Tag: reading

7 habits of successful writers and how I built them

Neera

It is your dream to become a successful writer. You have been harboring the desire for a long time. You have been setting daily writing goals. You have been attending writing workshops. You have been scribbling here and there. You started writing a book five years ago and you keep promising yourself that one day you will finish it. One day, when the kids are out of the house, when work is less demanding, when you retire, when all the stars are aligned, you will become a successful writer.

If these thoughts resonate with you, you are not alone. This is what I used to think too.

This was until I really sat down and had a good look at what successful writers were doing that I need to do as well in order to be as productive as them.

Here are the seven habits I identified and adopted which remarkably increased my productivity.

1. Don’t just set goals, build habits

Years ago I was setting goals to write a certain number of words every day but failing at it miserably. Something always happened to consume my time and energy. I even used an online app 750Words where people write for years at stretch but I was not able to maintain my streak. I was averaging twenty days a month. I have participated in National Novel Writing Month multiple times and won three times writing 50,000 words followed by months of no writing.

My writing pattern matched my exercise routine and I knew I needed to fix both. Surprisingly it was by fixing my exercise routine I was able to fix my writing.

Almost two years ago I started going to the gym every weekday. I set a time for it, 5:30 pm. This took the decision process out. By the time it was five pm, my mind would start reminding me. I always kept the gym bag ready in my car. When I did that a few weeks, all my resistance melted. Like any gym junkie knows that you always feel good after exercise (because of endorphins release). The habit brought a surprise benefit – I started looking forward to going to the gym. I even made friends there. They would ask me if they didn’t see me at my regular time. Another surprise benefit – my stamina increased and exercise became easier.

I did the same for writing. I bought a journal with 365 pages and started writing a page a day, no matter what. A page fitted roughly 250 words. If I didn’t fill the page it didn’t matter. As long as I wrote something there I had fulfilled my pledge. I did that every morning without fail. If for some reason I missed the morning, I did it at night.

Writing a page a day is a habit now. The day I don’t write doesn’t feel like the day I have lived. With time my stamina increased. I write close to 1000 words a day.

2. Understand writing is a three-step process

When I was a newbie writer, I thought that as would I move my hand on the page or punch the keyboard, beautiful writing will emerge on the other end. Something that could go straight in a book. I called it publish-worthy material.

We all know it doesn’t happen that way.

Most of the people give up their dream of becoming a writer at this stage because the magic fairy didn’t move her wand over their fingers.

But those of us who stick around, we find a magic formula. That magic formula is – writing is a three-step process – Idea generation, drafting, and editing. As my mentor, Jeff Goins says, “Think of them as three buckets. Make sure you add something to each bucket each day.“

Keep a notebook just to capture ideas. Ideas will come all day, without any effort on your part. Your job is to capture them in the idea notebook. Then pick one and write it and put it aside. It is called drafting. You will never be in a position when you have time to write and can’t think of anything. And when you have something already written, it is very easy to fix it and make it publish-worthy.

And this is what I do now and it works like magic.

3. Manage your time

I thought when I don’t have to go to work, I will have eight hours extra in my day. I will be able to devote all of that to writing and even the commute time and time wasted on getting ready for work. Within a month I realized how wrong I was. So many things are fighting for our time. Housework never ends. My house is still as messy as it was when I was working full time.

“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have 24-hour days.” – Zig Zigler

Two things I observed. One, work expands to the time available (Parkinson’s Law). Second, I only get blocks of time available for writing. I started using those blocks most effectively. To learn more about those read my post Use 90-minute bock technique to get more out of your day.

4. Become a smart reader

Writers are avid readers. Sometimes our writing suffers because of reading but sometimes our reading suffers because of writing. Recently I was not getting enough time to read so I went on to find ways to include more reading in my schedule.

I used Pierre Bayard’s method (How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read), to select which books I wanted really read, re-read, refer to, skim, and never wanted to open (read my post So many books, so little time). Using the system, I got rid of several books and prioritized the rest. Then I chose five strategies to get more reading done – set a dedicated reading time, read at least 20 pages a day, sprint reading at times, subscribe to audiobooks,  and quit reading early if I don’t like a book.

5. Show your work

I have been writing on and off for twenty years. I have boxes full of notebooks and countless files on the computer of my writing. But none of it was any good. Why? Because I was not revising it and making it worth sharing. It was only when I started writing for this blog that I started growing as a writer.

Showing your work, even if it is on a blog, makes you a better writer. Because now you are writing publish-worthy material. If you are serious about your writing, start a blog in a quiet corner of the internet and start sharing your writing with an audience. Even if you don’t want an audience you can publish for yourself. No one will find your blog unless you actually tell anybody. The notion that someone might read it will make you work harder.

6. Have multiple pieces of work in the pipeline

For years I was working on one novel. I wanted to focus all my energy on it. No distractions, I would tell myself. But the novel didn’t go far. I ran out of ideas. In fact, I got sick of it. I parked it aside and started writing short stories. Some I was able to finish, others just wouldn’t go anywhere. Then I started a non-fiction book. Last year I got into blogging.

All this time my novel was incubating in my head. Suddenly the whole story became crystal clear. Now I am able to go back to it and finish it. The same thing happened with some of the unfinished short stories.

Successful writers never stop at one book. They might be concentrating on one at a time but they have several in the pipeline.

7. Understand the higher purpose behind your writing

Most people dread writing, consequently, they won’t write even if their lives depended on it. Yet some of us find our calling in writing. I believe if some higher power has selected us to write, it will also give us the aptitude to write well.

One of my writing teachers used to say, “Writing is receiving.” That was why at the beginning of each session she would make us sit quietly and write. An act to receive with gratitude whatever we were given.

Our job as a writer to write, keeping in mind the teachings of The Bhagavad-Gita, “Do your labor without expecting the fruit of your labor. Labor is in your control, the fruit is in the control of the higher power. It will decide when to bring the fruit of your labor.

Want more?

Here is a related article worth reading 21 Productivity Hacks from 21 Prolific Writers.

What writing habits have you been able to develop? Share them here with other readers of the blog.

Photo by Kat Stokes on Unsplash

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So many books, so little time

Neera 2 Comments

There are so many books I want to read but it doesn’t matter how much I try I can’t seem to go through them fast enough. My reading buddies are always ahead of me. Today I decided to find a way to get ahead, and thus began the search for strategies.

One of my problems is that ever since I started writing (which was more than two decades ago) I have become a slow reader. I call it ‘deliberate reading,’ when I am savoring the good writing, mulling it over in my head, responding to it mentally, thinking how I can use this sentence structure or even the idea in my own writing. It frustrates me but I can’t get rid of this annoying habit. Then I found out that it is a universal problem for all writers. Amit Chaudhuri wrote in an essay in The Paris Review:

The number of books we buy far outnumber those we read. Again, the reasons for not reading are multiple—deferral, because of the paucity of time, is a common one. But a powerful cause for not reading is because the writer in us—I use the word “writer” not for one who’s produced books, but for whoever is possessed by the possibility of writing—takes over from the reader. This might happen when we’re transfixed by the jacket and keep studying it, unable to proceed to the first page. The image on the cover, its design, the lettering—these have thrown us into the realm of possibility. Once we’ve entered the story which that possibility engenders, reading the novel itself becomes redundant. We may not write a word, but the writer in us predominates. A version of the novel emerging from the jacket—or even the title—holds us in its spell. That’s why the crowd of unread books on our shelves is never, generally, a burden. They signal a possibility—not that we will one day read them but of how the idea, and moment, of writing is constantly with us.

The Moment of Writing by Amit Chaudhuri

How many books can one read in a lifetime?

Looking at the number of books being produced every year and the number of books that have been printed since the Gutenberg invented the printing press, there is a very little chance that we can read even a fraction of those.

Let’s say you are an above-average reader and read 52 books a year (although a 2012 study by the Pew Research Center found that adults read an average of 17 books each year.) Assuming you started reading at the age of ten and you continue to read one book a week till you turn 85, that would mean (75 X 52 = 3900) you will be able to read, at the most, 4000 books in your lifetime.

When you come to think of it, it is nothing.

According to Google’s advanced algorithms, there are 130 million books, 129,864,880, to be exact, in the world (reported by Ben Parr).

It means that you need to be awfully selective of what you read.

You need to be strategic about what you read rather than what you can get your hands on i.e. books bought on sale or got from the library because they happen to be displayed when you walked in.

What books should you read?

I found the best strategy to select what books to read in How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, written by the University of Paris literature professor Pierre Bayard.

“There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all.”

Pierre Bayard

In this tongue-in-cheek book, Professor Bayard points out that we think of books in two simple categories “books we have read” and “books we haven’t read.” But in fact, there are several more categories. He suggests the following:

  • books we’ve read
  • books we’ve skimmed
  • books we’ve heard about
  • books we’ve forgotten
  • books we’ve never opened.

Prof Bayard argues that we shouldn’t be ashamed of not having read everything, and that talking about books you only heard about should be more open and natural. It is better to strive to think about the ideas within the books – even if you only heard of them – than being a walking encyclopedia of citations.

He has a classification system to keep track of how he had interacted with the books in the past.

  • UB book unknown to me
  • SB book I have skimmed
  • HB book I have heard about
  • FB book I have forgotten
  • ++ extremely positive opinion
  • + positive opinion
  • – negative opinion
  • – – extremely negative opinion

I find this classification an excellent way to categorize the books on my bookshelves particularly the unread ones and this way figuring out which ones I want to skim through, which ones I want to read and which ones I want to give away to charity.

How fast you can read?

One way to go through more books is to read fast. Staples collected speed reading data as part of an advertising campaign for selling e-readers. The campaign also included a speed reading tool that is still available to try. Go ahead and take the test to see how fast you read.

Kevan Lee in The Art of Reading, Remembering, and Retaining More Books recommends five ways to read more books including speed reading through new technology. Spritz and Blinkist take unique approaches to help you read more — one helps you read faster and the other helps you digest books quicker.

Use eReaders and Audiobooks

For a long time, I remained loyal to physically books giving arguments like, I like to hold a book in hand, I like to underline it, I can easily pull it out from my bookshelf whenever I need to refer to it…

Then a few years ago I bought a Kindle. I have been carrying it with my holidays and have never felt short of books. I can read multiple books on it, just like I do at home, depending upon my mood. Kindle is also a great source of old classic books that you can get for one dollar.

Recently, I took membership of Audible and now I have become a fan of it. I am listening to it in the gym while walking and cooking. I can easily go through a book in five days.

Now I have divided the books into three categories. Books I want to listen to I buy them on Audible, books I want to read I buy them on Kindle or get them from the public library and books I want to keep I buy physical copies.

Strategies to go through more books

John Rampton gives 25 strategies in his post 25 Expert Tips to Reading WAY More Books This Year I picked five out of those to incorporate in my strategy.

  1. Set a dedicated reading time. For me, it is at night. Sleeping with a good book is the best thing in the world.
  2. Read at least 20 pages. This can be done in between chores and whenever I have a few spare minutes.
  3. Read in Sprint. This strategy involves setting up a timer for twenty minutes and read fast. Knowing the timer is on will keep me from distractions.
  4. Quit books you don’t like early on. This is something I really need to do. I keep hanging on to books I know I should let go.
  5. Build a reading list for the year on Goodreads and let it help you reach your goal by prompting you titles related to your previous choices.

Here it is, my strategies to go through more books.

Do you have any more suggestions for me? What are your reading habits? Please share them with me through the comments section.

The more I read, the less I write

Neera

Reading and writing are two integral activities for writers. A writer must read and she must write. But lately, I have found that the more I read, the less I write.

Why is that so?

There are a few reasons for that.

One, I get carried away, one article leads to other, one link has ten more, and by the time I am through I have used all the available time reading other people’s writing rather than creating my own.

Two, reading and writing engage two different parts of the brain. Reading is inherently a passive activity, while writing is an active occupation. Although, reading prompts writing if I don’t stop mid-sentence and pick up a pen and a pad, thoughts disappear pretty quickly.

One blogging guru once advised, “If you want to write good posts, stop reading other people’s posts (at least for some time).”  

There is a lot of truth in this advice.

As a writer, you first need to write what is in you. That could be utter nonsense, incoherent, good-for-nothing content. But it comes from the core of you and represents how you understand things.

After getting that on paper, you can research and find evidence in contradiction or in support.

It is possible, now that you are more informed, that you will change your mind. That is fine. You can do so. In fact, it will give your writing more authenticity if you can explain what made you change your mind.

It is also possible that other people have explained certain things much better than you.

Great. You can include their writing as a quotation in your own. This will strengthen your argument and give your post a boost.

You need to allocate separate time for reading and writing.

I write best first thing in the morning. As soon as I brush my teeth, I plant myself in my bed with a pen and a notepad and write. I don’t even make a cup of tea or coffee. I know fully well that if I go to the kitchen, the trance will break. Those two hours in the morning are gold.

Science supports my morning bout of creativity.

Studies have proved that soon after waking when the prefrontal cortex is most active, creativity is at its highest while the analytical parts of the brain (the editing and proofreading parts) become more active as the day goes on.

There are several writers who swear by their morning writing routine. But then there are a great number of night owls as well.

Charles Dickens was a lark. He would have finished his day writing (by 2 pm each day) by the time Robert Frost would just about getting started and often going late at night (and waking up the next day around noon). What each of these famous authors lacked in synchronicity, they made up in a routine. The daily schedule of writing is almost as important, if not more than the human body rhythm. 

I believe the same goes for reading. You need to set up a time for reading as well. Whether it is at night or during lunchtime or commuting to and from work. Allocate one to two hours each day to reading and stick to those. You find that you can go through a lot in that time.

Without realizing it, we give too many hours each day on the internet and TV. All you need to do is to claim them back and give them to your actual passions—reading and writing.  

Cherry blossoms and change of some rules

Neera

Here are the things I find worth sharing this week.

  1. My post about a scientific, fail-proof method to study and retain complex and lengthy material was introduced by no other than Tony Buzan.
  2. A note on how unforgiving and overdisciplined we have become.
  3. I have always believed that having a linear goal at every stage of life is as important as breathing fresh air and eating healthy food. You can survive in pollution and on unhealthy meals, but the quality of life is not the same. Ann Rand was an author much ahead of her time; that might be one reason she is my favorite.
  4. Creativity can be found anywhere. Even in the dog’s pooh. I have yet to see a more colorful place than Valparaiso, where residents hire street artists to paint murals on the outer walls of their houses.
  5. November is approaching fast. In three weeks and three days, many of us are going to have sleepless nights, early mornings, and social boycotts to take part in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). An international internet-based writing initiative started in 1999 from humble beginnings where a few people got together to write a novel in a month. In 2005, it became a non-profit organization. This year over 400,000 people world-wide are expected to write 50,000 words in thirty days.

I have been participating in the initiative since 2012 and won it twice. Winning or not winning I will participate again this year to write a non-fiction book that has been lurking in the background ever-since I started this blog. You will hear about it more next month.

This week I changed some rules. First, I started posting every day (to put more pressure on me). Second, I reduced the number of things I share through the newsletter from ten to five (to reduce the pressure on my readers and myself). I thought ten new things every weekend are a bit too much for everyone. I would like to hear what you think. Drop me a line in the comments section below.

If you like this newsletter and my blog and want to support it, forward it to a friend.

How to read a complex and lengthy book and retain most of it

Neera

I am a long-time fan of Tony Buzan, the inventor of the Mindmapping technique.

In his book Use Your Head he suggests an Organic Study Method that could be applied to reading complex and lengthy material for maximum retention with minimum time investment.

The usual way to study text or non-fiction is to start the book from page one and read, reread incomprehensible areas, take a break, force yourself to go back to where you left off, and continue reading, rereading, and taking breaks until the book is finished. Then going back and revising it, sometimes multiple times, for retention and still not succeeding.

It is like starting the jigsaw puzzle from the bottom left-hand corner and insisting to build the entire picture step by step from that corner only.

The normal steps we take to solve a jigsaw puzzle are:

  • Find edges and boundary pieces.
  • Sort out color areas.
  • Fit ‘obvious’ bits and pieces together.
  • Continue to fill in.
  • Leave ‘difficult’ pieces to end (for reasons that as the overall picture becomes more clear, and the number of pieces used increases, so does the probability increase that the difficult pieces will fit in much more easily when there is a greater context into which they can fit).
  • Continue the process until completion.

Tony Buzan proposes that the jigsaw analogy can be applied directly to study.

Similar steps in reading a book would be:

For a book, it would be

1. Overview—Review the book for all the material other than the actual text such as a table of contents, illustrations, photographs, chapter headings, graphs, footnotes, summaries, and so forth Use a pen or a pencil to provide a visual aid to the eye. This stage is equivalent to finding the edges and boundary pieces.

2. Preview—Cover all the materials not covered in the overview. In other words, the paragraphs, and language content of the book. This is likened to organizing the color areas of the puzzle. During the preview, concentration should be directed to the beginnings and ends of paragraphs, sections, chapters, and even whole text, because information tends to be concentrated at the beginnings and ends of written material.

3. Inview — This involves filling in those areas still left, and can be compared with the filling-in process of the jigsaw puzzle once the boundary and color areas have been established. Major reading is not necessary as in some cases most of the important material will have been covered in previous stages. Jump over the difficult sections, leaving them for the next stage.

4. Review—This stage is to concentrate on the difficult areas. It is aided by making notes on the book itself or separately in a notebook, including making mind maps. Notes such as the following can be made in the book itself.

  • Underlining
  • Personal thoughts generated by the text
  • Critical comments
  • Marginal straight lines for important and noteworthy material.
  • Curved or wavy marginal lines show an unclear or difficult material.
  • Question marks for areas that you wish to question or that you find questionable.
  • Exclamation marks for outstanding items.
  • Your own symbol code for items and areas that relate to your own specific and general objective.

5. Continued reviewing—Apart from immediate review, a continuous review program is essential. It is seen that memory didn’t decline immediately after a learning session, but actually rose before leveling off and then plummeting. Reviewing just at the point where memory starts to fall leads to the longest retention.

Aunt Grace’s Philosophy

Neera

Many years ago I read a story that impacted me so much that I wrote it down in my journal. Recently, while going through old notebooks, I read it and it hit the cord in me again. I have to share it with you.

It originally appeared in Reader’s Digest.

The writer Nardi Reeder Campion describes a time in her life when she was down in the dumps and discovered a diary that had been kept more than forty years before by a maiden aunt who had gone through some bad times herself.

Aunt Grace had been poor, frail, and forced to live with relatives. “I know I must be cheerful,” she wrote, “living in this large family upon whom I am dependent. Yet gloom haunts me. Clearly, my situation will not change; therefore, I shall have to change.”

To help her hold her fragile world together, Aunt Grace resolved to do six things every day:

  • Something for someone else
  • Something for herself
  • Something she didn’t want to do that needed doing
  • A physical exercise
  • A mental exercise
  • An original prayer that always included counting her blessings

These six things help change Nardi’s life as they had helped change Aunt Grace’s life many years before

“Can life be lived by a formula?” Nardi asks herself in the article. “All I know is that since I started to live by those six precepts, I’ve become more involved with others and hence less ‘buried’ in myself.”

Ever since I read this story, Aunt Grace’s motto, ‘Bloom where you are planted’ has become my motto too.