Monthly Archives: September 2020

Can a Tomato Help You Write?

What’s keeping you from writing better? Do you have so much to do that you feel overwhelmed? Do you start to write but get distracted? Is it self-discipline you need, or are you simply unable to focus?

If so, perhaps a tomato can help.

No, I don’t mean the fruit itself. I’m talking about the Italian word for tomato—pomodoro. More specifically, I mean the Pomodoro Technique.

Created by Francesco Cirillo, it’s one of the simplest time management methods I’ve ever heard of. You will need nothing more than a kitchen timer, or any timer will do. His kitchen timer was shaped like a tomato, hence the name of the technique.

Pomodoro Kitchen Timer

Here’s how it works:

  1. Set the timer for 25 minutes.
  2. Work on your writing task without interruption, without allowing distractions.
  3. When the timer rings, stop and take a 5-minute break.
  4. Repeat steps 1-3, but after the 4th session, take a longer break—say 20 or 30 minutes.

Those are the basics. Each 25-minute work session is called a ‘pomodoro.’ Writing most works of fiction will take you many pomodoros, but the 5-minute breaks will allow you to stretch and clear your mind. You’ll return to your writing feeling refreshed, and possibly with new insights from your muse.

It’s possible that you’ll finish a single writing task, like a chapter or a short story, while in the middle of a pomodoro session. Mr. Cirillo suggests you use the remainder of the session to review your work, not start your break early. The idea is to ingrain a mental association between work and consistent chunks of time.  

You may find it preferable to use a mechanical timer rather than a digital one. At first, you’ll connect its ticking sound with the relentless passing of time. Later, you’ll associate that sound with your own mental focus. It may actually aid in your ability to concentrate.

Here’s how I’ve used the Pomodoro Technique. Often I have several different writing tasks to do—a first draft of a short story, a second edit of a novel’s chapter, some research for a future work, and an upcoming blog post. Viewed from beforehand, with all these tasks undone, the pile of work can seem daunting.

I’ve found tasks don’t get done if I sit and fret about them. But if I view them as manageable chunks of time, then I can devote pomodoros to each task in turn. If they are unequal in importance, then I start with the most important one and devote more pomodoros to it.

You can use the Pomodoro Technique for many types of tasks, not just writing-related ones. It works for tasks where you can control the timing of your breaks, and where stopping after 25 minutes is possible.

Don’t use it while playing soccer, performing surgery, or defusing a bomb.

But if writing is your thing, consider letting a tomato help you out. It works for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 20, 2020Permalink

The Desk Generation

With schools now conducting ‘remote learning,’ many parents are setting up designated study areas for their children at home. It’s a thing.

Before COVID-19, children did their homework after school, squeezing time for it around sports practice, dinner, and other activities. They studied on a couch, on their bed, at the dinner table after the meal, wherever they could.

(Hold on, wait a minute. At this point you’re wondering why I’m writing about this topic. Isn’t this blog mostly about writing fiction? Yes, and this post is about that, too. Be patient. I’ll get to it.)

Where was I? Oh, yes. As a perceptive viewer of social trends, I’ve picked up on a change. With schoolchildren now home during school hours, linked to their teachers by computer, they need their own assigned study nook at home. In short, they need their own desk.

When I was a kid, I had my own desk. It stood in the basement, separate from the rest of the house, in a quiet area. I didn’t think much about it then, but that desk shaped my life.

There’s enormous symbolic power in a desk. First, it’s yours. It’s a horizontal surface on which you move things about, allowing you to concentrate on the task at hand while other tasks wait. You’re the general, strategically deploying your forces by your command.

Also, it’s got formality of purpose. That is, it claims to the world that this place, and no other, is where you study. That’s all you do there, and you don’t study elsewhere. It’s not some dual-use, multi-function furniture item. When you’re not studying there, you won’t be eating dinner off your desk or sleeping on it. It’s designed and optimized for one activity—studying.

Studying, of course, begins to look a lot like work. We even call it homework or schoolwork.

Even preschoolers can have desks

All the while, the desk is shaping you. You’re forming and ingraining a habit, making a mental link between a place and an activity. The desk is telling you studying is serious. Things you do at a desk are solemn, adult-like things. A desk is a place of the mind, a place to work, a place to create.

A desk is not just a tiny niche within the universe. It is its own universe. Yours.

I think the current push to provide children their own study desk could be a positive trend. And not just to help them do better in schoolwork.

The more people who become used to working creatively at their desk, the more inclined some will be to write fiction. The Desk Generation may end up providing humanity with some of history’s best novelists.  

Sit down, children. Your desk awaits you. Your future lies ahead. Write well, even better than—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 13, 2020Permalink

The Story Behind the Story—Broken Flute Cave

The CHILLFILTR Review just published my short story, “Broken Flute Cave,” and it’s available to read online here. This historical fantasy tale is well outside my normal line, and here is the story behind that story—

Some years ago, a friend of my father shared her interest in Native American flutes with him. Being curious about everything, he became interested himself, particularly with the Anasazi Flute, more aptly named the Ancestral Pueblo Flute. These differ from most other Native American flutes in that they have no ‘fipple’ mouthpiece. An archaeologist named Earl Morris discovered these flutes in 1931, lying in a cave within Prayer Rock Valley in Arizona.

Here is where stories get warped from retelling, often becoming more dramatic and less mundane than the truth. The way I understood the story was that Morris, familiar with standard Native American flutes, saw no fipple on these and concluded they must be missing their mouthpiece, so named the cavern “Broken Flute Cave.”

Later, (again, this may be apocryphal) someone realized the flutes must be intact, but they seemed impossible to play. Decades after their discovery, someone hit on the right way to play the flutes—the proper angle to hold them, the proper way to shape your lips—and the resulting sound seemed haunting and magical.

As a storyteller and a person intrigued by rediscovering lost technologies, I liked this account. I thought about the idea of a musician from a now-forgotten tribe, unable to pass on the techniques of making and playing these flutes, dying in that cave. Only after hundreds of years would they be found, and more decades would pass before their sound would be heard again.

Those thoughts percolated in my mind for years before I wrote “Broken Flute Cave.” My protagonist, Hototo, bears a name meaning ‘warrior spirit who sings.’ For a while, archaeologists called his tribe the Anasazi, but he wouldn’t have called himself that. Anasazi means ‘enemy,’ so that’s the name by which other tribes called them. The flute-making tribe vanished, leaving only their pueblos, flutes, and other artifacts behind.

In writing the story, I sought to link Hototo’s time to ours, and to portray the loss of names, techniques, skills, and civilizations through the failure to properly pass them on. Some may get rediscovered, many will not. Although these losses to time are sad, perhaps we can all learn from Hototo to look on the bright side.

In fact, it’s likely that the archaeologist Morris knew the flutes were intact, but named the cavern Broken Flute Cave because some of the instruments were truly broken. Further, it appears he figured out how to play them right away. However, it did take several decades for Anasazi Flutes to catch on in popularity.

As an interesting sidelight, my dad noticed a similarity between the flutes and common PVC pipe, so he bought some pipe and made his own. That intrigued me, so I made some, too. Pictured is a replica flute, and my four PVC flutes.

On the rare occasions when spirits smile on me, I can get decent sounds from my homemade flutes, but I’d need a lot of practice to produce enjoyable music. There are several good audio clips on YouTube featuring musicians playing ‘Anasazi flutes’ well, and I think you’d like the pure, rich tone they make.

If you’re wondering what such a flute would sound like in a cave, you can read “Broken Flute Cave,” but don’t listen to any PVC pipes played by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 6, 2020Permalink