New Year, New Chapter
Making time for writing – Eloise Millard
Amongst all the trivial studentesque activities we endure: food shopping, citing essays, levelling up on Temple Run, there seems to be less time to write for pleasure.
A great way to start is to always carry a notebook with you: the coat pocket/hand- bag sized type. Great ideas can strike when you least expect it, and usually when you’re meant to be doing something else. Making sure you always have an outlet for your ideas is extremely useful
Once you’ve got ideas, it’s time to fuse them all together. Finding a suitable place to write is more important than you think. Try writing in the library or a coffee shop (bit hipster but we’ll forgive it). When you’re at home, you’re reminded of the bins you hav- en’t taken out, the essay you haven’t started. Distancing yourself from the real world can aid your fictional one.
Setting yourself targets seems rather juve- nile but it can really help. It’s unrealistic to try to churn out a few thousand words at a time. Instead, set an aim of 500 words a day. When you think how quickly you can come up with 500 when you have a deadline the next day, there’s no excuse for not making time!
Author John Grisham used to work up to sixteen hours a day as a lawyer, and wrote a page of his novel A Time To Kill every night. If there’s no time in your schedule now, think about why that is. If you’re serious about writing, there’s always time, you’ve just got to find it!
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Making time for reading – Jessica Devine
No matter what degree you do, you’ll find yourself with a mountain of things to read. Be it the works of clas- sic authors, theoretical papers, case studies or strings of letters and numbers.
Whilst in the bubble it’s easy to forget to give yourself a little break and remember that reading is also something you can do for pleasure as well as just to have something to say in seminars.
Reading for pleasure has always been known to offer an escape, to invite us into different worlds and show us that there is more to life than simply going through the motions.
This has new significance when you are studying, even if just for an hour every night it can remove you from the bubble, take away the stresses of deadlines or the decision of what to wear to circle this week and lets you experience something outside of uni life; all from the comfort of your own bed!
So in 2014 I aim to read for pleasure as well as for my degree and I urge you all to follow my example.
Treat yourself by going to a bookshop, find something that leaps out at you: from the garish cover, interesting title or the writer’s funny name and see what you discover.
Life is all about balance and I decree that it’s time for some book-wormy hedonism.
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