This is the second post in the “Writing and the Martial Arts” series, this post from Steve Bein. For more on this series and on Steve, see the first post: “Writing and Martial Arts 1: How Do You Like Your Chances?”

Bruce Lee said that before he started martial arts, he thought a punch was just a punch.  Then, having begun his training, he realized a punch was not just a punch.  Then, having mastered the art, he understood a punch was just a punch.

Now you may say this sounds like advice from Yoda.  You may say it’s as inscrutable as a Zen koan.  And if you said that, you wouldn’t be far wrong; Bruce cribbed this from Zen Buddhism (in the Buddhist version it’s a mountain, not a punch, that needs to be understood), and as it happens, Yoda was first conceived as a Buddhist and Daoist master (Dagobah, where he lives, is the name of a Tibetan style of pagoda, a sacred structure in both Buddhism and Daoism).   But what I want to take from it here is a comparison with writing.

Before I started writing, I thought writing was just writing.  That is, I thought all you did was sit down and type, and then you’d have a story.  There’s an episode of Californication where Hank Moody’s childhood friend voices this view on writing: “I can’t believe you get paid to just sit around and make stuff up.”  The uninitiated in the martial arts have a similar view on punching: just ball up your fist and whack somebody with it.

They’re wrong about that.  I’ve told my martial arts students many times that if you spent a year working on nothing but your jab, it wouldn’t be a wasted year.  People who don’t want to waste time studying the punch end up breaking their hands.  Their punches are slow, sloppy, and without power.  They punch from the shoulder, not from the toes, and worse yet, they can’t even understand what it means to punch from the toes.

In my opinion, the same goes for sitting down to write without any sense of the art.  It’s an old adage that stories amount to interesting characters with difficulties.  But how do you invent an interesting character?  How do you find the difficulty that is hardest for this specific character, yet one that this specific character is best suited to solve?  How do you make a reader care about solving this difficulty?  For that matter, how do you get readers to flip to the next page so they’ll even find out what the difficulty is?

None of that stuff comes naturally.  Every writer must go through a phase in which writing is not just writing.  If that weren’t true, little kids’ stories would be interesting.  But they’re not—at least not to anybody but their parents.  Little kids’ stories go, “This happened and then this happened and then this happened.”  Good stories go, “This happened because this happened, and because of those, this happened.”  And when they say, “this happened,” what that really means is, “this difficult thing happened to this interesting person, and it turned that person’s world upside down, and now all of us really want to know how this person is going to set things right.”

A good story generates both tension and a sense of inevitability.  There is a causal connection between act two and act one, and enough suspense generated in act one to leave readers no choice but to read act two.  And that’s something we need to learn, and practice, and practice again until we get it right.

My process for this is a lot like my martial arts training.  In jiujitsu, for example, you’ve got strategy and tactics, you’ve got practice in technique, and you’ve got actual sparring.  Anyone who lacks the patience for the first two gets dominated in the third one.  At 170 pounds, I’ve tapped 400-pounders because they didn’t have technique and they didn’t have a game plan.

In writing, the strategic and tactical phase—for me, anyway—is a lot of free-form scribbling just to figure out what story I want to tell.  In the practice phase I create an outline for the story.  Sometimes this is short; other times it’s quite elaborate.  (My longest outline to date was 41 pages.)  The sparring phase is the actual writing itself, and then the editing, and then editing again, doing it over and over again until I’ve got it right—exactly like jiujitsu, or kickboxing for that matter, or any other art I’ve ever trained in.

In jiujitsu, sometimes technique fails me and I have to come up with something on the fly.  In writing, sometimes the outline fails me and I need to take it in a different direction.  In jiujitsu, when I get into a jam where the technique I learned isn’t working, I always want to get a technique that will work better.  In writing, when I get into a jam where the story I outlined is losing tension, I always want to start a new outline that ratchets up the tension again.  And both in jiujitsu and in writing, the most important phase is the first: understanding exactly what I want to achieve, so that my practice and my execution lead to the kind of results I want.

I’m a better kickboxer than a jiujitsu player.  Part of that is due to body type—I’m tall and lanky, and at my best when I can keep an opponent at a distance—but most of it is due to the fact that in jiujitsu I’m still at a point where I have to memorize techniques and apply them.  That hasn’t been true for me in kickboxing for years.  The fight just flows.  I know what it takes to make an opponent open his guard, and I know what it takes to keep him from advancing.  For me, kickboxing is just kickboxing.  There’s no memorization.  Show me something new even once and I can do it.  Jiujitsu is not just jiujitsu for me; show me something new and I need to practice it a dozen times right now, and then again at the beginning of the next class, or else I’m certain to lose it.

I’m not at a phase where writing is just writing either.  I used to believe that no writer can get there.  Now I believe otherwise.  In On Writing, Stephen King says he doesn’t outline at all, nor does he formulate a game plan in advance.  He just thinks of interesting characters and then watches what they do.  Harlan Ellison says he writes the same way.  If we take them at their word, then for them writing is just writing.

I am still looking for the magic formula that will allow me to do what they do.  I don’t particularly enjoy laboring over every story.  I don’t like doing all that free-form scribbling in advance just to throw it away and start anew.  I don’t like following an outline only for it to lead me to a dead end.  I also don’t like the process of memorizing one jiujitsu technique after another, just to get tapped because the technique came to mind a tenth of a second too late.

Here’s the bitch of it: there is no magic formula.  There is only time served.  There is only doing it, and doing it again, and doing it again.  Sooner or later I will either make myself a good jiujitsu player or I will get so old that my body can’t do it anymore.  And sooner or later I will either keel over dead or I will discover how to spontaneously create interesting characters, line by line tension, three act structure, and all the rest of it.

I wish I could tell you how.  I can’t.  For me writing is not just writing.  Not yet.

Continuing my series of quotes from writers I know through the online writing group Codex, here are some memorable thoughts from James Maxey, author of the Dragon Age trilogy and the superhero novel Nobody Gets the Girl. James’s latest feat, which floored a number of us at Codex, was writing the first draft of a novel (the sequel to Nobody) in a week. The resulting book, Burn Baby Burn, can be read in its first draft form as a series of blog posts on Maxey’s Web site. More on this particular accomplishment will show up in a week or two in my “Brain Hacks for Writers” column on Futurismic.

James is quoted often on Codex, so I’ll be breaking up the large selection of his quotes I put together into two or possibly three posts.

Swagger when you lie.

If the WRATH OF GOD couldn’t make this character give a sh**, I don’t know what might.

The worst novel you ever put onto paper is better than the best novel you are walking around with in your head.

On the other hand, I may be underestimating the appeal of my main character, a homosexual, drug-addicted, Republican, vivisectionist zombie. Sweet merciful Jesus, I wish that last sentence was a joke…

Momentum matters!

I can’t sing, play an instrument, dance, paint, sculpt, or act. So, in my early years, I drifted toward writing as my claim to some sort of creative ability simply because it seemed like the easiest talent to fake.

But a completed novel is always going to be haunted by the novel it might have been.

If you have affection and enthusiasm for your characters, then the readers will follow you into some very dark places.

If you and your partner find yourself co-owners of a project that gets optioned for a motion picture and I hear you complain about it on this forum, I will personally drive to your house and slap you about the head and shoulders with a rubber monkey until my envy is abated. And I can be very, very envious.

If anyone wants to power a time machine, the deadline for the first novel you ever sell from a proposal has amazing time acceleration properties. I can only imagine that committing to a whole series must propel you straight into old age.

My motto is, little by little, the writing gets done.

Is Batman really making the world a better place by wearing his underwear on the outside of his pants and clobbering muggers with boomerangs? I think that having your characters learn the wrong lessons from their private tragedies is the key to making them interesting.

… the key to writing a good novel is to first write a bad novel. You’re just piling clay onto the wheel at this stage. You aren’t spinning the wheel to turn it into something until the second draft.

But, I don’t yell. I write. I turn our presidents and judges and televangelists into dragons and I send heroes (or, more frequently, anti-heroes) out to slay them.

Look, I’ve had it up to here with people dismissing all Yellow-Eyed Beasts from Hell as “evil.” The idea that Judea-Christian labels for morality apply to creatures from the pit is an outdated, human-centric view of the world that I hope we, as a society, are finally outgrowing. Baby-eating and stabbing people with pitchforks may seem taboo to most Americans, but what right to we have to impose our values on the denizens of the underworld?

For me–and I can’t speak for anyone else–my formula was stupid stubbornness. I kept plugging along despite rejection letters and harsh critiques because I was too dumb to understand that I really was no good at what I was doing and it was time to give up and move on to something else.

The one thing you can do is buy a lot of lottery tickets, metaphorically. Every short story you write might be the one that wins you an award. You never know. Any book you write might be the exact book that a publisher is dreaming of publishing. Productivity is key.

If Jesus himself were to tell me the sky is blue, I’d argue the point. I mean, sure, sometimes the sky is blue, but a high percentage of the time it’s black, or gray, or white, or any of the zillion shades of pink or purple you find in the bookends of day.

I know a small but fascinating group of people who are both successful writers and accomplished martial artists, and as these are both areas of great interest to me that I practice on a regular basis, I was very curious to know what connections some of these friends drew between the two disciplines.

The first post in this series comes from my good friend Steve Bein, who is a martial artist with 20 years of training, a professor of Philosophy and History at SUNY Geneseo, and an award-winning fiction writer. His first novel (a thriller about modern crime and samurai history) comes out in 2012.

Steve has this question for you: How do you like your chances?

I was told as I entered my Master’s degree program of a plan to streamline graduate education.  We could dispose of the GRE, of long hours spent walled in by stacks of books, of area exams and dissertation proposals and all the rest.  We could weed out everyone who needs weeding out by collecting all of the applicants to a given grad program, lock them all in a concrete room, and tell them to bash their heads against the wall.  The last one to quit gets a PhD.

As education reform goes, this plan isn’t half bad..  I like my chances in this system.  It certainly would be easier to get a PhD in this system than to get one the way I did, with all that old-fashioned writing and test-taking and such.  But then, I’ve been in the martial arts for about 20 years.  I learned some things along the way, things about physical and mental punishment, about perseverance, about sheer mule-headed stubbornness when perseverance gives out, and most of all about extinguishing the desire to quit.

Most writers could use some lessons on these counts too.  Show me a successful writer and I’ll show you someone who has learned these lessons already.

Writing will bring its share of mental and emotional punishment.  Count on it.  Even as I’m writing this, I’m escaping the frustrations I’m having in working out the plot to my next novel.  (Don’t worry.  I’m only allowing myself 20 minutes of escape.  Then I’ll go back to that for 20 minutes, then come back to this.  My sensei taught me not to quit, but tactically speaking, he and I both recognize the merit of retreating in order to launch a new attack from a different angle.)

There is good reason for a writer to feel frustrated..  99% of people who submit work never get published.  Of the 1% who do, less than half get a second publication.  Of those, only a handful make enough money from writing to make protein a regular part of their diet, and even they tend to collect more rejection letters than acceptance letters.

We have a similar formula in martial arts.  For every 10 students who begin a martial arts class, only one still comes a month later.  For every 10 of those, only one is still training a year later.  For every 10 of those, only one earns a black belt, and for every 10 black belts, only one goes on to teach the art.  A sensei is one in 10,000.  A writer who doesn’t need to hold a day job is more like one in a million.

The more I write, the more I learn that the pains of this art go beyond the mental and emotional.  I’ve developed neck problems and chronic eyestrain headaches.  Writing cost me my 20/20 vision.  I now need yoga exercises to be able to write for any length of time.  As it happens, it was martial arts that led me to yoga, but that’s not the important part.  It was martial arts that instilled in me the discipline to actually show up to yoga classes, to actually do the stretches every day, and to actually keep on writing even when it’s uncomfortable.

Charles Brown, the former editor of Locus, once shared some grim but sagacious advice with me (well, me and everyone else in that year’s Writers of the Future class).  He said if you’re a writer, one of three things is going to happen to you: you quit, you die, or you get published.  I thought, I like my chances.  I’m not going to quit.  My sensei drilled the quitter out of me.  That only leaves death and publication.

You can read more posts by Steve Bein on the multi-writer blog It’s the Story at http://itsthestory.wordpress.com.

Photo by JimRiddle_Four

UPDATE 10:54 AM EST: ToDoist seems to be back up

Original post:

For ToDoist users, it appears the site is down again. Last night, Todoist tweeted “We had an 2h outage today, the service should be back up. We are still investigating why this happend, but we think it’s related to our host”; 12 hours later, unfortunately, more trouble. Under Chrome I get “504 Gateway Time-out nginx/0.7.13” and under Firefox, “An unknown error happend [sic] while loading data… We will try to reload Todoist.”

This is a great service, and considering I’m getting it for free at the moment, I can’t complain much, but I certainly am disappointed.

I’ll post updates if I hear anything.

Over at Shimmer, Elise Catherine Tobler has started a series of posts in which she asks five authors (me included) five questions about writing for the benefit of aspiring fiction writers. Questions so far have been “How do you begin a story?” and “How do you go about choosing a title for the story?” The answers get at the issue from a variety of points of view in a very short space.

The other four authors in the series are:

Krista Hoeppner Leahy (Writers of the Future XXV, Shimmer, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet)

Don Mead (Writers of the Future XXV, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Strange Horizons)

Justin Howe (Crossed Genres, Brain Harvest, Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

Vylar Kaftan (Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Abyss & Apex, ChiZine)

If you’re within playgoing distance of the Valley Players theater in Waitsfield, Vermont (about 45 minutes from Burlington, 30 minutes from Barre/Montpelier, or 20 minutes from Waterbury), you’ll be interested to hear about the Vermont Playwrights Circle fourth annual Ten-Fest of ten 10-minute plays by ten local authors:

Divora Zipkin’s “Blood Ties”
Lesley Becker’s “Road Map to Victory”
Lars Nielsen’s “The Night Letter”
Jeanne Beckwith’s “Be Sixteen”
Brett Cox’s “Consider the Services of the Departed”
Charles Coburn’s “A Pause to Remember”
Margot Lasher’s “Stay”
Em Frappier’s “I’m So Disapointed in You”
Terri Kneen’s “Lost and Found”

and my own “The Discovery of Fire and Other Bad Ideas,” an epic tale (well, maybe the 10-minute version of “epic”) of invention and jealousy among stereotypical cavepeople and their marketing consultant, Steve.

Thursday Aug 18 – Saturday Aug 20 at 8:00 PM
Sunday Aug 21 at 2:00 PM
$10 general admission
$8 seniors and students
Valley Players in Waitsfield
more information and directions:
www.vermontplaywrightscircle.org or www.valleyplayers.com
RESERVATIONS: 802-583-1674
For a live person, call Charlie at: 802-479-2136

A friend recently e-mailed me and asked me for some general background on eBook publishing. My answer went on for quite some time (maybe too long), but it covered a lot of basics. If you’re interested in learning about what possibilities eBooks offer to writers, you can read the cleaned-up version of that answer below.

Selfpub vs. tradpub
First, there’s the question of traditional publishing versus self-publishing, what I’ve been calling tradpub vs. selfpub, which is a very different comparison than it was even a few years ago: there are now authors (many of them already published through a traditional publisher, but others only self-published) who are getting substantial readership for their books through selfpubbing eBooks, sometimes along with a paper version (often through CreateSpace), but often not. eBook readership has grown so much and people who own eReaders are so hungry for content these days that it’s entirely possible to build a substantial career without even dealing with paper books any more.

However, the surest path to substantial eBook sales seems to be having already become popular (or at least modestly successful) through a traditional publisher.

In evaluating which route to go, you might be interested in reading “Two Roads Diverged in the Interwebs: Finding Your Place in Tradpub versus Selfpub” and/or “Traditional Publishing vs. Self-Publishing (‘Indie Publishing’) Breakdown.”

eBook stores and venues
Amazon.com leads the way with eBooks, and in virtually all cases authors I know are selling far more books through Amazon than through Barnes and Noble or Smashwords, the other two most substantial options. Many publish on Amazon for the Kindle only. Of those I know who have published for other formats, only a very few seem to be getting compensated enough for it to be worth the trouble. However, it’s hard to predict whether or not these other formats will begin to grow a lot in the foreseeable future. My general perception is that Amazon is making all the right moves and other companies are struggling without much success to catch up.

Amazon and other ePublishers generally pay the author a much higher royalty than traditional publishers. If a traditional publisher is publishing your eBook, you’ll probably get something on the order of a 25% royalty, while Amazon offers 70% for books in the $2.99 to $9.99 price range. However, traditional publishers can get reviews of your book in venues that don’t review self-published books and have other promotional advantages, so it’s certainly possible to earn more through having an eBook tradpubbed, though in other cases the higher selfpub royalty makes that the more profitable choice.

Tradpub limitations
Tradpubbed eBooks tend to be more expensive than selfpubbed ones, $9.99 vs. $.99 to $4.99 being fairly typical prices, though there is a lot of variation.

Some traditional publishers are being very greedy and/or underhanded in attempting to grab electronic rights, so it’s important to be cautious with publishing contracts these days. Even some agents are attempting similar shenanigans. With that said, of course there are a number of good and ethical people in publishing, too.

Formatting eBooks
When formatting an eBook for publication, the process is not especially difficult, but there are a few hoops to get through. While other possibilities are available, the best way to deliver your book to Amazon or another eBook selling venue is often either HTML (with certain limitations) or EPUB (the most popular standardized eBook format, which Kindles don’t read but which Amazon does allow you to use for your upload). There are a variety of tools out there that can help in this process, for instance Atlantis (a word processing program with special import and export capabilities), Sigil (a WYSIWYG eBook editor), and Calibre (an eBook reader, library manager, and converter), all free programs. Alternatively, you can pay someone to prepare your book for you. Traditional publishers, of course, do this part for you.

Smashwords has its own, very specific format for uploading books, which is somewhat burdensome, but which allows them to publish in a wide array of formats and to offer books for the Sony eReader, Apple iPhone/iPad, and other players in the eBook world whom you won’t reach through Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Some eBook formats have DRM (digital rights management); for example, Amazon offers this as an option for all eBooks they publish. If you opt to have DRM, then readers may have trouble reading your book or transferring it legitimately under certain circumstances. If you opt not to have DRM, then it’s all easy as pie, but it also means that any computer literate reader can copy your book and do anything they like with it.

Cover design
Another important concern if you’re selfpubbing is the cover, which while it may not be very important on the eReader itself is a key part of the marketing of the book. The quality or lack of quality in the cover design may make a big difference with potential readers and purchasers in terms of judging how well the book is likely to be written, how interesting it might be, etc. There can be a lot to consider in creating covers, but if this gets overwhelming and/or if you have zero graphic design skills, this too can be hired out.

Promotion
The last essential thing to take into account in selfpubbing an eBook is promotion. If you simply post the book, few people will know of it or hear about it unless you’re already famous. Traditional advertising methods (like taking out display ads, for instance) don’t seem to work well for most books; the more successful approaches tend to involve things like getting people to review the book, talking the book up in visible places on the Web, participating in social media, giveaways, etc. In the best cases, word of mouth takes off and readers begin encouraging other readers to get it, in time.

The great majority of people who selfpub eBooks sell virtually no copies. Some of us sell regularly but not in great quantity. A small but not impossibly small number make a substantial income from them. For an extreme example, see “Some Reasons for Amanda Hocking’s Success.”

Photo by ntr23

I do tend to go on a little about the myth of inborn talent, but then, it’s an idea that’s been smushed deep into the fabric of our culture, like gum ground into a carpet. Still, my apologies to people who’ve heard me play this tune a couple too many times already.

To see what I have to say about talent, read my posts “Useful Book: Talent is Overrated” or “Why I’m Proud to Have Been an Unoriginal, Talentless Hack,” or “Do you have enough talent to become great at it?,” or my Futurismic column “Critique, Mentors, Practice, and a Million Words of Garbage.” Or else ignore me and read Dean Wesley Smith’s post, “The Myth of Talent,” a chapter in the book he’s writing called “Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing,” in which he writes:

In school I hated writing because I was so bad at it. If I had listened to all the people who told me I had no talent for writing, I would have quit four decades ago. No, make that five decades ago, because all my early report cards said I had no talent for writing.

Now, after millions and millions of words practiced, many books and stories published, I get comments all the time like, “You are a talented writer, of course you can do it.”

Or one I got the other day. “You have the talent to write fast.”

Talent is something we build, not something that’s bestowed on us. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to build it naturally in the course of other activities, and other times we have to work like hell to get it, but what’s a little working like hell in the grand scheme of things?

Last week, a reader e-mailed me about a struggle with depression: while this person was working, good moods were possible, but at other times depression would creep in. Here are some suggestions that came out of that discussion.

In terms of immediate help, here are some things that might be especially helpful to try but that require at least a little time and effort.

First, walking somewhere beautiful–by a stream, in a park, in a quiet and beautiful park of town, or anything like that, especially near water and in natural places–can quickly make a difference in mood. It’s a calming practice that allows time to think, but it also gets your body moving and puts you in an environment that will tend to lift your spirits. I know it sounds so simple that it’s almost silly, but the research suggests this is an unusually good way to change your mood: see The Benefits of Quick, Easy, Pleasant Exercise .

A second approach is to get out and do something with people you enjoy spending time with, or to find a group that does something you enjoy (www.meetup.com is a good place to look). The moods of people nearby us affect our own moods, so that just spending time with happy people can help us be happier. (See Want to Reduce Stress? Increase Social Time.)

It seems that you can get some similar benefits sometimes with a pet (especially a dog or cat), if you enjoy pets, and I’ve certainly experienced pet-driven happiness myself.

Third, volunteering can be an enormous boost to mood and feelings of self-worth: there’s a different feeling to doing something good that you don’t have to do and don’t get paid for. Anything from donating blood to volunteering to shelve books at a local library to helping out at a fundraising event for a local charity can offer these benefits. Alternatively, you could just reach out to people you know, helping them with a difficult job–moving, for example.

A fourth thing that I can think of takes very little time and effort, although it will probably also sound silly: make yourself smile. Surprisingly, making an expression as though you have an emotion can set off the same neurophysiological reactions you would have if you actually have that emotion, so that a fake smile can become a real smile. See Using Body Language to Change Our Moods.

Each of these approaches is a short-term fix that reflects a long-term habit that can help mood: exercise, time in nature, time with friends, a sense of helping others, and a conscious effort to encourage positive emotions all can help create happiness as they become more habitual.

If you find that short-term approaches like this aren’t helping, a good cognitive therapist really might be able to open up new doors, provide essential support, and cultivate habits that support lasting happiness. I’d like to be sure to mention that I’m not  a licensed therapist myself, and this shouldn’t be construed as professional or expert advice.

Photo by tanakawho

Kristen Gagnon, a fellow student at the Blue Wave Taekwondo school in Burlington, Vermont, made this video chronicling her Taekwondo career up through black belt testing this past weekend. She does a beautiful job of showing what it’s like to enrich your life by finding a kind of physical activity you love.

How did she do? I’ll save a thousand words and just post this: