Tag: blogging

Today! Get The Writer’s Workshop as Part of The Writer’s Bundle for $99

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

If you’re a writer, or your goals include getting paid to write, publishing a book, or developing your blogging, listen up. This week I’m part of a BIG thing you’ll want to know about and it’s called The Writer’s Bundle.

Every year, The Write Life puts together an amazing package of resources for writers. This year, they’ve bundled together 10 ebooks, courses and tools on freelancing, novel writing, self-publishing, marketing, editing and more.

It’s called The Writer’s Bundle, and you can download it here.

You’ll probably recognize a lot of the people in this bundle, including Ali Luke, Jenny Blake, Joel Friedlander, Carrie Smith, and more (including me!).

Normally my course, The Writer’s Workshop, retails for $300. I rarely, if ever, have sales. This is why it’s a bit ridiculous — you can get my course for a third of the price (just $99!). And you’ll get nine other writing, blogging, and book-publishing courses. What.

The 10 resources available through this year’s bundle normally retail for nearly $1,700. But through this deal, you can get your hands on ALL of them for just $99.

Here’s what’s included when you download The Writer’s Bundle:

  • Stress Less & Impress, From Leah Kalamakis (Course; retails for $247)
  • ProWritingAid, From Chris Banks (Tool; retails for $40)
  • Book Ninja 101: 5-Day Series, From Jenny Blake (Course; retails for $150)
  • Press Release Masterclass, From Joel Friedlander and Joan Stewart (Course; retails for $97)
  • 30 Days to Creative Courage, From Mridu Khullar Relph (Course; retails for $199)
  • Get Paid to Write for Blogs, From Catherine Alford (Course; retails for $497)
  • The Writer’s Workshop, From Sarah K. Peck (Course; retails for $300)
  • Convert More Clients, From Carrie Smith (Course; retails for $59)
  • The Blogger’s Guide to Freelancing, From Ali Luke (Ebook; retails for $29)
  • The 4 Foundational Pillars of Novel Structure, From C.S. Lakin (Course; retails for $49)

Download The Writer’s Bundle Here

The catch? The bundle is only available until Thursday, April 6 at 11:59 p.m. EST. That means if you want it, you should click this link NOW and grab it.

Enjoy, writers!

And yes: when I’m part of group sales like this, I get paid, too. If you’ve been wanting to check out my course and haven’t had the resources, now’s a great time to scoop it up because it won’t be on sale like this for a long, long time!

Routine

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Every night, after a day’s worth of pumping milk for my baby, my husband takes the pump from my hands and washes it out in the sink with the special brush.

He shakes it dry, clean, ready for the next day. He says it’s one of the ways he can help with this job that is so much mine. It’s our routine. I pump, he cleans it up. We tuck into bed.

Every morning, after I drop the baby at daycare, I exercise. First things first. I take care of my body. Leo and I walk down the sidewalks by the park and we buzz into the daycare center. I smile and wave at him and he babbles at the daycare ladies. Morning, baby, daycare, exercise.

It’s the routine.

On the weekends, we try to make a stew in the Fall on Sundays. Leo is currently napping, I’m in flannel, writing, and Alex is in the kitchen, chopping up vegetables for a fall stew. We got one creuset deep pot at our wedding as a gift from one of Alex’s mentors, and the blue pot has been filled with stews and soups and creamy vegetables more times than we can count. We fill the pot with a stew and eat out of it as the week goes by. It feeds us and it fuels us.

We enjoy the variation and we sink into the routine.

A routine is a sequence of actions, regularly followed. It can be a routine that you follow in a dance (like a tap routine), or a series of steps you perform as part of a program. It’s often done on the regular, rather than as a special occasion.

“He settled down into his routine of writing and work.” 

“She got into the daily routine of exercise.” 

The word comes from “route,” or a regular, carved-into-the-earth way of getting there. Roads are carved from steady use and repetition. The road becomes a regular way of being.

We carve out our routines, and then our routines provide space for our craft to expand.

My little one loves having a routine. He’s out of the newborn phase (although still a baby), and thrives when he’s given regular naps and feedings. A day of good naps can be the difference between a smiley, content baby, and my fussy, crying-and-wiggling baby. Both are the same kid, on different routines.

Designed well, a routine lets me get more of what I want. I am as many words as I make space to sit down and write. If I spend all of my time thinking about what I’m going to do and when I’m going to do it, I’ve spent my time thinking, not doing. The routine lets me forget the path and get into the substance.

A routine is a way of being. How do you show up in the world? What are the patterns of your life, of your work, of your being?

More than an intention for a day, or a desire for the week, is the importance of setting up good habits. A routine is the invisible structure that lets us dig into what we want to do. Rather than rely on motivation or inspiration — we can settle into the gold that is habit formation.
This Fall, I’ve been craving routine more than anything.

Putting on and choosing (or not choosing) your clothing is a routine. In our household, we’re eliminating most of our clothing (my husband and I share a closet together — one closet, and we each have half of a dresser). We stick to a few basic outfits to stay simple. Why? Because we want to choose ideas and creativity in our work over thinking about year’s worth of clothing choices.

I exercise at the same time every day as part of a routine.

A pattern for the day, a pattern for the work, a system of organization, a structure that provides clarity — and freedom. A cadre, or a frame, can be more freeing than the idea of unlimited freedom.

By creating a routine, I can expand.

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What’s your routine? What are your habits and ways of being? This post is part of the Monthly Writing Prompts — check out October’s theme, here.
Get monthly writing prompts in your inbox by signing up for the newsletter, here.

3 Writing Tools To Draft, Edit, and Publish Your Work

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

It Doesn’t Matter How You Do It

I should title this post “how to write every day” or “what tools I use to write every day” because the questions I get over and over again from so many different people are variations of the same questions:

“How do you start a daily writing habit?”

And:

“What tools do you use?”

If you’re struggling to decide between a notebook and a computer, the answer is yes.

Write it down.

Write on a computer when you’re near a computer and you have something to say. Write it on a paper when you have paper nearby.

Put it down in your notebook or on scratch pieces of paper or — heck I do this all of the time — borrow a pen from the waiter and write across napkins if you have to. Miranda July has some stories about how even pregnancy (and labor!) gave her so many ideas for stories and projects that she was searching for paper while bringing her child into the world.

Put it into your phone, if it’s on you.

So the tools, if you must know the tools:

CAPTIO

I use Captio (an app) on my iPhone that allows for recording notes offline and then emails them to my gmail account. In gmail, I label them all automatically with a filter called “notes.”

Gmail-notes

MOLESKINE

I use a Moleskine to write in every day. (I prefer the black, large, hardcover versions that are plain on the inside, like this.) In my notebook, I write down who I meet, my main observations from a particularly delightful meeting, short memories, quotes, stories, and relevant notes. Sometimes I write longer form essays or journal entries when I need a space to write. I’ll often write in it when I sit at a coffee shop and brainstorm without my computer. Each one lasts me about 3-4 months, and has about 200 pages in each one. I label them on the front and keep a stack on my bookshelves.

EVERNOTE

I write in Evernote as well, when I write on my laptop. I prefer offline tools to online tools because I have some bad internet habits (I literally do not know how I end up with 47 tabs open on a new browser window when I get online…). In my Evernote files, I have what’s called a “stack” of notebooks; a notebook is a collection of documents, and then you can stack a collection of notebooks together. Essays move from one stack to the next.

Here’s how I organize my Evernote stack:

WRITING (Stack)

  • Ideas — any scribbling of an idea I have, ever.
  • Drafts — a workable idea that’s got actual sentences in it, paragraphs even, but still needs more work.
  • Pitches — list of places I’ve pitched stories and essays to. A more refined version of “Ideas.” I can move things from pitches to ideas (if they get denied) or from ideas to pitches if they look like things that will fit a particular editor or audience.
  • Finished — any note that works its way from idea to draft and gets published (like this very post here), will get dragged into ‘finished,’ so my ideas/drafts folders aren’t cluttered with already-used ideas.
  • Stories — a place for fiction and short-story writing, when I’m tired of narrative and non-fiction writing.
  • Archive — a place to clean out and dump any past ideas I want to throw away and won’t publish.

And actually publishing something:

When I sit down to write and publish, I start with one of my tools — either I sift through my paper notebook, I scroll through my Evernote stack, or I riff through my gmail folder of notes.

Side note: I usually leave the gmail notes until last, or perform this as a task-based item unrelated to my writing process, because the distraction temptation is so high. I’ll copy and paste out ideas from “notes” in my gmail and from my notes in my moleskine into my Evernote “ideas” folder so I keep an ever-growing list of ideas pouring into these folders.

I’ll review these notes and ideas until there’s something that pulls me and still feels vibrant, like I’m ready to tip and start talking or writing about it.

Some workdays I’ll work on two or three different essays, putting the meat and body into each of the essays. It involves researching, reading, writing out stories, and pouring as many words onto the page as possible. In this process, a 100- or 300-word idea stream can turn into 1500 or more words.

Here, in fact, are two unwritten, incomplete ideas that could turn into full blog posts if I pull them up and feel compelled to write about them:

Screenshot 2016-01-02 14.12.12 Screenshot 2016-01-02 14.12.02

This is actually what my first versions of essays often look like.

It’s highly productive and weirdly dissatisfying because usually there isn’t a single essay that gets finished. I still need another night’s sleep and a few more days to tidy it up. On a lazier day I’ll do polishing and editing of a final piece if I don’t feel like tackling a new subject.

When I do work to finish and publish an essay, I’ll find in my “drafts” folder something that’s nearly complete, like this essay was in here. I’ll move it into WordPress (or whatever platform I’m publishing through; sometimes it’s Medium, LinkedIn, sending a G-Doc to an editor, etc). Inside of WordPress, I’ll do a read-through and edit and polish with fresh eyes. Often I’ll add new material, shorten some paragraphs, and keep tightening up the introductory material.

I use the “preview” feature on many of the platforms to review the content in multiple forms. Once it’s ready to go, I’ll schedule it to publish.

But I’m diverting from the main point of this essay.

It’s sexier to talk about tools and process. It’s harder to talk about starting, doing, and persisting.

Not writing because you don’t have the tools is an excuse.

When you’re in the subway and you see the makings of a great story, and you have nothing on you, you still write a story. No pen, no notebook, no phone, no anything — you write the story by using words in your mind and telling the story. Play with it. Make it a sequence.

You practice the craft by practicing the craft.

The man lumbered over towards the station entrance, his walk punctuated by the jostling needed to keep his pants above knee height. His boxers had a cute heart shaped pattern across them, although the fact that she could see them at all wasn’t particularly endearing, she wanted to tell him to lift them up, tuck in his shirt, learn how to walk again. “That duck walk,” she thought, “will not look good anywhere but here…” 

Practice seeing stories all around you. Write them down, however you can.

Why Starting A “Blog” Is A Terrible Idea

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Getting out there on the internet is kind of like making friends as a five-year old.

The internet can be an intimidating place — it’s full of people who seem to write effortlessly and publish often. It’s like they have crowds of people gathering and listening, which makes other people wonder if they’ll ever be able to join in.

Pretty soon the voices of doubt crop up: Why bother? Will you ever get to it? Should you join in at all?

Starting a blog is a wonderful idea, and it’s also a terrible idea. To be clear: you should definitely write, but if you think you should “start a blog,” well, I have some ways to reframe that which are really important.

Everyone wants to write, but a lot of people are scared to.

In every writing seminar I’ve been to — both as a teacher and as a student — the most frequent thing I hear is doubt:

“I want to start a blog, but I’m not sure where to start.”
“I have an idea, but I’m not sure anyone wants to read it.”
“I have too many ideas, so I end up never writing them down!”
“I’ve always wanted to write, but I haven’t started yet.”
“Someone else has already written about what I’ve been meaning to say.”

Why you should write: the magic of the Internet.

Let yourself be found — carve out a second home on the internet.

What do people find when they put your name into the Google machine?

If and when you DO want to connect with others, it’s important to carve out your own “home” on the internet. In the world of Google-ability, we are quickly researching each other in order to learn about their skills and talents.

The good news is that you can own this answer pretty quickly. If you want to craft three articles on a particular topic that’s interesting or a hobby to you (ideally something you’d like to be known for), you can start a Tumblr,Weebly or a WordPress site for free or almost free (less than $50, max, if you want to own a domain name and buy a theme) and post three articles under a header with your name and contact information on it. This can be done in as little as four weeks.

All of a sudden, when someone types in your name, or better yet — the topics you’ve written about — you can now be found. Your ideas can be known.

Resumes are static, and we’re searching for ideas through our web-maze of online information. In today’s world, it’s your job to make yourself “findable.” Put your information onto the web so that search engines — and people, and serendipity — can stumble across it.

Without putting yourself out there, it’s a lot harder to be found.

I get so many emails from people that say, “I was looking for an article about how to improve my writing, or how to write a thank you note, and I started reading your blog and sat down with you for an hour last night. It was so fun to read your thinking.”

By putting my words and ideas into a space where other people can find them, I’ve let myself be found. I can become known for my ideas. If you have an idea and it’s stuck in your head, there isn’t an easy way for anyone to know that you have it. Serendipity comes through connection and collision, and when people can find you and your ideas, possibility sparks.

Now these interactions didn’t happen right away; I blogged for at least six months with only my mother commenting, gently correcting most of my typos and spelling or grammar errors. My sister discovered Grammar Girland gleefully pointed out my mistakes as well, which, as a younger sister, I’m sure delighted her. (I then hired her as my editor for my print projects, which probably made her happy as a clam — now she gets paid to point out all of my mistakes.) There was nothing perfect about my first few essays. Perfect is a pipe dream. There will be people who point out your mistakes, and people who see the bigger picture and connect with you over ideas. Both types of people exist, and you will meet both of them.

Don’t let being afraid of making a mistake stop you from making anything at all.

Start small: create a project, not a life.

The other thing to remember is that some of the best websites aren’t by people who show up every week. You might not have the stamina (or the resources) to enter into a writing relationship that’s indefinite in its time frame or scope. In fact, I think that’s a terrible way to start. For people starting a blog, I recommend thinking of it as a “Project” and not a “Indefinite Relationship.” When you commit to a blog and say to yourself that you’re going to write every week for the next two years, the minute you mess up or miss a week, you’ve essentially failed the project. Who wants to be disappointed that they tried something?

For people starting a blog, I recommend thinking of it as a “Project” and not a“Indefinite Relationship.” When you commit to a blog and say to yourself that you’re going to write every week for the next two years, the minute you mess up or miss a week, you’ve essentially failed the project. Who wants to be disappointed that they tried something?

The alternative, and what I recommend in all of my writing classes, is to create a project that you can do well at, by changing the parameters. Instead of promising an indefinite relationship, drastically reduce it in scope and start with a reasonable project that has a defined ending from the beginning.

When you can close a project successfully and complete it, you’re much more likely to continue on to a phase two or phase three of a project, rather than let it taper off into the land of incomplete projects. You also change the feeling relationship you have with yourself — instead of creating an inevitable failure-situation, with resulting disappointments and twangs, putting pressure to show up in a way that might not be reasonable for you because of all of your various commitments–you’re creating a success situation, where you can end the project within a concrete time frame and still be very happy that you did it at all.

I recommend creating a project that says, “I’d like to talk about _[topic]_ in 4 posts, within the next two months.” Give yourself a start time, and end time, and a quantity. Specify a topic. Perhaps you want to blog about four fabulous meals that you cooked and created. Maybe you want to chronicle your science journey behind the lens of a microscope. Maybe you want to document your notes on a new class you’re taking. You could start a Tumblr with your favorite photos of doorways in your quirky city. The possibilities are endless, but you must pick one small one (and only one).

Don’t believe me? Blake Master’s compilations of Peter Thiel’s lectures is one of my favorite sites to read and there’s a fixed (static) amount of content — 13 lectures — accessible indefinitely for those that want to self-teach and read the series. He’s not adding more content. He’s creating great content and sticking it up in a place for people to find it.

What I find with myself–and others — is that if we try to start too big, we actually fail to start at all.

When we dream the big dream of master projects and hundreds of photographs and best-selling books, many people fail to start because the dream is too big. I’m all for big dreams and goals–and relish in them, dance in them, and visualize them — but when it comes to the implementation, start with something small enough to do in a day or a week. Want to write a best-selling book or post? Start by researching your ideas, one at a time, in short posts. You can collect them later. In fact, the short pieces will serve as your building blocks for the bigger pieces.

Almost everyone I know that’s created something big started one, small, tiny step at time.

Bottom line recommendation? Create a fixed, small project that’s do-able within a time frame of less than 3 months.

Start writing — right now:

My takeaways for you? Build yourself an “internet home,” even if it’s only to enjoy making something by yourself.

I’m biased — I think we should all participate in this new form of community space, this digital world where we can place our creations. If you’re wavering about creating something, let me be clear: I think it’s time for you to join in.

To make it easy on yourself, start small. Pick one topic or project that you’re interested in, and make a small commitment to create a collection of pieces–drawings, ideas, words, notes, stories, essays, paintings, photos, or other–around this topic.

Give yourself a deadline of 3 months or less (ideally one month). And finish it.

What happens? It gives you something to point to. It’s a reference point for the future. It’s a means towards executing your projects. It’s a way to start a conversation. And it’s a way to do the things you’ve been talking (or thinking) about doing.

And best-case scenario? You get to meet a few people along the way who like talking about what you’re doing.

Is it time to join in?

If you’ve been thinking about joining the online conversation, or dreaming of starting a blog, website, or publishing more, it’s time to start.

The goal isn’t to have the loudest voice on the internet. It’s to have a voice: your voice. The point of writing is not to just to publish for someone else: Writing and storytelling are about developing a relationship with your voice and ideas. It’s about finding and practicing ways of expressing your ideas to yourself, and then to others.

It’s an incredible place. I hope you’ll join in.

Easy?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Shouldn’t it be easy?

An inside look at what it feels like for me:

There are some days when I can’t get out of bed. Some days when I feel so overwhelmed, tired, and disappointed in myself that I don’t know what to do, or where to begin.

The signs I hang up and the pins I post and the words I copy? They are just reminders to myself, first and foremost. I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. Most of the time. I’m just here, trying, just like anyone else.

It’s not easy. “Yoga teacher training,” for example, sounds like an indulgence when I type the letters into my social profiles, cheerily posting about heading off to practice, but the reality of practicing these twenty hours each week is a face-to-face awakening with the mindsets I live with. Each time, I struggle with being too tired, with being scared, and with confronting my “samskaras,” or the past stories and patterns of truth I’ve got imprinted on my brain. I struggle mightily with quieting my mind, and this devil of a mind drives me bat-shit crazy. A lot.

A lot.

Seriously, who writes 20,000 words a week… just to stay sane?

I write to let it out, to maintain my sanity. I’m afraid that I’ll be insane by fifty and mumbling to myself in poverty huddled in a torn jacket in the corner of the subway entrance, and that no one will see me.

None of this is easy.

Here’s the thing, though. It’s not promised to be easy. It’s going to be hard, it’s going to be weird, and there are going to be plenty of days where you’re in a puddle, confused, lost, lonely, or wondering where to go. When I left my job to begin my own company, it was hard—I had to learn (and I’m still learning) new systems, new organization patterns, new habits, how to prioritize—again and again. I had to learn how to work alone. How to be accountable.

The lessons keep coming.

The promise of “easy” is a delusion, sometimes. Is that the point, though? I don’t think any of us, if we really thought about it, said—yes, the only thing I want in this life is the easy stuff. Forget about the rest of it, I’d just like it to be easy.

No, it’s not about the easy. (There is ease, but that’s a different conversation). First, it’s about what you do when it’s not easy. It’s about realizing that even if it’s hard, it can still be beautiful, and you can still make things that matter when you’re tired, lonely, scared, depressed, or bothered.

In the words of my coach, during a particularly arduous sequence of events: “Just f-*king do it.”

“Show me you can do it no matter what.”

This is when you become better than the best. Not when circumstances are perfect. It’s when circumstances are shit and you do it anyways.

Easy?

When did someone sit down and promise you that it was supposed to be easy? Or better yet, fair? It’s not guaranteed to be easy or fair, and the people who get what they want go after it–in spite of and because of–each and every advantage or disadvantage they are thrown.

Sometimes, things are easier than you could have ever imagined–pieces fall into place, the actions a result of agreement finally locking into place in your mind.

Other times, the fight for what you want, what you desire, is harder than you’d ever imagined; it begs you to give up, to stop, to drop. You doubt your desires, you fear the pain. You quiver, you stall. Many give up–no, most give up–and say, you know what? I don’t want it as much as I thought I did. I’m not willing to fight.

But if you want it, if you really, really want it, you’ll make it, you’ll do it, you’ll fight for it.

You’ll keep going even if it’s years of pain and labor, if it’s a fight worth fighting.

You’ll give up the excuses and the hards and tireds and you’ll find a way.

This is when you become better than the best. Not when circumstances are perfect. It’s when circumstances are shit and you do it anyways.

Do it anyway.

The masks we wear–how we hide who we are.

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

We all wear masks from time to time: in our words, our habits, and our practices. We have an arsenal of crutches and shortcuts that slowly but surely hide who we are. They are things that prop us up and help us hide. We hide from our feelings and our desires. We hide from who we might become.

We drink coffee as a mask for how tired we are, or to replace what is really a lack of motivation for a certain project we’re involved in.

It masks how tired you are of caring for a newborn infant, or how miserable your boss’s cutting remarks make you.

The alcohol that you drink at night masks the fear and the stress feel from not having control during your day. Perhaps it helps to cover up the loneliness of your cubicle or help you get  through another night.

We project false smiles of protection to hide our fears, to be desirable. We wear high heels and new clothes and carry certain bags and advertisements to show a sense of self, a projection, an idea. We use extroversion to be well liked. We chase busy to mask our fear of not leaving an impact.

We cover a lot of things up. Scars we carry, stories we hold, work we’re afraid of doing.

Our selves, deep inside.

It’s not always bad to have a mask…

It’s not terrible to have masks, but they can’t be our only way of dealing with the world. If we spend the entire time warding off the world and hiding from ourselves, we’ll miss the best parts. By hiding from the world, we hide ourselves, and we lose a piece of our souls.

Many of us have lost touch with ourselves, our souls, with the tender, tired, scared part of itself.

Here’s the catch…

Releasing a mask requires feeling. It requires having a real, honest, scary, less-than-desirable feeling. Letting go of your mask means you might need to say,

By golly, I’m tired.

And no, I don’t want to do this.

Or, I’m scared. I’m scared of messing up. I’m scared of doing a bad job. I’m worried that I won’t be liked. I’m worried that I might try and I won’t be good at it.

Letting the barrier down requires Guts. Honesty. Softness.

Looking at the impulse before we rush to snatch a cover, and breathing in recognition:

Your feelings are clues.

These feelings inside? They aren’t enemies. They are clues. Feelings are way points in an uncertain world, direction markers that guide us back into the brilliance of ourselves, if we’ll allow it. The trouble is it can be uncomfortable and downright painful. Feelings you haven’t had in years might surface to remind you of areas of internal work you still have to do.

And your masks were protection, once.

The masks aren’t all bad. Sometimes pulling down the mask and showing your face requires gentleness and slowness. Your mask might have served you at some point. A therapist in my yoga training reminded me that these coping mechanisms shouldn’t always be disarmed quickly. Children of abuse who learned how to harden and deaden their senses built masks in order to survive those times. These mechanisms and masks were useful–they helped you survive. They got you here. They protected. Unlocking them too quickly without new ways of being can also be damaging.

But at some point, perhaps you might notice you’re still wearing one.

What masks are you wearing?

What masks do you carry?

What do you hide?

Can you lower it for a bit?

With love,

sarah signature

 

 

Looking for a place of love and kindness? Join our upcoming Grace & Gratitude micro-workshop, a two-week journey to cultivate grace and gratitude in your life. Two weeks of daily stories and exercises designed to bring light, love, and joy into your life–one photograph, project, and quote at a time. Sign up here (or give as a gift this holiday). We begin December 1. 

Finding your creative flow: 17 writer’s tricks to get un-stuck and start creating

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

IMG_0553

I wrung my hands, trying to figure out what to write next. It was a typical afternoon at the computer: Somehow I had amassed more browser tabs than laundry quarters, each of which was threatening to pull me into an endless loop of reading more things on the internet — all conspiring to collect as a massive wave of procrastination in the way of writing the essay in front of me. I closed all the browser tabs. I sighed. Why was I stuck again? Why couldn’t I just WRITE this thing?

While procrastination and distraction are two of the biggest weapons against making your art, the third hurdle to jump is often the problem of getting stuck.

When you’re stuck, you can’t find the right words, time passes endlessly, and you wish fervently for that flow — that moment when words come quickly, your thoughts spill out, and you’re itching to write more. Yet sometimes even when I return to the white page of my blank screen, I get stuck. My thoughts grind to a halt, and I’m not sure where to turn next.

What do you do to get back in creative flow and get un-stuck? As a writer and creative, these are the tools I return to again and again to get myself back into the writing space and find my creative flow.

Start with predictable statements. 

Blank pages, as a writer, can feel demonizing and cruel in their blankness. Sometimes I need to write anything down just to get started. Ray Bradbury found, after several years of writing, that word association was a powerful way for him to start. CARNIVAL, he would write in big capital letters. DANDELIONS. The project continued, each word unfolding into a paragraph and a study, his obsession with these strange, everyday elements turning into prize-winning stories. His word associations turned into explorations of the attic — finding the nooks and crannies in his mind, and chasing what he found both exciting and weird.

Write the banal. Start with where you are. Sometimes it’s garbage, and sometimes the simplest statements are powerful, raw, and beautiful.

Recount your day.

Often writers begin with “throwaway text” that they use to warm up. Summarize your day. Tell the story of where you are, what you’ve been doing, and what you’re trying to do. Even when crafting, I often write out a page of blank notes that describes the type of project and fill pages with sketches of the thing I want to make.

Get specific.

We often get stuck because we’re trying to tackle too much. An entire essay can take me days and weeks — or longer — so today, I focus on one paragraph. Just on one piece. In writing a story about two characters, I begin with the scene, coloring in the frames and spaces with more and more detail. I might spend an entire hour polishing the color and frame of the street lamp and the sidewalks, capturing the changing weather patterns as the seasons move into fall, describing the slippery stoop and broken stairs that the woman calls home. Get specific about one small piece of your project, and focus on that first.

React.

Peruse articles until you find one that stirs up your emotion in some way. Set a kitchen timer if you’re prone to getting lost in browsing, or set up a system that lets you read for a limited time. Browse and jot down notes about what you click on, and what pulls you. Observe that emotion. Find an article that makes you mad or enthusiastic enough to want to write a response. Begin by writing that response.

Mine your conversations for clues.

Often, my essays evolve from comment threads, email chains, and conversations that lead to longer and longer pieces. A comment turns into a paragraph. A paragraph turns into a page. A page turns into an essay. When people ask me questions and I know the answer to them — and I jump in, with lots of ideas and things to say — I’ve learned to become aware of these as golden nugget opportunities for future essays.

Go analog. Slow down.

By pulling out a pen and paper, clearing the table, and simplifying, we can slow down to capture our thoughts and ideas. Slowing down helps us pay attention. As Gwendolyn Bounds writes in the Wall Street Journal, handwriting trains the brain, and slowing down to write by hand helps us learn, convert to memory, and explore new ideas. “It turns out there is something really important about manually manipulating out two-dimensional things we see all the time,” explains Karin Harman James. Using our hands — and crafting physical works, even written works — unlocks new spaces and ideas.

“I write not just to record what I already know, but to discover what’s in my mind.”

Clean.

A cluttered mind can often be the result of a messy situation. Set a kitchen timer for 20 minutes or fewer and give yourself permission to clean and sort. The process of using my hands to clean, sort, and organize often unlocks powerful thoughts in my brain. Doing the dishes is meditative at times. Forcing myself to fold laundry can slow my brain down long enough to catch the thoughts that drift in after I release the pressure to perform.

Set deadlines and use timers.

I’m a big fan of the Pomodoro Technique and kitchen timers. Sometimes less time and more urgency can push us over the edge into massive creation, stimulating our brains with a sense of urgency. I’ll sit and write for one hour, making a bit of a game out of my essays. “Alright, it’s 10AM. Can I get the first complete draft of this done by 11AM? Let’s see if I can get 700 words and a structure all put together by then. Ready? Go!”

Release the negative harnesses.

Ever feel like you’ve got someone watching over your shoulder, breathing down your neck to make sure everything is perfectly done and correct? As best as you can, remind yourself that you are allowed to stumble and stutter, that your writing does not have to be (and likely will not be) perfect the first time around, and that messiness is part of the process.

When the critic comes, which she does predictably for me, observe her. Watch the thoughts pile up, and write them all down. Say to your critic, “Thanks for all of this, I know you’re trying to have my back. I’ll keep these criticisms over here in my notebook, but for now I need to work.” Let your critic take a break.

Add detail and narrow the focus.

For this moment in time, on what you’re creating, focus on one particular element. Find a soothing or repetitive rhythm to it. Perhaps, as a writer, you’re writing about the scene and setting the stage for the actors’ patterns. Describe the street lights in detail, from the luminescent glow in the aftermath of a rainfall, to the painted-black iron stands. Do micro-histories on the pieces. If you’re a craftsman or a technician, begin with one small piece and polish and craft that section until it’s gleaming.

Forget about the entirety of the project. At this moment, be within this moment.

Talk it out. Use your voice.

Explain your idea to someone. Use a voice recorder to explain it. Sometimes I’ll get on the phone with my parents or friends and ask them to chat about an idea for a quick minute. I’ll set a quick record on the voice memo and capture myself explaining it to people. Sometimes I set my voice memo down on the counter and start explaining to the blank walls how things work. I play back the voice memo and write down the notes. The notes on the page start to make sense, and I edit them with my writer’s eye.

Get moving.

Despite how many times we’re told to get moving, many of us never get up and stand up from our desk to take a break and move our bodies. Sitting is terrible for us, and we sit for an average of 9.3 hours a day (nearly two more hours than we spend sleeping!), causing our bodies to lapse into sedentary norms.

The best way to get myself back into flow is to shake out my body for a bit. Do a few jumping jacks. Go for a walk. Take a short jog around the block. Go for a 10-minute bike ride to pick something up. Plan afternoon or evening swims for when the day is winding down and your brain is chattering. Jump in the shower for a 10-minute dunk. Turn upside down and do a handstand against a wall in your office or living room. Stand up and do a few squats. Do a seven-minute workout.

By increasing the blood flow and circulation in our bodies, we can change our thoughts. (For more on this, read SPARK: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, which looks at the mind-body connection).

Get still.

Breathe. Lay flat across the floor. Sink into child’s pose or downward dog for a few minutes. Take a darkness nap — one of my favorite tricks. Do a darkness nap by going to a very quiet place, eliminating light, and reducing all of the stimulation (close your curtains, put an eye mask on, put earplugs in) and lie flat on the floor or a bed for 7 or 8 minutes. Use a timer to let yourself sink into rest. Like a power boost on a battery, getting your body and mind very still can re-set your mental and creative engines for hours.

Notice and adjust the stimulation.

Adding movement or stillness, as above, are about adjusting and equalizing the stimulation levels in my mind and body. Many times the creative flow is stalled when I am out of sync between my mind and body. My mind is racing forwards or backwards and my body is tired of being still. When the stimulation in my mind — and all of its dissonant bits and starts and bursts of energy — are out of sync with the stimulation in my body, I check in with a quick evaluation: Which one is racing more? Am I twitching and itching in my seat and in my body? Does my mind feel overwhelmed?

Sometimes our brain needs a rest, and our body and senses need to take center stage.
– Stephanie Guimond

Like a washer’s spin that’s gone off cycle, I need to put the two links together again, apace with each other. Adding movement, adding stillness, or adding a counter stimulation (music, water flow, massage) can help ease the frustration and pull me back into balance.

Disrupt your “stuck” with movement or stillness and find a way to balance the simulation in your mind and body.

Drink water.

There’s something magical about water. Drinking a large glass of water cleanses the thoughts in my mind and refreshes my energy levels. In addition to theenormous benefits of hydration, adding water reminds me to get up more often by forcing me to use the toilet more consistently as well.

Develop patterns.

Creativity is largely about creating systems and patterns that reveal (and allow) your best self to emerge. Read any great writer’s habits — Hemingway, Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art, Stephen King’s On Writing, Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing — and you’ll hear them describe their habits and routines. Some of them race to their desk for hours of uninterrupted morning writing, and others write late at night, but they all have habits and systems that help them get unstuck. The less you have to think about when or how you’re going to do what you’re going to do, and the more you do it automatically, the easier it is to do well. (For more on this, check out The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg).

Be honest.

Have an opinion. Sometimes “stuck” is part of getting angry, upset, or frustrated. You’re pissed off that the piece you wrote hasn’t been picked up yet, you’re upset that a friend treated you poorly; you’re mad at the universe for delivering blow after blow to your health. It happens. Sometimes when I try to write a chipper post and my feelings are anything but, I walk smack into a massive brick wall that says, “Nope, no way. You can’t fool me here.” The way out, fortunately or unfortunately, is often through: I need to work through each of these thoughts and feelings. That’s the heart matter of the day.

More often than not, however, these posts — these raw, vulnerable, frustrated essays that pile up — become the meat and story of future essays, pieces I surprise even myself with.

Remember that getting stuck is part of the creative process — and is often a precursor to great breakthroughs.

If you’re having trouble solving a problem or finding your way back into the flow, try any of these tips or let me know if you have your own peculiar habit that works to get back on track.

This post was originally published with Tara Gentile and Carrie Keplinger on Scoutie Girl in September 2013. 

What to write about when you don’t know what to write about.

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Building Walls in Brooklyn

What do you do when you don’t know what to write about?

When you’re stuck or worried or wondering what to say next, write anyways.

Write about things that no one is talking about.

Write about the things that are whispering in your ear, that seem strange, or that seem off, somehow. Write about the things you’re not sure if you should say. Tell the stories you haven’t told yet. Say it anyway.

Write about what makes you angry, or what seems paradoxical.

Write about how the New York Times keeps writing about how we should get more sleep, eat less sugar, drink less coffee, walk more, and that sitting is dangerous – and yet what if the people who write the pieces are still living sugar-filled, caffeinated, stationary lives? What does it take to actually enact habit change, or motivate change?

Write about how Fast Company talks about digital sabbaticals yet never seems to stop posting on the damn internet. I feel like I’m drowning in Fast Company Facebook Posts. It’s like FastBook, except it’s going too fast for me and I want to slow down. Maybe Fast Company can take a digital sabbatical and save the rest of us a day. Less FOMO, more JOMO.

Write about how the deluge of life coaches means something significant (maybe that we really are all screwed up?) or that maybe we’re in an ever-increasing flood of informational internet opportunities that’s just a fancy pyramid scheme in disguise (do I believe this? I don’t know); or, alternatively and more optimistically, that the idea of a life coach is indicative of a culture that has lost something. Write about a culture that has forgotten how to describe the value of people of immense wisdom, of mentors, of friends, of age, and of colleagues who give us the increasingly scarcest resource of all–ample time and thoughtfulness and attention.

Or perhaps–and you should write about this, or maybe I should, we’ll see–maybe it means that we’re a culture devoid of meaning, that we’ve lost the rituals, practices, habits, and deeper connectivity to the earth and to our own spirituality (to God, to the universe, to anything). Talk about how our post-enlightenment love affair with science has led us so far astray from the knowledge and wisdom we’ve had for thousands and thousands of years (the yogis emphasized the importance of meditation five thousand years ago; the scientific papers are just beginning to understand why this is true). Perhaps religion and science are hand-in-hand, and both will make the other stronger, as each catches up with the other (and more importantly, acknowledges the other).

Write about why we search for a reason and an understanding for who we are. Write about why we seek to understand why we’re doing what we’re doing.

Write about what it’s like to be curious.

Write about what it’s like to see. Capture the world in words, as best you can. Really write it out–the details and nuances and intricacies of where you are, and who you are, right now.

Write about how digital technology and interconnectedness is changing us, and what you think the future of the internet is.

Speculate on the future of public space, and whether or not democracy and digital connectedness are serving us.

Write about problems around the world that we collectively ignore because the hip gyrations of a young teen is more mesmerizing than the assassination of twelve human lives.

Write about how the next $500 ebook or self-guided course isn’t going to get you where you want if you don’t actually read it. Wonder why people buy things and still don’t take action.

Write about how fucking mad you are, and your inside feelings that you’ve been locking up for years.

Write about what it’s like to be you, and what makes you angry, and what makes you blissfully happy. Write about the tools you use to numb yourself, because we all try desperately to avoid sadness and misery, and we stuff ourselves with caffeine, sugar, stimulation, pot, television, phones, and other instant-pieces that fill our minds with avoidance. Write about the things we do to numb us from actually feeling.

Admit that you have a body, that you have a soul, that you’re damn depressed and the reason for that is because you actually believe you’re capable of a lot more–and you haven’t figured out how to make the magic happen yet.

Write about what it’s like to be one single individual cell within your body, a particle so small it’s incomprehensible; yet it’s dependent on the air you breathe and water you give it to pulse and beat and carry out its marching orders.

Write about what it’s like to be you, here, and now.

Write about what you feel, and have an honest conversation with yourself about it. Crack the vulnerability open a little bit. Watch for the flood gates. Let the floods come. Have some fucking feelings, and roll around with them. Discover your desires. Write them in big bold beautiful ink on the insides of your body (or the outsides) and on the walls of your living space and in the margins and pages of your notebooks.

Write about the fact that we have no walls anymore or natural barriers to say no, and so we’re constantly flooded with requests that make us anxious, tired and depressed.

Write about what the future will say of Steve Jobs, and how our collective idolization might be washed away if we discover that the advent of the personal and mobile computer–while an exceptional tool for human creativity–also created the unintended consequences of contributing to alarming obesity rates couple and such sedentary humans that our internal IQ’s went down as much as they increased through the information access we enabled.

Wonder about the future of the internet and how it’s changing our lives. Take a piece that someone has written and respond to it, thoughtfully. React. Respond. Listen.

Poke the box. Fuck it, shake it. Stir it. Challenge Seth Godin, give him an essay that makes him think harder, question each of your idols, re-examine your mantras. Think twice about the information you’re given. Disagree and argue. If you construct it well enough, I bet Seth would be fascinated with the conversation you create. You might be wrong. So what? Admit it, and try again.

Think, and then think again.

Write about people who have adrenal fatigue, who are too tired to keep up with work. Write about how an obsession with productivity is wearing down the souls of the people who are trying the hardest; the people we need to continue to be vibrant. Write about what a waste of time email is. Write about how you would do things differently–and then write about how many steps and stumbles it took for you to make it happen.

Write about how your heart bleeds when you hold a tiny infant in your arms because, just for a hot second, the world’s energy moves through your heart center and you feel both restfully still and a live pulsing, and you’re connected through your chakras to a deeper reason for being, and in that bliss, you look at the limitless possibilities in that tiny breathing being and you think,

Damn, that’s perfect, perfect,

and you look at yourself and you think,

what the fuck happened?

###

[ You are still as beautiful, you know. You already are beautiful. You are always capable of beauty. ]

[ You’re perfect, in exactly that messy way that you are. It’s just hiccups and hangups that occupy the world, and get all messy inside your brain space. ]

###

Cultivate Wonder.

Wonder about change, and how it happens. Breathe into the space and creases and pockets of your lungs. Describe what it’s like to be a cell within your body. Touch the sensation of one side of your body, and then the other side. Pause for a moment and detail–in delicious words–the tracing of a finger around the circumference of your body. Close your eyes and imagine where the edges of your humanity are: can you feel them?

Pick an object and tell the story of its life. Talk about what it was before it came into your consciousness, where it was made, and how its life intersects with yours. Wonder where it goes when you toss it flippantly to the side. Consider waste streams and garbage, and capture the movement of things through systems by tracing one item through time.

Write about something that isn’t being said.

If you have a thought, or a joke, or a cranky opinion—and you want to rant, or write, or change the topic—do it.

Write about the things that should be different.

Write a story about a conversation worth having. Write about your experience, and then write about how that connects to larger issues. Write your story. Write about what it’s like to be you.

But for the love of all of it, tell your story, and say what needs to be said.

There’s plenty to write about. Go on, get writing.

Jumping is terrifying. Or, behind the scenes of the last few months: Life. Mind Work. Change. Here. Now. Hello. Breathe…

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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I wake up in a panic, nerves sending a fear signal up and down my trembling arms. Adrenaline pours into my veins, shooting up my skin like a shock to my system. My brain races, full of questions and doubts and fears. I can’t sleep again, even though it’s dark. The light from the streetlamp outside my window glares at me, accusingly. I get up, I start pacing.

I wonder if what I’ve done is the right thing. If what I’m doing is the right thing. I feel like I’m jumping out of an airplane, a rug pulled out beneath my feet to reveal that I’m far too high up in the sky and gravity’s tugging on me. I don’t know if I have a parachute. I’m not sure what a parachute would even look like. I’ll need to figure it out later, but probably fairly soon.

Sometimes I’m soaring with the incredible high of experimentation, and other times my mind wonders if it knows just exactly what I’ve gotten myself into. I cling to my practices of yoga, journaling and other meditative daily walks, but they don’t fully temper the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing. My mind is a scramble. I can’t understand the illogical things I’ve put it through. It’s probably for the best that I don’t understand.

Trust.

There’s no easy way to jump other than to put both feet out and trust the world around you. Trust that you’ll land, that you might fly, that it’s okay to fall, or that some other iteration you can’t predict will come to fruition. Unlike the time I went zip-lining with my sister, where my jump off the platform was so timid that I smacked my butt against the wooden platform below as I launched, I need to lean, and lean so hard that it feels like falling.

I’m falling. This is falling.

While it’s been quiet around these parts lately, that’s just an illusion–a set of unwritten essays and the silence that is days passing a surface skin for a mind and a life that’s been in flux for much of this summer and this year. I look back at my writings for August, noticing that I’ve only scrawled two posts this month; those posts are just a scant glimpse into life behind the scenes and what I’ve been up to. For those familiar with astrology, the world’s been ablaze with the recent Grand Trine, the idea of a shift so large and a planetary arrangement so powerful that people will feel huge changes, up-endings, and fluxes in their life; that dreams become reality; that things get messy; that things resolve — and I don’t just read this, I feel this, I know this, I am living this.

Hello, world. Shall we dance?

Sometimes I struggle with what to write about on this blog—is it a diary? Is it a travel trope of my own adventures? Is it strictly related to writing and communications? It’s not always clear; I share my personal stories and lessons as a window into how I’ve practiced (and continue to practice) the philosophies and principals that underline most of my work, scratching out and re-writing as I go, editing as I learn. I don’t profess to write about myself because that’s the topic at hand; I do love telling the stories I live as a means for sharing bigger ideas and stories. But when I leave myself out of all of the writing and start to write just about rules or teachings or hollow lists, it starts to feel a bit empty.

Like I’ve forgotten to tell you something. Like I’ve left part of myself out.

The past six months have been a whirlwind, to the point that it feels as though I’ve been hiding something. The past year has been a challenge, and I’m not always comfortable talking about all of it. Some of the hands-down-best-things in my life have happened in recent months, but so have some of the scariest and hardest. It wasn’t shiny and glorious; much of it came in a package that felt like I was being thrown repeatedly against a wall like a rag doll and left in a crumpled heap to stand up and fight a bit more. The great moments came with adrenal fatigue, medical problems, extensive biopsies and visits to the doctor. Moments at conferences after months at home, working all day and late nights, and having to look at someone else and not quite share. Not quite tell. These months and moments have been filled with Doubt. Insecurity. Changes. Lives beginning. Lives ending. Leaving my job, starting a new one. Selling my car (finally). Meeting incredible people. Shifting careers, changing tack.

You, too, are probably noticing something in your own life and in the lives of others around you. As I talk with friends and clients and colleagues, I notice that these big shifts aren’t happening in isolation. We’re all experiencing it, the universe seemingly sending the earth into the spin cycle a few extra times, the players and movers jolted into new realities of their own doing–or as a surprise. The economy has been moving and un-sticking; opportunities are opening while entire industry verticals are left career wastelands; some generations are in huge loss while other people are starting to move around much more in jobs and vocations and practices.

I hear stories of daring and adventure, of incredible romance, of deep pain and loss, of glimmers of beauty within the deepest tragedies. Sometimes the suddenness with which you realize a dream can be incredibly unnerving, pressing you forward into a new sense of self, a new definition, a new story before you felt like you committed to the wanting of your dream. And yet the universe sends you out the door and through three new ones, pressing you to discover your readiness through action, not thinking. And other times it seems unfairly agonizing to wait, years of debt and doubt and pain layered into the pursuit of freedom, a tantalizing notion that seems just out of grasp. Change is rattling. Waiting is painful. I’ve watched people get all that they’ve said they wanted, and fall apart. I’ve watched people try for everything they’ve dreamed of and crumble, stall, wander into places they’d never wish to be. They’re surviving. The universe is doing something.

Change is not easy.

… I’m not sure there are many people who say that it is.

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Welcome to solo-preneurship*, to adventure, to freedom, to creation.

In my world, a big shift happened a few weeks ago. At the end of July, I parted ways with my wonderful and dear company, SWA Group, the place that has been my home for the last five years. Along the way, we created a number of digital and print communications initiatives — sharing the perspective of landscape architecture and describing how the built world works through books, magazines, blogs, and stories. My colleagues are some of the most talented physical and spatial designers I’ve ever met, and they challenged me constantly to learn how to create physical, built spaces within the tricky world of patterns, codes, rules and regulations–learning how to engineer and design places for human enjoyment. Understanding urban patterns and landscape systems is immensely appealing to me, and something I’ve focused on for a long time.

And yet, I leapt.

It’s exciting–and terrifying.

Transitioning from a wonderful job and a space with colleagues who have been extremely supportive of my adventures and experiments was not an easy choice, and it took several weeks and months to iron out the details and to wrap up my final projects and head out. Out into the world of clients and projects and writing and self-employment. Also the asterisk in the title is a note of caution–I’m not headed straight into “solo-preneurship,” because it’s never truly “solo”-preneurship, like Tara Gentile so aptly reminds us. “Business doesn’t happen in a bubble,” she writes; rather, it happens with teams and clients and support and evolution. And markets. And needs. Further, solo-preneurship is not about late nights hustling indefinitely; while hustling is a part of the journey, it doesn’t need to become the entire journey.

And then, I was here.

Shoved out the door and onto the sidewalk, suitcase in hand. I’m taking all the knowledge and chops I’ve got and doing the best I can.

Starting yesterday.

When did this happen? 

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”– Pema Chödrön

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But Sarah, what are you working on? How will you spend your time?

I’ve been avoiding conversations that pull up that dreaded question, that accusatory, “so, what are you doing?” statement, the question that permeates what seems to be nearly every conversation. The rush to fill time—or worse, to apply a story or a definition to how we will spend time—is a national disease we all have, one that requires us to chase productivity and results over holistic being and space for mental clarity. It’s no wonder Time Magazine features a different cover for Americans than the rest of the world when we’re a market more obsessed with our own job performance (and resultant anxiety) than the civil unrest happening in the Middle East. Prayers to Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Israel, and all of the countries in need of deep healing. Including our own.

“The rush to fill time—or worse, to apply a story or a definition to how we will spend time—is a national disease we all have, one that requires us to chase productivity and results over holistic being and space for mental clarity.”

We ask each other what we do before we ask how we’re doing, a quick question that rolls off the tongue faster than you can truly hug someone and look into their eyes, wondering how they actually are. When you’re in transition (and transition is not a temporary state but perhaps an always-state, as Pema Chödrön has gently reminded me in her book, When Things Fall Apart), it’s much harder to answer that question definitively. I have an answer that sounds good, I have an answer that’s short and sweet, I have the answer that helps my parents worry less about my finances (So… how are you supporting yourself?), and I have a few ways to broach the conversation with friends.

The short answer is that I’m writing. And teaching. And learning. And living. The shift, if you put a definition on it, is that I’m no longer working full time with a single employer; I’m working in freelance mode with several clients and project across the country and around the world. Part journalist, part documentarian, part strategist and mostly writer, I’m building a new set of tools and skills and building a new business plan for myself. It’s liberating. It’s thrilling. It brings up every uncertainty I’ve ever had and puts them flat on the kitchen table and stares me square in the face.

It’s full-on accountability.

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac

One of my first projects was a press campaign for a Y-Combinator company in San Francisco dedicated to helping aging seniors live gracefully. I joined Y-Combinator team True Link Financial, a tech start-up tackling the challenge of fraud target aging seniors. Seniors are increasingly vulnerable to misleading marketing and scams; the company’s cofounders Kai Stinchcombe and Claire McDonnell developed a new credit card with a customizable fraud-blocker that helps prevent your parents’ and grandparents’ money from being irreversibly stolen in the time in their life when they need it most.

Aging is an issue that’s fascinated me throughout my studies of cities and people, and with my grandparents aging and later leaving us, I wonder who will take care of them if we all don’t step in and take care of them. A society with no age diversity should alarm you: we need older people to be thriving within our ecosystems, visibly, or we should be concerned for our own future health. It won’t be long until we’re all old (hopefully–that’s the goal, right?). I wonder who will take care of me when I’m 70, 80, or 90.

“The way you do anything is the way you do everything.”

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My second assignment as an independent journalist this summer was joining 1for3.org as a documentarian and writer on a recent trip to Aida Camp, a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Bethlehem. I joined an exceptionally talented team of designers and human rights activists dedicated to making change in a part of the world that needs a lot of love. We traveled to Israel over the summer and spent time in several of the world’s oldest cities, and then focused on the problem of inadequate water access within a camp that serves 6,000 residents. A design and landscape-based challenge, the team built a variety of options to capture stormwater and rainwater, cleanse it, and re-distribute it as potable or recycled water for irrigation and play. While the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is long and complex (see this history of the conflict in maps), the challenge of capturing rainwater on a single site is something that can be implemented in real time. As a documentarian, I wrote 2,500 to 3,000 words per day, and we’re working on pieces for publication this Fall. Nothing in this paragraph suffices to capture what the trip was–I’m struggling for words. It was. I will write more.

And lastly, this Fall I’ll also be teaching again in the Writer’s Workshop, a private group for people who want to build a practice and a community around writing. Writing unlocks our minds and helps us clarify who we are, how we think, and how we connect with others. Last Spring, I opened up the first writing workshop to a group of twenty-five people from around the world and was blown away by the talent, enthusiasm, and dedication of each of the people in the class. I’ve updated and modified the program to make it into a four-week program that focuses on storytelling, imagination, creativity and persuasion–helping writers and aspiring writers of all fields learn how to add more detail, color, and story to their blog posts, essays, and other daily communications.

Writing well is critical to great living. It’s one of my core beliefs, as I dig into understanding the whys behind what I do: writing helps us clarify who we are, what we believe, and serves as an introspective tool for a journey into your own mind. Good writing also helps us get better at explaining ourselves, our ideas, our projects, our thought processes, and our deepest wants and desires. If you want to get better at any job, relationship, or project–get better at writing. Improving your writing makes nearly everything better. If you’ve been to one of my courses or live events before, come join us. ‘ll be sharing more information on the writing class over the next few weeks, and posting details here: http://dev.sarahkpeck.com/writers-workshop/.

SF-reflections Bay Bridge at night

And in addition to leaving my Day job, I’ve left San Francisco for a while. 

The distance a country puts between your old life and a new, unprepared, different life–a life now navigated within the corridors of unfamiliar yet strangely reassuring streets–makes me see my old self with more contrast, more clarity. Distance gives perspective. Change shows your edges. Challenges reveal where we have more work to do.

I left San Francisco, heading to Brooklyn, New York for the Fall to build my own writing, teaching, and consulting practice. My client roster was overwhelming my ability to stay sane and get sleep while working full time, and so–I jumped. I leaned, and I leaned hard, arms spinning, free-falling in the the glorious disruption that is change. After long conversations with close friends, my own coaches, and my mentors both at my company and in my life, I wrapped up my time with my employer and I’m in a bit of a free space right now. It’s wonderful, it’s open, it’s strange, it’s new–and it’s now. It’s here. I’m in it.

It’s less of a jolt and disruption, in some ways, because I believe that the old employer–employee relationship is antiquated, and the job that’s perfect for you three years ago is not the same job (and nor are you the same person) today. Everything shifts and is in flux, and the jobs (employers, clients, projects) that stick around longest are ones that match you and your evolving human talents and needs the best. This shift, then, at least for me, is one towards more project-based work; a move that I believe is more in alignment with how corporate and employment relationships should work.

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But the truth is, I’m avoiding the heart matter, the real reason I’m changing tracks, the deeper stories woven into this framework of self-employment and time management. It’s easier to talk about jobs and locations and moving, because those are things I can point to. These are the things that feel safer to talk about, for some reason. Yet one of the beautiful, albeit less publicly prominent, stories in my life has has been simply and glossily covered over with the use of words like “life opportunities,” and “strategic choices” and “changes,” and “new directions.” These words mask the beauty of a burgeoning and deepening and marvelous love story I can’t even fully grasp that I’m a part of (me? this is me? how is this happening!?) — and my heart is cracking open with this new adventure. My partner. In life. I can’t wait to write about it, too, whenever the time is right.

In short, I’m stunned by how much my life has changed over the last few years. I bow in deep prayer to the universe and to spirits and to energy flows with thanks and gratitude for the gifts in my life.

We can’t wait until later to work on developing beautiful relationships, to starting new adventures, to leaning, to jumping. It’s always time to practice and to push. It’s an adventure, and you’ve only got a few opportunities to live it.

Breathe. 

But let’s dig a little deeper. Even beneath the shift in my relationships and the work that I’m doing is even deeper heart work. Life work. Body work. The thing is, I’m doing some mind work. I’ve been running at full steam for nearly a decade, and in a grasp towards more consciousness and deliberate creation, I’ve slowed down the project roll and I’m consciously practicing choices that make space in my life for essential philosophies and practices I want to devote more time to. I’m continuing to practice saying no to opportunities that don’t quite fit right; no to clients that aren’t a fabulous fit; and no to things that make me tired, cranky, and uncomfortable–like sitting still all day.

And as this moves forward, I’m creating space–ample space–for projects I’ve long put on the back burner.

My critics–largely internal–tell me this is silly, self indulgent, a waste of time. They sit on my shoulders and grumble, moaning about the work I’d better be doing, about the nonsensical things my brain tries to write, cackling in the backdrop. Occasionally I meet a real critic–someone who voices what I’ve been spinning up in my head–and the conversation usually ends with a decent explanation of why I’m doing what I’m doing, surprising even myself.

It can be easy.

It can be now.

My new apartment has a blank wall on it, in a room we’ve devoted to art and creation and the expansive, contemplative work my partner and I are devoted too, and even though we’re not moving in for another week or so, I’ve already scribbled across multiple sheets of paper with ideas, brainstorms, and plans. I’m pinning them up in the invisible wall in my mind. The marked shift is not one of dreaming that I put movement and writing first in my life, but a life in which I actually do it, and continue to align my life according to my values and principles.

Mind work, body work, spirit work.

We are more than the work we create and the products we produce. We are more than the money we earn and the statuses we post. We are humans, to the core, with moving, living, breathing bodies. We are connected, in communities and networks and relationships, and all of the pieces and parts need to be nurtured and allowed; cultivated and fed.

The next few months–nay, longer, please–are about mind work; about spirit work; about body work. We create a career and chase financial gains for consumer-based tendencies; in an effort to challenge these assumptions, the next few months of my life are deliberately about experimentation. I want to push myself (or yield, or soften) into experiments with mind and body. With doing more movement, and less computer work. With changing routines to learn what suits me best. With spirituality first and mental work first. With practices that develop the mind, body and soul. I’ve opened up space in this new life, this new day, for more writing and more movement. More teaching and more learning. More being.

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This means its messy, it’s different. There are a lot of late nights (or early nights) with tears. I’m not good at this; I’m not good at being composed and balanced at all times. I don’t expect myself to be, either. I get really stressed out and I want to throw things against walls and I make hyperactive sets of lists and then I feel like a complete failure when I’ve only done one or two things on my list. I put the list down. I listen to waves of anxiety roll across my body, and I practice trying to observe it—not critique it. I spend months in places that don’t feel right and only when it really really doesn’t feel good to I finally leave; and I learn that next time, I’ll listen to my intuition a little more closely. I shift, I dance, I fall.

Finding calm in the midst of chaos is not easy. Today is a day just like any other, and there is no arrival. Pema Chödrön’s “When Things Fall Apart,” has been a close reminder that the idea of chasing a completeness or an arrival–that feeling of having arrived is a false premise. We are not arriving, we are always arriving. We are always moving. Life is more often a state of chaos than calm; the fleeting satisfaction of completion erodes, too, as time passes and we seek more challenges, learning, opportunities.

The entire process—this ongoing, transitory adventure, this journey—provides fodder for stories and writing and ongoing exploration and journey. The more I grow and learn, the less I feel as though I have any answers at all. I document to track my brain’s inner workings, to train my mind, to place markers in the ground, to discover myself. I write because it’s such a gift to my soul and a beautiful way to connect with others. I teach writing because I hope to share the journey and discovery with like-minded individuals; I learn as much from the talented people I work with as I hope to share.

Thank you for joining me on this journey, and for listening. I’ve created beautiful friendships from this blog and I am grateful to be able to share with each of you.

To living life, to mind work, to creating space.

XOXO

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Tell me what you’ve been working on: I’d love to hear about it in the comments. How has your life shifted and changed over the past year? What’s become clear to you, and what are you working to prioritize? How do you deal with change and transition? 

How much should you share with the internet, anyways?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Chelsea, New York City, June 2013 (Photo by Sarah Peck)

This is the third in a series of posts about building your voice on the internet and making work that sees the light of day for people who have been wanting to blog, create, make, or write. I host a quarterly writing workshop for people interested in learning more about storytelling and writing. The class will re-open for summer enrollment soon–I’m  currently updating the program and hard at work behind the scenes for the next class, which should be live in July. But first: when you do make something, how do you know if you should share it? 

How do you know if it’s okay to share your personal stories with the big wide internet?

Many of us have stories that are hard to tell to our friends, let alone the public. When is it right to share a story, and when could it get you in trouble? When building an online space or a brand related to you, how do you know if it’s okay to tell your story? If you have dreams and visions for the future that don’t align with your current direction with your employer, how transparent can you be about it?

One problem with writing so much personal stuff is wondering when and how to share it.

When I write, I often wonder whether of not I can share this immediately with other people. Knowing when to take your writing public (and when it’s still something you need to work through in community) is a difficult thing to gauge. When is your story worthy of other people being granted permission to see it?

I often share only about a quarter of the things I’ve written, if not much less, and I make it a rule to only share things that I’m nearly done processing or when I’ve found (or nearly found) resolution to a particular idea. While I write as a means to figure things out, I rarely share things as I’m going through the turmoil itself, for many reasons.

My mind is a fickle, raw and tender place, and I’m not always ready to put that space out into the world for judgment–nor is this beneficial to me as a person. I often need to discover my own thoughts and ideas before I can bring them to light with a larger audience.

When I’m working through an idea or a problem that’s raw and tender to me, I guard it closely and give it only to trusted people who I think can cradle my idea (and my heart) with enough tender kindness to assist my in my journey of discovery; each added circle is an extended level of intimacy that is granted permission to care about my heart as much as I do.

I don’t share the things that feel too scary or uncomfortable or too present; those I keep only within an inner circle of close companions and friends, expanding the circle as I get feedback and confidence and resolution in the particular process. Brene Brown articulates her thoughts around this beautifully, and I adhere to similar philosophies. As Brene Brown writes:

“Vulnerability is about sharing our feelings and our experiences with people who have earned the right to hear them.” 

As we circle into the places of darkness and respect the struggles that make us human, remember these boundaries, excerpted from “Daring Greatly” by Brene Brown:

“I don’t tell stories or share vulnerabilities with the public until I’ve worked through them with the people I love. I have my own boundaries around what I share and what I don’t share and I stay mindful of my intentions.”

“First, I only share stories or experiences that I’ve worked through and feel that I can share from solid ground. I don’t share what I call “intimate” stories and I don’t share stories that are fresh wounds. [Second], I follow the rule that I learned in my graduate social work training. Sharing yourself to teach or move a process forward can be healthy and effective, but disclosing information as a way to work through your personal stuff is inappropriate and unethical. Last, I only share when I have no unmet needs that I’m trying to fill.”

Learning these boundaries and rules can be difficult as a new writer, especially in the age of the internet where everything is recorded and visible by anyone. I’ve had my moments when I have essays up in public forums, presentations to give to large audiences, and a professional demeanor to uphold—and while the public world churns along (or dissects my teenage and past angst), I maintain a separation between the events of past and the current events that might dominate my emotional landscape.

Several years ago, during the worst of my breakup with my ex-fiance, I would come home late at night after work, let go of the armor that got me through the day, and quite literally crawl in through the garage to curl up on the carpet alone to the temporary bed I was sleeping on. The shaggy carpet smelled of stale cat and the room shook with the heat of the dryer adjacent to my tiny room. I would lie stone flat on the ground, staring up at the ceiling in such pain that I thought I could never eat again. I had a total of four outfits I could bear wearing, and I slept for days in the same outfit. I couldn’t find a way to eat, think, or cry, and I called my sister just to hear her talk to me on the other end of the line. I didn’t know what to do; and still, despite an inclination that wanted to paint the story across the social web and internet world, I knew that I couldn’t. I didn’t talk about much of this for well over a year, until I’d sobbed my way through my sister’s Kleenex boxes and worked closely with a therapist to help move through the hurt.

I remember the day that I finally shared the story, talked about and opened up to what I’d been through—and I found deep connection and soul-sisters across the internet who reached out and said, “I know. I’ve been there. And thank you, for sharing.” It was only after I’d found the ways to heal that I was able to share my story and learn from it. And like many of the painful moments we each go through, I know (now, at least), how much of my resilience and growth came through these experiences.

Writing is first about creating a relationship with yourself and then about sharing the stories. I use writing to discover and work through my emotions—capturing and recording the raw states of being, storing them in a place to revisit and reconnect with later—but the stories I publish related to emotional wounds are often long healed or well on the way towards healing.

A good rule of thumb to ask is “does this make me feel anything still?” If you’re still feeling pain or angst, or hoping for a response from others, consider keeping it in a smaller circle for now, or holding on to it until later. Likewise, if there’s a response that might be hurtful—and by this I mean if someone could read this and do something that would hurt your feelings—also consider that you might not be ready to share the piece just yet. Protect yourself, and take care of your heart. You always come first, no matter what. Sharing is second, and can be metered out to those closest to us and only later to larger audiences.

In the name of vulnerability, sharing is important. But in the world of the internet, it’s also good to be cautious about where you share and what you share, and keep it close to yourself at first.

Writing is first a journey into your own mind, and remembering to respect yourself and your soul is critical. Share everything with yourself. Put your words down, write your heart out, and keep that journal flush with ideas. This is your place, your soul, yourself. Part one of the week on persuasion is developing an authentic relationship with yourself. Learn how to listen to your ideas, how to applaud them, how to shape them, how to let them take the form that they want—as stubborn as they may seem at times.

First drafts are okay. You are not the Messiah, and your message is not going to be perfect. You can write first drafts, second drafts, and third drafts. This can be a work in progress. You are allowed to edit–in fact, you are allowed to change your mind! You can write later, “I wrote this a while back, and now I think this.”

Make mistakes. (And you can ask for forgiveness). If you make a mistake, you can take action to fix it. Don’t hold back from something because you’re worried about outcomes that are not yet real. Dive into them and make a lot of mistakes. (That’s actually the better outcome).

Start small. If you write a post and no one shows up, it’s because you didn’t invite them to the party. Write something and then share it with a couple of people that you think would actually be a good audience for it. Write them a personal message and say that you wrote something. (“Hey Susan! I wrote this essay and I’m wondering if you have time to read it and tell me what you think! Ideas, comments, general feedback is perfect. I’m new to this and just starting to share my ideas. Thank you!”). 

What about if you over-share? Remember, we live and learn. Don’t admonish yourself too harshly for oversharing. We can ask for permission (if you let the cat out of the bag about your future dreams and your employer lets you go, perhaps the universe was giving you a gentle shove). You can recover from most things and ask for forgiveness in places of error.

But my general rule is to write it out in my journals first, develop stories that are publicly share-able (usually a fraction of the writing that I do) and then tell the stories that help the message when the time is right. Much of the writing is for me (discovering, learning, processing), and many of the experiences become useful stories later.

What rules do you have for sharing yourself with the internet world? Have you ever been afraid to share something, and if so, what is the number one thing that’s holding you back?

AND–if you’d like, share a piece of your work in the comments below! There are lovely people who read this blog. Share away!

With love as always,

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