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.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

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

An open letter to anyone who thinks their writing is not good enough

Neera

Dear Writer,

Let me start by telling you are not the only one. Every writer, at the start of their journey, thinks their writing is good enough. Some like me will suffer from the malady all their lives.

Most of us, except for a few gifted occasions, are unhappy with whatever we write.

I used to be terrible to myself. On an almost daily basis, I would meticulously look for evidence to feed my belief that I was not a good writer and will never be able to become one. Yet there is nothing else I want to perfect than writing.

It is a constant battle, like losing five kilos I keep on putting back on every time I lose them. Just like my body keeps going back to the ‘overweight-threshold’ my mind keeps on going back to ‘not good enough’ baseline.

Getting good at any skill feels like climbing a mountain, the only difference is when you get to the other side you find there is another mountain. Writing is not just a mountain but a mountain range. You feel like you are climbing hill after hill.

Writing is compared to art and art takes practice.

And practice takes time.

You need to give yourself time.

Daily practice, even if it is for fifteen minutes is better than an occasional hour or a whole afternoon. Every serious writer writes daily, there is no example of anyone who wrote occasionally and produced good work but there are many who wrote daily, some only for fifteen minutes a day (think Toni Morrison), and produced a great amount of work.

More than anything else writing is about building a habit.

Initially do nothing else but concentrate on building the habit. Write anything, write about the sky, or the weather, or the surroundings, or the people around you. Develop your writing muscles. The stories will develop later. Concentrate on quantity, the quality will come later.

Always remember, there is more right with your writing than wrong.

This powerful reminder is inspired by a quote from Jon Kabat-Zinn: “Until you stop breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong with you.”

As my friend Henneke says, “As someone who sometimes tends to zoom in on all my perceived flaws, it helps to remember that there are lots of things I like about myself too—like the fact that I’m alive and breathing and able to pave new paths whenever I choose.”

Focus on progress rather than perfection

Don’t worry about how far you have to go, look at how far you have come.

One of the biggest causes of self-loathing is our hell-bent need to “get it right.” We strive for perfection and success, and when we fall short, we feel less than and worthless. What we don’t seem to realize is that working toward our goals and being willing to put ourselves out there are accomplishments within themselves, regardless of how many times we fail.

Instead of berating yourself for messing up and stumbling backward, give yourself a pat on the back for trying, making progress, and coming as far as you have.  

Forget quality, write from the heart

Ann Handley describes an article her friend, Cara published on LinkedIn titled How To: Fucking Work from Home promoting her shed business. The post is riddled with spelling errors and profanity but it caused a ruckus: 55,000 views, 624 comments, and 217 shares.

Why? Because it was authentic, written from heart, using the language she would use describing her frustration to a friend.

The post gave a clear-eyed view of one of her typically brutal mornings and by extension the chaos of mornings everywhere. It boils over with the tension anyone feels when trying to balance home, family, work, recycling day, laundry, walking the dog, dinner.

You breakthrough when you let go

I started getting better when I stopped worrying and let go. It didn’t matter whether my writing was plain, clunky and not to the level of the writers I loved reading and so admired. True it will take me years to get to their level, or I may never get there but I was writing something and it was better than what I was able to before.

In the end, frame Ira Glass’s manifesto, place it on your desk and get to work on your art.

All the best.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

3 Habits of a freshman writer (and why you should concentrate on only these)

Neera 1 Comment

I wish someone had told me, or better still, I had figured it out myself at the beginning of my writing journey. It took me twenty years of painful, frustrating, trial-and-error learning to figure out that I only needed to concentrate on developing three habits in the first year to become a writer.

Like all aspiring writers, I wanted to write and publish a book as soon as possible.

Why on earth would you write anything else? 

I wanted to have something to show for all the hours I was investing in learning the craft.

This had been my approach with every endeavor. Even as a teenager, when I started learning embroidery, the only projects I ever undertook were the ones that I could hang on walls. I was not interested in embroidering table clothes and bedsheets, which wear off after a few years of use. My tapestries and cross-stitch are still hanging in my living room in expensive gilded frames.

In the busy, achievement-driven, self-important society we live in today, it is quite logical to set ourselves a goal of writing a book as soon as we can put a few sentences together.

It is no accident that the creative writing industry is booming. Everyone thinks there is a book in them, and everyone is in a race to write the next bestseller.

While I had every excuse on the planet (full-time job, raising a family, looking after aged parents) for not writing my book, the truth is writing is a skill hard to master. It takes time, and it takes old fashion hard work. Modern distractions (TV, mobile phones, social media) don’t help.

But as I became a veteran, I realized a simple strategy would have given me much better results in much less time. I was so trying too damn hard that I failed to see it.

Writing is not a God-given gift or attribute of geniuses. It is a set of habits you develop over time, just like a sportsman or a singer or a dancer does.

Rather than getting overwhelmed by all the learning, I believe you should concentrate on developing just three habits in your freshman year.

1. Write Daily

No excuses. Full stop.

Write one page, or one paragraph, or just one sentence. But write every day.

Write whatever. It doesn’t matter what you write. When you are starting, you are writing to learn to put your thoughts on paper. The actual content doesn’t matter; the formation of sentences does.

Write about your day, mood, surroundings, the tree outside your window, the smell in the air, the sound of the birds, or a conversation you overheard at the bus stop. If nothing else, write about the weather. You are not writing for others but for yourself to develop your muscles.

Your body has writing muscles. Did you know that?

Neither did I.

But apparently, it does.

Just like our body has drawing muscles (as my drawing instructor told me). Since I was not using them, they were deteriorating. I started drawing a sketch every day, and they got stronger and stronger. I am drawing much better sketches within a year of practice.

Start exercising your writing muscles daily. You will be surprised by the result.

You can write online, on your computer, or better still in a notebook. My preference is a notebook. Something magical happens when your fingers glide across the paper. They knock on a special area in your brain where creativity resides.

2. Read Daily

Reading is an easier habit to develop than writing. If you are interested in writing, you may be an avid reader. If books inspired you to write, great, continue reading them.

Rather double the amount of reading in your freshman year.

Read in different genres. Reading books in the genre of your liking will make you a boring writer. To become a good writer, you must be well-informed in other fields as well. That is called cross-pollination. You will find that the novel you started writing had ideas from the gardening book you read years ago. This is exactly what happened when Elizabeth Gilbert wrote the “Signature of All Things.” She was reading about the plants in her pots and where they originally came from, and lo behold; she found a 500-page story to tell.

You need to read with a purpose. Start a journal and note down the paragraphs that inspire you or the quotes you can refer to in your own writing. It is a significant phase of your development as a writer because all this reading will influence and infuse your thoughts.

There is nothing more frustrating when years later, you want to refer to a story, and you can’t remember which book it was from. Or worst still, you don’t remember at all, which leads to habit number three.

3. Organize your writing and notes

No writing book or article I ever read mentioned organizing your writing and notes, yet it is one of the most important habits for new writers.

I have spent months trying to find things that I scribbled somewhere or notes I took and forgot about them. A writer needs a system to organize and store their work and their notes.

Your system should consist of three things.

a. An easy but robust filing system. Both digital and paper-based. Save everything. Any writing which seems trivial at the moment will sound beautiful when read months or years later.

b. Easy retrievability. When you need anything, you know where to look for it and how to retrieve it.

c. An Idea Notebook. This is to capture any idea you get at any time of the day. It should travel with you everywhere, even in the bathroom (especially in the bathroom to capture the ideas you will get in the shower).

Everyone is different. The way you will figure out your system will be different too. It is worth sharing mine here so that you can cherry-pick what you like.

My physical filing system is a string of diaries and journals — separate diaries for separate purposes. In my daily diary, I write about my day. I have one page per day diary, which is all I need to capture my day. On the other hand, my journal is a register size where I write about thoughts, ideas, feelings, and notes from my readings.

Digitally, I have moved from Word documents to Evernote to store everything under appropriate categories. Evernote is one of the best note-taking apps and is available for free with lesser functionality. It has a mighty search engine, and as long as you can remember one word in an article or story you are searching for, it will dish it out for you.

I also use 750Words, a digital app, to write daily. It gives me a blank page and 24 hours to fill it. My writing is stored on the cloud and is accessible at any time. I can write from home, work, or bus stop using my phone.

For writing novels and non-fiction books, I use Scrivener, an application for writers developed by writers. It takes writing tools from everywhere and bundles them into one application.

This is it—the three habits of a freshman writer.

You don’t have to worry about characterization, plotting, great opening lines, foolproof headlines, and all that jazzy stuff so many books throw at you. Leave them for the sophomore year. First, build these habits, which will set the groundwork for a serious writer.

Concentrate all your energy on developing and cementing these three habits, and you will be on your way to becoming the writer you want to become — a bestselling author in not so distant future.

Photo by Chris Spiegl on Unsplash

The things they should have taught us in school

Neera

When I read the preface of Mark Forsyth’s book The Elements of Eloquence I got mad. Really, really mad. All this time, all this knowledge, existed and we were not even aware of it. Not only that, there was an unashamed attempt to hide it, ban it from teaching in schools.

Today’s post is inspired by the Preface of Mark Forsyth’s book “The Elements of Eloquence”

Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without a shadow of a doubt, the most writer who ever lived. But he was not gifted. No angels handed him the words and no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learned techniques, he learned tricks and he learned them well.

I bet not many people know of Shakespeare’s earlier plays. Nobody is sure of which one is his first play but Love’s Labour’s Lost, Titus Andronicus and Henry VI Part 1. The reason not many people haven’t even heard of them is that they were not very good. There isn’t a single memorable line in any of them and Shakespeare is known for his memorable lines.

His first memorable line that everybody knows is from Henry VI Part 2.

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

Then the other one came from Henry VI Part 3.

“I can smile, and murder while I smile.”

Later on, each successive play had more and more great lines. By the time he wrote Much Ado and Julius Caesar and Hamlet and King Lear, he was a master at work we all know of.

Why?

Because he learned. He got better and better because he started badly as most people do when they start a new job. Like a doctor, or a teacher or an accountant at the start of their professional career. Everybody gets better as they progress, so did Shakespeare. He did that by mastering the techniques of good writing he learned at school.

Luckily for him, at his time, English was taught in a proper way in schools. The composition was an integral part of Elizabethan education. And they were teaching the ‘figures of rhetoric.’

Have you heard of figures of rhetoric? I admit I haven’t. And I was taught English from grade one. I have been reading grammar, composition and a mountain of books on how to write better English. But never before I came across the figures of rhetoric.

Why is that? I am beginning to smell something fishy here.

Elizabethan London was crazy about rhetoric figures. George Puttenhan wrote a bestseller on them in 1589 (a year before Shakespeare’s first play). A decade before that Henry Peachman wrote The Garden of Eloquence. Books after books were published about the figures of rhetoric. Shakespeare learned and used them extensively in his writings.

What are figures of rhetoric and why we haven’t heard of them?

Forsyth writes, “Rhetoric is a big subject, consisting of the whole art of persuasion. It includes logic, it includes speaking loudly and clearly, and it includes working out what topics to talk about. Anything to do with persuasion is rhetoric, right down to the argumentum ad baculum, which means threatening somebody with a stick until they agree with you.

One minuscule part of this massive subject is the ‘figure of rhetoric’, which are the techniques for making a single phrase striking and memorable just by altering the words. Not by saying something different, but by saying something in a different way. They are the formulas for producing great lines.

These formulas were thought up by the Ancient Greeks and then added to by the Romans. At Shakespeare’s time, the classical work on rhetoric was dug out, translated and adapted for use in English. England was a century behind than Greeks and Romans.

So Shakespeare learned and learned and got better and better and his lines became more and more striking and more and more memorable.”

So if they were so good, then why weren’t we taught those in school?

Forsyth gives three reasons:

1) England needed woodworkers.

2) People were always suspicious of rhetoric in general and figures in particular. If somebody learns how to phrase things beautifully, they might be able to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Stern people dislike rhetoric, and unfortunately, it is usually the stern people who are in charge.

3) The Romantic Movement came along at the end of the eighteenth century. The Romantics like to believe that you could learn everything worth learning by gazing at a babbling mountain brook, or running barefoot through the fields, or contemplating a Grecian urn. They wanted to be natural and figures of rhetoric are not natural. They are formulas, formulas that you can learn from a book.

All that the Greeks were doing was noting down the best and most memorable phrases they heard, and working out what the structures were, in much the same way that when you and I eat a particularly delicious meal, we might ask for the recipe.

So with the dislike of beauty and books, the figures of rhetoric were largely forgotten. But that didn’t mean they ceased to be used. The figures are, to some extent, are alive and well. We still use them, but haphazardly. While Shakespeare had them beaten into him at school, we might occasionally, use it by accident and without realizing it.

The best way of knowing that the figures are alive and thriving is that one line from a movie you can’t seem to forget. It is most likely a figure of rhetoric. The songs you sing you can’t get out of your head, the poems you love, the dialogues you repeat are all rhetoric growing wild.

Rather than being taught about how a poem is phrased, we were asked to write an essay on what William Blake thought about Tiger.

A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is one and the only difference between the poet and everybody else.

Mark Forsyth

Mark Forsyth explains the ‘figures of rhetoric’ devoting one chapter to each in The Elements of Eloquence and I intend to learn them and use them in my writing if possible. The study of rhetoric did not entirely disappear with Romantics but it is a complete mess.

There are still scholarly articles written about them but it is usually to debate the definitions rather than how to use them in everyday language. I think it is up to us, the writers of the twenty-first century, to revive this ancient art and benefit from the work of our predecessors.

Forsyth ends the preface of his book with a great paragraph which I would use to end this post as well. A point to note is Forsyth is not attacking or debunking Shakespeare in any way, he considers him the greatest craftsman ever lived. Insulting him would be insulting Wright Brothers for explaining the principles of aerodynamics or Neil Armstrong for walking on the moon.

Shakespeare did not consider himself sacred. He would often just steal content from other people. However, whatever he stole he improved, and he improved it using the formulas, flowers, and figures of rhetoric.

Photo by Jessica Pamp on Unsplash

Fury of Nature and Importance of Things

Neera

It is close to mid-day and wind is blowing with a ferocity that reflects Mother Nature’s fury. The temperature today is going to soar to 37 degrees.

The grass fire that was brought under control at Pialligo yesterday (which led to the evacuation) has reignited and is showing a red alert.

Another one has broken out in Phillip, just 3 kms away from my home and is showing out-of-control in the Fire Alert App I have downloaded on my phone.

I wouldn’t have known but for my daughter who texted to alert me. That pressed the panic button. I should prepare to flee. If the wind brings fire to my direction, it will not take it long to reach my home. My non-existent fire plan has just two water hoses which will be completely ineffective in this wind. I will not be able to save the house that is evident. Fleeing is my only option.

If I am to run away, which will be at the notice of five-minutes, what will I take with me? It is a question like the one I tackled once in a writing workshop – if you find out you are going to die in six months, what will you do in those six months?

Just like I would live my life condensed in six months, I should pick up the things that matter the most. But which ‘things’ mattered the most? What should I take with me?

I go from room to room trying to figure out. What can I salvage and what can I leave at the mercy of the fires? Perhaps nothing. All that clutter, which is a cause so much frustration on a daily basis suddenly feels so endearing. This clutter is somehow attached to my identity. It can’t imagine my life without these unnecessary things I have collected over the years.

Or, can I?

I know fully-well that when the time comes, I will leave everything as it is. I will save my life and life of my loved ones more than anything else. And when I come back, after the havoc, to the site where my house stood one day, I will cry for their loss. The things I thought I couldn’t live without will now live in my memory and I will continue to live my life.

This is how versatile we are. We spend our lives working like mad, earning money so that we can buy lots of things, well aware that none of them matter. Yet it is so hard to part with them. They do have some sort of meaning in our lives. Our possessions root us. To the place where we live. They bring a sense of belonging. Without them, we feel empty.

Maybe this trait of defining our identity with the stuff we accumulate separates us from other animals whose existence is complete without any possession. While ours depend on our possessions. The more we have, the more settled we feel.

As I think of these wild thoughts, I begin to understand the agony of hundreds of people who have lost their houses to fires in the last few weeks. The whole nation is mourning over their loss but as Joan Didion said, “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”

Winds are getting fiercer and fiercer. I am feeling a curious blend of anxiety and calmness. It is one of those moments when you just want to leave everything in God’s hands and resort to prayer. A place of hope at a time of helplessness.

I move from room to room making a mental note of things I should grab if I have the time and the inclination to do it but make no move to gather them in boxes as I did seventeen-years-ago when a terrible fire took Canberra in its grip and burned hundreds of houses. While I do that I take pictures of the ‘things’ in each room so that I could morn them if fires consume them.

I wish you well. I pray for your homes to remain safe. And I beg forgiveness from Mother Nature.