Category: Newsletter

The first two days of November are always exciting. I very excitedly start writing a novel. I write more than the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) prescribed daily quota of 1667 words.

And then phoof!

I fall on the ground like a deflated balloon.

The story idea that seemed endless fills just a few pages. How am I going to develop 200 pages novel from it? That too, in four weeks.

This year, like every year prior to this, I am plotting on the go.

All I have to work with is a simple idea. In one line, it is – two women, after experiencing the painful demise of their loved ones, decide to help each other end their lives in a dignified way. The “good death,” as they call it in euthanasia terms.

I ran past the premise by my writing buddies, and they all gave it a thumbs up. But it is one thing to have a story and another to develop it into a novel.

I used my favourite three methods to plot:

1. Snowflake Method
2. Three Act Structure
3. Save the Cat, Beatsheet

But even all that is not enough. Even if you know how to weave subplots like suggested in the “Snowflake Method” and how to arrange the main plot points as per the Three-Act Structure and beats by “Save The Cat Beatsheet,” you still need to know how to how to write scenes and show what is going on in your characters’ minds.

That is when the “imposter” demon starts raising its head. You are kidding yourself. You can’t write a book in four years, let alone in four weeks. Why are you wasting your time? Why did you have to declare it to the whole world that you are writing a novel in a month, now they all will laugh at you?

Before I dwelled too deep in self-doubt, I remembered reading an article Everyone Is Totally Just Winging It All The Time. The writer, Oliver Burkeman, gave several examples of politicians and people from all walks of life winging it.

We’re shocked whenever authority figures who are supposed to know what they’re doing make it plain that they don’t, President Obama’s healthcare launch being probably the most serious recent example. We shouldn’t really be shocked, though. Because all these stories illustrate one of the most fundamental yet still under-appreciated truths of human existence, which is this: everyone is totally just winging it, all the time.

The Guardian

This was before Brexit, Trump, Coronavirus, and Scott Morrison’s handling of Australia’s worst fires in 2019. Since then the phenomena is much more evident.

In a popular Reddit thread, someone questioned, What is the most embarrassing thing that you should be able to do, but can’t?

The answers were on the lines of:

• Basic arithmetic. Really embarrassing at work when I panic and struggle to add up two small numbers.
• I’m nearly 30 years old and don’t know how to tie my shoes in the normal fashion. Instead, I can only do it bunny ears-style.
• Swim, ride a bike, drive a car.
• I am really bad at telling time on an analog clock, I know how it works and I can get there but I can’t just glance at the clock and know the time.

What we drew from observing the so-called “experts” and even the common people like you and me, that there’s no institution, or walk of life, in which everybody isn’t just winging it.

So his conclusion is:

The solution to imposter syndrome is to see that you are the one. 

It’s you – unconfident, self-conscious, all-too-aware-of-your-flaws – potentially that have as much to contribute to your field, or the world, as anyone else.

Humanity is divided into two: on the one hand, those who are improvising their way through life, patching solutions together and putting out fires as they go, but deluding themselves otherwise; and on the other, those doing exactly the same, except that they know it. It’s infinitely better to be the latter (although too much “assertiveness training” consists of techniques for turning yourself into the former).

Remember, the reason you can’t hear other people’s inner monologues of self-doubt isn’t that they don’t have them. It’s that you only have access to your own mind.

Oliver Burkeman

So here I am, winging my way through writing a novel in a month.

I am thinking that ten of thousands of participating know what they are doing, but I don’t have access to their minds. They might be scared as hell like me.

Leaving a few professionals aside, who have already written many novels before, everyone has the same doubts.

They are fighting the same battles every day, as I am.

And despite the daily setbacks, in the end, what matters is who remains standing on the battlefield.

That is it from me this week.

Talk to you next week.

Take care.

Last Saturday, I noticed a familiar face on the round table in the library where they display new books. It was of Helen Garner. Her new book had come out. I grabbed it before anyone else could. It is titled Yellow Notebook Diaries Volume I 1978 – 87. I was in my teens since she started those diaries.

Like almost every Australian, I am an admirer of Helen Garner. She is like an unassuming, gentle aunt who is mostly quiet and observing. But when she opens her mouth, what comes out is so profound that you kick yourself for not taking her seriously in the first instance.

I opened it and flicked through the book. It is in the form of little snippets from her diary. After lightly reading a few, my eyes settled on one snippet.

I must disabuse myself of the illusion that I once sat down and wrote a novel. I am not good at constructing major pieces of work. I have a short concentration span. I can work only in small, intense bursts. I don’t seem to work consciously. I write to unburden myself, to amuse myself, to arrange in order the things that bulge in my head, to make myself notice things.

Incidentally, I was pondering the art of noticing ever since I stumbled upon Rob Walker’s newsletter where he urges people to notice things. Things that we otherwise won’t. His newsletter is full of ideas about how to notice things.

He suggests taking snapshots around your neighbourhood with an eye for a particular detail. One of the noticing exercises he gives his students is counting with numbers you find in different settings.

One of his readers, Judy, looked for numbers corresponding to the date for an entire month and took photos of them. She did several other projects of noticing. One was walking the entire length of her street and sketching and painting anything of interest. Thirteen miles, 14 neighbourhoods, +/- 120 blocks, and 53 pages of drawings.

Phyllis, another of Rob’s readers notices lone shoes.

“For decades, I’ve walked and hiked trails and sidewalks. And driven country roads. Sometimes … more often than seems plausible … I come across a shoe. One shoe. Never a pair of shoes. I make up a story about how each one must have ended up this way. Or about the person who has the other shoe. I don’t remember all the shoes or all the stories. But I always remember to take the time to ponder.”

The Art of Noticing

I borrowed Helen Garner’s book with the hope that I might learn to notice and write like she does.

That afternoon I drove to the hardware store to pickup some tapware for the bathroom renovations we are doing. I decided to notice something to practice my newly found knowledge. It had to be some I otherwise would have taken for granted. It has been raining in Canberra for a few days now. Everything is green. I decided to notice the shades of green. This is what I found.

Right in front of me is a tree with big leaves. Its green is different than the green of the grass. It is very vibrant, with a tinge of yellow, almost luminescent. The grass, on the other hand, has several shades of green. There is deep green, pastel green, and green with a tinge of purple in it. The leaves on the eucalyptus trees on Redhill have a different shade of green altogether. They are not light green and not even pastel green. I suppose I can call them eucalyptus green, but then there are so many eucalyptus varieties, and each one has a different shade.

I will be doing more of noticing exercises.

This week I wrote the article Mental Models For Writers, I promised last week. Sit with a cup of tea and read it. I am sure it will help you and inspire you.

NaNoWriMo is starting from Sunday. I have figured out the story and run it past a few writing buddies. They like it. So I am invested in it now. I will talk more about it in the coming weeks.

That is it from me this week.

Talk to you next week.

Take care.

As I type these words, the Jackhammer is whizzing literally above my head (upstairs), making it very hard to concentrate. We are renovating bathrooms. My mental energy is being consumed by plumbing and electrical issues typical of installing new fixtures in old structures, something we are all guilty of doing with our lives.

We try to upgrade ourselves by getting the latest gadgets, modern houses, and luxury vehicles, while we need a new vision.

This week I created a vision for myself based on Cameron Herold’s technique called A Painted Picture. I described it in the article How I Created A Vision For Next Three Years. I highly recommend that you read the article and create a vision for yourself.

I know, I know. The times are gloomy. The pandemic is still here. No one knows when it will go away. But that is the beauty of having a vision. You don’t concentrate on ‘how’ but on ‘what.’ Once you know ‘what’ you want, figuring out ‘how’ is easy.

Most people don’t know where what they want to do and where they want to be in the next three years of their lives. Having ‘no vision’ is a big reason that they can’t upgrade their lives.

Another thing that is extremely helpful in changing lives is Metal Models. Mental models are frameworks of thinking that you can use to solve problems, whether related to your life, work, business, or vocation. Any idea or issue can be seen through a mental model lens and solved uniquely. You can think of them as tools in a toolbox, each having a specific purpose. Like a hammer can’t be used where a plier is required, they make problem-solving much easier.

It is a fascinating field. I intend to write an article on them, particularly on mental models for writers.

Speaking of articles, I will be concentrating less on articles for the next four to five weeks. November is approaching, and I am gearing up to participate in the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) challenge. For those of you who don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, it is a non-profit organization that provides a portal, tools, structure, community, and encouragement to writers to write 50,000 words in a month.

I was a bit hesitant to participate this year as I already have too many projects in the pipeline. But I decided to go ahead anyway because there is nothing like the energy I gain from thousands of people worldwide, writing together. Even if I don’t reach the 50,000 words, whatever word count I will manage will be better than no words at all.

Although I will be writing fewer articles next month, I still will be writing this newsletter, keeping you updated on my progress and whatever else I am learning through the process.

That is it from me this week.

Talk to you next week.

Take care.

Two things happened this week. One, I got up at 3:45 AM on Thursday to listen to Jane Friedman’s seminar on blogging, and second, I got into a very interesting discussion with a group of friends on Whatsapp.

More than two years of blogging, and I am still learning about the craft. Blogging has changed so much in the past five to seven years. No longer it is a web diary to write about one’s hobbies and passions but a strategic tool to develop a brand and build a following.

“Blogging is not critical for every author and you don’t have to do it,” said Jane, “so if you’re eager to be let off the hook, you have permission to ignore blogging altogether.”

But then she goes on to add:

But blogging does remain one of the most straightforward paths to build and engage a readership over the long term, at least for writers. Blogging, at its core, is a special genre of writing and can be a wonderful creative outlet that doubles as one of your marketing superpowers.

But for blogging to have a real payoff for your career or author business, it has to be done with a particular strategy in mind and executed with some discipline.

In the two years, I have spent thousands of dollars, attended countless courses, and invested an insane number of hours to build my little turf on the internet. Yet I am nowhere near the nirvana.

As I was contemplating the countless mistakes I have made in my short blogging career, a friend of mine, Sean D’Souza, posted a list of products (mostly ebooks and courses) he had created and sold through his website in the past twenty years. It was an impressive list.

I probably would have delivered a similar number of projects in twenty years of my corporate and public career but they are nowhere to be seen. They certainly are not generating income the way Sean’s products still are. I could have written twenty books in twenty years and they would have amounted much more than the work I did working for others.

We have a tendency to look at things that didn’t work in our lives.

But “things that didn’t work” are the stepping stones to “things that did work.”

Sean told a story about going through his cartoon diaries because people kept telling him that he needed to make a book out of those. He was having a hard time finding what to include and what not.

Then he remembered, once, one of his clients was so happy looking at the blank and unfinished pages in his diary. He couldn’t figure out why. But he does now. It is that kind of stuff we don’t see. All the unfinished work, the sketches, the crumpled paper. They are the stepping stones to the finished work.

If we don’t have a decent amount of bad work, we’ll never have good work. If we don’t attend bad webinars and courses and workshops, we don’t know what good ones are like. If we don’t make mistakes we will never achieve anything.

Our passions become obsessions. We spend an insane amount of energy doing things we love to do. We may never get the rewards for our labor but we do get the satisfaction of action. Then Kinky Friedman’s words say it all.

My dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you.
Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.
Let it kill you and let it devour your remains.
For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.

Falsely yours

Kinky Friedman

This week I wrote two articles, How to make your writing memorable, poetic, and persuasive, and How to Structure Your Novel both I have been wanting to write for some times. Hope they are helpful.

That is it from me this week.

Talk to you next week.

Take care.

Photo by Reza Hasannia on Unsplash

The world has been in various phases of lockdown from the past seven months. No one has any idea of how long we will be living in this manner. It is not just weeks or months; we are talking years. Working from home is going to become a norm pretty soon if it hasn’t already.

While there are plenty of reports saying that productivity has gone up with lockdown, but what about creativity. Are we feeling more creative working from the confinement of our homes? Are we coming up with more ideas in isolation?

Isolation is beginning to get on people’s nerves. Office workers are missing their workplace (which not so long ago was they hated the most). Lack of socializing is driving people crazy. The common complaint is boredom.

But there is one thing that blossom in boredom- creativity.

How can one be creative when one is bored?

Agatha Christie made an explicit link between her writing and childhood boredom:

People often ask me what made me take up writing. Many of them, I fancy, wonder whether to take my answer seriously, although it’s a strictly truthful one. You see, I put it all down to the fact that I never had any education. Perhaps I’d better qualify that — by admitting that I did eventually go to school in Paris when I was 16 or thereabouts. But until then, apart from being taught a little arithmetic, I’d had no lessons to speak of at all. Although I was gloriously idle, in those days children had to do a good many things for themselves. They made their own doll’s furniture, and they made Christmas presents to give to their friends. (Nowadays, they’re just given money and told to buy their presents in a big store.) I found myself making up stories and acting the different parts and there’s nothing like boredom to make you write. So by the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I’d written quite a number of short stories and one long dreary novel.

Austin Kleon has been saying for a while that to be creative you need to be boring. You are more creative working in a mundane routine than from exciting, socially-active days.

Neil Gaiman’s advice for writers is, “Get bored.”

[Ideas] come from daydreaming, from drifting, that moment when you’re just sitting there… The trouble with these days is that it’s really hard to get bored. I have 2.4 million people on Twitter who will entertain me at any moment…it’s really hard to get bored. I’m much better at putting my phone away, going for boring walks, actually trying to find the space to get bored in. That’s what I’ve started saying to people who say ‘I want to be a writer,” I say ‘great, get bored.’

Even Einstein was in favor of idleness: “Creativity is the residue of time wasted.”

So if isolation is getting to your nerves, find something creative to do. You can – start a veggie patch, learn to draw, write a book, make a collage, do some embroidery.

I do not know about others, but I am taking more ideas to completion. I am sticking with them longer, exploring them more, and finishing more articles and sketches than before. Not being able to go out means I can plan my days better and get more work done.

This week I wrote two articles, Seven Tips To Write With Style and Kindness Starts At Home.

I was really heartened by the fact that Seven Tips To Write With Style was picked up by the Medium curators (team of people at Medium who look for good articles and recommend them to subscribers). This is my second article in three months that got curated, which means the article will go to a wider audience.

In my cartoon drawing course, I have commenced drawing cartoons for Ms. Jolly’s Rule Book For Writers that will be published at the end of the course. Those of you who don’t know, Ms. Jolly is the cartoon character I have created who is more or less my alter ego.

That’s it from me this week.

Take care.

I am reading a book on Kurt Vonnegut, a great American storyteller, and teacher. Known for his satirical style of writing, he was one of the most popular writers of the 1960s. 

His career spanned over 50 years, in which he published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of nonfiction, with further collections being published after his death.

In spite of his scathing satire and willingness to scoff at received wisdom, he was an exceptional and generous teacher. His students at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop gained a great deal of wisdom from him as a writer, teacher, and human being.

In 1980, he wrote an article “How to Write with Style” which was published in the Times. In that article, he made seven suggestions on the literary style.

1. Find a subject to care about
2. Do not rumble
3. Keep it simple
4. Have the guts to cut
5. Sound like yourself
6. Say what you mean to say
7. Pity the readers

Although all the suggestions are gold, the last one caught my attention. We writers are so focused on ourselves that we forget the readers. 

He wrote:

Readers have to identify thousands of little marks on paper and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high-school — twelve long years.

Kurt called reading an “art.” You are not born with it. You must learn how to do it, and as with any art, you can keep gaining skills and pleasure in it for the rest of your life.

Those “marks on paper” i.e. words are symbols. They require deciphering. If they are not easy and clear, the readers give up. Rahter than encouraging them to read, we turn them off. They give up. We lose the opportunity to get our message across.

Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient teachers, ever willing to simplify and clarify.

From next week I am starting a new column in the online magazine The Innovation from. A column for writer on how to write from readers’ point of view. And it is titled… you guessed it Pity The Reader.

I have been writing on Medium, an online publishing platform. Launched in August 2012, it is the place to be for writers and bloggers because it has an audience of 100 million. I have published about 47 articles there and steadily building a readership. It is very satisfying to know that your work is going to such a vast amount of people and is not going waste.

This week I wrote one article on the blog The Four Cs of Writing, and two on Medium – Why is it easy to tell personal stories but so hard to write them and Failing To Build A Habit To Write Every Day? Try A System Instead. Have a read.

It is wet and windy today in Canberra and I am going to take a leave and from you. I will write again next Friday.

Until then take care.

Photo by Marcos Gabarda on Unsplash