The biggest trick to writing without a block.

You ready for it? The one trick that will destroy writers block forever?

What could it possibly be????

Relax.

Sorry I wanted to play the shtick up.... anyhow that is my answer to writers block, but I think I need to explain.

In my life I have written two plays that I think are really special. I have written a lot of other things, but nothing that I feel measures up to these works. I have also spent a large amount of time chasing after the phantom of these plays and trying to recapture the magic that happened when I wrote them. I think I have hit on an answer that may finally make some headway on this problem.

I realize that having recently asked my mom what her opinion is on how I can write more and better, the question of anxiety couldn't have possibly come up in that discussion because it would have been an admission on her part that she could now observe something that she had a hand in creating and had done nothing to help me with in the entire time I was growing up.

So I will tell you the story of the two plays "The count of Venice", and "Malaria: The Musical".

The Count of Venice was written about ten years ago. I was at the time taking a pen and a pad of paper around with me just in case I had an idea come to me. So one evening I was out taking a walk, it was late July or the beginning of August. I wasn't in school there wasn't a whole lot that needed to be done, I am not sure what year it was but perhaps it was the summer before I started University.

I was out taking a walk and this idea came to me about a count, a very pompous fellow and he would go into a panic over something insignificant. Then it came to me that it should be a hangnail and he should have a lot of advisors that would react as though it were in fact very serious. I then got out my notepad and very quickly started writing down the outline, one thing after another came to me and it all made sense and so I wrote down the outline on this long thin notepad that you might use for a shopping list, and I think it took two pages front and back.

I was quite happy with that outline and was determined to write the play. At the time we had an older computer around the house that wasn't good for much other than word processing. It certainly was not much good at browsing the internet, well I used that computer to write on because I didn't want the distraction of the internet. I would sometimes just roll out of bed and start writing, or I would not even get out of bed and start writing. At the time I think I carried a floppy disk back and forth between the older computer downstairs and the newer one in my bedroom. Most of tthe writing was done on the old computer downstairs while I was sitting on a high bar-chair, which was kind of like a barstool, but had a back to it. I started writing at the beginning of August and finished at the end of August. "the Count Of Venice" was my magnum opus, I believe it clocked in at 87 pages and it was the longest thing I'd ever written. It was fantastic, but I don't know if anyone has ever read it. Certainly it has never been performed.

Needless to say for someone who struggles to write and rarely put together anything longer than two pages it was quite something. At the time I thought that it would change everything and I would never struggle to write again... boy was I wrong. I now believe that the way I framed it then and have up until this very night thought of it as "inspiration" was in fact relaxation.

So why do I think that it is relaxation, because that's what I've come to realize that both plays have in common. I was relaxed about writing them. It's not just about being relaxed and leaned back in your chair because that's fairly easy. It's more about being at peace with the act of writing. I have tried everything to reproduce the process of writing either play. I've tried taking long walks with a pencil and paper in my pocket. I've tried making outlines. I've tried coming up with silly stories with silly main characters that need to be taken down a peg. I've tried writing on computers not connected to the internet. None of them produced results, but I never tried simply relaxing and not worrying. Actually this comes down to a distinction I was realizing in language learning. In language learning you have to be paying attention to learn, and that's the kind of learning that is confusingly called "unconscious learning" to differentiate it from the grammar and vocab practice that is the hallmark of traditional language learning. Well that learning does take place mostly in your unconscious , but there is nothing unconscious about it. You in fact have to be paying attention and actively interested in order to learn anything. So I think it would be more properly called "attentive learning", however back to my point, the writing process is not divided between two false alternatives of worried or active writing on the one hand and relaxed or passive writing on the other. The relaxed end of the spectrum always seems like it is supposed to be some kind of passive state where you are just letting the muse work through you. In reality the relaxed state is a very active and attentive state, you are paying full attention to what you are writing. In fact you are so absorbed you don't even have any attention to spare for worrying or anxiety.

So writing "the Count Of Venice" I was in a relaxed state I was not nervous or tense, I was not pushing myself to write. I was relaxed and just enjoyed the writing. Now how do I know that it was relaxation and not something else? Well this evening I decided that I would write a part of a story. So I sat down at the computer feeling worried about how the writing would go. I could see in my mind's eye how the evening would go, I'd get a few halting sentences out and end up feeling like they were terrible and perhaps I should just give it up for lost, and then I'd either push myself to keep writing something I had no interest in or I'd find myself browsing websites for news about the latest videogames. In that moment I decided that I would not worry, I'd just relax and enjoy writing. That there was nothing bad going to happen, I might write something bad I might write something good. I just needed to relax about it. So I did. I took a deep breath, relaxed back in my chair and decided to not be nervous about writing. This is not an absolute fix, I still need to work on being able to relax about my writing.

I think I should also talk about 'Malaria' because it reinforces the idea here about relaxing. Now 'Malaria' was written in such a Zen state of relaxation that I can hardly remember the process. I remember I started writing it one day in a thoroughly boring class about South America and perhaps south american politics. It was the worst and the professor was an out and out admitted communist. But it was easy, so I didn't have to spare any attention and could devote it entirely to writing a silly play with overt references to the Bush administration attacking Iraq and whatever else I found amusing at the time. In fact I believe I may have modeled one of the characters on my droning professor. Point is though, I was super-relaxed. The classroom was quiet apart from the droning prof, I knew I didn't have to pay attention because the class was super easy, and I had no special reason to be worried about what I was writing because I was just writing it for my own amusement. Now later after it got picked to be produced in the theater department I was a complete nervous wreck about it and couldn't make decent revisions to save my life. In fact I wrote an entire 26 page play the Sunday night before our revisions were supposed to be done using the exact same characters and setting since the play had already been cast. I mention that play to point out that you don't need to be relaxed to write, but if you want to write well it helps to be relaxed. I think that play I wrote in one evening is probably quite cringe inducing, and I'm glad it never saw the light of day. I still felt very nervous about the revisions and so enlisted the help of my best friend in revising it, we did a terrible job of revising it and I blame myself and the director for turning the play into crap by the time we actually put it on stage.

Well anyhow, that's the tale. I have tried very hard to reproduce the process that made either play, but I don't think I'd grasped the essential similarities until now.

So my answer is relaxing and it works, at least thus far it seems to work. I got into a relaxed mood and wrote 500 words in real short order. and this little essay is somewhere around 1700 words, I haven't felt the least bit nervous about it, just focused and attentive on the points I want to make. Now relaxing is something that most people who know me think I don't have any problem with. They think I'm always laid back and don't worry about anything, but that's not true. I do have a facade of not worrying and of bored indifference... However that's a bit off the main topic and I have gone on more than long enough. Thank you for sticking with me if you did. Please leave comments if you don't agree or have something to add that perhaps I missed.

Elephants, On The Eating Of.

You would think that a blog about writing every day might get updated every day. Well too bad!

I have been writing most every day, just not in the blog. I've just started on a new project related to language learning. I can't really go into it because it's too early to say much about it. But it is a pretty exciting application of the ideas of Stephen Krashen in a multimedia environment. Which is a bad way of saying that if you were to take Rosetta Stone and make it useful then you'd have what I'm talking about.

I may post the proof of concept video, I'll edit it and see.

Sorry I'm being so tight on the details.

Anyhow, this idea that I'm working on is going to be a lot of work and from where I'm sitting it looks like a huge mountain. In fact it is not something I can possibly do alone, but for the time being I will need to go it alone.

What does this have to do with writing? Well I figure that any story of a reasonable length and complexity is a huge task. Even if you are the worlds fastest writer and you never have writer's block it will still take you a good long time. One thing I was never given the respect necessary to develop competency in seeing projects all the way through to completion. The end result is that I really struggle to do task that are long complex or have many parts.

anyhow, as they say the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

That's all for this post, later I want to talk about breaking a project down into manageable parts and goal setting and whatever else that comes along with taking on a large project.

What to do when the story is just going nowhere.

Sometimes I will just start writing without a plan or a thought on what I'm writing. I think I do that from a compulsion to write. However it seems that writing without even having an idea of what you want to write about is not the easiest way to write. Take for instance this dialog that I was just writing.

Hey there buddy, what you up to?

oh me? not much.

you ever seen a wet bird fly at night?

a what? I don't think so.

would you like to?

No, if I'm honest I donn't think I care about what a wet bird looks like flying at night.

Well it's not that, because you see it's slang for something.

oh so what does it mean?

I think it has something to do with sex. I don't really know

Yeah it's the ladies man!

who was that?

that was the ladies man!

well how did he get here and why was he talking just now?

I don't know, I thought you might have been the cause of the ladies man.

Perhaps if you talk about wet birds flying at night and sex then the ladies man appears.

yeah, like bloody Mary or something.

Did someone call for the ladies man?

See there he is again!

But where did he go?

probably went to go find a lady, cuz that's what the ladies man does.

Wow that is just fantastic!

So what do you like to do on a saturday night?

I like to go to clubs and dance.

Yeah really? me too! let's go to a club together!

(at the club)

yeah, check out all these fine ladies in the club!

Let's dance!

(they dance)

Yo I spotted a fine lady, I'm gonna go dance with her!

(can't spell hater without h e r)

(he goes to dance with a lady)

Hey baby you so fine let's dance together!

No I don't think so!

As you can see there isn't much of a story there. I will on occasion write things like that, or write dialogs where people are just fighting for the sake of fighting. Good confrontational dialog is funny and fun to write (a good example is "The Taming of the Shrew"). but pointless jabbering of characters is pointless. Or to not have a completely circular sentence, if the story doesn't go anywhere, if you have no idea why these people are fighting then the dialog loses it's snappiness and isn't clever or funny.

So no grand conclusion I just wanted to share the thought... I think it's time to dig into my backlog of ideas, though as I recall many of them are written down on scraps of paper that happen to be in China right now.

Working as a teacher

for the time being I'm working as a substitute teacher. I never thought of myself as a teacher but I have been teaching English in China for several years, and recently gone into subbing.

So that got me thinking about teachers that are writers. It seems to be very common, and I think the summers off makes it easier to be a writer and a teacher. On the other hand I don't know of any good writers or writers that I enjoy reading that are also teachers. I also find that many of the teachers who are writers are not very interesting. So does being a teacher or having the security of the teaching profession make you a boring and uninteresting writer?

If you think about it most of the textbooks you had to read in the course of school were written by teachers and textbooks are universally dull tedious and uninteresting, much like most classes I suffered through in school.

My experience subbing has shown me that these kids would learn a lot more with a library card. I think it is fairly obvious that the schools we have today are not producing competent adults, they aren't even about learning or any of that. I wouldn't say that a good teacher can't be more effective than reading books on a subject. The teacher can know the subject well enough to guide a student down the right path. That kind of guidance can save a lot of time, but at some point the student is still responsible for their own learning because once you get really good at something then there is no one there to give you guidance. Just think of Einsten, he didn't have anyone to tell him how to figure out relativity he had to pursue it and take all of the information he had and find a way to understand it. That kind of understanding can never come from a teacher, but must always come from a learner's interest in a subject and dedication to learning. In this kind of pursuit a teacher can be anyone who is informed about the subject.

Well then if you are a public school student who would like to be a writer someday read as much as you can and write. If you can get published in some way, even if just in your school paper, then that might help you later get a job writing for a living. If the teacher objects to reading a book in class tell them they need to be more interesting than you might think about not reading a book in their class. If that doesn't work you can always drop out and spend your days at the local public library.

Write every day.

The mantra of everyone who has looked into the question of how to be a writer is "write every day". If you read a book about how to be a writer you will invariably see them telling you to write every day. Everybody insists on it because writing is like eating an elephant, a huge task that takes a long time.

If you write every day then you get ahead of the curve, and even though this is a substantial elephant that requires things like editing and getting your elephant published (I'd like to see a published elephant). It all has to start from your written work.

One thing I want to do with this blog is to report on how much writing I am doing. So today's writing has been this blog post and this week's writing has been several blog posts and some journaling. I would like to be writing more fiction, stuff that is more creative. But I haven't really felt particularly creative.

There have been studies done on the question of how people stick to writing. One I read about from one of Krashen's books found that people punished for not writing would write more, but have fewer unique ideas and had much reduced likelihoods of continuing with writing after the study finished. and the ones that wrote the most consistently were those that had someone they simply reported their writing to every week. And since writing is a battle of attrition against blank pages the winner is the person that does it most consistently.

I'll do a post later that goes into it better after I look up that study.

Addicted to my internets

A few years ago I used to spend a ridiculous amount of time chasing down every last detail about my university's football team. Then it was tracing down every bit of information I could find on Nintendo DS games because I was worried about missing a hidden gem. The problem with that is I spent far more time looking up information about games and refreshing videogame websites like Joystiq.com or gonintendo.com than I did actually playing games. I would even read all the ridiculous and stupid comments that people would leave... It was I think a classic addiction because I felt nervous and anxious whenever I wasn't checking the internet for some obscure tidbit about a video-game or my alma mater's football team.

I've not as of yet entirely kicked the habit, I will sometimes sit refreshing iTunes every five minutes because I hope someone will release a podcast and I will be able to ignore whatever it is causing the tension for a little longer.

What's the solution? well part is to not be so hard on yourself. You can't beat yourself up over "wasting time" because attacking yourself is the opposite of a solution. You can try being more gentle with yourself, and try to find a therapist. Now I've been to two therapists since the beginning of the year, the first one seemed to be pretty interested in wasting my time and money. The second one couldn't even answer a simple question about something she found negative in her training, how can she have any hope of talking honestly about negative parenting? She can't so I'm still looking for a better therapist. Though at the moment I'm sticking with the second one because she isn't a big drain on my bank account.

So in the end what am I saying about internet addiction? Well if you feel like you have it, or any other kind of addiction then you should get some help and not attack yourself, try to be your own best friend.

what is good writing?

Something that comes up often is the attempt to classify things as high-brow or low-brow. This is especially prominent in fiction where you have the popular books and then you have what English professors think of as real literature.

I think it comes up because people wonder why the market doesn't reward them for having more schooling and thinking deeper thoughts.

This is something that I find hard to navigate because on the one hand I don't care for the elitist tone that people take when they talk about literature versus what Dan Brown writes.

Now if we think about it Dan Brown and the a writer of literary fiction both have to sit down and write their book. They have to draw from their brains whatever kind of ideas they can, they then have to translate that into words on a page in order to convey some meaning to the reader.

The first difference between them is that Dan Brown sells millions of copies and the literary fiction writer is lucky to sell a few thousand. Now why does he sell millions of copies? Because people like his books and buy them and they tell their friends who also go and buy them.

There are many reasons why this happens and Dan Brown can afford steak dinners and the writer of literary fiction has to survive on foodstamps. One is that Mr. Brown makes it very easy to read his books, he guides the reader through the story in a very direct manner. He then has exciting events happen and he writes in a fairly simple manner so that the average person doesn't have to struggle to understand what is going on.

So the meat of it is that his books sell because they are easy to read and have exciting plots. Does it matter that he writes in a laughable manner much of the time? No not at all because it makes some semblance of sense and even if it is all spectacular hogwash it makes the reader feel smart.

Rewarding the reader is one of the important things that we as writers can glean from video games, because you see in well made video games the player is constantly rewarded for playing. From Super mario Bros. where you got that coin sound for collecting coins, or you felt clever for having discovered a secret passage or warp pipe all the way to now where you have call of duty or World of Warcraft that are constantly rewarding the player with points and numbers that help to progress their character. Those well designed programs of rewards are the reason that millions of people have sunk hundreds of hours into those games.

That translates to books because on a pure behavioral level if there are no rewards for continued reading then your reader will stop reading and not recommend your book to friends and then you won't be able to afford that nice house on the Riviera.

I want to think of a good example, and what comes to mind is Harry Potter. Mrs. Rowling starts off immediately by making the reader feel like they are a much more interesting friendly and open-minded person than Mr. Dursley. Then we have the interesting question of what is so objectionable about the Potters that Mr Dursley would be so reluctant in bringing up the topic with his wife. That payoff comes pretty quickly, but then there are other questions and some people feel smart because they figured out that the Dursleys world had magical people, of which the Dursleys strongly disapprove.

Anyhow, my point is not to analyse Harry Potter here, but to talk about a few ways one can make your work more appealing and more likely to sell. Needless to say, a literary fiction which makes the average person feel confused stupid and ignorant is not going to appeal to as wide of an audience. It can still appeal to enough people to sell a fair number of copies, as we see with writers like Thomas Pynchon. His work also functions on the same principles. His audiences like to feel smart and like to be rewarded, after all even academics are human.

I guess in the end I'm not going to advocate that you write books that are appeal to the lowest common denominator like Dan Brown, But I do say that you ought to write to be read. You ought to make your writing for people to appreciate. Because what good is a clever idea or story if no one ever reads it?

Zombies eating my brain!

So today I am not terribly sure about what I want to do. I feel like I should write something and have something to show for myself, but as of yet I only have a few ideas floating around and some stuff sketched out. I do have some amount written down but I'm not sure where it's going.

Well anyhow I think that I ought to get to writing some more. So that's what I'm going to do today.

Sticking To Writing Podcast #1

sticktowriting podcast

The first podcast on the topic of sticking with writing. I've got a backlog of a few podcasts that I hope to clean up and post as time goes on.

Let me know what you think in the comments!

Community of writers

Some people say that having a community of writers and writing friends is helpful in writing.

I don't really know, I can see that having someone to help push you and encourage you to write every day can be helpful to keep you on task. On the other hand I think that the practice of talking about writing and doing workshops is largely a waste of time if the end result isn't more writing.

ugh, someone is watching some stupid rednecks in a reality show in the next room, god I hate TV.

forever Young

Krashen has a nice article from October about keeping your brain fit.

Who doesn't love Krashen? in the article he recommends reading, learning a second language and drinking coffee. I don't know about drinking coffee but I like reading much better than silly things like watching TV.

"Older people who read more do better on tests of mental ability. If fact they do a lot better"

http://www.sdkrashen.com/articles/Keeping_Your_Brain_Young.pdf

greets

Alright a fresh morning to start off with. Though granted it isn't morning when I am writing this.

Well so this is the first post, I am full of plans for this blog, I want to talk about writing and language learning and other interesting topics that cross my mind. I also plan on releasing some podcasts to accompany the blog and for the moment I'll post those on posterous and link to them. I have a few which need cleaning up first.

Welcome to my new home, hope you enjoy it!