Rest, reading and planning

In the last blog I wrote that the universe tended to be on the side of the writer. And, as a means to inspire writers, I mentioned that Walter Mosley said that when you are not writing, you could be dreaming; that, according to Mosley, is “the mood of thought below your conscious mind”.

At the Hay Festival at the end of May, one of the many fascinating talks went below the conscious mind into rest, relaxation and sleep. 

Claudia Hammond, an award-winning writer and BBC broadcaster, has a new book called The Art of Rest  which includes a survey of 18,000 people across 135 different countries.
 

Claudia, who is also Visiting Professor in the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Sussex, presents All in the Mind on BBC Radio 4 - available on Sounds, and a repeated edition was broadcast yesterday (Wednesday). She said that the two-year study, funded by the Wellcome Trust, revealed that British people rated reading as the number one pastime for rest. Now that is good news for we writers and readers; in Germany, it is being alone; and in both Canada and India it is being in nature.

As well as reading, writers need rest. You are advised against spending all day writing.  It is a job, but not a 9 to 5 job.  If you fail to rest or get enough sleep both you and your writing will be tired in every sense of the word.

Much has been written about sleep, and Claudia’s top tip for going to sleep was to write a "to do list" before going to bed (but not to be a slave to that list the next day as ‘unexpected things’ crop up.

 Rest is different; it is how we unwind, calm our minds and recharge our bodies. And, as the survey revealed, how much rest you get is directly linked to your sense of well-being.

Mind maps

To do lists are less important to me as a writer than mind maps which I mentioned in an earlier newsletter. If you are planning an important piece of writing, from a personal statement to a presentation or a book, write your topic in the middle of your page of A4 and jot down all the ideas that emerge from it. Then prioritize and edit those topics. 
 

That gives a structure for any piece of writing.