Live Writing Marathon – 4

It’s Monday morning and day three of the writing marathon. Let’s begin with some quick numbers. I have written 8,181 words including three blog posts and three chapters of the book I am working on. I have also written three poems.

That’s pretty sustained! I didn’t write into the evening on either Saturday or Sunday.

Lessons learnt so far:

• starting each day with a short meditation really helps me to get started
• having a structure ready in advance so that I am sitting down with a job to do, rather than a blank page is a big help
• the process has shown me that I have the ability to focus far more than I thought I did
• doing this over three days builds mettle, as each day goes I gain in confidence
• the power of the visual post-it note technique for helping me to build a structure for the book was remarkable. It really helped me to see what the chapters could be and how they fit together
• it is also remarkable how much the ideas come together in the actual writing process itself. Whilst writing, new examples occur and connections between sections become more obvious

All in all, it feels like I learnt so much through doing this. I have figured out how to pull a book together into a coherent whole and demonstrated to myself that I have greater resilience and focus than I thought possible. There are interesting analogies here with the running marathon or any sort of endurance challenge.

The book itself? I am still calling it “Believing in what we do”. It has developed into a book about the core values that shape us and determine the way we work, where we work and who we work with. The book begins with a practical example of the core values that my own team work with – these were written about in a series of blog posts last year. Then I give some examples of techniques to identify core values.

After looking at techniques I look at some examples of corporate values and ways in which things can go wrong. Then finally I will look at some of the literature that has informed my thinking on this. It is shaping up to be an interesting book (though I say so myself!)

Music I played whilst writing:

1. Miles Davis – Agharta
2. Arve Henriksen – The Nature of Connections
3. Richard Skelton – Dyad
4. Brian Eno – Neroli
5. Bass Communion – Atmospherics
6. David Sylvian & Holger Czukay – Flux & Mutability

I started with the same album as for Saturday to get me into the same zone. Then the rest of the music was a mixture of ambient and jazz. Enough of a presence to stir me to create, but not too intrusive to distract.

Now, I have one more day in this experiment to see how far I can get with the manuscript before the world beckons…