What I’ve Learned So Far

Probably not for me . . .

[This is one of those things that you write once so you can refer people to it over and over. If you’re not interested in my academic history or future, feel free to pass this one by — especially because it’s quite long.]

You’ll have guessed the punchline of this story from its title: it’s likely that I’ll never finish the Ph.D. in United States history that I started in 2004 at the University of Texas. This post explains why. (And don’t worry — it’s a story with a happy ending.) Read the rest of this entry »

See that beehive? Don’t poke it.

If you know you have a particular weakness, steer away from it.

Examples:

• Recovering alcoholics avoid bars.
• Recovering overeaters stock their fridges and pantries with adequate amounts of healthy food, not cake and soda.
• Writers with an Internet addiction — e.g. John Scalzi — know when to unplug the DSL and just work.
• If you know that a non-essential topic is a sore subject with your friend / family member / boss / colleague / whomever, just don’t bring it up.
• If you’re prone to distraction, turn off your e-mail and your RSS feeds.

I’m sure you could supply me with more examples from your own life (and please do). My point is a simple one, but when I consider my own penchant for, say, online grazing, I think it bears repeating: each day will bring enough trouble of its own, so don’t go looking for more.

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(Photo by Sara Schroeder, used under a CC-Noncommercial license.)

Sometimes people ask me for advice on writing in general, or on blogging in particular. Even though this could be considered a dubious move on their part, I’m happy to oblige, because (a) I like giving advice, and (b) I do think I’ve learned a thing or two about writing by this point.

The specific advice at hand — that you work in batches — is particularly useful when it comes to writing blog posts. Other forms have different demands, and may not suit themselves to batch completion:

• If you’re writing poems, you may need to revisit them many times to get the rhythm and flow right.
• If you’re writing novels, their length will prevent you from writing them back-to-back in a sitting.
• If you’re writing scholarly papers, you’re likely to build them up over time, footnote by footnote, rather than dashing off several — even in draft — at a sitting.

Blog posts, by contrast, are made for immediacy. You have an idea, you write it up, maybe find an image to go along with it, . . . and presto, you have a finished post.

One of the barriers that I’ve run into in my own blogging history — I know I’m not alone in this — is the self-imposed pressure to make a post Deep, or Significant, or Good Enough, or Especially Meaningful. Allowing this barrier to stay in place is, in my experience, a great way to be a crappy blogger.

The antidote is to get very used to plowing through a post from soup to nuts and then hitting “Publish” — all at once, all in a sitting, and multiple times in a sitting when you can manage it. It’s like hitting a whole bucket of balls with one club at the driving range, even though during an actual round of golf you wouldn’t normally hit 25 shots in a row with just your driver or your 6-iron.

Keep this in mind: the timestamp feature in modern blogging software makes it effortless to hit “Publish” over and over in one session without bombarding your audience with a ton of posts in a short period. Just date your posts to appear later so that you can spread out all the posts from one session over the coming week / month / whenever.

Or, for that matter, don’t publish the posts at all, if you think they’re not good enough. But write them anyway, under the assumption that you’re going to need to write a bunch of posts — good, bad, or mediocre — before you can start reliably turning out good ones. Save your bad efforts to revise later, or just chuck them in the bin.

But — whatever you do — get cracking.

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(Image by if winter ends, used under a CC-Noncommercial license.)

We don’t talk about “relationship block.”

We don’t say “entrepreneurial block.”

I’ve never heard it called “talking-to-pretty-girls block.”

If anyone calls it “fitness block,” that usage has escaped me.

My point: we’re all familiar with hangups — our own and others’ — and we have all sorts of language to help us deal with them. This ranges from the therapeutic (Freudian, Jungian, cognitive-behavioral, and on and on) to the commonsensical (”Get over it”).

But that particular piece of language, “writer’s block,” gets us nowhere, because it implies the existence of a special category of psychological beastie that doesn’t actually exist.

Oh, it sounds dramatic and deep to say, “I’ve got this terrible case of writer’s block.” It’s harder to say the honest thing, which is “I’m scared.” It’s hard to work your way through to a goal that has become so freighted with psychological weight that it’s painful even to get started on it.

Go ahead and be scared. Go ahead and start unpacking the psychological load. But don’t call it “writer’s block.”

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The inspiration for this post, by the way, came from Michael Neill’s post “The Loaded Goal.” I encourage you to give it a read — he’s got some good advice for you.

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(Image by Rebekah Sommer, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.)

Mine’s writing.

My advice, in a nutshell, is to build your career around your “Main Thing” — your most distinguished ability or your most consuming passion — that will set you apart from others in your field.

For me, it’s writing. No matter what title my business cards carry in the future, my work will always center around writing, because that’s what I’m best at, and what I can’t help doing even if I try.

For you, it could be . . . well, I don’t want to jump the gun, so please tell me: What’s the “Main Thing” of your work?

What with being a wordsmith maven obsessive, and all.

US lawyer charged over $1bn Ponzi fraud scheme

A former lawyer based in South Florida has been charged with operating a $1bn (£603m) investment fraud scheme. . . .

So . . . what does it take to become a “former” lawyer? Disbarment? Stopped practicing? Took up another profession? Renounced the law?
Since the source is the BBC, maybe this is a case of being divided by a common language, but I can’t recall a lawyer ever being described this way. You become a lawyer, you’re “a lawyer” even after you stop practicing. It’s like describing Gerald Ford as “from Michigan.” Didn’t matter that he was born in Nebraska, didn’t matter where he lived later in life — he was always “from Michigan.”

Thoughts, gentle wordfolk?

Don’t take his writing advice personally — but do take it to heart.

Key bit:

When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer, must give him something worthy of his gift to you.

Funny, but as I was reading this piece a P.R. person sent me a mass e-mail flagged as “Important!”

It occurred to me, for maybe the 4,000th time, just how little credence I put in a P.R. person’s idea of what’s important.

In other words . . . what Pressfield said.

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ADDENDUM: Ach, I neglected to credit my good friend Russ Somers for pointing out the Pressfield post to me.

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Related post from last year:

• Rapid-fire 4: Good book: The War of Art (Pressfield wrote it.)

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Yesterday I was talking with a friend about the risks of talking too much about one’s efforts to improve oneself. (Ahem.)

Here’s what I’m afraid of:

Or, to put it another way:

Know-what-I’m-sayin’?

No matter how long you’ve worked on a blog post, if it just doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

Retreat, regroup, rewrite. Who knows? Maybe it will come together better tomorrow.

And now I’ll be shutting down the laptop and watching some basketball, because that’s about what my mind can handle at the moment.

*whistling*

By whatever quirk of chemistry or temperament, I’ve never found it that hard to get up early in the morning. I don’t always like it, but if I set my alarm for 5:00 a.m., there’s a 99% chance that I’ll actually get up at 5:00. Let me pour my coffee and get a bite of breakfast, and by 5:15 I can be steaming away at my work.

Can be. The hard part, for me, is using the early-morning time well. It’s all too easy to read a magazine, check box scores, or noodle around with a to-do list rather than actually producing something. Yet the whole point of being up that early (this early — it’s 5:42 a.m. as I write this) is to get a head start on the day while the world is quiet and my brain is fresh.

The solution couldn’t be simpler: set out your work ahead of time.

If you go to the grocery store without a shopping list, you can buy a lot of food, and you may even buy a lot of what you actually need. But you’re likely to add some things to your cart that you wouldn’t have set out to buy if you were composing a shopping list at your kitchen table, and you’re likely to overlook some things you need to fill the gaps in your larder. The first problem leads to conversations like this:

Housemate: Ice cream? I thought we were trying to slim down?

You: Oh, just a little indulgence.

Housemate: Rocky Road and strawberry?

You: I have varied tastes.

Housemate: But two gallons of each?

You: [sheepishly] It was on special?

The secod problem leads to the highly annoying scenario of getting home from the store, lugging in all the groceries and putting them away, then realizing that you forgot something vital that you’re completely out of — say, coffee beans — and having to go right back to the store for it.

And who needs that grief?

So, back to my rise-and-shine routine: I’m parceling out my work better. No point in getting up early morning after morning just so I can feel virtuous for rising early. Far better to get up early and do something with the time to earn that feeling of virtue.

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(Photo by Daniel James, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)