Karinwritesdangerously

Commitment. Confidence. Consistency. In a Success Hotline message (973.743.4690), my friend and mentor Rob Gilbert identified these three C’s as the building blocks of a successful endeavor. Let’s explore their meaning to us as writers:

Commitment: In my mind, a commitment is a promise we make to ourselves — something we take a stand on that’s important and motivating to us. We reach deep into ourselves and decide that whatever we choose to do simply has to be done, without exception. We say to ourselves, “I can, I will, I must” — and we make it happen.

Confidence: This “can do” feeling springs from our belief in our work. Whatever the challenges, we feel equal to them. Confidence is a belief in our innate ability to achieve what we set out to do — to find our way. Yes, there will be obstacles. Yes, doubts will assail us — but like the wind that blows through the branches of a tree, our doubts may shake us, but we will stand strong and they will pass away. 

Consistency: Staying power — the willingness and steadiness of purpose to sustain our commitment through the daily rounds of life. To fulfill our commitment and bolster our confidence, we need to persevere and build momentum through sustained action.

I’d add three C’s to this list:

Concentration: One-pointedness. The ability to screen out distractions and turn all our mental powers to the job at hand. When we concentrate fully, we are in flow: Time stops and there is only now.

Creativity: We have everything we need inside us — a boundless wellspring of ideas we can tap into when we are relaxed yet focused, when we let our work lead us where it wants to go. Relaxed alertness is the open door to creativity.

Courage: The strength and resolve to be bigger than our fears — to see them as paper tigers and break through the self-imposed barriers we build for ourselves. The courage to both dream and do, to fuel our passion with discipline.

When we bring all these to our work consistently, we create “C” Changes—we magically transform ourselves into the writers we want to be. These six qualities and the changes they trigger are the coin of the realm for us. Let’s seek them and spend them wisely as we all write on!

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Whether we’re crafting a short story, novel or play, one of the most powerful — and trickiest tools — in our kit bag is dialogue. Dynamic dialogue makes a story sizzle and gives it forward momentum; lackluster dialogue limps along. How can we inject drive in our dialogue and avoid rookie mistakes? An online story offers some tips:

Keep speeches short: If a character is delivering a pivotal speech, then an extended chunk of dialogue makes sense. But dialogue blocks should usually be pithy and concise — often no more than a few sentences. You can say a lot with a few well-chosen words.

Make each voice unique: Well developed characters will usually have subtle speech patterns that make them distinctive. While you can go overboard in giving each character a verbal tic, it’s important that the reader can easily spot a character’s way of speaking. 

Use dialogue to suggest action: Instead of interrupting a chunk of dialogue with stage directions, you can use a snippet of dialogue to indicate actions. This keeps the story moving and doesn’t interrupt your story or readers’ attention.

Be dramatic: Dialogue is often the perfect vehicle for delivering a big insight or surprising confession, so use it to amp up the emotional drama in your story. But don’t make every speech a “To be or not to be” moment or you’ll wear out your readers. Make those big moments stand out and sparkle.

A few “don’ts” to steer clear of: 

Too many adverbs: They can undercut your dialogue. Avoid sentences like, “I hate my life!” she said gloomily: You’re saying the same thing twice.

Getting creative with dialogue tags: In most cases, you want dialogue tags to just melt away, not attract attention. That’s why it can be best to stick with he or she “said” most of the time. Using tags like “moaned” or “laughed” can be problematic because people can’t talk and moan or laugh at the same time. You are either doing one or the other. On the flip side, using “said” constantly can be annoying. A reader should be able to figure out from the dialogue who’s saying what most of the time.

Using dialect: Unless you’re a master at this, it can backfire. Use it sparingly. A quick turn of phrase may be all you need to signal a speech pattern.

The words we put in our character’s mouths matter. So let’s choose them with care as we all write on!

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“Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.” Daphne Du Maurer

Today, May 13, is Daphne Du Maurier’s birthday—she was born in 1907. Perhaps best known for her amazing novel, Rebecca, she also penned other well-known novels and short stories that have stood the test of time. Reading Rebecca after seeing the classic movie, was quite an experience. A few thoughts on it that might spark your own muse.

The story begins at the end: The novel begins with several pages of description just dripping with decay. Du Maurer describes Manderley, not in its glory, but in its decline. Naturally as readers, we want to know what happened. Why is Nature encroaching on a place that was once alive with human activity?

Place becomes a character: As we are taken back in time and visit Manderley in its heyday, it quickly becomes clear that it is not just a setting, but also a character in the novel. It seems to live and breathe and have a life on its own, and to affect the people who live there in strange and unexpected ways.

A sense of foreboding creates confusion: From the very beginning of the novel, people begin doing and saying things that seem jarring and disquieting. They seem to be living on the surface of life, while all sorts of emotions roil around just below the surface. This keeps you as the reader, fascinated and engaged. Who are they really? What do they really want? Why aren’t they being honest? As a reader, these are some of the questions you ask yourself. Naturally, you keep on reading.

Everyone has something to hide: As the story unfolds, you realize that everything, even the naive heroine, has something to hide. Nothing is really as it seems. You begin to wonder when the truth will surface, when what’s really happening will be revealed. This keeps you off balance as a reader, which is both enticing and unsettling.

The plot twist at the end is earned: When the story shifts at the end and we see more clearly what’s really going on, we don’t feel cheated. We feel as if the writer earned that ending, because she dropped clues all along the way. And now, as we look back, we see everything in a different light. We see what we didn’t see before. Masterful plotting!

It’s so much fun to read the novels of a masterful writer! There’s so much to admire and to learn. Check out Rebecca—what an amazing, atmospheric novel. Write on!

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“Train Your Brain to Thrive from Nine to Five from the CenterforBrainHealth.org offers some techniques for venturing into our day with “renewed mental vigor.” Renewed mental vigor — sounds great, doesn’t it? Here is a simple strategy for getting the most from a day. It’s an approach we can easily apply to the writing life:

• The night before, identify one or two of the most pivotal tasks you’re facing — tasks that will require deep thinking and advance your longer term goals/vision. (Note: I do this all the time. I have a small pad by my bed and before going to sleep, I jot down a question about a scene or thorny plot point I need help with.)

• Then simply “sleep on” the question or priorities without any effort, relaxing into the belief that it’s in “good hands” and the answer will come to you. By priming your brain the night before notes the report, “you are likely to have unanticipated, new, and productive ideas. Our brain is always working for us especially during sleep when our rhythms slow down. Your brain consolidates your previous ideas into flashes of new insights that can jump-start your big goals for the day.” In short, “just sleep on it” really works!

• In the morning, as you get ready to begin your day, make it a point to keep your environment quiet except for meaningful conversations. Don’t turn on the TV or radio. Try not to make any calls or even listen to music. Just let your brain continue focusing without interruption on the tasks you gave it the night before. 

• When you start to work, don’t get distracted with email or other small tasks. Jump right into the ones you set for yourself the night before. Give them “prime brain time and stick to these top one or two priorities until you make progress.” Start with 15-minute intervals of concentration and work up from there. “You will achieve more in 20 to 30 minutes uninterrupted than you will in over two hours when constantly interrupted.’

• Give yourself regular “brain breaks.” “When working on “mentally challenging activities for more than 25 minutes at a time, take a five-minute break. Your brain quickly resets and recovers from fatigue when you step back. As an added bonus, new visions are likely to arise regarding your task.”

What a promising approach! It works! Just by jotting down a question before I go to bed and then just relaxing and trusting that my mind will work on it, I’ve awakened with some great ideas and solutions. A relaxed mind is a creative mind — this is so true. Why not try this technique? I’d love to have you share the results. Write on! 

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“Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.”
David McCullough

“Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it. Success is shy. It won’t come out while you’re watching.”
Tennessee Williams

“Success is shy” — this intriguing idea prompted me to search my author quotes for other thoughts on success. Here are some to ponder:

“Your success and happiness lie within you.”
Helen Keller

“Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
Woody Allen

“Everything bows to success, even grammar.”
Victor Hugo

“I have learned that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
Henry David Thoreau

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates a talented individual from a successful one is a lot of hard work.”
Stephen King

“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
Winston Churchill

“To love what you do and feel that it matters — how could anything be more fun?
Katherine Graham”

“There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way.”
Christopher Morley

“What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.”
Julia Cameron 

“Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.”
Tom Clancy

May a spark here catch fire for you today as we all write on!

For Mother’s Day, a beautiful bouquet of words full of hope and love:

“All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother.”
Abraham Lincoln

“Mama was my greatest teacher, a teacher of compassion, love and fearlessness.
If love is sweet as a flower, then my mother is that sweet flower of love.”
Stevie Wonder

“This heart, my own dear mother, bends, with love’s true instinct, back to thee!”
Thomas Moore

“God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers.”

Twilight

Of all the hours of day or night
Give me the twilight hour,
When little birds hide out of sight
And every sylvan bower
Is filled with their sweet good night song,
While darkness creeps apace
O’er all the bright blue sky along
And hides the sun’s gold face.

That is the hour when Mother dear
Says, “Come, sweetheart,” to me,
“And of the earth’s great heroes hear
While sitting on my knee.”
Upon her arm I rest my hand
And wondrous stories hear,
Until it’s time to go to bed,
Tucked in by Mother dear.

—Winifred Sackville Stoner, Jr.

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“Everything I’ve written …has seemed to me, at one point or another, something I probably ought to abandon. Even the best things I’ve written have seemed to me at some point to be very unlikely to be worth the effort I had already put into them. But I know I have to push through….For me, it’s more important to keep the discipline of finishing things than to be assured at every moment that it’s worth doing.”
Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life

“Everything can look like a failure in the middle.”
Rosabeth Moss Kanter

How True! When starting a new writing project, it’s natural to feel hopeful and excited — after all, anything is possible. And When a project is finally completed, we often feel a sense of satisfaction and well, completion. But in between, there’s what Tim Brown, who served as CEO of the creative think tank IDEO calls , “…a negative emotional valley labeled ‘insight.’” This is a very tough place to be, because we often feel that we’ve lost our way and are floundering. 

Many writers and other creatives become so downhearted when they hit this phase of a project, that they give up. But Brown notes that it can be easier to survive and push through this phase if we realize that failure in the middle of a project is a natural, predictable part of the creative process and should be expected 

In her wonderful guide, The Art of Slow Writing, Louise DeSalvo, the author of seventeen books, has an entire chapter called “Failure in the Middle” in which she highlights the authors I’ve quoted here. In it, she also shares her own experience with this stage: “For me, too, the toughest part of the writing process comes in the middle. Middle. Muddle. That’s how it’s always been, although I forget from one book to the next. I start a book, excited. I go to the desk eagerly, write page after page, scene after scene. I don’t yet know what the book is about, but at the beginning, I don’t need to . At this stage, anything goes.”

As Louise describes it, this excitement can sustain her through a draft and even revising. “But then, there’s that moment when we realize that a mass of pages, no matter how good they are, no matter how good they might become, don’t constitute a book. A book is different in kind, not in degree, from a mass of pages. This is the dreaded middle.” Even though we feel like a failure, at this point, adds Louise, “it’s a necessary stage that no creative person can avoid.”

The only way out of the middle — and this is the tough part — is to write through it. So, it you’re in the middle of something and feeling muddled, just keep going! For more help, see my posts, “Fall-apart Stage” and check out Louise DeSalvo’s great guide, The Art of Slow Writing. And then, wherever you are, just sit down — and write on!

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“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Frederick Douglass

“Your dreams always lie outside your comfort zone.” Coach Mike Tully

“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”   Robert Browning

A story worth reminding ourselves of: A butterfly was struggling to break free of its cocoon. Someone watching the slow and painful progress the tiny butterfly was making took pity on it and slit the cocoon so the butterfly could escape more easily. Once it emerged, the little butterfly tried to spread its wings. But it tried in vain — and perished. The human helper later learned with sorrow that it in the act of struggling to free itself from the cocoon a butterfly’s wings are coated with a substance that strengthens them so that once it leaves the cocoon, it can fly. The struggle gives it strength.

“Struggle” is not an easy word to embrace: It suggests resistance, obstacles, impediments. Who wants to struggle, to battle for ground, to fight in order to make progress on the page? And yet, it’s hard to argue with Frederick’s view that there’s no progress without struggle.

With this in mind, can we transform our attitude toward it?

Here’s one approach suggested by my friend and mentor Dr. Rob Gilbert:* When you face a struggle or hit a problem, “don’t get frustrated, get fascinated.” What a novel idea! When we’re fascinated, we’re empowered: we become energized, we become inventive, we come up with ideas. The obstacle we face turns into a challenge, not a roadblock.

So, why not try it? Sometime today, or sometime soon, you are going to be struggling with something on the page: a clumsy paragraph, a creaky plot point, a character who’s wooden instead of alive. When you find yourself caching a challenge on the page, don’t resist the struggle, embrace it. Get fascinated instead of frustrated and impel it to release its strengthening powers to you. Write on!

* Check out Dr. Gilbert’s wonderful Success Hotline: 973.743.4690.

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“The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful will win.”

“The reason sport is attractive to many of the general public is that it’s filled with reversals. What you think may happen doesn’t happen. A champion is beaten, an unknown becomes a champion.”

“The mile has all the elements of drama.”

Roger Bannister

It’s almost here! Wednesday, May 6, marks a legendary moment in sports and human history. Here’s why: May 6, 1954 is the day that Roger Bannister, a British medical student, ran the the four-minute mile. Just about everyone thought it was impossible do: The medical community warned that a runner’s heart would explode at the pace needed to run a mile in under 4 minutes. Even Roger thought it might be true, but he ran it anyway.

But here’s something even more amazing I’ve learned about Roger, thanks to my friend and mentor Dr. Rob Gilbert’s fabulous Success Hotline (973.743.4690): he only trained 45 minutes a day! That’s right: while his competitors were practicing long hours, Roger put in less than 60 minutes a day. After all, he was a medical student with a full work-and-study schedule; he didn’t have any stray minutes to spare.

But as Rob says, “It’s not how much time you put in, it’s how much you put in the time.” Roger made up in intensity what he lacked in quantity. He’s surely a beacon of inspiration for of us who have limited time to write each day. If Roger could run his way into the history books footfall by footfall, well then, we can write our way in word by word. And as Roger proves, we don’t need tons of time to do it, we just need commitment, focus, intensity, and discipline.

Here are two more fascinating facts in this story. First, right after Roger broke the barrier, other people left and right began running four minutes miles. By proving it was possible, he made it probable.

Second, when Roger ran his way into history, he was rebounding from a huge defeat: He had just recently competed in the Olympics, but failed to medal, though he was England’s great hope. After wiping out in the Olympics, instead of giving up, he set an even bigger goal: becoming the first man in history to run the four-minute mile — and dedicated himself to it. Now that’s persistence! Ultimately, Roger hung up his track shoes and became a world-class neurologist. He was also knighted, not once, but twice. What a story — write on!

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Albert Einstein is believed to have invented the theory of relativity while riding his bicycle. Evidence is mounting that taking breaks from mental activity boosts productivity and creativity. The reverse is also true: Skipping breaks can create fatigue and stress. 

Mental concentration is similar to a muscle—after sustained use, it needs a rest to refresh and recover, much as a weight lifter needs rest in-between round of reps. 

“Short and frequent intervals of study” — that’s the advice one of my high-school teachers gave us about studying. It turns out, she was right. Working intensely for short periods of 25 minutes or even 15 minutes punctuated by brief breaks can be more productive than sitting long hours at a desk. Breaks also encourage flashes of inspiration.

Here are a few easy brain-boosting break ideas to work into your day:

Listen to a guided meditation for 10 or 15 minutes. There are tapes and CDs that promote relaxation and mental refreshment — and reduce muscle tension. Just put on a pair of headsets and you’re off.

Close your eyes and take 10 deep breaths. Walk away from your desk. Find a quiet place, where you can sit, close your eyes, smile to yourself and take a few deep breaths. Imagine tension, stress and anxiety leaving your body as you breathe out, and peacefulness, positivity and relaxation filling your mind with every breath.

Eat an apple. In the middle of a busy day, when you feel rushed, take a few minutes to eat an apple (or another favorite fruit). Just do it very slowly. Notice the flavor, the texture, the freshness. After a few minutes you’ll feel much calmer and less stressed.

Energize yourself with H2O. Drink a full glass of water, then splash some water on your face: warm to relax or cold to wake up and make yourself more alert.

Do something artistic. Write a short, funny poem. Draw a picture or doodle. Take a few photos of your surroundings. Let your creative side shine!

Get moving: Leave your cell phone behind and head outside for a brisk walk to refresh yourself. Try interval walking—raising your heartbeat and letting both your mind and body relax and recharge.

A relaxed mind is a creative mind: Just remember this and write on!

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