Call me crazy, but serendipitous messages sometimes bombard me through repetition. Every where I turn for a given number of days or weeks, the same word or idea comes up over and over in different ways. Once I was assaulted by the word “clutter.” I heard mention of it in conversation, on the radio, books about it caught my eye in the library and bookshop, a friend told me about www.Flylady.com and Fly Lady’s hot spot theory and  her fifteen-minutes-a-day declutter approach. Then, the final blow came one morning in Paris, TN, when I was clicking a TV remote, flipping through the channels on the hotel television. I heard the word “clutter.” I clicked back to the source and sat on the edge of the bed while a woman minister, who looked like a Barbie Doll and whose name I can’t remember, preached about getting out of our own way, about clearing the clutter out of our life so we could make way for the BIG things God wants for us. “Make room for BIG,” she said over and over. I paid attention for a little while, a few months, and then the clutter crept back in, and every inch I’d reclaimed from the junk and stuff and stack monsters slipped and slid back toward chaos.

Now that I’m reading Getting Things Done by David Allen, I realize the clutter isn’t just in my room. It’s in my head. In the collecting process, the first stage of GTD, you list all your things you have to do, all your ideas you have to hang onto, all your commitments you haven’t followed through on, which are often even more overwhelming than you imagined. The reason this list can be so overwhelming is that you’ve pushed so many of items on the list in to the dark because there wasn’t anymore room left in the plain site of memory.

I realized that even if I’ve forgotten some of those commitments, they still weigh me down, slow me down. I need to list them and keep them, renegotiate them, or unmake them, as David directs in GTD.  I told this to my friend Ginger B. Collins, and she immediately identified. She said she always wanted  to be a singer, and one day when she was a grown woman and it was all up to her, she signed up for six weeks of voice lessons. When she was finished with the six weeks of voice lessons, she knew that singing well is hard work and she didn’t want to practice it that much or work that hard at it. (Ginger, feel free to tell the story your way in your own comments, or in your great blog: Off the Top of My Red Head.)

What am I getting at? Make way for the big things coming into your life by clearing out not only 17 things a day in the month of January, but begin a list of all the things on your mind. Eventually some items are going to bubble up; you’ll think of things you’ve been carrying around for a long time. Do you want to keep carrying them? Do you want to make an appointment with those things in the future? Do you want to say “adios and vaya con dios.” And maybe even, “What was I thinking?”

As these ideas and desires from a while back float to the top, you can let them float off, or you can net them for another purpose. No, don’t make more clutter for yourself. Give some of these ideas and desires to your characters, to your poem, to your work. It’s all material. It may not be your desire or your commitment any longer, but your characters can still use it, or not use it, if that’s how conflict and tension come into your story.

Assignment: Make a list of 10 things you wanted to be when you grew up. How many of those goals have you accomplished? Still want to accomplish any of them?

Exercise: For each item on your list, write about the child or young adult you were who decided she wanted to be that or do that when they grew up 

Exercise: Choose a character you’ve been working with. Have him list 10 things he wanted to be when he grew up. Then have him tell you how many of these goals he’s achieved. Have him “talk” on paper about the child or young adult who chose those particular aspirations. Let the character try again to fulfill an aspiration or two on the list he still hasn’t accomplished. What are his obstacles? How does that create an internal and external conflict? Is there a story there? If so, write it.

Suggestion for the physical clutter problems: Check out www.flylady.com and the concept of hot spots and 15 minutes of daily decluttering. When you clear your physical space, your mind clears to a certain degree along with your environment.

Resolution # 17: Declutter hot spots 15 minutes per day as directed by Fly Lady.

Recently my repeating message from the universe is to write two hours a day. I met a crime novelist who writes the first two hours of his day, seven days a week, even when he’s on vacation with his family. He gets up early, writes his required time, and his kids never even know he’s working while the rest of the family takes a 100% vacation. Then I picked up How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul J. Silvia, Ph.D, (American Psychological Association, 2007). He also recommended the magic number of two hours. Then I read The Call of the Writer’s Craft by Tom Bird (Adams Media, 2009) and he insists on an author writing two hours per day, six days per week. Then Ginger B. Collins, blogger of Off the Top of My Red Head and wonderful singer who decided she’d rather write than work on voice exercises, told me she’s just made a commitment to write for two hours a day. Okay, I’m listening!

While I believe you can get a novel draft done in fifteen minutes a day, if that’s all you have, I usually can make room for two hours if I make the good choices and keep my priorities in order.

Resolution # 18: Write at least two hours per day, six days per week. Preferably, this two hours will be before my 1:00 PM online gateway.

Scene Storm Word Lists plucked from my clutter-contributing stack of books to the left:

whammy

raisin

hormones

trumpet

house

ice

scare

Alabama

marriages

worst