At certain points in my life I tend to take long breaks from writing as it generally takes a good deal of time for me to get into the mood to pen something, anything, after a long day of work. I understand how you feel: the whole week seems to be filled with work; after your day job maybe you volunteer, go to classes or even have siblings or children to take care of. These responsibilities, even if minor, add up during the course of the week and you are left with, at best, mere hours a week to dedicate to hobbies. What I find unfortunate is serious writing takes effort. You must be in a creative state of mind, relaxed and focused all at the same time. For some of us this zen-like state is nearly impossible to get to late at night when all you want to do is go to sleep an hour early.
I have personally solved this problem in two steps. The first step is to always carry around something to write with. For me most of my creative ideas come when I least expect it. I may be zoning out on the train ride into the city, listening to a friend ramble on about their day during lunch, or even waking up in the middle of the night with a brilliant idea for a chapter or short story. The point is to always be able to jot these ideas down when they are fresh on your mind, in their most lucid form, because attempting to recall them later will be much harder than you may think! I suggest a cheap pocket-sized moleskin notebook that is available from Amazon or your local Barnes and Nobles store for under ten dollars. These notebooks tend to last being jostled around inside a jacket pocket, purse or sat on when in the back of your pants pocket.
The second suggestion I could give is to make a rule about writing. Every Wednesday, for example, add an appointment or notification on your phone to remind you to sit down and write for two hours. Be sure to add a reminder two hours before your writing period so that you can finish dinner, reading or studying. A notebook (or more likely, a computer) should be close at hand on this particular day, so be sure to choose a day when you are for sure most likely to be home from your other engagements.
A half hour before you are to write make sure you get yourself in the mood. Put in some relaxing music, distance yourself from any distractions like other people, television or instant messenger applications, and the most important piece to the equation – review the notes that you have been taking in your handy-dandy notebook. If they are related to a story that you are already working on be sure to refresh yourself with the previous couple of pages that you have written. Don’t get hung up on any spelling or grammar mistakes that you may have made, this is not the time to edit, but focus on the structure and layout of the story. A good editor will always go through your piece with a fine-toothed comb.
Remember that the most important thing is to enjoy what you are writing. Even though it helps to make writing a timed event, do not turn it into a chore, because it will that much harder to sit down at your computer desk and type away for hours. Get lost in what you are working on and enjoy the world that you are crafting. If you feel yourself getting bored with the story, do not be afraid to work on another chapter or entirely different story. Sometimes it helps to come back to a piece later to refine it.
I was reading a blog post today about how you’ll never become a full-time writer and even though I disagree, I find myself not enjoying the idea of needing to force myself to write hours on end in order to make a paycheck. For me writing is a hobby, it is something that I enjoy as it gives me a creative outlet, but I far more enjoy writing software as a day job. As the post points out many bloggers are “corporate suits” by day and “smartass bloggers” by night. Is this really a bad thing?
Sure you may have a small portion of yourself that wishes you could ditch your corporate job, sit at home all day and write opinion pieces for an online publication, but would you really be happy? For some of you that answer is a resounding yes, but for myself, the only way that I seem myself being able to be a full-time writer is if it were to be a novelist. As a blogger you are forced to have a shtick, either it being able to come up with witty one-liners for each and every post, be a complete and utter asshole to the point where people laugh at the obsurd shit that you put out, or be able to write a complete story that flows beautifully.
I am not a person that is consistant at any of those to be even considered an adequate candidate as a professional blogger. Of course I cannot say that I have ever tried doing so, but I think if that were my job I would end up falling back on writing software because that’s what I enjoy to do. For some people blogging (and writing in general) is a dream that may eventually become more than a hobby, but for others, it is something that we enjoy in addition to our daily work grind. If it becomes more than that then we may decide to go with the flow, because really, that is all we can ever do anyway, right?
In a lame attempt to actually promote my my lifelong dream of a project I have decided to write a few blog posts on how to become a better writer. I am not going to claim that I am an authority on writing, but somes kills that I have acquired over a very long career in amateur writing. As I go along I may incorporate my thoughts on some other blog posts as I completely believe in taking advice from people who are more informed on a particular subject matter than I am.
A Google search regarding reading and writing will bring up millions of search results that explain exactly what I am about to summarize – the more that you read the better of a writer you will become. The two cannot be separated from each other. A blog post on writetodone.com gives some suggestions on how to use reading to improve your writing skills. The first is quite obvious – develop a habit of reading and make sure to stick to it. If you are like me, a public transportation commuter, pick up the daily newspaper and read through all the articles that you can on your trip. If you happen to stroll by the cheap novels go find one that interests you and make a habit of reading a few chapters each day while on your subway grind.
The more that you read the more you will want to read, but make sure to choose something that interests you. One particular suggestion that is made in the aforementioned blog post is that you should read great writers. While I absolutely agree with this statement I do not believe it is a prerequisite to building a reading habit to foster a writing desire. Because I have been a reader most of my life there is rarely a book that I won’t at least attempt to read, but I have found that most of the “classics” bore me. I am not a person that is drawn to reading romance, drama or anything in between. I often find myself picking up young adult novels because of the interesting story aspect. When you are first embarking on this journey read what you believe will keep you interested. If you happen to stroll across some great novels at the book store, give them a whirl, you can often find them for about five dollars at Barnes and Nobles.
After spending a couple of months becoming a frequency reader you’ll quickly notice that your comprehension, vocabulary and reading speed have all dramatically improved. The fact of the matter is the more words that you take in the more you are likely to recall when you are writing. Please remember that Words Are Power. If you have a few minutes watch this short YouTube video with Morgan Freeman. When you are reading keep your mind open because inspiration for writing may come from the words in front of you as well as the life you’re walking to everyday.
If you want to help me out with my writing movement, whenever you write a blog post, story or newspaper article be sure to reference the #iamwriter, #iampoet and #iamreader hash tags on Twitter. The more writers, readers and poets we can inspire the better off the world will be.
If you are a frequent rider of the PATH system between New Jersey and New York City you may have noticed big brother communicating overhead reminding you that there is no eating or drinking on the PATH. I have been commuting into New York City for three years now and I absolutely understand their point – due to the high volume of people, even if every third person was eating a sandwich the amount of trash left all over the train would be amazing. But only the other day after I had read my complimentary Metro newspaper, dropped it into a puddle of who-the-hell-knows-what, I realized that there are absolutely no trash cans inside of any of the station terminals!
This was a moment I actually had to double take. I looked around the World Trade Center terminal searching for a trash can and I was only able to find some construction worker’s trash bin which should absolutely not need to be used to throw out newspaper. So I walked out of the terminal in search of a trash can on my normal commute on the Lexington avenue line. It was not until the corner of Broadway and Vesey had I actually found a trash can! That is roughly a quarter mile away from the terminal entrance! As you can clearly see below the distance from the World Trade Center, which is not even accurately depicted due to the ongoing construction, is quite surprising. You would think that someone, anyone, might have decided to stick a trash can on one of the busiest commuter walked areas in the city.
I understand the need to enforce physiologically the fact that you do not want trash inside of the terminals. But should you absolutely remove trash cans completely, even outside of the turn stiles before you even get inside of the terminal? Some people are standing around drinking (or eating) the remnants of their breakfast/lunch/dinner before they decide to step through the gates. Although, I have to say, it seems to be working – the PATH commute is by far the less smelly of any of the lines that I have to take. Just some food for thought.
I am a product of a sub-par New Jersey education system. The New Jersey State Education system is in shambles, barely having enough money to keep teachers on the payroll and nowhere near enough money to adequately fund the extracurricular activities that are actually interesting children enough to go out and learn on their own. Most of my days of high school I slept through, my memories of Spanish class included a milk chug contest and a phone call resulting in a mad rush to steal the exam questions off the teacher’s desk. The good memories usually involve my friends, skipping school to go hang out at the mall once I had a driver’s license, or skipping class to work on computers inside of the school’s computer science lab. When it came to education I was able to perfect the art of bullshit, but I did not learn the skills necessary to get myself into a good college.
I am also lucky, because I knew at a very young age what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I have been writing software since before I remember, tinkering with web pages and writing scripts since well before high school. I was crimping network cable to construct a make shift LAN-party to scrimmage before Counter-Strike (and later, Day of Defeat) tournaments. My final year of high school I went into vocational school for computer science, spending most of the time writing code for my Half-Life modification and extending some Quake code to gain an illegal advantage over some of the other guys that were in the technology class with me. Those were some good memories. But now, eight years later, after spending six years working towards a bachelor’s degree I can look back and say that I wish the K-12 education system had their shit together. I would have spent much less time re-learning trigonometry, college algebra, physics and chemistry.
What is the point of this rather long anecdotal account of my education history? I read every day about how “Governor Christie is destroying the education system by slashing education funds,” and each day I laugh, because the education system was already destroyed long before Christie made the attempt to balance their budgets. Teachers are pissed off, parents are pissed off and their kids are sitting around oblivious to it all. So the school goes and blames the governor for their budget problems, goes and balks at the union cutting the newbie teachers that actually give a shit about the students they are teaching. I have worked with education professionals, met some amazing teachers, been taught by a few of them, but those are far and few between. The sad fact is the vast majority of teachers are collecting a pay check, tired of their job, but do not have any other career to fall back on.
Unfortunately teachers are amongst the lowest paid professionals when they should be on the opposite end of the spectrum. These are the people molding (or at least put in charge of) the workers, thinkers, tinkerers, great minds, of the future, and we pay them pennies? As I said earlier I believe that the whole education system in New Jersey (and from what I can tell, most of the United States) is broken. We attempt to teach the masses the same exact way, not focusing on the kids’ skills where they excel the most at. A student’s education should be well rounded, but if they are better at mathematics (or a field which involves mathematics) make sure to focus their plan on math.
For those that are not interested in mathematics, literature or the sciences, we have carpentry, automotive, and other mechanical trades that can easily be taught at a young age. One thing that I credit my high school for making available the superb-focused (and amazing instructors) of automotive, carpentry and beautician programs at the choice of the student as an elective. I was lucky that the computer repair and general information technology programs were budding at the time that I went through. But this is exactly my point – we need to go back to the times where we have targeted programs for the interests of students, including apprenticeships, and certifications that actually mean something in the work place. I did not need to go to college, I was more than ready to take a full-time job working as a programmer at the age of eighteen, but in my industry a bachelors degree is a litmus test.
New Jersey, please make a real attempt to clean up your education system, and stop placing your budgetary blames solely on the shoulders of a man just attempting to balance the books. Because the last time I checked not only are we in debt, but we have the highest property taxes, the most toll roads, in the nation. Where is all the money going?