Writing Practice

photo credit: Whatsername?

I’ve been listening to Natalie Goldberg‘s Writing Down the Bones in the car recently, and I’m in love.

She often mentions the phrase “writing practice” when talking about daily journaling/writing/skill work/tying one’s self to the desk until blank pages have words on them. I’ve heard other writers also say that is important, so I decided I should finally figure this out.

Natalie has developed a routine for writing every single day. She has developed writing exercises to make this a productive time, and she set a goal to fill one 100 page notebook each month. Sounds like a good plan.

Being someone who wants to be a writer I took Natalie’s advice to heart. I dug up a spiral bound notebook I bought on sale last year when school started (it’s only 70 pages, but will have to do for this beginner) and I started writing every day. Well, by every day I mean one day here, and one day there. And by “writing” I mean filling pages with words about the things I’m confused about in life.

After a few weeks of uninspiring ranting, I gave up thinking this writing practice stuff Natalie talked about must only work for certain people. I would need a different formula because this was unfulfilling and didn’t spur creativity or energy.

But, I kept listening to Writing Down the Bones, and today the tiny lightbulb in my head went off.

Writing practice is more than a routine, a special notebook, energizing writing places and a quota. Its a chance to practice life.

For me, this means that instead of filling a backpack full of spiral bound notebooks with gibberish like, “Oh, I’m so confused. I think I should feel this way, but I’m not sure that I do. Poor me.” I can claim my feelings and inspiration by practicing life on the page. Instead of being frozen with fear about the change of a relationship, I can write about what my life will be like without that person. Instead of wasting pages worrying if I’m a decent business owner, I can practice writing about success and failure.

Natalie shares in one part of her book that she found an old notebook where she had tried on several occasions to write about her father’s death. Finally, after months of trying she was able to approach the subject in a manner that satisfied her. The striking fact is that her father is still alive and well today. She was practicing life on the page. She was simply doing writing practice.

New website for Alicia Farrell, LLC

I’m happy to announce that today I launched a new website for my freelance copywriting business! Check it out and let me know what you think!

Tags: Work

2009 Mid-year Review

We are halfway through 2009, what a great time to assess how we are doing with goals set for the year, or set new ones for the next six months.

For my personal life I didn’t set measurable goals, more thought of changes to make.

Things I’m proud of so far include:

• Organizing a craft space & office
• Exercising more
• Learning about setting healthy boundaries in relationships
• Finding creative & meaningful ways to socialize with women I admire (Grilled Cheese & Champagne dinners & Mrs. Farrell’s Ruckus)

Things I’d like to improve over the next 6 months:

• Rely on my day planner like its a religious text
• Practice yoga most days than not
• Practice creative writing everyday
• Program the coffee pot I received for Christmas from my mom
• Blog more frequently

I’m also doing a similar review about my freelance copywriting business at More Than Words.

Tags: goals

Roanoke Times Article about the Jarrett Lane Memorial Golf Tournament

Today the Roanoke Times published an article about the Jarrett Lane Memorial Fund, and the upcoming golf tournament that will support the fund. It’s a great article that touches on how we want to use the memorial fund to better the lives of youth in Giles County.

Golf event to raise money for Jarrett Lee Lane Memorial Fund
Saturday sees the first Jarrett Lane Memorial Golf Tournament held in honor of the student from Narrows.

When her children were little, Tracey Lane had to work overtime so she could afford to send them to 4-H camp and out-of-town sports and leadership programs. The single mom was determined to give her children a window into the world beyond their small Narrows town.

So when it came time to design the Jarrett Lee Lane Memorial Fund in honor of her son, killed in the April 16, 2007, shootings at Virginia Tech, she and her daughters decided to help other parents of needy but promising area youths to do the same.

The inaugural Jarrett Lane Memorial Golf Tournament will be held Saturday at Castle Rock Golf & Recreation in Pembroke to raise money for the fund.

Summer camps, sports and Boys State leadership programs played a huge role in shaping Jarrett Lane’s character. “I remember 4-H Camp especially, that was a key thing in the beginning that opened Jarrett’s eyes to the possibilities of life outside of our small town,” his sister Alicia Lane-Farrell said.

Lane, the valedictorian of his Narrows High School class, was less than a month away from earning his engineering degree when he and 31 other students and faculty members were killed.

He was known for his fun-loving and generous spirit, his intellectual curiosity and his willingness to play pick-up sports — any sport — any time, any place. He kept a variety of balls in the trunk of his car just in case an opportunity arose and, as a child, once dug holes in his mom’s back yard to practice golf putting. When she complained, he blamed the holes on the dog.

While two other scholarships have been established in his name — one by his Narrows class, the other by his Governor’s School class — the Jarrett Lee Lane Memorial Fund is operated by his family.

Lane’s friends from Narrows and Virginia Tech are expected to attend the event, along with his family. Nongolfers are encouraged to participate by playing Captain’s Choice style, allowing all team members to play off the best team shot.

Lane-Farrell views the event not only as a conduit for remembering her younger brother but also as a continuation of his legacy. “He only got to the 22-year mark, and now our goal is to keep his story alive so we can continue his legacy by helping others,” she said.

The registration fee for teams of four is $300 per team, and teams can register by calling the golf course before Friday at 626-7276. Cash prizes will be awarded to the winning team, and a cookout is expected to take place after the tournament about 1 p.m.

For more information on the memorial fund, e-mail Lane-Farrell at alicia@aliciafarrell .com or go to JarrettLane.us

Contributions to the fund may be mailed to: Jarrett Lane Memorial Fund, c/o Celco Federal Credit Union, P.O. Box 361, Narrows, VA 24124.

(Thanks to Beth Macy at the Roanoke Times who has done a wonderful job at sharing Jarrett’s story.)

Tags: Add new tag, jarrett

15 Books

I saw a friend post this on Facebook and thought it sounded like fun.

Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
2. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
3. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
4. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
5. Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
6. The Guernesy Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Anne Shaffer and Annie Barrows
7. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
8. Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott
9. Plan B by Anne Lamot
10. Ariel by Sylvia Plath
11. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
12. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
13. The Journals of Sylvia Plath
14. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
15. Self Reliance by Emerson

It’s funny to Anne Lamott & Sylvia Plath keep repeating. They’ve been my favorites over the past few years. Now it’s your turn. Leave your list in the comments, or a link to your blog.

Family Time (WARNING: CUTE PICS!!)

I traded big city buildings for big rolling mountains last week and went to visit my family in Narrows. Sometimes life gets a bit confusing and a girl just needs to go home and be with the people that have known her the longest.

It was a good trip full of family fun, gardening, writing and enjoying the beauty of mountains.

It rained nearly every day I was there, but we had one beautiful summery day and spent it playing in the pool with my nephew and nieces. Of course, this means you are about to be overwhelmed by their cuteness with a few pictures I took.

Kennedy

Kaydance

Landon

Kennedy

Kaydance

Fawntane and the girls

Fawntane & Kennedy

Kaydance

The girls watering flowers I planted

Landon asking me not to take his picture

Tags: Family

Overcoming Brain Fog

Yesterday I heard the end of All Things Considered, just in time to catch the You Must Read This segment. Author Jeffery Eugenides shared one of his writing secrets: how to overcome fog brain. I don’t know if you struggle with fog brain, but I battle it most days. And most days I give up and take a nap.

I found Eugenides words to be very inspiring, and wanted to share them here.  (Or if you would prefer to listen to the segment, visit You Must Read This.)

There’s a little thing I do when I can’t write: When I’m feeling sleepy, when my head is in a fog, I reach across my desk, digging under the piles of unanswered mail, to unearth my copy of Herzog by Saul Bellow. And then I open the book — anywhere— and read a paragraph.

It always works. Right away I’m restored to full alertness and clarity. Style, in literature, has gone out of style. People think it’s just ornament. But it’s not: The work that goes into a writer’s style, the choices that are taken, the cliches that are chucked, represent a refining of thought and feeling into their purest, most intelligent, most moral form.

Of course, there is a danger, with a great stylist, that the sentences will outclass what the sentences are about. Not with Bellow. Bellow gets the mix between form and content about as right as possible. His sentences pack maximum sensual, emotional and intellectual information into minimum space — all the while generating an involving, deeply moving story.

Published in 1964, Herzog is about a middle-aged college professor, in the midst of an emotional crisis, who begins writing letters: “He had fallen under a spell,” Bellow writes, “and was writing letters to everyone under the sun. . . . Hidden in the country, he wrote endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to people in public, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.” The book zooms off from there. Herzog goes from New York, to Martha’s Vineyard, to Chicago, to the Berkshires, penning his funny, serious, brilliant, self-lacerating, accusatory letters, each one acting like a new screen in a hypertext novel that opens an entirely different piece of his life: his immigrant childhood in Montreal; his indomitable ex-wife Madeleine; his numerous lady friends; his free-falling career, his pain at losing his daughter in divorce. Bellow, the supreme realist, discovered in Herzog a new form — the self-reflexive epistolary novel — without any of the obscurantism or self-preening of so-called “experimental” novels.

Herzog worried that his frantic letter-writing meant he was “out of [his] mind.” But, in the last 45 years, his predicament has become universal. Herzog’s life resembles the way we live now, where we’re forever sending off e-mail and texts, fielding cell phone calls: where we’re no longer any one place but everywhere — and nowhere — at once. Our life in shards, randomly returning.

The mark of a truly original work of art is that is gets truer the older it is.

The impulse here is to quote. Every single page of Herzog teems with jokes, apercus, deep-thinker riffs — little genius moves every other sentence. The impulse is to read the entire book out loud. But I’ve only got a minute here, time to make the pitch but not go nine innings.

So let me say this: If you’re in the market for a safe neuro-enhancer, something to break you out of your foggy-headedness, a pill more powerful than Adderall or Provigil, with no side effects other than pleasure, then pick up Herzog and open it — anywhere — and read.

Sylvia Plath has been my safe neuro-enhancer over the past few years. It never fails that when I’m feeling fog brained and lose sight of why I want to write I can pick up Ariel or her unabridged journals and instantly feel renewed.

Who or what gets you through those moments when you feel exhausted with everything in life?

70 pages a month

In “Writing Down the Bones”, Natalie Goldberg tells stories and gives tips from her life as a writer. She calls her daily writing “practice” and equates it to meditation and practicing Zen. Over and over she talks about her spiral bound notebooks. Years ago she made a commitment to herself to fill a 70 page spiral bound notebook each month. I’ve heard of other writers making similar commitments. Write everyday for 1 hour each day. Or, as I have done in the past, practice Morning Pages from “The Artist’s Way”, which is writing 3 pages each day. Write 500 words a day. Keep a dream journal. Write the day’s events before going to bed each night. Keep note cards in your purse because you never know when or how inspiration will strike. Share your writing with others. Write all the junk that goes through your head that says you are not a good writer and should be washing the dishes instead – then throw it away.

I’ve tried them all. And here is what I’ve found that works: just write. Find a balance that works for you. If you can write everyday, that’s fine. If you can write one evening a week, that is fine too. Be gentle with yourself, don’t judge and don’t feel guilty for not writing more or better, or without spelling errors. Just write.

My interest in writing grew out of my passion for literature, and I’ve found that writing takes me to places I could not have gotten to otherwise. It is space to explore my emotions, problems, dreams and even boredom. It takes me to the place inside where I store all my truths. I love the experience of pouring everything that I have out onto a piece of paper until I think I have nothing left to give, but then feeling myself become full and whole again. I’ve known nothing else like it. The closest experience I can think is the release and centering that happens after having a good, hard cry.

There is no wrong way to practice writing. Everyone has their own tricks and tips, that is why there are thousands of books and blogs about writing. Also because I think writers often enjoy reading about writing as much as they actually enjoy writing.

Anyway, here are some tips that I do practice with my writing:

• I do not edit while writing.
• I keep a list of topics at the front of my notebook for times when I want to write, but don’t know what about.
• I tend not to set a limit, I just write until I’m done or tired – then I try to write a little more. I’ve got this funny idea that is how I will build up endurance.
• I can’t buy pretty, expensive notebooks – they are too intimidating.
• Sometimes I write, “I don’t know what to write.” Over and over again until something comes up.
• A walk or a few minutes of yoga is a great way to start a writing practice.
• Sometimes a new practice can energize my writing because I like the challenge. For example, for the month of May I’m going to attempt Natalie’s practice of filling up a 70-page spiral notebook.
• I am one who enjoys reading about writing as much as I enjoy writing because I need to be fed. I need the encouragement, the inspiration, the words of wisdom – and the reminder that nearly every writer struggles from time to time.

For those of you who write or journal, what pieces of wisdom have you picked up over the years?

Flavor of the Week

On my iTunes:

Loving “Writing Down the Bones”  by Natalie Goldberg.

I splurged to buy the audio recording, and it was well worth it. Listening to Natalie tell stories is becoming what I look forward to most each day.

Book on my nightstand:

Debating on what to read next. Here are some options, what do you guys think:

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

One Writer's Beginnings by Eudroa Welty

Drink in my cup:

Virginia made beer.

This weekend I fell in love with Star Hill's The Love.

Task keeping my hands busy:

Gardening & yard work. Lots of work has been done, and there is still lots to do. Maybe if it ever stops raining I will take some pictures for you.

Stay Tuned

I’ve been a slacker lately with blogging, but that’s about to change. Over the next few weeks I’ll be adding some new stuff on here about writing, my journey over the past several months and finding (err…searching for?) fulfillment in life. On my professional blog I’ll be writing about social media, communication, marketing and fun businessy stuff. Also over the next few weeks I’ll be re-launching my website and growing my business.

Lots of plans, here’s hoping I get most of it done. Along with the laundry and gardening.

It’s April….

Notice the lack of posting around here? Well, that is because it’s April. The most difficult time of the year for me as I “prepare” for the anniversary of when Jarrett was killed. I’ve been feeling a lot of stress and worry about the upcoming anniversary, but I’m trying to be gentle on myself.

Anyway, some very nice folks in Giles County have offered to host a golf tournament in honor of Jarrett, with all proceeds going to his memorial fund. Even if you are not a golfer, please help us spread the word!

Here are the details:

Castle Rock Golf and Recreation of Pembroke, VA will host a golf tournament in honor of Jarrett Lane, one of the 32 students killed at VA Tech on April 16^th, 2007. All proceeds will benefit the Jarrett Lane Memorial Fund and its mission to better the future of deserving youth in Giles Country.

The tournament will be held on Saturday May 9th, with a tee time of 9:00am. Teams of four will play on one of the area’s most beautiful and challenging golf courses. The registration fee is $300 per team, and teams can register by calling the golf course before May 8^th at (540) 626-7276.

Just to let you know, the Jarrett Lane Memorial Fund is used to provide college scholarships to Narrows High Grad. We have a vision of expanding this to provide financial assistance to deserving youth in Giles County who wish to participate in various academic, athletic and leadership development programs.

Tags: Family, Insanity, jarrett

Clothes Swap!

It’s time for another clothes swap, ladies!

"My Wife Needs Clothes" by House

Clean out your closets and bring all your unwanted clothes to my house on Saturday for the ultimate swapping event. Trade in that ugly sweater your aunt gave you at Christmas for your friend’s cute pink skirt that you’ve been lusting after!

Clothes, shoes, purses, accessories, and anything else you want to get out of your house (husbands, children and pets are not included in this offer). I might throw in some home decor stuff.

I will have snacks and mimosas. Also, it’s an open invitation to all women who have junk in their trunk…I mean, unwanted clothes in their closets.

When: Saturday 3/21, 11am-2pm

Where: My house (leave comment or email for directions)

Why: Because we love new clothes, even “new-to-me” clothes.

Image by House.

Tags: clothes swap

High School….a decade later

This year marks 10 years since I graduated high school, so that means it’s time for a reunion. Mine has been scheduled for sometime this summer, but tonight some of my former classmates are gathering to plan the celebration. I’ve decided to make the drive back  home to attend the planning party.

I still have extra envelopes from these announcements and the matching thank-you cards

There were only 5o-some people in my high school class, but even with a class so small we still had our cliques and drama. I wonder how that will affect us 10 years later. I don’t think I was really involved in the drama. I guess it was hard to get involved since I kept my nose in a book or was too busy with sports & clubs. But, that also meant I didn’t have a lot of close friends who knew me well. I think most people considered me a “friendly” person, but I only had a couple of close friends. And, since our graduation a decade ago, I haven’t spoken to, seen or had any contact with most of the people from my class.

Don't you think more people should wear solid gold gowns?!

Needless to say, I’m a little nervous about tonight. Luckily we are meeting at a place that I hear has good beer. That should help take the edge off. Plus it will be entertaining because only two or three of my former classmates have seen me drink or heard/understood my slightly inappropriate sense of humor.

Tags: high school, Narrows

A Tribute to My Devote Blog-Reader

Rarely do I let my reader(s) now how much you guy(s) mean to me and how wonderful you are.

So, here is a little tribute, just for you.

Tags: Blog, silly

Blogging Thoughts

Last night I went to Refresh Richmond’s monthly meeting. This month they gathered a panel of local professional bloggers. Telling us their stories, we got an pretty good review of the start, growth and success of This Young House, Mac Rumors, and, one of my favorite blogs, Tobacco Avenue.

The discussion got me thinking about my blog, and just blogging in general. If you’ve got a minute, would you mind answering a couple questions about your blogging habits?

What are some of your favorite blogs?

Do you read your favorite blogs for information, inspiration or entertainment?

Do you blog? Why?

Tags: blogging