a mother is still not natural for me. I got started in the wrong order.

I would see her at another event at the University of Massachusetts where I attended a program she was running. She began with an apology, because her husband was ill and she had been distracted when preparing her presentation. Then she proceeded to give what I felt was a fine college-level lecture, because that was what she was capable of when she wasn't at the top of her game.

Maybe sometime in the 2000s, the early teens, I actually shook her hand at some small gathering, again at UConn. I mentioned that we'd run into each other a couple of times over the years, and she looked at me intently and said something like, "I hope I was pleasant," which I thought was just lovely.

I am certain someone took a group picture of us at the end of that event. I know I had it, but I can't find it now or remember exactly when it was taken or why we were all where we were, which would help me to look for it. I am afraid I may have deleted it because I remember thinking it made my ass look big. I suspect Jane didn't give a damn about her ass, which left her with more time for all the things she did give a damn about.

I never read a great deal of Jane's work. It was Jane, herself, who drew me, the fact that she existed. In a nod to Michel de Montaigne, if you press me to say why I was obsessed with Jane Yolen, I can say no more than because she was she, and I, sadly, was only I.

The Reading History Project: History and Politics

In Writing the Trump Years Into History in The New Yorker (May 12), historian Jill Lepore writes about writing history. After calling upon Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (which I read as a teenager and now want to read again) and her experience writing These Truths: A History of the United States, she discusses the impact she's witnessed of recent executive orders and state laws on what history is taught in classrooms.

Unless you have a New Yorker subscription, you won't be able to read her article. So I'll give you a few high points. Lepore says:

"Make America Great Again" is a four-word argument about American history, and one of the movement's aims has always been to press the teaching and writing of American history into the service of that argument." Trump wishes "...to make American history great again by removing all evidence of anything that ever happened that wasn't so great..."

"In the Trump era, government censorship of American history has been used against not only classroom teachers but also against writers and publishers and librarians and booksellers..."

Gift shops at national parks and National Historic Sites are now supposed to review what they offer for sale for conforming to the "President's preferred account of American history."

Not so great things have happened in America. And everywhere else. Does pretending they didn't happen make it so? Will pretending these things didn't happen make life better now or in the future? 

History vs Politics

I've just started reading Lepore's The Story of America: Essays on Origins. In the Introduction (I read introductions these days) she says she wrote these essays "because I wanted to try to explain how history works, and how it's different from politics." They are both interested in stories about the past, but

"Politics is a story about the relationship between the past and the future; history is a story about the relationships between the past and the present."

"Politics is accountable to opinion; history is accountable to evidence."

But more on The Story of America after I've read beyond the Introduction. 

In the meantime, in Lepore's article Writing the Trump Years Into History she writes about how difficult it is to write historically about the very recent past, because you can't get much perspective on it. And writing a history of our recent past is complicated by what you might call the legal restrictions being placed on history. She brings up the issue of books purchased by Florida public schools, libraries, and universities requiring stickers that indicate the federal name for "Gulf of Mexico" is "Gulf of America," though the term "Gulf of Mexico" first appears in documents from the sixteenth century. 

Does the whole "Gulf of America" thing mean that governments today can change history? Yes, it's only a name, but it's a name that's been in use for four hundred years. 

"...sometimes," Lepore says, "the only thing to do is to fight. And the only way I know how to fight is to write."

Is Reading History a Political Act?

I am going to argue that those of us who don't write can also fight the political takeover of history. We can do it by reading.

No, don't just say "Those executive orders about history are ... " whatever outrageous term comes to mind. Don't just complain. Don't just make jokes about the President sleeping through history class. Jokes aren't doing anything these days.

You know what does do something? Educating ourselves.

Read history. Any history. Any group's history. Just by reading it, you're helping to preserve it. Support the historians you read by buying their work or by asking libraries for it or by reviewing it on-line. Spread your new-found knowledge any way you can.

My somewhat shallow knowledge of history suggests to me that someday we will come out the other side of what's happening now. Groups don't stay in power forever, and the kinds of groups in power now have not held on for long periods in the past. 

We are not powerless. We can retain historical knowledge for the future. Perhaps that is a political act.

Getting Serious About Humor: Hyperbole, the Risky Literary Device

Timmossholder on Unsplash

 "I have a nagging fear that children's literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole...maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids' books are crud." Mac Barnett, National Ambassador for Young People's Literature in Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children

If you are unfamiliar with what I think someone called crudgate earlier this month, congratulations! While you missed out on some serious discussions of how the above quote passed around on social media offended writers some of whom feared its impact on children's literature, you also missed out on seeing the following types of personal responses directed toward the author who wrote it: 

• I never cared for the guy.
• He's a snob. (Unclear why. Maybe because he namedrops people like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Saunders in his book?)
• What a dick. (I saw more than one dick-related comment.)
• It's mainly white women defending him. 
• He is not part of our community.  (I saw a number of community-type comments and couldn't help reading the word "community" as "club." Now I will always wonder how a community is different from a club.)
• He should resign. He should be impeached. 
• Asshole.
• His publisher should pull his book. (The person who said this on an email digest also said she discussed with a librarian having a copy of Make Believe pulled from circulation. The librarian had to point out that that would be censorship.)

This was all coming very soon after Make Believe, a short book made up of three rambling, somewhat didactic essays romanticizing children and children's literature, was released in this country. Many of the people making these comments said they hadn't read it. Many said they wouldn't read it. 

In a statement to School Library Journal, Barnett said the following: 

"Thank you for the opportunity to respond. First of all, I want to acknowledge the passage I wrote is hurtful, especially to people who work hard making books for kids. I understand why people are upset and feel betrayed. In trying to make a point, I got hyperbolic and glib. I was wrong. I'm truly sorry."

Spoiler alert: Many people did not accept that apology and the controversy raged on. It is still raging on. People may write books about this someday. I would watch the movie.

But you know what? In all that was said about this issue, I didn't see anything about hyperbole, even though it comes up in Barnett's apology and is the literary device that got this ball rolling. So let's fix that. 

Let's talk hyperbole. 

Definition

Definitions are a clichéd addition to an essay, but here we go, anyway.

Hyperbole--The use of exaggeration, which the author does not expect to be believed, to create an effect, often involving humor. Gauthier Law of Hyperbole

When hyperbole is used for comedy, it is related to the incongruity theory of humor, which states that the clash of unrelated ideas is funny. What is exaggerated clashes with something, if only what it is exaggerating. Aristotle is supposed to have recognized incongruity as a type of humor. Corollary to the Gauthier Law of Hyperbole

I mention Aristotle in the corollary not to namedrop, since I haven't read him, myself, but to point out that I'm not making this crud up. Aristotle did. Blame him.

Personal Experience

Yes, personal experience is another cliché of essays these days, but that's not stopping me.

Back before 2008, when I still had a nice little mid-list, middle grade author thing going, a Booklist reviewer said of my book, A Year with Butch and Spike, "Gauthier demonstrates a real talent here for humorous hyperbole and episodic classroom comedy."

They made hyperbole sound like a good thing. At least, I thought so at the time.

Maybe thirty years later, I wrote a very hyperbolic piece called What We All Want to Say to That One Out-of-Touch Grandfather at the Playground that was published at Frazzled, a parent humor site on the Medium platform. The humor was developed around the idea that older men spent much of their adult lives in work situations that did not prepare them for the rigors of taking their grandchildren to the playground. Among the personal responses directed toward me in response to it:

• I was a bigoted anti-male feminist and should mind my "f***ing business." I believe this was the first comment I got.
• I was a sanctimonious shit sack.
• I sounded like an ass.
• I was smug, dumb, superior. 

It went on for days!

Hyperbole is risky. 

Barnett Also Has a History with Hyperbole

I've seen Mac Barnett described on BlueSky by fans of Make Believe as being funny or at least wry, which is like funny but tends to be more of an attitude. It's a form of humor that applies a twist to something for a subtle, comic effect. Having now read a few of his picture books and a middle grade novel he co-wrote with Jory John (I hadn't heard of Barnett before all this started), I would place him in the wry category.

The picture books were lost on me, but I am not a picture book person and can't address them in any meaningful way. Or at all. The middle grade novel, however, The Terrible Two, is definitely hyperbolic, filled with stuff about kids pulling over-the-top and unbelievable pranks. Reviewers found it funny and it was successful enough to lead to a sequel.

At that point, Barnett may have thought, like me in my middle-grade writer days, that hyperbole is a good thing.

The Major Problem with Hyperbole

Hyperbole is a form of situational humor. It is not your classic one-liner, which, by the way, would probably work very well as a pull quote. Instead, hyperbole comes out of a situation. You have to understand the situation--what is being exaggerated--to understand the exaggeration.

Sometimes what is being exaggerated will be understood by the audience because of the audience members' cultural knowledge. For instance, in The Terrible Two Barnett and Jory could assume their audience would understand the hyperbole behind an elementary school principal finding his car on the steps in front of the school, because child readers know that kids don't drive and wouldn't be able to get a car up steps, if they could. (The authors explain how it was done at the end of the story.)

But sometimes the exaggeration used with hyperbole requires a lot more build-up, which was the case with "I have a nagging fear that children's literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole...maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids' books are crud." That line got a lot of build-up in the book, but not in the pull quote. What's more, not only does the pull quote not include the build-up, it eliminated a section that would have tipped readers off that there was missing build-up.

What Barnett actually said was not

"I have a nagging fear that children's literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole...maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids' books are crud."

but 

"I have a nagging fear that children's literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole. So I now offer Barnett's Addendum to Sturgeon's Law: Maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids' books are crud."

This is still not funny as a pull quote. Readers still won't get the hyperbole Barnett was trying for. But they would have realized something was going on here. If they hadn't heard of it, they would have wondered what the hell is Sturgeon's Law?

What the Hell is Sturgeon's Law?

Anyone who read Make Believe would have had access to the page before the one the pull quote appears on. On it was an account of how science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon dealt with complaints about the quality of his genre back in the 1950s. Among the complaints? "...ninety percent of sf is crud." Sturgeon's response, "Ninety percent of everything is crud." 

That became Sturgeon's Law. It is so well-known in some circles that you can find it on memes and t-shirts. Usually on t-shirts "crud" is replaced with "crap."

After addressing Sturgeon's Law, Barnett begins his very next paragraph with a transitional sentence. "It's tempting, when explaining the abundance of bad kids' books, to just shout "Sturgeon's Law!" and move on." 

And then he goes on to what became the now infamous pull quote.

A Sort-of-Joke That Didn't Land

Some people who knew Barnett was referring to Sturgeon's Law questioned where Sturgeon got his ninety percent figure when he said "Ninety percent of everything is crud." Where's his evidence? I can't speak for the man, of course, but my wild guess is he was using hyperbole. 

Other readers wondered why, if Barnett was referring to Sturgeon's Law, he said ninety-four percent of children's lit is crud when Sturgeon said only ninety percent of everything is crud. Upping the number looks like hyperbole to me. More exaggeration. If ninety percent of everything is crud is funny, ninety-four percent will be even funnier!

Does knowing the build-up for this hyperbole now make this quote a knee-slapper? No. The best this was ever going to be was wry. It appears in an essay that argues that "lots of children's books are bad..." and ends with "...we'd better do our best to make some good kids' books." The twist on Sturgeon's Law may have been an attempt to lighten that message. Instead, it made it worse.

Hyperbole is Risky

Both Barnett and I had better luck using hyperbole in writing for children than for adults. Does that mean that children enjoy hyperbole and adults don't? Or do the adults who control every aspect of what children read (see Barnett on this) believe they do, so it gets into children's books and is well received  by the adults who review them no matter what kids think of it? 

Unlike child readers, adults do control every aspect of what we read. Additionally, we get to respond to what we read in a more direct way, on social media and in comments. As noted above, not all adults responded well to our use of hyperbole in writing for them.

For me, that didn't matter a whole lot. The main purpose of a humor piece is to be a humor piece. If there is some underlying idea being conveyed, it’s secondary to the humor, it supports the humor. Readers don't spend a lot of time on humor, whether they like it or not. "Ha-ha" or "boo," and then they move on.

For Barnett, his use of hyperbole mattered. The main purpose of an expository or persuasive essay is to explain or persuade, to make a point, as Barnett said himself in his apology, and not to be funny. If there’s humor, it’s secondary to the point, it supports the point. In an essay, everything needs to support the point.

I, myself, dropped the line "And they say serious literary criticism is dead!" in this essay that I originally used after the list of types of comments I saw Barnett receiving. I decided it didn't support what I wanted to be a meditation on hyperbole. The literary criticism line was about how we address those we don't agree with, and that's a totally different thing. Stay on task, Gail! 

Whether or not Barnett should have used Sturgeon's Law in his essay depends on what he was trying to do with it, how it supported the point he was trying to make. If he'd dropped it before publication, his argument that "lots of children's books are bad" might not have raised the same kind of ire that "94.7 percent of kids' books are crud" did. 

It probably wouldn't have made as attention-grabbing a pull-quote, either. 

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!