Category: Grow and Learn

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

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)

Photo by Artur Aldyrkhanov on Unsplash

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

Obtaining Focus

Obtaining focus As I find myself struggling to get words down I dance all over all kinds of subjects. I am thinking of my car keys. My stomach is wondering what’s for dinner. A problem from work or one of the issues with one of the kids rises to demand some of my time. Almost anything but the writing I want to get done. Sound familiar? What’s missing? Why can I not get into the flow? What do I lack? The answer is focus.

Focus is a tricky thing. We need focus and we can trick ourselves into believing we have it when we don’t. That’s the bad news. The good news is you can also trick your mind into being focused with some tips and tricks.

I should point out though; that this is not a one size fits all world we live in. You are going to have to try some of these things for yourself and be ready to either customize it to fit you better or even just work with it till it works or just chuck it if it is a complete no go.

Focus on Friend

One of the best tools for staying focused is to write like you are talking to a friend. This takes the pressure off what to think about and also gives you a point of focus. As I learned in the martial arts, focus on a target makes for better practice. Placing that target in the right area will determine if you hit in the right area and actually make contact as well. One of the practice concepts we use for targets to place them behind where we want to hit. That way we don’t look too hard and actually punch through.

It is the same concept here. Your target is to get words down but holding a conversation with a friend in your imagination kills the effect of the blank page syndrome we all suffer from. Suddenly you do not edit as you write.

Paper and Pen Focus Plan

It may sound ancient and antiquated, but I have found these two tools are the best for planning out there, at least for my money.

The trouble with planning is that we want to look at our project from the larger sky view rather than get down to the ground pounding view getting the words on the page. Each job requires a different pace and speed.


Using a physical paper we head off much frustration by removing the need to edit ourselves. When we type it’s almost instinctive to want to hit the backspace and kill what offends… That is one reason why I tend to use Notepad to speed write my first drafts. I do not have to see anything but a simple window without any editing going on. When we force our fingers to move as fast as we are thinking we also cut our thinking down. We focus on the topic more and cut the chatter in our heads so we can get more of the right words on the page.

Doodle dandy to obtain focus

There is also a side benefit to it. You can doodle. I had not noticed that one till I read an article on it by Pamela Hodges, Doodle Your Way out of Writer’s Block.  Thinking without words in lines and pictures is a differenent way to stimulate ideas than a writer’s normal word based approach.  The strange thing is it does work. Our brains tend to think in picures. If you doubt me, what do you see in your head when I say elephant. Chances are it is not the word.  I do not always find the exact idea I want directly in the doodles but at worst it is a nice break that still lets the brain think. That break often does give me a new trac to run on.

Practice obtaining focus

Writing skills take practice and getting focus is just one of them. Taking the time to use and work with new and existing focusing practices ensures that you will grow your focus skills.

Deadlines you need these to obtain focus

Deadlines are one of those love/hate things we all have. Unless you are writing just for fun with the time commitments of a beach comber, you are going to need to set deadlines to get your work done. It’s just the way the world works and the way writers get paid.

The wonder of deadlines though is they are not just for the end of things like the week or project. You can use them for work days, for chapters, for a given white paper, for outlines and research. In fact you can use them for everything including this writer’s favorite tools, the writing sprint and the editing sprint. They both work exactly like they sound. Set a timer and play beat the clock.

Even your muse shows up with a deadline…eventually. Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway and Asimov all worked so that they did not wait for their muse to arrive when they set to work. They demanded she get to work. You can do this too. The trick is to see the start of your work day as the muse’s deadline for showing up. So what if she does not show up? Then start without her for a time. She will get so frustrated with all the uninspired crap displayed before her that she will be there.

Work on deep habits

People have many ways to fool themselves into believing that they are productive. One of the more sinister is pseudo-depth. We mistake things like multi-tasking or even being too focused as working deep. The trick here is to remember that when we work deep, we are letting the mind have time to come up with its ideas. We do this best in a time and place where we can let our thoughts work out for themselves.

Multitaskers kill their productivity. Stanford found that when we multi-tasks that we hurt our cognitive control. In their study the researchers said that
multi-taskers have shorter attention spans, cannot consciously recall or switch between jobs as well as those who focus and complete a single task before moving on.

Too many thoughts means no focus

Distractions are the real enemy here. The source and type of distraction did not matter.  Anything from your cell going off to the kids playing or any number of other outside factors takes your mind off the ball. All distractions kill your line of thought. This holds just as true with multi-tasking as it does with random outside stuff. A change in your line of thought, for whatever reason even for a short time, reaches the same end. Shallow work.

Deep thinking solution for obtaining focus

Taking time each week to work on one line of thought over a long period is a great investment in deep thinking that will greatly improve your end work. For more on this I recommend you read some of Cal New Ports’ work Deep Work and the article Deep Habits: The Danger of Pseudo-Depth

Time is on your side obtaining focus is there

Where we focus our attention is always the key in the focus game. Writing with an emotional focus can be a plus too. Instead of working to beat your production numbers, try focusing on the pleasure of the writing itself. Make it a game. This works great when you are using a friend in your imagination. Enjoying the conversation is automatically there. You can do the same thing by just being aware that you are enjoying what you have to say. Ignore outside distractions like time, the amount of work or even the deadline and the ticking clock. Instead just enjoy the work for the work’s sake.

Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art covers this nicely. When we do our work for the joy of doing the work itself, we always get some positive biofeedback from our time. This will not only make you more productive, but could very well lift your mood and reduce stress as well.

Writing sprints for obtaining focus

Sprints are easy to understand and easier to do once you practice them for a bit to shake the weird feeling. Write as fast as you can for a given time, ususally between five and 25 minutes. When the timer goes off, you are done. Stop. Count the words. Note them. Then cue up the timer and try to beat your score. Repeat till you have done however many you sprints have setup to do.  Remember to take a break every now and then to give the mind a break. You would not run sprints on a track back to back all day. Writing is no different for your mind.  Writing sprints are that simple.

There are a couple of ideas to bear in mind.

First have fun. Work on getting as much of your thoughts down as possible. Do not worry over anything else.

Second set reasonable goals in your sprint. For instance do not set word counts you cannot possibly make or are even a push.

Word sprints are meant to build confidence and skill as much as make your production goals. You will have a better time and create better copy if you work to get goals that are in a reasonable range. Shooting for 500 words in 25 minutes when you know you can easily make 450 is a good streatch. 600 when you can only make 400 is off the mark. You can even use ridiculous goals like using five random words to start a 25 minute race. The entire point of the goal is to just get you moving. Once you are moving the process will naturally take you higher.

You might also use your writing routine to Build Your Morning Writing Routine

My thoughts on obtaining focus

Obtaining focus is mostly just a matter of setting the right habits and routines in place for you. Take your time. Play with new ideas. Choose what works for you. That’s how to find focus in your work.

Persistent Patient Practice  

Photo by Lucian Novosel on Unsplash

Understand the Stumbling Block

Understand the stumbling block is a classic concept. If you know what is tripping you up, you can get over it. That is a constant for writers. We all have our own personal stumbling blocks. We all adapt in our own ways.

One of the bigger stumbling blocks for a writer is the day to day self-discipline to get the work done. Nothing happens unless we get in front of that blank page and make it happen. It is that simple and that hard. To make it happen we build our self-discipline.

Discipline Plan

Getting past your stumbling blocks means you have to know yourself and the stumbling block a little bit and formulate a plan for how to prevent your own writing hara-kiri. Here are a few things to line up so that you stave off that temptation to kill your still unborn writer’s life.

Inside You

As writers we already know that when we write we learn about ourselves. We learn what is deep inside stuff coupled with stuff we just ignore. It’s a mess of ignorance and unawareness. We stand a better chance of getting something written if we understand ourselves, a major stumbling block for us all, and the inner self-sabotaging portion a little more. We need to ask ourselves some questions about our thoughts that we have no self-discipline.

A few of the questions we can ask are:

  • Were you being too critical of the work, especially when we are dealing with a fresh first draft?
  • Did the ideas lost before we get them to the page?
  • Are you quitting somewhere shortly after the passion wears off?
  • Do we finish everything to the last yard, then run for the hills? We shy from Seth Godden’s rule “Ship it”?
  • Why does it seem you only create ideas that fail to work beyond page 45?
  • Are you so comfortable with your sideline gig to support your writing that is now the unplaned carreer you never imagined you would have? Did you take your current gig to give you the time to write yet somehow you never get around to putting in a consistant writing effort?
  • Have you restarted that fantastic project multiple times with scant pages to show for it?

I am totally guilty of almost all of these. You should see all the partial starts and incompletes I have on my computer and in my files that are still in waiting. I think every writer out there has way more of these that they would care for. They are the road markers on the way to becoming a writer.

Clunkers and Solutions

Our clunkers are kept more for sentimental reasons than any real chance they will become the next great novel or a published short. I seriously doubt I have a million dollar ad in there either. However these same stories, essays and other scribbles serve a greater purpose. They are part of the practice and feedback every writer needs so that they can fix what what is incomplete in their process.

Incomplete

Each incomplete work or incomplete idea come down to finding your solutions in the nueances of your basic process. If your problem is your inner critic, you need to learn how to shut him off. Learn some Writing Confidence. Adding confidence is a great way to shut that critic up. One fix is simple. Commit to writing a really crummy first draft that covers the entire canvas. Your point is to get it done. Do not edit. Do not even pick up the phone when that critic calls. Write.

Story Fade

Issues with a fading story line can often be from either lack of technique or plan. A little study of story lines and plot structues helps. To that end Joseph Campbell’s ‘The Hero With A Thousand Faces’ and Shawn Coyne’s ‘The Story Grid’ are great starts. Follow that up with some writing structure like the foolscap outline and/or Blake Snyder’s beat sheet, ‘Save the Cat’, are often all that’s needed for many to break out of this.

Are You on Theme

Stories fade when we do not know what the story is about. Or put more plainly you do not know your theme. The solution there is to ask yourself, “What is this story about?”. You might have to do that a lot. Even the greats still have a lot of work to do for this every time they start another story. Remember Paddy Cheyefski’s rule, “As soon as I figure out what my play is about, I type it out in one line and Scotch tape it to the front of my typewriter. After that, nothing goes into the play that is not on-theme.“

Don’t feel that you should know everythhing right at the start. Even published authors and writers have to work on what they don’t know and what they think they know. Writing is not just about learning new stuff. It is also about learning new things you do not know in the stuff you alrready know. This includes your actual work. Some writers go so far as to point out that they have even fully written the entire book before they figured out what the story was about.

Just in case you missed it, yes, finding out things can and often does mean you will rewrite the whole manuscript. That’s the process and you work will not just be better for it, it will actually work.

That’s how powerful theme and story line are. Am I really good at this? Well, I think that if I live another 50 years, I might just have it almost mastered. If not, I will have died trying. That is enough.

Foolscap and Beat Sheet

Pantsers will love the foolscap. Plotters the beat sheet. The main idea is to know where you are going. After that it’s a matter of watching for the slow points, fill in the gaps, and let the bodies hit the floor. You are free to make a mess that needs to be written out of too. Steven King is famous for this one. As writers we are not really tied to any given form, but it’s generally a good idea to atleast know where you are going when you take off. Not all of us can be Steven King.

Ship it

Got a ship problem? That is how Seth Goden phrases not finishing. You need to work on your habit of finishing. Like all habits, start small. If you have a problem shipping, ship smaller projects more often at first. Build your habit as you scale up.

Process Problems

There are a lot of places you can fail here form finishing a draft to being unable to put a finished manuscript in the mail. In general though I would look at my process then break the project down and finish each step. Becareful of that voice to take off a day between. My rule here is take the first next step the next day. Plan to draft. Draft to edit. Edit to rewrite. Rewrite to polish. Polish and ship. No skipped days to celebrate. I take one small step the next day. The end rule is to ship on the done. Do not wait. Ship. Ship every time. Commit to it. Ship. You can also start your own blog with a weekly, thrice weekly or even daily column. Make those deadlines. Ship. Kill that failure to fully commit. Ship.

Seth Godin on shipping is totally spot on. Here’s a great interview with Godin on shipping ‘Shipping Creative Work with Seth Godin’ to start you. You can also read his book The Practice.

The Never Ending Restart

Keep on restarting a project? Good. Keep on building. Keep getting up. We fall a lot when we are learning. Sometimes it takes some space to get the guts to plunge again. Do it. Just one small change, fall forward. You want to go further than you did the last time. Ship.

Learn

Learn what you need to keep going. Is it accountability? Join a group. Take a class and use your work as the class project. Join NaNoWriMo. Read deep into a writer who you want to follow and try his guidance. No two writers will have the same view. Use some other creative that clicks, such as the writings of Vincent van Gogh. Emulate what they did and see what works for you.

Done This

My never ending start breakthrough started on one snowy November morning in 2011. I bailed on November 30 2011. Picked it up again January 2, 2012. Dropped it 16 pages later. Back again mid July 2013 for another five whole pages. Ponied up for Nanowrimo November 1 2013 and again in 2016. Three pages total between both. Placed my manuscript such as it was over on Some Day Isle. It took Re-reading Steven Pressfield’s War of Art for the second time to start again on June 8 2018. That one clicked. I finished the draft.

More, I gained control of a new habit. I write every day. 1177 days later I have better results than the preceeding years. I finished the first story split into three books. The next day I stared a new book. That draft is done and I am on to my fifth draft.

Yes I still have problems getting my editing done, but the fact is my writing habit is solid. I am working on the edits.

Comfort Issues

Comfort, it is big thing. We all like to eat. The trouble is: are we, at times, too comfortable for our own good? If you are a writer that is not getting work done, then you could be too comfortable.

Shake Things

You don’t have to stop earning money, but you do need to shake things up a bit to create a sense of urgency to get the work done. You do need some fire. My own experience with a steady sideline job lead to a comfort zone that I would likely have been better off getting out of at least ten years earlier than I did. The old saw says you gotta be hungry. The trouble with too steady of an income outside of writing for the writer is often a loss in drive to get stuff out there because you don’t feel a need to. In short, while you still may be producing, you have taken the edge off your hunger enough that you will not sacrifice an evening out or you will binge wach Netflix instead of getting a chapter edited.

Mind you I did not just up and quit. I did some sensible steps that if you are like me you should consider. I cleared a great deal of my debt load, saved up as I created a simple frugal life style, worked to up my writing habits and created an alternate writing based income path. In short I and my wife worked on an exit strategy so that when we felt we were ‘ready’, we could move forward.

You are going to have to think around this one too. Your plan will be different, but if you cover your bases you can transition to a full time writing career. The key is to look at all the possible choices and choose what works for you. Just remember to keep your main income till you are certain you can cover your basics for a long period of time.

What known writers did

I would suggest you learn from other writers on this. Isaac Asimov was still working as a professor with over 130 books to his credit. Steven King jumped from teaching high school English when he sold his first big seller Christine for an $400k advance and royalties. Michael Crichton had 15 books to his name, which he used to pay for his Harvard medical degree, but he only made the jump from thorasic surgery at Stanford Univerytity with his first big hit The Andromeda Strain. The fact is most writers have to go through a time of planning and work before we are able to write to live. Plan and work this part carefully. The big trouble here is finding your sweet spot. Think of it as having just enough rope to hang you without enough drop.

Retrun to write

When you get stuck and come back to a book or project after some time off. Forgive yourself for the drop. You don’t really need the baggage. Then evaluate where you are and fix whatever you think is your current issue. Create your plan. Act. Track your results. Look for places to improve. Create and implements those changes. Repeat the process.

Know your weaknesses to understand stumbling blocks

Everyone has habits that hold them back in the writing process. These can be a tech addiction like gaming or Facebook, food based addiction like not being able to pass up cookies or a habit addiction such as smoking. That’s why the writer must know what addictions can prevent getting their pages in every day. Self-control is an essential skill in the writer’s tool kit. Developing your self-control, will power if you will, is a key step to being able to ensure your writing time is not taken over by another.

Remove temptations/simplify your process

The next step is to remove those temptations so that you clear your space, time and diet of those things that make getting the work done. Set clearer goals and use an execution plan. Make clear goals once you figure out who you are and what you want to achieve. Honest self-answers for five key questions will aid you in your effort.

1. What are your core values?

You need three to seven traits, such as honesty, team work, motivation that describe yourself and your brand/work. Use those to stay on track.

2. What is your core focus?

This is often call a unique selling position. What makes you different from the competition? A clear focus helps prevent distraction by those things that do not fit the focus.

3. What is your 3 year target?

Studies show that people often over estimate what they can do in the next three months to a year out, but they under estimate what they can do in three years. Plan your longer term goals and break them down into yearly, quarterly and monthly goals. Ensure they are reached by building upon small daily habits that add up over time. Set small minimums so that you will keep momentum.

4. What is your marketing strategy?

Know your key market. For a writer that is not just who will buy your work, but also who you are writing to, aka your avatar. When someone reads you work you are talking to them. Who is that person?

5. What issue do you solve?

This is important for a writer. You do not have just a theme for your books or articles but also for your business. Knowing your theme will prevent you from marketing to those who have no real need for your products and services. It will also help you to serve your true market better.

NEXT Start small and build

We build our best habits out of small repeated steps. Write five minutes a day for a week. Grow to ten next week. Focus on the habit of writing. Build the overall time to thirty minutes or more a day, but set a tiny fallback position so that when things happen, and they will, you can keep the momentum and self-motivation going. If you lose that momentum you are far more likely to quit.

The first minimum I found was just writing two sentences from one of my high school English teachers. The shortest I’ve ever run into was to write just five words from Jessica Brodey. There are tonse of minimums to use from words to time based minimums.

One of the more flow induced is to write what ever comes to mind for a time. There is no staring on the page. You have to put words down the entire time. No checking to see if it’s bad or does not work. Bad ideas generate the process of creating ideas. Create enough ideas and you will get good ones. When your time is up, you can quit for the day.

A minimum gives you a small powerful step to stay in there. Keep it simple. Once you get to your minimum, you can quit. I have found low ball minimums are seldome the only thing I do. Most of the time, I get past them. You will too.

Accountability matters, but not so much.

I have used accountability in some efforts and failed. Accountability is like everything else, what works for you might not work for others. For me accountablitity was letting my wife know where I was in the project. For others there’s the need for a coach or direct mentor. Writers often use tracking to hold themselves accountable, such as writing down the hours completed or their word count on a calendar. The method is not the key part. You want a tool in place to ensure work is moves forward and gets shipped.

Reward a job well done

The work itself is a biofeedback loop once you get it turned on, but you still need to acknowledge the major mile stones (chapters done, rough draft/edit/rewrite completed, etc…) as you move through the process. When you reach a given milestone, give yourself a reward. Do something you love as a break at the end of a chapter. Spend a little special time with a friend after the rewrite for the editor. Open that mystery package that came in this morning out of the blue when your day’s work is done. Recognize your progress with active positive recognition is a strong way to keep motivated and focused on longer projects from books to blogs to a weekly writing column.

Backup plan with set tiny minimums

Psychologists recommend using “implementation intention” to increase your will power. Having a plan for dealing with possible satiations will increase the effectiveness of your overall plan. For instance say you are planning to write your daily blog post before you go on line and get distracted by social media. You know you might need to do some additional research while working on the post. So your back up plan might be to have both chrome and Firefox web browsers. One is setup totally for your blog with blocks for those sites that distract you when you are working. You can use the child settings for this to block your inner child. Then use that browser when you have to go on line while you are writing and need to do research.

Make it flow.

Every writer uses flow to write. Every writer has to create their own way of getting into that state. For some it’s literally sit down and write at a specific time like Somerset Maugham. “…Fortunately for me inspiration strikes at 9am.”. Steven Pressfield likes to use the start of Homer’s Odyssey as a small ritual invocation to turn the writing lights on. Steven King drinks some water or tea and a set 8 o’clock to 8:30 time frame as part of his startup ritual. The key is to create a pattern that warms your brain up for the work ahead.

Track it.

The fact is you are going to need to see gains. You can use a calendar to write down your time, your word count, or even just put in a gold star for making your daily process goals. The point is to help you see that you are making headway.

Another tool is a journal.

Journals help you process life both strange and beautiful. Keeping a separate one for your experiences with writing your blog, books, or writing business can help you weather the down times and find solutions for any questions or issues you might have with a given type of writing, plot line, customers, etc… It also will help you see patterns in your writing and process, such as when do you produce the most or get the best ideas or are the most disciplined. Tracking is all about getting to know you. The better you know you, the better you can work.

Forgive yourself to move forward.

One of the most important parts is to remember we are all human. We can very often fail and come up short in our goals. Stuff happens and we can all too often get caught up in useless emotional traps. To win is to learn to keep the forward momentum. As many experts have told us, we all fall, but the win is to fall forward and keep moving.

A critical part of that fall forward process is to forgive ourselves. Acknowledge what happened and how it happened. Move on but leave the emotional baggage of anger, frustration behind. These emotions only drag you down and grind your momentum to a halt.

Learn from the missteps. Forgive yourself. Refocus,then get back to work. A great tool to forgive yourself is the Six Phase Meditation, a daily exercise that takes just ten minutes to refocus your mind for the day, while leaving the baggage behind. It’s got another advantage. It’s free and all over the web. YouTube or download it. It’s worth far more than the mere ten minutes you will use with it.

Organize your approach

The more missed stumbling blocks are the ones right in front of your face. They are often the ones that are easy to fix if you are just aware of them. One of the ones I used to fall prey to is how I spent and organized my writing periods. I found I got a lot more done if I just had an organized approach. I think you will too. Take a look at my article Build Your Morning Writing Routine for some ideas.

My thoughts on understanding stumbling blocks

Welcome to the writing practice. I hope I have given you some discipline ideas you can use or at least think about while you look at your practice. Find those stumbling blocks, understand them and get those words out there.

What I learned most from Isaac Asimov and Michael Crichton on getting words done.

Photo by Joshua Pilla on Unsplash

Feedback Response is Important

Feedback Response is Important. Good feedback is like manna from heaven. Poor feedback can kills gains and even end your writing career before it even starts.

I like working through leadership books. I got hooked on the idea by my karate Sensei. Later the Marines hammered the concept of learning more about leadership. Today, I keep on learning for the main reason that everyone is a leader.

Always Leading

Humans are leading all the time. We lead in our social groups. Sometimes we lead as a member of a team we work with. At home it is our family or among our friends when we hang out. We are even leading people we do not know by our example as we go about our days. However, the most forgotten leadership position is that we are also leading ourselves. That is the one position we do all the time. It is by far our greatest responsibility. We screw up that and we send ourselves and the rest down the same rat hole. Our only tool is feedback. How we respond to that feedback is important.

That’s part of the reason I have been spending some of my mornings this year working through Chet Scott’s 365 day long training book Becoming Built to Lead. I really like his dive in approach of sound advice focused on building your internal base by learning about yourself from you as you work to improve your leadership skills over the course of the year. He has some great feedback in those lessons, like a walking version of Kipling’s If The correct response should be to see the importance of what he is talking about. Then apply it.

Lessons From Scott

Today’s little slowdown period started out talking about Lionel Messi of the Paris Saint-Germaine soccer team. It would be fair to say I am a distance from being the greatest soccer fan. I watch the occasional game, like when the Italians play the Germans. My knoledge is just enough to keep up with the game and appreciate much of the skill the players have. I even know of some of the better players. Though, you don’t need even that much to agree with Scott’s belief that Messi is a master of his game. Anyone watching can see that on the field Messi is in his element. He has mastered the game to an amazing level of play. Just watch him play and pay attention to how hard they have to work when he has the ball. The story is written in their faces.

The interesting thing is, as Scott points out, that he is very dominate on his left foot. He is not really the balanced player many people might think a player of his level would be. In fact his right foot is not all that good. This is for most players a distinct disadvantage. It’s not really a secret either. Everyone knows this, not just on his team but all the other teams as well. This does not stop him from playing so well. His strategy is to just focus on brining his natural dominance to an even greater level of play. He raises the bar to such a level that even with such insider understanding no one can touch him. He is proof that you do not need to be totally rounded in everything to master your work. Instead choose to become extraordinary.

Put It In Play

So, how do you become an extraordinary writer?

The answer for Scott is found in the feedback we get from our work. You need feedback and running from it is not an option. You should be running to it. Absorb all the feedback. Drink it deep.

Though, here’s the first key point….only learn from 1% of everything you take in. Let the rest just flow through you. None of that stuff is worth your time because it really does not have an effect on what matters. What matters is the work itself. That’s where you get your answers. That’s where we need to focus. We are focusing on what feedback improves your work.

The important point in feedback is how we respond

You have to ask the hard questions. Does the feedback even apply? Will it produce real improvements? That one two combo knocks out much unneeded information and clears your mental decks to really use the remaining feedback effectively. We all need feedback that strengthens our work. We can and should ignore the feedback imposters that stroke our egos like approval and popularity. So too, the negative side of the coin gets the bin. Focus instead on doing the work and your mastery of that work. As Steven Pressfield points out you find the payoff in the work. You don’t find it in the emotions about your work. Your pay off is the joy of the job itself. The payoff is better when you used the right feedback to make your work stronger.

https://endennis.com/top-three-mental-habits-writers-need-how-to-get-them/?preview_id=109&preview_nonce=932ac803d0&preview=true&_thumbnail_id=134


Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

Writer Traits What are they?


Writer traits support every writer known. Without them very little if anything would be written. The most basic writer’s trait is that you write. If you want to be a better writer you write then re-write. If you want to go further to professional then you add in a professional mind set.

There are literally hundreds of traits for each phase along the path that writers travel in life. My experience is different from others but from where I stand now after having written and not written over the years these are the traits that come most to mind for every writer to at least consider adding if not growing in his skill base.

Kaizen

The Japanese have an excellent word for a process that Ford came up with over a century ago. Kaizen is the process of constantly improving what you are doing for the better. We are not talking change for its own sake, rather the work to make things and processes better. No system or method is perfect. Writers have to work to find the things that can be improved to make things work better.

Writers have many things to work on beyond the work itself. They also work to improve their own inner character traits to support and grow their practice, develop their thinking skills, become more resilient and adaptable, improve the systems by which they get things done, increase their contacts in the writing sphere, etc.. There is a lot of work that goes into being a writer, not all of it is just a simple scribble on a page. Taking the time to think about what you need to improve and what to do about it is a great trait for a writer.

Patience

We all get caught up with a lack of patience from time to time. No one likes becoming patient. We just like the advantages when we are. Writers’ labor in a craft that takes time for everything, including down time between drafts just to get the head cleared around things. Being patient is a key writer’s trait for coming back to a project or given point when you have given it the time for things to line up. Patience is the best friend you will have while you slog it through.

Long Haul Perspective

Looking down the road is one thing, but actually accepting it and the daily grind to get there is another. This is likely the one thing that kills so many writers time and again. We just cannot accept the realities of the road ahead. All writers want our work done and a nice paycheck. It is hard to accept that we are going to actually have to walk every step of the process to get there. Changing that mental reference changes the entire game.

When we understand the game is going to be long, we can do things other than try to sprint through things or just walk away. We can sit down and work out a plan and strategy for actually getting there. Our work becomes more focused. We become more resilient when we hit bumps, our current limits, time constraints and painful evaluations along the way. We learn new skills like how to break our projects down into planning, research, writing, editing, re-writing, and publishing or delivery phases. Accepting the full scale of the work, much of it far from the glory we have in our minds and much more painful, is a powerful comfort when the winter winds blow and your life everywhere goes off into the deep.

Only one shot

There is a constant I have seen in several of the disciplines I have learned from over the years. Be it water color painting, sword drawing, riflery or writing the key is always to let your focus go to just one point then keep it there till the work is done and let it go to move to the next. No thoughts of the future. No worries of the past. Just stay in this instant and do the work.

This is not to say you should keep pounding away on a project that is stumping you or is in need of a break to let things settle. There are times and jobs where the mission of the day is to just slog one boot in front of the other till the journey is done. You will need to break from them. That’s why so many writers have multiple projects going at any given time. From Isaac Asimov to Steven Pressfield, I have seen the successful writers recommend that when you are stumped with a given project, move to another project till the mist clears and you can hit it again.

Time–it’s important

You will not live forever. You are going to die. For the writer, or anyone else who wants to achieve something, there is no clearer message that your time is valuable. The thing is most people treat time as the least important thing on their list. The writer cannot think this way. You will not get back one second that you spend…ever. You have no idea how many you have left either. A writer must use their time wisely or find themselves at some point looking their body of work lacking to their own wishes.

The best treatment I have found for this lies in two facts. One is a commitment to write daily. The second is locked writing office hours. I have found that having a morning that includes a solid writing practice for my novels has provided the anchor I needed to keep me on the path and expand that path to include time for more professional work in other fields like blogging and copy writing. You do not have to write books. You can blog or provide blog content or any other kind of writing you wish. The key here is to anchor yourself and your time with a set schedule for your writing whatever that is.

Gotta be stubborn

The one luxury you can ill afford as a writer is to quit. You just cannot do that. No quit in you. That means getting back up every time you fall. When you start to grind down you turn ornery. You slog. Steven Pressfield says it best, “Stay stubborn.”

Be Hungry

Les Brown is famous for saying that “You gotta be hungry.” He’s right. Nothing replaces the fuel of being hungry when working to your goals. Hunger is great. It narrows your focus and clears the excesses from your mind. Hunger even lights the path you need to travel today. Things become very simple when you let your hunger do its thing.

Every trait in this list can be learned, practiced and grown over time. The first step is to choose to work on them and commit to the process, then start working through the hard questions like: How do I do that? Then answer it. If you can’t think of how you can do it now, research it. That’s what Google and the library are for. You will find some answers easy and others hard. Some you will love others you will hate. Deal with them as they come and most importantly, write.

If you liked that, try a look at what Thinking Clear can do for you.

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Get Words Done Isaac Asimov Michael Crichton


To get words done Isaac Asimov Michael Crichton remain the role models of solid writing production. If you want to learn what skills you need to write a lot, you have to look at those who have written a lot. Since there are no off the rack solutions, you are going to have to compare some of them to get an idea of what common ground they share that I could use. I have found the most useful writing tools by looking at writers I like and comparing their processes.

Two of my favorite writers are Isaac Asimov and Michael Crichton. On the surface they seem very different in how they wrote. Crichton worked in intense periods for each project with breaks between, while Asimov is famous for not doing anything else other than writing. Asimov wrote in fiction and non-fiction. Crichton really focused on fiction.

Yet it is not their difference that made them produce so much. Nor are those differences the reason they were ultimately successful.

Love and Critics

The first key reason really comes down to the fact that they both loved their work. You have to love your work or it will not fly. Somerset Maugham once said that “Books can’t matter much if their authors themselves don’t think they matter.” A Writer’s Notebook

The second reason is they did not listen to the critics or even the inner one we all have. They listened instead to their own voice.

Asimov’s Process

Asimov worked large chunks of time every day. What he felt like did not matter. He got to work. He used a very minimalist straight forward approach in his writing style. His critics sometimes even complained on how clean he wrote. James Gunn described I Robot as :

“Except for two stories [of Asimov]—”Liar!” and “Evidence”—they are not stories in which character plays a significant part. Virtually all plot develops in conversation with little if any action. Nor is there a great deal of local color or description of any kind. The dialogue is, at best, functional and the style is, at best, transparent… The robot stories and, as a matter of fact, almost all Asimov fiction—play themselves on a relatively bare stage.”

Asimov himself was not offended. His writing is much like Ernest Hemingway’s. Asimov himself said:

“I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.”

Asimov wrote in the flow, often producing books in just one draft. He said that when he found a point where he could not find a solution he chose to not resist those sticking points by just plowing through, but instead he moved on to something else till his brain could formulate an answer. This is why he worked with so many typewriters at one time. Moving gave his brain a rest so that he could more quickly find solutions.

Crichton’s Process

Crichton worked in a start and stop process on one project. He tended to work in flowing times like a maniac, from an organized outline, and often using plots out of Victorian era writing and was known to shift his work days around, by getting up earlier in the mornings, to keep the inner resistance down long enough to complete the work.

Crichton’s critics claimed he lacked anything literary. Bruce Cook said Crichton’s The Great Train Robbery was “written directly with the requirements of the screen in mind” and said “never really gets inside his characters.” Science Fiction author Greg Bear said Jurassic Park had “excitement in large quantities”, predicting that it would “make a terrific movie.” But he did not like Ian Malcolm’s “extended philosophizing” on chaos theory. “Long before Malcolm has his say, this reader, at least, was hoping for some more dinosaurs to put him out of his misery.”

What They Share

Asimov and Crichton’s work was not about tomorrow or yesterday. It was what they did today that mattered. Both focused was the work while ignoring the wait for the muse. They were the soul mates with many of the more prolific writers of the late eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Somerset Maugham pointed out that loving your writing is the most important aspect of your work.

“A prolific writer, therefore, has to have self assurance. He can’t sit around doubting the quality of his writing. Rather, he has to love his own writing… If I didn’t enjoy my writing so much, how on earth could I stand all the writing I do?”

Writer’s Secret

Both writers knew the secret was to read, learn, then Steal like an artist.

Asimov read volumes over a wide variety of subjects, much of which he used for grist in his works. Crichton read volumes, but his main source for plots was Victorian books that he used to create his stories. Asimov admitted books gave him both information and inspiration.

Writing is an act of faith, but every writer uses the muse. They act and the muse comes. That’s the faith. As Maugham said, “Fortunately, inspiration strikes every day at 9 o’clock.” Both writers knew and practiced this as well. You show up and start putting words on the page and things happen. Somewhere along the line the muse has to kick in. She can’t let you have all the fun.

A Time to Start

Depending on the time of his life, Asimov would start at 9 or 9:30 am then work to 9pm. Toward the end of his years, he would start at 8am and work to 10pm. When he was still a working professor, he would work around university lecture times with set writing periods. He worked every day, even on vacation with pen and paper instead of his normal typewriter.

Crichton got to work at set times as well, though he often changed the times to start earlier as the project developed so he would not lose the momentum of the previous day. This lead him famously on one project to rise so early that it drove his wife nuts. His solution was to check into the Kona Village where he worked round the clock till he finished his work.

Slaying the Inner Critic

Each had his own way to tackle his inner and outer critic. They knew the real critic they were fighting was the inner one.

Asimov tended to fight this voice by not fighting it when stuck. That’s why he, like so many writers, tended to have multiple projects simultaneously in play at various stages. When stuck with one, the writer can move on to another. In Asimov’s case he went this one better by having a separate typewriter set up for each project being worked on. He wisely knew if the work was ready, he would need no setup time. He could just start steam rolling over that inner urge to stop the instant he sat down.

“I don’t stare at blank sheets of paper. I don’t spend days and nights cudgeling a head that is empty of ideas. Instead, I simply leave the novel and go on to any of the dozen other projects that are on tap. I write an editorial, or an essay, or a short story, or work on one of my nonfiction books. By the time I’ve grown tired of these things, my mind has been able to do its proper work and fill up again. I return to my novel and find myself able to write easily once more.”

Crichton’s momentum effort may have been hell on his household, but it did not fall down in self-destruction either.

Distractions Are Evil.

Asimov worked to remove the distraction in his life. He hated everything that kept him from writing, and even once commented about being forced to go on vacation. Another time he remarked that he hated sunny days because people used them as an excuse not to get words down. He also used this trait to make his writing more prolific in his editing process. As Asimov said:

“If I had the critic’s mentality (which I emphatically don’t), I would sit down and try to analyze my stories, work out the factors that make some more successful than others cultivate those factors, and simply explode with excellence. But the devil with that. I won’t buy success at the price of self-consciousness. I don’t have the temperament for it. I’ll write as I please and let the critics do the analyzing.”

For Asimov the editing work was done in his mind before he put words to the page. Much of his later work is pure first draft flow, as far as the paper is concerned. No one has any clue as to how many drafts he went through in his head before he set his fingers on the keys. He wrote with clarity of mind first then did not question what he wrote when he typed.

Asimov’s Memory

Remember Asimov is unique among modern writers for using mental reflection to write first then type out the finished copy. He really was sitting down with finished work when he typed all the time.

In How to Enjoy Writing, written with his wife, the pair recalled an example of his ability to do all of his work in his head then type it. Janet woke at 4 am and found Isaac wide awake. She asked if he was troubled and found that he had been awake for a couple of hours because he had woken up with an idea for his next Black Widower’s story. Amazed he was still in bed, she had told him to “Write it down.” But an unfazed Isaac said “I’m going back to sleep.” Janet told him that would mean he would not remember it later. Isaac told her “I will” and he did. He might not have stood out in the ancient days when the writers of ancient Greece remembered virtually everything, but Asimov likely owes a great deal to his flow writing to having cultivated this ability.

“For one thing, I don’t write only when I’m writing. Whenever I’m away from my typewriter- eating, falling asleep, performing my ablutions- my mind keeps working… That’s why I’m always ready to write. Everything is, in a sense, already written. I can just sit down and type it all out”
His ideas were the result of his “…thinking and thinking and thinking till I’m ready to kill myself.” Isaac Asimov, A Memoir

Oats on Distractions

Joyce Carol Oats remarked that distraction is the greatest enemy of writing. We tend to think we are writing for five hours but in reality the interruptions from family and friends really make it closer to half an hour. Asimov was the poster boy for the possible end game on that.

Asimov Spartan

In later life Asimov lived in a suite. In it he had three main things. Five IBM Selectric typewriters, about 1000 books, 9 projects in various stages and his most prized view behind some drapes, a brick wall. He did not even have a kitchen to divert at meal times. He had his meals brought in.

That may be a little Spartan for some, but the lack of distraction is likely why he did not feel any loss when he sat down at 8am and did not quit till 10pm. He was not joking as much as honest when he once quipped, “I work whenever I am not doing anything else and I don’t like to do anything else.”

Asimov had much in common with many writers, even Steven king used a small secluded cubby area with a skylight, allowing form much needed light and cutting out far less desired distractions.


“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.” ~ Stephen King, On Writing

Wrapping Up

For all writers everything is about evolving change, when it comes to our writing. We work constantly to purify our own processes to deal with distractions, critics, momentum, organization, the craft and work of writing, but of them all the things we deal with the most important part is the love of the work itself. You have to love what you write or the rest of it will not really matter much to anyone.

Mental Strength and Courage Develop Committed Writers

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