I had the good fortune to participate in a Mike Robbins workshop on authenticity a few weeks ago. Mike is a Stanford graduate and a former pro baseball player who injured his pitching arm in his first year in the Kansas City Royals’ farm team. He turned his bad luck into good luck for the rest of us. Now, he’s an author and an inspiring, energizing speaker. His website has loads of resources, including a blog, a podcast, and links to other things like a free meditation audio and a 4-part class on authenticity.

Emotional intelligence and the growth mindset

We all know by now that emotional intelligence is just as important as intellect in determining success. It involves self-awareness and social awareness; the ability to manage relationships with other people.

• One component is the growth mindset that Carol Dweck identified and wrote about: when faced with a problem or challenge, you are curious and engaged and work hard to figure it out (as opposed to a fixed mindset where you want to get the answer fast, and if it’s hard you assume you just weren’t born with the right abilities). Dweck recently updated her 2006 book on the subject because she found people were misusing the concept; see this Dec. 2016 Atlantic article on the difference between a true growth mindset and praise for effort as a consolation prize.

• When bad things happen, our first reaction might be to ask “why is this happening to me?” This is a dangerous, insidious question that makes us a victim. Mike says a better question is “why is this happening for me?” which shifts your perspective and gives you more power. In other words, what can I learn from this? How will this make me better and stronger?

• Accept things the way they are. It’s the first step in having the power to change. When you argue with reality, you lose.

• Communication is the bedrock of relationships. Each person in a conversation may be having a different kind of conversation. Listening is harder than you think – Mike had us pair up and just listen to each other without interruption or comment or thinking about how we’d respond; it was really difficult. But if you can figure out how to pay attention it makes the other person communicate better – those people who just ramble on are usually doing it because no one is actually listening to them.
  • Be present – the first level is attention to what’s being said, the information. Notice when you check out of the conversation; you’ll be surprised at how often you get distracted and miss part of it. Try admitting it to the other person.
  • Look for and feel underlying emotion with empathy – the second level is listening to what’s not being said, like how the other person is feeling, where they’re coming from. Notice the triggers that get you to stop paying attention.
  • Let go of negative judgments – the third level is noticing your own filters and upgrading them. We all have filters we listen through. To upgrade your filter, deal with the issue directly until it gets resolved, or let it go – really let it go, don’t just act that way.

Authenticity

It takes trust and courage to be authentic. Mike views it as a continuum, from being a complete phony at one end, through honesty in the middle, with authentic at the far end beyond honesty:

honest – self-righteous + vulnerable = authentic

Inauthenticity shows up because of social norms, or when we don’t know or understand something (but we pretend we do), and when we’re having a difficult conversation. Often, what stands between you and authenticity is a 10-minute sweaty palmed conversation. It takes mental gymnastics to be inauthentic, because you have to keep remembering what level of honesty you have with each person.

Self-righteousness is having opinions and knowing you’re right; thinking your opinions are facts. It fundamentally separates you from other people. We react to others’ self-righteousness with defensiveness. You might win the argument, but you damage the relationship. There may be other ways to see things.

A key driver in human relationships is trust, which requires vulnerability. The natural human response to vulnerability is empathy. A growth mindset requires vulnerability: you have to tolerate the discomfort of not knowing. Ask for help! Everyone loves to help, although nobody likes to ask. If you compare yourself to an iceberg, with the greater part hidden from public view, it turns out that the further down you go on the iceberg, the more universal the experience.

Mike said at one point in his life when he was down, one of his mentors told him:

“You live your life like you want to survive it, but nobody ever has.” 

Summing up: Ways to practice authenticity

• When something happens that you don’t like, ask why is this happening for me?
• Focus on the things you can control (your attitude, perspective, and effort)
• Give people your undivided attention – don’t multitask
• Use email, text, etc. for idea/info sharing, not conflict resolution and problem solving
• Admit when you don’t know something, need help, or make a mistake – be real
• Ask for support from others in a genuine way
• Address challenges directly; don’t let things fester
• Challenge yourself to take yourself out of your comfort zone and take bold action
• Lower the waterline on your iceberg – allow yourself to be vulnerable to others

A lot of things about this workshop resonated with me, but the one thing I want to make a priority is that idea of self-righteousness. Especially now, after the divisive election season and with everything that’s going on with the new president, I see things several times a day that push my buttons. I intend to do better at examining my own opinions and reactions, and work harder to find common ground with the people who, for one reason or another, see things differently than I do. As Mike put it in a blog post on his website, “The challenge I’m sitting with personally at the moment is how to speak up for what I believe to be true and important, and at the same time do so in a way that brings me closer to those who may disagree with me?”

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

For Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend of 2017, I visited my friends Bob and Lucy, who live in Raleigh now. Lucy and I worked together in Arizona years ago. Our friend Ned, who lives in Idaho now, was at a conference in Washington and took the train down for the weekend, so we had a little reunion.

Beach vacation at Cape Fear

We got up latish on Friday, had breakfast, then packed the van for a road trip to the beach. Bob drove all the way, both ways, intrepid soul that he is.

Our first stop was Bob and Lucy’s son Patrick’s suggestion, the USS North Carolina, which is just across the Fear River from Wilmington. The North Carolina is a World War Two battleship that was in the Pacific during the war – it was the first ship built after a 1923 peace agreement, and construction started in 1937. The battleship was ready in 1941, although it went back to the shipyard in New York for a bit of retrofitting after it first set sail. We think we saw some evidence of the retrofitting, way down in the engine rooms, where two levels are joined by a ladder and a stairway but the ladder is unusable because of the position of the stairs, which we thought must have been put in afterwards.

The ship held over 2,200 enlisted men, officers, and marines. You enter by way of an exhibit hall, which has an introductory film and a few artifacts, including part of the ship’s silver service. Back home in Arizona, the entire silver service from the USS Arizona is on display at the Arizona Capitol Museum. It’s a spectacular display, made possible by the Navy’s practice of taking such nonessentials off a ship that’s in a battle zone – otherwise, it would have sunk with the Arizona on Pearl Harbor Day.

The highlight of the USS North Carolina monument is the self-guided tour of the ship itself. Arrows guide you deep down into the many levels of the ship and up into the bridge, with informative signs explaining what you’re looking at. A nice feature was the “in their own words” pieces on the signs, written by the men who served on the ship, telling their memories of life on the ship – the mess halls, store, laundry, sick bay, etc. – and of significant events like the time they were torpedoed by a Japanese sub and the day they were hit by friendly fire, killing three and wounding many more.

We drove on into Wilmington and had lunch at the Front Street Brewery, then took a horse-drawn trolley tour of a bit of old downtown and a residential neighborhood. The driver told stories, including the story of how cooks had to carry meals from the kitchens – in separate buildings to protect the main house from the risk of fire – to the dining room, and would toss bits of fried dough to fend off the wild dogs that lived in the town, saying “hush, puppies” and giving the snack its name. The horses that pull the trolleys are all rescues. Ours was a Percheron named Pete.

After the tour, we drove down to Carolina Beach and checked into our hotel, the Hampton Inn, where we had reservations for two adjoining ocean front rooms. We settled our things and then went downstairs to have a drink at the patio bar, where we sat around a lovely gas fire pit and watched the moon rise over the ocean. Later, we took a walk down the beach and then over to town and had dinner at Havana’s. Bob said his clam chowder was the best he’d ever had.

We awoke to the sunrise over the ocean,

and headed over to the Carolina Beach State Park for a walk on the Flytrap Trail to look for carnivorous plants. The Venus Flytrap is native to the area. It’s a tiny, inconspicuous plant, though, and tends to hide beneath other plants, so we didn’t find any. It was a nice walk through the woods, anyway. I was a little nervous about alligators (after seeing warning signs over by the battleship). My friends told me that alligators can move faster than a person can run over short distances, so your best bet is to climb a tree. The trees didn’t look very climbable to me. Luckily, it was a cold day, and there weren’t any alligators out.

Before we left the park, we went over to the marina – very quiet at this time of year – and wandered around a bit, taking pictures.

We had a couple of options for the rest of our time at the beach: a Civil War reenactment and a visit to the aquarium. Both were at Fort Fisher. We’d heard a blast from the reenactment while we were in the woods, and we could see it from the road as we drove by, so we decided that was enough battle for us. We went on in to the Aquarium and spent an enjoyable few hours exploring the exhibits. Albino alligators, jellyfish, seahorses, sharks, and an eagle – the aquarium has it all.

Our beach adventure was at Cape Fear, which I only knew about before from the terrifying movie starring Robert De Niro. An excellent movie, but definitely not one I’d recommend to Lucy. Ned and I’ve both had the experience of finding out movies we liked were too disturbing for our friend, and a running joke over the weekend was, “but would you recommend it to Lucy?”

Back home in Raleigh

Raleigh’s only two hours from the coast, so we got back in time for the Chinese Lantern festival on Saturday night. A big grassy area was transformed with what must have been hundreds of beautiful silk lanterns representing everything from bicycling pandas and roaring lions to an enormous Chinese dragon that seemed to be floating in a lake. It was the festival’s second annual holiday season visit to Cary, NC.

On Sunday, we visited the spectacular Hunt Library at North Carolina State University. The first thing you see when you enter is a huge glass wall, behind which are the stacks where the books are kept. A robot called the bookbot retrieves and shelves the books, and you can see a demo: the robot rushes down the aisle, raises or lowers an arm to the correct level, and pulls out a drawer full of books. It takes the whole drawer away – maybe to a human librarian who selects the correct volume and hands it over to the user.

The library has hundreds of seats of all different kinds, so you’re bound to find a comfortable place to read and study. Some are configured in conversational formations, and for more demanding study group needs, there are rooms where the walls are lined with whiteboards, complete with flat screens to hook your laptop up to. There are even music rooms on the top floor, with keyboards and headphones.

And for serendipity of discovery, there are a few places with shelves of actual books. Patrick found a Mishio Kaku book on the physics of the future that Lucy checked out for him with her faculty card. Pat’s twelve and in 7th grade, but he was fascinated by the book and had read a quarter of it by the end of the day. I’m looking forward to seeing what he does in the future himself.

Bob and Patrick are train enthusiasts, and are active in the Neuse River Valley Model Railroad Club. We stopped in to tour their terrific new clubhouse and chat with the other members who were there.

Finally, we visited the natural science museum in downtown Raleigh. We had lunch at the museum cafe and then looked around at a few exhibits while waiting for the monarch migration movie to start. We would certainly have stayed longer and seen more, and gone for a hike in the afternoon, but I’d managed to pick up a cold somewhere along the way and I was fading fast. My friends graciously cut their own adventures short to take me back to Bob and Lucy’s cozy house.

I spent the last day and a half of my visit sleeping or bundled up in front of the fire, reading, working on a jigsaw puzzle with Lucy, and watching movies on tv.

January might not seem like the best time to visit North Carolina, but except for getting sick, it was a wonderful time with lots of interesting sights and good conversations with old friends.

Used to be, I was a little sponge. Tell me something and I’d remember it. Teach me to spell a word (we used the See It, Say It, Spell It method at Fairmeadow Elementary in Palo Alto) and I pretty much had it nailed. And it was fast and easy to retrieve, too.

Those days are gone. I don’t know if it’s the crowd of stuff in my brain, or maybe constant distractions interrupting the process of transitioning something into long term memory, or what. But nowadays, memorizing is a real challenge. And there’s a lot of memorization and retrieval involved in learning the banjo. Things like where all the A notes are or which string in a particular chord is the root note.

I wondered what other people have said about the best way to learn things.

The Knowledge of London

Anyone who wants to be a licensed cabbie in London has to take written and oral tests to prove they know 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks and points of interest, along with the shortest legal route for 320 sample runs and a quarter-mile circle at each end of the runs. It takes years to master the knowledge. For example, one native Londoner spent 5 years on it, and according to this National Geographic article, every day he would recite at least 30 of the 320 sample runs, working his way all the way up through the list and then starting over. “Knowledge boys and girls” – people who are learning The Knowledge – ride around London on scooters with maps attached, as shown in the introductory video on this official website.

Thankfully, I don’t have nearly as many things to memorize. How does this Herculean effort apply to playing the banjo?

• Reciting and repetition – Daily review of the facts I’m trying to memorize, and going back over them later on, will help with retention and ability to retrieve the information.
• Hands-on experience – Applying the facts in the real world of the physical banjo, like the Knowledge students on scooters, will make them more meaningful and useful.
• Testing and retesting – Testing myself on paper and in person (trying to play a new piece from musical notation or guitar chords) will show what I still need to work on.

Lifehacker

This Lifehacker article explains a bit about how the brain reacts to learning. You’re aiming to increase the number and strength of connections between neurons, and to build myelin that speeds up the signals. To achieve this:

• Productive failure – Force yourself to learn without help (finally, my beloved trial and error approach is vindicated!). This is the principle followed by Project Euler (see this Atlantic article about it), which gives you progressively harder problems that you figure out how to solve using math and computer programming. Confusion and struggle help you learn better, because you’re doing more thinking, processing more deeply, and maybe invoking those emotions that make things stick. You end up remembering what you learned better, and being able to apply it more flexibly to new problems. On the banjo, I can apply this by figuring out a song on my own. Right now I’m learning The Sound of Silence from a guitar book, figuring out how to use the chords as a structure, find and play the notes, and add banjo type embellishments.
• Distributed practice – This is that reciting and repetition idea from the cabbies. Spread it out over time, don’t try to cram it all into one concentrated session. Mix it up (this editorial explains it). For banjo, this means even if I feel like I know where all the D chords are and am working on the A notes, I should mix D chords into my practice sessions.
• Sleep –  Solidify what you learn: have a nap after your practice, or practice right before bed. Here’s a very cool infographic about how to nap, if (like me) you aren’t naturally a napper.
• Retrieval practice – Testing, in other words. If you practice retrieving information, it will be more accessible, and you can use it when you need it.

Deliberate practice

At first I thought this didn’t fit here – it seems more relevant to learning to play better than to memorizing facts. But experiential learning, where you learn by doing, through deliberate practice – applying your skills – connects what you’re learning to real world tasks and puts it in context, which forms bonds in your brain so you learn better.

I wrote about this idea in June 2016 (Practicing better). There’s lots more information out there, like this violinist’s article that is eerily precise in its description of how I’ve usually learned to play new songs (play it through to figure out the fingering and chords, maybe taking some notes, and then playing little chunks over and over and over till muscle memory takes over).

The violinist recommends:

• Limit practice time so you can stay focused. Could be 10 minutes, could be 60.
• Practice at your best times of day (Cal Newport says twice a day is best).
• Use a notebook to plan practice, keep track of goals, and record discoveries.
• Stop and think of other approaches when something isn’t working.
• Use a problem-solving model to stay on task (define problem, analyze it, generate and test solutions, implement and monitor). It’s easy to slip back into rote mode.

The Piano Practice Assistant provides some concrete advice about this:

• Use explicit, specific goals, like “play this passage without stumbling.”
• Practice at a speed where you’re just barely not making mistakes.
• Monitor with recordings to find ways to improve.

And finally, a USC study says to mix up your practice routine, so you’re solving the problem anew every time and thus processing it more deeply than if you just keep repeating the same movement. This also has the advantage of fighting boredom. Metro Music Makers suggests five things to do:

• Branch out and try something new, like a different music genre.
• Practice with a backing track to accompany you.
• Learn a different instrument’s part.
• Get out of your usual practice space.
• Go back to the classics, the first things you learned, and try to improve.

Developing the ultimate quiz

I made myself a set of flash cards a while ago. Here’s what I covered:

• Major chords. What notes are in them (1, 3, 5 based on the naming note’s scale), where the root note is, the distance between each shape as you go up the neck (3 frets from bar to F shape, 4 to D shape, and 5 back to the next bar shape), and then for each of the 8 major chords, where they are and which note is on which string for the first 3 inversions. An inversion is a fancy name for other versions of the same chord.
• Minor chords. The same stuff, plus how you get from a major chord to a minor chord (you flatten the #3 note, which results in different shapes depending on what major chord shape you’re working with).
• Scales. What notes are in the major (whole-whole-half-whole-whole-whole-half step) and minor (W-1/2-W-W-1/2-W-W) scales for the 8 named notes.
• Seventh chords. Same stuff as for minor chords.

And then I made special flash cards for certain songs that had weird chords, like F# dim, and for certain practice routines, like 3-finger grabs up the neck of G-C-D or G-Em-C-D. I can think of other things I could make flash cards for, like picking patterns, musical notes, other types of chords, and little licks and embellishments.

Since I already have those cards, I’m going to use them, along with some of the principles summarized above, to develop the Great Banjo Quiz:

• Schedule two daily 10-minute sessions for working on memorization
• Divide the flash cards into groups
• Study and quiz with one group at a time, and stick with that group until I seem to have it down. Read the cards, read them out loud, test by only looking at the cue side, and play the associated chord or whatever on the actual banjo.
• Put the mastered cards into a separate deck. Shuffle the deck at the beginning of each session, and after every third card of the current group (the new stuff I haven’t nailed yet) pull a mastered card.
• Log the daily plan, practice, and results. Modify the plan as needed. If it’s working, go ahead and make those other cards and work them into the plan.

How about you? Do you have any effective strategies for memorizing and retrieving? Please share them in the comments below.

Well, 2016 was not my favorite year.

It reminded me of another year that lives in infamy in my memory: 1968. At the beginning of 1968, I was halfway through my first year as a boarding student at Rowland Hall-St. Mark’s School in Salt Lake City, still adjusting to the change from Cedar City Junior High. The classes were harder, the other kids were smarter, the world was bigger and more present in our lives, and it was our job to make the world better, more peaceful, and more just. But then… Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, and riots followed in cities across the country. Bobby Kennedy offered new hope, but he was assassinated in June. There was chaos everywhere, with violent police clashing with protestors in Chicago, student protests in France, and the war on tv every day. With body counts. And don’t get me started on George Wallace’s third party presidential campaign: the politics of rage weren’t invented in 2016. On the positive side, I became an aunt in November of that year when my amazing nephew Joey was born. Even so, I was glad when the year was over.

365 Day Writing Challenge

This year, I’ve signed up for a challenge and committed to write every day. My goal is 1,000 words a day, and I plan to accomplish that through a mix of:

• Editing the novel I finally finished last year. It’s a mystery of the amateur sleuth variety. It’s way too long. It’s lumpy. I wrote part of it during NaNoWriMo or in word sprints with writer friends, so there are scenes in there whose only function is to bump up my word count, not to mention things like unnecessary dialogue tags (“he said”). I’ve been getting feedback on it from my critique group a few pages at a time, and I’ve sent it to my two nephews who volunteered to try to read the whole thing. I figure I can write 1,000 words an hour if I’m not trying to make them good, so I’m going to count an hour of editing as meeting my daily goal.
• Blog posts. I want to finish my self-imposed task of taking notes on Brandon Sanderson’s BYU class and writing them up here. My granddaughter Lorisa pointed out that I don’t have many blog posts that aren’t writing related, so once I’m finished with the Sanderson class I might write a bit more about learning to play the banjo, traveling, and other stuff. One idea I’ve had is to try to compile a one-stop place to find out about all the live theatre that’s happening in the Phoenix area on any given day, with links to the different theatre companies and links to newspaper reviews.
• New stories. In Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing, he described his approach to writing when he was young. He’d write a new story on Monday, revise and polish through the week, and by the end of the week he’d have sent it off. Elsewhere I’ve read that he recommended writing a story a week because it’s impossible to write 52 bad stories a year – it’s bound to improve your writing. I have a couple of books that I’ll use to help me generate ideas.

One thing I’ve learned about myself is that if I don’t write every day, it’s harder to write. I lose the thread of the plot, I forget who the characters are, I don’t know where I’m going. Rachel Aaron‘s first step in going to 10,000 words a day (!!!) was to know what she’s writing before she starts, and you can’t do that if you don’t write every day. At least I can’t.

Health and fitness personal challenge 

The Monday before Christmas, I started Weight Watchers with my friend Lois. You could call the timing insane, but I call it brilliant. I lost almost two pounds during the week of Christmas, which I figure is equivalent to losing seven based on my past history of gaining five every year.  I succeeded on their program 22 years ago, but gradually crept up to where I started. I calculate that if the same pattern holds, I’ll be over 85 by the time I see that number on the scale again. I love the new Weight Watchers program, which encourages healthy eating by making all fruits and most vegetables zero points and encourages healthy activity by setting a weekly goal. If I stay on the program, I’ll be where I want to be way before the end of 2017.

Two years ago, I started walking my dogs every day. I’ve only missed a few days since July 2015. In July 2016, I added yoga twice a week at Floating Lotus, and I still work out once a week with Jeremy at Funktional Fitness. In 2017, I plan to add another workout to the weekly mix. I’m going to start by trying out some other yoga classes, and I’ll probably drop in occasionally at the Biltmore Studio, the hot yoga studio Lois goes to. I went with her to a hot barre class last week. Or while it’s still cool out, I can play racquetball and climb A Mountain and hike South Mountain. I’m going to keep that fourth workout flexible to start with, but if I find I’m not keeping up with it, I’ll make a firmer schedule.

I’m also going to continue trying to get more sleep. There’s a great iPhone app called Positivity that’s a great help in getting to sleep some nights, and I’ll keep using the Bedtime app that comes with the latest operating system.

Happiness Project

I’m continuing my goals from last year to follow some of the advice in Gretchen Rubin’s book. In addition to the ones that overlap with my health and fitness goals, she recommends:

• Good marriage practices like adjusting your own attitude and expectations and managing your own behavior, which is really all you can control. This is still a work in progress after 24 years.
• Keep happy memories alive by doing things like looking at pictures, telling stories, and keeping up traditions.
• Master a new skill like photography or bookbinding. Or writing! I think I’ve written before that I somehow came out of school with the mistaken idea that because I read fiction, I could write it without consciously studying it. Boy, was I wrong.
• Emulate people I admire. I think this is going to be more than ever important in the coming years. Courage and the willingness to stand up for what’s right, take action against what’s wrong, and defend people and the environment. I don’t need to be Gandhi but if I can be a little more like my friends Kim, Ned, and Lucy, the world will be a little bit better.
• Make time for friends.

Goals around the house and so on

Another goal that overlaps with the Happiness Project recommendations is tackling a nagging task. Last month I finally cleared some boxes out of my home office – these were boxes of papers and things that have been sitting there since my mom died in 2012. Even though I didn’t finish the task, I got a tremendous boost from making progress on something that’s been hanging over my head for years. 2017 is going to be the year I get that office into shape.

In 2017, I’m going to design and adopt a daily routine. I retired in 2013, removing the structure of having to be somewhere every day within defined hours. It’s been nice having the freedom to schedule travel whenever I want, stay up late and sleep in, and spend whole days reading the new Stephen King. But now it’s time to develop my own structure, so I can accomplish all the things I want to do. My mornings tend to get away from me because I don’t have to go to the office – I used to get up at 5:30 so I’d have a couple of hours to read the paper, read my book, do the Sudoku, maybe have a hot bath before I had to leave. Now, I don’t have that natural end point, and there’s really no reason I have to do those things early to set my mood for the day.

I don’t think I need to set a goal to keep tracking the books I read and the movies I see – it’s finally a habit I can count on. I am going to tweak my journal to track my banjo practice more effectively and a couple of other things, though.

I think that’s about it. Do you write goals or resolutions? Tell me about them in the comments if you dare.  Happy New Year!

After taking a break during the entire month of November for NaNoWriMo, I’m back with more notes from Brandon Sanderson’s fabulous BYU class on writing fantasy and science fiction. This was the first time I started NaNo and didn’t finish. Lessons learned include (as Chris Baty says in the book that started it all, No Plot? No Problem!) start something new for NaNo – if you try writing something you’ve already been working on, it’s too close to your heart, and you can’t set yourself free to write crap, so you end up being unable to write at the pace NaNo requires. Life got in the way this year, too, with a couple of trips, a move, and an unexpected hiatus after November 8th. But I’m not quitting!

Class #4: World Building

Follow up on last session

Practice – You don’t have to follow any of the approaches to plotting Sanderson talked about in the last class. Explore your own approaches by practicing. The more you write, the more you’ll be able to do unconsciously and naturally, freeing your conscious mind for higher level problems. The more you write, the easier it all becomes for you.

Making your story distinctive – If everything has been done before, why bother? Genres and cultures evolve and change. Readers want a mix of the original and the familiar. Plot is the hardest thing to be distinctive about while telling a good story, so that will be the familiar; your characters and setting will be original and reflect your own passions and specialized knowledge. When John Grisham started writing legal thrillers, he brought lawyers as characters to the familiar genre. Bring your own enthusiasm.

World building

This is the place where you can be the most distinctive. Try to take a few steps forward; don’t build a world just like everyone else’s epic fantasy.

The iceberg – You show the tip of the iceberg in your book, but the reader needs to believe that the underwater part also exists. Your job is to extrapolate, be able to answer questions about the culture and setting, so the reader gets the sense that it’s real. You’re taking them to a different time and place, immersing them.

The iceberg includes the physical setting, which includes all the stuff that would be there if there were no people (flora and fauna, geography, weather, laws of physics or magic, etc.), and the cultural setting, which can include things like economy, religion, laws, government, caste system, gender roles, folklore, languages, music, fashion,  technology, history, education, arts, etc. You could come up with many more. Magic is a special element in fantasy world building, and there’s a whole lecture on it later on.

Watch out for world building disease, where you spend so much time world building that you never get around to the story, and don’t dump the whole iceberg on your readers. Pick two or three things that really pop off the page. Be as original as you can with these, and extrapolate as far as you can go. These elements should be at the heart of at least one of the conflicts in your story. Be distinctive and interesting in these areas, and it can make your world feel more real than if you had a 100,000 word bible for it.

Building the iceberg

• Fake it: If you’re a discovery writer, you can write the tip of the iceberg in your first draft, then develop the underwater stuff, and weave it in when you rewrite, just enough so the underwater part is somewhat visible. You need to give the illusion that there’s an iceberg there – you don’t have to actually have it developed.

• Write it: You can write a 400,000-word encyclopedia of your world. Tolkien spent decades doing this, and the actors playing elves in the Peter Jackson movies actually wore elven underwear even though it never showed onscreen. Do it if you enjoy it. Caution, though: you don’t want to show the whole iceberg on the page (next session will have more on how to avoid this). Also, if you want to make money by writing, you can’t afford to spend 30 years inventing languages and mythologies for your world.

The reader’s learning curve

The learning curve determines how long it takes the reader to become expert in the world. Every book has a learning curve, whether fantasy or not – Moby Dick has a steep learning curve; Harry Potter has a shallow curve that eases you in, and steepens once you get your feet underneath you. You need to decide how steep you want it to be. For middle grade fantasy, for example, the curve needs to be pretty shallow.

One reason for the popularity of series in fantasy is the learning curve. Once the reader has invested the time to learn about the world, they want other stories so they can just enjoy the ride.

• Sprinkle in terms: Sprinkle in the occasional term as you go along, and let the reader pick up the meaning by context. Readers like to do this. Use terms that will be relevant to your characters and plot, so they become familiar. Give good payoffs on a couple of things so the reader feels rewarded for paying attention. Make the details not throwaway but relevant.

• Give hints: Dole out information in a careful way. Introduce things slowly, by context. The reader should get to know the character first, then learn what the character wants, and then see how the character fits into their larger place in the world. Watch out for maid and butler talk. This is old stage lingo and it’s when characters talk about something familiar to them in a way that makes them sound unfamiliar to it: “As you know, the master is away…” Don’t have characters discuss things they would already know about.

• Go deep on one thing: Take one little thing about the world, and go into depth with it to create the illusion of the iceberg beneath the surface. Talk to other people about the little thing, see what 3 assumptions they’d make about it, and then in your next couple of chapters put in 4 things about it. This gives the reader confidence that you have the same depth on the whole world as you have about that one thing.

• Don’t confuse the reader with proper names: In the first few chapters, construct the story so you don’t have to drop a lot of proper names on the reader. The opening chapters should be more intimate with the character. For example, “She pulled against the wall, breathing heavily, as the bandit stomped past.” This lets the reader get to know the character in a tense moment.

• Only use a prologue if it serves a real purpose:  If it establishes the tone, for example, it might be great. If the only reason for a prologue is to explain the world (an info dump), it will bore the reader.

• Start with character: Be sparse with the world details up front; focus on character instead. You can set the character up in a strange situation that lets you drop in some of the background (but only the stuff that’s integral to the scene).

• Consider using a Watson: One approach is to have a character who’s unfamiliar with the world. They can ask questions, and it also gives you a chance to reveal some things through points of tension and conflict between the Watson and the natives of the world. There are lots of examples, including Bilbo in The Hobbit, Harry Potter, and Lucy in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

How much research should you do?

Sanderson tries to get himself 75% of the way there by reading up on the topic, and then writes as best he can. He then gives the draft to someone who really knows the topic and asks what he got wrong. He tries to get as close as he can in a reasonable amount of time, so he isn’t basing the story on really faulty premises.

Writing outside your own experience

Watch out for creating a straw man. Humans are great at combining things, not so great at imagining things that are brand new. You can take existing patterns and extrapolate for your book. The danger is when you create something that’s “not the Catholic church but exactly like the Catholic church and they’re all evil.” Don’t create a weak copy of something in our world; make something new, your own, tied into your created world, with a well rounded viewpoint.

If you’re writing the other – someone different from yourself – present their arguments, their way of life, in a way they’d present themselves. Every character shouldn’t be a copy of you, but write other people appropriately. Watch out for subtle sexism, racism, etc. in your writing. When you can notice it, it’s easier to overcome it. Sanderson gave an example from feminist theory to help explain this, but it applies equally to people who are different from the writer in other ways. Level 1 is woman as object; there aren’t many women, they aren’t relevant to the plot; they only exist to be moved around so manly men can do their manly things. Level 2 is woman as paragon; there’s only one of them, they’re awesome, can do everything, and their role is to come in and save the day – they have no character arc. Level 3 is woman as authority figure or straight man; there may be more of them but they still don’t have character arcs. Level 4 is woman as token, where you finally have a full, well realized character, with passions, dreams, quirks, and flaws, but there’s only one (the Smurfette principle).

Let your characters be real. You want each character to be important to the story that they are part of, have independence and agency over their destiny, allowed to be flawed. Force yourself to look critically at your “other” characters. If every one from X culture is a wisecracking person, or whatever, do some work to make them different from each other, and make them more real.

Why is this important and relevant? Engaging characters. The whole world isn’t inhabited by the same group. Everyone has made mistakes in writing “other” characters. It’s okay to realize that you’ve been racist or sexist in your writing, and fix it – you’ve fallen into the trap but you won’t in future.

Class #3: The illusionist writer

Motivation – The point of those character sliders, dossiers, and other techniques for understanding your characters covered in the last class is to know your characters’ motivations. You can have them act in line with who the reader knows them to be; or if you have them act outside who they really are, you can foreshadow so the reader understands why they’re acting that way.

Characters in motion – Your story needs motion, a sense of progress. Scrooge changes into a different person over the course of the story; this character arc is the motion of the story. In contrast, Superman accomplishes things but he doesn’t change himself. Either type of story can work, and you can combine the two where your character accomplishes things and also changes; decide what kind you want to write.

Plot as illusion

As a writer, you’re creating an illusion. You want the reader to feel it’s real and get caught up in the story, enjoying it, and anticipating but not quite knowing what’s going to happen. Use foreshadowing that makes the ending surprising yet inevitable. Hide your foreshadowing – it should be invisible.

Every story combines something familiar with something strange. This varies by genre and age. Middle grade books and cozy mysteries have more of the familiar. The essay The Strange Attractor by Terry Rossio explains it well. Decide where your own threshold for familiar and strange is.

• Sense of progress – This is the most important part of plotting, and you’ll get better at it with practice. You can take any great story and boil the ending down to an unsatisfying one-sentence conclusion or drag it out into something long and boring. As the writer, this is your domain, and you can do anything. Your job is to make it exciting by creating conflict and tension in the reader. If the reader is bored, it’s because the story isn’t progressing; if they feel the story is moving forward, they’ll keep reading.
• Promises – Learn to make promises early in your story, and fulfill them in a satisfying yet unexpected way. This usually happens in the first few pages, and it’s one reason epic fantasy often has a prologue – it shows the tone, where you’re going, what kind of book you’re getting into. The prologue in the first Indiana Jones movie shows you’re going to see fun wisecracking action with an awesome hero, and even though he fails in the prologue you expect to see him succeed later.

Promises unfulfilled might explain why another author’s first book didn’t succeed. It starts as classic epic fantasy, and about 3/4 of the way through the author upends all the tropes and it becomes a modernist take on the generic fantasy. The people who were loving it in the beginning suddenly hated it, and the people who would have loved the modernist take stopped reading before they got that far.

Plotting approach #1 – Three-act format

Most Western civilization stories can be put into this format. It’s useful because of its simplicity. Save the Cat – either the most important book ever written or the worst thing that ever happened to screenwriting – explains this in detail. Dan Wells’ Seven Point Story Structure videos on YouTube have great information on it from a discovery writer’s viewpoint.

• Act I – Introduction – introduce characters, setting, tone. This is usually the second biggest part of the book.
• Crisis point – character is forced to make a decision, enter a plot from which they can never return; things will never be the same. Luke’s aunt and uncle’s death in Star Wars.
• Act II – Confrontation – things get worse. Establish what the character’s trying to accomplish; character tries things and fails and things get worse. This is usually the biggest part of the book, and it can be broken into parts.
• Low point – do or die time. Character can’t fail again or we are defeated. The Death Star is pointed at the planet with the rebel base.
• Act III – Satisfying conclusion – where you make good on the promise. Not necessarily a happy ending, but the reader accepts what happens as the end.This is usually the shortest part of the book.

Plotting approach #2 – The monomyth

Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces is worth knowing, but don’t use it as a guidebook – use it as a tool. Think about the reasons behind the elements. It’s basically a 3-act format but described as a circle.

Common elements include the mentor, who guides the hero, while the hero becomes more like the mentor. Often, the mentor dies, allowing the hero to become independent and take the mentor’s place. The hero often refuses at least once before crossing the threshold and entering the trials. The hero may have a boon, or magical gift, like Harry’s scar that tells him when Voldemort is near. Sanderson didn’t mention it, but I think the structure described in The Better Novel Project follows this model.

Plotting approach #3 & 4 – Two general ideas for pantsers

The try-fail cycle is the rising action diagram you may have seen in English class. This is too simple to help a writer, but you can modify it by making the rising line jagged instead of smooth – so the main character goes up two steps and down one, and repeat until they reach the top.

Yes, but/No, and is a simple technique to keep things moving. You introduce a conflict in the first few pages. The character tries to do something to address it. If it works, you introduce a “but;” if it doesn’t work, you introduce an “and.” This can be exhausting for the reader but it can work, like in Dan Brown’s books (The Da Vinci Code, for example). If you use this, string the events together with causality and motivation, so it’s not just a series of events. Be sure to make the main character proactive. You can also nest the plot cycles, so some things are getting resolved (she reconciles with her father) even as other problems are building.

Plotting approach #5 – Sanderson’s own method

He starts building a series of promises and great moments he wants to fulfill. For his Mistborn, these included a romance, overthrowing the empire, and learning magic. There are lots of these, reflecting all his goals and all the cool scenes he wants to include. Then he brainstorms bullet points for the progression of things that need to happen (i.e., for the romance, the character needs to learn to trust).

Readers keep reading because they see a little progress. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Inferno is essentially a bunch of vignettes, almost like short stories, but they hang together and the reader senses progress because of the map at the front that shows them working their way to the center of Hell. In Lord of the Rings, Frodo’s corruption by the ring has outward manifestations, so even though this basically happens inside him, the reader still sees progress.

Consider the types of promises and subplots you might include, such as mysteries, romance and relationships, travelogues, time bombs, and overcoming character flaws. Then figure out what the steps are along the way.

Once he has all this down, he builds the book by taking something he likes from one place and mixing it with something else from another place to build a scene. To do this well, you must make sure there’s conflict and red herrings. Finally, you need to make sure the steps match the type of novel you’re writing.

For Sanderson’s actual high-energy lecture, with whiteboard illustrations and much more detail, see the original video.

A few days ago I posted my notes from the first session of Brandon Sanderson’s BYU class on writing science fiction and fantasy at BYU. Today: notes from the second class. Link to class on YouTube

Class #2: Cook vs Chef

Your job as a writer is to be a chef who comes up with something new, not a cook who just follows a recipe. The chef looks at the ingredients and thinks about how to combine them in a new and interesting way — which may or may not work out. This class will talk about a lot of formulas, and there’s a danger of treating them as checklists. Instead, focus on why the formulas work, what you can learn from them.

The Hero’s Journey is a great tool. This is the idea from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which describes storytelling and common elements like the wise mentor who dies at some point in the story. It tells how the elements have been combined in the past. The chef looks at why these elements work. For example, the mentor dies to give the hero a chance to see that he can stand on his own.

Sanderson said that while planning a book, he thinks about the principles he talks about in this course, but while actually writing he isn’t consciously thinking about them. When he gets stuck or runs into trouble, he’ll go back and consider these ideas again.

Parts of a story 

A story has 3 main parts: plot, setting, and character. The conflict – a character at odds with some other element or character – draws them all together. How you tell the story – viewpoint, tense, tone, paragraphing, chapters – is your window into this structure, your personal voice. In this class, there will be about 2 sessions on each element (the 3 parts and “the box”).

Starting with a hook

Character is what keeps the reader interested. Rather than starting with a “bang,” start with a hook that grabs the audience’s attention and promises what the story will deliver. The hook should introduce the idea of your story in a concise, interesting way that encapsulates the kinds of emotions and tone you’ll be giving the reader. Part of the hook is the interesting and engaging character, maybe someone who wants something really badly.

What makes a character interesting?

There are lots of things that can make a character interesting. Maybe they can do cool things; maybe they can’t but they seem real and remind you of yourself. They may have conflicted morals; be out of their depth; be haunted by a powerful past; or be flawed. Their relationships with other people and the way they’re affected by the world around them can make them interesting. They may contrast against stereotypes, be funny, or be sympathetic (or not sympathetic). Consider why these things are compelling or interesting to you, and use that to help make your characters sympathetic and readable.

Character sliders

Three major forces drive whether a character is interesting to us. You can think of your character as falling along a spectrum in each of these dimensions.

The competence scale goes from everyman to superman. A hyper-competent character like Sherlock Holmes or James Bond, where the reader just knows they can do anything, can be interesting because they do interesting things. Often this is balanced by an everyman, like Samwise from The Hobbit – he’s hyper-competent in loyalty and being a good friend, but mainly he’s an everyman. The main character can start on the everyman end of the scale and be dropped into an environment where they have to become hyper-competent (fish out of water type stories). We tend to see ourselves more as the everyman and wish we were more like the superman, so the everyman character is sympathetic. Everyone should have something they’re good at, even if it doesn’t relate to the main plot.

The likability scale measures how nice the character is, how much they remind us of ourselves, are they a good person, do they have friends. An easy way to make someone likable is to have another character talk about why they like them (but don’t overdo this; it can become sappy). In Hollywood, there’s a cliche that you have the character pet a dog or kick a dog to signal whether the audience should like them or not. You can increase likability by increasing the other scales, or by having an antagonist attack them.

Proactivity reflects how the person moves the story along. We like people who move the story, and get frustrated with people who refuse to move it along. This can lead to the villain problem – in a lot of stories with dynamic villains, the villain is the main source of proactivity in the story. Your challenge as a writer is to make sure the main character is also proactive. One way is to have the character arc be that they learn to step up and take control of their own life – but then how do you make the character sympathetic enough at the start of the story? You can force their hand early, as in The Hobbit where Bilbo is invaded by dwarves in the first chapter. Another way is to have a false plot that carries them through the beginning – they actually want something, and they’re working towards that while the real plot is sneaking up on them. Give an indication that even if they think their life is perfect, there’s something missing, like when Luke looks out at the two suns in the original Star Wars. You can show the character’s desires even if they can’t act yet. Give them small things to be proactive about even if they’re stuck in a rut.

These sliders move independently of each other. You can have a character who’s competent and proactive but not likable at all, like Sherlock. Villains tend to be this way and stay there, but heroes may move along the scale, like Gru in Despicable Me. If they can’t be proactive, you want to show them being competent in some sphere. We forgive people for being incompetent if they’re trying – if they’re proactive, like Wiley Coyote.

Flaws and handicaps

A handicap is something the character is stuck with and won’t get rid of, but learns to deal with. It’s not just physical limitations like being blind; it can be something like having a family you don’t want to endanger, or having been brought up by Muggles and not knowing things you should already know, or having OCD like Monk.

A flaw can be overcome. It’s something that might be the character’s own fault. Examples are arrogance or shyness. It causes the character trouble in the story, and they may learn from it and overcome it. Flaws make the character sympathetic because it makes them more like us.

Getting to know your character

Dossier method – questions you ask about your own character. You need to develop this for yourself, based on what’s meaningful to you. There are lots of examples from other writers out there. Answering these questions is a structured brainstorm to develop your characters. You can also brainstorm with friends to get yourself thinking.

Character monologue – if you’re a discovery writer, you can try writing a directed monologue like have the character write about their great passion in life.

What you’re trying to figure out is this: Before the story begins and the plot grabs them and carries them along, who is the character? What have they done with their life, what do they care about, what do they want? Stories that seem flat are usually because the character was built to suit the plot and doesn’t seem to have another life.

Figuring out the characters is how you figure out what the conflict is going to be, and what needs to happen in the plot. For example – if the character doesn’t fit the role they’ve been put in, like the wise mentor is actually the villain, or the loyal sidekick has to take over as the chosen one, this can drive the plot. Another example – what’s the character’s deep, dark secret? Hiding this or having it come out can drive the character arc that drives the plot. What goes wrong in their life, and why can’t they have what they want? Good characters change in some way over the course of the story, with a few exceptions like Miss Marple.

Character motivation is critically important and it’s the subject of another lecture.

The talented and prolific author Brandon Sanderson teaches a class on writing science fiction and fantasy at BYU, and generously posted – or allowed someone to post – videos from one entire 13-week class on YouTube. He also has an ongoing podcast he does with other authors. I recommend watching and listening for yourself! Below are my notes from the class. Link to class on YouTube

Class #1: Course Overview

This session introduces the goals and philosophy for the course, and provides some specific guidance on writers’ groups. The course as a whole will cover plotting, creating likable characters, world building, and the business of being a writer. The goal is to give you tools you can try out and see what works for you – a writer’s toolbox. There’s no one right way to write. Listen to other writers talk about their style and think of it not as “this is what I should do” but just consider trying it out and see what the tool does for you in a given story.

Discovery writers versus outline writers

Discovery (gardener, pantser) writers like Stephen King tend to know their characters really well. They often don’t do a lot of world building in advance but may explore it in notes as they go along when something becomes important. Their first draft is their outline. They then go back and revise, sometimes even rewrite from scratch. Watch out for endless loops – when you write chapter 2, you find you need to change stuff in chapter 1, which necessitates more changes in chapter 2, and so it goes. Keep moving forward and get it finished first.

Outline (architect, plotter) writers like Orson Scott Card tend to meander less and have better endings. Watch out for world builder’s disease – when you can’t start writing till it’s all perfect in your head. A professional writer needs to complete at least one book a year. Almost every outline writer uses the outline as a changing skeleton, modifying as they go along.

Writers aren’t all one or all the other, but more 75/25 or 25/75. Sanderson “discovery writes” his characters but outlines his plot.

Science fiction and fantasy

Genre fiction means any story that fits in a particular section in the bookstore. The tropes of your genre are useful tools but they don’t define the genre. SF/F can be anything you want – literary, humorous, romance, adventure. It’s your job to say “what is it about vampires/rocket ships that makes people interested, what kind of emotion is it going to evoke in my readers” and go beyond the superficial.

Writing as a professional

The odds of becoming a professional writer aren’t as impossible as people think. You’ll have to spend 10 years of your life producing a novel a year to hone your craft and get a chance that the job will pan out (this is about 6 hours a week at 500 words an hour, which is a typical pace). Out of the 22 people in a writing class Sanderson was in, 5 are now professionals, including 3 who are full-time. His own job is more stable than his friends in the computer industry who have changed jobs multiple times.

On the other hand, never feel guilty about writing as a hobby. If you went out and played basketball once a week, nobody would expect you to go into the NBA. Writing is good for you, just like playing basketball is.

Write what you wish was out there – what you would want to read.

Workshopping

Workshopping helps you perfect your book, and can have other benefits – networking via his writer’s group put Sanderson in touch with the Tor editor who published his first book. (Tolkien and CS Lewis were in a writing group.) However, the group needs to be managed. Sanderson says writing groups will try to ruin your book. The biggest problem is when discovery writers workshop pieces that aren’t finished yet. “This is great, what if you did this?” and suddenly your story goes a totally different direction. People will hijack your story. You’ll end up writing to the wrong audience: the writing group.

What works for him is a weekly, in-person meeting, with writers who have a similar pace and are at about the same level.

• Giving advice?
  • Be descriptive instead of prescriptive – “I was confused here” not “I know what you should do here;” “I was bored here” not “You should add an action sequence here.” Your editor’s job is to be prescriptive – they know what kind of book you’re trying to write, and how to bring it out.
  • Stay positive. List the positive things in a piece before getting to what’s bothering you. Prevents the writer from taking out the good stuff. “I loved this character’s voice.” “I laughed out loud here.”
  • Discuss. If someone else says they were bored on page 2 but it was something you really liked, speak up; you should talk about why each of you had those reactions. It could be a pet peeve for one member of the group, or it could be legitimate. If three people think a joke fell flat, that could show it’s a problem; if one thinks that and five like it, it’s probably that one person.
  • Drop it. Learn to say you’ve had your say about it and the writer has heard you, and leave it alone.
• Being workshopped?
  • Be quiet. Avoid saying anything at all! Don’t defend yourself, don’t explain yourself. Treat your writing group like a test audience for a movie. You want to get the fly on the wall feedback.
  • Don’t argue. You can ask questions at the end if you need something explained more, but let them talk it out first.
  • If you’re a discovery writer, write the whole book first, and then workshop that one while you’re working on something else.
  • Consider the feedback and make changes when the comments bring up things that are important for your story. He usually takes about a third of the comments he receives and makes changes based on them.

Sanderson didn’t mention the need to develop a thick skin, but he did say that the people who like his books least are his writing group friends, because they only read his first drafts. The writing group doesn’t get your best stuff.

I plan to keep on with this class and post my notes as I finish each session. Have you watched this? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The first rule in Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work (which I wrote about in Focus on Writing), includes advice to focus on specific goals. The rationale is that goal setting allows you to say yes to a few things instead of constantly saying no to all the distractions.

So what does that mean for a writer?

Well, my ultimate goal is to have people buy my book and read it and love it. Simple, right? If you’re a writer, you probably have a similar goal.

But before that can happen, my book has to get published, which means I need to finish it and find a publisher.

Performance goals versus outcome goals 

That ultimate goal of mine is an outcome goal. It might be a great motivator, and it might help me make decisions about my writing, but it’s not something I can just sit down and do today on my laptop. It’s like saying I want to lose twenty pounds.

Performance goals are things I can actually do, like getting more exercise or eating less sugar or figuring out how my villain gets the deadly disease to the victim. What I need on a day to day basis are good performance goals that will eventually get me to my ultimate goal.

SMART goals

Business gurus, who never met an acronym they didn’t like, say that useful goals are specific, measurable, action oriented, realistic, and time based. Action oriented is another way to say performance based. Specific, measurable, and time based are another way of saying be precise with your goals, so you can tell whether you achieved them or not. For me, writing a specific scene, finishing the lead-up to a particular plot point, or writing a set number of words could be the goal, and all I would need to add is a deadline. This is the genius of NaNoWriMo: the simple goal is to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, which is easy to break down into 1,667 words per day.

Realistic but ambitious

It’s important for goals to be achievable – otherwise, you’re apt to just give up – but at the same time, they shouldn’t be set too low. If your goal doesn’t ask you to do more than you’d do if you didn’t have it, why bother having a goal?

Written and prioritized

Finally, writing goals down helps to clarify them, and gives you something to look at to remind you where you’re going today. When you have multiple goals, prioritizing them helps ensure you’re working on the right thing at the moment.

What do you gain from setting goals?

• Happiness and a better life, according to Eric Barker’s post about goals from 2012.
• Faster progress! Goal setting is a step towards something Rachel Aaron recommends in her blog about how she went from writing 2,000 words a day to 10,000 words a day. She calls her first step “know what you’re writing before you write it.”
• Less reliance on moment-to-moment willpower. By making the decision once, when you set the goal, you make life easier for yourself. This NYT article says willpower may be a limited resource that can get worn out over the course of the day.

Do you set writing goals for yourself? What works for you? Please share in the comments below.

I don’t know why I expected writing to be any different.

At work, I got interruptions all the time. It just went with the territory. I had tactics I used in special circumstances, like working at home, using the out-of-office email message, shutting the door. Growling at people who tried to interrupt me. That kind of thing.

It turns out, now that nobody but me cares if I ever finish my current novel, I’m better at interrupting myself than the most demanding boss or team member I ever had. The other name for these interruptions is “distraction.” There are multitudes!

Deep Work

So I just finished a book by Cal Newport called Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. He aims to teach us strategies we can use to be more like, for example, the guy who published 7 articles in peer-reviewed journals in a single year and had published over 60 articles and at least one book by the time he became the youngest full professor at the Wharton School.

Deep work is what you do in a state of distraction-free concentration. It pushes your cognitive abilities to their limit. It’s the opposite of shallow work which is not cognitively demanding and can be done while distracted. Deep work helps you learn hard things quickly and optimizes your performance. It’s good for you neurologically, because it means you’re paying attention to what’s important to you. It’s good psychologically, because you spend more time in a satisfying “flow” state. And it’s good philosophically, because your work is more meaningful.

Newport proposes 4 rules.

Rule #1: Work deeply. Decide what philosophy works best for you. Neal Stephenson writes his science fiction novels in monastic isolation – he doesn’t do email or conferences. You could do that, or divide your time between isolation and connected times when you’re doing your day job and gathering material for your novels. The approach that makes most sense to me is rhythmic, where you establish habits by setting daily goals and/or a regular schedule so you do deep work every day. There’s also the journalistic mode, where you fit deep work into your schedule whenever you can, planning for it when you plan your week. Then ritualize – set up your work space, your rules (word count goal, Internet ban), and your supports (coffee!). Maybe try a grand gesture like locking yourself up in a hotel room to fully commit yourself. Use business disciplines like focusing on specific goals so you’re saying yes to a few things instead of trying to say no to all the distractions; keeping a scoreboard – his is a checkmark for each hour spent in deep work, and he circles the checkmark when he achieves a milestone; and accountability – for writers, this could be a weekly review of progress and plans. Take downtime seriously; have a shutdown ritual where you review your unfinished work and decide to do it another time, then let your unconscious take over while you recharge your energy.

Rule #2: Embrace boredom. You may think you know how to concentrate, and all you need to do is make the time for it, but you’re probably wrong, Newport says. You need to train your brain by improving your ability to concentrate and overcoming your desire for distraction. Once you’re wired for distraction (smartphone while waiting for your table), you crave it. Schedule internet time in blocks as breaks from focused work. Even in your free time, you can schedule your internet blocks, so you aren’t constantly switching back and forth – you’re training your brain to resist distraction. Set deadlines that are just barely feasible, forcing you to work intensely without distraction; do this once a week at first then more often. Use productive meditation – think while you’re physically occupied with walking or whatever, resisting and redirecting when you notice yourself looping or getting distracted. Start by reviewing the relevant variables, define the next step question, and examine the answer you come up with. Do memory training such as memorizing a deck of cards to improve your ability to concentrate.

Rule #3: Quit social media. (Gasp!) Newport acknowledges that there are benefits to using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., but he argues that they may not outweigh the negative impacts. First identify your main high-level goals and then list the 2-3 most important activities that help you meet the goals. For each networking tool you use, assess its impact on those activities, and drop it if it doesn’t have substantial positive impacts that outweigh the negatives. Your time, your willpower, and your capacity for attention aren’t unlimited; invest wisely. Go cold turkey for 30 days and then ask yourself if your life would have been better and if other people cared that you weren’t using it. Use your leisure time better – don’t use the internet as entertainment. Plan how to use your free time for things like reading, exercise, time with other people, and hobbies. If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.

Rule #4: Drain the shallows. You can’t spend all your time in deep work. It’s exhausting – after about 4 hours you reach the point of diminishing returns – and other stuff does need to be done. Still, the other stuff tends to creep up on you. To control it, schedule every minute – block out your time in multiples of 30 minutes, and when things go over or interrupt, revise the schedule for the rest of the day. Set limits on your working time, such as 50 hours a week or ending every day at 5:30, so you don’t shift your deep work to an imaginary super-productive weekend or evening. Manage your email: instead of a general address, have separate ones for different purposes, so senders decide which to use based on what they want from you and on your statement about when and whether you’ll reply to each type; in answering email, don’t send a stop-gap response but take the time to craft a complete answer so the question doesn’t just bounce back to you; don’t answer email that’s ambiguous, uninteresting, or won’t lead to anything really good if you reply (or anything bad if you don’t).

For another perspective on this excellent book, see Eric Barker’s blog entry in Barking Up the Wrong Tree, which is where I first heard about it. Cal Newport’s own blog, Study Hacks, has more on how to perform productive, valuable, and meaningful work.  I recommend reading the book for the stories and research that bring the ideas to life. His take on managing the demands of an academic career seems especially valuable; I’ve been observing that life from the outside as my daughter pursues a PhD and I believe Newport’s insights are spot on.

…for Writers

Newport’s examples are drawn from academia and business. For fiction writers, I think the main difference is in defining what’s deep work and what’s “the shallows.” Newport suggests thinking about how long it would take a smart college grad to learn a task to decide if it’s deep or shallow. For me, I think the key distinction is this:

Does this task contribute directly to my writing?

The answer is yes for research, planning, plotting, drafting, and revising. It’s also yes for getting help on the plot from a writer friend or getting feedback on the draft in critique group.

Studying the craft of writing is probably sometimes yes, sometimes no – depends on the book, article, conference session.

The shallows are all those other things surrounding writing. Travel planning to go to conferences, keeping track of queries, dealing with software issues, researching agents, updating stats on NaNo. Doing the scheduling and time tracking Newport recommends. Maybe giving feedback to other writers on Scribophile, and (despite Newport’s advice) keeping up with social media news from writers and agents.

I’m excited to apply Newport’s principles to my writing life. I intend to spend more time in deep work, and less time in a fog of semiconscious Web surfing. Let me know in the comments if you try this, too, and how it works out for you!