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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Persistent patient practice? Is it that makes a great writer or artist? It can’t be that simple…or hard. Let’s visit the question again. Why is anyone great really? What talent do they possess that so many never seem to have?
Many people think there is some secret they are missing. Some say there is a talent that is bestowed on just a chosen few. The conspiratorialists will tell you there is some fix set against the masses. Some guy behind him will tell you he has a hack or short cut that will fix things for you to beat that conspiracy.
None of that is true. You can talk to a million people and few of them will hit even close to what it will take to be a successful writer or any other creative endeavor for that matter. Even if they spout something close to the truth, they will not really know how to use it.
So is it really persistent patient practice?
The truth is you have to practice and get your stuff out there. Practice and production are two separate ends bound by a process. You will need all three to actually make any career or skill shine.
How long will it take?
That depends on the factors you start with. Everyone has pieces for the solution, but we don’t all have all the same pieces. You might have more skill than I do in some area. I might have more experience in another. The difference between people is why it’s so hard to do exactly what someone else has done to succeed right off the bat. In fact unless you are just very lucky, you will not have enough of the exact combination of factors that lead to their success.
Don’t let anyone fool you even with the best of connections and plenty of money to back them, every writer still has to work through all the key work to get any where. You cannot buy your way into heaven. Since Gutenberg invented the press there have been thousands of vanity publishing businesses that come real close to making the claim that anyone can write an instant best seller.
A Writer Born
The truth is fledgling writers are going to have to write a lot and keep on writing over a long period of undetermined time to get enough skill, develop their mindset, allow enough to people see their stuff, receive enough of the right feedback to make the right improvements they need, and for the stars to align just right to become an overnight success. Persistent patient practice pays off every time.
Same Song Another Verse
Persistent patient practice not new really. Every profession has the same curve. Fireman to Writer we all must put in our dues. There is no other way. That is the real skill. You have to put in the work.
Where to Start
So what skill does a writer need to pay those dues? The big three that come to my mind are persistence, patience and practice. Those three skills are the start.
Persistence
I start with persistence. There are lots of terms describe this attribute from dogged determination to resilience to tenacity to even, my favorite term plain old stubborn.
All of those way of thinking are really about one thing. We are answering one question: When do I quit? We answer that with our mindset. Will we discipline ourselves to endure our challenge? Will we keep moving forward one step at a time with a definite plan in mind instead of just freaking out or being reactive?
Patience
Out of persistence we develop our patience. Bruce lee said that “Patience is concentrated strength.” He meant that to be patient was to actively work for a given destination.
True patience has little to do with taking things and moving on. That’s toughness. It is a useful attribute but in reality it is quite passive. Patience is engages the obstacles and breaks them down like water on a stone. Water is very patient.
Patience requires us to make a plan to act from if we want to create something great. As Dr. Alex Lickerman said in Psychology Today, patience is essential. ” It defends us against foolish, impulsive behavior, gives us time to consider our options carefully, plan appropriately, and execute effectively.”
With patience we create the self-confidence to win, come to recognize the goal is not crucial to be happy, as well as build the determination to take the next small step forward in our practice.
Practice
Our practice is the path itself. It is getting up at five am to pound out our pages. We make different choices with a practice. Instead of watching TV, we choose to sit down in the evening to go over our drafts. We choose to do some research at lunch or use our break times to learn how to use keywords better. A practice is the active application of both persistence and patience combined into a practice.
The Takeaway
The writer’s path is found in just three words. Persistent Patient Practice. From that point is where your path is found.
Motivated writing after skip day. We all delude ourselves that a day off will fix all our woes. So we skip a day of writing. Then the next day comes and we find that our self motivation is tough. The key to making the most of your vacation is the certainty that will outpace the low motivation we now feel. In fact the rewards are far better than almost everything else. Here are some of the best tools I have fund.
Habit and Ritual Magic
Keeping a regular writing time puts a routine factor into the writing process. We tend to get stuck in routines, so you can use that tendency to juice up your writing. When you view sitting down to write as just another part of your day, it provides a little motivational push to be there on time writing instead of skipping the day.
Mantras
Have a mantra and a goal for the good and the bad times. You will hit both. Having a mantra like “I got this” may sound offbeat to some, but it works. Even using a work like “peace” to promote a feeling when you sit down to work can have a great effect on your willingness to get the work done.
Praise Works
You can ward off the need for motivated writing after skip day if you remember to praise raise yourself when you show up. Don’t just kick your own ass when you don’t do well. If you show, you get credit. Showing is 90% of the game. Self-praise recognizes your work and we all love to be recognized. All too often we forget that we can do that all by ourselves. Praise yourself first, if you need a critique do it after the frustration of a bad day wears off.
See Work as a Game
Staying in the game means turning your head game on. Prizes come. Prizes go. The best thing about working like your writing is a game is that there is always another reward down the road. Treating your work like a game will allow you to provide yourself with all kinds of rewards for leveling up, improving skills, and scoring points.
Imagine you are Writing.
Strange as it may sound, the mind can be tricked. It can not tell imagination from reality. If you imagine yourself pounding the keys or scribbling along with the pen, the mind will believe it. The feeling you get from your imagination is a more powerful motivative boost than just telling your mind to get to work.
Write Now. Edit Later.
Trying for a perfect draft on the first go is a recipe for failure and frustration. Speed write your ideas. Get the rough done first, then you can go back for an edit and cleanup. Break away the perfection monster in your head. Getting started is one of the better ways get traction and some momentum. Once you have a draft feel free to let that edit monster to rampage like Godzilla.
Daily Minimums
Avoid taking on too much in one day on a project. Set your goals based on the size and scope. Set your daily minimums so low that you will have no excuse for avoiding the work. The interesting thing about minimums is that once you are rolling you will likely do more. Consider it a bonus. But, keep the starting jump small to motivate you and build both momentum and more confidence. Instant motivation, writing done, no skip day what so ever. What could be better?
Change the Process.
Self-sabotaging procrastination is what every writer faces. Even the big guys will do it. The first big chunk is to sit down. Do that first. Avoid thinking “I will write tomorrow.” You won’t do it. Write today. Gain motivation tomorrow. Avoid the skip day entirely.
Track it.
Put an initial for your project on the calendar for the day’s work, then add a check mark when you are done. You can use a scheduler too. Though, a Calendar is more impressive when you can see the entire month at a glance. You self motivate and reafirm when you can see weeks of checkmarks filling the pages in a streak. Bonus. You can hang that calendar beside where you can see it, so when you are writing you get that little pick me up to get going or keep going.
Writer’s block got your motivation?
Get up and move. Take a walk or a swim. Tap into other creatives with a book, podcast or TV for a short trip. Go to a coffee shop and people watch while you day dream. Sometimes what you need to trigger your own thinking is another idea, even if it is not your idea or even the right idea. Even no specific ideas at all should you choose to use the daydream approach. The point is to change your perspective, move some of the blood from your feet to your head and or just clear your mental decks to get the idea machine in your head moving.
Outside Support
Writing alone can be more than your motivation can handle. Take your motivation needs and your writing to a writing group. Getting outside feedback, encouragement and accountability are excellent pluses for writer’s groups. Far better solution than a skip day.
NaNoWriMo for the Win
A great writer’s group to try is NaNoWriMo–National November writing Month. Every November members write a 50,000 word book.
Sometimes motivation is partly about knowing you can do something with confidence. Everyone starts out in the same place on this. Using a writer’s group for a specific project, like writing a first book in a month, is a good way to use some training wheels to get that confidence and motivation for other projects.
Changeups
The project stalls in the middle. Change up time. Use a different writing style. Move to a different scale of project like moving from your book to a short story or blog post. Turn your work into a commercial or your ad into a drama. Change where you are writing. Take your show on the road. Bloggers can write guest posts or write for an entirely different blog. You can write a creative post for social media post, just don’t spend all day doing dozens of them.
Writing Prompts
Use writing prompts to break out a new idea. You can find them all over the web and books like Writing Down the Bones or Unjournaling. You can also use real life. Recal something that happened yesterday or from child hood. Newspapers and Magazines both are idea mines, just do a little digging.
Bribery.
It’s ok if you reward yourself a cup of coffee or some treat for some milestone you want to get to. There is also extortion. No desert at the restaurant Friday if the words are not met. The key here is to not be over indulgent or vindictive. You want to motivate yourself, not left wondering what Jenny Craig meal you want tonight or never tasting a cookie ever again.
Ask Yourself: “Why?”
Get back to your why. Take some time to remember why you are writing. Why did you take on this project? Knowing and using your why is a very big motivator. Take some time to recall and visualize the finished project too. Use your feelings as well. How does it feel to be done? Then get back to work.
Cut your Workload in two.
It’s easy to pile up a long list of things to do. Cutting down the things you have to do closes all kinds of mental folders and allows you to focus on the remainder with far less worry and far more focus. In general it’s best to have only three to five major things to be done on any given day as well.
Change your schedule around.
Instead of working first thing in the morning, try to write at night. Eat lunch late by a couple of hours. Skip swimming laps to hang out with friends. Time and event changes stimulates excitement in your brain that gives you happy feelings and a need to put things to right again.
Toys, Uh I mean Tools
Use writing tools so that your work is better, faster, less frustrating and intimidating. Nothing kills a lack of motivation like the right tools for the job. Timers to take the guess work out of how long you have. Stimulate some idea generation with Quora, Writing programs like Grammarly and editing programs like Calmly, Trello and Evernote organizine your research and work. Readability tools like The Readability Test Tool Writer take out of much of the worry and stall factor from many writing hang-ups and fill in many of your writing gaps and needs. Here is a great list of 50 of them to look through for what you need. 50 Writing Tools
Other Writers
Talk to writers by joining a group of writers. One good one is The Writing Cooperative . Getting advice from other writers or making contact to get advice from with a writer you admire can be an incredible boost for your motivation.
Simple Self Motivation
The trick to making self-motivation work is found in consistency and variety. We all need motivation every day. If not for that day, to save up for those bad days that are going to rain down on us in the future. That’s why a little motivation every day will go a long way and your skip days will be few and far between.
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.
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.
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.
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.
