news, podcast, prompts

Episode 6, now with a writing prompt

Meghan No Comments

Today we publish our first mini-episode, where we just talk a bit about what we were up to last week, with audio clips of our daily off-podcast voice memos (and the kittens!). We also share our first writing prompt exercise! Next week, we’ll have a quick critique session of our responses, and would love to have you share yours here, on Instagram, or by email. Send us a voice memo, and we will include it on the show!

Full show notes are here, but the prompt is:

Your boss calls you into their office and closes the door. What happens next?

October writing prompt: Your boss calls you into their office. What happens next?

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news

When the world gets in

Meghan No Comments

We talk a lot about the importance of getting the writing done before the world gets in the way. As journalist and author Sigrun Davidsdottir says on this week’s podcast, “These early hours, they are worth gold.” Even if you’re not a morning person (we aren’t).

This week, it has been especially hard to get the writing done before the world gets in. There’s a lot coming at us, all the time. I live in the U.S., where we have had a decades-long problem with gun violence and domestic terrorism, and police violence, and systemic oppression, and climate change. Waking Monday morning to the news from Las Vegas definitely got in my head and heart, already broken wide open because bad things just keep coming. The most I have been able to hope for is 45 minutes right after waking up, when my mind is still foggy and my body slow, because after that, it’s time to start making phone calls to my senators and state governor to ask them what’s your plan? and the world — and the anger and horror and frustration — gets in. And that’s where I am right now.

The world doesn’t need another hot take, but it needs even less people being quiet.

A prayer is not a plan. We know this as writers — you can wish you were writing or think about writing or fantasize about being published, but unless you actually write, none of it does any good. Unless our leaders actually do something, none of their public “thoughts and prayers” do any good. It’s also clear that our leaders won’t do something until we force their hands.

So why was I talking about writing in the morning? Because it’s okay to protect your writing time. Writing makes us — I hope — more empathetic. More connected. More human. So protect your time before the world gets in so you’re ready to meet the world when it does. Protect your voice — so you can use it when its needed.

-Meghan

Some stuff to read

Why Mass Shootings Keep Happening (Esquire)

We Have to Stop Pretending We Can’t Do Anything About Gun Violence (Teen Vogue)

Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde review — prophetic and necessary (The Guardian)

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news, podcast

Episode 4 is up, and we talk identity

Meghan No Comments

Episode 4 is live — this week is all about identity. How do you handle the dreaded question, “So, what do you do?” Also, whether or not you’re public about being a writer, the intersection of age and shame, and being ambitious while female. We also talk writing uniforms — keep an eye on Instagram this week, and share your writing outfit with us! Use #marginallypodcast or tag us (@marginallypodcast).

As usual, get show notes here, get the show on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever get your podcasts.

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inspiration, magic

Do you 10Q?

Olivia No Comments

(Disclosure: I actually do not like that slogan – not sure of the grammar of it, but I will use it because it’s what they use.)

There’s this thing I’ve been doing since 2011, or in other words (but coincidentally) as long as I’ve been doing my “corporate drone” job. It’s called 10Q, and was inspired by the time of reflection between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but you don’t need to be religious in any way to participate.

As you might have guessed, there are 10 questions that it sends you – one question per day, that you can reflect on (stuff like, how did a significant experience affect you) and write an answer to. At the end of the 10 days, you lock your answers away in a vault until the next year. Sure, anyone could do this for themselves any time, but there is something about the process and the community that I like. It probably adds some accountability.

You can choose whether your answers are public, or you can make them public but anonymous, or totally private. It’s up to you.

Also, you can answer all the questions on the last day, or only answer some of them, or answer a few at a time if you’re busy at work and haven’t gotten to it (speaking from personal experience). So I like that it’s not super rigid, but it has a structure.

There are lots of things I love about it, but these are probably the biggest ones:

  1. It’s for a specific period of time. So you can only read your old answers for a short period of time (the “vault” opens a bit before 10Q and closes a bit after). So it is part of a rhythm of a year for me – the sort of autumnal reboot, since I am not Jewish, but for a couple of years I observed some Jewish holidays and met with a rabbi, and so the religious rhythm also has some significance for me. In any case, I like that this is not about constant naval-gazing and more about a process of looking at your year and assessing it, and then saving something to consider for next year.
  2. It reminds me why I am writing. It gets me out of my day-to-day grind and makes me think about why I do what I do and why I want to write. And going back a few years (2011-13 especially), before I started really trying to write or taking writing classes in the evenings, I felt so frustrated that I wasn’t writing – I felt a need but wasn’t doing it. That’s really helpful to read about.
  3. I love reading my old answers. Again, this is sort of like reading your old journals and laughing at how you thought things would be. But the questions are thoughtful enough that you answer them in good ways. (For example, last year I wrote this: “I would like to be finished with my novel, maybe pitching it for publication.” HAHAHAHA.) For something a little bit more meaningful, I wrote this in 2012, which still really resonates when I read it again:

“When I was in university, I believed that I wanted a life in pursuit of knowledge and wonder. I think I need to add “joy” to that list. I have been pursuing knowledge for some time, but not with the wonder and definitely not with the joy. I have been making rules for myself, and that means as well making rules for others. I need to be myself. I think it is still important to seek knowledge – to evaluate and analyse – but I need to do this because of a deeper pursuit of joy and love.”

We’d love to hear from you if you’ve done it before, if you enjoy it, if you are going to do it again?

(olivia)

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getting started, inspiration, rituals

Inspiration week! Olivia’s writing music

Olivia No Comments

I loved talking about week inspiration and motivation on the podcast this week. This is one of my favorite topics because it means I get to go back to the things that make me excited to write, and read or listen to them again. It’s a good way just to start noticing what is working for you – and maybe what isn’t.

This morning, while writing, I noticed how much I was loving Bill Evans’s album Everybody Digs Bill Evans – a great album. When that finished, I went on to Bonobo, a totally different type of music, but the album Migration really gets me into a good writing place. It’s a mix of melodic and some beats that make me feel cheerful and creative. Lately, I’ve also been writing to Philip Glass’s Piano Works, and before that I just listened to Mendelsohn’s Songs Without Words on repeat.

I can’t write to music with words (although I can listen to mellow and folky music at my day job). In college, I played through an old CD of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture – the one with the yellow label on the front and a canon – literally hundreds of times to write a paper in college. It also had a couple other Russian composers; I guess that was helpful for all my Slavic Studies classes.

(As an aside, I have started to feel sort of annoyed at how many playlists I have been listening to, curated or automated by Spotify, and am trying to consciously listen to albums. Have you ever felt that? I just feel like I’m not really listening to music anymore – more like I am just sitting in a lobby with random music on. I like the wholeness of an album. But maybe that just makes me super old.)

All that is to say, music is one of those things that can make a big difference in my motivation/inspiration to work.

And, despite having said all the above about playlists, I have a playlist of music I work to here on Spotify, if anyone’s interested. I like following other actual humans’ playlists; probably my favorite is Teju Cole’s Jetlag playlists, although he is in general a good music curator.

We’d love to hear your favorite writing music!

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getting started, inspiration, productivity

Rituals, the brain … and writing

Olivia No Comments

I’ve read a lot about rituals and how important they are when you’re doing creativity. There’s a lot out there about how the muse will only show up if you actually put your ass in the chair and wait for her. In fact, I think, if you’ve only got a very short amount of time to write or be creative (like all of us day-job-workers), then this is even important: we need our muse to show up on time, right?

And yet, if I’m honest, I think something in me is somewhat resistant to the idea that I need to make a special ceremony for my muse. Like, why isn’t it there already?? Maybe there’s something wrong with my muse? Maybe my will for the muse isn’t strong enough to summon her, etc.

So I was sort of encouraged to read this post about how rituals affect our brains. It’s a very scientific explanation of how that whole “put your ass in the chair” thing works: we perform better when we have a ritual.

Well, if science proves it, I guess I can let myself and my muse off the hook and start doing what the scientists tell me to. I am going to work on a ritual – nothing too intricate, but something to get me going in the morning. As we are heading into autumn/winter, I’m thinking my ritual should involve candles and maybe wonderful tea.

What does your writing ritual involve?

We’d love to hear from you, especially because next week’s podcast is about inspiration, motivation – and I think a big part of that is making it easy to stay motivated. A ritual can be a big part of it.

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getting it done, inspiration, magic

Matters poetical

Olivia No Comments

The title of this post is totally stolen from a Times Literary Supplement podcast I listened to today, which had this lovely interview with the British theatre director Peter Brook CBE. You can listen here, or on iTunes or wherever else you get podcasts. The interview starts around 27:10, and it’s lovely.

Next week on the podcast, we’ll be talking about inspiration and motivation – what’s the difference, and what makes a difference for us. This is totally inspiration for me. I’ll give you bits of it if you are interested, but obviously listen to the whole thing if you want more.

First of all, he talks about the need to try but let go – we will have a longer discussion about this idea on a future podcast, because it’s something I’ve learned about through yoga. Here’s a quote from Peter:

There is something very subtle that can come through if we, just for a moment, try the best we can, and then quietly let be.

He then goes on to talk about what he calls “the formless hunch,” which I’ll let him explain:

I had to have gone through all the impossibilities. I had this very early on in my career, where people said to me, if you’re a young director, you must prepare. So I took it seriously. … I had a great ball doing this. But then I came into rehearsal and just saw simply that none of it was any good. And I think all one needs is to be able to say to oneself, ‘It’s no good.’ And at that moment, things fall away, and that’s what the formless hunch is about.

I really loved how he talks about the separation of the form and the meaning. He says that, for the podcast, they have a microphone, a table, whatever, but continues:

but they are not the cause of whatever good may come out of anything we say to one another. That will happen. And that’s why I say the formless hunch. People get obsessed with the form, and the form is just a starting point. It’s something we need… We need words, but words are just a form. Gradually you can find that the word is either a dead piece of useless bone, or it is vibrating because within the word there is more.

And then, the magic (bonus tip: I basically love anything about magic used in this way):

Yes you have to prepare and now, when you come to it, you have to trust the true magic of intuition, and the intuition only comes if you’ve prepared the ground and if you then have the simple good will to stop taking yourself so seriously.

 

*

We’re collecting inspiration for our podcast next week. What type of thing do you learn to hear about?

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news, podcast

Episode 2 is up, and the kittens are home

Olivia No Comments

Our second episode is up here!  Turns out we had a lot to say about what we get out of our day jobs.

We would love to hear your thoughts on writing retreats, how you keep up your routine when you travel, and how you think about what you get from your job – and what you don’t like.

Plus, I (Olivia) adopted some kittens. I’m now trying to convince them that I’m trustworthy. This photo from my morning writing session represents huge progress – we are all sat at the same table:

For comparison, here’s a photo of when I found out that the grey one doesn’t like to be watched when she eats:

They don’t have names yet. My dad’s suggested Romy and Michele – a pretty solid suggestion, considering how great the film is (I think there’s a glitch in the IMDB star rating on the page I just linked to, ha).

Any literary or funny suggestions?

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