This is the last post in Better Writing Month. Please don’t remind me it’s no longer April

Writing skills are funny. You could spend years studying ‘important’ literary works, deconstructing obscure texts, and writing post-colonial analyses of Salman Rushdie books…but still be a mediocre writer.

I speak from experience.

One English degree earned, hundred of books read, thousands of pages written…and I still can’t spell onomatopoeia without a spell checker.

However, over the past two years, I have become a much better writer. I’m no Joyce Carol Oates, but compared to where I was when I finished university, the difference is like comparing Spam burgers to Kobe steaks.

Did I climb a mountain, talk to an oracle, and receive sage advice? No. Did I deconstruct even more texts? No. Did I go back to university for more education? Hell no. I’ve had enough post-colonial/post-structuralist/marxist/feminist/post-deconstructionist theory for one thousand lifetimes.

How did I become a better writer?

The answer will shock you. Hold your breath…

I developed the habit of writing. Every. Damn. Day.

While doing research for Better Writing Month, I became sucked into a swirling red vortex of articles on writing. Most of  these articles say write everyday. Thanks for the letter postmarked Obvious City. But how does one develop the habit of writing every day?

Developing the daily writing habit is the hard part.

But once you have it, writing everyday is easy, natural, and as necessary as breathing.

Before I developed the daily writing habit, I wrote about 2,000 words per month…even though I wanted to write more. I simply couldn’t do it. After I developed the habit, I started writing over 2,000 every day (without writer’s block, excessive procrastination, etc.) Again, the difference is like spam and kobe.

Like curling, kayaking, and fly herding, writing is a mental game. Developing the discipline to practice is difficult. Writing without an audience (or without the immediate feedback of academia) is difficult. But when you write every day, the effect is like compound interest; your skills build and multiply over time. You do become a better writer. Plus you’ll learn the secret of creative inspiration.

Please don’t think I’m bragging. I’m still a 3rd-rate hack with ambition. And please don’t think I’m saying the development of the daily writing habit is the only way to become a better writer. Reading one book a week, taking writing classes, getting feedback and critiques, reading books on writing, all these will help (some more than others). And of course, everybody’s different; what works for me mayn’t work for for you.

How did I develop the daily writing habit?

Well, I met this guy in a graffiti-covered alley. He wears a hoodie, his eyes are always bloodshot, and he carries little glass vials

If you want to develop the habit of daily writing, you need a routine or a system that makes you write everyday. You need to be writing with some purpose or goal. Just saying you want to write every day doesn’t work. At least it never worked for me. I tried for years. Finally I tried something a little more regimented and structured…and it worked.

I found structure and regimentation in two different ways:

• Nanowrimo (past two years): Write 1,667 words a day for a month. Easy, but damn hard. The end product is unpublishable drivel, but that’s not the point. The real payoff is a the discipline you learn and the skills you pick up along the way. Check out 10 Lessons Learned from Nanowrimo.
• Before I started blogging, I set up a thirty day challenge to write a 1,000 word article every day. By the time I hit thirty articles, I could write faster and better than before.

I know I dramatically improved my writing because, at the end of each project, I wrote and revised test pieces and compared the results. For Nanowrimo, the before-and-after was a chase scene. If the before wasn’t so pitiful I’d post a before-and-after sample. Same for the articles. Spam and kobe.

For me, hitting daily word counts for a minimum of thirty days burned the daily writing habit into my brain like a branding iron on a cow’s flank. Thirty days is kind of an arbitrary number to establish a new habit, but it seems effective. Some people claim a new habit is established in as little as twenty-one days. Here’s an interesting Google answers entry on this topic.

If you want to develop the daily writing habit…

• Set a daily word count goal or target.
• Create a visual way to measure your progress (calendars, spreadsheets, % complete bars).
• Hit your wordcount goal every day for 30 days.
• Write for an audience (even if it’s in your head).

That’s it. Soon you’ll develop a routine and experience positive creative inertia. That’s all you need to do to begin to develop the daily writing habit.

Set a goal. Write towards that goal.

Every. Damn. Day.

If you enjoyed this fine post, join Happenchance on Facebook, subscribe to Happenchance for more creative techniques, or hit one of the fancy social media buttons below to share it with your friends. You know they’ll appreciate it.

Photo credit: Robert S. Donovan

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What is Songkran?

The Songkran festival celebrates the start of the traditional Thai New Year. Originally, people sprinkled water over those they respected in order to help wash away the bad deeds of the previous year. Festivals evolve, of course, and Songkran is no different.

Today, during the Songkran festival in Chiang Mai, Thailand, people pelt each other with buckets of water. A moat runs around the old city, providing celebrants with thousands of gallons of ammunition. The streets run deep with (admittedly nasty) water from the Chiang Mai moat.

Everyone in the city, young and old, Thai people and foreigners, carries water guns and buckets. People stand on sidewalks or ride around on the backs of trucks and toss water on each other. Many of the truck people use big blocks of ice to cool their barrels of water; even though the outside temperature is around 38C/100F degrees, that cold water hurts!

Even though the festival has changed, the original idea remains the same: when you hit people with water, you’re doing them a favor; it’s a sign of respect. All this is done without malice. In fact, I was amazed to see that Thai people would often thank the person who dumped 100 liters of brownish moat water down their back.

If you leave your house during Songkran, you will be pelted with water. It’s part of the fun. So you have a simple choice: you either stay home and stay dry, or you go outside and risk getting drenched.

Once you’re outside, you have another choice: you can simply be drenched or you can get a bucket of your own and drench those around you (and be thanked for doing so).

During this festival, I realized writing, or any act of creative production, is the same way.

Why Songkran is like writing (or any other creative act)

When you write, you step outside of your comfortable house.  You run the risk of being doused, of having some kind of feedback being dumped over your head, whether its criticism, indifference, scrutiny, or praise.

During the first day of Songkran, I felt like I was constantly under attack, like being doused with water was an act of aggression. (Some cultural baggage is hard to shake). But as the festival went on, I realized it’s all in good fun. No one is out to harm anyone else.

Getting feedback and criticism is the same; you might feel like you’re being ruthlessly attacked, but it really is for your own good. The people who take the time to give you a serious critical response, they’re doing so out of a desire to help. Instead of washing away bad deeds, they’re trying to wash away what they see as mistakes, things that could be improved upon.

Of course you’ll sometimes have sadistic critics who put rocks in their buckets and offer only scathing attacks without any positive suggestions. Fortunately, they tend to pass by pretty quickly.

At the same time, putting your work out there is like taking your own bucket, filling it with moat water, and throwing it onto the crowd. Sometimes you hit your target, sometimes you don’t. Most people don’t care one way or another if you hit them, but sometimes you’ll really make a splash (pardon the pun) and you’ll be thanked for your efforts.

But if you want to hit anyone, you have to go outside. You have to participate. And when you participate, you run the risk of getting drenched. It’s worth remembering that no matter how wet you get, you’ll dry out eventually.

The question, then, is this: will you go out and participate in the fun? Will you run the risk that you might not hit anyone? Will you risk being hit with rocky water? Or will you stay in your house, stay safe and dry, and miss out on all the fun?

As for me and my bucket, we’re going outside. There’s still water in the moat.

Photo credit: apes_abroad

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This is the third article in the series Removing Barriers to Creating Amazing Things. Previous articles have dealt with removing physical barriers and managing your inner critic. This big honker of a post will examine our attitudes toward failure and end with some strategies on managing the fear of failure.

But first I want to start with some song lyrics from Ben Folds Five. These lyrics are from the song Regrets off the album The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner.

“I thought about the hours wasted
Watching TV, drinking beer
I thought about the things I thought about
Until immobilized with fear
And all the great ideas I had
And how we just made fun
Of those who had the guts to try and fail
And then I ended up in jail
Regrets, regrets”

Fear of failure is like an invisible fence, the kind used for dogs. In an invisible fence, wires are buried around the perimeter of a yard. The dog wears a collar with a radio transmitter. When the dog gets near the perimeter, the collar emits a little warning buzzer. If the dog keeps going, the beep gets louder, and if he goes outside the perimeter, he gets a little shock.

This is classic classical conditioning at work. After a few shocks, the dog only needs to hear the buzzer to know that if he goes any further, he will experience an unpleasant feeling.

Fear of failure is quite similar, except that instead of wearing a collar, we have these pesky things called brains. As I said previously in How to Manage Your Inner Critic, the brain wants us to be safe, comfortable and protected. In order to do this, the brain creates an invisible perimeter and tells us not to go outside.

“Enemies lurk outside,” the brain says, “and you could be hurt. You could fall on your face. Stay in here, where it’s safe.”

When we get close to this invisible fence, instead of a warning buzzer, we experience all kinds of strange things: scenarios in which we are ridiculed, abandoned, humiliated, and ruined. When we get even closer, instead of a shock, we get things like anxiety, cynicism, and perfectionism.

But you know what? That collar only has a limited range, and once you go far enough outside the perimeter, the collar stops working altogether. Of course, you might find that another invisible fence lies farther out in the distance, and the shocks are greater, but that’s no different.

Fear sucks.

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.” -Mark Twain

In the past, fear served humans well. Fear kept us safe from predators, the elements, and other humans. When venturing out into new lands, we had to be especially careful. Tigers and hostile tribes lurked in the bushes, waiting until the prime moment to pounce. By creating scenarios and imagining these threats, the brain made us keep our guard up; it’s easier to fight when your weapon is at the ready.

Now, at least in the  developed world, we have little to fear from predators and enemies, but the brain continues to conjure threats and dangers.

Why?

Any creative endeavor involves setting out for new territory. Thoughts of doing and creating amazing things make us uncomfortable and anxious. When we create, we put ourselves and our hearts out there. We open ourselves up for public ridicule and shaming. Sure, some people are happy to create only for themselves, and that’s fine, but having an audience will, I promise, influence and improve your work. Having an audience is like having a source of feedback.

And there’s the rub.  You need feedback to improve, but when the brain gleefully points how awful it is to fail, we stop ourselves from taking the steps necessary for that feedback.

What’s Wrong With Failure?

Our attitude toward failure is learned in school and reinforced through mass culture. If you do horribly in a class, you ‘earn’ an F (for failure!). The problem is that ‘earning’ an F usually results from not trying. Laziness and apathy were the cause of this failure.

As we get older, though, we begin to perceive failure a little differently: failure changes from laziness and not trying to actually trying but not having any success. Failing starts to equal doing something wrong. Failure can also mean screwing up…big time.

This is a huge shift. Think about it. Look back at the lyrics from the beginning…who is the bigger ‘failure?’ The guy who sat on the couch drinking beer and laughing at the people out there failing? Or the people actually trying and failing?

History is filled with people who ‘failed.’ You’ve probably heard these stories a million times, but just in case…

• Michael Jordan failed when he tried out for his high school basketball team.
• Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times before invented the light bulb.
• Robert Pirsig failed 121 times to find a publisher for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

You get the point. If we say that failure is not getting something right the first time, then these people were bigger failures than the Hindenburg. Yet today, all three of these failures are regarded as wildly successful individuals.

As creative people, we are  way too hard on ourselves. Every rejection is personal,  and every unrealized dream is the end of the world. Yet, by giving into that mentality, we start to think about taking the easy road, the path most traveled. If we give up on what we were meant to do, we will end up doing something we don’t want to do, only because it is the safe, easy, and fail-proof path.

Redefining Failure

“A calm sea does not make a skilled sailor.” -African proverb

As people who create amazing things, we need to redefine failure.

Merriam-Webster’s first definition of failure is an omission of occurrence or performance. Yet, if you’re actually trying to do or create something, then you have performed something. The problem is you didn’t get the desired result or outcome. So, in this sense, you have had only limited success.

When your creation fails, it does not mean that you failed. It just means you either didn’t find the right audience or you need to improve your skills. We all have setbacks and we all make mistakes.

Learn from your failures. In each lies valuable lessons.

Remember: Every failure is an education.

Before we get into strategies for managing the fear of failure, let’s take a look at some symptoms of this odious problem.

What does fear of failure look like?

Fear of failure takes many forms, but it usually comes down to one thing: not trying. How does fear of failure manifest itself?

• Procrastination: We put off doing things in order to avoid the imagined pain of doing them. In reality, the pain of not doing them is usually worse [than the pain of actually doing them].
• Anxiety. The thought that we might fail paralyzes us and prevents us from even trying. If you think about some big idea and you get a weird feeling in your stomach, that’s anxiety. Fortunately, it’s easy to channel this anxiety into creative energy, but you have to get started to do it.
• Cynicism: Some people become cynical and say everything is shit. This is really just an excuse not to try (and to keep your fragile little ego safe in the process).
• Waiting for something or someone. You can wait for years, but nothing could come along. No one will rescue you. The world won’t change in your favor.
• Worrying about others. People don’t like to upset the dynamics of their social circle. Yet, when you start trying things, you run the risk of doing just that and, if you have limited success, those who were made uncomfortable by your efforts will be the first to point out your failures.
• Perfectionism. Nothing is perfect. Nothing. You can spend years working out the final details, but eventually you have to say enough is enough and trust that you’ve done the best you could.

Managing the Fear of Failure

In my opinion, the most important thing you can do to manage the fear of failure is to ask yourself one question: “Realistically, what is the worst that could happen?”

That’s it. Imagine the worst-case scenario. This is very powerful. When you really scrutinize all the worst-case scenarios, you realize they’re not that bad. In almost all cases, you’ll still have your family, friends, and finances. You might look like a goof for a few minutes, but people forget things quite quickly. And… assuming you learn from whatever missteps you make, eventually the things you do and create will supplant any early setbacks.

Here are more techniques for managing the fear of failure:

• Judge success based on your own results. Don’t compare your results to those of others. We all progress at a different pace.

• Just get started. This is often the most terrifying part of any endeavor. The first steps are the hardest, but once you get moving, you can make this creative inertia work for you.

• Set small, concrete goals. Rather than focus on one huge goal, focus on small and specific goals.  Let’s say you want to make a living as a painter. Not easy, but doable. Focus on selling one piece a month.

• Remember that you are not your work. If something you make is poorly received, either look for ways to improve it or chalk it up to a learning experience and move onto the next thing.

• Set a cut-off date. You’ve seen the guys that are rocking well past their prime. Their goal is to get a record deal. While their persistence is admirable, they never set a concrete goal or took responsibility for their own success. They waited on someone to rescue them. No one did.

• Take responsibility. Your success depends on you alone. While it’s easy to blame external forces (the shitty economy, a rotten town, lazy friends), these are all beyond your control.

• Recognize that nothing is a sure thing. All endeavors require risk. Entrepreneurs risk capital and reputation. Artists and creators risk their mental well-being, but that risk is the price of  admission for playing the game.

• Rest assured that failure gets easier. The first ones burn, but after a while, it gets easier. Especially once you get some honest feedback and learn to learn from your mistakes.

Who am I to talk about failure?

I am proud to say I have had a lot of ‘failures.’ From each I learned some valuable lessons.

• I failed Calculus. Twice. I also learned two things: one, it’s okay to quit things that just don’t work. Two, don’t go to class with a hangover.
• The first time I ever sang in front of an audience, my guitar and voice were out of tune. My voice cracked. I forgot the words. I quit after my second song and left in shame. Yet, a few months later, I was happily crooning away in front of larger and larger audiences.
• My first attempt at creating an information product, Pizza Confidential, sold only a few copies. I spent more on advertising than I made in book sales. Yet, from that experience, I learned some valuable lessons. (If you know anyone who delivers pizza, do me favor and send them the link).
• The first time I spent any significant time away from home, I set out to hike all 2,176+ miles of the Appalachian Trail. After a couple months, though, I bitched out and went home. A couple years later, I am wrapping up my first year of living abroad.
• I am collecting an impressive pile of  rejection slips for my short fiction. At first they were form letters, but I’ve also started to get some valuable personal feedback from editors.
• This list could continue, but that’s enough for one post.

Over to You:

• How has failure helped you grow?
• Have you ever been paralyzed by what you later learned was an irrational fear of failure?
• What can we learn from the failure of others?

Here’s to a 2010 full of failure! ! !

If you enjoyed this post or others, share it! Tweet it, Digg it, Stumble it, email it to friends, or submit it to your favorite online service.

photo credit: tommy the pariah

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Korean students are smart. They consistently rank among the top performing students in the world, especially in math, but it’s no surprise, given their study habits and sheer relentlessness.

A majority of my students tell me they like math.

The goal for many of these students is to either study at one of the SKY universities or to study abroad. Korea sends more students to study abroad than any other country, about 350,000 total. According to the NY Times, South Koreans are the largest group of international students in the U.S.

The following is my attempt to describe a typical day in the life of a fictional Korean middle school student. This comes from what students have told me while using their second language (English is fiendishly difficult for Korean kids, but even the younger students can make themselves understood).

Keep in mind that I’m talking about hagwon students. Even though private hagwons are affordable for middle class families, not all Korean students are able to attend. In other words, these kids are born with an initial advantage over their non-hagown peers (See also Accidents of Birth).

That said, let’s have a look at the typical day in the the life of a fictional Korean middle school student.

My School Day, by Park Hyeun Jung.

Monday to Saturday, I wake up around 6:30 to 7:00. Eat a quick breakfast of rice and seaweed soup,  put on my uniform, and walk to school. Some of my friends have to take the city bus, but I’m lucky.

My classes are math, science, Korean language and literature, morality, social studies, English, physical education, music and art. Math is my favorite, though I like social studies, too. I do a couple hours of self-study in the morning. During this time I usually work on assignments from my afternoon classes.

At lunch, I get to talk to my friends.

I finish around three. When I leave, I’m pretty hungry. If I have any pocket money, I’ll buy some food from the old lady’s snack cart. I don’t get to eat until I get home.

After School

From three until five, I do self-study at the library. I try to finish up my hagwon homework. Some of it is pretty hard, but it’s helping me become a better student. Besides, if I don’t finish, the teachers will call my mother. That’s never fun.

I go to hagwons for math, science, and English, one each. Some of my friends go to two different hagwons for each subject.

Three days a week, I have English and math. Two days a week, science and Korean hagwon.  I spend a couple hours at each one. In math, we’ve been working on geometry, and that’s pretty fun. English hagwon is okay, though the foreigner teachers smell funny. At least they don’t give too much homework. I think they’re lazy but I get to talk a little bit. For my Korean teachers, we mostly memorize vocabulary and translate articles.

After Hagwon(s)

I get home from the hagwons at about 10pm. I used to stay later, but the government recently passed a law that says all hagwons have to close by 10pm. At home, I’ll eat a little dinner with my family. Dad is usually home to eat with us, but sometimes he has to work late and I don’t even see him; he leaves before I’m awake and gets home after I’m in bed.

After dinner, I study and do homework. We recently moved to a bigger apartment so my sister and I could have a room just for studying. Tonight, she’s working on English homework; she has to translate four pages before class tomorrow.

I’ve got to get ready for a math test at the end of the week, so I’ll probably study until about one or two. I’m so tired, and all I want to do is sleep, but I’ve got to finish. My future will be ruined if I don’t.

Good Night

What Can We Learn

As a westerner, it’s easy to say these kids are being worked too hard, that they don’t have any free time to play or to develop their own interests.

Yet, it’s not my culture and I’m not a researcher. I’m just an outside observer, and an ignorant one at that. A full comparison of Korean vs. American education is waaay beyond the scope of this article. (Here’s an article dealing with the negative impact of the hagwon industry).

However, I’d like to think I’ve learned a few things about learning from my ever-gracious host country.

• Sometimes rote memorization has its place; some information simply has to be learned by heart. You can’t Google foreign language vocabulary or math formulas.
• Your friends and peers influence you more than you think. When all your peers are so hard-working, it’s shameful to be lazy.
• You don’t need expensive courses and fancy technology, you just need to put in the time, work, and energy. On education, South Korea spends half as much as the US but gets better results.
• The less free time you have, the more valuable it becomes. Make the most of what you’ve got.
• In the West, elbow-numbing hard work is underrated. Sometimes you just have to push yourself really damn hard.

Today, Korea is a modern, industrialized country, but according to the OECD (via the BBC), 40 years ago, Korea’s national wealth was the same as that of Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world.

How did Korea pull itself out of that mess? They rolled up their sleeves, built a bunch of factories, looked to the outside world, studied hard, and outworked almost everyone else around them. In short, through work, effort, and sweat, Korea transformed itself from a war-torn mess to one of the richest countries in Asia.

Is it any wonder Korean students work so hard?

photo credit: zukunftsalick

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When I was 25, I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel Everything Is Illuminated. The novel is a whimsical modernist work  about a young man who goes to the Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis during WWII. Critical reaction bordered on exuberance, later tempered by a minor backlash. Houghton Mifflin published this when Foer was 25.

When I learned Foer’s young age at the time of writing, I came close to abandoning my own modest writing goals in favor of a career as a plumber. I’d certainly be more financially stable.

If you look a little closer, though, you can see that Foer had a lot going for him. He attended a private prep school. He had classes with the children of senators and attorney generals. He also had Joyce Carol Oates for freshman writing at Princeton; she ended up being his advisor for his  senior thesis.

Joyce Carol Freaking Oates….for a freshman-level class.

To put this in perspective, my freshman writing instructor was a dude with a skullet (example) who had just self-published his first novel about a CIA conspiracy. Sometimes he brought his stinky-ass dog to class.

Undoubtedly, Foer is a talented writer. I’m sure he put in thousands of hours of hard work, but you can’t ignore the advantages conferred upon him by the accident of birth. If Foer hadn’t been encouraged by Oates, he probably would’ve discovered success elsewhere, all because he was off to a good start the day he was born.

Politicians pay lip service to equality and opportunity. This rhetoric plays nicely in the media. However, the reality is muddier. Even in developed, first-world nations, we’re all born into vastly different circumstances. The accident of birth could drop us from the universal uterus to a starting point in an Amish enclave, a Shanghai slum, or a Pyrenees palace.

It’s all chance.

Personally, I think my starting point was cool. My parents were great. I went to public school just like everybody else. I might grumble about public school (I never really had to try), but I realize I was damn lucky. I’ll also admit I was kind of lazy.

After visiting places like Chiapas and Cambodia (photos), I’ve realized just how lucky myself and others born into the developed world are. If you’ve ever met a landmine victim or seen a group of street children begging, you know what I’m talking about.

After reading great novels by people my age or younger, I realized that if I ever want to write anything worth reading, I will have to do a ridiculous amount of work because I’m off to a relatively late start.

New mantra: I can’t change what I did, only what I will do.

Look, America has more problems than a turkey has feathers, but it’s still an excellent country to be born into. We have clean(ish) water, freedom from armed militias (exceptions), almost universal literacy, and lots of good, affordable universities and community colleges.

We also have a country where, if you’re willing to work, you can at least have a roof over your head and enough to eat. Even better, you can be lazy for a few years and still make up for lost time and opportunities.

Back to Foer. Foer got Joyce Carol Freaking Oates as an advisor. I got the skullet guy. The main difference was the accidents of birth.

Let’s look at a couple more examples of  people who created great work at an early age. Mozart famously ‘started composing’ at age five, but this just means he made up little melodies on the harpsichord while his composer/court musician father transcribed them. Pablo Picasso started his Blue Period in his early twenties. As a child, his talent was recognized by his painter/art professor father. See a pattern here?

When you have someone who decides what you’re going to do, or you’re put into a situation where you have famous mentors, chances are you’re going to have some success at an early age. Maybe not at the Mozart level, but you’re going to be better than your average creator.

For everyone else, we have to figure things out as we go along. We work menial jobs to support ourselves. We wait tables and deliver pizzas to earn rent money or put ourselves through school(s).We might take a round-about path to our craft or career, and that’s only if we are lucky enough to find it and able to find the time to work on it.

Yes, people born with some advantage have to work hard, but the majority of people have to work even harder to close the gaps caused by birth accidents. The people born into really difficult circumstances have a harder slog than anybody. Those who pull themselves out of the hardest circumstances deserve more respect that someone like Foer or even myself (if I ever actually do anything awesome) deserve. People like Oprah Winfrey, Ray Charles, Andrew Carnegie, and even (ahem) 50 Cent all come to mind.

Sadly, many people recognize the amount of work required and simply quit before they start. The road is too long, the mountain too steep.

For those that do  try to close these gaps, we have to put in forty hours a week…on top of a regular job. A four hour work week? That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard (By the way, Tim Ferriss, author of the Four Hour Work, went to a private boarding school before attending Princeton.)

For those of you who are figuring it as you go along, those born only with a desire to create and make the world just a little bit better, I tip my fedora to you.

I would like to leave you with a quote I like.  It’s from a writer whose first work was also published at 26. This writer was born to working-class parents, went to a one-room school house, and was the first of her family to finish high school.

Not exactly an enviable accident of birth, but this was later balanced out by winning a scholarship to Syracuse and writing a lot of practice novels. Through relentless effort and hard work, this person became the most ridiculuously prolific writer of the twentieth century.

While the quote is specific to writing, we can apply it to any creative endeavor.

“Writing is not a race, and nobody really wins.”

That writer’s name?

Joyce Carol Oates.

Photo Credit: cindy47452

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In the Kurt Vonnegut novel Bluebeard, the protagonist Rabo Karabekian is an abstract expressionist painter. Early in his career, he used a paint called Sateen Dura-luxe. At the time, Sateen Dura-luxe was cutting edge, top-of-the-line stuff.

After a few years, though, the Sateen Dura-luxe decayed and Karabekian’s paintings crumbled, leaving only vague impressions on the canvas. Work that had been hanging in galleries became worthless, putting an end to his painting career.

While this is a fictional example, it effectively describes what happens when we passively read books and texts. Here, passive reading refers to the way most people read, taking in the work from front-to-back.

Reading a book is like having a picture painted on your brain. Your brain is the canvas, and the paint is your ability to remember, recall and synthesize the information. Passive reading, though, is like using Sateen Dura-luxe to paint that picture. After a year or five, the canvas will still be there, but the image may be faded and cracked.

To put this another way, passive reading is like bailing water from a leaky boat with a pasta strainer. Active reading is like having a sump pump, a quality bucket, and a patch kit. Not only does active reading improve your memory and reading recall, it leads to a richer understanding of the text and, in my opinion, a higher quality reading experience.

Yes, active reading takes a little longer, but if the book is important enough to read in the first place, isn’t it worth taking the time to solidify the information in your mind? Plus, if you can remember something instead of having to dig back through a book to reference it, haven’t you saved yourself time?

Let’s look at some active reading strategies that will keep your memory paint bright and prevent the water of forgetting from sinking your boat.

Before Reading

• Preview the material. Scan the chapter headings, table of contents, and index. Flip through the book and see if you can connect the themes to something you might already know.
• Write down  any questions you would like answered.
• Ask yourself what you want out of this book. Do you want to be entertained, informed, persuaded, challenged or cajoled?
• Think about how you might be able to use or apply the material to your own projects.
• Learn a bit about the author. For fiction, find out if the author has any recurring themes they like. John Irving, for example, has a thing for bears and boarding schools.

While Reading

• Use a pencil or pen to annotate, underline, and circle the text. Use multi-colored highlighters to make important ideas stand
• If you like, draw pictures or make little models.
• Think about the questions you had before reading it. Are you finding the answers you’re looking for?
• Can you connect this material to what you already know?
• At the end of each section or chapter, take a minute to write a summary, in your own words, of what you just read. An hour later, go back and review your notes.
• If you can, read aloud the key points and the summary.

After Finishing the Book

• Both after a reading session and after finishing a book, see if you can summarize everything you read.
• Make a mind map of the text entirely from memory. After you make it, scan the text again and see if you missed anything.
• Ask yourself if the book answered your questions.
• Think about what you got out of this book. Did it meet your expectations or give you anything useful?
• Review, review, review. Spend about five minutes reviewing your summaries and mind maps after one day, one week, one month, and six months.

When I was at university, I only used a small portion of these techniques, but once I started annotating and summarizing, I cut my study time in half and improved my grades.

Today, though, most of the non-fiction I read is either on the internet or in audio book format. How do I apply these active reading strategies to other mediums? By taking extra notes and spending just a little more time summarizing each section. For especially useful internet articles, I’ll write an outline in my indexed black book as I’m reading. Each section of the outline gets a little paraphrased summary.

An extra trick for remembering and recalling audio books and podcasts.

I used to listen to a lot of audio books when I worked as a delivery driver, and I still listen to them when I wander the neon alleys of Seoul.

A couple years ago, I noticed a strange thing: when I passed a certain landmark or area, I would think about a particular section of the audio book, remembering things almost verbatim. This also worked the other way: if I re-listened to a section, I would see the exact spot where I initially heard these words.

I soon learned that if I mentally retrace my route, I can remember most of what I listened to. I suppose this is only a variation on the loci method, but it’s still cool. Those crazy Greeks…

I’ve been working to improve audio book recall, and here are some things I’ve found useful:

• Consciously noticing your surroundings, the sights, smells and sounds, makes recall easier later.
• Remembering the weather helps.
• Associating chapter headings to landmarks can act like a fast forward and rewind button.
• Retracing your steps or route can help fill missing gaps.
• Pausing the audio book every half hour breaks things up nicely.

Whether you’re reading non-fiction, listening to a novel, or reading my blog, I hope these strategies help keep your mental paintings as bright and crisp as they were the day they were created. Even if you only use a couple of these strategies, I promise that you will remember more of what you read.

Further Reading

“Close The Book. Recall. Write It Down.” Chronicle of Higher Education

Reading Tips from Povidence College

SQ3R Wikipedia Entry

Tips for Active Reading

@The Readers Have you used any of these techniques, and if so, what kind of success have you had?

Photo Credit: King Chimp

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Inertia: the tendency of objects to preserve their present state of motion unless acted upon by an outside force.

Creative Inertia: the tendency of a creator at work to stay at work unless allowing an outside force to act upon them. Or, an artist at rest to stay at rest unless applying their will as an outside force.

NanoWriMo is almost halfway finished. As something of a Nano evangelist, I convinced a couple friends  to get on the bandwagon. Yesterday, I received an email from one of them. He said that even though he was behind, he hadn’t written this much or had so many ideas since he was in college. “The ideas,” he said, “just start jumping out at you.”

Reading about this made my day. It also made me think about burlaks.

What were burlaks? In pre-industrial Russia, burlaks were flea-bitten peasants laborers who would pull barges and ships along the Volga river or through canals. Working alone or as a team, they tied ropes around their body and were able to move huge amounts of freight to and from Moscow to the White Sea.

What does this have to do with creative inertia?

Before railroads, water was the way to move large amounts of stuff. Why? Because once you got the boat moving, it was pretty easy to keep it moving. You needed only sails, galley slaves, or some flea-bitten peasants to keep your vessel in motion.

In my experience, and as most NanoWriMoers can testify, creative inertia is no different. Getting started takes a huge act of will, but once you’re moving, it’s not too hard to stay in motion. You just have to do some grunt work.

Think of your creative project, whether it’s a book, a massive sculpture, an album of songs, whatever, as a big ship that you need to pull from city to sea. The distance is great, the size of the boat is intimidating, and you’ve got to work if you want to survive the winter.

Nobody ever said creating anything worthwhile was easy.

The work isn’t actually too bad, though. Getting started is the hard part. Once you overcome the first three stages of creative inertia, it’s smooth sailing.

The first stage is when you decide to pick up the rope. You know what outcome you want, but the ship seems so big. The thought of pulling it all the way to the sea makes your hands and shoulders hurt. That’s understandable. Most people quit at this point, before the job even starts.

Maybe you’re not sure. You might be waiting for the perfect time. You might say you’re still working out the details. These both seem like reasonable, logical reasons to delay starting a project. However, you should remember four things:

• The perfect time will never come.
• The details will work themselves out as you go along.
• Your mistakes will help you learn what you’re doing right.
• All that said, you can save yourself a lot of effort if you’re sure you’ve got the right boat.

The second stage is when you begin to pull and set your project in motion. In my opinion, this is the most challenging stage. That ship really is massive, and building up the inertia takes a lot of energy, will, and force.

Most new projects carry a huge learning curve. There are new steps, new processes, new physical and mental coordinations to learn. The five simple tasks required for completion have turned into fifty. Yikes!

Worse, this is when the real friction starts, and a lot of it is negative mental chatter. The ship is huge, and it really wants to remain at rest. This stationary inertia may manifest itself as anxiety, fear, or insecurity: fear of failure (or success), worries about how you’ll be perceived, fear of the shame of failure, insecurity about your own abilities. Things to remember during the second stage:

• Getting good at anything takes time. Getting really good takes years. If you want to get really good as something, expect to spend a lot of time doing it.
• You’re probably better than you think. If you’re not, you’ll learn from the process and will improve.
• Most people won’t even notice if you fail, and if they do they won’t care. If anyone laughs at your failure, you can ignore them; they’re irrelevant bastards anyway.
• Keep pulling! It gets easier.

In the third stage, you’re moving down the water to the sea.

The first two stages are hard, but if you keep working, you’ll reach the third stage. The third stage is when things begin to move along a lot easier. You’ve broken the stationary inertia of the ship, and now that your ship is in motion, it really wants to stay in motion. The bigger the ship, the more mass you have working in your favor. You still have a long way to go, and great effort and patience are required, but the important part is the ship is in motion.

The best part is this: in the third stage, your skill increases and your anxiety lowers. For those of you familiar with the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, you know these are two conditions you need to achieve flow in your work.

And what burlak doesn’t like a good amount of flow?

When the ship starts to move, when you start to take advantage of creative inertia, you will start to see great results. A little bit of effort applied over a long period of time will keep your ship moving and your project(s) on track.

Sometimes all you have to do is pick up the rope and start pulling.

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How many times have you heard this phrase: “he’s breaking all the rules!”? Taken out of context, it seems pretty cliché. This phrase is trite and overused, but media types cant’ get enough of it.

Western culture rewards the rebel, the trend setter, the people who do amazing things.  These people often seem to come from out of nowhere. They are called game changers, paradigm shifters, or revolutionaries. Their work or their life alters the way a majority of people look a their medium. People say they ‘broke all the rules! or they ‘changed the rules of the game!’

Look closer, though, and you’ll see the basic, structural rules of the game never really changed. The conventions changed, the rules remained the same.

Every part of our daily lives follows rules and conventions, and art is no different. Rules and conventions allow creators and their audience to find a common ground, a place in the middle to meet. Most people in the audience don’t even think about these things. They just want to be entertained, to have a good time.

However, when the rules are broken, their Spidey-sense kicks in, their bullshit detectors turn on, and they’re turned off. They don’t know why, they just feel like something is amiss or wrong. Ask them to explain it, and they’ll probably just say they didn’t like it.

Rules and conventions make the game possible. They don’t stifle creativity, they enable it and give it a framework, a place to play. Rules of form are like a giving a child a playpen inside a bunker in the middle of a war zone. Inside the playpen are the rules, inside the bunker are the guidelines. Outside lies the hell of war.

“You can do whatever you want, as long as you stay in the sandbox. If you go outside the playpen into the bunker, you might get kicked around or stepped on, but you’ll survive, maybe even thrive. Go outside the bunker, though, and somebody else will have to pick up the pieces.”

Is art any different?

Here are some examples  of people that followed the rules but are called rule-breakers and game-changers.

Shakespeare The Bard’s work follows a fairly rigid set of guidelines: all of his plays  followed the Roman five-act structure. Look at the sonnets. Working within the relatively narrow confines of the sonnet form(three four-line stanzas and a two-line couplet at the end), over 150 of these sonnets were published, and they all followed the same basic rules.

Claude Monet Unlike most young artists at the time, Monet did not spend his time in museums copying the old masters. Instead, he painted the world around him and learned from his contemporaries. While he didn’t follow the conventions, he still used rules: he combined a naturalistic approach with the laws of optics. The rules of painting remained the same, Monet only changed the conventions.

Nirvana People remember Nirvana as the band that brought ‘alternative’ music into the mainstream. Did Nirvana break the basic rules of songwriting? No. Most Nirvana songs follow the verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus format. They definitely went outside the narrow conventions of late eighties/early nineties rock music (hair spray, reverby drums, cheesy lyrics), but they followed the basics almost to a ‘t’.

[While I don't think Nirvana is anywhere near as culturally important or relevant as Shakespeare or Monet, they're are a great example].

Almost all movies and novels Most modern story-telling entertainment follows some kind of three-act setup, build-up, climax structure. The age-old rules of storytelling lead audiences to expect these things. Leave one part out and it’s like a car without wheels.

People can complain all the want about formulaic movies and books, but how many people actually watch art films or finish novels that disregard these basic rules? Yes, formulaic art and media is boring, but the formula-film not only stays within the sandbox, it cowers at the thought of even touching the edges.

Once you know the  difference between rules and conventions,  you can step outside of the sandbox and start playing in the bunker, messing around with the conventions. You might get bruised, you might get rich, but you’ll definitely get an education.

Pardon me for sounding like Seth Godin here, but the real opportunities for innovation lie in changing and shattering conventions while adhering to the basic rules. Disregard the rules at your own peril.

I want to give credit to Larry Brooks at StoryFix for his writing about story architecture. His posts inspired me to think about the importance of rules.

Photo credit: the_chris

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The internet is a fascinating beast, but for curious people, it will eat hours of your life. Tangential rabbit holes beckon. If you’re not vigilant, you’ll find yourself reading about Napoleon’s exile to Elba even though you wanted to find a word that rhymes with ‘houseplant.’

Sometimes this is cool. Learning useless skills and information is great, but other times this informational horn o’ plenty is a hindrance to real work. What if you need to learn a lot about a specific topic? How can you make the most of your research time?

1. Know Your Research Goal Maybe you’re looking for an introduction to a subject or you need an answer to an obscure question. Whatever you’re looking for, if you know what you need to know, you can get in and out faster.

2. Separate Researching from Surfing Think about research as a task to finish and surfing as passive entertainment. It’s easier to stay on task  when you make a distinction between the two.

3. Read Critically…aka Power up the Bullshit Detector Most people can easily distinguish between advertisements and real content, but what about people making unverified claims or citing dubious statistics? When you’re evaluating a new-to-you site, always question not only the quality but the motivation of whatever is presented. See if you can guess their target audience.

4. Take Notes If I want to remember something I’ve read, I almost always take notes. While I may never refer to the notes, the act of writing my notes down on paper seems to make a mark on my brain. Taking notes is more effective if I summarize content in my own words rather than just copy lines verbatim.

5. Use Delicious for bookmarking I’m still new to delicious and I rarely log on to the site. However, I don’t know how I got by without their bookmarking system. If I find an article I want to read or reference later, I bookmark it, add appropriate tags, and get back to my research.

6. Stay Focused! This is the single biggest way to make the most of your research time. When something unrelated to your research piques your interest, bookmark it to read later. Ignore everything except the task at hand. Read more on focus here.

7. Turn of Notifications Between gmail, tweetdeck, and facebook, you’ve got a lot of people and information competing for your attention. Whatever the message is, it can wait until you’ve finished your reseach.

8. Active Reading This includes taking notes, paraphrasing, and thinking about how you can relate this  information to what you already know. Also includes thinking about how you would explain the material to someone who was unfamiliar with it.

9. Stay Fresh I like to take breaks every thirty minutes or so. Any more than that, and the brain fog starts to descend. I process information slower and I’m more likely to let down my bullshit detector.

10. Use a Good Web Browser with Mouse Gestures A good browser and mouse gestures will save you time and prevent headaches. Lately I’ve been experimenting with Chrome. It’s fast and doesn’t crash. So far I like it better than Firefox, though delicious support could be better.

11. Know When Not to Use the Internet Sometimes you’ve got to go old school and hit a library, get a proper book, get away from the computer, and read, read, read. Even better, call someone up and and ask if you can ask them about your topic. Don’t forget to take notes.

12. What Can My Readers Add? Over to you. Can you share any tips for better web research?

Photo credit: autumn_bliss

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Three years ago, I received a box of dusty old books. Most were over 50-120 years old. One of the books was Coleridge’s ‘Rime Of the Ancient Mariner.

Everything about the book  suggested attention to detail and craftsmanship: the blue embossed binding,  the lithographs of castles, flowers and  vines that surrounded every page, and a personal note in the front.

The note read ‘To my dear Emma, May you enjoy this as much as I did. Joseph. March, 1882.’ It was written in a Spencer script, the letters smooth and flowing. Just a simple message, but it looked so nice it seemed to be a part of the book. I wish I had pictures  to share, but the book is back in the U.S.

At the time, I wondered how people wrote like that and why no one writes like that today. The answer is pretty simple: in the past, good handwriting was an important skill, just like typing or knowing how to make lolcats in Photoshop. Before typewriters and computers, you were judged by the quality of your handwriting. Quality handwriting was drilled into students through hours of exercises.

Today, teaching and learning quality handwriting is almost an afterthought. I don’t remember exactly how much time I spent learning penmanship skills, but it wasn’t enough. And I had a disadvantage: I’m left-handed. I was told to use my right hand or to write with my book turned sideways. That’s like telling a cow not to moo (Click here to learn more about the relationship between the word ‘left’ and all things evil).

Now, two decades later, I’m sick of my ugly handwriting.

Not only do I want to have better general penmanship, I want to improve my cursive.  Why would I want to improve what a New York Times Op-Art article basically called an obsolete style?

In a lot of U.S. school systems, especially since the 1980s, some decision makers felt that keyboards and technology would replace the need for handwriting. By the time these kids are adults, the thinking went, you’ll have to buy ink pens in antique stores and handwriting won’t matter. Also, as schools sought to cram more content-based materials in, basic skills like handwriting received less and less time in the classroom.

I don’t deny that typing and tech skills are important. The faster and more accurate  you can type, the better, and because of my early access to Apple IIs, I am comfortable with all types of computers. But, the mistake here is believing that typing is a replacement for writing. No. Typing and writing are like singing and dancing. One isn’t a substitute for another.

Why Write By Hand?

The pen and paper aren’t going anywhere. As long as we are thinking people who engage with the world around us, as long as we have love letters to write, bureaucracies to deal with, and dirty messages to write on bathroom stalls, we will need to write things down.

Physically writing things down is like thinking on paper. Spiderman’s hands shoot webs. Writers’ hands shoot ideas, and for me the difference between drafting by hand and using a keyboard is like the difference between using an assault rifle and an RPG to kill a field mouse; they both get the job done, but one is a whole lot less messier.

Before I even start typing a post, I usually write all my ideas out onto a mind map, then use that to make an outline. Writing on paper, I’m not constrained to put things in a linear order.  And, if I want to draw little sketches of the dead plant on my desk, I can do that, too. While typing, I have to interface with a keyboard and abide by its restrictions.

Writing on paper is a more visceral and physical experience, unmediated by screens  and machines.

Why Have Good Handwriting?

Besides assisting my admittedly puny mind, I would also argue that good penmanship increases the usefulness and impact of whatever I write. If I’m taking notes on some topic, and I  take the time to make the notes look decent, I get a lot more out of the notes and feel less resistance to go back and reread them.

Writing neatly will initially take a few moments longer, but it will save time if and when you need to read over what you’ve written. If you’re typing something you’ve written by hand but struggling to decipher the words, squinting, struggling, turning the paper upside down, you’re spending a lot of extra time. Had you written a little slower initially, reading what you had written would be far simpler.

If you write a note to yourself that you can’t read, it doesn’t do you a damn bit of good, does it?

Going further, in some occupations good handwriting can save lives. In 1999, RamonVasquez died because the pharmacist misread his doctor’s ugly-ass handwriting (link).

There is the visual  appeal of looking at a page of nicely printed script. A well-printed page has more perceived value, both for yourself and others. Sadly, if you have messy handwriting, the people you’re writing to will probably think you’re a moron. Of course, you  know better, but still.

Let me argue the counterpoint as well: good penmanship isn’t always important. Quality should vary depending on your purposes. If you’re just trying to get some ideas out as quick as possible, don’t let good handwriting stand in your way. Quick and dirty has its place, and you can’t let a properly formed ‘a’ slow you down.  This is when cursive comes in handy. For me, legible cursive is still a lot faster than anything else.

For the past couple months month, I’ve been trying to learn all I can on improving my own handwriting. Here are some things I’ve found useful so far.

Tips for How to Improve Your  Handwriting and Penmanship

Write Slower For me, this was the most easiest and most effective way to improve my handwriting. Most writing is done with little regard to the actual act of dragging a pen across paper. By simply slowing down, being conscious of, and paying attention to this act, you should see some immediate improvements.

Write Bigger You don’t have to make balloon letters, but slightly bigger letters are easier to make and easier to read. Don’t worry about taking up too much space. You can always buy more paper.

Back to Kindergarten Sometimes you’ve got to go back to the basics. Print off some guide sheets and practice basic letters. The Times article I mentioned earlier has instructions for a nice italic font.

Get Your Body Into It Several sites recommend using using your shoulders and arm to make letters instead of using your hand. This helps a bit, but it requires you to sit at a desk and have good posture. I like to write while slouching on the couch.

Get  an Awesome Pen Not all pens are created equal. Find a pen that doesn’t require a lot of pressure. I like Pilot G-2 07s, and I hear fountain pens (like the one in the picture) are good, but I’ve never used one.

Think of Writing  as Typography and Drawing As an experiment, I tried to write in a Garamond script. Doing this, I had to start thinking of printing letters as drawing rather than writing. The results were impressive. If you’re patient, try copying some typeface style sheets. Smashing magazine has a nice list here.

Experiment The way you hold your pencil and your wrist will affect the way you write. Try different hand positions, writing styles, slants, etc until you find one that works for you.

Practice, Practice, Practice Undoing years of bad habits will take time, but the results are worth it.

Further reading:

IAMPETH is a non-profit that promotes beautiful handwriting and calligraphy. They have an excellent selection of lessons in Spencerian Script, Copperplate, and skills as well as printable guide sheets.

Paperpenalia has some solid tips on improving handwriting, especially the ones about using your shoulder muscles. I’m not sure about the pens they’re selling, though.

Before and  After Shot

The photo on the left is from the middle of June. As you can see, it looks like roadkill. The one on the right is from the end of September.

Over to you

How is your handwriting and penmanship? Do you prefer to type and handwrite drafts? Can you still write in cursive? Is cursive obsolete? Am I wrong that good handwriting is useful? Will electrodes on our brains connected to printers eventually replace old school handwriting? Holler back.

Top of the page photo credit: The Mad Guru

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