November 2021 - Page 2 of 2

Writing the 13 Gates Mountain Path

Writing often deals in metaphor. There is good reason for this. Metaphor paints a good picture in the readers’ minds and makes communication easier for the writer. We all learn well from the use of metaphor. It works all around. That is likely why we use it so much.

The writer’s path is itself a giant metaphor of the travel all writers take as we climb the mountain of ideas before us and the gates we must pass to gain all the skills.

13 Gates of writing

There are 13 major gates every writer uses as we climb the mountain of projects before us. Every time we sit down we bring the keys we gained from previous climps to increase our efficiency. The gate guards are clever though. They throw new obstacles in our way every time to ensure the journey requires as much effort as previous trips. Their aim is to stop the climb. We must adapt to the changes. Over time the keys become well grooved habits that allow us to make it through to the top and back.

The hardest part of the entire trip is always the same. We never really know where our keys will work easily or where new trials will bloom up. Nor is there an order these weaknesses will show themselves. There is no pattern. All we can do is be aware of ourselves and realize when we are under attack at one of the gates.

Writing is an easy thing to do, you think?

Not really. Writers are only human. We are not gods immortal and eternally wise. A writer can all too easily engage the good old triple-D habit to hide the realities facing them. It is one of the easiest self deceptions to allow ourselves to defend, deny and destroy to protect ourselves from learning a life lesson so that we can fashion the proper key we need.

What are the writing gates?

Courage

The first gate that comes to my mind is courage. Without courage a writer is often lost. It takes guts to write, edit and then give your work to the world. In writing we expose our inner most thoughts and our own skills. All of that is laid bare for critics to assail. No one is naturally immune to the piercing light of the public eye. It’s one of the great fears our inner critic will use to stop us in our tracks. We fear that society will judge us instead of our work and will be cast out.

When we kick in our courage we acknowledge our fears but instead of running we choose to accept them and act anyway. We become like a soldier on the battle line. He accepts his fear of death when choosing to see him-self as already dead. This allows the soldier to act uninhibited by his fears. It does not remove the fear. Such is the courage the writer assumes when choosing to move past a fear. He finds that the fears that held back his hand hold little sway in reality.

For writers we need not worry of some literary death. This is mainly because with each new work we are reincarnated anew. No critic can kill us as long as we complete our work and move to the next.

Self-honesty

The second is the writer’s honesty with ourselves and their writing. We can hardly be courageous if we are not honest enough to admit, if only to ourselves, about how we feel about a given work at a given time.

To write is to not just be honest with the material or the audience. It is to be honest with ourselves cross the board. We only improve when we can be honset about how well we are performing, what we need to improve as we work to make the corrections we need to make in ourselves, clairify our thoughts and create better works.

Honest often entails being more honest with ourselves about our performance when we could greatly profit from less work. Poblo Picaso is probably the most famous for honesty at this level mainly because of the manner he chose to display it.

Some years ago Picaso was showing his latest collection to his friend and art dealer in preparation for sale. The work was amazing to his friend. He was certain that Pablo had achieved a new level in his skill.

At some point Pablo stopped talking about the paintings then marched to his work table and seized one of his pallet knives. He strode to the first painting and sliced it to shreds.

His friend was shocked. A great work of art had been forever lost. That did not even slow Pablo. He marched through the rest of the paintings to rend every single one to the same level of destruction.

What had caused the carnage?

Pablo had realized during the showing that the works had failed to reach the level he knew he could achieve. His honesty with himself was such that he could not allow himself to profit from them, and he would have. Poblo held firm to higher standard fro himself. He would not allow himself to profit from such a shoddy effort on his part. He chose to only give to the world his best.

That is the kind of honesty a writer must have. When we think we are done we must ask ourselves did we put forth our best effort? Do we need to put in more practice? What do we need to learn? Then we must act accordingly.

Self-Confidence

Self-Confidence is another learned skill. It comes from doing our work naturally as we practice our craft. We become more aware of ourselves and learn from those lessons. We grow and our confidence grows along with it.

Humility

Humility seems to rise with all the great writers. A good writer knows that they are merely apprentices to their higher minds. Youngians would say that the us we experience, the ego, is nothing more than the smallest part of ourselves.

They are right. All creatives tune into a cosmic radio in our heads. Humility means more for us than just crediting a higher power for our work. Our humility allows us to see our work in a clearer light so that we can more easily find where improvement is needed. Humility allows us to rally our courage to fix and build up those areas. Humility is the reaosn we can improve our work and ourselves. Without humility we will stagnate leaving our work little more than a cesspool of less than stellar compositions. To build our humility is to strive to improve our work.

Find our humility

Humility growth requires little more than the lessons every mother strives to pass on to their child. Be gracious to those who aid or support you in your work. It takes little more than an honest thank you. Give your support and help to others. Remind them their work is valid. Avoid wearing your accolades on everyone else’s nose. Lift up others. Encourage them. Be grateful for those who believed in you when you were floundering. Take some joy when others win, be happy for them. Draw some faith that you too will grow with them.

Compassion

Compassion for yourself and others. Humans get all wrapped up in our own inner struggles such that we forget that we are human. We are creatures that learn by explorations. That means we will make mistakes and fail often. This is how we grow as people, societies and every other aspect of being human. It’s a great way to adapt and grow.

The devil in our details is we can become critical of not the failure but the person or persons involved. It becomes a personal issue and we attack the human without remorse. The most damaging part is we withhold our most destructive elements for ourselves. This is why writers must must learn to control our inner voice with compassion for ourselves and those about us.

When we allow ourselves to express our assessments in compassionate terms we can give better guidance and wiser plans for correcting our missteps.
Compassion allows us to reach our ability to be objective when we receive criticism or need to look at our work critically. It is when we cannot reach our objective mind that we become defensive and destroy our own gains.

What holds the writing path together?

Patience

The answer is a whole lot of patience. Patience comes when we allow ourselves to merge into the work. We embrace the grind to allow our inner urge to move forward to become unbound by time so that we focus on the work. We accept that it will take time for the process to unfold and choose to give the time less value in favor of a greater value to the work itself.

Curiosity

We use our curiosity to pull us into our work by cultivating an open mind that is receptive to the new. The question to look at is how would we see what we are looking at if we were a child. Then we seek to answer that in our work.

Focus

Like steps along a path curiosity inclines us to build our focus which we can use in our work to block out thoughts of other things to induce a flow. Nothing abnormal in this process. Once we start with one part we move to include the rest.

Deferred Gratification

Deferring gratification is often one of the hardest steps in a world where instant everything is not so much an ideal anymore than a way of life. A famous comedian and author Jim Mendrinos once summed it up as, “No one wants to write. Everyone wants to have written.” That is a profound statement at the heart of why every writer must work to grow their ability to defer gratification.

Writers always want ways to be done yesterday, but the only way to succeed, regardless of how skilled we become at the craft, will always be the grind to get the work done. The process of writing will always take more time than we would rather. Being able to defer gratification is critical to our success.

Scale Your Process

One way to defer gratification is to skip waiting for the reward of a finished project by breaking down the larger work into smaller steps with rewards for completing those steps instead of working for the finnish of the larger work.

Will

Will power is a limited force in us. Even with building it over time we deplete it constantly as the day goes on. Many writers structure their days such that they save their largest reserve of will for the time they write. In this case the skill is found in an awareness and understanding of yourself. That self knowledge helps them to conserve more will power and allows them the will to write even if they must write late at night after a long day of will depleting obstacles behind them.

Gamification

The best way around this one I have found save will power is to make a game of limiting the times I use will power before I sitdown to write. Play to limit the times you have to make choices. You can save will power by simplifying your choices throughout the day. Steve Jobs used limited his wardrobe to his famous black turtlenecks and slacks for this reason. You can also use routines to get through the mundane issues of the day from how you workout to how you clean your house, give yourself some easy out answers for repetitive situations like what to eat for breakfast, and so on.

Permission

One of the crazier ideas I have run across is to give yourself permission in advance of a choice to go with your favorite choice or your gut. For instance you know you will be going out to dinner. Give yourself permission to have desert or to remove your normal calorie restrictions instead of having to make a choice about what you eat in the moment. Take the pressure off of choosing. You could even be detailed with exactly what you are going to choose with an option for availability or just choosing another thing on a whim. The point is to enjoy an evening free of choice.

I will add that is not an excuse for dietary debauchery every day of the week or some other kind of destructive habit, but the occasional use can really save on worry issues that deplete your will power.

Mental Toughness

Mentally tough is what we get as we work with these skills. We learn to eliminate random desires and choices so that our desires are naturally limited to those habits and things that will give us the writing results we most want. This is much like the practice circles a swordsman uses. As his skill grows the smaller the ring he can work in to limit his ability to move. The smaller the ring the greater his skill. That is how we grow mentally tough when we remove those things that do not add to our skills as writer. We become more proficient with less options and room to move.

Endurance

As we improve our mental toughness we increase our ability to endure hardship. That allows us to channel our energy and skills to endure adversity, injustice and indifference. All three are common fodder for the writing field. A writer fights these demons both in the mind from the inner critic as well as the world at large.

Focus

While you can focus on any given attribute to improve yourself and your work, they all come into play all the time with every step up the mountain.

The Writer’s take away

Have no fear. As long as you continue to simply build your writing practice you will build on the skills for all the gates the rest of your writing life. May it be a long one.

Try some writer’s Humility

Photo by Keith Hardy on Unsplash

Mastery It’s Not What You Think

Mastery is often thought of as a place or level we get to. It’s a little different really.

Working on mastery

A while ago I was working through another BTL (Built to Lead, Chet Scott) article. I love Scott’s stuff. He makes you think. In my case often by evoking a kind of denial or anger when he hits the mark too close to one of my own thoughts. This time he was talking of mastery. What touched me off was his comment that “The enemy of mastery is thinking you know it already.”

Part of me woke up. I took Scott’s meaning as just talking about avoidance and was partly wrong. That part of my mind raising the commotion did not stop with understanding. It protested instead. “Does not such a mindset also harm? Does this line of thinking not harm confidence? Do we not say “I’ve got this” when we start out on a new journey?”

I did agree that when we are learning repition is essential. I learned long ago in karate that we humans need to over practice far beyond the phase where we think we know things. Many masters are known to practice in this manner.

Following the masters’ thoughts

My initial rejections were followed by some new thoughts. Steven Pressfield said he dealt with a criticism of his work by his editor. Shawn Coyne had returned Pressfield’s manuscript with ten needed edits. He had an instant flutter of frustration. There was noting he could agree with. I could see the parallels I had here.

Adjust to mastery time

Instead of just attacking the critique, Pressfield chose to allow himself time to adjust and see the possibilities. Over a few weeks he found some of the changes made sense and he could deal with them. As he progressed over several more weeks he whittled down his arguments against the changes. His emotions died down and his mind wrapped itself about the issues from his more clear frame of reference.

Pressfield has mastered the professional mindset allowing him to deal with things from a less emotional state. Taking more time allows his mind work through the data set. I decided to let my mind work through the data set that with Scott’s line of thought by going with Pressfield’s approach to let it sit a bit before I did my BTL writing on the article.

Results

By the time I sat down I could, like Pressfield, already see how the change up thinking worked in learning situations. I had already come to the agreement that there is no going over old stuff without something new coming out of it. All new stuff is the result of old stuff. You cannot have the new without a solid and regular repeated exposure to the old.

It occurred to me that I had run into this before. I had talked to my youngest daughter about learning new things and the secret to kata found through kaizen, never ending practice. I had told her, “When you learn something new from another person, you learn something that was found in somebody else’s mind. When you learn something knew from your own mind and the connections you made with old material, you create something new that you can give the world.”

New thought

That memory brought up a new thought. ‘Are you a giver or a taker?’

When we learn, we are the takers. We look for the thoughts and ideas of others. When we move into a more giving mode of mind, we look deeper into the material to find new connections that we can give to the world.

Mastery is process

Taking a break allowed me a new take on concepts I already possessed. Mastery is not an end of a process. It is the process. We kill that process when we think about the material we are looking at in the wrong way. Scott could not be more right than “The enemy of mastery is thinking you know it already.”

Scott’s mastery solution

To combat this enemy mindset Scott reminded me in a new way that we should never tell ourselves, or anyone else for that matter, “I know that, I didn’t really learn anything new, or give me something new.” In its stead Scott offered a great mantra:

“I’ve a lot to learn, I’ve found the melody line, and now I am after a thousand nuances and then a thousand more.”

This is the heart of mastery. You don’t learn new things. You learn the details of what you thought you knew.

Mastery lesson

In life, whether that is on a dojo floor or at the keyboard late in the afternoon struggling to get through another article on time, we never stop learning. Most of that learning will be influenced by what we have already learned. The deep learning all comes from what we have already learned. There is always something new to learn in old stuff we think we already know. We find it in the nuances.

Mastery is a deliberate practice in the mundane where we strive to learn what we did not learn before. The only path to mastery is through the grind down the well trod path of what we already know. Looking for those nuances is where we find the joy of our practice.

Gain mastery

Writers of all levels can optimize our own learning on the path to mastery. Here are a few suggestions to add to your path.

Your job.

Not all jobs are writing based, but when choosing work you should look at possibilities beyond the financial ones when possible to open yourself to more learning that will improve your writing skills. Consider such options as a low paying startup job, unpaid internships, and opportunities to follow a mentor.

Just because you have to hold a full time job in another non writing field does not mean many of these opportunities are not still on the table. Some of them can be done on a limited bases such as evenings, weekends or even for two weeks of vacation. You can also look into online work as well. The point is to find a way to add to your mastery practice. You will not find one if you do not open yourself up to try.

Those you know.

Jim Rohn is famous for saying, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” He is right. We might not be the average of our five closest friends and acquaintances, but those around us do shape our attitudes and habits. Choosing some people who share your desire to become better writers to hang with is a wise investment in your path to mastery of this wondrous craft. Look for people you can learn from. Get comfortable with the idea that you are not the smartest in your circle. Being dumb allows you to ask the dumb questions you might otherwise avoid and suffer from the lost opportunity to fill in a gap.

Attitude adjustment chamber.

Pride and ego are a tag team bent on destroying your education. When we are learning we need to ask stupid questions and even accept looking foolish for one really good reason. We don’t really know something. Not asking stupid questions holds us back and is the most foolish reason for failure ever, especially when the answer is right there for the asking and the only cost is the posibility of looking foolish or feeling stupid. On should never feel ashamed for saying, “I still don’t get it” for the third time. Writing mastery demands that we get it. There is no deadline or award for getting it in record time. We just need to get it. Cultivate an attitude that is fearless before negative feedback and failure.

The mastery wrap up

The writer’s path to mastery is the same as mastery of any field. Once we have learned what to do, we grind through our lessons ten thousand times finding the nuances till we find nothing more to learn. So far no one has proved Hemingway wrong, we work in an endeavor that has no master, but one in which all aspire to being one in. Welcome to the path.

Want to read more on the writer’s path? Try this article: Writing with Self-Confidence

Photo by Motoki Tonn on Unsplash

Writing with Self-Confidence

Writing builds self-confidence as we write. The issue for many of us is that it also requires confidence to write. Writing therefore is one of the great chicken and egg processes of life. That can be frustrating if you are just beginning, trying to maintain or increase your writing confidence. Where do you start?

Before we just whip out a mesmerizing list of hints and tricks to getting off the dime, let’s take a look at what a confident writer looks like. We are not going to get anywhere if we can’t tell where we are going to begin with.

There are lots of things we can look for as indicators of confidence, but for our purposes here, I am going to use only a few.

The Look of Confidence

A confident writer tends to:

–Be self-reliant in consistently producing regular high quality work.
–Focus their time on creating and developing their own ideas and solutions for existing problems, rather than worry over how well they can write or how good they are seen.
–See writing as a tool rather than a chore.
–Feel that writing is fun and recognizes the positive feelings they get from the bio-feedback loop we create when we write.

So where do we start to build our confidence?

We start when we make a commitment to be confident. This choice will take some time to become a natural feeling, but it starts with a conscious choice to be confident first. Continuous self-improvement and being satisfied with the gains with writing work itself will only build on this choice as you go along.

A few ways to improve our self-confidence are:

–Get Feedback from people you know and trust.

You can ask anyone you trust to be honest about the work. That includes co-workers, friends, family, or members of a writing community. The main thing here is to choose just a few people you trust and to critique the advice they give. Do not accept their answers as either condemnation or a gold stamp of approval.

Take all constructive criticism in a professional manner. It should not be personal for you. It is meant to help you. It will not always sync with your own emotions. Sometimes it can feel too supportive when you want to shred the work or too critical when you really need more of a boost. Balance these issues in yourself and beware of them in others.

Avoid getting advice from the over brutal or those who only praise. Ask your critic what should be improved, removed, is missing, added to, made clearer, etc… Giving your evaluators some clues for what you are looking for will help them give you the kind of feedback you need.

–Start a blog.

The most common advice out there is to write every day. This is generally great advice. There can be a sticking point though for those who are writing longer pieces or work in a profession like science, where one writes regularly but feedback is low.

Blogging solves both the issue of regularly writing and getting feedback along with a whole host of other useful writer’s skills like going live with your work before you publish. Seth Godin is famous for going live and getting feedback from what he calls shipping. If you want to be a published writer, you are going to have to deal with every level of the process a writer takes to get a blog out regularly. The idea here is start a blog and ship consistantly. The confidence and skills will both grow with the accumulated work.

–Build a library or portfolio.

A large collection of your own writing serves to build confidence on several levels. It is a great reminder for how much you have produced and how far you have come in your skills. It also serves as a great tool to show potential clients, possible bosses and businesses your skills. It can also give you some goals for what skills you want to work on next.

–Use Confidence to build confidence.

Build your confidence from something you can see you already have confidence in, such as your ability to learn. Approach your writing from a learner’s mind. Writing, like all forms of work, gets stronger the more you do it. As your writing proficiency grows from what you have learned, your confidence to tackle more through learning about writing grows as well. You become a more confident writrer.

–A rolling stone gathers no moss.

Rolling snowballs only grow while rolling. Once you start to build your confidence, just keep going. The confidence will take care of itself. This is where we can use our habit building to help maintain a daily writing practice.

–Build your writing confidence by using learning as a tool.

Writing is a learning process. We can use that to become better writers and more confident. Gaining confidence by a learning approach allows for us to avoid some of the pitfalls that we already face as writers, such as failure. Mistakes are part of the learning process. We tend to look more at them from a corrective and improvement stand point rather than a critical self-evaluation.

Remember the wins.

We win all the time. Trouble happens when people fail to remember the small wins because we are all hung up on the big ones. We all like to feel good and big wins make you feel real good. They can be an emotional rush. We tend to spend lot of time looking for these rushes because they do not come all the time.

Small wins happen all the time. The thing is they bring the same good feelings as the big ones. They are smaller in scale, but they are constant like sand falling through an hour glass. They add up pretty big over time.

Sure we should work and look for the big wins. They are like giant rocks filling our hourglass, but the daily small wins add up too. They fill the spaces between the larger wins and take out the empty feeling we get between big wins.

Embrace criticism.

In the Marines we often say “Embrace the suck”. This is just another way of saying “Have courage.” It takes guts to look at ourselves with an honest eye for improving things. Ego is a tricky and does not like change. Our egos make it easy to ignore some issue that really needs addressing.

When you open yourself up to criticism you will have to let much of it fly past you. Most of it is not really useful, but among all the stuff flung at you there are some criticisms you need to hear. You have to be open for that. The only way is to embrace it all with more than just listening from time to time. You need to actively seek valid criticism. If it applies, use it. The rest you can let slide.

Don’t compare yourself to others.

Instead of looking at others, use your past performances and grade against them. Learning to know yourself allows you to identify both how you have improved as well as those areas you still need work on. Knowing what needs work is a rather important self-development skill in and of its self. It is one of the main reasons we read our old stuff.

Take your time with your work.

Rough drafts are a must. No one writes a perfect first draft. I have read that Asimov only typed one draft for his books, but he had a little secret. He wrote his first draft in his head. He had worked on his memory so he would know his complete piece when he sat down to type. Even then, he would hit sticking points that required he stop and let his mind cook a little more before going further. That’s why he had so many typewriters setup. When one project got stuck he could move on to another. So for the record, even one of the most prolific authors of all time got stuck too. He may not have had multiple paper drafts, but he did have at least two drafts…even if one was in his head.

Take your time too.

Edits take time and give us a safe space to clear things away before they go live before the world. Accept the amount of time you need to present your very best. Relax and get down to the grind and slog. Your final work will give you greater confidence.

Take just one shot at a time.

A writer’s work load can grow in magnitude before our eyes. It can look too overbearing, stopping us in our tracks. Break it down into manageable steps. I have found the block method is great in these cases. Say you have three articles and two emails all due this week. Break it down into smaller pieces. Today, your job is to focus on just getting an article done, the BIG one. Tomorrow hammer out the emails. Then finish the remaining small articles over the rest of the week.

The point is to limit your thinking to just one type of work at a time so that you can focus. Shifting between various types of work tends to slow the process because with every new start there is a lag in time for your mind to get up to speed. Shifting too often slows your over all work down. Blocking out your work not only decreases the size and scope of the work in your head but it also speeds up the process while handing you the confidence that you can get the work done.

Track your wins.

Nothing grows confidence like reinforcing it with records of achievement. Take the time to record your wins. Last week you won three new clients and got a positive comment for some of your work. Write them down so that when doubt hits you have ammo to counter with.

Choose to be confident.

Confidence is a choice as much as a feeling. To feel it you have to want to be confident first. It might take some time to feel it. You don’t have to feel confident all the time. It just means you can be more positive when you need it. Observe your self at bit when you don’t feel confident and use your imagination to see what it would be like were you more confident.

While I am at it. The best book I have read on optimism points out that we learn optimism. Anything that is learned can be improved. Read the book Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman, PhD.

Believe in yourself.

Instead of asking “why me?” ask yourself “Why not me?” instead. When we lack confidence we tend to ask, “Why are we the target?” This negative thinking tends to draw us into a pattern of focusing only on the problems. Instead shift it more positive with “Why not me?” For instance instead of asking why we never get the good $1 per word job or the fantastic editor position we shift our thinking. We ask Why not me? Why should I not get $1 per word or that great editor job? This forces us to find the hidden errors we have been making. Then we can fix them instead of avoid them.

Lastly WRITE.

In the end nothing will make you a more confident writer than writing. You have to put down the words and send them into the world to get somewhere. So write.

Last Thought

Realize that self-doubt is a normal feeling. Self-confidence can be built. You are going to make a choice either way. Choose confidence.

Please read some more. How about: Writing the 13 Gates Mountain Path

Photo by Michael Shannon on Unsplash

Kipling’s Writing Lessons in IF

Kipling’s writing lessons in If are a treasure trove for the writer willing to put them into practice. When I think of maturity and growing up I find myself thinking about Rudyard Kipling’s poem to his son “If”. I first ran across the poem somewhere back in my child hood. Not sure where I first ran into it. Though, I remember it was referenced and read in class in high school and middle school.

Kipling’s Writing Lessons on Two Importers

Even outside of school I found the poem in some of the most unexpected places from lines on buildings and parks. A friend once pointed out that they quoted from the poem over the player’s Center Court entrance.

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”

Society

I have found many writers have used ‘If’ in their books and articles. Some of our pop culture is based on this poem from music classics like Bread’s If (https://youtu.be/qGfVOdTiUEc) to TV shows like Boardwalk Empire’s used it as the theme for the Season Three Episode 11 Two Importers.

College

I have had a college roommate put If up on his wall so he could read it daily to remind himself of the standard he needed to make for himself. It became a kind of mantra for him as he dealt with the struggles of getting through college and getting on with life after the Army.

For most of that time I did little with If other than agree this was the general course a young man like myself should follow, then promptly moved on to other things.

Kipling’s Writing Lessons and the Writer

It was not till I sat down to really look at what a professional writer was that I found that Kipling’s writing lessons were much more than a surface level oration for a child. Even more, I found it was relevant to me as a writer with every beat.

Kipling’s lessons on personal integrity, behavior and growth reach deep into the craft of writing. While the poem serves quite well for a personal philosophy and ethos, it also gives a writer a blueprint to follow for their development as a writer.

Kipling’s Lessons

A writer must dream and think, but we really cannot just dream or think. We must do our work. There are pages to be written, edited, rewritten and published. Then the manuscripts and articles must be promoted and the research for the next tale done.

Every book, article, and work launched is an invitation to success or disaster. The writer must see them only for the feedback and the lessons instead of some stamp on their character or a vote of popularity.

Every time a writer publishes, we gamble with all our emotional and financial winnings of life in one pitch of the dice. The mature writer will take the loss silently, at least as far as others might hear, and return to the keyboard with a feeling of having been spent to try another book or article.

A writer must learn to let no critic hurt you, even the one inside.

Act When You Fall

If packs lessons in every line. There is even a lesson of what to do when the world has crashed down on you.

“If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, …”

No truer words for a writer who has just had a failure. Write something fast. Don’t look down or look back. Write. The power of a writer is that even when there is nothing to be done, we can do something. We can act. We can write.

Kipling Life

Kipling’s own life is a hero’s journey of pain that gives us a clear vision of what our own trials may one day yield in our work. His life was more tragedy than gift. In child hood he was denied him parental love and attention, sent by his parents to a faster mother who beat him. Kipling even failed in school where they tried to instill character traits that he was not suited for. He even found great pain in adulthood with the loss of two of his children.

Yet out of all of that pain and misery he gave us a clear definition of what an adult should aspire to. For the writer becoming an adult is to say that we are turning more professional in our effort to write.

Kipling Set Standard

Kipling himself seems to have lived to the very standard he set for his son in the poem. In his life he was successful as a poet in his early years and gained quite a sound popularity that was able to withstand the later critics who attacked his work as superficial without any deep meaning.

The Work

For Kipling the work itself was the point. Because of this more humble take on both himself and his work, he turned down several honors that included Poet Laureate, Order of Merit and even a knighthood. Out of all of them it was only the Nobel Prize for Literature that Kipling accepted in 1907. The results of his work reach far further than mere egotistically driven self-acclaim.

We still read Kipling’s works today. From his works springs a form of immortality that only a dedicated writer is capable of achieving. After over one hundred years, we are still enriched as we bask in his work. The Jungle Book, Kim, and Just So Stories that enrich us all. Of them all it is If that enriches the writer most.

Kipling’s Writing Lessons for Writers

To the writer just reading through his poem is a complete list of the mind, skills, and strengths a writer need to do battle with one’s own ego. There is not one line that every writer should not commit to memory and habit in their pursuit of the craft.

In the lines we find not just the advice to improve ourselves, but also to practice daily those skills that motivate, encourage… much of it comprised of mantras to use in those times the world comes crashing in and our egos rend our spirit to shreds.

Clairity

If is one of those crystal clear lines of thought that if we head and learn from its guidance, we cannot help but become better people as well as better writers. That is the mark of a true master on the path.

‘If’

by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master,
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

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Honesty- What does that have to do with writing?

Honesty is a tricky subject for people. We are taught it from the cradle. Yet, at times we are not honest at all. We all tell little white lies to others like “Oh yes what a great dress” or “Sure, I will consider your ideas.” This is often just to smooth the social considerations or avoid making a commitment call now.

This is the kind of vacillating behavior that salespeople are taught to head off at the pass so they can nail down a sale. You see it every time the sales pro says something like, “Now I know what you are thinking…”. The point is not whether he gets it right or not. When he acknowledged that you are thinking is enough to stop you in your “No” tracks. Using white lies a pervasive kind of thinking that is common throughout society for better or ill.

Most of the time when we doge on honesty it is all about our own inner fears. We kid ourselves that we don’t want to hurt the other people’s feelings, but in reality we don’t want to feel bad for saying “No I cannot do that.”

In many cases it serves us well, to some degree. The greatest trouble I have found with this kind of thinking is that we use it on ourselves far more often and with far greater subtlety than we do with others. We are experts at avoiding self honesty.

Honesty in Getting Down to Work

How many times have you avoided sitting down to write something because something else was “more important”? Did you miss publishing deadlines because you were “sure no one wants to read my stuff”. Were your books not completed because you “found something interesting over here to write on just because you were stuck…or worse something to do other than writing at all?”

Using these convient white lies we effectively skip out on our work. If we choose to be honest with ourselves, we can see the problem. What we need to change to make the writing a priority in our lives is right there, just for the moments we accept the lie because likely there is a need for some work or worse we need to grow some where.

Honesty Changes

When you have you enjoyed someone knock your work? Did you take their evaluation and given it time to wander about in your brain before calling them, mentally I hope, an ignorant slob? Are you avoiding taking that course on better blogging techniques just because it will cost $100 or because you can avoid putting up a blog if you don’t know how to do it?

Does any of that sound familiar?

Honesty is said to be the best policy, but it’s also the hardest thing for a writer to do to himself. Being the dream writer floats before our eyes. We want to write like Hemingway or Asimov. We want to be brilliant like Peggy Noonan or Will Rodgers. So many writers we want to be like the greats but none of them are us.

Writing another wrtier’s way is not being true to your voice. Yes, using a given style is useful to learn, but when the learning is done it comes down to just you. The interesting bit here is your voice, the one in your head, knows this. When we try to write with another voice, our voice just politely shuts up. Then we wonder why we failed. We failed because we did not listen to ourselves, our voice. At our higher level we know this. It’s our ego that just cannot be honest about it.

Denaial is our recourse, so we try to write like someone else because we are not them. It’s a form of escapism. The honest writer knows he is who he is and writes his way. When honest self discovery shows improvement is needed the honest writer signs up for a class, gets a book or asks for help. If the same honsety finds that we are stalling by too much practice or research, it is time to shift gears and get that work finnished and published. It is not easy to be honest with yourself.

So what do we do? How do we get honest with ourselves?

Honesty Starts at Listen

The first step is to start listening to our own voice. Write like we talk to another person. Talk on paper to a friend, someone we know. We can talk to ourselves even, younger or older, you choose. The key though is to talk to a specific person you know. It does not matter if that person is living and breathing or if they are an avatar you have imagined. There are no points for how we build the conversation, only that we hold it.

What is the commitment

After we become honest about our own writing voice, we can move on to ask ourselves about other things, like just how much work we will be needed for a project. What do we need to learn for running a writing business? How committed are we to getting something done? The list is long and the first step is being honest with yourself. Then we can be honest with our audience, the work, our editors, critics, etc…

The thing to remember is our honesty starts with ourselves. Build that and the rest starts to fall in place. So where do we go from here?

Honesty is to Know yourself

To be honest with yourself I think takes place over several areas inside yourself and your writing. The start is knowing yourself.

I have been a long accustomed to practices in meditation, reflection and journaling. Regualar reflection has givne me a better understanding of myself and taught me to take criticism better because of it. Recieveing criticism is still not fun, but I am more empathetic to the critic now than in the past. You could say that I am a big fan of these kinds of practices for writers. Many of the old writers like Thoreau were big into it. The biggest reason writers to use such reflective practices has always been that reflection requires self honesty.

Self honesty makes you a better writer.

From my standpoint, a writer’s job is to use their inner self-evaluation and understanding to understand the characters he is creating and the audience he is talking to.

Morning Pages

I took up writing free thought writing ev I am also a big fan of Chet Scott’s Becoming Built to Lead practices. I have fount the mental upkeep from both to have added to my work.

Taking the time to put our thoughts honestly in writing allows us to build the strength to be honest with ourselves like nothing else I have seen. It’s a kind of safe space where you take out the factor of fear of what others might think and just let go. I totally recommend these practices as a way to get to know what is floating about in your mind. The fact is you are never going to be able to write honestly, and your readers will be able to tell, if you are not honest with yourself first.

Honesty is Your Voice

From my experience our voice is basically listening to and repeating that clear voice in your head instead of copying another’s. We deal with other voices in our heads all the time, and outside of writing, reflection or meditation, we frequently ignore it along with all the other voices.

Who are those other voices? For the most part they are the voices of well meaning and loving friends and family that have tried to give us the best advice they found. They are a kind of endless loop of recordings constantly going off in our heads that tend to interfere with us actually having an original idea. This is why so many people have said over the centuries that they did not have an original idea till they were some age or another well past what anyone would consider young.

For a writer it comes down to just one thing. When we are honest with ourselves so that we remain ourselves, we are honest with our writing. Your voice needs to be shining through the word, not your favorite author.

Emotional Honesty

Honestly you are who you are. When we write we are the summation of everything we have seen, heard or experienced. Those things are going to come out. If you want to write better you are going to let them out. That’s why we start with courage when we write. Ours is not a craft for the feint of heart. It takes a warrior’s guts to do this because much of what we will write deals with pain. Our pain.

In dealing with our pain, we have to be honest with ourselves first and before that we have to look at ourselves. Everyone has pain. That pain is going to come out in our writing. Sure we might dim it in some ways to lighten the book’s read. How many kids throughout the years knew that Louis Carroll and Frank Baum’s beloved children’s’ books were about drug trips?

The honesty of both writers’ experiences remained for those experienced enough to see them while the books remained safe enough for more innocent eyes. All in all, it was the honesty that made their books better.

Last Point

This is only a blast off point. My thoughts here are meant for you to start your own effort to get to know yourself and your thoughts. I’ve only covered a couple ideas. There are plenty of other reflective techniques out there. Go reflect on your thoughts a bit. Become a better writer.

After so mush honesty, try to take it slow with Going Slow Makes Mastery

Photo by Larry Nalzaro on Unsplash

Going Slow Makes Mastery

What is the hardest concept for improvement out there?

Going Slow

Going slow is the key that makes mastery possible. There are many times we are better off if we use this concept. Writers can get locked into thinking we need to write as fast as we can so we can get something out there or to get to our authentic voice. There is a time for this. I personally like to use it for quick first drafts. It helps me get my ideas down. However there are times we should go slow, or at least slow down.

One is the Hardest Number

The hardest advice for a writer is to be told to improve just one thing. Many of us have lists ot things we know we need to work on. Yet, often working on that one thing can improve not just the current draft but all the ones that come after.

Working on multiple fixes at one time tends to divide our one thought mind into a multi tasking mindset. This might be good for the ego but it will not really eliminate an error from our practice. We are better off if we work to just take out that one concept that is mot problematic for us. If you eliminate a dragging element in your process, then you are naturally going to improve. A clean mental process means faster and better writing.

Improve Skills

Improving a skill is a good time to slow down a bit with some focused work on one aspect of our skill base. This holds especially true when you are faced with a list of things you want to improve yesterday. Trying to hit a list all at once is just another form of multi-tasking. Our brains are rigged to work with one thing at a time. A slowed down approach is the best way to make headway, one correction at a time. This allows us to get deeper into the work. A deeper view allows us to see more clearly what we are getting right and wrong without having to balance a lot of other concerns at the same time.

The concept here is slow down to learn fast. We learn things faster with one thing to focus on. This is part of the reason you did not try to study math, history and a foreign language all at the same time in school. Our minds are made to deal with only one thing at a time with any efficiency. Trying to bring multi tasking into a learning environment is of an error.

Mastery Comes When We Go Slow

When we want to work to master a skill focus is again the key. Just one focal point is enough. Even then you are likely still working with multiple items. Think of driving. We have to monitor the road. Watch the speed. Control the wheel. Control the gas and breaks. Shift if it is a manual transmission. Even automatic requires the occasional reverse or parking setting. Learning to drive bounces our attention to far more than one thing at a time.

Writing works much the same way. It is a simple skill, and yet it is not. We have to work with typing, editing, original rough draft, rewrite, research, outlines, theme, characters /people in the story, interviews, and so on. Accuracy comes from slowing down and working on each of the skills at a base level so they become more automatic and flow into a more harmonious whole.

Shifting Gears

There rush is in the muse lead madness of the rough draft. The edit is more in the conversational mode. Moving from one to the other requires a different speed. Edits require a slower pace so that you can catch your own biases and errors as well as give you time to accept the validity of an editor’s efforts.

Deep Work

Deep writing demands we slow down to allow our minds to cover the ideas and or work through our outline before we write. Sometimes you just have to accept being slow to wrap your mind around things enough to clairfy and demistify.

Process

We slow down at many points during the process as a whole. We shift down when we shift from plugging pages to tackle questions like what is the theme of my book or blog? Finding the answers to the critical structure elements in our work are not just a snap of the fingers away. You are going to need some time to find those answers.

Research Fast and Slow

Research is a two phase process we do before and after the first draft. We only need a limited amount of research to tackle a totally new subject. The best advice I have ever gotten to avoid death by research was limit the initial research, like just three books. Do it fast. Do not take notes. Move to the rough draft and cover the entire canvas. Do all of that as fast as possible. Research after the first draft is done. It’s quite likely we will need a bit more work to refine the work. That’s when we can slow down a bit for deep research, but only after we get our first draft done.

Blogs Collumns and More

Slowing down is also a wise idea when you are tackling a larger project such as a blog or a regular collumn or a large white paper project. There is virtually no way to realistically create such work in just a day or so. Sure there are some ways to get through the process in a shorter time, but you are still going to have to slow down at points to get the devilish details into place.

Anytime we work on a longer term project over time we are going to have to slow down. Our focus is often more on the work this week than the overall growth of the work. It would be impossible to work from the perspective of the end point for a ten year project today. The scale would stop us in our tracks. Can you write 7000 articles in a month? No one else can either. We are far better off working on what we need to get done today. That means we have to thing in slower terms than where it will be in a decade.

Accuracy in Thought

Developing the mind takes time but developed our mental processes actually speeds up our long term writing skills. Asimov worked on his memory first, rather than his rewrites later.

When we look at the number of drafts writers go through, we see two types. Some writers advise getting used to working in multiple drafts and thinking of the process in terms of multiple drafts. Many of the great writers advocate this. This is a solid successful process. However there are others who come from a totally different approach. They advocate for less drafts.

Do these points of view conflict? Not really. Most of the masters have a tendency to do much of the thinking before they drafted anything. That does not mean they necessarily knew word for word what they were going to put down, just that they knew exactly what the story line was as clearly as possible.

Asimov’s Memory

Asimov viewed his memory as most important skill to develop because a stronger mememory allowed him to figure out his plot lines in advance of typing anything. When he sat down to type he already knew exactly where he was going. This allowed him to regularly write one physical draft rather than the more common process of multiple drafts.

While Asimov could be said to be the king of single drafts, he is not the only writer to advocate strengthening skills to limit the number of drafts a writer needs. Steven King talks of three drafts: a rough, a rewrite/edit and a polish. Jack London wrote several of his well known books in just a few drafts, Call of the wild was done in just a month.

Other Writers

It’s not just literary masters who have a monopoly on developing solid mental writing skills. Many reporters and other nonliterary writers advise a kind of writing that allows them to slow down to digest the information first, often they write some form of brief summation or short outline in their head or on paper.

How to Write Fast

One of my favorite books How to Write Fast (while writing well) by David Pryxell recommends just a few sentences for an article. His basic steps for writing articles can be used in most writing. They are to:

1. Resist any urge to not do outlines.

Even to save time is not a valid point. You need a clear idea of what you are going to write. Pantsers are likely to say nay, but I would offer that even for a free form effort, some idea of where you are going with your work is preferred to zero. Many pantser have some idea of what they are going to write on, maybe a couple of characters, possibly they are ripping off a well known story line from an old source like the bible.

2. Outline

Compress your story line in your outline, distill it down to remove the fluff, just the facts ma am just the facts. You want to have as crystal clear a thought in your head as possible. This makes the articles quicker to write without all the fluff running in your head.

3. Keep the story a smooth read.

Use compare and contrast for movement in the narrative. Smooth the read with transitions. A fast pace moves the writing. This holds true for all writing not just newspapers. The smoother the writing the happier the reader.

4. Deep six any material that does not actually fit into the story.

Some times this part is hard because you really like a given point or idea. Save this for after your rough draft is done, but do it. A good story is tight and on point.

Pryxell’s Point

What was different for Pryxell’s meathod to writing over than a standard news article. “Unlike most time pressured newspaper stories, it (His news story) had a narrative flow more elegant than the ‘inverted pyramid’ (common news paper form), and the points I made worked together to support and overall thesis about my subject.”

A few minutes of outlining and linking his notes was all it took to create a much more readable as well as faster written news story than many of his colleagues at the newspaper.

End Point

The thing we can easily forget in our writing is that we do need to slow down. We are all speed junkies to some degree, but slowing down in the right places not only makes for faster writing, but also allows for better writing that pulls our readers along through a solid story.

Next up try: Mental Strength and Courage Develop Committed Writers

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Mental Strength and Courage Develop Committed Writers

Mental strength and courage are the first things I learned about working as writer for a small weekly newspaper. These two writing skills taught me that I was not near as great or as helpless as I thought. When I first started every submission I turned in seemed to be hacked to death by the editor before he sent the corpse back to me to be revitalized. It was a process that improved me as a writer.

Over time I realized that I already had many of the skills but they just needed time and practice to become more habituated. That realization helped my confidence a lot. Other skills needed some work or had to be learned. One of the key points many newbie writers miss is that writing is a never ending work in progress. Every writer spends a great deal of time learning to write better.
My fears that there was something wrong with me were totally unfounded, just that mental voice going to extremes.

My problems were not cured some mystical voodoo or some magic hack. Most of the solution was either just realizing I what I already had and how to tweak it or that the problem was develop a little more humility so I could learn some skill I did not have and needed to learn. I had to learn to ask for help. This is something that every professional writer knows to do. It’s also one of the many times a writer will need to use their mental strength and courage to help them selves develop as committed writers.

I would not have improved without developing that sense of self-awareness. You have this skill too. A little self awareness with a commitment to write better will help you to push your writing forward. Over time other mental skills will come on line as well.

Mental strength and courage are writing skills

So what are these mental writing skills? There are many but chances are you already have some of these traits to some degree. What is lacking is the understanding of what traits are useful for a writer, why they are so important and, if you happen to think you don’t have them are that they are weak, that you can develop them. No one comes to writing with all the knowledge. In fact we are more often a blank slate than anything else.

This list is only a base line to help you know what mental strengths to look at as you start out. So while this list may not cover absolutely every mental or psychological thing every write could need, it is enough to help any aspiring writer in any writing field build their writer’s confidence. That’s the key here. I want you to gain confidence where it counts, in your head instead of just an acceptance of the word of some teacher or other person. The writer’s important skill is self-confidence. You will need mental strength and courage to face the challenges you will need to over come to gain that self-confidence.

Have a Why

Let’s start with our why. The why is easy. It comes down to our beliefs. What we believe about ourselves is what we are and will do. Becoming aware that we have a given skill or even that we can learn it is often enough to help us make the seemingly giant leaps of faith that a writer needs to do to actually get stuff written and published or on the business side sold to a client. The great thing here is that we choose both our beliefs and our whys.

Have Courage

Courage has never been about being fearless. It is really about overcoming our own innate fears. That’s what marks the courageous soul. We all have it, but for many they don’t’ know they have it. Much like the cowardly lion of the Wizard of Oz, they lack any proof of it in their lives.

My greatest example of courage was a Marine Staff Sergeant I served with. A courageous man in so many way, not the least of which included swimming. All Marines must pass swim qualifications based on their MOS. (military occupation skill) The first thing we are required to do is step off a tall tower to practice abandoning a ship fully clothed. The hitch here for the Staff Sergeant was a serious fear of heights.

How did he deal with this?

Simple. He waited for the rest of us to go through that part so he would not hold anyone up. Then he would ascend to the platform. There he would wait a bit and let himself adjust at every step. At no time did he allow himself to step back. Eventually he made it to the edge. I still remember the determined face as he looked down into the water, directly into his fear, then stepped off. That is courage.

A writer’s lesson on mental strength and courage

Becoming aware of you thinking and emotions is critical to know how you deal with things. This awareness allows us to develop a plan or strategy for dealing with those critical emotions and still attaining our goals.

When working with our fears they may be irrational. They may be rational. But, the committed writer must still face them. The process is simple. Give yourself time to adjust. Take steps forward. Commit to never stepping back or quitting. When you come to any step that freezes you, let yourself adjust. Then step out into the air and let the water catch you.

Have Confidence

Often in life we deal with things that are dangerous like knives in the kitchen or a car on the road. What we don’t do is over think about them. Yet when we first took the family car out on the road we likely were very nervous. We lacked any confidence. A few weeks of driving about with our parents and we lost that fear. One drive test later and the fear disappeared with a driver’s license in our hands.

Writing works the same way. We have to write things and ship them. There are a thousand places along the way that we can slip and fall. These range from the inner critic, who is an idiot that wants only to run away from our greatness to worry over what people will say about our work.

My take on mental strength and courage

Mental strength and courage are what propels us forward. They are what put our butts in the chair to pick up that finished manuscript then drops it in the mail slot or email it. Mental strength and courage are needed to create and promote our portfolio, closes a contract deal, do the work, and then submits it to the client. Of these often it is to ship it. We have this strength and courage. You just have to be aware of this, then commit to using it just one step at a time. Eventually you are going to make it.

Take the slow path with Going Slow Makes Mastery

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