Jim and I used to travel together a lot, but somehow after our 2012 trip to China and our road trip to Canada in 2016 we haven’t gone further than Flagstaff, which is only 3 hours away by car. We were planning a trip to Italy for 2020, but … well, a lot of people’s travel plans got canceled in 2020.

Italy’s special to Jim because his father’s family came from Cortina d’Ampezzo, up in the Dolomite Mountains (that’s Cortina in the picture, taken from the top of the Funivia Faloria cable car ride). Seeing Cortina was the main point of the trip, but if you’re going all the way to Italy for the first time, you can’t skip the Colosseum, and if you’re going all the way to Rome you might as well make a stop in Florence. And Venice was a given, being the handiest big airport to Cortina.

We had a fabulous time. I took 526 pictures and I could regale you for hours with stories of what we did, what we saw, and who we met.  

This isn’t a travelogue but just a compendium of tips. I hope you’ll find some of these ideas useful, next time you’re headed off to Europe.

1. Rick Steves is the best. I have to start there. We’ve been watching his shows on PBS for years, and his books are a gold mine of accurate, up to date information. Where else can you find out where the ATM is in the Prague train station? I love his travel philosophy and appreciate the encouragement, the sense of “you can do this” that his books convey. For this trip, we used his big fat Italy book and our Venice, Florence, and Rome stays were at places he recommended.
2. Consider who you’re traveling with. I went to Italy in 2015 with a friend, and we were on the go constantly, hiking through the Cinque Terre, visiting churches and markets, and spending hours in museums. It was a great trip, but Jim would have been miserable if we’d tried to keep up that pace. For the most part, we planned one major activity a day, returned to the hotel for an afternoon nap, and went exploring on foot before a leisurely dinner. Jim’s more interested in people than sights, so we spent lots of time just chatting with people we met along the way.
3. Sign up for an international phone plan. We’re on Verizon, and they had 3 options: an $88-a-month plan, a $10-a-day plan, and the default pay-per-usage. We signed my phone up for the monthly plan and Jim’s for the  daily plan, figuring we’d be together most of the time and would only need his occasionally. We used mine constantly to get directions, opening times, and so on. The only time we really needed his phone was our first night in Florence. I’d had a stomach ailment and couldn’t face going out to dinner, so he went out on his own. After dark, everything looked different, and he couldn’t find his way back to the hotel. In hindsight, we might have been better off with pay-per-usage on his phone, but it gave us some peace of mind knowing we could use his phone if something happened to mine.
4. Get some Euro notes for tips. The books tell you to just round up the bill if you’ve had great service, but if you’re paying by credit card, the machine won’t give you that option. You may also want to tip your tour guide, as we did after our tour at the Vatican. You might want 5s, 10s, and 20s.
5. Consider applying for Global Entry. The airports in Europe (London, Venice, and Rome) were a delight compared to our experience coming home via Charlotte, North Carolina. In Europe, passport checks were automated—you’d put your passport on a scanner and then look into a camera, then a gate would open and you’d be all clear—but here in the U.S., we ended up in a snaking line of several hundred people waiting to see one of three agents, and then had to go through the most rigorous TSA screening I’ve encountered in years. Global Entry would have eased both processes. It costs $100 and requires a personal interview and background check, but it’s good for five years.
6. Pockets and money belt. I felt ridiculous every time I had to dig out my credit card or passport, but I used one of those under-clothes money belts. There really are pickpockets, and a confused tourist trying to get their bearings in an unfamiliar place is an easy target. A couple at one of our hotels had a backpack containing passports and phone as well as cash and credit cards stolen—luckily they were able to use Find My iPhone to track it to a trashcan, and only the cards and money were missing, but imagine what a disaster that could have been. For things I needed constantly, like my phone, paper map, and a few Euros, pockets were the way to go. I brought two pairs of pants, one with pockets and one without, and never wore the pocketless pair. In cooler weather, a jacket or vest with pockets would have worked. On days when I carried my day pack, I kept it tucked under my arm or in crowded places wore it in front.
7. Medicine bag. I’m susceptible to stomach ailments so I always travel with Immodium, which was a lifesaver the day we took a 2 1/2 hour bus from Cortina to Venice followed by a 2 hour train to Florence. Not sure what I ate the day before, but I woke up sick in the middle of the night before that travel. I’ve also had a couple of past vacations partially ruined by catching a cold, so I always bring some Advil Cold and Sinus, which helped Jim get through the long trip home after he picked up a bug somewhere. I also bring Aleve, which I take proactively on days with a lot of walking so my arthritis doesn’t slow me down; Advil PM, in case I need help resetting my sleep schedule; and bandaids, which were handy after Jim tripped over a doorway and scraped his arm.
8. Portable phone charger. My phone got a workout every day, between the maps and the camera. At the end of our Vatican tour, I was at 3% battery and we still needed to find our way back to the hotel. Next time I’ll try to find a smaller, lighter version. The one I have supposedly will charge the phone twice before the charger needs to be recharged, but I didn’t need that much.
9. No voltage converter needed this trip. We just got a little pack of plug adapters and that was fine, since our phones and the iPad are all capable of using the higher European voltage. I didn’t bring a hair dryer, and Jim’s electric shaver lasted the whole trip (he brought a stick razor along as backup).
10. Plane meals. I’m vegetarian, so I need to request special meals on the flight. You can only do this between 30 days and 24 hours in advance of the trip, so I couldn’t do it when I made the reservations. Set a calendar reminder. Also, be clear about which passenger needs the special meal: on the flight over, both of us got the vegetable curry. Side note: although the airline asks for details about your diet, it appears they prepare one generic meal that covers vegan, vegetarian, diabetic, and all other restrictions. It always makes me a little sad when I don’t get dessert.
11. Get a PIN for your credit card. Some ticket machines require a PIN for a card transaction, meaning I had to use my debit card a couple of times on this trip. I called my credit card company and learned it would take two weeks to get a PIN, which had to be mailed to my house. I had a credit card PIN in the past, but that card was compromised and replaced years ago and it never occurred to me to request a PIN for the new one.
12. WhatsApp. This is the app many people in Europe use instead of text messages. Our Venice hotel had told us about this so I downloaded the app at home and had good luck with it in Venice. Apparently I didn’t go all the way through the registration process, though, and when I got to Florence the app didn’t work anymore, meaning we had to use an awkward workaround of sending messages and information via Booking.com.  I was unable to get it to work for the rest of the trip.
13. Book activities in advance. As it turns out, September is the busiest month in Italy. I knew Rome would be a zoo and booked our Colosseum and Vatican tours in June, but wasn’t expecting the crowds in Venice and Florence. A few days in advance I took a look at the museum hours and discovered the Uffizi and Accademia in Florence were sold out, and the Doge’s Palace in Venice was getting close. I was able to get us in by booking tours in Florence, and I snagged the last couple of early entries at the Doge’s Palace.
14. Paper maps: still the best. Google Maps worked fine on my phone and got us where we needed to go, especially in Venice, so I’m grateful for that, but when you’re frazzled and feeling a bit lost, nothing beats a paper map. Street names are legible, landmarks don’t disappear in favor of a shoe store or a Starbucks, and you don’t have the illusion of certainty that the blue arrow and dotted line provide as you wander off to take the longer alternate route. It probably would have been a good idea to practice in my home town so I’d be more comfortable switching views and using all the app’s features. 
15. Italy-specific tips, mostly about transportation.
    • Vatican tour—We took the EuropeOdyssey.com skip-the-line semi-private tour, which cost about $190 for both of us. Well worth it! It was just us and another couple with the guide, and we did literally skip all the lines and go straight into both the Vatican Museums and the Basilica. The lines to get into those places are hundreds of people long; they get 25,000 visitors a day. Bonus, the guide took us to places where nobody else seems to go, like the underground garage where all the popemobiles going back to horse-and-carriage days are displayed.
    • The ATVO bus—Cortina d’Ampezzo is in the Dolomites, and the guidebooks have it on all kinds of driving tours of the region. We weren’t driving, but we discovered this bus service (we bought our tickets through GetYourGuide.com) which for about $20 apiece took us in comfort from the Venice bus station to Cortina. I’m a nervous passenger on mountain roads but this trip wasn’t scary at all.
    • The train—We’d bought Frecciarossa (fast train) tickets from Trenitalia for travel between Venice and Florence and then from Florence to Rome. The Frecciarossa trains are fast and comfortable, with assigned seats, table service and snacks. When we went to the Florence station for the trip to Rome, though, there was no 15:45 Frecciarossa. Instead, there was a 15:45 regional train to Rome. The customer service line was long and we’d have missed the train if we waited for help, so we went ahead and hopped on the slow train. No amenities, and it took more than twice as long, but it got us there, and we had a nice conversation with a local teenager who was getting off a few stops down the line. I guess the lesson here is be flexible.
    • Stairs—So many stairs! We don’t have stairs at home, and although we both do a lot of walking, it’s pretty much all flat. Some places, like the Colosseum and the Doge’s Palace, had elevators available for elderly visitors and other people with mobility challenges. They offered them to Jim, who’s a bit older than me, and we took advantage of the offers a couple of times. Next time we’ll hit the stairstepper at the gym before we go.
    • Taxi service—We only took a taxi once, from the train station in Rome. We carefully heeded the warnings to only use the official white taxis and although the ride itself was terrifying (Roman drivers go as fast as they can and treat traffic signs and lights more as suggestions than rules), we got to the hotel safely and for only a bit more than we’d have spent if we’d taken the Metro. For the ride to the airport we used the hotel’s car service which was a nice, luxurious end to our trip.
    • Rome’s Metro—Jim’s habit of talking to everyone he meets paid off more than once on this trip, as it did with our Metro plans. When we were planning how to get to the Vatican, a fellow tourist at the hotel pointed out that if we went to the San Sebastian station instead of the Colosseum station, we’d be able to get on a train that went directly to the Vatican with no changes. The two stations were about the same distance from our hotel.

I was already reading The Count of Monte Cristo on a friend’s recommendation when I signed up for a “read like a writer” challenge on Gabriela Pereira’s DIY MFA website. The challenge suggested we dedicate a notebook to the project, and gave us ten prompts for examining our chosen book with an eye towards improving our own writing. CofMC turned out to be a great choice—all except its length, which meant I was nowhere near the end by the time the challenge was over.

Warning – this blog post is riddled with spoilers for the book.

Reading The Count of Monte Cristo

The blurb on the abridged Enriched Classic version calls the story a “thrilling adventure of one man’s quest for freedom and vengeance on those who betrayed him.” The unabridged Penguin Classics blurb suggests a deeper meaning: “On what slender threads do life and fortune hang.”

All-around good guy Edmond Dantès is wrongfully accused of a political crime and ends up in a dungeon for 14 years. After his escape, he tracks down the people responsible so he can get his revenge—not simply killing them, which would be too easy on them, but making them suffer as he did.

As a reader, I was fascinated and drawn into the story, all 1,243 pages of it. I was horrified at what happened to Dantès in the beginning…but once he escaped and began his revenge, I was equally horrified by what he did. Dantès believed himself to be Providence, the embodiment of justice, doling out rewards and punishments. The dividing line between who deserved those fates wasn’t innocence or guilt, but friendship with Dantès. 

My review on Goodreads gives the book 5 stars for readability but discusses at length my disagreement with some of the author’s choices. These weren’t choices about the writing, but about what happens in the story, how it’s resolved, and whether the characters including Dantès deserved the endings they got. The emotions the book inspires, 170 years after it was first published, and the life in the characters, far removed from our own world, suggest that I can learn a lot about writing from Alexandre Dumas.

A character to root for

Gabriella says one of the promises books make in the beginning is a character to root for. Given that by the end of the book, our hero has been responsible for several innocent deaths and a variety of other terrible consequences, how does the author keep us engaged?

• He gives us a thoroughly good character at the beginning. Edmond Dantès is a fine lad in every respect, as shipowner Morrel says.

• He makes us sympathize with Edmond’s plight, accused of a crime and unfairly imprisoned because of one man’s professional jealousy, another’s romantic envy, and a third’s selfish concern for his own position.

• He gives us a ‘moral vacation’ – we can root for Edmond’s revenge, thinking about the people who’ve done us wrong.

• He makes Edmond’s new identity as the Count of Monte Cristo interesting, à la James Bond or Batman. He’s brilliant, invulnerable, admired, confident, and infinitely wealthy.

• He shows us the count helping now-impoverished Morrel and his family, rescuing young Albert from Roman bandits, and saving Valentine’s life when her stepmother tries to poison her.

• He provides glimmers of introspection that suggest in the end, the count will find redemption. 

• He lets us spend time with other characters who are more sympathetic, like Albert and Maximilien, giving us a break from the count’s misanthropy.

• He stays outside the count’s head, for the most part. The narration is omniscient third person, so we do get various people’s thoughts from time to time, including the count’s, but it’s not a steady bitter stream that might turn us off on the character.  

Portraying a complicated world

The book’s setting is complex and unfamiliar. It’s been a couple hundred years, and it’s France. Politics are messy, and the way money works is indescribably foreign.Yet the reader needs to at least have a sense of both to understand why Edmond ends up in prison and how his revenge plots work. How does the author convey these things?

• He drops hints in the dialogue, like when the plotters are discussing how to bring him down: “…if someone were to denounce him to the crown prosecutor as a Bonapartist agent…”

• He includes documents, like the letter the plotters write to the prosecutor, that lay things out more clearly.

• He uses dramatic language to draw our attention. “If a bolt of lightning had struck Villefort, it could not have done so with greater suddenness or surprise. He fell back into the chair and drew out the fatal letter, on which he cast a look of unspeakable terror.”

• He makes the hero as ignorant as we are. Edmond himself doesn’t understand why he’s been thrown into prison; the wise Abbé Faria explains it to him. 

• He uses straightforward summary exposition in the narrative. There’s no need for us to see all the dramatic events that put Napoleon back in power for 100 days and then put the king back on the throne—all we care about is whether Edmond will get out of prison. Dumas gives us a couple of pages of this, keeping it from feeling like a history book by mentioning what the characters we know are doing, and then dives back into the action with a scene showing how Villefort’s refusal to act keeps Edmond in the Chateau d’If.

• He uses dialogue again to help us understand the money. The count has an unlimited letter of credit, whatever that is. The lengthy conversation with banker Danglars shows at least vaguely what that means, while at the same time illustrating how enormously wealthy the count is now: Danglars proposes he could even give the count a million, and the count pulls a million in cash out of his wallet, as though to him that’s just walking-around money.

Juggling subplots

The main plot is easy to summarize: innocent man is sent to prison for 14 years, escapes, and takes revenge on the people who sent him there.

Within that main plot, we have three primary strands—one for each of the people mainly responsible for his imprisonment—and countless others, including the fiancee who didn’t wait for him, the good shipowner who tried to help, and the landlord who saw the whole thing. The primary strands are complicated by the addition of the villains’ children, who are linked by a web of marriage plans and romance. 

And then there are the tangents, the subplots. There’s a story of the Borgia pope, the Medicis, and the treasure, and how that ends up in the hands of the good Abbé Faria. Another story tells about the Roman bandit Luigi Vampa, and how he took over Cucumetto’s gang and became friendly with the count. A third tells how Haydee’s father, the Ali Pasha, was betrayed and killed, and Haydee and her mother ended up enslaved. The political context gives us other subplots, like the story of General Quesnel’s death. Altogether, there are over 100 named characters in this book, many of whom have their own stories.

With so much going on, and particularly since the book was originally published in serial form, how does the author make sure we can keep track?

• He gives us vivid scenes that live in our imagination. Grassy fields of sheep, mysterious caves full of gleaming treasure, campfires surrounded by evil men waiting to take their turn with the captive girl, lavish opera houses full of well-dressed patrons who talk through the first act, bloodthirsty crowds gathering to see a public execution, the lonely telegraph operator in his garden.

• He links everything to the main story, one way or another. Even General Quesnel, who seems like just a bit of historical color, turns out to have been killed in a duel with the prosecutor’s father, and that revelation destroys the prosecutor’s wedding plans for his daughter.

• He explicitly reminds us when he thinks we might have forgotten something important, or might need help to connect the dots. “This man was our old acquaintance, Gaspard Caderousse.”

• He doesn’t use a regular pattern of alternating between the storylines, but he doesn’t abandon any of the primary strands for more than a few chapters. For instance, Danglars (the jealous coworker) is the main focus of chapters 65-66, 70, 76, 81, and 87, among others.

• He connects the characters to each other, so we may see them even in chapters mainly devoted to a different character. Danglars’ daughter is meant to marry Edmond’s romantic rival’s son; the prosecutor’s daughter is in love with the worthy shipowner’s son; Danglars’ wife and the prosecutor had an affair years ago and had a baby who was adopted by Caderousse’s sister-in-law.

The rules can be broken

The biggest lesson from The Count of Monte Cristo? You can break the rules, and still write a book people will love.

Plotting rules

Trying to map the book to the plot beats outlined in Save the Cat and other writing craft books was an exercise in futility. Apparently Hollywood had the same problem; all the hero’s journey analyses I found online mapped to the movie, not the book. 

Even something as basic as the three-act structure was a challenge. Here’s how I think it plays out:

That’s one l-o-n-g second act, if I’ve put the breaks where they belong. 

The plot works, though. It isn’t just a series of events, but a unified story. It starts with young Edmond sailing into Marseille, and ends with a bookend image: “on the dark-blue line on the horizon that separated the sky from the Mediterranean, they saw a white sail, as large as a gull’s wing.” In between, even if the character arc isn’t quite what I wanted it to be, it’s a gripping tale.

Style rules

You can’t expect a book written in 1845 to follow the style rules that apply in 2021, and it doesn’t. Info dumping, for instance: chapter 3 starts with three paragraphs of background about the Spanish colonists who settled a little spit of land near Marseille. But I think even in a current book, this might not be flagged for cutting, because of the way it’s written. The language is colorful—“clinging to it like a flock of seabirds,” “this bare and arid promontory,” “these gypsies of the sea”—and personal to the story. It begins, “A hundred yards away from the place where the two friends, staring into the distance with their ears pricked, were enjoying the sparkling wine of La Malgue, lay the village of Les Catalans, behind a bare hillock ravaged by the sun and the mistral.” 

Dumas was paid by the line, and he certainly didn’t try to use three words when seven would do. Even though the prose might be padded, it doesn’t feel that way, except in a few sections where the count is explaining his philosophy. (These are notably absent from the abridged Enriched Classics version.) I think the difference is that things are happening in all those words—Bertuccio is hiding in a closet and the warm rain that falls on him is blood; Mme Villefort is creeping into her stepdaughter’s room to put poison in her drinking water; Andrea is lying in wait to kill Caderousse as he exits the count’s dressing room. 

Give the reader something to think about (and maybe argue about)

The Count of Monte Cristo offers more than a thrilling tale of revenge. At the outermost level, we can imagine what it would be like for us to suffer alone in a dungeon, and then how it would be to have that bottomless treasure, and how it would feel to take revenge on the people who’ve wronged us. But as we see that “fine lad,” Edmond Dantès, become the cruel vengeful count, watch him torment even the people he helps to see if they’ve become “unhappy enough to deserve happiness,” and follow him as he visits the sins of the fathers on their children, claiming to be the agent of God, we begin to think deeper thoughts. What is justice? Can the count be redeemed after he commits so many terrible acts? Could the villains have escaped their fates if they had lived better lives after what they did to Edmond? What about the women—Mercedes, who’s destined for a convent; Haydee, who fell in love with her possessor; Valentine, the ideal woman in the eyes of male romantics; and Eugenie, who got her happy ending with her girlfriend—did they deserve their fates? Did the count do enough to earn his happy ending?

I’m glad to have read The Count of Monte Cristo at long last. There are many more lessons for writers to be found within those pages. If you’ve read it or had a similar experience with another classic, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

I’m still working towards developing a solid habit of writing every day. In January 2019, I wrote about Gretchen Rubin’s advice on habit formation, and Charles Duhigg’s explanation of the neuroscience of habits. I’ve used their advice to help me develop some good everyday habits, like walking, keeping track of my weight, flossing, and making sure the dishes are done before I go to bed.

Writing is a different matter. Today, I’m enlisting the help of Austin Kleon and James Clear.

Groundhog Day

Austin Kleon’s latest book, Keep Going, says the creative life is not linear. It’s more like a loop, or a spiral, in which you keep coming back to a new starting point after every project. 

We need a daily practice that insulates us from the outside world. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our lives on. If you have all the time in the world, a daily routine helps you make sure you don’t waste it.

Observe your days and your moods to establish the best routine. When your days have pretty much the same shape, the days that don’t have that shape become even more interesting. 

Make lists, like David Shrigley who makes a huge “to-draw” list, so he doesn’t have to waste time worrying about what to make; or Leonardo da Vinci, who made “to learn” lists. 

Forgive yourself when the day doesn’t go well. Before bed, make a list of what you did accomplish, and a list of what you want to accomplish tomorrow, then forget about it.

I highly recommend reading all three of Austin Kleon’s friendly, encouraging books on creativity. They’re deceptively small books, jam packed with good advice and inspiration.

Atomic Habits

James Clear is the ultimate guru on habit formation. Between his website, his awesome weekly newsletter, his Habits Academy, and the Clear Habits Journal (suitable for bullet journaling but oriented towards his recommendations), and of course his 2018 book Atomic Habits, he has everything I should need to create that elusive daily writing habit.

His approach is brilliant in its simplicity. He boils the research down to four laws, each of which has a corresponding inversion for habits you want to get rid of.

The First Law: Make it Obvious

Make an implementation intention: “I will [behavior] at [time] in [location].” With repetition, you’ll get an urge to do the right thing at the right time. When your dreams are vague, it’s easy to rationalize little exceptions all day long and never get around to the specific things you need to do to succeed. I will sit at my desk to write at 1 p.m. every day.

Use habit stacking (Gretchen Rubin called this the pairing strategy): identify a current habit and build the new one on top of it. You build momentum and can actually create a chain of multiple habits that feed into each other. I use this for my walks: after I have a cup of coffee, I take the dog for a walk. After I read the comics, I’ll plan my writing session.

Design your environment to create obvious visual cues. Put the book you want to read before bed on your pillow. Make sure the best choice is the most obvious one. It can be easier to build a new habit in a new place, where you don’t already have cues telling you to do what you’ve always done. If you can’t do that, try rearranging your current space. I’ve drifted into a habit of doing other things at the desk where I write—crossword puzzles, taking care of email, paying bills. I’ll do those other things elsewhere. I’ll set up my desk with my favorite writing pen and brainstorming paper, and post my writing plan for the day where I can see it as soon as I sit down.  

Inversion: Make it Invisible

Don’t rely on grit and willpower to break bad habits; create a more disciplined environment instead. Leave the phone in another room, uninstall apps that are wasting your time, take the tv out of the bedroom. It’s easier to avoid temptation than to resist it. I’ll turn off Mail and Discord so I don’t get notifications on the computer, and leave the phone on the charger in the living room.

The Second Law: Make it Attractive

Use temptation bundling: link the new habit to something you enjoy. I listen to podcasts while I walk the dog, for instance. I’ll listen to music and drink tea while I write.

Use the power of fitting in with the group by joining a culture where your desired behavior is the norm. The shared identity reinforces your personal identity as a person who does what you want to have a habit of doing. Imitate successful people.  I’ll meet regularly with other writers, and pay attention to their good habits.

Reprogram your brain to highlight the benefits, not the drawbacks, of the habit you want. I get to make up stories and write them down! Create a motivation ritual, like taking three deep breaths and smiling or lighting a specific candle, to get yourself in the mind-set to perform. 

The Third Law: Make it Easy

Don’t get bogged down in a question for perfection: start with repetition. All habits start as effortful practice before they become automatic behavior. Standardize before you optimize. 

Take easy steps (this is the principle behind Katharine Grubb’s book, Write a Novel in Ten Minutes a Day). Use the two-minute rule: instead of vowing to do a whole session of yoga, just commit to taking out your yoga mat. Make starting the habit as easy as possible. I’ll commit to working on my project for 10 minutes at 1 p.m. daily, no matter what.

Reduce the friction that makes the habit harder. At the end of each writing session, I’ll make a note about where to start next time.

Use habit shaping to build on that 2-minute starter habit—add an intermediate 2-minute step, and so on—until you’ve achieved the full habit you intended to form. Once I’ve mastered the 10-minutes-a-day writing habit, I’ll extend the goal.

Use one-time actions with big payoffs: unsubscribe from emails and use email filters, delete game apps, buy smaller plates, set up automatic bill pay. I’ll deal with those nagging technical issues that get in my way when I sit down to write.

The Fourth Law: Make it Satisfying

Add a little immediate pleasure to habits that pay off in the long run and a little immediate pain to the ones that don’t. I’ll print out my written pages so I can admire them at the end of every writing session. 

Use a habit tracker like Jerry Seinfeld does for writing jokes, and don’t break the chain. The tracker gives you a visual cue reminding you of what you want to do, motivates you by showing your progress, and feels satisfying. I’ll use my DIY MFA spreadsheet to track my streak.  Gabriela Pereira’s book, DIY MFA is another great resource for writers looking to build good habits. She recommends collecting data on your writing life—time of day, location, other environmental factors, and what you got done—for 3 weeks, then analyzing it to figure out what works best for you. I did that, and now use a simplified version of the same spreadsheet as a habit tracker.

Just show up—don’t beat yourself up if you miss a day, but don’t skip the second day too.

Get an accountability partner and maybe set up consequences for what will happen if you don’t follow through. 

There’s lots more in James Clear’s excellent book, including case histories and examples of how to apply these principles to all kinds of habits.

There you have it! That’s my plan. It’s almost November, time for NaNoWriMo, the best possible time to experiment with a new writing habit. Wish me luck, and please share your ideas in the comments below!

I’m tempted to begin with an enumeration of all the things that drag my spirits down lately. We’re in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, no vaccine or cure has been developed yet, we’re still staying home and wearing masks to flatten the curve and make sure hospitals aren’t overwhelmed. And all that has taken a huge toll on the economy, which depends on people going out and spending money. Here in the U.S., as with everything else, it’s turned into a political thing. And the political thing in this country right now is like a vast sea of toxic sludge, a tarpit just under our feet trying to suck us down.

So it’s been hard to remain optimistic. But I’m determined to find my way back to my native optimism. Maybe this will be something I can post to help other people find their way out of the quagmire too.

1. Look for the helpers

This is a lesson from Mr. Rogers, who said that’s what his mother taught him: whenever there’s a disaster, look for the people who are trying to make things better. Right now, those people are everywhere. Researchers looking for vaccines and treatments, entertainers putting on free online performances to make staying at home easier, healthcare workers showing up every day, government and nonprofit and corporate workers getting money and supplies to people who need it, teachers reaching out to their students, not to mention all the people keeping the Internet running and doing the ordinary jobs like stocking grocery stores. When we all heard about shortages of PPE (personal protective equipment) for healthcare workers, videos immediately went up showing how to sew masks, fabric stores gave away free kits to make them with; schools and cities with 3-D printers geared up to make face shields and other equipment; and factories retooled from manufacturing cars to manufacturing PPE.

2.  Look to the past

Getting a historical perspective can make the present seem less disastrous. It’s sort of like looking at those stock market charts that show trends over a hundred years or more—even though there are plenty of downturns, the overall trend is up. Steven Pinker’s books go into detail on many aspects of human progress, many ways life is better now than in the past. Reading history about terrible times in the past can put today’s events in perspective and might suggest how civilization can weather the storms and come out better than before.

For example—the Black Death killed off half the population of Europe, but in the aftermath the old feudal system died out. The U.S. Civil War killed over six hundred thousand people, but it ended legalized slavery in this country.

For a less lethal example, read Dickens, or Henry Mayhew’s London Characters and Crooks. We haven’t solved poverty or homelessness by any means, but we don’t have debtor’s prisons or a population who can only eat if they’ve been able to find and sell enough cigar ends, dogs’ dung, and other garbage to be able to buy a bit of oatmeal. 

3. Turn down the negative voices.

COVID or no, the news is always a downer. Always. If it bleeds, it leads, and all that. Conflict and disharmony, crime and malfeasance, doom, defeat, and despair. And it’s on all day all the time. Normal day-to-day living isn’t news; by definition the news is reporting on the unusual, the novel. You might see a story about the guy on the corner who’s making meth in his garage (yikes!) but all the rest of the people on the street who are just living their lives are never going to be in the news. 

So, limit tv news time—say, one show a day—or cut it out completely and get the news from the paper or the radio. That’s plenty to stay up to date. And choose a news source that isn’t constantly screaming and trying to get people upset and angry. 

Same goes for social media. Block the friends and/or sites that do nothing but complain and post bad news. Cut back on the number of times you check social media, and the length of time you spend on it. 

4. Fill up with good stuff

Seek out the positive—like looking for the helpers, but focusing more on the people working towards a better future. For me, the absolute number one place to boost optimism is a science fair, and the king of those fairs is the International Science and Engineering Fair (find it at societyforscience.org); the International Society for Biomechanics lists other big ones here. Depending on your interests, you could check out the Long Now Foundation, a May 2020 Forbes article listing of 50 female futurists, NASA, Citizens for Global Solutions, the United Nations, 4-H, or the League of Women Voters. 

Read, watch, and listen to upbeat things, like Eric Barker’s Barking Up the Wrong Tree blog, your personal choice of self-help books (I like Gretchen Rubin’s approach; a friend prefers the Bad-Ass books), amazing documentaries about strange birds and resourceful camera work, and cheerful podcasts like Reading Glasses.

Study philosophy. Eric Barker’s latest blog post uses lessons from the Stoics to suggest ways to get through hard times. Read the classics. Dredge up that old list of books you intended to read someday, and read one of them.

Read Terry Pratchett. Watch comedies and action movies. Do something creative like coloring, gardening, or knitting. Resurrect an activity you enjoyed as a child, like jigsaw puzzles. Hang out with people who make you feel good; empower yourself to speak up to Debbie Downers.

5. Do something

 Do things you think are valuable and useful. Forgive yourself for not doing as much as some people do; appreciate them and give them money and all the support you can provide, but don’t feel you have to uproot your own life and move to Africa and run a boarding school like my friend Terry did. Appreciate your own contributions, which might be as minor as staying home and not spreading the disease to other people. 

6. Memento mori

Life is impermanent. We are all dying from the moment of our birth. Everyone does it. In the meantime, we have sunshine and rain, hummingbirds and herons, apples and cabbages, stories and songs. Not to sound all Pollyanna or anything, but in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson,

The world is so full of a number of things

I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

The incredible Makana gave a terrific workshop on slack key guitar at this year’s Pickin’ in the Pines bluegrass festival. Even better, he said we were welcome to record video of the workshop and post it wherever we liked!

I’ve been a fan of his without realizing it ever since I saw the movie The Descendants. Good movie, George Clooney awesome as always, but my favorite part was the soundtrack. Turns out, Makana performed the magical, mystical Deep in an Ancient Hawaiian Forest on that album. If you haven’t heard it, check it out!

I’m a banjo player, not a guitarist, but a couple of things stood out for me that apply equally to any instrument:

• Beginner mind – Don’t let what you’ve learned get in your way. Stay open to new ways to play with your instrument. This especially resonated with me after I sat in on an old-time jam the day before. I was totally out of my depth but it was a privilege to participate, and it showed me many things I still want to learn.
• Play – If it isn’t fun, why are you doing it? Makana had so much joy in his instrument and the beautiful sounds it produces, and all the different things he could do by just fiddling around with the tuning; it was contagious!

I video recorded the entire 1-hour workshop in two parts:

• Part One – the first 15 minutes, up to the point where he decided to replace a string
• Part Two – the 45 minutes from the story he told while replacing the string until the end

The links above are only good until October 16, 2019, but feel free to download the videos to keep.

And – if you’re anywhere near Flagstaff, Arizona, in September, or even if you’re far, far away – check out the festival. It’ll put a smile on your face.

I first read Salem’s Lot, Stephen King’s vampire novel, in the 1970s, and a couple of scenes—a little boy floating outside a window asking to come in, and a priest confronting his doubts in a kitchen—have stuck with me ever since. This week, I reread it in a version with a new introduction and afterword and a bunch of deleted scenes and early versions of published scenes. 

Pantsers rule

From the 2005 Introduction:

Of course, the writer can impose control; it’s just a really shitty idea. Writing controlled fiction is called “plotting.” Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however…that is called “storytelling.” Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.

Obviously, Stephen King knows more about plotting a page-turner than anyone, but it’s nice to have the vindication for those of us who’ve tried plotting in advance and failed miserably.

Everyone starts somewhere

This was King’s second published novel, after Carrie, and he was still mastering his craft. He started writing it in 1972, when he was about 25.

The published version isn’t as tightly pulled together as his later works. You can see the seams, the places where he wrote something and liked it and left it in when he probably should have taken it out—as a fellow pantser, I have a hundred things like that in my current project. It’s both a caution and a reassurance to see it here.

Deleted and early-version scenes illustrate other lessons about writing. 

• Don’t overexplain. In several of these, the narrator or a character in dialogue explicitly states the novel’s message. The published version leaves it to the reader, who can read it as a straightforward adventure about vampires or think about what the story says about ordinary people, small New England towns, and the post-Vietnam era.
• Work on the reader’s emotions. Other scenes show how choices about the order of events, the way events are described—more or less detailed, more or less bloody—and the way characters respond to events affect the emotional impact of the story. That scene of the priest in the kitchen that’s stuck in my head for 40 years was different in an earllier version, for instance. As published, that scene kicks the hope right out from under you; the earlier version left some room for daylight.  
• If you don’t need it, drop it. Some of the deleted scenes are just unnecessary, like the one that explains Ben’s financial situation: it’s something King needed to know as a writer, but it didn’t add anything to the story.

Intentions matter

In his 2005 introduction, King says his ambition was to write The Great American Novel by combining the overlord-vampire myth from Bram Stoker’s Dracula with the naturalistic fiction of Frank Norris and the EC horror comics. He might be shelved in horror, but you can see his literary origins in his precise choice of words and images:

• a straw-dry whistle of air slipping from his mouth

• as though a special small slice had been cut from the cake of time

• The town hasn’t changed that much. Looking out on Jointner Avenue is like looking through a thin pane of ice—like the one you can pick off the top of the town cistern in November if you knock it around the edges first—looking through that at your childhood. It’s wavy and misty and in some places it trails off into nothing, but most of it is all still there

• he felt sixteen, a head-busting sixteen with everything in front of him six lanes wide and no hard traveling in sight

• the older people to whom funerals grow nearly compulsive as old age knits their shrouds up around them

It’s okay to take your time

As always, the last page of the book shows when King finished it, and this time it also tells when he started. He wrote Salem’s Lot from October 1972 to June 1975. I plan to remind myself of this whenever I’m tempted to compare my writing speed to, say, my middle-grade writer friend who can have a draft finished in three months or less.

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What do you think? Have you found writing lessons in an old novel? Please let me know in the comments below!

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but even now that nothing stands in my way, I’m still struggling to get my current project finished. Can I use the power of habit to help me get where I want to go?

Gretchen Rubin would say yes. She wrote a whole book, Better than Before, about using habits to make your life better. Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, would agree.

Here’s the thing about habit: it lets you make a decision once and be done with it. No dithering about whether or not to brush your teeth or make the bed; the decision is already made. No arguing with yourself about whether to order french fries or a salad at lunch. No choosing between writing and doing something else.

Once a habit’s established, all you have to do is go with the flow.  

Know yourself

Self-knowledge is key to establishing good habits. If you’re creative at midnight but a zombie before 10 a.m., maybe getting up extra-early to write isn’t going to work for you. If you enjoy starting new things more than finishing what you’ve started; if you like novelty more than familiarity; if you prefer simplicity to abundance – use that knowledge to figure out the best approaches and incentives.

If you’re one of Rubin’s “upholders” you follow through on whatever you expect of yourself, so it’s most important to design your new habit wisely. If you fit her “obliger” category you might need to set up external accountability to keep you on track till your habit’s ingrained. A “questioner” needs a good reason for doing anything, so clarifying your ‘why’ is critical. (Check out her newest book, The Four Tendencies, for more on applying her theory to your life.)

The structure of habit

Habits can be changed if we understand how they work, says Duhigg. It’s pretty simple: cue, routine, reward. When we encounter the cue, our brain checks out, our basal ganglia take over, and we execute the routine and get the reward. Once the habit is established, we anticipate the reward as soon as the cue shows up, creating a craving – this is why it’s hard not to check your phone when it buzzes; your brain is already salivating over the little boost it expects to get.

To form a new habit, choose a simple cue. Identify a reward that naturally flows from the new routine – maybe the satisfaction of seeing your word count climb, or the pleasure of reading what you’ve written, or the attaboy your accountability partner gives you – and allow yourself to anticipate the reward, really feel it, to help build that craving.

 You can’t extinguish an old habit, but you can change it: keep the cue and reward, change the routine. If the cue is opening the laptop and the routine is checking social media or reading email, figure out the reward you get out of those distracting activities and find a way to link that reward to writing instead.

In The Power of Habit, Duhigg lays out the neuroscience behind understanding how the brain does this, as well as how habits apply to organizations and societies. I highly recommend reading his book.

Strategies for habit formation

Better Than Before lays out concrete steps to improve the odds that you’ll succeed at forming good habits and changing bad ones.

Monitoring – It’s an axiom: what gets measured gets done. Track your behavior, as in WW where you track your food, or your results, as in NaNoWriMo where you track your word count, and you’re more likely to succeed. I started using a spreadsheet when I read Gabriela Pereira’s DIY MFA. She suggested doing it for a month or so to figure out what time of day, location, etc. made you the most productive, but I’ve kept it up because it gives me a little boost every time I get to say I met my goal for the day. I have columns for date, daily goal, whether I met the goal, start/end/elapsed time, start/end/total words added, location, mood, and notes about who I was with and what I worked on.

Foundation – Good habits related to sleep, exercise, nutrition, and clutter make it easier to do everything else. If you’re chronically exhausted, it’s harder to make good choices. The siren call of unwashed dishes can make it impossible to concentrate (when I was a student, my apartment was never cleaner than during finals week when my subconscious was actively seeking distraction). 

Scheduling – If you can do it anytime, you might never get around to it, but choosing a time and putting it on the calendar gets it done. At the moment, my only consistent writing times are Friday mornings, when I meet some people at a coffee house after my workout. I do much better with exercise, because the yoga class I like is at noon on Mondays, and my strength sessions with a trainer and a workout buddy are scheduled on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Accountability – Reporting to someone else, or even to something else like an app, helps reinforce good habit formation. My writing critique group meets every Thursday, and every three weeks I need to produce a chapter for them to comment on. The 10 Minute Novelist group on Facebook has a 365-day challenge every year that gently nudges you to keep up the good work.

First steps – Try taking it one day at a time. Take a deep breath and jump in.

Clean slate – Look for a new beginning on the calendar (New Year, first day of school) or in your circumstances (new house, new job) and start your new habit when everything else already feels new.

Lightning bolt – Take advantage of an aha moment, like a book that changes the way you think, to kick-start a new habit.

Abstaining – It might be easier to never yield to temptation than to do things in moderation. Uninstall the distracting game from your phone, for instance. 

Convenience – Make it easier (or make the bad habit harder). Turn off notifications, close your browser and email programs, maybe even use one of those productivity tools that forces you to jump through hoops to open a distracting app. End your writing session in the middle of a scene so when you start next time you’ll have a head start. 

Safeguards – Anticipate and minimize the temptations that will derail you. Put distractions where you won’t see them. Write at the library where you can’t stop to put another load of laundry in. (There’s something about housework that’s infinitely fascinating when I’m stuck.)

Recognize loophole-spotting – I surpassed my goal yesterday, so I can take today off. I had a hard day (I did the taxes, I dealt with the plumber) so I deserve a break. It’ll be easier to write if I take care of this email first. I’m traveling so it doesn’t really count. As Duhigg said, your old habits are lurking under the surface. Don’t give them a foothold.

Distraction  – Give yourself 15 minutes before getting up from your desk, and see if the urge to go do something else fades. At the very least, you’ve spent another 15 minutes on your writing.

Reward – Don’t link your habit to an unrelated reward. You risk teaching your brain that you wouldn’t do the activity without the reward, converting it to unpleasant drudgery. You also risk stopping when you reach the finish line and earn the reward. 

Instead, find the intrinsic motivation that works for you and for the habit you’re trying to form. These might include challenge, curiosity/learning something new, control/feeling of mastery, fantasy/using your imagination, cooperation/working with others, competition, or recognition.

Treats – Allow yourself small pleasures just because you want them. This helps you feel cared for and contented, and strengthens your ability to maintain good habits.

Pairing – Link your new habit to something you already do. I always have coffee as soon as I wake up; I’d write more consistently if I took the coffee into my home office and wrote while I drank it.

Clarity – Figure out why you want the new habit. I have to do this with writing a couple of times a year. Writing a novel is hard; why on earth would anyone put themselves through the agony? In addition to clarifying your why, clarify the specific actions in the new routine. My Friday writing habit is pretty loose – show up at the coffee house and spend a few hours planning, editing, drafting, and/or researching, plus a little mostly-writing-related chatting – but it clearly excludes social media and reading for fun, so it works.

Identity – Defining yourself as a writer makes it easier to maintain writing-related habits. We tend to believe what we hear ourselves say. 

For a quick take on 10 tips for habit formation, check out this video:

Thanks to Gretchen Rubin and Charles Duhigg, I have a lot to think about. I’d love to hear your experiences with establishing good writing habits in the comments below.