|
In this section, I’m sharing some of the most powerful writing tips I’ve come across or devised myself. I hope you find them useful. There are more like these in every monthly issue of the Brainstorm e-bulletin, which I’ll be happy to send you free. You can sign up by clicking the ‘subscribe to brainstorm’ button on this site.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Boris Akunin, Russian author of a successful series of mystery novels, says before he begins writing he plays recorded music: "I have to put on the right sort of music, to listen to it for five or 10 minutes just to get tuned to the right mood." For a tragic mood, he likes Mahler, for a tender mood, it's early Beatles albums. There's another way to use music. That is to wait until you naturally get into a good writing mood, then put on a song or an album that you don't normally play but that supports the writing mood. Do this two or three times, each time using the same music. Thereafter, when you don't feel in a great writing mood, but want to, you put on that music, and it should create the mood by association. In NLP, this is called an anchor. Of course, before there was NLP, Pavlov did something similar with dogs and food. (This item originally appeared in my blog, www.timetowrite.blogs.com. For more tips, check out the blog for new items every week.) It’s hard enough when others reject what we think is good, but it’s even harder to take when we know we have failed to meet our own expectations with something we have written. Not too long ago, I wrote an outline for a TV movie project, and I realized that I just hadn’t done a very good job. At times like that, I consider it helpful to remember something that creativity expert Eric Maisel wrote in the magazine "Intuition": “If we do not think about the place of failure in the creative process, then when we write a miserable first novel or draw people who look like ducks (when we wanted them to look like people) we’ll chastise ourselves, retreat from future efforts, and shut off our creativity. If we do not understand that failure, mistakes, missteps, wrong turns, bad ideas, shoddy workmanship, half-baked theories, and other sad events are part of the process, if we romanticize the process and make believe that creativity comes with a happy face, then when we encounter our own rotten work we will be forced to conclude that we do not have what it takes. But we have what it takes. What it takes is learning and recovering from our mistakes.” If you’re too hard on yourself when you make mistakes, it might be worth printing out this quote and sticking it up somewhere near your desk. I recently read about a motivational and presentation technique called “shading”. It comes from presentation coach Jennifer Scott. She suggests that when you’re giving a presentation, you augment what you say out loud with something you say silently, to yourself. For example, she might introduce herself by saying, “Good morning, I’m Jennifer Scott,” and pause and say to herself, “and I’m a warm and friendly person.” Then, out loud: “I work for a company called Theatre Techniques for Business,” followed by the silent, “and I love what I do.” She says most of us talk to ourselves anyway, so why not make that work for us. It occurs to me we can use the same technique in lots of situations. For example, when you sit down to write, what are you saying to yourself? If it’s hesitant or negative, maybe something else would be better. For example, after writing your first sentence, instead of saying, “This isn’t really a very good opening,” you might try, “This gets me started, and I can always change it later.” (This item originally appeared in my blog, www.timetowrite.blogs.com. For more tips, check out the blog for new items every week.)
Many writers work from home, which of course has advantages and disadvantages. Here are some tips that might help: • Look for extra filing and storage space outside the room you’re officially using for an office. Does your kitchen, utility room, bedroom or even bathroom have wardrobe or closet space that’s not being used? Naturally these are suitable only for supplies or documents you don’t need frequently. • If you can’t resist trips to the fridge when you’re working, keep your supply of tempting foods strategically low. Most cravings are strong enough to send you to the kitchen but not strong enough to send you to the store. • Post your working hours on the door of your home office (and puts locks on the door). Make it clear to your family that nothing less than a major loss of blood warrants interrupting you during those times. • Put a chalkboard or whiteboard on the wall outside your office door, so when your spouse or kids have a message, they can write it on the board rather than interrupting you. Don’t check this board too often. • Turn on your radio or TV to an unused station, or get a ‘white noise’ machine to create noise to block out the sounds of what’s going on out there. You don’t want to know. • Put your family to work. Your children may well enjoy stuffing and stamping envelopes, cutting out articles you’ve marked in the newspaper or magazines, etc. If they don’t enjoy it, make them do it anyway, it’ll be character-building. • Social calls during working hours can be distracting. Alternative one: leave your answer machine on, monitor the calls, and take only the business calls. Alternative two (if you can’t resist picking up the phone when you hear a friendly voice on the machine): keep the sound on your answer machine so low that you can’t hear who’s calling. Check the machine once or twice a day and return the business calls only. Alternative three: hook up the answer machine in another room and unplug the phone in your office. Alternative four (the only one I’ve managed, to be honest): keep social calls short. • Remember to get out once in a while. Avoid going stir-crazy by taking a walk or a drive, or a swim at the gym. A technique that can help us to allow a writing project to grow organically, rather than jumping right into it before it’s ripe, comes from Twyla Tharp, the internationally renowned choreographer. Here’s how she describes it in her wonderful book, “The Creative Habit”: “I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses, I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance. This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me. The box documents the active research on every project. For a Maurice Sendak project, the box is filled with notes from Sendak, snippets of William Blake poetry, toys that talk back to you.” She adds, “The box makes me feel organised, that I have my act together even when I don’t know where I’m going yet. It also represents a commitment. The simple act of writing a project name on the box means I’ve started work.” This is a also a marvellous technique for allowing a writing project to incubate while you’re actively working on something else. Anytime you have a thought about the project, or see a photo in a magazine, or overhear a bit of speech that might become a line of dialogue, put it in the box. It’s a perfect right-brain storage system in that it’s visual and unrestrictive. I’ve used a variation of Twyla Tharp’s system for years, and I’ve become convinced that when you’ve put enough ideas and artefacts into the box, they start growing by themselves. Ideas germinate in there, and at some stage you go back to the box and realise it’s ready to be realised as a story, script or a book (or, in her case, a dance).
In the world of improvisation, one of the secrets of making a scene and a story work is the “Yes…and” technique. What improvisers discovered is that while we want to create conflict in a story, simply having the characters be opposed to each other often is predictable and therefore boring. For instance, let’s say we have a story in which a bank robber approaches someone to help him do the deed. The most obvious conflict is if that person says no. Then our man has to either find someone else or convince the potential colleague. Neither of these sounds very interesting, since we (the audience) want the story to move ahead to something surprising. Let’s look at some “Yes…and” alternatives. The potential colleague might say, “Yes, and my daughter can help, too” (the daughter turns out to be a disaster); or he says, “Yes, and when we’re done with this one, we can rob more banks the same way!” (our man only wants to do this once in order reduce the chances of getting caught); or he says, “Yes, and this will be my last job because I’m dying” (which will have consequences as the plan goes along). Naturally the “and” bit of information may not come out immediately, it may be revealed after the person has said yes, and the plan is underway. The “Yes…and” technique is useful both at the story level and the scene level. The skilled improviser knows that adding a bit of interesting information as the scene goes along can transform the entire scene. Example: the “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” revelation that Butch has never actually shot anybody, or that the Sundance Kid can’t swim.
You may be familiar with the concept of "flow" as written about extensively by Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "chick-sent-me-high"). It's that state in which you are so involved with whatever you are doing that you lose all track of time. Often it's an exhilarating experience in which we do whatever we are doing more easily, more quickly, and at a higher level than normal. Naturally, it’s a great state to be in when writing! The question is, can we induce such a state rather than waiting and hoping for it to occur spontaneously? The Professor says yes, and here are a few factors that can help evoke it: a) Work on a writing-related task that is at or just above your level of ability. If it's too hard or too easy, you won't enter flow. Often the key to doing this is to break a bigger task down into smaller chunks, each of which is at the right level of difficulty. For example, starting a new book or article can be daunting because we are faced with the enormity of the task. Instead, chunk it down into pieces that are easier to handle. You might decide to devote a session just to doing research, another session to doing an outline, another session to writing five pages. b) Make sure that the task includes immediate feedback, so that you know as you go along whether or not you are doing well. Generally, you need to feel positive at the beginning stages, and eventually the task may so absorb you that you stop thinking about how you're doing it, or how well. This doesn’t mean, however, that you should assess whether what you have written is good—that’s more likely to cause stress and even writer’s block. Instead, for now just assess quantity: if you set out to write five pages in a two-hour session, then you should be writing one page every 25 minutes or so. c) Create an atmosphere in which you have as few distractions as possible. Again, later in the process, you may be so involved that you don't even notice things like a phone ringing but it helps if you can start off in an environment that makes it easy to concentrate. This also includes setting aside a period of time when you won't feel you really should be doing something else. Unfortunately, the people around us often don’t consider writing as real work and they don’t hesitate to interrupt us. If that’s your situation, you may find it easier to schedule some chunks of writing time away from home. The library, a quiet coffee shop, or even the guest room of an understanding friend can be great escapes for those times when you really need to concentrate. ACTION: Schedule some time during which you want to tackle a project and create the conditions described above. Go into the process with the idea that if flow occurs, that will be great, and if it doesn't, you'll still get a lot done (that mentality makes it less likely that you'll distract yourself by asking 'am I in flow yet?).
As mentioned in the recent issue of The Writer magazine, author Janet Groene says she has a panic list: a list of phone numbers and supplies she keeps handy in case of emergencies. On the phone list are the numbers of her computer consultant, the support lines for the software she uses, her office supply store, an office machine repair shop, and a temp agency that can send over an assistant at short notice. Her emergency supplies include packaging and paperwork for overnight mail and FedEx. If something goes wrong when a deadline is looming, she's prepared to handle it. ACTION: Every person will have his or her choice of items for a panic list, but it's a great idea to have one with at least two options for each type of person you may need to call upon, and several of each of the key items. I'd include an extra set of inkjet or toner cartridges, an extra hard drive you can boot up from if your main hard drive crashes, and extra batteries of various kinds, as well as the phone number and addresses (or website addresses) of suppliers who keep these in stock and can deliver them quickly. Coach and trainer Marilyn Atkinson helps people to move beyond their Gremlins; she quotes Dr. Sally Jenkins as defining the Gremlin as "the inner voice that abhors change and keeps you from moving forward and getting what you want in life." If you’re a writer, these gremlins may stop you from even starting on that book or article or poem, or they may stop you from finishing, or from daring to send out your material to agents, editors, and publishers. One gremlin Atkinson mentions is System Identification. This means assuming that things must be done a certain way and you have no hope of breaking out of that system. If you ever feel caught up in that, she suggests asking the following questions: If, for example, the thought ‘my writing isn’t good enough to be published,’ is your gremlin, you could ask whether it’s true (do you see material that is no bettor or worse than yours getting published?). You could also check whether this is an old agenda (were you told when you were a child that you aren’t good enough?). And you could ask who you’d be without that thought (what could you accomplish if you weren’t holding yourself back?). ACTION: The next time you feel that a system is limiting you, try asking these four questions. You may find that you have greater freedom than you thought. Just about everybody agrees that marketing yourself and your product or service is important, yet most of us have problems being immodest enough to do this effectively. The answer can be getting someone else to do it for you. One great example: Patricia Gallagher, author of the book "Raising Happy Kids on a Reasonable Budget" had tried without success to get on the Oprah Winfrey Show and said to her kids, jokingly, that anybody who gets Mommy on the show will earn fifty dollars. Her nine-year-old, Katelyn, wrote a letter that started, "Dear Oprah Winfrey, My Mommy wrote a book..." and decorated it with stickers. A producer phoned, sent out a camera crew and invited Katelyn and her mother to appear on the show. ACTION: Who can help you tell your story? It may not be your children, but if you’ve written a book, can you get an endorsement from a relevant person? For instance, if it’s a book for kids about taking care of pets, a ringing endorsement from your vet (or several vets) might help an editor take your manuscript more seriously. Brainstorm who might add credibility to your proposal, or to your marketing efforts. A study reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology reveals that creative people are poor at shutting out irrelevant information. At the extreme level, this is linked with mental illness, but at a milder level it could be possible that creative people are creative exactly because they can see how information that is seemingly irrelevant may actually relate to a problem. Nonetheless, this tendency can make it hard to concentrate and therefore could work against you. ACTION: My favorite means for coping with this is a set of noise-reducing headphones. I originally bought these to use on airplanes, to reduce the drone of the engines and other unwanted noise. You can plug them, instead of the cheap headsets the airlines provide, into the airplane's entertainment system, and you'll get much better sound. But you can also wear them (unplugged) anytime and anywhere that you want to reduce distracting noise. If you feel self-conscious, just tuck the plug into your pocket and people will assume you've got a mini-iPod in there. (By the way, once made exclusively by Bose, and expensive, these types of headphones are now made by several companies and the price has come way down.) They work best at shutting out a steady noise (like the drone of an airplane engine) but they’re helpful at dampening other noise as well.
|
