Time to Write

Creative people: when you can't beat the forces of convention...

This is the story of a kind of unconventional collaboration. It also illustrates the principle, "when you can't beat them, join them"...sort of.

Street artist Mobstr is used to having his graffiti painted over. He decided to tell a story one line at a time, with the next one appearing when the previous one had been painted over.

You can see the results here: 

http://designtaxi.com/news/355932/Street-Artist-Teams-Up-With-The-People-Who-Destroy-His-Work-To-Tell-A-Story/

Who or what do you consider the opposition to whatever creative projects you hope to achieve? 

Could there be a way to harness that opposition to make it work for yiou?

Writing sessions: get off to a great start

In the previous post we looked at how to gain momentum when doing a big writing project. This time let's see how you can get off to a great, fast start for each of your writing sessions and keep up your momentum.

There tends to be resistance at three points:

1: Getting started

For many peope this is the toughest one. 

• Schedule a time and make sure your resources are there at the start.
• Use a mood board or folder of images to stimulate your thinking
• Use an app that gives you an uncluttered blank screen so you're not distracted by your desktop.
• Train people in your environment that certain days and hours are your writing time
• Find the location that works best – if necessary, go to a café, library, etc.
• Find a scent that energizes you (peppermint is good) and sniff it at the start (you can get little bottles of essential oils for this at many health food stores)
• Have tools you enjoy using – notebooks, pens, folders, etc.
• Before you start, decide on a small reward you’ll give yourself at the end of the session
• Use a timer so you don’t have to think about the time. I suggest sessions lasting 45 minutes, then a fifteen minute break (also timed), then repeat.
• if you’re tempted to do something else that is more immediately rewarding, imagine with all your senses how good it will feel, look, sound, smell when you have achieved your writing goal (the feel of your book in your hands, the smell of the new pages, the sound of people complimenting the book, the look of a stack of the books in the book store, the spreadsheet with the sales figures for your ebook, etc.

Also get a copy of my book, Creativity Now. The first section suggests 25 ways to get into a creative state of mind, the second section offers 25 ways to generate new ideas, the third section reveals 25 ways to go from idea to real project and the final section includes 25 inspiring examples of others who have built impressive businesses or careers using their creativity. It's published by Pearson and available from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.

2: The middle

This is where distractions will intrude if you let them.

• Turn off the phones
• Put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door
• Don't stop to check email or Facebook or Twitter, etc.
• Consider getting or making a stand-up desk so you can spend part of the session standing up. If making phone calls is part of that session's tasks, stand or walk around while you do it.
• Wear noise-cancelling headphones or have white noise playing in the background—whatever you need in order to stay focused. Listen to music if that doesn't distract you.

3: The end

At the end of a working session you may face two problems. 

One: your Inner Critic rushes in and tells you that you didn’t get enough done.

• Use the Inner Critic visualisation to send it away (you can find this as a bonus on the website for my book, "Your Writing Coach").

Two: you are tempted to keep writing until you get to the end of a chapter or section— if you don’t know what you’ll write after that bit, this can be stressful. 

• Follow Ernest Hemingway’s advice and stop mid-sentence so you’ll always know what you’ll be writing the next day.

RECORD YOUR PROGRESS

You'll feel more motivated during all three of these phases if you record your progress every day—the number of words or whatever measure makes sense at that point. Keep in view not only how much is left to do but also how much you have done already. Checking off squares or filling in a chart makes this a physical thing, which is very satisfying.

(For innovative time management strategies for creative people, see my book, "Focus: use the power of targeted thinking to get more done", published by Pearson.)

 

Big writing (or other) project? Here's how to build momentum!

If you have a big writing (or other) project, one great way to build momentum is to spend a full day working on it with support from your peers.

IT'S GOOD TO GO MAD

That's what we do on my monthly MADs--Massive Action Days. It's all online. You sign in to our exclusive website, declare your goal for the day there, and get to work. Every hour I do a brief live video broadcast to answer questions and offer tips. You update us on your progress and everybody supports each other.

The people already doing the MADs find it incredibly productive and it's inexpensive--only £5 each when you sign up for ten. You can find our more at www.MassiveActionDay.com. 

What else can you do to build momentum? Let's start with the basics:

The formula is Velocity x Mass = Momentum

The more you apply effort, the more momentum you get, unless you encounter another important aspect of momentum, Resistance. Resistance can increase the mass of a molehill to that of a mountain.

FOUR POINTS OF RESISTANCE

In writing there are four points at which you tend to have resistance:

1: Getting started. The best solution is chunking down the goal into manageable chunks, scheduling regular time to work, and getting support.

2: The middle. You’ve done a lot but there’s a lot yet to do and the initial excitement has worn off. The best tools are: knowing this is normal, using a variety of brainstorming techniques (like the ones in my writing books) to get a fresh perspective, and making sure your Inner Critic doesn’t talk you into quitting.

3: After the first draft. The first step when you're ready to critique your first draft is to use methods for getting a more objective view of your own writing (wait a week, change location and posture, print it out on different colour paper and/or a different typeface, read once for general reactions and don’t try to fix it as you go—note the necessary changes, then go back into creative mode, at your usual writing location).

When it’s as good as you can make it, show to someone you trust to be constructive. Tell them you want them to jot down any problems they discern—where it’s boring, where it’s confusing, where they think what’s happening isn’t plausible, etc. Tell them you don’t want them to suggest solutions, only problems.

Fix the problems and repeat, but stop rewriting when the new version isn’t getting better, just different.

4: When you send it out into the world.  Put on your business hat, not your sensitive artist hat, and make a plan. Let your sensitive artist get busy on a new creative project so it doesn’t hang around getting tense.

>> In the next post we'll see how you can also build momentum for every working session.

(Want to get more things done, more easily? Using creative methods rather than more hard work? You'll find the ansswers in my book, "Focus: use the power of targeted thinking to get more done." It's published by Pearson and you can get it from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A part of rewriting your book or script you won't like (but it'll help)

Are you on track for your writing or other goal? (Reminder 3 of 12)

Want to solve a writing or marketing problem? Ask 'How do THEY do it?'

Let's say you have a problem relating to your writing or selling what you write. You're stuck...now what?

I suggest a brainstorming activity I call, “How do THEY do it?” First you think of somebody who does something that’s similar to—but not exactly the same as—whatever you want to do. Then you look at what are the main things they do and translate those back to what you’re trying to do.

For example, let’s say you have finished writing a book or script and now you want to sell it. First let’s pick a “they.” Who sells stuff? Well, salespeople. Let’s pick the kind of selling that probably is the most daunting: door to door sales.

 WHAT THEY DO

What do THEY do? Make a list of their key behaviours and attitudes:

They go from door to door, calling on many potential customers in a day.

They come up with a first sentence or two that is designed to capture the interest of the potential customer so the latter won’t slam the door in their face.

They have a strong pitch that relates the product to the needs of the potential customer.

They have answers ready for the most likely objections, such as “I can’t afford it right now,” or “I’ll have to ask my spouse.”

They know that most people will say no, but that if they persist, it’s likely some will say yes.

They listen to what the non-buyers say and adjust their pitch accordingly for the next time they might make the sale. They learn from the no's.

WHAT WE CAN DO

Now what can we take away from that in terms of selling our manuscript or script? What would be our equivalents to what "they" are doing?

One is that we would approach a number of agents or publishers or producers, not one at a time. After all, a door to door salesperson wouldn’t say, “Well, Mrs Miller said she’d think about it and let me know next week, so I’ll just wait for her answer before I try next door.”

To get our foot in the door we would fashion a strong first sentence for our query letter or our pitch, so we  capture the interest of our potential customer.

We would think about what objections might come up—for instance, maybe that it would cost too much to produce a certain script—and we’d be ready with an answer. Maybe we could even build that information into the pitch or the query letter itself to disarm the objection.

For instance, if you were pitching a novel right now that features zombies, you’d want to be sure to explain very early in the letter or pitch how it’s different from all the zombie stories out there at the moment.

We would not give up after the first few rejections.

And we would listen to the feedback we get, and if several potential customers point out the same issue, we’d fix it before moving on to the next one.

That’s the “How do THEY do it?” strategy and you can apply it to just about any process that you’re finding difficult.

MORE EXAMPLES

Having trouble building a story? Figure out how the people who build houses do it and translate that back to story-building.

Having problems with a story that seems too predictable but you don't know how to throw the reader off the scent? List how magicians deceive their audience and find out which strategies might work in your story.

Finding it difficult to come up with ideas? Find out how advertising agency people come up with them and apply them to your kind of story-telling.

By getting inspired by people and solutions outsideo of your field you will come up with fresh ideas, not imitations of what everybody else in yours is doing already.

(You'll find lots more creative ideas for solving writing problems and creating powerful stories, in my book Your Writing Coach. It's published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite book seller.)

Forge ahead with your writing: the Next Massive Action Day is on Saturday, May 18

Want to make huge progress on a writing project (or on getting your home office organized, or anything else)? Join my online Massive Action Day on Saturday, May 18.

Declare your goal for the day in our exclusive chat window and update throughout the day. You'll get support from me and the other particpants and I do a brief live video broadcast every hour with tips and to answer your questions on how to get more done.

It's only £5 (about $7.70 or €6) when you sign up for the series of ten. Get all the information here: MASSIVE ACTION DAY INFO.

How to write in your sleep

OK, maybe you can't write a novel or a screenplay in your sleep, but you can certainly generate useful material.

In my book, Your Creative Writing Masterclass, I mention several great authors, including Robert Louis Stevenson, who spun stories from their dreams. In her book, Writers Dreaming, 26 Writers Talk About Their Dreams and the Creative Process, Naomi Epel cites some others.

Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club, said, ""Sometimes, if I'm stuck on the ending of a story, I'll just take the story with me to bed. I'll let it become part of a dream and see if something surfaces." 

William Styron, author of Sophie's Choice, said he had a "lingering vision" of a young woman with a tattoo on one arm and he "was seized by this absolute sense of necessity--I had to write the book." He said the ""whole concept of the book was, if not the product of a dream itself, the product of some resonance that a dream had given me."

Writing mentor and novelist John Gardner has said that a work of fiction should read like "a vivid and continuous dream," so to some degree you can use your own dreams as a model for what you write. Naturally dreams are much more chaotic than novels or scripts, but they're raw material that you can shape, edit, and combine. 

Dreams are especially useful for people who want to write children's books because their surreal elements can be adapted for picture books or fanciful fairy tales.

If you don't remember your dreams you can train yourself to do so. Every morning jot down anything at all you remember, even if it's just one tiny fragment. Over time you'll begin to remember more and more. You can dicate rather than write, if you prefer, using a digital recorder or your smart phone.

If you have writer's block, remind yourself before you go to sleep that you'd like to dream a solution to the problem that's blocking you and see what comes up.

Give it a try; if it works for you, you can have a good sleep and still say you were working all through the night.

(There are lots more great tips in "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)

 

 

 

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If you worry about what people will think if you fail at writing

Be a writer right now!

How writers can be more objective about their own work (good for rewriting)

A member of my Raindance workshop emailed me to ask whether I could recommend any ways to get over being too close to one’s own work to see its faults.

The most useful approach is to treat the draft as though it had been written by someone else and they’d asked you for constructive criticism. The ways you can get that distance include:

• Print the draft in a different font and/or on different color paper (pale yellow is good—easy on the eyes);

• Read the draft in a different room (or a different place altogether) than the one in which you created it;
  
  
• Sit back as you read the draft—this is the critical posture, whereas leaning forward tends to be the creative posture (which is why most of us writers have terrible posture);
  
  
• Note the problems you see with it, but resist the temptation to come up with solutions at this point. That will be part of the creative process.
  
  
• Experiment with the time of day that seems to work best for you in terms of making constructive criticism. I find in the first hour or so after waking up, my creative juices aren’t flowing but my critical faculties are. The opposite may be true for you—experiment to determine this for yourself.

(Did you know that Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, and many other great authors left behind excellent advice for aspiring writers? I've collected it and suggested how you can apply it to your own writing--all in the book, Your Creative Writing Masterclass. You can get it from Amazon or your other favorite book seller.)

A part of rewriting your book or script you won't like (but it'll help)

In a post on the Raindance site, Stephanie Joalland included a rewriting tip that I also advocate and that most screenwriters and novelists resist: before you start on your second draft, write a new outline of your first draft.

Why do writers not want to do this? Well, it’s extra work and they feel that they’ve gone past this stage. Sure, probably they made changes to their original outline (I’m assuming there was one), but they don’t seem big enough to warrant re-doing the outline.

That's often wrong because some of those changes may have derailed the logic of your storyline, or started strands that you didn’t pay off, or involved incidents that you didn’t set up early enough. By this point you will have been wrapped up in this story long enough that you can’t see the forest for the trees.

An outline forces you to step back and look at the major events of the story. With that in hand you can ask yourself some painful but necessary questions:

• Does every step of this story makes sense?
•  Is there a clear cause and effect sequence?
• Are there at least one or two surprises for the reader?
• Are there “orphan” scenes that should either be cut or integrated better?
• Is the overall flow of the conflict escalating?
• Have you chosen actions and settings that reveal character as well as advancing the plot?

The answers to those questions will make rewriting the second draft much easier.

In the next post I’ll suggest some ways you can get the necessary distance from your own work to be able to critique it more objectively.

(Do you want friendly guidance for writing your own book? Get a copy of Your Writing Coach, published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite book seller.)

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Is the opening of your novel or screenplay like a stone in a slingshot?

Drive your story with the Three Excitements (great rewrite tool)

Things that make a story fail (as shown in the film "Oblivion")

One of the best ways to improve our own writing is to figure out why a novel or screenplay written by someone else works or doesn’t work.

I just saw the Tom Cruise film Oblivion which looks great but, in my opinion, doesn’t really work on the story level. What are the lessons to be learned from it (I don’t think any of these points involve serious spoilers):

• A good hero deserves a good villain. Here most of the time his opposition is deadly metallic beach ball drones. Not a lot of personality there.
  
  
• A good hero deserves a good cause. The ultimate beneficiaries of this hero’s efforts never go beyond stereotypes.
  
  
• You’re in trouble when a secondary character (in this instance, played by Morgan Freeman) makes you wish the story had been about him instead.  I was also disappointed that the character of the hero’s handler, who we see only on a TV screen but whose sweet Southern accent is enticingly menacing, doesn’t get the reveal she deserved at the end.

• You’re also in trouble if the audience doesn’t feel an emotional connection with the protagonist. In  this case, probably the three points above account at least in part for that lack. It could also be that I don’t find Tom Cruise an emotionally vulnerable enough actor for there to be much of  a connection.

• If in doubt, cut. Despite the explosions and battles, this movie drags in places, and it almost feels like two movies glued together in the middle.
  
  
• Twists are good, and this has a couple of nice ones, but it isn’t enough just to surprise people. The best twists are the ones that make us feel that we could have seen them coming (e.g., Sixth Sense).

Having said all that, I don’t think Oblivion is a bad film, just that it falls far short of what it could have been if the people concerned had spent as much time and effort on the story as they did on the special effects and the rich look of the film. 

When do you have to know what your novel or screeplay is REALLY about?

The movie critic Roger Ebert, who left us not long ago, wrote the following in his 1992 article, “Reflections After 25 Years at the Movies”:

“I have a colleague who describes his job as 'covering the national dream beat,' because if you pay attention to the movies they will tell you what people desire and fear in their deepest secrets. At least, the good ones will. That's why we go: hoping to be touched in those secret places. Movies are hardly ever about what they seem to be about. Look at a movie that a lot of people love, and you will find something profound, no matter how silly the film may seem."

I don’t agree with the writing teachers who say you need to know the theme of your book or screenplay before you start writing. I just start with a story and/or a character that strikes me as interesting. Usually it’s only after I’ve finished the book or script that I can look back and understand what it’s really about--the meaning, not the plot.

For instance, I’ve just written a short novel about a teen-age boy and his father. The latter is in the witness protection program but the people he testified against are still on his trail. Over the course of the story the boy finds out some important things about his father that he didn’t know.

I think the theme is how little we really know about the people we think we know best. But if I’d started out telling myself that I want to come up with a story with that theme, I doubt I’d have been able to. And if I’d tried to figure out the theme when I was halfway through writing the story it probably would have sounded pretentious to me.

If you write stories that interest you deeply enough to spend weeks and months writing them, the odds are there’s something about that story that goes deeper than the surface. With luck it will speak to the people who read your novel or see your movie, too.

(Want to write a novel or screenplay'? You can get friendly guidance via my book, Your Writing Coach, published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite book seller Why not buy at least some of your books from your local independent book store? If we want them to survive, we have to spend some of our money there.)