The end of the decade stocktake

Neera

How has 2019 been for you? Or rather the whole decade?

Did you come far? Achieved all that you wanted to achieve?

Or was it a terrible decade with all its economic doom and gloom, crazy heads-of- states (surely there are more than one), drought, natural disasters and with climate change thrown in just for fun.

I have good news for you.

Matt Ridley has reported in SPECTATOR that this has been the best decade in human history.

He has been watching closely and this is what he has observed:

We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.

Does that make you feel better?

It didn’t to me. I am more concerned about the things that aren’t going well.

Matt’s response to bad stuff is: “Bad things keep on happening while the world still keeps on getting better. It has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even starry-eyed me.”

Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.

…

In 2011 Chris Goodall, an investor in electric vehicles, published research showing that the UK was now using not just relatively less ‘stuff’ every year, but absolutely less. Events have since vindicated his thesis. The quantity of all resources consumed per person in Britain (domestic extraction of biomass, metals, minerals and fossil fuels, plus imports minus exports) fell by a third between 2000 and 2017, from 13.7 tons to 9.4 tons. That’s a faster decline than the increase in the number of people, so it means fewer resources consumed overall.

I can definitely relate to this. I know I am on the starting point of (just starting point) of reducing my footprint. Although it will take me another decade to reach the optimum point. But the change has begun and that is a positive sign.

Minimalism is one thing Syd Robinson lists the 18 Things This Decade Will Be Remembered For along with the rise of smartphones, Netflix, Meme culture, social media, Millennials, beginning of automation, social and political change and of course Obama and Trump.

It is hard to believe how much has changed in the last ten years ago but it’s even harder to fathom how much more is going to change in the next decade.

Change is coming faster than any of us can predict. Which makes life hard as well as interesting. How will it turn out for you will depend on how do you respond to the interesting times.

The best way is to become an interesting person in interesting times.

Photo by Tomas Robertson on Unsplash

Before you throw away those old books try this…

Neera

I have long been inspired by Newspaper Blackout poems, made famous by Austin Kleon. I have read enough of them to see the potential they have to develop your ability to connect words in a different way.

Austin uses old newspapers to create poetry by redacting newspaper articles with a permanent marker, leaving only a few words behind which he calls “as if the C.I.A. is doing haiku.”

“Essentially, I destroy someone else’s intellectual property to create something new,” is his take about it but the activity has created such a fervor that Austin had to create a site solely dedicated to blackout poems where anyone can post their blackout poem.

In a recent bout of creativity, I tried doing the same but the newspaper’s dry language didn’t inspire me. I could hardly find nuggets in the news. Books on the other hand always have beautiful phrases worth keeping. So I thought why not use books to create Blackout poems.

I pulled out the books that were sitting in the back of my car, on their way to the donation bin (I have discovered if things stay in the book of my car for too long they tend to make their way back inside my house).

So, in they come and I picked one book and tried. There it was, a poem on the very first page.

The next was equally easy.

I am reluctant to let go of books anyway. Now I have found another reason to keep them.

Here in this video, Austin shows how to make those poems.

The rules are easy. Here they are in Austin’s own words:

  • I try to disfigure the original article in such a way that the resulting poem has no resemblance to the original subject matter, or if it does, it parodies or reverses that subject matter.
  • The more “nonfiction” and mundane the section the better the transformation. (Although, the sports section tends to be the most filled with everyday speech and metaphors, therefore the easiest.)
  • The fewer words I use from the original, and the more I chop them up, the more the poem sounds like me.
  • The blackouts are not a degradation of the newspaper, but a celebration. Several savvy newspapers have recognized this, running their own blackout poetry contests in which they encourage readers to buy a Sunday edition and try their own.

Happy poetry!

Are you an interesting person?

Neera 1 Comment

Recently, in a cartoon drawing course, I created a character who immediately took over and started showing her true colors.

I named her Ms. Jolly and she is turning out to be an interesting character. Even though she is still in the making, she is gathering a following of her own on Instagram where I post her daily adventures.

Her popularity made me think what makes her so interesting.

That question reminded me of a story I recently read about the novelist and short story writer Barry Hannah.

A student gets her story back from Barry, with honest criticism on it, “This just isn’t interesting.”

The student, a whiner, complained, “What can I do to make it interesting? ”

Barry, looked long and hard at the student, decided she was earnest about becoming a better writer, and told her the truth, “Try making yourself a more interesting person.”

Boomrang and Never Die

It seems like ‘being an interesting person’ is imperative for writers.

The usual image of a writer is that of someone in pajamas, sitting behind a desk with piles of paper, diligently typing away in a dark room.

But when I drew Ms. Jolly writing on her desk she came in the complete opposite way. She was dressed properly, complete with high heels, and was working from a clean desk.

How can one become an interesting person? It sounds like too much of hard work for introverts like me.

Well, it is not.

The recipe to be an interesting person is simple.

Do interesting things. That’s all.

Ms. Jolly is interesting because she is finding interesting things to do.

Interesting people have interesting lives not because they are interesting but because they are doing interesting things.

There are many roads to becoming an interesting person, but they all involve developing your curiosity and your desire to know and understand — yourself, others, the world around you. You can read. You can pursue a new activity like knitting or rock climbing. You can volunteer. You can commit to asking three people a day an open-ended question about themselves and really listening to their responses. You can share your information and connections freely.

J. Maureen Henderson

A person participating in archeological digs is an interesting person because he has so many stories to tell.

A person making movies with his phone camera and winning the amateur short film award is an interesting person. He has a lot to share, most people wouldn’t even bother to learn all the features of their phone camera.

A novelist traveling to the north pole to experience the northern lights so that she can use them as a setting in her novel is an interesting person. How many people do you know who would do that?

Austin Kleon wrote in his book Show Your Work!:
If you want followers, be someone worth following. [“Have you tried making yourself more interesting?”] seems like a really mean thing to say, unless you think of the word interesting the way writer Lawrence Weschler does: For him, to be “interest-ing” is to be curious and attentive, and to practice “the continual projection of interest.” To put it more simply: If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested.

Maybe that was the reason that I enrolled for a cartoon drawing course this year which lead to the creation of Ms. Jolly.

That could be the reason why I was reading, researching and blogging about my travel from the bus and on the airports when everyone else was having a nap or strolling around aimlessly.

Jessica Hagy writes in How to Be Interesting: (In 10 Simple Steps): Being interesting is about taking chances. It is also about taking daily vacations. About being childlike, not childish. It’s about ideas, creativity, risk. It’s about trusting your talents and doing only what you want—but having the courage to get lost and see where the path leads. Because it’s what you don’t know that’s interesting.

It is about living at the intersection of wonder, awe, and curiosity.

Go on, do something.

‘No-time’ syndrome and 7 strategies to get things done

Neera

Have you ever whined that you have ‘no-time’ to do so many things you want to do? That your to-do list is like Chronicles of Narnia — neverending. That you don’t know where your day goes. And this year is whooshing past faster than even the last year.

These are the symptoms of the ‘no-time’ syndrome and if you are suffering from it like me), then there is something seriously wrong.

When I finished full-time employment to devote my time to my passions I thought I will have so much time on hand that I will be able to do anything I want. Boy was I wrong!

It didn’t take me long to find out that I have even less time than when I was working fulltime. I was taking more time to do everything. Parkinson’s Law in action! So much so, that my usual tasks were not even getting done.

Then one day I stopped the mad rush and took the day off to figure out what was going on.

I realized all my frustrations can be attributed to two things — lack oof efficiency and laziness.

With the amount of time and effort I was putting towards my passions it was hard for me to accept that I was not being efficient and just plain lazy sometimes, but it was true.

If it takes you two hours to do something that could be done in half an hour it is an issue of efficiency.

If you have bought new software (Scrivener by the way) and don’t bother to learn its features then it is laziness. Learning those features might take time but in the end, they save time and you end up writing faster.

That was it. I was not prepared to have the labels of inefficient and lazy on my back forever, so I set upon finding the antidotes to the ‘no-time’ syndrome.

I have come up with seven strategies.

1. Write your tasks down and put them where you can see them.

I realized there were five tasks that I must do every day to count my day to be productive. I made a list of those.

Then there were tasks that can be divided into small-size projects (taking a week to finish) and medium-size projects (taking up to a month to finish). Since I am a compulsive list-maker, I made a list of those as well. I won’t talk about big projects here because they require different strategies. 

Now the problem was unlike work I was not sitting at my desk so my tasks were not in front of me all the time. Working from home means constant interruptions which break the rhythm of productivity. 

So I made a grid of my daily tasks and put it up on the pin board. Now as soon as I finish one task, I tick it off and move on to the next one. 

Viola! it was that simple. I now have a system to stay on top of my daily schedule.

2. Allocate time for each task.

My next challenge was not to let the tasks expand themselves. The best way to do was to allocate time to each task. 

I knew it took me only twenty minutes to write a page in my diary (I write one page a day to chronicle my life) and 40 minutes to write 750 words (which go towards my articles, stories, and novel). That adds up to one hour. So two tasks are done in one hour.

I allocated one hour each towards blog posts and walk and half an hour to draw a sketch. Two hours and my exercise, creativity, and business tasks are ticked off.

Then depending on the family and social commitments, I would carve out five hours a week for the weekly project and 7–10 hours for the monthly project But I made sure I don’t spend no more than one hour a day (15 hours altogether in a month) on either of these projects. This meant I was spending, on average, just half an hour every day on projects.

For maths buffs, it adds up to four hours a day. Four hours of work and then I have the rest of the day for myself. 

The important thing to understand here is when we have a time limit, we tend to finish the work within that time limit. Taking longer will not improve the quality of the work, rather it will bring procrastination for future projects. Finishing work within the time limit sharpens our concentration and brings exultation that comes with accomplishing a task.

3. Take breaks.

I don’t do all these tasks in one sitting. No one can. High-energy consuming tasks need to be separated with lighter and less-concentration-needing tasks. 

I write my diary and 750 words as soon as I wake up and before breakfast. I have just woken up, my mind is fresh and in the creative zone and they give a great start to my day. Breakfast is a natural break. I read my emails over the cup of tea and catch up with reading articles on Medium or other magazines I subscribe to. 

Then around mid-morning, I work on the blog post. If I have time I will work on a weekly or monthly project before cooking lunch. 

Sketching is an afternoon activity. Straight after lunch. I am in a relaxed mode and my fingers love moving lazily on the paper while I listen to a podcast. It usually leaves me enough time to work on projects. 

The walk around five pm. It is an indication that the tasks are over and I have the evening for myself and my family.

What makes the schedule work so well is the natural breaks. I know I have to get up for breakfast hence I have to finish the diary writing and 750 words. I know mid-morning is the only time to work on the blog post, so I make sure it gets done.

Some things still don’t get done for whatever reason. Walk gets interrupted because someone dropped in for dinner, or I had to duck to shops to buy something urgently. But that is fine. Life happens. But my schedule keeps me on track most of the days.

4. Manage distractions.

Emails, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Pinterest, online window-shopping, and TV are all chewing up our time. I made a pact with myself not to check them when I am working on my tasks.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t check them. I am on social media while having breakfast, cooking lunch/dinner or at night while watching TV. I just make sure I stay away from them when working on a task. I don’t watch TV during the day and even at night if I don’t like what is on. I switch it off (or mute it) and read or surf the net.

5. Improve skills.

If it is taking you two hours to do a task that can be done in half an hour, it is possible you don’t have the right skills to do it. Invest time and effort to learn those skills and keep improving them with continuous practice. 

I used to take seven hours to write an article. I have spent three months learning how to write articles in a reasonable time. Now I am able to write an article in less than three hours. More importantly, I have learned how to spread it over several days. I don’t spend more than an hour each day on article writing. Three months I spent on learning was well worth it because of the time it has saved me in the long run.

6. Don’t spread yourself too thin.

Trying to accomplish too many things in a day is a recipe for disappointment. I used to fall into this trap all the time. My enthusiasm would want me to start a new project as soon as I conceived it. The result was many unfinished projects and me burning out.

I have now started pacing myself. Any idea has to pass the test of time. It goes into a queue of either weekly or monthly projects. At the start of each month, I pick a project from the list. I will only start it if I am still feeling passionate about it and stick with it for the whole month. The same goes for weekly projects.

7. Outsource whatever is not magic.

After spending years and years doing tasks that can be easily outsourced, I have learned to let go of them. Imagine 33 years of house cleaning every weekend. What if you can use that time writing books or painting or making movies or becoming a therapist or whatever else you wanted to be.

There is no magic in washing dishes or vacuum cleaning or mopping the floor. So I have outsourced them. I have outsourced my garden too. Now I only do the things that have magic. What is magic? For me, the magic is in writing articles. Drawing cartoons. Plotting a novel.

We’ve covered quite a bit, let’s summarise:

‘No-time’ syndrome is because of two reasons only — lack of efficiency and laziness. If it is taking you double or triple the time to do something it is an issue of efficiency. If you haven’t learned the features or skills that can help reduce the time to do something it is laziness.

Seven strategies I have used to beat the ‘No-time’ syndrome are: 

  1. Write your tasks in a grid form and put them where you can see them easily. Cross them out when you complete each task.
  2. Allocate time for each task and make sure to finish it within the allocated time. Taking longer will not improve the quality of the work, rather it will bring procrastination for future projects.
  3. Make sure to separate the high-energy-needing tasks with lighter tasks and breaks, preferably natural breaks such as breakfast and lunch.
  4. No social media while doing tasks in the allocated time. Leave it during breaks or for the evening when you are relaxing.
  5. Get better so that you can do the tasks in less time. Improve your skills. Learn what you have to learn to reduce time it takes to finish a task.
  6. Don’t overcommit. Manage your passions. You can’t do everything you want to do straight away. Make ideas pass the time test. 
  7. Outsources whatever is not magic. Save your energies to do what is magic for you.

That is what I am doing by writing this article and letting my fellow writers beat the ‘No-time’ syndrome.

Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash

How to make your character come alive

Neera

For the past few days, I have been working on the character development of my novel. There are a few techniques I have learned which I am going to share with you in this post.

Figure out how your character looks like.

Knowing how your characters look physically before starting writing about them makes them come alive. The tool I have used to find their physical appearance is Google images. I would go to the images section of Google and do some random searches. More than usual I will find a picture that matches the character I have in mind.

There could the eye color you might be looking for or a jawline or maybe the hair color. The only thing I knew about my protagonist was that she has long black hair. When I searched the term ‘long back hair’, I found a picture of a girl who I knew instinctively was my protagonist.   

Find pictures not only for the protagonist but also of the antagonist and all major characters. Once you know how they look like, it will be very easy to write about them. Keep in mind you will have to describe their physical features to your readers so they can also picture them in their minds. The best way I have seen it done is by tagging them.

J. K. Rowling goes to a lot of trouble to create characters with very distinct physical tags. Harry Potter has green eyes, lightening-shaped scar, glasses, and messy hair. Ron Weasley can be very easily pictured with red hair, freckles, and long nose, so is Hagrid from his size shaggy hair and a bushy long beard.

You don’t have to go to a lot of lengths to describe your characters. You can use very short descriptions when you first introduce them and tags are a great way to do them.  

Tags can include physical features, body marks, clothing, hairstyles, characteristic mannerisms, facial expressions, manner of speaking, jargon, noises the character makes, or even odor – anything, in fact, that a person interacting with the character would notice about him.

Do a Personality test for each of your main characters.

To save your characters from falling flat, give them rich personalities. Figure out what they like and dislike, what that think, say and how they react. You can give them behavior traits like real people and the best way to access a vast majority of data on people’s behavior is through personality tests.

The Myers Briggs Test was the first one of its kind (compiled by Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers-Briggs) based on psychologist C. G. Jung’s work. Since then several others have come into play. The one I used is called 16 Personalities because it is free and it also has a vast database based on millions of real-life people.

When you take the test, you get access to both the positive and negative traits of that personality type. The trick is to answer the questions as you think your character would have answered them.

You will get about twenty pages of information. You can use whatever you like and discard the rest. You don’t have to stick with it completely, can add other things on top of what you got. The outcome will be a close to life, three-dimensional character.

Interview your character.

Interviewing is a great way of finding the voice and also the mannerism of your character and I find it very easy to do.

Settle at a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed for some time, close your eyes and invite your character to come and sit with you. See him standing across from you. He will be reluctant initially but if you are kind and show compassion, his resistance will break and he will accept your invitation.

Start with easy questions. Have a conversation with him. How are you? Thanks for coming today. I am sorry I have been ignoring you, but I am here now and want to know you better.

Tell me how have you been lately. Tell him the bits you already know about him. I know you have been upset when your father spoke so badly to you, why do you think he does that? You will find he will start talking. Note his mannerisms and start writing (or typing).

You can open your eyes now. You will find the conversation very easily move from your mind on to paper. Write everything you see or hear. Keep asking easy questions keeping the hard one for the last. You may find that he doesn’t answer the hard question and leaves the interview. That is fine. He will tell you next time when there is more trust between the two of you.

Then he will tell you everything, even the things you haven’t imagined for him.

That is when he will come alive.

Photo by Duncan Shaffer on Unsplash

A writer’s graduation

Neera

If you are on a journey to become a professional writer, you need to understand one thing. Like any other profession, you need to graduate from the school of writing.

Professional qualifications can take anywhere from three to seven years. A bachelor’s degree in science typically takes four years; a law degree can take three years on top of that, and medicine up to seven years. 

Graduation in writing can take many years, but four to five years if you are working on the craft full time.

But most of us are writing on the side.

That takes a long time to learn the skills of the trade.

Indeed, you don’t have to go to university to get the qualifications. You can learn the craft through self-study, but you become a writer by writing, and that, my dear, takes years. 

You got to be writing a lot, and for many years, before your work gets anywhere close to publishable quality.

The major drawback of the self-study writing degree is that we don’t automatically advance one level per year. We can be a freshman for years. I know that because I have been a freshman for twenty years.

Randy Ingermanson, the writer who invented the Snowflake method of outlining, has devised a method to figure out where you are on the road to graduation as a writer.

Following his method, you can self-judge whether you are a Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, or Senior. Here are the criteria:

Freshmen are novice writers. They often have very fine content, but their craft is unpolished and they usually don’t have any contacts at all. Most Freshmen are convinced that they will never sell anything and they might as well give up. It’s fair to say that all Freshmen are very confused. That’s OK!

Sophomores have a bit of writing under their belts. They’ve improved their craft and probably also their content and they’re starting to get restless. Just how long does it take to get published, anyway? Why can’t those editors see that my book is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius and just publish the thing?

Juniors have gone even further. They’ve become strong writers. They’ve submitted some actual proposals at conferences. They’ve had an editor say those magic words — “Send me that proposal.” Their friends can’t understand why they’re not published. There is a reason, of course — they’re not Seniors yet. But they soon will be.

Seniors are those few who are ripe to graduate. A Senior is writing excellent stuff. Explosive. Powerful. Moving. But still unpublished. Seniors are worried sick that those mean editors are never going to notice them, that they’ll be submitting proposals forever. And then one day the phone rings. It’s one of those cranky editors you sent that proposal to last year and she wants to buy your book!

Source: Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Author

How to move from one level to the next

Randy advises not to jump levels. It is hard enough already. If you try to jump from Sophomores to the Senior level, you will frustrate yourself and eventually give up writing altogether.

His tip is to take your time to move from Freshman to Sophomore and work on the craft. This means writing a lot and writing for readers. Write in your journal daily. Start a blog. Participate in November Novel Writing Month. Join a critique group.

Once all that becomes a habit, you can work towards becoming Juniors. Start attending writer’s conferences and learn to write book proposals. Writing proposals is an art in itself, and you will need a lot of practice to hone it. And guess what, you will need to get critiques on your proposals too.

As a Junior, you strive for excellence. Both in your work and your proposals. You will need to build your contacts and broaden your horizons. This will mean meeting lots of people. Not just editors but writers too, as Randy says, ” knowing lots of writers is better than knowing lots of editors, and it’s a whole lot easier.”

And finally, when you have made yourself known in the writing circle, you become a senior writer. Then just like any university, you win the bragging rights to intimidate the freshmen. 

But even at this stage, you need to continue to strive for perfection in your craft. 

But your main job is to wait for the right idea. 

And as soon as it strikes, you are to grab it with both hands and turn it into the book by using all that you have been learning so far.

Then my dear, an editor, who is a lifelong friend of a lifelong friend, will offer you a contract, and you will be an author. 

If you have already checked and your lifelong friend doesn’t have an editor friend, not to worry, you can build a writer’s page on Amazon and self-publish your book.

Then will start the real journey of being an authorpreneure. 

To know more about those, read my previous articles on the Authopreneur series.