Month: June 2020

Gifts of writing

Neera

Last night I was going through an old notebook when the following words jumped at me.

The very activity which gives me the greatest pleasure makes me suffer beyond anything. Writing doesn’t come to me in sentences or paragraphs. It comes in words or phrases, the disjointed blurb which makes sense only to my muddled mind with lots of blank spaces where a keyword is missing. I am forever looking for the right word to complete that thought, word that exists in my mind, the word that I have read so many times before but I cannot seems to recall it. Sometimes I find its closest companion. Then begins the task of compiling the incoherent rambling in some sort of order so that it makes some sense at all. Why do I torture myself with all this day in and day out? Why do I bother? Why can’t I be like other girls? Looking for new cosmetics instead and having a facelift at the new parlour of which they have taken membership all paid for by their lovers or husbands.

I don’t even know who the original writer of these words is, I failed to record it. But I recorded these words because they describe my state of mind and perhaps of every writer’s state of mind working on their craft.

Writing is hard but it bears a lot of gifts. Over time I am beginning to understand that writing itself is a gift given to only a select few. It gives you an opportunity to live life with an intensity not available to everyone.

Writing motivates you to look closely at life as it lurches by and tramps around, says Anne Lamott. She finds in writing what Carl Sagan found in science — profound awe, deep reverence, a source of spiritual elevation.

She writes in Bird by Bird:

In order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? … Think of reverence as awe, as a presence in and openness to the world. Think of those times when you’ve read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone’s soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of — please forgive me — wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious.

[…]

There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.

If you give freely, there will always be more. … It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host, of hosting people, of being the person to whom they come for food and drink and company. This is what the writer has to offer.

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird

She goes on to say:

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

Bird by Bird is a must read for writers, a gift by a writer to the writers to understand gift of writing given to them by god.

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

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Three principles of personal storytelling

Neera

Scott Harrison was sitting in the restaurant of an Ethiopian inn with a few people when the innkeeper walked in and started telling him the story of a woman who lived in his village, unprompted.

His was a small remote village, where all women used to walk for water for eight hours a day. They would carry heavy clay pots on their backs and one day, on the way back, this woman, Latticur slips and falls. The clay pot breaks and all the water is spilled on the ground.

At this point, the restaurant owner took a pause making sure they were listening. Then he said, we found her body swinging from the tree in the village. They all stared at him. Stunned. “The work you are doing is important, keep it up,” and he disappeared back in the kitchen.”

Scott Harrison is the founder of a charity called Water. He has been able to raise over 100 million dollars by telling stories like that of Latticur.

When I heard Scott telling this story in a YouTube video I was as stunned as Scott and his friends were when they first heard it from the innkeeper. Not only because the story is powerful but the way it is told.

There are 663 million people in this world who live without clean water. Scott has been telling the stories of these people, and in the process discovered three important principles of telling more engaging stories in any environment.

The first principle of storytelling is to take the listener on the emotional journey.

While telling the story Scott sets the scene describing how innkeeper walks in on him and his friends and starts telling them the story, uninvited.

He then mentions the innkeeper’s pause, so that we can get his attention just like the innkeeper waited for his. We get to absorb what he says just as he did when he heard the story for the first time.

The temptation while telling a personal story is to jump ahead and tell the listener what you learned as quickly as possible. Do not do that.

If you slow down you take people on the same winding journey you went on and the story connects much more.

As he continues he also talks about his emotional response, that he doubted the truth of this story just as we might.

I remember we said “What!” It felt as we were hit by a ton of bricks. And then we starting doubting it. Is that story really true? Can we tell this to the international donors? But I just couldn’t shake the idea or the picture of a woman that slipped and fallen, like all of us have done, and was in such despair on her living conditions that she tied a rope around her neck climbed a tree and jumped.

So I sent one of my partners to the village to find out if anyone by that name of Latticur lived in the village and whether what happened to her was true. A couple of weeks later I got an email from him saying, yes the story was true. He saw her grave. He met her family.

Then I asked my wife, I want to go there and live there for a week.

The second principle is that every story needs a near-constant element of mystery to keep the listener engaged.

You need to constantly raise questions in the listeners’ minds if you want to keep their attention. Every time you answer one, you need to plant a new one.

Scott hints on a bit of mystery right at the beginning of the story by asking whether the story is true. When he finds out that it is, he immediately raises another question – what happens when he goes to Ethiopia himself?

So I went to the village, I lived there for a week. I met the priest who gave her the funeral. I saw the pile of rocks behind the church that was her grave, I met her mom, I met her friend who was with her that day. I went on writing about it on Medium about the experience and seeing the tree.

It is a frail tree. And I didn’t know until I went to the village that she was thirteen.

That was a huge shock for me. I was expecting an old lady. This hunched back mature woman who has walked water all her life.

She was thirteen years old girl. A teenager.

I remember asking her friend, through translater, why she thought she hanged herself. Her best friend said, she would have been overcome with shame because she had broken the clay pot and she spilled the water.

So that is the main action of the story but it doesn’t end here because there is a third principle.

The third principle is that the best stories have a lesson in the end, like Aesop’s fable.

It doesn’t have to be explicit, but it needs to be there like an overarching point. When you get to this point you need to know your purpose of sharing the story.

What is the audience supposed to take away from your story?

Here is what Scott thinks what we should learn from Letticur’s story.

This is an emergency. Something has to be done where thirteen-years-old are not hanging themselves on trees for breaking clay pot and spilling water.

I found this story while researching storytelling for my book.

I learned three principles of storytelling and they are powerful but what is more powerful is the lesson of the story.

It has inspired me to tell the stories of people like Latticur who have no voice. People like George Floyd whose life has been cut short by racism, a plague more dangerous and widespread than the coronavirus.

Credit: The full credit of this story and the whole post goes to Charlie who runs the YouTube channel Charisma on Command.

Photo by Johann Siemens on Unsplash

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Is perfectionism stopping your progress? Here is how to beat it.

Neera

An average adult reads between 200 to 300 words per minute, and you get to that level by the eighth grade. For success in college, you should be able to read 350 to 450 words per minute. If your work involves reading a lot of material on a daily bases, like that of a writer, you are expected to read at least 500 words per minute.

Yet I averaged about 83 words a minute. Every time I sat with a book that I was dying to read, I couldn’t manage more than ten pages in half an hour.

What was surprising that I wasn’t always like this. I used to be able to finish a book within three days. What was hindering my progress?

It was only recently that I realized that very quality that should make me a better reader was stopping me from finishing the book.

There are two ways of getting things done.

The first is to be slow and methodical. The second is to beat the clock.

Many of us like the idea of perfection, toiling away at our work, in order to reach a seemingly impossible goal. 

Will your work be any better if you take twice as much time.

If you consider yourself to be a perfectionist, chances are, you wear it as a badge of honour. You think you should be producing your best work at all times.

Perfectionism is the enemy of getting things done.

Have you ever tried to write a book in one month?

The idea was absurd and close to impossible when Chris Baty and his friends thought of it in 1999. But they went ahead and did it anyway. Six out of twenty participants completed the challenge including Chris Baty.

They succeeded because they were not out there to write world’s best book or even their own best book. They succeeded because they went out to beat the clock. They wrote 50,000 words in one month. Each day they raced the time, writing 1667 words.

Next year they launched the project on the internet. 140 people participated, 29 won the challenge. Last year (2019), more than half a million people participated, over 60,000 won the challenge.

How come?

Because they put the perfection aside and went on to beat the clock.

Speed beats perfection every time.

Being a typical perfectionist, I was turning the simple act of reading into a much harder exercise.

Rather than enjoying the book, I was analyzing every sentence trying to figure out how the writer has transitioned from one idea to another, how she has managed to move the story while giving minimum details.

To my perfectionist mind, what was the point of reading a book if I couldn’t learn from it?

By striving to learn more I was jeopardizing the learning that comes from simple reading.

Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving to be your best. Perfection is not about healthy achievement and growth.

Brené Brown, a writer and research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work

I started reading with a timer, finishing 30 pages in 30 minutes. The eighth-grade reading speed can help me read three books in a month.

You’re probably trying to shake your perfectionism but finding it too hard.

It is understandable.

It is hard to break any habit.

The mistake we make is that we want to make a massive jump.

The key to breaking out of your comfort zone, you stretch yourself ever so slightly.

That massive jump may not be possible. Instead, take a smaller one—just a slight stretch goal. Set yourself the time in which you’ll complete the job.

Your work may not be as perfect as you hoped, but it gives you a chance to finish it and improve it later.

If you follow this simple formula you’ll find yourself less exhausted and with more energy. However, the biggest benefit of all is you’ll become far better and far quicker at what you’re doing.

Photo by Tai’s Captures on Unsplash

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