rituals – marginally

The eBook has landed

Olivia December 24, 2018 No Comments

Today’s episode takes you through our Seven Days To A Writing Routine eBook. You can get the eBook with lots of worksheets by signing up for our newsletter (check out the sidebar on your right), or follow along and do it yourself.

We are really excited to share this podcast with you, and we also want to plug Katherine from Olive Apple Moss for the beautiful illustrations.

We’d love to hear what you think and if you have other routine hacks that you’d like to share with us.

Sign up for the newsletter to get the ebook with all the worksheets, and listen and check out the full show notes here, or in your favorite podcast app.

day jobs, getting it done, inspiration, podcast, rituals, tips

On Episode 27, Hamid Ismailov reminds us how a day job can help your writing

Olivia March 12, 2018 No Comments

In today’s episode, we talked to the BBC journalist and prolific novelist Hamid Ismailov. Hamid has a fascinating day job – Editor of the Central Asia service at the BBC World Service – but he still makes time in evenings several months a year to write novels. He shared with us his system for averaging one novel for year, but still having time to daydream about your next project(s), and why he doesn’t want to quit his day job.

Hamid is the author of numerous books in Russian and Uzbek, which have been translated into English and many other languages. His most recent book is The Devils’ Dance. One of his first books to receive widespread acclaim in English is The Railway, which has an untraditional, folkloric structure and many fantastic characters. Since then, in English he has published several books, including The Dead Lake, about the area of Kazakhstan where nuclear testing had occurred previously, an elegy about Moscow called The Underground, and A Poet and Bin Laden, and many more books and artistic projects that have not been tranlsated. He was formerly the BBC’s Writer in Residence, and during that time he wrote many lovely blog posts.

We enjoyed talking to him, and we think you’ll learn from and be inspired by our discussion with him this week.

Full show notes are here.

getting it done, getting started, productivity, rituals, tips

What not to do when you’re staring at the screen early in the morning

Olivia February 13, 2018 No Comments

Good morning! A post from the trenches of margin-writing today. I wanted to write you a post called something like “How to get started writing in the morning if you can’t remember what your book is about.” But then I realized that I am in that situation right now and I have no idea how to start again, and only 28 minutes to write, so I would be a hypocrite if I wrote you a blog about that. And I don’t have time to both remember what my book is about and write a blog post.

So this post is what not to do when you’re staring at the screen early in the morning and can’t remember what your book is about.

First of course, don’t start writing a blog post. Is this your book? No, it is not.

Oh well.

Second, do not let your cats sit on your notebook and cuddle up with each other. They will look too cute and then you will not be able to move them. And if you do, then they will just start eating everything on your desk, and that is also annoying.

Third: definitely do not look at Facebook. You will not find your book on there. One time (literally just one time) I had to go on Facebook to check out someone who was a fashion inspiration for a character. The rest of the time, I was just procrastinating.

(Point 3 also goes for Pinterest, although I do use it more for research than Facebook. You can see proof of this on our Marginally Pinterest page, which is not my personal Pinterest. I had a serious Pinterest addiction and have had to separate my writing account from the one about beautiful bedrooms and vegan baking.)

Another tip: don’t organize anything. Organization is a great procrastination technique, but you don’t need procrastination when you have max 1 hour to write in the morning. Organization is a great thing to do in the evening.

Fifth, don’t turn on your phone. I keep my phone on airplane mode until after I’ve written (or at least theoretically). Days when I don’t do that, my brain gets fried and it’s super hard to sit down to write.

Sixth, don’t forget to light your candles and turn on the music that makes you know you’re ready to write! That’s your ritual! Why did you forget??

In short, writing isn’t working for me this morning, so I’m going to go meditate. I’m really thinking about shifting my writing routine to the evening.

PS – I’m going to put this smug quote from an Earlier Me here for a bit of irony.

inspiration, pep talk, podcast, tips

Our Episode 23 chat with filmmaker Ashley Maynor

Olivia February 11, 2018 No Comments

Episode 23 is live, and we are super excited to bring you our wide-ranging conversation with Ashley Maynor, who is a university librarian by day and an award-winning filmmaker by night. Ashley is a long and dear friend of Olivia’s. This conversation is anything but boring – we touch on divorce and our inner octagenarian, as well as farm animals.

Using her mad librarian skills, after our chat she put up this great Resources for Creatives page, with things to get you unstuck, a crash course on starting a podcast and a guide to microbudget film production. We thought you’d like to check it out!

Full show notes are here.

getting it done, magic, news, podcast

Episode 7 gets real

Olivia October 16, 2017 No Comments

We posted Episode 7, and in it we open up about the ugly side of writing when you have a day job – when you can’t really manage to fit everything in, when you feel frustrated, or when you’re just really freaking tired. We know everyone feels this sometimes, so we just went with this feeling, picked it apart, and then talked about some of the things that can get us to writing.

Some of it comes down to this –

– but there’s some other stuff in the episode as well.

As always, we would love to hear how you are doing – so contact us here, on Instagram, or by email. Send us a voice memo, and we will include it on the show!

Full show notes are here.

inspiration, magic

Do you 10Q?

Olivia September 20, 2017 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:

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.
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.
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)

getting started, inspiration, productivity

Rituals, the brain … and writing

Olivia September 16, 2017 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.