I spent all of last year trying to write a book (it’s getting there) so a good deal of the entries in my commonplace diary were somehow related to writing.
(When you’re writing, everything is related to writing.)
I picked 100 of them and stitched them together for today’s newsletter: 100 quotes that helped me write.
My three notebooks. On the left: my logbook. On the right: my diary. And in the middle, my commonplace diary. (You can take a peek at it in the latest newsletter.)
At this risk of this blog just being a back-and-forth with Alan: I love his “twoquotes” tag on his blog, where he simply juxtaposes one quote with another.
I’m coming up on the second anniversary of keeping my commonplace diary, and all year I’ve been putting one quote beneath another quote, letting them talk to each other:
Sometimes I am intentional with the juxtaposition, saving a quote for the right day, but the really fun juxtapositions are the random ones when the meaning reveals itself only after the ink is dry.
Heading into my third year, it’ll be interesting to see if this still works with three, then four, then five…
In the comments of my newsletter on interviewing and wanting to be a better listener, a reader told me about an acronym people in the coaching world use frequently: WAIT, which stands for “Why Am I Talking?”
There’s something about this acronym that is more helpful and hits much harder than my usual “Shut up and listen” mantra.
I’ve taken to giving myself temporary tattoos on my arm:
I just spent the week doing promotion for the Steal Like an Artist 10th anniversary, and WAIT took on a different meaning: Why am I talking here? What am I trying to do with my words? It sort of kept me “on point.”
We are just about to break ground on my new studio. Construction always takes about twice as long as you think it will, so the WAIT on my wrist tells me to relax, stay calm, the days will accumulate.
Related reading: Hit pause
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