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

Neera 1 Comment

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

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

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

Most newbie writers struggle to write every day.

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

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

That is when a system comes to rescue.

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

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

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

Anything hard to do has been converted into a system.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the three-bucket system?

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

Illustration by Neera Mahajan

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

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

Ideas can come anytime.

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

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

Set a specific time for first drafts

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

Afternoons are perfect for editing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash

Use Lies To Communicate Truth

Neera

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

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

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

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

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

Stories are a vehicle to communicate truth.

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

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

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

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

Stories make the message personal.

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

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

It is easy to remember stories than the facts.

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

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

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

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

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

Happy fiction writing!

Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash

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

Neera

We tell stories all the time.

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

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

This is what happened at my dinner table last night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is easy to tell stories verbally.

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

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

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

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

The way we tell stories matter.

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

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

What can we learn from them?

Three things:

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

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

Photo by Surface on Unsplash

How to bring the fun back in learning?

Neera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning itself is fun.

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

Then something happened.

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

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

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

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

Learning stops when the fun stops.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michel has two ground rules for learning.

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

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

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

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

Learning shouldn’t be work but a pleasure.

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

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

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

How to make learning easy.

Here are 3 simple things you can do:

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

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

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

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

Let me summarise what I have covered so far.

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

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

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

Photo by Lidya Nada on Unsplash

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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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