Just Keep Writing

A post by P.T. Phronk,
of Forest City Pulp fame

I joined Across the Board in late 2019, and since then, I’ve written 30 posts on this blog. Once a month, I spent my Sunday morning thinking of approximately 500 words (or in this case, exactly 500) to put in a sequence that I hoped would get across something interesting or meaningful.
 
That’s about 15,000 words total, which adds up to the length of a whole novella, or a good chunk of a novel. All from writing for a few hours a month for a couple of years.
 
Today, I started reading a book called Just Keeping Buying, which is about the magic of regularly investing money, for a long time, and without worrying too much about what you’re investing in or trying to time it. The book’s title was itself inspired by a YouTuber whose secret to millions of subscribers was “just keep uploading.” I think this applies to a lot of things, writing included. Just keep writing, and even with modest effort and not overthinking choices about what to write, it adds up to something. Maybe even something good.
 
I just kept writing here on Across the Board, and I’m proud of most of the things I came up with. I got to document my unfiltered thoughts about the pandemic, from the beginning, to the awkward middle, until more hopeful times. I mixed in my day job as a brain scientist by writing about how to make people remember your content, the appeal of horror, and why you shouldn’t listen to successful people. When I couldn’t think of anything for the month, I posted about miscellaneous stuff like what pretentious scotch reviews taught me about writing, bikes, the sasquatch, and, uh, hands. And speaking of Just Keep Buying, I even wrote about retirement for writers.
 
As you may have guessed by the wistful reminiscing and past tense, I gotta retire. Not from writing or my job, but from ATB. This is my last post here.
 
It’s been wonderful, but I feel like a bit of a fraud, because I’ve barely written anything since I joined this blog that is (mostly) for writers. My lack of writing has primarily been because of life getting busy and pandemic stress, but also, those Sunday mornings are sometimes the only time I have for writing, so over the next few years, I’m hoping 15,000 words go toward an actual novella or novel.
 
Thank you to my fellow writers here on Across the Board. I have been reading every post and will continue doing that, plus I hope we stay in touch on social media because you’re all pretty cool. Thanks especially to Stephen Kozeniewski, who gave me the chance to join this blog and helped make the last two and a half years much better than they would have been otherwise.
 
You can find me on Twitter.com, and Phronk.com will continue to exist as a monument to not blogging.
 
That’s all for now. Have a nice day, and just keep writing. Bye.

How Not To Plan

By Cheryl Oreglia

They say the most productive artists have a plan in mind when they get down to work. The word plan is either a noun, meaning you have a detailed proposal or it’s a verb, as in something you decide on and arrange in advance. 

As it turns out I’ve been treating it as an adjective as if it could modify my time. 

See I’m newly retired and it’s not going well. This week I would have launched my first classes, I would be memorizing my student’s names with a series of flashcards for each block, and we would be full-on planning (there’s that word again) our curriculum for the entire semester. The idea is to plan for the topics we hope to explore but leave the flow of the class open to the myriad of possibilities. Sometimes we have to throw out the plans even though they are indispensable.

This annual pattern has been with me for so long it sort of inspires everything else. That would include keeping my personal calendar up to date with notations as to when my blogs are due, weekends at the lake, dentist appointments, birthdays, social commitments to friends and family, etc. 

I’m in total disarray.

I can’t remember what day it is let alone the date or time. I’m confused about how food gets into the house and ends up as a meal. I’m regularly shocked we have a female vice president, each time she appears on the news it’s as if I’m finding it out anew. I have no alarm clock set. That’s probably the most disturbing part of it all. 

I’m waking up in a fog each day trying to figure out who I am? Talk about the walking dead.

Okay, that was the longest explanation ever for missing my blog schedule this week. I apologize for the delay in our schedule. Now, in my defense, there’s a fine line between good planning and over planning and I haven’t navigated that well. As Twyla Tharp warns, we don’t want all the planning to inhibit the natural evolution of our work, or life in my circumstance. 

So I took a little dive into Tharp’s ideas around planning. She says a plan is like the scaffolding around a building. When you’re putting up the exterior shell, the scaffolding is vital. But once the shell is in place and you start work on the interior, the scaffolding disappears. That’s how she thinks of planning. 

I forgot the scaffolding. 

This is sort of a paradox, in order to be habitually creative, as in a member of a blogging group, you have to know how to prepare to be creative, but of course, that’s not a guarantee of success, because it’s only after you let go of your plans that you can breathe life into your efforts, says Tharp.  

In my old life, I had every other day off, those were my writing days, rain or shine, that computer would be open on my lap, flanked by a cup of steaming hot coffee no more than six inches away from my right hand. The thing is I had a plan as if someone said between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. if you’re working something good will happen. 

And it always did. A blog would appear.

Woody Allen said that eighty percent of success is showing up. So I need some new scaffolding that can accommodate a restructured life, one that allows for unexpected delays, multiple exits, and maybe a little color because this project is going to take some time. I say plan to a point because without leaps of imagination, space to dream, we lose the possibility of the unexpected and that makes all the difference in writing. 

As a reminder scaffolding is only temporary.

So I will be updating my calendar with scheduling reminders and I’ll be setting aside specific time to put my butt in a chair and write but I’m leaving the subject or topic open so as to allow for a little magic. That’s how I plan not to plan. 

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed says, William Gibson. Bahaha.

When I'm not writing for Across the Board, I'm Living in the Gap, drop by any time.

What are your planning tips?