Month: January 2020

3 Habits of a freshman writer (and why you should concentrate on only these)

Neera 1 Comment

I wish someone had told me, or better still, I had figured it out myself at the beginning of my writing journey. It took me twenty years of painful, frustrating, trial-and-error learning to figure out that I only needed to concentrate on developing three habits in the first year to become a writer.

Like all aspiring writers, I wanted to write and publish a book as soon as possible.

Why on earth would you write anything else? 

I wanted to have something to show for all the hours I was investing in learning the craft.

This had been my approach with every endeavor. Even as a teenager, when I started learning embroidery, the only projects I ever undertook were the ones that I could hang on walls. I was not interested in embroidering table clothes and bedsheets, which wear off after a few years of use. My tapestries and cross-stitch are still hanging in my living room in expensive gilded frames.

In the busy, achievement-driven, self-important society we live in today, it is quite logical to set ourselves a goal of writing a book as soon as we can put a few sentences together.

It is no accident that the creative writing industry is booming. Everyone thinks there is a book in them, and everyone is in a race to write the next bestseller.

While I had every excuse on the planet (full-time job, raising a family, looking after aged parents) for not writing my book, the truth is writing is a skill hard to master. It takes time, and it takes old fashion hard work. Modern distractions (TV, mobile phones, social media) don’t help.

But as I became a veteran, I realized a simple strategy would have given me much better results in much less time. I was so trying too damn hard that I failed to see it.

Writing is not a God-given gift or attribute of geniuses. It is a set of habits you develop over time, just like a sportsman or a singer or a dancer does.

Rather than getting overwhelmed by all the learning, I believe you should concentrate on developing just three habits in your freshman year.

1. Write Daily

No excuses. Full stop.

Write one page, or one paragraph, or just one sentence. But write every day.

Write whatever. It doesn’t matter what you write. When you are starting, you are writing to learn to put your thoughts on paper. The actual content doesn’t matter; the formation of sentences does.

Write about your day, mood, surroundings, the tree outside your window, the smell in the air, the sound of the birds, or a conversation you overheard at the bus stop. If nothing else, write about the weather. You are not writing for others but for yourself to develop your muscles.

Your body has writing muscles. Did you know that?

Neither did I.

But apparently, it does.

Just like our body has drawing muscles (as my drawing instructor told me). Since I was not using them, they were deteriorating. I started drawing a sketch every day, and they got stronger and stronger. I am drawing much better sketches within a year of practice.

Start exercising your writing muscles daily. You will be surprised by the result.

You can write online, on your computer, or better still in a notebook. My preference is a notebook. Something magical happens when your fingers glide across the paper. They knock on a special area in your brain where creativity resides.

2. Read Daily

Reading is an easier habit to develop than writing. If you are interested in writing, you may be an avid reader. If books inspired you to write, great, continue reading them.

Rather double the amount of reading in your freshman year.

Read in different genres. Reading books in the genre of your liking will make you a boring writer. To become a good writer, you must be well-informed in other fields as well. That is called cross-pollination. You will find that the novel you started writing had ideas from the gardening book you read years ago. This is exactly what happened when Elizabeth Gilbert wrote the “Signature of All Things.” She was reading about the plants in her pots and where they originally came from, and lo behold; she found a 500-page story to tell.

You need to read with a purpose. Start a journal and note down the paragraphs that inspire you or the quotes you can refer to in your own writing. It is a significant phase of your development as a writer because all this reading will influence and infuse your thoughts.

There is nothing more frustrating when years later, you want to refer to a story, and you can’t remember which book it was from. Or worst still, you don’t remember at all, which leads to habit number three.

3. Organize your writing and notes

No writing book or article I ever read mentioned organizing your writing and notes, yet it is one of the most important habits for new writers.

I have spent months trying to find things that I scribbled somewhere or notes I took and forgot about them. A writer needs a system to organize and store their work and their notes.

Your system should consist of three things.

a. An easy but robust filing system. Both digital and paper-based. Save everything. Any writing which seems trivial at the moment will sound beautiful when read months or years later.

b. Easy retrievability. When you need anything, you know where to look for it and how to retrieve it.

c. An Idea Notebook. This is to capture any idea you get at any time of the day. It should travel with you everywhere, even in the bathroom (especially in the bathroom to capture the ideas you will get in the shower).

Everyone is different. The way you will figure out your system will be different too. It is worth sharing mine here so that you can cherry-pick what you like.

My physical filing system is a string of diaries and journals — separate diaries for separate purposes. In my daily diary, I write about my day. I have one page per day diary, which is all I need to capture my day. On the other hand, my journal is a register size where I write about thoughts, ideas, feelings, and notes from my readings.

Digitally, I have moved from Word documents to Evernote to store everything under appropriate categories. Evernote is one of the best note-taking apps and is available for free with lesser functionality. It has a mighty search engine, and as long as you can remember one word in an article or story you are searching for, it will dish it out for you.

I also use 750Words, a digital app, to write daily. It gives me a blank page and 24 hours to fill it. My writing is stored on the cloud and is accessible at any time. I can write from home, work, or bus stop using my phone.

For writing novels and non-fiction books, I use Scrivener, an application for writers developed by writers. It takes writing tools from everywhere and bundles them into one application.

This is it—the three habits of a freshman writer.

You don’t have to worry about characterization, plotting, great opening lines, foolproof headlines, and all that jazzy stuff so many books throw at you. Leave them for the sophomore year. First, build these habits, which will set the groundwork for a serious writer.

Concentrate all your energy on developing and cementing these three habits, and you will be on your way to becoming the writer you want to become — a bestselling author in not so distant future.

Photo by Chris Spiegl on Unsplash

The things they should have taught us in school

Neera

When I read the preface of Mark Forsyth’s book The Elements of Eloquence I got mad. Really, really mad. All this time, all this knowledge, existed and we were not even aware of it. Not only that, there was an unashamed attempt to hide it, ban it from teaching in schools.

Today’s post is inspired by the Preface of Mark Forsyth’s book “The Elements of Eloquence”

Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without a shadow of a doubt, the most writer who ever lived. But he was not gifted. No angels handed him the words and no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learned techniques, he learned tricks and he learned them well.

I bet not many people know of Shakespeare’s earlier plays. Nobody is sure of which one is his first play but Love’s Labour’s Lost, Titus Andronicus and Henry VI Part 1. The reason not many people haven’t even heard of them is that they were not very good. There isn’t a single memorable line in any of them and Shakespeare is known for his memorable lines.

His first memorable line that everybody knows is from Henry VI Part 2.

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

Then the other one came from Henry VI Part 3.

“I can smile, and murder while I smile.”

Later on, each successive play had more and more great lines. By the time he wrote Much Ado and Julius Caesar and Hamlet and King Lear, he was a master at work we all know of.

Why?

Because he learned. He got better and better because he started badly as most people do when they start a new job. Like a doctor, or a teacher or an accountant at the start of their professional career. Everybody gets better as they progress, so did Shakespeare. He did that by mastering the techniques of good writing he learned at school.

Luckily for him, at his time, English was taught in a proper way in schools. The composition was an integral part of Elizabethan education. And they were teaching the ‘figures of rhetoric.’

Have you heard of figures of rhetoric? I admit I haven’t. And I was taught English from grade one. I have been reading grammar, composition and a mountain of books on how to write better English. But never before I came across the figures of rhetoric.

Why is that? I am beginning to smell something fishy here.

Elizabethan London was crazy about rhetoric figures. George Puttenhan wrote a bestseller on them in 1589 (a year before Shakespeare’s first play). A decade before that Henry Peachman wrote The Garden of Eloquence. Books after books were published about the figures of rhetoric. Shakespeare learned and used them extensively in his writings.

What are figures of rhetoric and why we haven’t heard of them?

Forsyth writes, “Rhetoric is a big subject, consisting of the whole art of persuasion. It includes logic, it includes speaking loudly and clearly, and it includes working out what topics to talk about. Anything to do with persuasion is rhetoric, right down to the argumentum ad baculum, which means threatening somebody with a stick until they agree with you.

One minuscule part of this massive subject is the ‘figure of rhetoric’, which are the techniques for making a single phrase striking and memorable just by altering the words. Not by saying something different, but by saying something in a different way. They are the formulas for producing great lines.

These formulas were thought up by the Ancient Greeks and then added to by the Romans. At Shakespeare’s time, the classical work on rhetoric was dug out, translated and adapted for use in English. England was a century behind than Greeks and Romans.

So Shakespeare learned and learned and got better and better and his lines became more and more striking and more and more memorable.”

So if they were so good, then why weren’t we taught those in school?

Forsyth gives three reasons:

1) England needed woodworkers.

2) People were always suspicious of rhetoric in general and figures in particular. If somebody learns how to phrase things beautifully, they might be able to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Stern people dislike rhetoric, and unfortunately, it is usually the stern people who are in charge.

3) The Romantic Movement came along at the end of the eighteenth century. The Romantics like to believe that you could learn everything worth learning by gazing at a babbling mountain brook, or running barefoot through the fields, or contemplating a Grecian urn. They wanted to be natural and figures of rhetoric are not natural. They are formulas, formulas that you can learn from a book.

All that the Greeks were doing was noting down the best and most memorable phrases they heard, and working out what the structures were, in much the same way that when you and I eat a particularly delicious meal, we might ask for the recipe.

So with the dislike of beauty and books, the figures of rhetoric were largely forgotten. But that didn’t mean they ceased to be used. The figures are, to some extent, are alive and well. We still use them, but haphazardly. While Shakespeare had them beaten into him at school, we might occasionally, use it by accident and without realizing it.

The best way of knowing that the figures are alive and thriving is that one line from a movie you can’t seem to forget. It is most likely a figure of rhetoric. The songs you sing you can’t get out of your head, the poems you love, the dialogues you repeat are all rhetoric growing wild.

Rather than being taught about how a poem is phrased, we were asked to write an essay on what William Blake thought about Tiger.

A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is one and the only difference between the poet and everybody else.

Mark Forsyth

Mark Forsyth explains the ‘figures of rhetoric’ devoting one chapter to each in The Elements of Eloquence and I intend to learn them and use them in my writing if possible. The study of rhetoric did not entirely disappear with Romantics but it is a complete mess.

There are still scholarly articles written about them but it is usually to debate the definitions rather than how to use them in everyday language. I think it is up to us, the writers of the twenty-first century, to revive this ancient art and benefit from the work of our predecessors.

Forsyth ends the preface of his book with a great paragraph which I would use to end this post as well. A point to note is Forsyth is not attacking or debunking Shakespeare in any way, he considers him the greatest craftsman ever lived. Insulting him would be insulting Wright Brothers for explaining the principles of aerodynamics or Neil Armstrong for walking on the moon.

Shakespeare did not consider himself sacred. He would often just steal content from other people. However, whatever he stole he improved, and he improved it using the formulas, flowers, and figures of rhetoric.

Photo by Jessica Pamp on Unsplash

Fury of Nature and Importance of Things

Neera

It is close to mid-day and wind is blowing with a ferocity that reflects Mother Nature’s fury. The temperature today is going to soar to 37 degrees.

The grass fire that was brought under control at Pialligo yesterday (which led to the evacuation) has reignited and is showing a red alert.

Another one has broken out in Phillip, just 3 kms away from my home and is showing out-of-control in the Fire Alert App I have downloaded on my phone.

I wouldn’t have known but for my daughter who texted to alert me. That pressed the panic button. I should prepare to flee. If the wind brings fire to my direction, it will not take it long to reach my home. My non-existent fire plan has just two water hoses which will be completely ineffective in this wind. I will not be able to save the house that is evident. Fleeing is my only option.

If I am to run away, which will be at the notice of five-minutes, what will I take with me? It is a question like the one I tackled once in a writing workshop – if you find out you are going to die in six months, what will you do in those six months?

Just like I would live my life condensed in six months, I should pick up the things that matter the most. But which ‘things’ mattered the most? What should I take with me?

I go from room to room trying to figure out. What can I salvage and what can I leave at the mercy of the fires? Perhaps nothing. All that clutter, which is a cause so much frustration on a daily basis suddenly feels so endearing. This clutter is somehow attached to my identity. It can’t imagine my life without these unnecessary things I have collected over the years.

Or, can I?

I know fully-well that when the time comes, I will leave everything as it is. I will save my life and life of my loved ones more than anything else. And when I come back, after the havoc, to the site where my house stood one day, I will cry for their loss. The things I thought I couldn’t live without will now live in my memory and I will continue to live my life.

This is how versatile we are. We spend our lives working like mad, earning money so that we can buy lots of things, well aware that none of them matter. Yet it is so hard to part with them. They do have some sort of meaning in our lives. Our possessions root us. To the place where we live. They bring a sense of belonging. Without them, we feel empty.

Maybe this trait of defining our identity with the stuff we accumulate separates us from other animals whose existence is complete without any possession. While ours depend on our possessions. The more we have, the more settled we feel.

As I think of these wild thoughts, I begin to understand the agony of hundreds of people who have lost their houses to fires in the last few weeks. The whole nation is mourning over their loss but as Joan Didion said, “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”

Winds are getting fiercer and fiercer. I am feeling a curious blend of anxiety and calmness. It is one of those moments when you just want to leave everything in God’s hands and resort to prayer. A place of hope at a time of helplessness.

I move from room to room making a mental note of things I should grab if I have the time and the inclination to do it but make no move to gather them in boxes as I did seventeen-years-ago when a terrible fire took Canberra in its grip and burned hundreds of houses. While I do that I take pictures of the ‘things’ in each room so that I could morn them if fires consume them.

I wish you well. I pray for your homes to remain safe. And I beg forgiveness from Mother Nature.

The greatness lies in making those paragraphs great

Neera

Every time I start writing something new, I find myself asking these questions:

  • Can I write it? 
  • Can I write it well? 
  • What will people think if I can’t write it well? 
  • What kind of a writer will I be if I constantly can’t write well? 
  • Should I be writing at all?

I know it is not just me. All writers have these demons they constantly fight. You have to if you want to write. You have to grapple with these fears, put them out of your mind, and go for it. Some people can’t do it. For some people, it’s too paralyzing. 

Some writers constantly worry, “What if I can’t get published? What is the point of writing, then? How do I get published? 

They get so preoccupied with these questions that they never give themselves a chance to truly experience the art of what they’re doing. Which incidentally is the big payoff.

Writing itself is a payoff for all the work we do.

The great success as a writer isn’t getting published but is making those paragraphs sane. 

It’s in discovering ideas in yourself that you never thought were there. 

That’s where the greatness lies.

The greatness doesn’t lie in getting published or getting a great review in some newspaper or magazine. Or receiving lots of claps. They are nice, but the greatness has to do with the feeling you have in yourself that you’ve created something important and the sense of accomplishment you feel while creating it.

Every paragraph you write, every sentence you construct, in a way, is your creation — by design, by meditation, by argument, by wondering, by analysis. 

It is your artwork to convey whatever you want to say. 

Every paragraph is part of the story you are telling. 

Every sentence is a piece of one puzzle. 

If you concentrate on the sentences and paragraphs, make them so beautiful that your own soul gets immersed in their beauty, then no outer reward is going to matter.

Good writing holds its reader’s hand and leads her through the unfurling of itself, pointing back to the last step and forward to the next, showing her the map, reminding her of the destination. Good writing is a coherent journey back to the place where it began. It’s a circle. It’s a wall whose logic is implicit in every stone. In good writing, a reader finds it hard to get lost.

– Mark Tredinnick in The Little Red Writing Book

Are your paragraphs doing that?

Holding your reader’s hand and leading them back and through, out of the maze, in an effortless manner.

They don’t have to lead them straight out. There has to be some drama, some mystery, and a bit of uncertainty. In the hands of a good writer, readers enjoy all that. 

Because in the hands of a good writer, they feel safe. They know when it is all over, they will be happy that they took the journey.

“Make your prose as you might make a drystone wall. You are not bonding the pieces; they just have to fit. How will you chisel each stone, how will you turn it and set it down so that it sits comfortably with its neighbors and carries the wall forward? “ — Mark Tredinnick

Whenever I feel too distressed with my own writing, I pull out Mark Tredinnick’s The Little Red Writing Book and start reading randomly. This is what he writes on the last page.

I wrote this book because I long, and I don’t think I am alone, to read more sentences so well made, so perfectly uttered, they make one weep — in their form and rhyme, in their topography and amplitude and the truthful spaces onto which the open. Let plots take care of themselves; it’s time more writers spent more care shaping astonishing sentences. Elegant, shapely, heartbreaking — in the way a mountain range ora horse, a woman’s form, a child’s voice, the posture of a tree, the taste of a wine can be.

Most of us worry too much about getting published than writing elegant, clear, and lovely prose that sings. 

It is no small feat, hard to begin, and even harder to sustain. It is no good to be content with one or two good sentences. 

“A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art, should carry its justification in every line.” — Conrad

The struggle to improve our prose is the struggle to improve ourselves. Immerse yourself in that struggle and you will get your reward.

Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash

3 Essential elements of art that every artist must incorporate in their practice

Neera

When my daughters were five and two years old respectively, my husband decided he wanted them to learn classical dance. It was a bit surprising because there was no one with any artistic inclination on both sides of the family.

We found a local teacher who came from a reputed ‘classical dance family’ from north India. Her parents ran a Bharat Natyam school in India while her sister and she ran similar schools in Singapore and Australia.

We enrolled our daughters in her school and a very strict regime started for them at a very early age. Rules were strict and inflexible. Many kids left. Those who survived had to put their heart and soul into something which others regarded as just an extracurricular activity.

For this dedicated teacher and her whole family, Bharat Natyam is art. And art demands nothing less than total commitment.

One of the rules was an annual dance performance. There was no escape from it. Every student regardless of age or expertise had to participate.

Preparation for the performance demanded more than two months of commitment. Extra classes, longer session, repeat performance, full program rehearsals, full dress rehearsals, stage rehearsals. Sometimes my children had to practice four nights a week that too after school on winter nights. Even exams were not an excuse. Parents had to chip-in too, by selling tickets and cooking food to be sold during the break.

A normal perception could be that she would make a lot of money from it but she wasn’t. She was, in fact, putting money from her own pocket to buy costumes and jewelry. And she was spending countless hours into training before the show.

Why performance was so important?

Because without performance the students won’t get better. The age of teaching traditions of classical Indian dancing has an inbuilt element of performance. It is believed without performance, there is no learning.

To qualify as a Barat Natyam dancer a student has to perform Arangetram – an on-stage solo performance for three hours in front of a live audience. Not only the dancer has to have the stamina to dance for three hours but she also has to have variety in her performance to captivate the audience for that long.

Writing is also an art.

We need to present our work, on a regular basis.

We need to develop stamina too. Without that, we won’t be able to meet deadlines.

And we also need to develop pizzazz in our writing to captivate our readers.

Whether you are a dancer, painter, or writer you got to find a way to incorporate – presentation, stamina and pizzazz -in your art.

The images are from Cultural India.

Don’t set goals, set a theme instead

Neera

As you might have figured out I am a big fan of setting goals. All my life I have been setting goals.

Setting SMART goals was ‘the‘ thing of my time. All motivational speakers were harping about it including Brian Tracy who made goal setting a phenomenon in the nineties and the twenties.

Goals are great but there is one big problem with them when you can’t achieve them you feel terrible.

On a day-to-day basis, goals often lead to anxiety, worry, and regret rather than fulfillment, pride, and contentment. They exert pressure from afar. Once fulfilled they just disappear, leaving a vacuum which we try to fill with a new goal.

And when you do achieve them, the happiness that comes from it only lasts momentarily. Then they leave behind a vacuum that we try to fill by setting more goals, bigger and higher ones this time, and the whole cycle of begins again.

A Harvard researcher, Dr Tal Ben-Shahar (I had the pleasure of attending one of his workshops), describes in his book Happier, something he calls “the arrival fallacy” — the false hope that “reaching some future destination will bring lasting happiness.”

Recently I came across an article by Niklas Göke you don’t need a goal you need a theme.

Why?

Because a theme has no end date.

According to Niklas Göke a theme gives you an achievable, meaningful, daily standard you can live up to. The point of a theme is to make you happy.

A goal splits your actions into good and bad. A theme makes every action part of a masterpiece.

A goal is an external constant you can’t control. A theme is an internal variable you can.

A goal forces you to think about where you want to go. A theme keeps you focused on where you are.

A goal condemns you to order the chaos of life or deem yourself a failure. A theme provides room to succeed amid that chaos.

A goal shuts out opportunities for current fulfillment in favor of a distant payday. A theme looks for opportunities in the present.

A goal asks “where did we get today?” A theme asks “what went well today?”

Goals are sticky. They’re clunky armor, weighing you down. A theme is fluid. It sinks in, becoming part of who you are. It flows from the inside out, allowing you to change as you go.

When we use goals as our primary means of attaining happiness, we trade long-term life satisfaction for short-term motivation and reassurance. A theme gives you a meaningful, achievable standard to live up to. Not once in a while but every day. It’s a way of being content with who you’re becoming, choice by choice, one act at a time, and finding peace in that.

No more waiting. Just decide who you want to be, then be that person.

Niklas Göke

In other words, you feel happy, content and fulfilled and make more progress than you do while going through the cycle jubilation and desolation of goals setting.

It was James Altucher who first switch goals with themes.

The only times I’ve ever made money (and I’ve been on this roller-coaster quite a bit) is when I switched from ‘goals’ to ‘themes’. Instead of having a goal: ‘I need to make money’, I switch to a theme: ‘I want to help people with this product’. Or…” Forget about money completely. I want to help people by writing a blog about honesty, failure, myself, entrepreneurship, and whatever else I can write that people will relate to.

Don’t set goals – Business Insider

Psychologists too emphasize the importance of meaning over pleasure. Meaning comes from your actions, pleasure from results.

The difference between goal and theme is like the difference between passion and purpose, between seeking and finding.

A goal asks “what do I want?” but a theme asks “who am I?”

Now the question is, how to set a theme?

According to Niklas Göke, good themes are verbs and nouns at the same time. Such as ‘Focus,’ Love, ‘Balance,’ ‘Compassion.’ So are the ‘invest,’ ‘help,’ ‘kindness,’ and ‘gratitude.’ 

Each year you can set yourself a new theme depending upon what you want to achieve that year.

With a theme, all you have to do is ask one question: Is this aligned with my theme?

There’s a clear answer, yes or no. For every thought you have, the decision you make, and action you take, if they are aligned with your theme, and you’ll go to bed happier.

Themes support goals, they reduce the pressure goals create. At the same time, they replace the need for your goals to make you happy.

Full converted, I decided to set a theme for myself.

My theme for 2020 is: FOCUS.

The question that will keep my thoughts, actions, and decisions aligned to my theme is: “Does this add to or take away from my focus?”

What will be your theme for 2020?