My father is a puzzle to me. He watches sports for entertainment, for example, and when I protest that I prefer watching something with a story, he tells me “It’s all about stories.” He believes (I’m guessing) the strategies and the occasional player biography means that watching the events of a game unfold makes it a story.

This logic of his makes no sense to me.

Saying that a football game is a story is like saying a rainbow is a poem. It can inspire one, certainly, it can become one, but it is not one while it is happening.

The story is what happens later, when you’re TELLING what happened. The event itself is no more a story than the list of to-do items in your schedule is a journal. (Although I’ll grant that the instant replays can qualify as anecdotes–little, mini-stories.)

A story isn’t a story until you define it by the explanation of what happened and why.

Think about history. You can look at it and figure out how the pieces fit together to make the Battle of Gettysburg or the discovery of penicillin possible at just that moment in time. While it’s happening, you might get that little frisson up your spine of “We’re making history, here” but what you’re doing is participating in the events that become history.

When you tell it to other people, it becomes history–before that, it’s just current events. A sporting event in progress is just a game. You don’t know the story of the game until it’s over.

Mind you, I’m not saying there aren’t any similarities.

When you watch a sporting event, you do have many of the features that make for a good story–you know who the main protagonists are, and are usually rooting for one of them. You have the rush of adrenalin at knowing something is going to happen, but not knowing how it’s going to play out. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the people in charge are trying to plot for every possibility. Presumably you’re interested in the outcome, or you wouldn’t be watching at all. And, of course, you want to know how it turns out.

But it’s still not a story. It becomes a story later that day when you tell a friend, “I saw the best game today! Our guys were down 5-to-2 and it didn’t look like they could possibly win, but then…”

See, Dad? Even the most exciting event–the birth of a child, a marriage proposal, a successful defense of your country, the final game in the World Series–is just an event.

It doesn’t become a story until you tell it.

Imagine this: You’re busy all the time. You’ve got more assignments than you know what to do with. You’re running continually just to get things done and still find time to see your kids for five minutes once a week.

How did your schedule get away from you?

First, congratulations on being so busy that you’re almost too busy. Hopefully, most of your full schedule stems from your booming business.

Not that that’s necessarily true. You can be busy trying to build your business. Or running errands. Shuttling the kids back and forth to school and soccer practice.

Or maybe you’re simply not the most organized person.

So, how can you reel it back under control?

Keep a calendar.
Remember that old saw about “a place for everything, and everything in its place?” It not only works for keeping your home and office neat, it works for your time, too. Do you have things that need to be done? Write them down. Then you can not only stop worrying about remembering to do them, but you have the time blocked off for it to make sure you do.

Make a plan.
Take a few minutes every day to think ahead to what you need to do. Plot out where you need to be, what you need to get done. (Don’t forget to stop for lunch.) Even just 10 minutes at the beginning of the day will make your work flow purposefully, rather than bouncing around like the ball in a pinball machine. You have time at the beginning of the day, before you’ve started answering emails, before you’ve started making phone calls—take advantage of it! You’ll accomplish more than you think.

Take good notes.
I don’t know about you, but I have a good memory. I rarely forget birthdays, I’m never late to appointments, and I can remember details from jobs I finished months ago. Yet … sometimes it fails me. I’ll say, “No, I don’t remember why we made that change,” and will search frantically for an email to back it up and … nothing. So, take notes. You never know when your own memory will fail, so it’s better to be safe than sorry—it saves all that crazed trouble-shooting later on.

Stop goofing off.
I don’t want to tell you to stop reading blogs (especially mine), or to avoid those online forums that give you support and ideas. Those are good things—but like many good things, they’re better in small doses. Like junk food, or dessert, they’re delicious, tasty, enjoyable … but a steady diet will leave you feeling bloated and tired, with no energy to accomplish anything. You can still play with your online friends, just, like Mom always said, do your homework first!

Reward yourself.
But, of course, you still deserve to play. You can’t work ALL the time. Make sure you make the time to play with your kids, take your dog for a walk, joke with your friends on Twitter, spend time with your favorite hobby. There’s no point in earning enough money for a good life if you don’t take the time to enjoy it.

Okay—your turn. What are your favorite time-management tips?

I am so conflicted about my schedule, it’s not even funny.

We’re in the process of moving from our home of 34 years, and time-management has been forefront in my mind for weeks now, as I juggle my full-time job, my freelancing, my novel-writing, blog-writing (not that you would know that, sorry) … and, oh yes, packing.

The irony is that, the more things that I have to do, and have to do right now, the less time I have to organize myself. It’s just one more item on the to-do list, right?

Well, no, not really.

When things are slow, why would you need a schedule?

I’ve gone for years at a time without keeping a schedule, or even writing things down on the calendar. Vacations might have been marked off with a highlighter, or, maybe, I’d scribble down the time of my next dentist appointment, but otherwise? I had no need to “schedule” anything. I had a regular job that I went to five days a week, followed by a quiet evening at home, curled up with my books or my computer monitor. The only thing time-related thing I had to worry about showing up to the office on time.

Who needed a schedule? It was simple enough, and routine enough, that the rare alterations like doctor visits were easy to keep in my head.

Shortly before that, though, it had been different. I had a datebook/calendar system in college to keep track of my classes, my assignments, when papers and exams were due—all the irregular things that make college life so varied.

So, why would I need a schedule now?

Obviously, the useful thing about a meticulous calendar schedule is that you don’t have to rely on your memory to show up for appointments or meet your due-dates. They’re right there in black and white. If you’re using an electronic scheduler, you can even program reminders that pop up an hour, a day, or even a week in advance—all to make sure you don’t forget the meeting with your most important client, or forget to send your Mom’s birthday card.

• Schedules can remind you of places you need to be, things you need to do.
• Schedules can remind you of the things you WANT to do—things that aren’t as firm as an actual appointment, but that are on your To-Do list.
• Schedules can serve as a record of what you’ve done. Can’t remember when you talked to John about that brochure project? Glance back through your schedule.
• Schedules can be a place to jot down ideas as they happen—just because you’ll have it with you, and not only is it important to record them when they occur, it’s important to record when they happen, for future reference. (“Oh yes, I had that idea on a Thursday afternoon, right after I spilled coffee on my keyboard.” You never know when information like that could be handy.)

There are two tricks, though.

Any calendar is useless if you don’t fill it in.

It doesn’t matter what calendar system you’re using—a paper date-book organizer, an electronic schedule, a series of post-its, or a secretary (sorry, administrative assistant). If you don’t add in the things you need to do, it’s not going to do you any good.

I’ll confess that whenever I’ve tried to institute an efficient calendar system, I’ve quickly failed, dwindling away from the routine of writing things down—just like a New Year’s diet resolution wastes away to nothing by February.

Use any system you want, but write things down, preferably before they happen. Write down the “hard” events like meetings, phone calls, appointments—those are easy—but also enter the “soft” events like reminders to follow-up with a client, or to check in with a prospect.

Writing your schedule down doesn’t help you if you never bother to look.

This is my other problem—even in those few weeks when I try to be as organized and efficient as possible about scheduling my time—I have a nasty habit of writing things down, but never actually looking at them.

You have to agree that that is not exactly efficient.

Part of the point of your calendar is to make sure you do what you need to do when you need to do it … not two days later when you look and say, “Crap, I forgot Mom’s birthday again!”

Let your brain focus on what it does best—thinking, not remembering!

Ultimately, the better you can discipline yourself to put these life details down on paper (or into the computer), the more your brain can relax and focus on how to get things done, instead of having to concentrate on remembering that it needs to do them in the first place.

So … let’s have a poll. Do you have a calendar system? What is it? Does it make your life more efficient?

It’s Blog Action Day, the annual blogging event that “unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance.” Last year’s theme was Poverty.

This year’s theme is Climate Change.

The idea, of course, is to talk about the environment. Global Warming. Melting Ice Caps. Severe storms. Acid Rain (remember that?).

These are all important topics, of course, but I figure my fellow bloggers have that covered. What I want to talk about is more the social climate. This is a blog of writing and good manners, after all, and it seems that the good manners most of us grew up with are slipping away.

Let me tell you a story. When I went to my junior prom, way back in 1984, my date … well, he drove me nuts. He was determined to adhere to all of the rules of etiquette and to be a perfect gentleman. I appreciate good manners, of course, but he took this to extremes. He didn’t just hold the door open for me, which is reasonable, but he made a point of walking on the outside of the sidewalk. He didn’t just hold my chair when I sat down to dinner (which, since I was wearing the oh-so-trendy hoop skirt a la Molly Ringwald’s bridesmaid’s dress in Sixteen Candles was actually quite helpful), he also politely waited for me outside the ladies room.

His argument? That his family had recently been out with his grandmother and she told him that it was nice to see a young man with such good manners. Well! You can imagine how thrilled that made me, because what 17-year old girl isn’t delighted to be compared to her date’s grandmother?

The point, though, is that the good manners his grandmother was so delighted to see were already falling out of fashion in 1984. Not only were standards relaxing, but there were rampaging feminists taking offense at innocent door-holdings. (”What? You don’t think I’m capable of opening a door for myself?”)

Manners have consequently only gotten worse.

We live in a world where so many things are instantaneous. Have a question? Check the internet. Want coffee? Go to Starbucks. Need to ask your mother how to cook a roast? Pull out your cell phone. Short of matter transmission, there aren’t many things any of us really need to wait for any more. Long gone are those lazy days when you would write a letter, put it in an envelope, hand it to your friendly mail-carrier and then wait a week for a reply. Now we have faxes, email, mobile phones … not to mention instant messaging and online conferencing. Twitter. Facebook.

Meteorologists talk about globally shifting weather patterns which are causing more intense storms–record-breaking hurricanes, tsunamis, tornados, and wildfires are all over the news, as are the less flamboyant but equally severe extremes like droughts and heat waves.

More and more, it seems to me that we are suffering from similar firestorms of bad manners–massive shifts in behavior, in patience, in basic courtesy. Changes in trends that have gently sloped over decades and that have recently spiked into outbursts of rage and basic rudeness, simply because it’s more acceptible than it was in the past.

Climates change. Emotional, physical, and social. Sometimes there are causes that can be seen or measured, sometimes there are not.

But it is always important to take note of the changes. There are reasons we have scientists recording tiny bits of data in weather stations around the globe–because you can’t always see the changes as they happen. It’s not until later that you look  back and see that the change started here.

Sometimes a 17-year old boy in a rented tux is just being faintly ridiculous (and annoying) because he doesn’t want to embarrass himself on a date. Sometimes he’s a metaphor for an entire metaphysical shift in the cultural mores of an entire civilization.

The trick is knowing which is which … before it’s too late to do anything about it.

Just a quick note to direct you over to my guest post at Joyful Jubilant Learning:

Because, Autumn is a Breath of Fresh Air.

So … you have your blog and/or website set up. You’ve got business cards and your services listed. Your writing samples are perfection. You think you’re all set … and then a prospect asks you for your resume.

Cripes!

Sure, you’ve got your old, standard resume stashed away from the last time you searched for a full-time job, but … a resume for freelancing? But … how?

They have a similar purpose to traditional resumes, of course, and similar structure. They show your experience and qualifications to show a potential employer that you can do the job.

The trick is that, unlike more traditional resumes, freelancers don’t have steady jobs. You can’t list every clip you’ve ever had, or every client.

So, what do you need?

Contact Information.

It should be obvious–like any resume, you want potential employers to have no trouble finding you if they want to hire you. Put your name, address, phone, email, and website right at the top.

Objective.

What kind of job are you looking for? These used to be mandatory for resumes, but some people consider putting an objective on a resume to be old-hat. Every job is different, after all. How can you make one statement that will suit all possibilities without sounding ridiculously generic? (”I am looking for a job to fulfill my potential as a writer.” Ugh.) I’ll just make two observations, here. One, in our digital age, it’s easy to customize your objective for every job you want, and two, if space becomes an issue, you don’t really need it. It’s nice enough to have it, but unlike some of the other criteria, it won’t be missed.

Types of Writing.

Not quite the same as the Objective–this is your chance to specify the kinds of writing you do. Webpages, SEO articles, brochures, White Papers, Ad copy, Articles. Things like that. Also any specializing. If you have a niche, mention it here.

Work Experience.

You can address this in different ways, depending on your breadth of experience. You can list specific clips. You can list top clients. You can list some of your more successful projects. Everyone has a different levels of expertise. If you’ve been freelancing for years, you can pick and choose some of your best work to highlight. If you’re just starting, you’ll have fewer “scores,” so you might want to generalize a bit more. Hopefully, though, you have at least something to list!

Salaried Jobs.

If you’re lucky, your 9-to-5 jobs have some impact on your freelancing credentials … but maybe they won’t. Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to show that you’ve put in your time and responsibly held down a steady job for years at a time. True, some jobs might shine less brightly on a resume (working the fryer at McDonalds, for example), but some can prove that you have expertise in the area you claim. Did you work on a horse farm for eight years before branching out into writing about horses? Yes, that definitely qualifies as related work experience.

Achievements, Awards, Assorted Acclaim, if any.

If you have a horn to toot, this is the time. Do I really need to say more?

Education.

This is another area where, if you’ve got it, show it. You might not think your Bachelor’s Degree in Renaissance History directly impacts your current career at writing case studies for Fortune 500 companies, but the fact that you successfully completed your college degree still counts as an accomplishment. On the other hand, if you dropped out of high school so you could devote yourself to your writing … well, that’s fantastic if it’s working for you, but you might still want to avoid drawing attention to the fact … at least not until the actual interview, huh?

Writing Samples/Links.

Your resume, of course, can only say so much about you. Facts on a page, nothing more. You will absolutely want to take this opportunity to show off some of your work to a potential employer.  If you’re handing over the resume in person, you will naturally be providing some hard-copy samples, but still … put some links to your online writing samples on the resume. (You DO have a website, don’t you?) Even just one link to your website–which will have the “Writing Samples” page easy to spot on the front page–is better than nothing at all.

Hard copy or Email?

Depending on the job, you will probably be sharing your resume in two possible ways. Hard copy, or email.

If it’s  hard copy … if you’re mailing or hand-delivering a printed version on paper to a real person … make sure it looks professional. Use good quality paper, the high-rag stuff that feels substantial to your fingertips. Keep the paper neutral. White. Maybe beige, maybe pale gray, but nothing else, nothing too creative. And the ink should be dark. Black ink, ideally. Don’t mess with navy or brown … but if you do, make sure it’s easy to read. Eyestrain is not going to endear you to your prospects.

Email on the other hand, opens some other options. You can send your resume as a Word document, a pdf, or as text in an email. Often, a prospect will have preferences as to which they prefer, but as a rule, I prefer to stick to basic email. If you send an attachment, the email could be stopped by spam filters. It could fill up the mailbox and irritate the recipient. If your prospect is particularly busy, they might not bother to go through the extra steps to open an attachment–whereas if your resume is right there, in the text of the email, you’re good to go.

Lastly, your resume should fit on one page. Yes, some resumes go to two pages, but as a rule, they should fit on one page, one side so they can be consumed at a glance. This rule applies to electronically-transmitted resumes, too. If the recipient chooses to print it, it should still fit on one page.

There, see? Simple!

Anything I missed?

You know how it is when you have the perfect word on your tongue but you can’t. quite. get. it. out?

It happens to me when I’m writing all the time.

So, what do I do?

Trusty Thesaurus:
Well, there’s the thesaurus, of course. They can be handy if you can think of similar words, if not the right one. “Not angry, not mad, not upset … just … irritated.”

Sounds like…
Try to sound it out. Have you done this? The word is right there, where you can practically taste it, so … you do. “Does, doesn’t, doormat, doorbell, … dormitory!”

Spelling Bee
Spell it out. You know it starts with an S or an S sound … what comes next? A? E? Some other vowel? Maybe a consonant, like a P or a T?

Substitutions Allowed
Settle on a similar word and hope to come back to it. When you’re writing (or even more when you’re speaking) you can’t wait forever for the right word to come along. At some point you really need to move on or you’re not going to simply lose the word you need, but your entire train of thought is going to pull out of the station and leave you stranded with nothing more than a dime in your pocket and drained batteries in your cell phone.

Walk Away
The most extreme option, but … you can simply drop the entire thing. If your mind’s blanking on a word because you’re really too tired to be working, or you’ve been working for hours, the best thing you can do is leave. Yes, in mid-sentence. Maybe you’ll want to scribble a brief, faulty sentence so you can find the thread you were weaving when you come back, but at times like these, sometimes your best choice is just to stop altogether and trust that your brain’s neurons will be firing better when you come back.

How about you? What do you do when you can’t quite nail down the word that you want?

I talked the other day about DIPs (Delusionally Important People). You know the ones, the ones who think they can get away with whatever they like because they’re so special. Well, I am not the only one to find these folks annoying. Check out this column from Ruben Navarrette Jr at CNN. He says, among other things,

There are many people out there, in all walks of life, who think they’re more significant than they really are. Plagued with an exaggerated sense of self-importance, they feel entitled to do whatever they want, whenever they want to do it no matter whom it hurts. The self-centered rarely think about the consequences because they’re too busy claiming what they see as their rightful place in the spotlight.

Ouch. That sounds just about spot-on to me. Just in the last week or so, we here in the U.S. of A. have had a tennis star, a musician, and a politician all speak out, in public situations, in the rudest possible manner. A member of Congress who vocally accuses the President of lying while he is in the middle of a speech is nothing if not rude. You can disagree all you like, but there is a time and place for this sort of thing. A tennis star who lambasts a referee in the worst language? Perhaps her fame is going to her head? And when a musician gets up on stage and takes the microphone away from a giddy young star who has just won an award, so he can say that a friend of his was robbed? That goes beyond rudeness.

Want another spot-on statement?

Americans have reared at least one generation of kids, or maybe two, to think of themselves as the last bottle of soda pop in the desert. We said we were building children’s self-esteem so they could be successful, but it never occurred to us that giving kids what psychologists call “cheap self-esteem” could do more harm than good by making our kids think they’re 10-feet tall and bulletproof when they’re neither. Besides, what many of these parents were really doing was feeding their own egos; by telling your kids they’re special, it confirms that you’re special for having such special kids. Isn’t that special?

I think of this as the “Gold Star Syndrome.” The minute you give everyone gold stars, is the minute that all of them become meaningless. What happened to having to earn them? What happened by showing the other people around you the kind of respect that you expect yourself? Sigh … sometimes I just cringe for the future of the human race.

It’s been a while since we talked about manners or civility around here—and considering the blog’s subtitle is as much about manners as writing, that just seems wrong.

Maybe the problem is that there seems to be so little civility in the world and I just don’t want the headache from beating my head against the wall. I see enough people trying to write well, so I believe that talking about writing is a discussion people want to have. But, manners?

I can’t be the only person who walks down the street shaking her head as the spoiled divas of the world pass by. Let’s call them DIPs (Delusionally Important People), because unlike rockstars, heads-of-state, and other assorted guests of honor, these people are only important in their own heads. (And, well, to their family members, I suppose.)

DIPs whizz through doors and not only don’t hold the door for people coming toward them, but they never glance back to see if there’s someone behind them. DIPs just let the door close.

DIPs stroll across roads and parking lots as if they have all the time in the world. They are not only full of the belief that you will stop your car (because, you know, it’s THEM), but they don’t even bother to look to make sure you see them. Of course you’ll stop!

But, also of course, when a DIP is driving the car, and reaching for their cellphone, their iPod, or their lunch, and somebody walks across the parking lot right in front of them? Well! They are immediately affronted that someone would dare. Doesn’t that hapless pedestrian know how busy/important/wonderful they are? They are just lucky the DIP is a (cough) truly good person who stopped out of the kindness of their heart … and incidentally to save their SUV from getting its paint scratched.

Actually, I think that’s the crux. DIPs think only of themselves in their day-to-day transactions. They cut in line because they (unlike the rest of the world) are too busy to wait. They expect special deals and bargains simply because they ask for it. They have no compunction about taking the last gallon of milk at the grocery store—even if a mother with three young children clinging to her skirt is reaching for it at the same time.

To be fair, however, not everyone is acting like a spoiled diva these days.

I find grace and kindness everywhere. Helpful bloggers who try to spread useful knowledge or words of encouragement. Tweeters who go out of their way to say nice things to other people. I’ve had people with full grocery carts let me and my two items go ahead of them. I’ve seen people hold doors not only for people in wheelchairs or with large packages, but even for able-bodied people.

It’s encouraging, really. Honestly, I think that those of us–and people like YOU–owe it to, well, the world to encourage polite behavior.

Because who wants to be a DIP?

So, Joanna wants to know how writing makes things possible?

Well, duh, Joanna.  What DOESN”T it make possible? (grin)

Writing makes everything possible.

For example:

Writing down instructions on how to build things.

Writing down instructions how to do things.

Writing down lessons for children so they can learn.

Writing down ideas for children so they can think.

Writing down the hard lessons for adults.

Writing down advice to make those lessons easier.

Writing down wisdom from generation to generation.

Writing down stories to inform.

Writing down stories to entertain.

Writing down stories to escape.

Writing down history so it won’t be forgotten.

Writing down possibilities so they can be met.

Writing down dreams so we have something to aim for.

Writing down anything we can imagine so we forget our limitations.

Writing down our hopes so that we don’t let our disappointments tie us down.

Writing down our wishes so that we know exactly what we are trying to accomplish.

Writing–just the mere act of putting words on paper–shapes the possibilities of our lives. Things we’ve learned. Things we want to share. Things we want to pass on to other people and other generations. Ideas. Philosophies. Poems. Emotions. Stories. Drama. Comedy. History.

If there was no language, we’d barely be able to communicate at all–certainly not the grand, huge, bigger-than-life things that make exploring life at all worthwhile.

But, if there were no writing, how would we share these Ideas between generations? Would the world still know that Galileo proved the Earth circled the sun? Would we still know about Socrates? Plato? Aristotle? Would Americans remember the ideals the founding fathers fought for in 1776? Would the Magna Carta be as bold an example of democracy? Would we even have democracy in any form? Would there be art? Would there be any point to anything other than mere survival? Would we have gone to the moon? Explored the world’s oceans? Been able to build a ship in the first place?

Writing–the mere act of putting words on paper–makes everything possible.

Amen and Hallelujah.