BDWS #3

Tonight, I wrote a response paper for my Utopia and Dystopia in Literature and Film class. It was only around 400 words, so not long at all. I spent a good majority of the time focusing on isolating myself from the rest of the world. It worked well the last time: not allowing myself the opportunities to become distracted. This time it worked flawlessly. I was able to sit down, gather my notes and write. I had already done enough prewriting for this, so I needed to relax and let things flow. It went well. 45 minutes.

BDWS #2 Aug. 30

Read civil war text while taking notes with post its in book. For fifteen minutes focused heavily on reading slowly and choosing notes carefully looking for topic for end of semester final paper. 9AM Aug. 30, 2011.

Reading Resopnse #1

After reading the first 12 pages of Boice's book "How Writer's Journey to Comfort and Fluency", I have realized that many of the same issues that plague my writing process also consume others. At first this realization gave little comfort as while I'm sure that if a key to motivation for writing was as easy as using mindfulness exercises and taking a closer look objectively at your actions from a behavioral point of view, well then... I hadn't thought of instilling mindfulness into my work motivations.

I have had a little experience with mindfulness as a concept. In fact my roommate, a behavior analyst, lives by much of the tennants of mindfulness and the relational frame theory. I just hadn't taken a serious look at my professioinal life in this way. I am going to seriously establish a time each week to really give this a go with my personal projects as a supplement to my BDWS and reading response.

BDWS #1 Aug. 29

This is my first Brief Daily Writing Session. I wrote a response paper for my Film Theory class last night, but I had to do some tweaking and ended up writing an extra page this morning. When I did this, I decided to get the mindfulness portion out of the way. I tried very hard to isolate myself and leave my thoughts to themselves (if that makes any sense). I didn't have any music on, or a television. No destractions. I was simply writing about an essay on the tenants of Apparatus Theory as conceived by Walter Benjamin and a guy named Baudry. This whole process probably took a total of 30 minutes and I actually feel I retained more and was able to participate in class discussion a little more easily.