These days are again very hectic. The project office has scheduled a crash course on our PPM tool. Actually a refresher course but too much information I think to absorb in a short 2 day session. I could not attend both days full time due to the work I need to do for my projects. I was only able to attend a few hours today. I got into an argument with the project office head because he insisted that we resolve all the data quality issues in the coming 2 weeks. Everyone is rushing to complete their projects as the year ends and project office is rushing to improve the data quality of the PPM tool which is his project.
This afternoon I had a phone conference with the IBM team on my project. The project head is a former colleague who has transferred to IBM. I am glad to work with her because at least we understand each other. The team is quite new and I am not happy with the response as I think it's quite slow. Nevertheless, I think that I need to be patient because I have to establish a good rapport with the team. I hope to have access to the environment because it will be helpful to resolve problems in the future. But under the new rules only IBM has access. So this will be a problem and user satisfaction will suffer if we don't have access.
The only way is to establish a close rapport via interpersonal interaction. This is the way it's done in the Europe office and I hope to establish the same in the local zone. I am not happy with the way we are required to follow the new rules. I always have diffculty adjusting to new procedures or new bosses. But the resentment is not as strong as before. I think I have mellowed down and controlled my impulses. The trick is to keep cool and focus on the activity at hand. I always lose my focus and attention due to the distractions that I allow myself to indulge in. It's the same thing with my writing when I cannot focus on the task at hand.
I borrowed a book again called 'Write. 10 Days to Overcome Writer's Block. Period.' I borrowed it before but thought otherwise when I reserved the book online. I was looking for another book about writing and the title caught my attention. In fact it's a good book but I did not appreciate it when I first read it in the past. Now after my reflections and recent reading on writing, I now appreciate the lessons it's trying to impart. Like the previous book on writing that I have just finished, the author is a PhD. A psychologist and writer who can talk about different sides of writing.
The author also spoke about writing as a therapeutic activity. She mentioned books with titles like 'The Writing Cure' or 'Writing to Heal'. I remember that in my first journal I wrote the following title 'My Therapeutic Diary' where I recognized the healing effect of journal writing. I realized only now that the medical profession has recognized this effect of journal writing. So I have been journal writing for many years to cure my stress and heal myself of traumas. Hence, it's a good activity for self transformation and self knowledge. Since I have been doing it for many years, the impact was not really to improve my writing skills but to reduce stress. I now wonder if I have been living a stressful life or is it just me.
Now the challenge is to move from a writing experience derived from a stressful existence and self-understanding to a more formalized writing process. The main activity is self-expression and I should use this core benefit to move towards being a novelist. So I write for therapy and not as a novelist. So I write to heal instead of writing for profit. So the motivation is really different for both instances. So perhaps that is why I flounder when writing a novel. There is no therapeutic effect; no release because it feels like work. Hence, there is no feeling of exhilaration. So this is the challenge for me when I try to be a novelist to find that feeling of exhilaration derived not from therapy but from a pure expression.
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