Photos are a funny thing: they can often communicate things about us that are hard to convey in words, but many of us, when we’re being photographed, stop acting like ourselves: we try to force smiles, feel uncomfortable in front of the camera, or pose in a position we’d never take in real life.

I’m no expert on how to get the perfect author photo, but I do know how to avoid some major mistakes because of my interest in and study of body language and facial expressions. As I mentioned in a recent post about Michael Port’s Book Yourself Solid, photos on business books are often the worst offenders, but I see many of these problems in author and promotional photos of all kinds. Here are some things to avoid.

1. A fake smile. A true smile can really light up a photograph, but considering we’re relating with cameras and photographers and not with friends or family when we get our picture taken, they can be hard to come by. People often can identify fake smiles without even trying, making the subject of the photo look sad and desperate. Even if you know what the difference between a real smile and a fake smile is, it’s next to impossible to smile convincingly without having something to smile about. Consider going without a smile, having the photographer tell you dumb jokes, or talking about something you’re passionate about–although this last strategy can result in a lot of photos of you with your mouth open. If that happens, stop talking and take time to reflect and create non-talking smiling opportunities every few sentences.
2. Crossed arms. Unfortunately, a lot of businesspeople seem to think crossed arms indicate power and confidence. What they usually indicate instead is anxiety. We tend to cross our arms over our chest or stomach as a protective measure, an instinctive attempt to keep our vital organs from being damaged. Even touching our hands together or holding something that connects our hands is just a diluted version of crossed arms. Alternatives include having hands at our sides or behind our backs.
3. Hands in pockets. I think this is usually meant to suggest “Hey, I’m laid back and relaxed,” but in body language terms it often means “Please go away: I don’t want to talk to you.” This is not an ideal message for your photo. Interestingly, having hands in your pockets with thumbs sticking out, while still not especially inviting and open, tends to convey confidence, so if you absolutely have to hide your fingers, at least show your thumbs.
4. Crossed ankles. This seems to be another favorite “relaxed” pose, but in body language it commonly translates as “I’m holding something back” or “I have something to hide.” I can’t blame people for wanting to cross their arms over their chests or cross their ankles when in front of the camera, because lenses really can make us feel vulnerable unless we’re very used to being photographed or can consciously befriend the camera. Still, uncross those ankles! In addition to looking less sketchy, this helps us actually feel more open, because our body language doesn’t just transmit our emotions: it also helps shape them (see “Using Body Language to Change Our Moods“).
5. Touching the face. I think the intention is to imply “thoughtful,” but when we touch our faces in real life, it often more specifically signals doubt, or at least deliberation. For instance, you may be touching your face as you read this if you’re still trying to decide what to do with what I’m saying. If the chin is resting on the hand, the message can be boredom. In author photos, there’s a tendency for face touching to appear to be self-doubt, which again is probably not what you want to advertise.

While there are other mistakes we can make, these five are the big ones, and avoiding them helps convey a sense of openness and reliability. Actually, though, the best way to use these pointers might not be to try to avoid the five mistakes, but to use them as a red flag and realize when we’re not comfortable in front of the camera. The most effective photos won’t be ones where we’ve just managed to avoid body language errors, but ones where we’re actually feeling open, energetic, and engaged. With that said, the worst promotional and author photos, at least in terms of the poses the subjects take, will be the ones where these errors slip by and go unnoticed–so at the least, let me implore you not to fall for any of them.

In case you’re interested in learning more, much of the material for this post comes from things I learned from Barbara and Allen Pease’s exceptional resource The Definitive Book of Body Language.

Smashwords founder Mark Coker just released a presentation and related free eBook revealing the results of analyzing sales of more than 50,000 books over several years. Admittedly, what applies to Smashwords might not apply to Amazon, but based on what I’ve seen here and on the data I’ve seen from various writers (successful and not) who have been experimenting with Amazon eBook sales, this analysis does seem to reveal some basic truths about pricing, selling, and positioning eBooks.

Among the thought-provoking findings: the sweet spot for eBook pricing, as many of us suspected, is in the $2.00-$5.99 range. Books priced in the $1.00 to $1.99 range not only earn less money–they also often sell fewer copies!

It was also eye-opening to see what Coker did not find, including consistent patterns of eBook sales growth individually or in aggregate. Basically, past sales don’t predict very well what any particular title is going to be doing in future.

Coker emphasizes that books don’t sell well unless they’re great books, and that writing a great book is the hard part. With that said, selling a selfpubbed ebook is also no walk in the park, and Coker’s information helps selfpub authors to see the way a little more clearly.

Michael Port’s bestselling marketing book for service professionals, Book Yourself Solid, doesn’t really break new ground, but it’s a profoundly useful book if you are a service professional trying to get more business and are willing and able to love what you do. The most powerful thing about the book is that it asks extremely productive, basic questions that we often don’t consider when trying to market ourselves, questions that put a high value on integrity and connection not just for their own sake, but as basic forces to find and book new clients. I learned a lot from Port.

With that said, there are also some serious problems with Book Yourself Solid. The most obvious is that it’s relentlessly self-promoting. Port uses “Book Yourself Solid” as a brand identity that he then plasters over page after page, referring to Book Yourself Solid Certified Professionals and the Book Yourself Solid Writing Strategy and whatnot. He even refers to fairly common marketing strategies with the BYS brand. Honestly, I don’t know if this is a shortcoming of Port’s marketing understanding or if I’m just outside his target market. Actually, he speaks repeatedly and meaningfully about the importance of knowing who is and is not a good client for you, emphasizing that every service professional has personal strengths and a personal style that will be great for some clients and not a good fit for others, but for himself, he seems to throw the net very wide. He doesn’t filter his readers: he tries to convince them they’re his kind of people. Actually, maybe that does filter his readers, because perhaps the people who believe in the hard sell and money for its own sake quickly get tired of his assumptions and give up on the book.

Regardless, although I was willing to sample Port’s e-mail newsletter and so on, I quickly unsubscribed once I realized how energetically he was spamming himself, and I expect to stay away from most of his other materials, too. In my particular case, he has managed to sell one book and get me to advocate for it, but he’s probably ruined his chances of selling me anything else. Not that he needs my money!

As for me, I’m entirely behind the idea that our work should be driven by our passions and by wanting to bring some meaningful value to those we serve. I just have trouble being bombarded over and over with blatant marketing messages. I was going to say I “can’t stand” that bombardment, but the fact of the matter is that I can and did stand it in order to get all of the good information out of that book.

And there is a lot of good information, especially the broad strokes and deep questions. Port offers a way to rethink a business from the ground up that takes the stress, distastefulness, and self-centeredness out of self-promotion while bringing in new clients. In some of the details, the book isn’t as strong, though here too there’s a lot of good material. I was impressed, for example, at how on the mark the social media section was, considering how changeable that world is.

The writing section, on the other hand, has some bad gaps and even some misinformation. For instance, there’s no mention of the fact that electronic querying for magazines is very common now; the SASE method is still described, and while that still applies for some markets, it seems a bit out of date.

Considering how strongly I would recommend this book to any service professional who wants to build up business through integrity and offering great value, I seem to have a lot of complaints about it, but let me mention one more: Port’s special article of faith. He states repeatedly that he believes that if you feel called to offer your services to the world, then there are people out there who need them. I have to say that I think this is dangerous bunk. Why dangerous? Because it suggests that you need to just do what you want to do, and the market for it will magically appear. I feel strongly that creating useful and valuable things in the world is accomplished by starting with the need itself, not with what you want to supply.

Fiction writing is a great example: for instance, just because I write and love a story doesn’t mean that there’s anyone else out there who wants or needs to read that story. Just because I love to write a particular kind of fiction doesn’t mean that there’s a market for that kind of fiction. Port seems to be promising unlimited success for everyone regardless of what they want to do, and some people who dive in regardless of whether there’s anyone who needs them will be sadly disappointed, because people don’t spend their money on just anything.

If you want to follow your passion without regard to what other people are wanting and needing, that’s fine–just don’t expect anyone to pay you for it.

With that said, I don’t think Port’s creed ruins the book, because it seems to me very close to the truth, which I’d say goes something like “Work hard at what you love and pay attention to what others need, and sooner or later you’re likely to find a place where the two meet.”

Overall, Port’s book was tremendously useful to me, even when it was being mildly annoying. If you’re working on building a business, I hope you’ll give it a shot, spend some real time thinking about the questions he raises, and see if it doesn’t help take you to the next level.

A side note: A lot of photos of business gurus are laughable in terms of body language, and this book cover is no exception. Michael, get your hands out of your pockets and uncross your ankles! If you don’t know why I’d say that, check out this book.

This week Toasted Cake, Tina Connolly’s weekly audio fiction broadcast, features two short stories of mine, “A is for Authority” and “B is for Bureauracy.” This is a series that I’d like to see through to completion some day (just 24 to go!), but frankly the stories are a little exhausting to write, so it may take a while. If you listen, you’ll see why.

I’ve been more energetic about sending out my fiction in recent months, and as a result I’ve been selling more stories, including one upcoming one to Nature, certainly the most widely-read and prestigious magazine I could land in this side of the New Yorker.

I’ve also done a long-overdue update of my bibliography here on the site, so that a nearly-complete list of my published short fiction is now available. Some of the stories are available free to read on the Internet; see the page for links.

Note: It’s only just at this moment that I realize why the initials of Tina’s site are T.C. Alas, I am not always quick on the uptake with these clever subtleties!

Recently Janine and I attended a series of six weekly classes (with substantial homework assignments) taught by parenting advisor Vicki Hoefle. Our children are wonderful, but we were running into problems like computer overuse with our teenager and getting our two grade school children out the door on time. Before we knew anything about Vicki’s work, I would have expected some helpful tips, useful insights, and gentle tweaks to our parenting. What I wouldn’t have expected was to hear–and quickly come to believe–that I’d been basically doing it wrong … and that I was not alone.

Wait, but I’m a good parent!
It’s very difficult for me, and I think for a lot of parents I know, to consider the possibility that we could be screwing up on a basic level. Sure, no parent is perfect. Ideas like “Ah, I should have been more involved here” or “In future, I’d better limit that” are perfectly comfortable for me. What’s not comfortable is to have to grapple with the idea that although I view parenting as one of the most important things I could do with my life, and although I’ve put great thought and effort into being a good parent, I was misunderstanding something as basic as what my job as a parent was.

This isn’t to say I haven’t been a good parent. I love my kids, and I make sure they know it. I go out of my way to spend time with them, to support them, and to listen to them. I help make sure they have good food, a stable home, fun, safety, and good schools. I try to guide and advise them to help them become better and more capable people. Isn’t that enough?

In a way, sure: my kids are great. At the same time, it’s not exactly on the mark: there’s an important understanding I (and virtually every other parent I know) had missed. That understanding is about who should be in charge. It’s not the parents: it’s the kids.

Parenting isn’t about telling our kids what to do
What’s the essential job of parenting? If you had asked a few months ago, I would have said something like “To love, support, teach, protect, and provide for our kids.” I also would have thought it was a pretty great answer. So where does it fall short?

To answer that question, I have to think about the thing that Vicki pointed out to us at the very first class: when they’re 18 or thereabouts, in most cases, our kids will be going out on their own. As of that moment, we will no longer be able to do things for them, teach them much of anything, or protect them from the world. By the time our kids leave home, they will need to know how to do everything we currently do for them and everything we expect them to do for themselves, as well as a bunch of things that we adults already do for ourselves and they will have never had to do before.

They have 18 years to learn everything. Go.
The list of things to know includes how to do laundry, how to cook, how to choose healthy foods, how to eat at regular times, how to get enough sleep, how to get up on time, how to be reliable, how to solve problems without anyone else’s help, how to act in a crisis, how to spend money, how not to spend too much money, how to earn money, how to save money, how to make and keep friends, how to resolve arguments and disputes, how to drive, how to navigate, how to keep a home clean even if you’re very busy, how to limit games and television so that they don’t get in the way of things like school and work, how to tell whether or not other people are trustworthy, how to deal with unexpected setbacks … and on and on and on. The complete list is probably too long to even fully imagine.

As competent adults, we know how to do a huge number of things, a lot of which we never even let our children try, sometimes because we don’t think they can do it and sometimes because it’s our job to do. (Do you let your children pay the gas bill without oversight? Hire their own lawyers? Take themselves to the hospital? I don’t either, although there are ways for them to learn how to do all these things without having to be abandoned by us.) As a result, young adults out on their own often make huge blunders with money, love, cleanliness, health, school, work, friendships, and in other areas. Sometimes they find their way through and eventually get good at these things. Other times they find an unhealthy status quo, like staying away from other people because they’re too nervous about negotiating relationships, or bossing everyone around, or bingeing on doughnuts every Friday night, or avoiding getting a serious illness or injury checked out because they don’t know how they’ll pay the medical bill, or ruining their chances at a great job and getting stuck with a lousy one.

Some of basic principles I took away from Vicki’s classes were these: let children do everything they’re capable of; let them find their own way; and help them learn how to do the things they can’t yet do.

Not all there is to it
There’s much more to what I’ve recently learned about parenting, especially in terms of what problems with kids’ behavior are really about and how to respond in a way that addresses the real issue instead of just trying to fix the situation. I’ve had to let go of a lot of my previous assumptions about parenting, though the principles of love, involvement, and support have only been strengthened by this process. If I tried to explain everything our family has gone through in the past six weeks, you might not even believe me. I will say, though, that our family is much, much happier and more functional than I could have imagined we’d be. We still have a lot of work to do, but we’re making steady progress.

How can I say this in strong enough terms?
I’ll try to express this as effectively as I can: I don’t think I know a single family with children at home that does not need what Vicki is teaching. Not a single one. I know some outstanding parents, and I suspect those outstanding parents would get at least as much–if not more–out of learning from Vicki as the average person.

When I say “need what Vicki is teaching,” too, I mean that any time, effort, and expense put into this education will pay off many times what was invested.

Just so you know, I have no affiliation with Vicki’s operation and don’t get anything for talking her up. The reason I’m so enthusiastic about promoting her work is that I think it is desperately needed.

Vicki has begun speaking more widely just recently, as her youngest child (of five) has just left the nest. This is good news for people who, unlike Janine and me, do not live in Vermont and would not previously have had direct access to her. Even more usefully, she has a book, Duct Tape Parenting, coming out in August. (She already has a for-Kindle-only book out called Real Parents, Real Progress, but it’s more of an extended preview of what she’s offering than a real resource in itself. Actually, it’s perfect if you wonder if there might be something to what I’m saying but don’t really believe me that it can make an enormous difference in your life yet. Invest the five dollars in the book and see whether you agree it’s worth pursuing.)

I’d suggest that if you can think of anything important that you’d like to improve in your relationship with your children, whether it’s a problem kind of behavior or anything else, that it would be well worth your time to look into Vicki’s site or her books. I’m sure there are other people in the world who have as deep and useful an understanding of parenting as Vicki, but I’ve never run across any of them, and they’re not the parenting experts I’ve heard of before. Prove me wrong if you can that Vicki’s take on parenting is something we desperately need.

Photo by Bindaas Madhavi

Recently my son came down with a bad head cold, and I soon caught it from him. Some combination of echinacea, zinc, extra sleep, and luck probably saved me from a week-long ordeal, because I woke up less than 24 hours after symptoms started feeling well.

The illnesses, though, started some discussions in our household about activity when you’re sick. My assumption about illness was that once you start getting sick, you should rest intensively until you’re better, but it turns out that the experts don’t necessarily agree. A Rodale News article on the subject quotes researcher David C. Nieman saying that people who exercise more get and stay less sick, which may be no surprise, but in the same article Nieman points to research he has done that seems to suggest that moderate exercise when we’re mildly sick (like with a head cold) can cut the length of the illness by half.

Nieman and article author Emily Main are quick to point out that exercising with a chest cold or severe illness is a recipe for trouble, and give pretty specific guidelines on when to exercise during an illness and when not to; read the full article for details.

Writing about the topics I write about here–habits, fulfillment, focus, goals, motivation, and all the rest–is exciting to me because I can mine useful ideas and techniques out of a wide variety of sources and try to offer them to you here in as clear and meaningful a way as I can manage. I get a similar charge out of writing articles and books (and a different but also compelling charge out of writing fiction). At times I’ve tried to offer those ideas and that kind of communication in other ways, for example by doing a limited amount of coaching, but after a great deal of study and preparation, I’m now bringing the things that I’ve learned and that I teach into a new arena: public speaking.

I’ve done public speaking before, most recently at the New Hampshire chapter of the Romance Writers of America, where I had a wonderful time and got the chance to connect with some good people. However, until recently I had never made a formal study of public speaking or set my sights on making it a regular part of my schedule. I’m now taking the lessons I’ve learned here on the road–though not very far on the road, as for now I’m sticking almost exclusively to New England, southern Quebec, and parts of upstate New York.

I’ve added a new speaking sub-site here on LucReid.com, always available through “speaking” tab above or at www.lucreid.com/speaking . There’s an explanation of my offerings, some biographical information I’ve never shared on this site before, a speaker sheet you can print off if you’re interested, a contact page, and a video page for speaking clips. If you’re curious about what I offer or just about what in the world I’m doing, I hope you’ll explore and perhaps comment or get in touch. I’m always interested in talking about these presentations with anyone who has questions or ideas.

I’m not sure when I first began wanting to become a professional writer, only that by third grade I had that idea firmly in my head. It wasn’t until a few years later that I got a particularly awful SF book from a bookstore–I think it had a robot on the cover, one of those jobs with the dryer-vent-hose arms and the antennae on the head–and really got fired up for the job. I thought (and this may sound familiar) “God, if a lousy book like this can get published, I’m going to be rich!”

Let’s skip over the many misconceptions and sad bits of naïvete lurking in that sentence, if you don’t mind.

Good writers had at least as much influence on me as bad ones, of course: reading Tolkien and LeGuin as a kid, especially, gave me something to shoot for. Here are some accounts from writers I know who talk about authors who drove them to write in the first place, either in admiration or disgust:

Donald Mead, whose work can be found in venues like Fantasy & Science Fiction and Writers of the Future XXV, said

I suppose it was 20 years ago or more that I read Brooks’ Sword of Shannara. I found it to be an unrepentant rip-off of Lord of the Rings. I had no writing aspirations at the time, but after reading that disaster, I thought “Well, anyone can write a book.” And then it was a short step to “I can write a book.”

Funny, many years later I was on a panel at Capricon with Peter Beagle and he mentioned that he was the first reader for Sword of Shannara. He told the editor it was a rip off of LotR. The editor said “That’s great! That’s what it’s meant to be.” It was for the reader who’d read LotR eight times and just couldn’t pick it up for the ninth time.

Please note, I have nothing against Brooks. From all I’ve heard, he’s a great guy. I’m just saying if I ever make it big, it’s because of Sword of Shannara.

Incidentally, I found out it wasn’t true that “anyone can write a book.” I quickly found out I had no idea how to write; it was a lot harder than I ever imagined. I have a lot more respect for Brooks now.

SJ Driscoll’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and elsewhere, and her successful works include plays, many articles, and poems. Her inspiration was

Poe. I started reading him when I was seven, while those moronic learn-to-read first-grade textbooks were being stuffed down my throat. Death from boredom…. I never wanted to learn to read–I wanted to be outside doing things. My dad tried to teach me starting at age four, and I despised it. Then elementary school almost murdered me with dreariness. Squash, crush, stifle. Man, did Poe revive me. The way he used language! By the time I was ten, I’d read all the fiction and poetry he ever wrote. I used to think the word, “poetry,” came from his name. He taught me to use words to give the world hard edges. He started me writing stories because stories gave my strapped-down childhood a shape I could control. I was a child, I wasn’t allowed to do real things, I wasn’t free, so I wrote. I still write to give the world hard edges, to be free. Poe was the first writer to save my life. I honor him.

S Hutson Blount (Andromeda Spaceways In-Flight Magazine, Escape Pod, Black Gate, etc.), said

Most of my formative examples were negative. There was once a section in bookstores called “Men’s Adventure.” Mack Bolan lived there, along with Remo Williams, Dirk Pitt, Casca, and a bunch of hypothetical Third World Wars. This was where I went when I needed to reassure myself that if these guys could get published, I could too.

Melissa Mead (Sword & Sorceress and others–no relation to Donald), on the other hand, said

I first tried writing for publication after reading Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword & Sorceress series. I commented to my husband that it would be such fun to write for something like that, and he encouraged me to give it a try. S&S was invitation-only by then, and shortly thereafter MZB died and the series ended. By then, though, I’d had a story accepted by The First Line, and I was hooked.

Years and years later, when Norilana revived S&S, I sold a story for the 23rd volume, and the inspiration came full circle.

Yep, it was as much fun as I’d imagined. 🙂

The takeaway here, if you’ll indulge me for a second, is that if at any point we want to be more enthusiastic about some kind of work we might do, one option is to immerse ourselves for a little while in the work of someone who is either very good or very bad at whatever it is. While this may not work for anyone who has evolved beyond all feelings of indignation, superiority, or envy, for the rest of us it can provide a damn good shot in the arm.

This piece is reprinted (with improvements) from my “Brain Hacks for Writers” column at Futurismic.

A friend of mine, writer John Murphy, pointed me to this discussion, in which devotees of the computer game Starcraft talk about how they recover after a losing streak. My first thought was that the topic wouldn’t be of much use in terms of looking at how we motivate ourselves in general, because computer games are hardly the same thing as cleaning out the garage or succeeding at our chosen career, right? Fortunately, it didn’t take me long to set myself straight on that count: after all, when we are focused on a goal and are facing obstacles and frustrations, the emotional situation is very similar regardless of whether the obstacles are gaming opponents, inefficient coworkers, or unmarked boxes full of bicycle parts. (See “A Surprising Source of Insight into Self-Motivation: Video Games“)

That’s not to say that I think that all goals are equally praiseworthy. I wouldn’t expect to impress anyone with my skilled movie watching or badminton playing, and while computer games are much like anything else in terms of how motivation works, that doesn’t mean I’d especially recommend that people direct their energies there. Engrossing is not necessarily the same thing as meaningful. With that said, every healthy life has leisure activities, so let’s learn from this one.

A warning: if you do read the discussion I linked to on your own, there may be parts that are completely foreign to you. For instance, in the following passage, I had no idea whatsoever what the author was talking about (although I enjoyed the sense of disorientation that came with that):

When I lost to broods, I checked the rep and knew I needed an observer in his main to see what the hive timing was, when hive was started I threw down a stargate. If I couldnt get an obs in his base, I told myself to start a stargate at the 12 minute mark, and to try to get a third faster.

But enough jargon: to the interesting parts. Many of the suggestions and ideas in the discussion touched on meaningful self-motivation strategies that are supported by research. For example, the gamers in this discussion were very sensitive to losing streaks, as most people tend to be. Streaks can become a burden, or can be used to create more motivation (see “Harnessing a Winning Streak” and “How to Stop Having a Bad Day“).

A couple of things to know about Starcraft (although everything I know about the game I learned from that discussion thread): first, there are different kinds of games, and the highest-pressure option seems to be “Ladder,” which I gather is a highly competitive fight to move up in the rankings. Also, unlike many video games, Starcraft seems to have limited social aspects. A user called Stereo (all participants in the discussion went by user names like this) said

Yea in wc3 if you had a losing streak it didn’t seem to matter at all ’cause I could just go talk to people and jump back into a game and have some laughs …. Here it’s like a ghost town where the only thought is the last game and why you lost.

Some of the insights in the thread (and there were a number of insights from gamers paying attention to their own thoughts and feelings) touched on taking ownership of success, failure, and the emotions that result from those experiences. Qriator said

When I’m losing it’s not because the other guy’s trolling or just way better – it’s because I’m messing up my own build.

This point is a key one: our mood, effectiveness, and resilience are affected enormously by whether we assign blame for a failure to someone else or take responsibility for it ourselves. It’s not intuitive, but taking responsibility for a failure can actually be much less stressful than blaming it on another person or outside forces, because it suggests that we have some control over the situation and might be able to handle it better next time. Focusing on others’ actions is demoralizing and stressful because by and large we have no power to make people act as we think they should. RipeBanana (I know, the names are a little strange for a conversation like this, but bear with me) commented in a similar vein:

I used to get really angry when I lost a game, then get a ton more angry if I lost 2-3 (or 9) games in a row. Then one day, and I am completely serious, I told myself I wouldn’t get mad anymore.

As simple as that – and I no longer rage.

It’s interesting how emotions work. We may have little control over our immediate, initial reaction to an experience, but our emotional state from there on is powerfully influenced by our own thoughts. (See “How emotions work” and “All About Broken Ideas and Idea Repair“).

Several participants in the discussion emphasized the importance of going back to figure out what went wrong, and of concentrating not on winning, but on improving. Terminus said

… by analyze I mean going to the point in the replay that made you lose the game, and remembering to not commit that same mistake again.

You have to get into the mindset that games are no big deal. Points aren’t important, ranking isn’t important, what matters is improving …. once you improve, your ranking will naturally rise.

Jazzman takes a similar approach:

… then I watch the replays of my last couple of losses, pinpoint the earliest possible fix I can make, and proceed to go crush 3 or 4 people in a row.

Both of these players have a good chance of doing better through this process–that is, their loss may mean that they’ll actually win more in the future–because they’re pushing themselves to consciously work in a different way. (See “Practice versus Deliberate Practice“)

The last idea I’ll quote from the thread–although far from the last idea that was suggested there–is from piCKles:

There’s actually a little trick that I learned from a quarterback that I’m going to start using. You wear a rubber band around your wrist and every time you get into a new game, you snap the rubber band. This helps create a trigger in your mind … that every time you snap the rubber band you forget about everything that went wrong with any of the previous games, and that this game is fresh start and a new chance to pull off the winning play or game in this instance.

I’ve never tried this, but it makes perfect sense: any simple reminder to clear our minds and shed any lingering anxieties or anger about previous problems is likely to help us do better at the next thing. For instance, if a person has two job interviews in a row and the first one is a disaster, the ability to “snap back” and approach the second job interview fresh is likely to make a big difference for the better.

Recently a friend posted in an online discussion forum that she had revisions to do on a book she was writing, but didn’t feel able to do them. This is an accomplished writer, but she found that she just really doesn’t want to tackle rewriting this particular chapter.

I have some suggestions for her, because of course writing motivation is a subject in which I have a passionate interest and on which I’ve done a lot of research. Here was my response, much of which applies as well to other kinds of tasks as it does to writing.

First, may I suggest my free PDF eBook, “The Writing Engine: A Practical Guide to Writing Motivation“? There’s a motivation troubleshooting section in back that could get you some good answers within minutes

About the specific question, I wouldn’t suggest walking away and waiting for your subconscious to sort the problem out. That definitely works some of the time, but there’s a needless delay involved, your subconscious may very well be preoccupied with other things, and there’s a chance that you’ll let it linger and dread of the work will grow until the project dies for want of just a little industry. Better to face the problem head-on, get used to facing such things in that way, and get the sense of satisfaction that comes from making progress through dedication and effort.

I share the thought that it’s possible you sense something wrong with the story, in that I have been derailed in my own writing sometimes when that was the case. However, it’s also possible that you’re facing fears of what will happen to the story when it’s finished and is finally ready for you to try to sell it or get representation. A lot of us seem to get thoughts like “Is it any good? What if it’s really junk and I’ve spent all that time on it? Can I even do any better? Maybe I’m just a lousy writer. Maybe my success so far is a fluke.”

Alternatively, you might just be associating some bad feelings with the task, e.g., “Man, this is going to be a pain,” or “I don’t even know if I can fix this,” or “I hate revising!” or “Why didn’t I write it well the first time?”

Regardless of the reason, here’s what I would recommend.

1. Sit down now or at your nearest opportunity and commit to making some kind of progress on the work. You don’t have to finish it. You don’t even have to start on it. Instead …

2. Write about your situation. You can write about what you want to change, what you’re feeling about the work, both, or something else related.

3. If you’re not already carried into the work by step 2, next brainstorm as many ways as possible to change it, include ridiculous and stupid ideas, ideas that might require more work elsewhere in the book, cutting things, adding new elements, etc. (See “Writing Differently: Picking Up the Scary Tools“)

Step 2 or 3 is very likely to get you into a mood to want to work on the revision. From out here, the revision looks like nothing more than a pain in the ass. From up close, working on ideas that excite you, it may well start looking like an exciting opportunity. Alternatively, you may discover to your dismay that you think the whole project is horribly flawed, in which case it might be time for feedback, or else to just finish it, send it out, and perhaps discover that you were wrong and it’s terrific.

If Steps 1-3 don’t get you there, then I would recommend

4. Sit down, make a list of the things you need to do, figure out what the first one is, and just start doing it. Don’t worry about if you don’t feel like it, aren’t sure you can do a good job, have other things you need to do, etc. Focus on the task, ask yourself whether it’s physically possible to accomplish it, and if so, do it. Then do the next one. This isn’t forcing yourself: it’s resignation.

Picture by kxp130