Month: June 2020

Your story is the only legacy you leave behind

Neera

Elizabeth Gilbert’s (writer of Eat, Pray and Love) father is a Vietnam veteran. She recently shared a very touching conversation between her father and a woman of his age, who had been a hippie and anti-Vietnam War protestor. The woman said to her father, “I was against the war, but I’m sorry that we didn’t respect your service and your sacrifice back then.”

Elizabeth’s father reached across the table, took this woman’s hand and said, “Thank you for saying that. But here’s the thing — your side was right. The protestors were correct. The Vietnam War was unjust and inhumane. I didn’t know it back then, but I know it now. You were right to protest. You were on the right side of history. Without your protests, the war would’ve gone on even longer.”

The woman said, “But all the same — I thank you for your service.” And Elizabeth’s father said, “And I thank you for your protest.”

Both, Elizabeth’s father and the hippie woman have legacies they will be leaving behind. Their stories.

We too will leave our stories behind, and they will be our legacies more than anything else.

If my story is the legacy I am leaving behind then what is my story?

I have never seen my life as a story before. Things that happened in my life are mundane and commonplace. Choices were made, some by me, some by others for me. I got educated, found a good job, built myself a home. I got married, had kids, raised them like everybody else. Where is the story?

And yet when I look at other people’s lives, I can see their stories.

I can see the story in my parents’ struggle, their commitment to give us a good life and their conviction to their professions. I could see Elizabeth Gilbert’s father’s story. A Vietnam veteran who probably went to war at a very young age, to fight a fight which wasn’t his or even his country’s fight. Yet he put his life on the line not knowing until years later that he was fighting on the wrong side.

I could see the story of the woman protester who, equally young, fought a fight on the streets of her hometown, for a cause that didn’t directly affect her. But it mattered so much to her that she chose to face rubber bullets and water canons to make a difference.

Aaha! therein lies the legacy worth leaving behind.

My parents’ legacy was their struggles to fight the scarcities of life of their era to build a better life for themselves and their children. They did that through the medium of education. Their contribution was the propagation of education not only for their own children but for all the children. They were both teachers.

Elizabeth’s father’s legacy is in knowing that he was on the wrong side of the war, accepting that, rehabilitating himself, and becoming a contributing member of society.

The woman protestor’s legacy lies is raising her voice to help make a change so big that it saved thousands of lives and changed the course of history.

We all have stories.

Our stories lie in the choices we make, the lessons we learn, the things we do.

Most of the time we do these without realising that our choices, our lessons and our actions are going to stay behind long after we are gone.

That realisation itself is powerful. Now that we know what our stories are, we can make better stories. We can make better choices. We can learn more meaningful and deep lessons. We can do things that really matter. So that when we come face to face with our mortality we are ready.

We are not used to preparing for our mortality.

Which is a shame.

Death is as much part of life as birth is. We make so much preparation for the arrival of a new life but we don’t prepare ourselves for leaving this life. By that, I don’t mean leaving behind a will or writing your funeral plan. I mean writing your stories.

Have you recorded what choices you made and what lessons you learned? Have you written down which side you chose in the moment of controversy and which fight you fought to make a change?

Ever since I have entered the second half of my life I have more vigilant of my choices. Although the first half of my life seemed mundane and commonplace it still many stories of choices made and lessons learned.

And now that I know that everything I do will one day become my legacy, I can live the rest of my life to make better stories.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

[mc4wp_form id=”138″]

Writing is equivalent to walking down a street naked

Neera

I once got caught cheating in a final examination.

In the year nine maths exam, our examiner from the goodness of her heart gave us five minutes to help each other. The whole room burst into talking. Girls helped each other by giving hints or showing how they had solved certain sums.

I was stuck on an equation. I asked the girl ahead of me who had already solved it. She was one of the brightest students in the class and was tipped to top. She told me the answer in a roundabout way which didn’t make sense. Watching me struggle and five minutes coming to an end the examiner quickly held out her paper for me to have a quick glance. That was enough for me to solve the equation.

The next day, I was summoned to the principal’s room. The other girl had reported what had happened. I received a slap on the face and a warning, the humiliation of which stayed with me for the rest of my life.

Even topping the school and district the next two consecutive years and beating the girl who was tipped to top twice by a vast margin didn’t wash away the shame I felt.

When I first wrote about the incident in a writing class, I felt I was exposing my soul. Yet this is exactly what I had signed up for by choosing to become a writer.

Many aspiring writers do not understand the price they need to pay for the vocation they had chosen. They think writing is an art of putting words on paper. A craft of creating stories by putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. But writing is a commitment to one’s soul.

You need to make three commitments to yourself before you embark on the journey to becoming a writer: Commitment to show:

  • Courage
  • Honesty
  • Perspective

Writing takes courage

Neil Gaiman, one of the most revered writer of our times, was not prepared to reveal anything about himself when he started writing. He didn’t want to be judged. He didn’t want people reading any of his stories to know who he was. If you haven’t read any of his work, many of his books could be described as weird. Then one day he realized,

“…as a writer, you had to be willing to do the equivalent of walking down a street naked. You had to be able to show too much of yourself. You had to be just a little bit more honest than you were comfortable with.”

Neil Gaiman in Masterclass

This is what the readers want to see. They want to see your soul. They want you to spill your authentic self onto the page. And that takes courage. A lot many people want to tell their stories but lack the courage to bring them forth.

So the first pact you make with yourself – As a writer, I shall nurture my courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within me.

Writing demands honesty

Telling a story is one thing, telling an authentic story is another. A fake story is dispelled like fake news even if it is fiction. In fact, fiction needs to be as truthful as non-fiction. Just like a patient needs to be honest with his doctor, a writer needs to be honest with its readers. Writing that titillates because of its shock value breaks readers’ trust and comes to haunt its writer as it did to James Frey who fell from grace for fabricating certain details in his memoir A Million Little Pieces.

At the same time, honesty is not tell-all and reveal-everything and washing your dirty laundry in public. Rather it is a combination of accuracy, sincerity, compassion and truth. Every story contains a snapshot of its creator. You need to give your honest one to your readers.

Your second pact with yourself is – My stories will be a reflection of my honesty.

Writing requires a perspective

If you don’t have a viewpoint, if you are too scared to upset people, if you rather walk in the middle of the road, you should not take up writing a vocation. People want to read your writing because they want to hear your perspective. As a writer, you need to provide a voice to what you are thinking, and by default what others are thinking.

Most people can’t articulate their thoughts and look up to the writers to put words to their feeling. Writers have the responsibility of setting the tone and mood of a generation. That can be done without ruffling some feathers and upsetting a few people. Give your readers what they want: a story with personality and authenticity.

Your third pact with yourself – I shall use my writing as a platform to share my perspective and opinions truthfully and boldly.

Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash

[mc4wp_form id=”138″]

Failing to build a habit to write every day? Try a system instead.

Neera 1 Comment

In the early 1980s, the carrot business was stagnant and wasteful. Growing seasons were long, and more than half of what farmers grew was ugly and unfit for grocery shelves. But then in 1986, a carrot farmer Yurosek, itching to find a way to make use of all the misshapen carrots, tried something new. Instead of tossing them out, he carved them into something more palatable.

At first, Yurosek used a potato peeler, which didn’t quite work because the process was too laborious. But then he bought an industrial green-bean cutter. The machine cut the carrots into uniform 2-inch pieces consistently, the standard baby carrot size persists today.

Yurosek had figured out a system for baby carrot production. To be able to write consistently, writers need a system too.

Most newbie writers struggle to write every day.

I know I did, for many many years. To me, the idea of writing every day was not only incomprehensible but fanciful. And yet the daily practice is a must for every writer. Read about any successful writer and you will find how religious she is about her daily writing.

But getting to that stage is not easy. We know from personal experiences, that building any habit is hard, let alone writing, for which resistance comes in many forms. Procrastination, self-doubt, lack of ideas, getting stuck, limited vocabulary, imposter’s syndrome – all are waiting to bounce on us unsuspecting well-meaning writers making us give up our dreams of becoming a writer.

That is when a system comes to rescue.

A system is a set of procedures to do something efficiently and consistently.

Nature is full of systems. Think of the solar system, ecosystem, cellular system, digestive system, circulatory system, photosynthesis.

Learning from nature, we humans have built ourselves numerous systems. There are systems to building software, systems to transport, systems to govern a country, and believe it or not, a system to do your daily cooking, cleaning, and any other household chores. You follow the system when you go to the gym, do yoga, or play basketball.

Anything hard to do has been converted into a system.

Building a habit is hard but following a system is easy.

The reason I struggled to write daily because I lacked a system. A system not only helps get the work done but also helps build habits.

When I took to writing, I thought I would sit down with a pen in hand, and beautiful prose will flow out of it on the paper. It didn’t happen.

I tried getting up early (because this is what serious writers do), make myself a cup of tea, and waited for the words to come. They didn’t.

I tried morning pages, filled out diaries and journals, participated in the November Novel Writing Month challenge. But I remained sporadic and irregular.

I was disheartened and frustrated and was on the verge of giving up when I discovered the three-bucket system of writing.

The three-bucket system did to my writing what competing in MasterChef does to cooking enthusiasts.

hose new to cooking think of it as a one-step process. Ask any chef, and he will tell you that preparing a meal is a three-step process — shopping, preparation, and cooking.

If you want to cook dinner, you will not first go to the shops, buy the ingredient, come home, do all the preparation( cutting, chopping, soaking, marinating), put the dish together, and then place it in the oven to cook.

Chances are you already have done the shopping. You might have started some preparation too (soaked the lentils a night before, marinated the meat, or have chopped the veggies during the day). So when the time came to cook, you put all the ingredients together and put them in the oven.

Writing is like cooking too. It is made up of three distinct activities:

  1. coming up with ideas
  2. turning those ideas into drafts
  3. editing and publishing

You can’t do them all in one step. You got to separate them, and you got to do each activity every single day. If you can do that, you have a system.

A system doesn’t have to be complicated or confusing. It just has to work. Three-bucket-system is repeatable and straightforward.

What is the three-bucket system?

I first learned about it from Jeff Goings. Three-bucket-system is exactly what the name suggests. Three buckets. Each with a label on it — IDEAS, DRAFTS, and EDITS.

Illustration by Neera Mahajan

Your job is to add something to each bucket every day.

It doesn’t matter how much. You can add just one idea into the IDEAS bucket and only one paragraph in the DRAFTS bucket and EDIT something small, but you mustn’t miss any of the buckets. Soon you have a system going. You will never run out of ideas. You will have plenty of drafts ready to edit.

Ideas can come anytime.

Our job is to capture them whenever they come. Otherwise, they will disappear and never come back. I have a notebook dedicated to ideas. Even if I capture them on the back of an envelope or a serviette, they go in the notebook at the end of the day. So when I sit down to write, I have a whole list to choose from.

You can record them on the phone or in Evernote. The tools don’t matter, as long as you are capturing them.

Set a specific time for first drafts

For me, it is the mornings when my mind is fresh. I don’t set up any alarms to wake up at insane hours. But between waking up and having breakfast, I get my writing done. It’s insanely easy because I have a collection of ideas to choose from, and I know I am just writing the first draft, which means it doesn’t have to be perfect. I will be editing it later at least two or three times.

Afternoons are perfect for editing.

This is when I pick up something I have written the previous day or before and polish it. I do it for just half an hour. No more.

There it is, the three-bucket system of writing.

Just like baby carrots transformed the way people think about carrots, the three-bucket system has changed how I feel about writing.

Try it. You will surely benefit fit from it. Just like I did.

Just like baby carrots transformed the way people think about carrots, the Three-bucket system has transformed the way I think about writing.

Try it, you will surely bend fit from it just like I did.

Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash

Use Lies To Communicate Truth

Neera

A plane went down. The only survivors were some British schoolboys, who couldn’t believe their good fortune. Nothing but beach, shells and water for miles. And better yet: no grownups.

On the very first day, the boys instituted a democracy of sorts. One boy, Ralph, was elected the group’s leader. Athletic, charismatic and handsome, his game plan is simple: 1) Have fun. 2) Survive. 3) Make smoke signals for passing ships. Number one was a success. The other two? Not so much. The boys were more interested in feasting and frolicking than in tending the fire. Before long, they began painting their faces, casting off their clothes and developing overpowering urges – to pinch, to kick, to bite.

By the time a British naval officer comes ashore, the island was a smouldering wasteland. Three of the children were dead. “I should have thought,” the officer said, “that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that.” At this, Ralph burst into tears. “Ralph wept for the end of innocence,” we read, and for “the darkness of man’s heart”.

This story never happened. An English schoolmaster, William Golding, made up this story in 1951. His novel Lord of the Flies sold tens of millions of copies, got translated into more than 30 languages, and was hailed as one of the classics of the 20th century.

In hindsight, the secret to the book’s success is clear. Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. And he used lies to communicate that.

Stories are a vehicle to communicate truth.

Imagine for a moment that instead of writing a fictional story William Golding had written an essay on the darkness of the human heart. How many people would have read it? Would it be as memorable as the novel? Would it communicate the truth about human nature that effectively?

Stories have always been a primal form of communication. They are timeless links to ancient wisdom, legends, archetypes, myths and symbols. They connect us to universal truths.

All religions communicate with their disciples in the form of stories. Ramayana and Mahabharata are prime examples. Although their authenticity still hasn’t been validated, the message is clear.

Storytelling is an art, and like any other art, it is a vehicle to communicate. Picasso said, “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”

Stories make the message personal.

When I was in primary school, once in a while, our headmistress used to read us a story during the morning prayer. One particular one stayed with me forever. It was the story of a mighty tree and humble grass. On one stormy night, the tree was uprooted by the ferocious wind but the grass remained as it was, in fact it was more lush green due to all the rain. The wind could bend its blades but couldn’t uproot it, while the tree with all its might, couldn’t stand the storm.

That lesson with humility stayed with me because I could relate to grass. We all can relate to something in the stories. Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Call them schemas, scripts, cognitive maps, mental models, metaphors, or narratives. Stories help us understand how things work, how we make decisions, how we persuade others, how we understand our place in the world, how we create our identities and define and teach social values.

It is easy to remember stories than the facts.

Do you know how many people have died this month with the Coronavirus pandemic? If you are anything like me, you will be making a guess to come up with a number. Even though seventy percent of the news these days is about the pandemic and havoc it is causing in the world we can’t keep the facts in our heads.

Yet all of us know what happened to George Floyd. We will never forget his story or what followed after he was pinned under the knee of the very force which should be protecting the citizen of its country. Just like the story of Rosa Parks of Alabama, who was jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man, started the Civil Rights Movement, the story of George Floyd started the Black Lives Matter Movement.

Fictional stories have the same kind of power. They are one of the most interesting tools that human beings have. Since our brain cannot tell the difference between the real and imagined, we can create imagined characters and imagined events to bring home the message. All parables and fairy tales are invented. For thousands of years, through all civilizations, humans have been using stories to teach children.

As a fiction writer, you are licensed to create lies, you are licensed to create people who do not exist and licensed to make things up that didn’t happen to communicate truth.

Because you are not just creating lies you are creating memorable lies.

Happy fiction writing!

Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash

[mc4wp_form id=”138″]

Why is it so easy to tell personal stories but so hard to write them

Neera

We tell stories all the time.

At the dinner table, around the watercooler, in the cafes, on the phone. We talk in the form of stories. But we don’t notice that. We think we are having a conversation, but in fact, we are sharing stories.

Don’t believe me? Think of the conversation you had at the dinner table last night and you will see what I mean.

This is what happened at my dinner table last night.

Yesterday I made a special pumpkin dish that my mother-in-law used to make. It smelled devine and looked delicious. Rather than enjoying it, my husband went to the fridge and brought out leftovers.

That was enough for me to lose my temper. I had spent an hour making the dish that I thought he would enjoy, and he didn’t even try it.

“Why do you have to go for left-overs every time? Why can’t you eat fresh food? Don’t you like my cooking?”

I was furious. The questions came out like bullets. Yet they were unnecessary. I already knew the answer. Coming from a large family, he was brought up not to waste food.

But that was not the point. The point was, forty years of living in an affluent country where fresh food is abundant; he still couldn’t change his habit.

Did you notice? How a simple routine dinner table conversation is, in fact, a story.

It is easy to tell stories verbally.

When we tell stories, we have the advantage of facial expressions, body language, and verbal cues from the listeners. The listener might ask a question. Which might prompt us to expand that story or add the details we missed. We can use broken sentences and may repeat ourselves to make a point.

But when it comes to telling the same story on paper, we don’t have all these luxuries. Most of us get stuck when it comes to using personal stories in our writing.

If writing stories is so hard, why should we bother?

The skill to incorporate stories in your writing is valuable not only for writers but for everyone. Just like we tell stories in our conversations, we tell stories in our everyday writing. A report, a discussion paper, a resume, or even an email encrusted with stories makes a much lasting impression than just facts and figures.

The way we tell stories matter.

Ever noticed that some people have the knack of telling stories. The ones with a group of people around them at a party. They are the storytellers. They have figured out how to tell their stories in a way that people gather around them to hear them out.

What do they know about storytelling that others don’t?

What can we learn from them?

Three things:

  1. Follow the structure. Every story has a structure — a beginning, a middle, and an end. Written stories need to follow the structure even more stringently than a verbal story. Even a four-lines story, should have the first as the beginning, the last line as the ending, and two lines forming the middle of the story.
  2. Bring in drama. Drama draws in the audience. Any story can have drama in it. Conflict is a great way to introduce drama. My dinner table story wouldn’t be a story if there was no conflict in it. Drama can also be introduced by using anticipation, exaggeration, and detail.
  3. Make it short. No one has time to read long-winded personal stories. Shorter and punchier stories make more impact than lengthy anecdotes. Make sure it is tight, has no unfinished sentences, repetition, or unnecessary details. Otherwise, it stops being a story and becomes a ramble.

A well written personal story is a great way to connect with the readers and to make a point. Learn to write them. And write them well.

Photo by Surface on Unsplash

How to bring the fun back in learning?

Neera

Ever wondered why we use “XYZ” and not “HIJ” or “LMN” as a variable in maths.

The obvious answer is that “XYZ” are the last letters in the alphabet. But that is not the reason they are used as variables.

The credit of using “XYZ” goes to French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. The same Rene Descartes who famously said “Cogito ergo sum” meaning “I think. therefore I am.”

But that is not all he is famous for. He has contributed more to maths and philosophy than anyone else outside of Greeks.

As the story goes he was printing his mathematics work when he needed letters to denote ‘unknown’ variables. Since he had lots of variables in his work, he needed lots of spare letters. X, Y, and Z are not that commonly used letters in French, so he used them.

The other speculation is that in those days, printing presses needed all letters arranged by hand. Since X, Y, and Z were stored furthest away, way out of the reach of the printing-man arranging the letters, they were the least used.

Who knows which story is correct but I am sure you had as much fun learning about the stories behind the use of “XYZ” as I did.

Learning itself is fun.

Whenever we start learning something new, we are enthusiastic, excited, and full of energy. Remember the last time you started learning painting, dancing, or singing. How excited you were? You joined a course. You bought new material. You were always the first one to arrive at the class. You started great. You did your homework. Everyone encouraged you and you had so much fun.

Then something happened.

Things started getting harder. You lagged behind. You tried to catch up but that doubled the pressure. You started putting in more hours. You were getting tired but you didn’t want to give up. And suddenly the learning stopped.

The same activity that was so much fun started to stress you.

You left the territory where things were easy and entered the zone where things became harder and harder. Now you were expected to be serious and put in the hard yakka if you really wanted to learn the skill.

In other words, you were not supposed to have fun. Or at least this was what you thought. And that is a mistake.

Learning stops when the fun stops.

Somewhere along the line, we pick up the belief that learning has to be torturous. Whether it was due to the fear of examinations or due to our upbringing which insists on learning at the cost of fun that we start hating the act of learning itself.

So much so that many adults believe that after a certain age they can’t go to college or university because they are too old to learn anything new. The same people will be fine to go to clubs and learn to play bridge or chess, the games requiring memory and strategic thinking.

They are able to learn new games because they are having fun.

Learning becomes easy as soon as you put the fun back into it.

No one knows this better than the language teacher Michel Thomas. Michel has a completely different approach to teaching. In a BBC documentary, he was given what could be considered the most challenging students. And his mission was to teach them French.

Michel starts with something entirely unexpected. Rather than starting with the first lesson, he gets his students to move the desks and replace them with sofas. The blackboard and screens are all abandoned because Michel doesn’t believe in textbooks, or taking notes or homework. He says, “Anything that causes stress must be removed from the experience.” And classroom-like setup causes stress.

Michel has two ground rules for learning.

  1. You have to be relaxed.
  2. You should never worry about remembering anything.

You got to abandon any anxiety usually associated with learning. Michel’s theory is that any form of tension and anxiety inhibits learning.

He also believes that the responsibility of retention lies with the teacher, not with the learner. The method of teaching should incorporate retention.

We associate learning with work, with concentration, and with paying attention. Learning reminds us of homework and of memorizing. It brings back painful memories. Learning becomes hard work rather than a pleasure.

Learning shouldn’t be work but a pleasure.

When we learn we should experience a sense of progression, of excitement. Rather than feel exhausted from it we should want more.

We feel exhausted because we forget the intimidation factors. We are intimidated by the unknown. We are intimidated by the pain it is going to cause us. And we are intimidated by the fact we are not going to retain much of what we are going to learn.

Ease is the opposite of intimidation. The only way we can become enthusiastic about learning if we can make learning easy. Ease brings the fun back to the learning process.

How to make learning easy.

Here are 3 simple things you can do:

1) Break the learning into smaller components and tackle them one by one. Smaller components make it easy to gain and retain information.

2) Remove any expectations from yourself. Expectations cause stress and stress is the enemy of learning.

3) Make the hard components fun somehow. Why not make them crazy. For example:

  • Write a story backward? Tell the ending first, then the middle and then beginning.
  • Start a course from the middle rather than the beginning. You will be surprised to find out you already know a lot and your concentration level has doubled.
  • Write with your eyes closed? Describing what you are seeing on the inside of your eyelids. Do they become a tiny screen and a film starts playing on them.
  • Put some constraints. Write for just fifteen minutes and see what you can come up with. Learn to play only two notes for a month and master them. Draw the same sketch twenty times.

Let me summarise what I have covered so far.

Learning itself is fun. You keep learning as long as you are having fun. As soon as the fun stops, learning stops.

Fun in learning is linked to “ease of learning”. As long as learning is easy, it is fun. As soon as learning gets difficult, the fun stops. And the learning stops too.

So how to bring the fun back in learning. 1) make learning easy by dividing it into small components 2) remove any expectations 3) introduce fun by doing crazy things.

Photo by Lidya Nada on Unsplash

[mc4wp_form id=”138″]