3 Habits of sophomore writers and how to cultivate them

Neera

Last month, I wrote about 3 Habits of a freshman writer (and why you should concentrate on only these) in your first year, where I urged the new writers to focus on developing just three habits:

  • daily writing doesn’t matter however, small
  • daily reading and
  • organizing your writing and notes from reading so you can find them when you need them.

While working on developing these habits, a day will come when you feel that you have wasted the whole day if you had to go to bed without writing something.

You would have a nagging feeling if you did not file away the scribbling you did on the back of an envelope when your diary was not handy or notes you took on a piece of paper while reading the amazing book you accidentally found in the library.

When this starts happening frequently, congratulations. You are now in the sophomore year as a writer and ready to develop three habits of sophomores. They are:

  1. daily editing
  2. show your work
  3. introduce yourself as a writer

1. Daily editing

As a sophomore writer, you will have some writing under your belt. Your job now is to take some bits from it and learn to edit it. To make it ready for human consumption.

Self-editing is as important as writing. You will have to learn to do it. If you have this thought in mind that editing is the job of editors and proofreaders, banish it from your mind. Build a self-editing habit from the early stages, and you will not struggle when you are writing a book.

Tighten your sentences. Remove unnecessary words. Cut out the waffle. Refer to objects by name. Be specific. Avoid adverbs and use more verbs. Choose an active versus passive voice. Include dialogue. Learn how to describe a scene and a setting.

Though much disliked and feared, editing, in fact, is one of the most joyful activities for writers. This is where you learn and practice the craft of writing.

And the craft is in making our writing meaningful. As a writer, our job is to observe, decipher the meaning and articulate in such a way that the message becomes universal. It might take us a lifetime to learn how to do that, but when we do, we will leave behind something that will last much longer than us.

2. Share your work

Once you have a few pieces of work ready, it is time to find appropriate writing groups. Writing groups are the best way to get some objective feedback to improve your work.

It is also the least threatening way to get a critique of your work. It could be very intimidating for new writers to get their work critiqued. Writing groups provide encouragement and help and aren’t afraid to pick things apart when they need to be. I have been a part of various writing groups for two decades now and have benefited immensely from them.

How do you find a writing group?

Usually, there are some already in your city or town. Sometimes, when you attend a writing course, participants agree to continue meeting after the course and form a writing group. There are some online writing groups also available. One I know of is Ninja Writers, run by Shaunta Grimes.

If nothing works, form your own group by giving an ad at your local writer’s center.

3. Introduce yourself as a writer

The time has come to call yourself a writer. You don’t have to publish a book to be a writer.

The fact that you’re actively and consistently writing and sharing your work with others is all the proof you need to take up the title of ‘writer’ and start proclaiming your writerhood to the world

So what are you waiting for? Go own your status!

Tell the world. Actively seek opportunities to tell people.

The best way to do that is to have an elevator pitch ready. An elevator pitch is a short, pre-prepared statement you use to introduce yourself. It needs to be short, punchy and should finish before the finish of the elevator ride.

You don’t want to feel embarrassed or hesitant in admitting to someone that you are a writer. A handy, ready-made well-practiced statement can do wonders for your confidence level.

So when someone asks you what do you do, rather than fumbling for words, you can automatically say, “I am a writer, I write…”

Try using this statement even when you are not a full-time writer. Try it on strangers first then move on to friends.

The idea is to make your subconscious mind believe it.

Be ready for the next question, “What do you write?”

Incorporate it in your elevator statement. Keep it sweet and simple. In most cases, the person you’re talking to isn’t expecting a seamless three-paragraph book blurb. They’re simply curious about what you write.

There you have it, the three habits of a sophomore writer.

A sophomore writer writes daily, reads daily, edits daily.

They organize their work and notes so that they can find it when they need it. They show their work to others and get critique to improve their writing. Most importantly, they introduce themselves as writers without hesitation.

Photo by Joshua Ness on Unsplash

The art of slow writing

Neera

We are constantly living our lives in the fast lane. There is so much happening around us all that time that we have practically gone numb. We don’t feel anything, we don’t notice much. We are going through life just like those bullet trains that whoosh by at the speed of two hundred and fifty miles per hour and where the outside scenery keeps changing every minute.

We apply the same approach to writing as well. We want to write quickly. We want to build a portfolio of articles in a matter of months, finish a book in a year, do revisions hastily and publish as soon as possible.

We measure our output by the number of words at the end of the day rather than the insights they carry. We are beginning to think that writing is the same thing as typing.

Good writing takes time.

Just recently I came across the concept of slow writing through Louise De Salvo’s book The Art of Slow Writing. Louise makes the case that mature writing often develops over a longer period of time. Deep immersion in the process of writing yields results that might are not possible with quick writing we have become so accustomed to. If we want our work to get stronger, more nuanced and more compelling we need to practice the process of slow writing.

Slowing down allows us to explore the complexities of the craft. Lousie gives an example in her book, “Virginia Woolf penned roughly 535 words and crossed out 73 of them, netting her 462 words for her day’s work. Let’s say she worked for three hours. That’s about 178 words an hour including the words she deleted—and Woolf was writing at the height of her creative powers.”

She explains, to explore our creativity we need to slow down. We need to give ourselves the opportunity to get to a deeper level by getting to know ourselves and our stories fully over a longer period of time.

Louise goes on to say:

“Trying to work too quickly, trying to work in too polished a way too quickly, expecting clarity too soon, can set us up for failure.”

[…]

“Slow writing is a meditative act: slowing down to understand our relationship to our writing, slowing down to determine our authentic subjects, slowing down to write complex works, slowing down to study our literary antecedents.”

[…]

“Getting completely lost, coming unstrung and unbound, arriving at unknown and unexpected places, is, for me, a critical part of writing.”

Louise DeSalvo, The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft, and Creativity

In the age of the internet, where we are continually under pressure to produce more content, strive to meet daily writing quota, write to deadlines and give preference to quantity over quality, Louise’s book is a sigh of relief.

Intrigued by the concept I went digging and found that slow writing is being used quite effectively in schools. The children are encouraged to slow down while writing, cut out the waffle and focus on every single word or sentence that they construct.

What is slow writing in schools?

In schools, slow writing is used as an approach to writing that uses a step-by-step structure to create a short text or paragraph. A teacher will give specific writing prompts or instructions as to what grammar, language or punctuation features to include in each sentence.

David Dadau has a lot of resources on the topic.

Picture
Image Source: The Literacy Shed

For adult writers, the concept of slow writing is wider than that. It refers to actually slowing down in life and making time to think, meditate and daydream. According to Louise De Salvo, “The most productive writers and creative people I know realize that dreaming and daydreaming are important parts of how writers work.”

Is there a way to slow down in our lives?

Apparently there is.

When a train is traveling at two hundred and fifty miles per hour if you look inside, the things are at a normal pace – a man reading a newspaper, a woman tending to her child, teenagers stealing a look at each other.

Franz Kafka said: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked…”

When we begin a new project, our ideas are in their infancy. They need to be researched. They need to mature. That takes time. As we learn and understand new information, and let it percolate over days and weeks at length, it makes unique connections with the information we already have in our heads. That is when we discover new insights.

It is the gestation process to become a writer. During this, we learn about ourselves as writers. We establish our work’s foundation. We permit ourselves to play and explore. We commit—or recommit—to working steadily and purposefully.

But no matter how fast the world zips along, if you want to write you need some silence and space, time to slow down to figure out what you think and feel.

Here’s what you can do to practice slow writing:

Schedule a time when you can sit still. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. Anything. Keep a notebook handy. Let the thoughts cross your mind and try catching one that intrigues you. Write it down. Keep writing as long as it is there. Stop when your mind moves on to the next one.

For the next month, stick with that thought. Research it. Meditate on it. Look for examples to illustrate it. Find analogies to explain it. See what other people have written about it. Find out books on it and read them. By the end of the month, you will have enough material to write an elaborate article on it. But most importantly your mind will grow and develop insights. A simple thought that appeared randomly while sitting still has now become a fully formed insight. That is what you aim for when you practice slow writing.

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Your journal can be your most important tool as a writer.

Neera

The impulse to write is natural to many people, yet the demands of many public forms of writing can be inhibiting or even crushing. Writing a journal, on the other hand, opens up possibilities.

Your journal is one place you can write anything, in any form and shape and it doesn’t matter. You can draw, make lists, copy quotes, write down what you heard of the nasty things someone said to you and you can’t get them out of your head. In your journal, you can sack your internal judge and explore your mood, emotions, views, feelings even anger and anxieties.

Journal writing is a supreme way to records your life’s journey; where you are at a point in life, where you want to be, what are your aspirations, how life derails you.

Many times, we feel we have not made any progress and our life has been a standstill, but when I read my journals from three years back or five years back, I realize how far I have come.

Writing in my journal in the time of confusion and indecision is my way I discover what matters to me and what would be the right choice. It is a place to explore and what and how I am thinking.

A journal is not only a great source of inner development but also a tool to become a fluent writer. Before I started a journal, my writing was clunky. I would struggle to put my thoughts and ideas into words. Journal writing helped me understand and crystalize my ideas and write them with clarity. My journal became a tool to capture gems that I could use in other writing.

Before long my journal became my most trusted companion that supported me through life’s trials. I could write anything without the fear of being judged. It became a place of discovery, of learning, of emotional relief and insights.

It also became a playground, where the everyday rules of writing, reflecting, problem-solving, goal-setting, production and planning no longer applied. It was a training ground to appreciate beauty, to describe scene and setting, to record dialogues, and to write in the moment.

Journal writing trained and honed my eye for beauty. It invited me to live in the present moment as well as allowing me to roam in my past.

It will let you re-experience awe and wonder. It will let you intensify your pleasure in events and situations that have gone well. It will support your recovery (and the gaining of wisdom) from the times you wish had never happened.

My journal is the place where I record the conversation between my many selves – my intuitive self, my everyday self, my dreamy self, my practical self, my uncertain self and my all-knowing self who know what needs to be done. This is the place where I can talk to my soul and can hear it talking to me. I can even talk to my parents who are no longer in this world. I sometimes say things to people that are too painful and difficult to say in person and hear their responses even without talking to them.

I discovered my voice in my journal. I would I explored the writing prompts, exercises from writing books and topics suggested in writing groups in my journal which helped develop the tone and rhythm of my writing.

When I started writing, I sounded self-conscious and stiff, or sometimes chatty and superficial. So I started experimenting. I tried writing in the third person, or in the second person. Rather than writing in past tense all the time, I beginner writers do all the time, I would try writing in the present tense. I wrote shabby poems and copied quotes and changed them to something different. I wrote letters to myself and to others which I never meant to post. I could take those risks because my journals are for my eyes only.

In A Writer’s Diary, Virginia Woolf asks herself what kind of a diary she’d like to write and answers:

“I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through.”

“Without looking them through,” is important. Your journal is the place where you shouldn’t try to censor yourself. Fill it in with your incomplete thoughts, your inner life, your first feelings. Include any pictures or clippings that spark your imagination, poems, and songs lyrics that move you. Write letters in it that you never mail.

Journal writing is a simple practice, yet it can make you the writer you want to become.

Keep a Swipe File

Neera
I have been keeping a swipe file even before I knew what a swipe file was.

A swipe file is a notebook or a folder where you keep all the fantastic ideas, inspiration, prompts, quotes and bits and pieces of information that you’ve come across over the years. Think of it as a professional scrapbook designed to inspire your writing.

My swipe file started with collections of quotes at the age of thirteen. I still have that tattered diary in immature handwriting (it still hasn’t improved much).

I filled it with ideas or words of other people. It kind of felt right to keep that ‘intellectual loot‘ somewhere where I can get back to it again and again. I started with notebooks and moved on to A4 size journals, A4 size diaries with pockets. Ring binders, clear-plastic sleaves, and zip-seal document cases housed newspaper and magazine clippings and as my collection of online articles grew so did my pile of thumb drives.

My swipe-files are my comfort food. Just like I reach for the cookies-jar when stressed, I go to my swipe-files when I am looking for comfort.

Not just that, they are the one I scan first when my mind is begging for stimulation. It reminds me of an idea or a piece of writing I read years ago and have forgotten about it. Reading again, it invokes different emotions and brings new insights.

The idea of a swipe file is nothing new. The creatives in every field have been using them to overcome almost any professional hurdle.

Keeps a swipe file. It’s just what it sound like – a file to keep track of the stuff you’ve swiped from others.

See something worth seatling? Put it in the swipe file. Need a little inspiration? Open up the swipe file.

Newspaper reports call this a “morgue file” – I like that nave even better. Your morgue file is where you keep the dead things that you’ll later reanimate in your work.

Austin Kleon in Steal Like an Artist

The more complete your swipe files are, the more powerful your resource will be.

How can a swipe file help you improve your writing skills?

If you want to grow as a writer, the easiest way to do that is to keep a swipe file.

Professional writers use swipe files as a learning method to improve their writing. They study other people’s content and create a collection with proven examples.

A swipe file helps you understand writing techniques as you can see how others write. It also provides templates for your own writing. A swipe file can even help you overcome writer’s block and save time, as it provides suggestions for sentence structure, dialogues, description of settings, facial features, mannerism, interesting anecdotes and much more.

If something catches your attention, the chances are that it will have the same effect on others.

For a long time, I kept on believing in the advice of reputed ‘writing gurus’ that if you read a lot and write a lot, and you’ll become a better writer. But it didn’t work. My writing was not improving fast enough. But when I started learning from other people’s writing, sometimes copying, other times imitating, yet another time structuring my sentences based on sentences that caught my attention, my skills improved at a much-exceeding rate.

Is that plagiarism?

The exact definition of plagiarism is – the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.

While the purpose of a swipe file is to study techniques and templates and get inspirations and ideas other people writing will invoke. Since you can’t keep all you read in your head, you have to have a place where can go to later when you need it.

You don’t copy other people’s writing, neither do you claim their ideas as your own. But you do use their prose to understand how to apply different writing techniques. Swiping is a legitimate and effective method to improve your writing skills, and to become a more persuasive and engaging writer.

How to organize your swipe file?

Although you might start in a haphazard way, you need to organize your swipe files in such a way that makes it easy to find the guidance you need when you need it most.

There are several ways to do that, and I have listed some below, but you need to select the ones which work best for you.

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  • A scrapbook. cut and paste things into it
  • Notebooks. Separate ones for separate categories such as metaphors, quotes, stories, etc.
  • Folders. Chuck clippings, photocopies in it and organize in clear plastics sleeves.
  • Reference cards. The writer Anne Lamott swears by it.
  • Mobile phone. Take pictures and sort by using albums.
  • Digital swipe files. I have started using Evernote which has an excellent search facility and easy to organize in categories
  • Pinterest. You can create boards with different categories and save hundred of pins other people are sharing freely.

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To make sure your ideas and inspirations don’t evaporate in thin air, have a trusted system for managing them. Swipe files are a great tool for that.

Take that little bit extra time at the end of each session (reading or writing) on filing so you can find what you need when you need it.

Besides, you will find that keeping swipe files is the most enjoyable activity you will engage in as a writer.

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Learn by teaching

Neera

Do you know who is the best teacher? The one who is master at his craft or the one who is a beginner.

The answer might surprise you.

Sometimes when someone is too good or too experienced, they turn out to be the worst teachers. They can’t teach because they’ve lost touch with the learning challenges at the beginner level. Anything that you become good, you tend to forget that you have mastered and internalized a number of things.

Take the internet for instance. Most of us have mastered a number of things and don’t even remember how we struggled when we just started. Now try teaching internet surfing and email writing to a senior citizen who has never used the internet before and watches your frustration with their lack of knowledge.

Now let an eight-year-old teach the same old person. Watch their patience and technique.

Their own learning is fresh in their mind. They can use different techniques, one they used themselves to learn, to teach their pupil (an old person in this case).

The problems faced by someone just starting out are very different to the problems of someone who is already making progress. The people on the mediocre-to-good spectrum are much different from people who are just starting. Who you decide to learn from and who you look up to should vary as you make your way through your learning journey.

C.S. Lewis wrote a great introduction to his Reflections on the Psalms 

It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than a teacher can… the Fellow-Pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has only recently met. The expert met it so long ago he has forgotten… I write as one amateur to another, talking about difficulties I have met, or lights I have gained…

First cited at To be a teacher and remain a student

Often, rather than turning to a master or a guru or already made the slog through to the other side, the better person to learn from is the person who is next to you in the trenches.

The world is changing at such an amazing rate that we can’t be satisfied with knowing what we know now. If you become complacent, the world will leave you behind. You need to have the humility to become a student again.

But if you want to fast track your learning, start teaching what you want to learn.

In 1980, Jean-Pol Martin developed a teaching and learning approach in German school which led to a psychological phenomenon that was appropriately named protégé effect. 

He got second-year students of German at the University of Nottingham plan, design and deliver a teaching session for first-year beginners’ students.

The result was:

The result was:

– The second-year students reported increased metacognitive processing, which made them more actively aware of their own learning process.

– Expecting to teach and teaching can led toincreased use of effective learning strategies, such as organizing the material and seeking out key pieces of information.

– It led to increased motivation to learn, since they make a greater effort to learn for those that they will teach than they do for themselves.

– They felt increased feelings of competence and autonomy, by viewing themselves as playing the role of a teacher, rather than that of the student.

Source: The Protégé Effect: How You Can Learn by Teaching Others

We learn a skill better as a result of several psychological mechanisms, all of which revolve around the differences between how we learn information when we’re learning for ourselves, compared to how we learn it when we expect to teach others, as well as when we teach them in practice. 

Teaching not only improves our own learning of the skill but also improves our soft skills such as – communication, confidence level, and leadership ability.

When preparing to teach not only our quality of learning improves but our retention also increases. The same is true of the increased feelings of competence and autonomy that we experience as a result of playing the role of the teacher.

Another study attributed the benefits of the learning-by-teaching strategy to retrieval practice.

Most of us already have some knowledge in our area of interest, why not start teaching those to someone else and in the process improve our own learning.

This is what I am doing through this site. Learning and improving my writing skills by teaching others.

Whether you have skills or don’t have any skills in your area of interest, your teaching ability is about 60 hours away.

How?

I will write about that next week.

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Three kinds of mentors for writers and why you should have them all

Neera

In the 12th century BC, when Odysseus, the legendary Greek king of Ithaca and the hero of Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey, left for the Trojan War, he left his son Telemachus in charge of his friend named Mentōr.

Since then, the Greek word Mentor became synonymous with someone who teaches, gives help, and advice to a less experienced and often younger person.

All beginning writers need mentors. Mentors are those kind souls who say to you, “I believe in you,” even when you don’t; especially when you don’t.

Writing is said to be a solitary profession. We are expected to tread in isolation and toil quietly. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Your writing journey can become a joyful walk if you can find a good mentor. The right mentor can instruct, guide, support, and encourage you and help you realize your full potential.

Who is the right mentor?

According to Patrick Boland, a right mentor has three main characteristics:

  1. Good mentors are open as a person. They see the world as an exciting, curious place, and he is open to ideas and possibilities. He is comfortable in his skin and wants you to be comfortable in his skin and wants you to be comfortable in yours.
  2. They are more interested in what is going on internally than externally.
  3. They celebrate your rise and sit with you during your falls, through all the disappointments, heartbreak, and hurt.

The right mentor will bring you through the whole learning cycle of trying failing and getting better.

A right mentor is someone who meets you where you are.

A right mentor is someone you admire and want to be like.

Finding the right mentor is not easy. Fortunately, mentoring can happen in many shapes and forms. It can be formal or informal and may change and evolve with changes in your needs.

The three kinds of mentors you should look at are:

Dead mentors

The dead mentors are those who have died a long time ago. But they have left their advice behind in the form of books. They are the best kind of mentors because their advice is time-tested. Besides, they can’t say ‘no’ to mentor you. 

You can pick and choose which was you want to follow. You can also pick the advice that appeals to you and applies to your circumstances. 

But, of course, not every piece of advice applies to everyone. 

And it is quite possible the time is not right for certain counsel. In those scenarios, you can use your own judgment to decide what to take and what to leave.

“The best mentors can help us define and express our inner calling,” says Anthony Tjan, CEO of Boston firm Cue Ball Group and author of Good People. “But rarely can one person give you everything you need to grow.”

Dead mentors with their books can easily cover that gap.

Alive mentors

Alive mentors could be hard to get because you need their permission to be your mentors.

Sometimes, your agents, your editors, your writing coach, or even your writing-group-buddies can fit the bill.

As your mentor, their job is not to solve your problems (writing or otherwise) than to help you see them clearly. 

They do that by observing, listening, challenging, asking focused questions, and making you reflect. 

They can suggest strategies for solving problems you might not have considered and can help you think “bigger picture.” 

Your mentors can be your cheerleaders. Having the positive support of a cheerleader can give you the necessary motivation to keep going. 

Our parents, spouses, and good friends can fill this role for us in many ways. Professionally, having a person in your field saying, “you can do this,” can be a tremendous asset. 

As your cheerleader, they will be genuinely happy for you when you succeed and will cheer you out of the hole when you can find no way out.

In his TED talk, Anthony Tjan identifies five kinds of people you should have in your corner

  • Master of the craft
  • Champion of your cause
  • Copilot
  • Anchor
  • Reverse mentor. 

Listen to his talk below to find out how they can help you grow. 

One person can’t cover more than one category so use this list as a guide to identify them deepen your bond with them. You probably already know all of them.

Find writers you admire. Writers who are living their life in a way you aspire to. Get to know their routines, their resources, how they go about their days. While their way is not the only way, you can gain valuable insight into steps you might want to take to get you closer to your goals.

Online mentors

Online mentors are the educators. 

An educator is a person who takes the time to share their expertise with those who want to learn. They love to help others by sharing their wisdom. They want to see everyone succeed.

Many writers are sharing their craft online. They are willing to teach what they have learned through their blogs and courses. They are imparting information for free. You can subscribe to your ideals which are doing things you want to be able to do. Search for any topic online, and you will find a lot of free information. These are your online mentors.

Here is a list of some I follow:

You can choose a more suitable one from this extensive list.

Don’t follow too many at a time. Otherwise, there will be too much advice, and you won’t be able to act on it.

The best way is, to follow one or two for a while, learn from them, and then move on. If you stick around too long you will start seeing things their way which will hinder your growth.

When their well dries, or you think you are learning no more from them, stop following them and find someone else you can learn from.

Photo by Joshua Ness on Unsplash