This piece originally appeared in April 2011 as part of my Futurismic column “Brain Hacks for Writers”

Lately I’ve been looking, for the sake of my sanity, for some principles of writerly success that I can really depend on. These are a tad elusive when the publishing world is being shaken up by the complete redefinition of self-publishing and the whole eBook thing. I don’t know about you, but I look at all this and say “Hey, how am I going to make a living as a writer in this mess–or even just find a readership–when we don’t even know what the publishing world will consist of in five years?”

Uncertainty is a terrible motivator.

Comfortingly, I think we can distill a few principles that apply to virtually anyone who wants to write and be read, whether on paper or screen, selfpub or tradpub. They are

1. Be passionate about what you write
2. Focus your efforts
3. Grow your long-term readership

Why do these matter? Because as long as you’re doing these three things, your writing career is going in the right direction, and as soon as you stop doing them, your writing career is in danger.

Be passionate about what you write

We already know that to be successful in writing, you have to write a lot. To take it a step further, I suggest that we need to write a lot and love the work we’ve chosen.

There are two ways to do this, and most of us need both: First, there’s being captured by the project, getting excited about starting it. Second, there’s taking a project you’re already working on and finding things in it that make you eager to keep diving into it.

The initial lure of the project is something I know all too well: I love to start things. The opportunity, the promise, the creativity, the fact that I haven’t screwed anything up yet–it’s easy to get excited about something I’m not working on. But it’s also important, because if you can’t get excited about your own work, how likely is it that your readers will? I imagine you’ve heard that nugget of wisdom before from more authoritative sources, but it’s a good nugget.

Re-infusing excitement is essential for most of us too, because virtually every long-term project seems to have its ups and downs. Maybe you’ve gotten to a point where your story has gone off track, or you’ve begun to question whether your whole idea wasn’t stupid in the first place, or you’ve just lost enthusiasm for rewriting the damn thing a third time.

This column isn’t about the specific ways to renew that passion (though there are a lot of specific tools for that in my eBook The Writing Engine: A Practical Guide to Writing Motivation). This is just a reminder that not having that passion makes it very difficult to keep coming back and cranking out the words, and without passion it can feel pointless even when you do crank out the words. Passion isn’t everything, but it makes a hell of a difference.

Focus your efforts

The topic of focus brings us back to my “oh, I thought of a great new project!” problem. Running off after every charming new story idea, or writing a book but not cleaning it up to submit, or not sending stories back out after they’ve been rejected, or spending all your time writing for your blog and none on your books–all of these are symptoms of unfocused effort. Focused effort means knowing what your most important writing goals are and sticking with them until you’ve seen them through. This is essential whether you need to crank out words, submit query letters, promote selfpubbed eBooks, or anything else. If you’re just writing to write, that’s great as long as you don’t care about getting anything published or read, but if you want readers and completed projects, don’t let your head get turned by other projects–and don’t let your concern that something might be rejected prevent you from sending it out there over and over until it finds a home or until you’ve proven conclusively that it doesn’t have one.

I will be sure to come back and harp on this point some more once I’ve mastered it myself.

Grow your long-term readership

This item is the one that has the most to do with your career as distinct from your writing, whether you’re just looking to get an occasional story published, are trying to go (or stay) full-time, or are shooting to break the bestseller lists. If the things you are doing outside writing itself pay off well in terms of connecting you with more people who will want to read your work for a long time, then they are good as long as they don’t hog too much of your writing time. Any writing-related activities that don’t serve that purpose need to be considered for possible elimination.

So working really hard on rewriting that dragon porn novel that you intend to publish under a one-time pseudonym is a fail on this front: even if it becomes very popular, unless you intend to cultivate that pseudonym and write more dragon porn, it’s a career fail. So is spending an hour a day on Twitter if your followers are interested in you because you are dutifully retweeting news items instead of in ways that would get them interested in your writing. Publicity is useless if it doesn’t build up a sustained following of people who are interested in you and what you write. This is one reason begging for retweets and commenting across the Internet with pleas to buy your new book is as unhelpful as it is degrading.

But selling a book to a traditional publisher, or self-pubbing a book that you are really excited to continuously get word out about, or maintaining a snarky blog about fashion when you write snarky chicklit, or pushing to get foreign rights to your latest novel sold–these are all getting your name out to people who are interested in you because of what you write and who you are, people whose reading needs you can help satisfy and who can support your career. Successful promotion, like successful livestock breeding, pays off for everyone involved.

photo courtesy of Ann Arbor District Library

Earlier this year, my partner Janine and I had the chance to study with parenting educator Vicki Hoefle, whose Parenting On Track™ program, with its roots in Adlerian psychology, strikes off in a completely different–and more effective–direction than any approach to parenting I had ever come across. Vicki has kindly made some of her parenting articles available to me to reprint here. If you’re interested in the topic or have questions, please comment to help guide me in choices for future posts.

I don’t usually post guest articles that promote a particular product, but I do strongly recommend any Parenting on Track book, course, or media you may be inclined to buy, and I hope that if you’re not inclined to buy anything you won’t be put off by this departure from my usual way of doing things.

This article originally appeared at http://www.parentingontrack.com/2008/06/if-they-can-walk/ .

If you’re beginning to wonder if you’re the maid or the parent, then…

A) You’re not alone

B) Now’s the time to do something about changing roles, and

C) Believe it or not, both you AND the kids will be glad you did now, and for years to come.

I realized at an early stage in my pregnancy with my first child that I could either be the maid or be emotionally available to my children, but I could not do both. Since there’s a far greater payoff to being emotionally available, I decided to train my children early on to help with the household chores.

Now, if you’re at all put off by the word train, here are a few other verbs straight out of my thesaurus: teach, coach, educate, instruct, guide, prepare, tutor… and you’ve got to love this one… school.

I use the word train because that’s what it is. And let’s face it, training is useful – it makes us all better at what we do. And knowing how to learn from our training is a skill in and of itself. A skill, I might add, that will serve your children well as they go off to school, into the workplace… but that’s another topic for another day. Back to making everyone’s life easier and more pleasant by taking off that maid’s outfit and giving your children a chance to be part of the family fun.

Is there an optimal time for training?

The quick answer is YES! Over the years I developed a very simple answer for parents when they would ask me how young they could start training their children to help around the house. My answer is, “If they can walk, they can work.” That’s right moms and dads, it’s never too early.

There are two good reasons to start training your children in what is essentially the fine art of cooperation and contribution, as soon as possible.

1. The first reason is that, if children have been invited to participate in family chores from a young age, contributions will be a normal and routine part of their daily lives by the time they hit the pre-adolescent, “I am not interested” age. So, it’s actually less painful for both you and your kids if you start ‘em young.

Consider this. When our children are very small, they come to us asking to help and we are quick to reply with, “No, too hot; too heavy; too dangerous; too sharp; too fast; you are too little; too slow; too short.” And then we send them out of the kitchen and into the other room to play with the plastic kitchens and plastic food and say, “Now go play and have fun.”

We continue to do this, over and over, for years, until one day, about the time that same child turns 10, WE decide it’s time for them to be responsible for their stuff and we start in with, “Hey, pick up your back pack; unpack your backpack; put your dishes away; clear the table; pick up your room; do your laundry…” Sorry ladies and gents, but by then, it’s too late! We have missed the most opportune time for training.

You see, when children are very, very interested in just about everything around them – including mimicking mom and dad, you, as a responsible, pro-active parent, can use that natural curiosity to everybody’s advantage and get everyone involved in doing their part around the house.

2. The second reason to start training your children early to contribute to the household chores is a very practical one – kids need years of practice to become good at doing “stuff” around the house.

Just take a second and look around your home. I’m sure you’d agree that tasks which truly contribute to running even the simplest of households require some pretty complex skills, and developing any skill takes practice, more practice, and even more practice. The sooner you start practicing a skill, the sooner that skill develops.

So, just how should I go about training my toddler to contribute to the household chores?

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• An immaculate house is NOT the primary goal. If you want it clean to your standards, wait until the kids are in bed and clean it yourself – but for goodness sakes, don’t get caught!
• Set reasonable expectations based on the child’s age.
• Notice what your child is doing, and talk about it.
• Train in small time increments.
• Start with something relatively easy, like putting back toys, then move on to more advanced tasks like picking up trash and helping with the dishes.

The following checklists should help you get started with your first attempt:

Planning Basics

• What two jobs can my toddler attempt successfully?
• When am I going to train him or her? (Pick a time in the day that works for you and your child.)
• What are my expectations?

When Your Child Says, “No”

• Smile and walk away.
• Go do something more interesting like read your book, listen to music, paint…

It’s also good to keep in mind that training in the art of cooperation and contribution doesn’t have to be explicitly planned during the early stages of training. As long as you’re ready when the opportunity presents itself, you can instill this spirit at a moment’s notice.

When Your Little One Tugs On Your Pant Leg to Play

• Say “Yes, I would LOVE to play with you, as soon as we use bubbles to wash the dishes!”
• Ask another question like “Would you like to learn how to squeeze the dish soap or turn on the dishwasher?”

Above all, DON’T GIVE UP — the ability to cooperate and contribute is a life skill that takes practice. And, whether you know it or not, your little ones will notice that you never give up on them, and that means the world.

If you have stories about how life has changed, now that you have handed in your feather duster and started training your kids, please share your comments below!

For more information on HOW to stay patient, set reasonable expectations, teach in small increments, and encourage your child (& yourself) along the way, purchase our Home Program and join the forum — Today!

Photo by horrigans

There’s no question that money can buy pleasure: if you have enough cash, you can get a hot date, the world’s best mojito, or even your very own Hawai’ian island. It can also help you believe you’re happy. For instance, in a 2010 study, two Princeton psychologists found that the richer you were, the better you were likely to say your life was.

The question is, how does having more money change how we feel from moment to moment? The answer, according to the same study, is that up to a certain point–an annual income of about $75,000, on average–having more money made it possible for people to experience more happiness and feel less stress. Past that point, the effect leveled off: someone who earns $75,000 a year has about the same chance to be happy as someone who earns $750,000 a year. Why is that?

The key to answering that question, I believe, has to do with a point I mention often here, that pleasure is not the same thing as happiness. Things like worrying about losing your home, not being able to afford good food, or living in a dangerous neighborhood can cause stress and interfere with happiness, but when we reach an income level where those problems don’t hold much sway, happiness then appears to have a lot more to do with how we think and what we do with our lives than on what kind of car we drive or how often we’re able to eat out.

There’s a confusing piece in here: richer people say their lives are better, but they don’t report being happier. How can you say your life is better if you’re not any happier? Well, one way is to evaluate your life based on how it might look to an outsider instead of on how it feels. People will guess you’re happier if you own a nicer car or have nicer clothes, and we often seem to evaluate ourselves the way we would expect other people to evaluate us. That may not apply to you, but to test it, consider this question: would you take a job where you earned a lot less money if you enjoyed the work more? If not, why not? If so, have you actually looked into it, or do you already love your job?

Oracle founder Larry Ellison is the 6th richest person in the world (according to Forbes’ Billionaire list), and he’s the one who’s buying that Hawai’ian island. He also owns one of the world’s most expensive yachts, a fighter jet, some of the most high-end cars a person can buy, and multiple mansions. Is he happy? I don’t know. It seems likely that he’s no more happy than a 25-year-old database administrator who makes a living working with Ellison’s Oracle software for about $75,000 a year. If he really is happy, why does he need to keep buying such expensive stuff? Unless the formula for happiness is to keep buying incredibly luxurious things so that there’s always something new to have fun with.

Most of us aren’t really in a position to try that approach, but we can take some comfort in knowing that research suggests it’s less effective than, say, meditating for 15 minutes a day and making friends with a few fun people–after earning that first $75,000 or so, of course. Meditation and good company can improve practically anyone’s outlook, but it’s true too that only about 12% of the U.S. population earns $75,000 or more per year, if we’re talking about personal income, and of course if we look at international incomes, the numbers are much lower (though the $75,000 figure is an average for Americans; the cut-off income level is likely to vary a lot by location and culture).

I stop reading a lot of novels before I get anywhere near the end. My thinking is that these days, there’s far too much available to read in the world for me to stick with a novel that doesn’t have me hooked or pay off in some big way. Books by authors I’m trying for the first time often suffer this fate, but so do classics and bestsellers. It doesn’t necessarily say anything bad about the story, just that a particular novel isn’t for me.

However, if I stick with a novel to the end and continue to be deeply engaged in the story, that does say something good about the story and the author. Not everyone will share my taste in stories, but it’s an important feat to keep even one reader on seat’s edge for hundreds of pages.

As I started reading K. Bird Lincoln’s new Kindle novel Tiger Lily, I half-expected never to finish it. The main character, Lily, is plagued by self-doubt and pessimism, and that’s just not the kind of character that tends to draw me in. It wasn’t far into the book, though, that the story took an unexpected and intriguing twist, and I decided to keep reading until that problem was resolved–except that before that issue came to a complete close, the story took another twist, and then another, and then another. Halfway through, the story walloped me with a twist that made perfect sense but that I would never have imagined, and I knew the book was a keeper. Straight through to the climax, these reversals and surprises never let up. I was impressed enough with Lincoln’s mastery of these attention-trapping skills that I asked if I could interview her on the subject. She kindly agreed.

Luc: In your novel Tiger Lily, it seems that as soon as we begin to get relief from one suspenseful situation, a new one comes up as a natural part of the story. The result, for me, is continuous suspense and engagement. Is this something you consciously set out to do, or does it just happen automatically because of how you write? 

K. Bird Lincoln: Yes to both?

I’ve got a fairly limited attention span. Also, I’ve read quite widely and deeply in Science Fiction, Fantasy (urban, historical, epic, paranormal) over the years and so have come across quite the range of tropes for these genres. I kind of know what’s going to happen and who it’s going to happen to most of the time when reading. So for a story to keep my interest, there have to be continuous issues for my main character to overcome.

In short, get me attached to someone, and then give them big and small problems. Think about X-Files when it was blazing new trails in TV-Land for having an overarching question that we got hints about (are there aliens? who is the cigarette smoking man?) at the same time as smaller, more bite-sized monster-of-the-week issues were resolved in each episode.

Books that keep my interest do this. So when I’m writing, I keep in mind the overall issue that’s going to need to build up and be resolved by the end of the book. In the case of Tiger Lily, it’s the confrontation with the Pretender Emperor on the plot level and Lily’s feelings for Ashikaga on the inner-character level. When I come to the end of a chapter, I try to give the reader a dramatic pause, as well a reason to go on to the next chapter that involves smaller obstacles. Those are the monsters-of-the-week.

But here’s my confession. This sounds all very purposeful and consciously planned out. The truth is, I’m a “by-the-seat-of-my-pants” writer, not an outliner. So my short attention span kind of naturally guides my writing towards the dramatic pauses (such as Tiger Lily encountering a kami for the first time) every 3,000 words or so….because if I don’t, I get bored. Then writing is work and not fun any more. If writing isn’t interesting/fun, then I’ll go watch an episode of Vampire Diaries or do the laundry or bake cookies.

So it happens naturally when I write, but I tend to rework chapter breaks during editing to make sure they hit a dramatic pause. Or else I end up eating too many cookies 🙂

Luc: So let’s say you’re getting to a point where something new needs to happen: 3,000 words have passed, or you find yourself starting to think about cookie recipes. How do you decide what that “something new” is going to be? Has it been brewing already over the past 3,000 words, or do you sit and think “What can I do to shake this up?”

K. Bird Lincoln: Oh, I don’t have anything planned. I totally just make it up as I go along.

K. Bird Lincoln’s Unconscious (KU): You’re kidding, right? You’re so full of it. I’ve been working like a dog thinking about the character, and the overall arc, and where the character is, and the other characters’ motivations while you’ve been sitting poolside drinking a latte and watching the kids’ swim lessons. “Totally just makes it up” MY PANTS!

K. Bird Lincoln: I get into that writing zone after the first 200 words or so and the next line jumps magically on to the page. I don’t have to consciously “shake things up.” The crisis just happens naturally.

KU: *palm to face* As if you never read that Scott Westerfelt interview where he said he always started off a writing session by going back and editing the last few pages he wrote. It’s not magic, doofus. When you’re editing, I’m getting bored, so I am figuring out how to make things more interesting before you crack open the 101 best chocolate chip cookies book.

K. Bird Lincoln: Okay, okay, I do go back and edit the prior day’s pages before writing. And so, of course, whatever happens there usually plants the seeds of the next impending crisis. But you can’t take credit for planning that crisis while I’m daydreaming or editing. I’m a seat-pantser writer, not an outliner!

KU: Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Luc: I’m not sure whom to ask this final question, so I’ll throw it open to both of you: how much of the suspense emerges in the first draft versus what comes out in editing? 

K. Bird Lincoln: I guess I’ll take over for my Unconscious. She needs to get back to work figuring out how my plucky boy adventurer, Eli, is going to escape from a cave full of giant centipedes in my work-in-progress.

When I first crack open a blank Word Document, I have a vague plan how the big, ending battle is going to go down. In Tiger Lily’s case, I pictured her using forbidden Jindo songs to fight evil. I started writing- and life intervened.

One month passed, my children started school, my job required overtime, and I’d completely lost touch with my original excitement about how she was going to fight evil. That’s such a MARVELOUS feeling. And it happens to me all the time.

So I sat down to write anyway, and my husband interrupted with some news about an active volcano in Southern Japan, and I remembered climbing Yamadera (awesome, shrine-laden mountain stairs in Yamagata Prefecture) ten years ago. Suddenly Lily’s climbing Hell Mountain to save Ashikaga.

The official answer is that suspense emerges in the first draft, but by the time I’ve finished the “First Draft”, I’ve probably gone through three or four different tension-building scenarios.  Then when I’ve written the end, I go back and erase aborted ideas and false starts, and layer in little bits of tension that (hopefully) foreshadow the big, ending battle.

That’s how to to be a constantly interrupted, short-attention span writer: be willing to change ideas mid-scene (no matter how painful) if the romance suddenly dies, and also put your butt in the chair and write even if you’re not sure where your characters are going. You can always fix it later.

After you’ve made cookies.

Musician John D. Boswell, known on YouTube as MelodySheep, has a unique and startlingly beautiful way of sharing his love of science: he takes video footage of some of the most brilliant modern scientists talking about the subjects they most love, uses Autotune to transform their speech into singing, composes symphonic pop-electronica pieces around the quotes, and offers the result freely on YouTube and for pay-what-you-please download.

Actually, he doesn’t only do it for science, although his love of science and natural philosophy drives most of the work he has on offer: he has also done pieces starring personalities like Mr. Rogers and Yoda. While I would recommend any of his compositions to you, though, the one strikes the closest to my area of fascination–understanding who we are, why we do what we do, and how to change for the better–is this one, on the human brain.

I used to have excuses: I wasn’t as clear on what would make me happy, on the difference between happiness and pleasure, or even on whether or not happiness was what was really important. Even when I understood what the best things were to do, in the past I often couldn’t figure out how to care and act on that.

Past excuses
These days I don’t have those excuses. I understand how central happiness is and how it’s different than pleasure. From researching and writing about habits over the past years, I have so many available ways to get and stay on track, it’s not so much a bag of tricks as a chase van full of them. I have a clear sense of how to be a deeply fulfilled, effective, and compassionate person.

So why aren’t I doing a better job? Sure, I’m doing pretty well, but why aren’t I closer to, you know, perfect?

It’s true that knowing isn’t enough, but if we understand the process of bridging the gap between knowing and doing (see the link for details), that’s not much of an excuse. No, I think what gets in my way those times that I could do the better thing and end up doing the worse thing, is the little lying creep that lives in my head.

I’ll call him “the Creep” for short.

Meet the Creep
Let’s say I come across a plate of doughnuts. I might say to myself,  “Yeah, those doughnuts look good, but you know what would make me feel better and happier? A round of push-ups.”

The Creep will respond “You know what would actually make you feel better? A freakin’ doughnut, that’s what. Push-ups don’t make you happier than doughnuts do. Push-ups just make you a joyless, self-righteous exercise junky. Doughnuts make you somebody who’s eating a delicious doughnut.”

Or I’ll have an hour or two available and think, “Why don’t I spend this time going over my task list and reorganizing items into updated categories so that I have a better handle on what I need to get done over the next couple of days?”

The Creep will respond “Or you could not do something stupid and boring and instead install World of Warcraft. Then you could spend the next six months playing that. Come on, it would be fun!”

I am pleased to say that these days, the Creep usually loses. I’ve been waging a long and exhausting battle against him over the course of years, learning to be more reliable, more productive, more self-aware, kinder, and a lot else.

Yet he’s still a major daily obstacle. I know he’s a big fat liar, but he’s so convincing. He emerged when I was very young, and I’m used to following his instructions.

Sometimes he’s even partly right. “Wow, this doughnut is good,” I might say, and he’ll say “I know, right? Now let’s get you some kind of candy to go with that.”

Later I’ll point out how the Creep’s advice has created problems or squandered opportunities, but he’ll be unavailable for comment.

Keep on Creepin’ on
These days, I try not to fall into the trap of fighting the creep. You can’t win an argument with him: he keeps coming up with more “common wisdom,” more “obvious truths,” and more justifications. “But you’re tired,” he’ll insist. “And you had that thing with the water spraying all over you, which wasn’t fair and was annoying, and anyway who are you trying to impress?”

Even if we get past all that, he doesn’t stop. “Yuh huh,” he’ll say. “Nuh uh,” I’ll point out. “Yuh huh,” he’ll rebut. He can go on like that all day … and sometimes has.

Still rummaging through the toolbox
So what’s the cure for the common Creep? I don’t have a single, easy answer: now that I’ve identified him, I have to see what mental tools I can use to get him to settle down. I take heart that I’ve been making headway, that he’s become a weaker and weaker influence over time.

I’m also interested in this idea of the Creep as a character or a mode in my head. This connects well with the schema therapy concept of modes, nine different roles that people take on mentally, for example the Healthy Adult and the Impulsive/Undisciplined Child.

Seeing the Creep as a mode or role, as soon as I identify him as being the one behind an idea in my head, my perspective shifts. I can say to myself “Well of course the Creep wants to do that. But what does the part of myself who actually has a clue think?”

Actually, I didn’t even realize that the Creep was a mode until I started writing about him here, and with that realization I suddenly have access to the Schema Therapy tools that apply to modes–dialog between modes, for instance, where the healthy part of me asks the Creep what’s going on.

Creeps wanted
What about you? Do your worst impulses have a personality? What tricks does that character have up its sleeve? Got a name for it? I’d be interested to hear your stories.

I’m not much of a fan of sitcoms, but here’s the voice over introduction to one that’s not only dang amusing, but also a surprisingly good course in habit change:

You know the kinda guy who does nothing but bad things and then wonders why his life sucks? Well, that was me. Every time something good happened to me, something bad was always waiting around the corner. Karma. That’s when I realized I had to change. So I made a list of everything bad I’ve ever done, and one by one I’m gonna make up for all my mistakes. I’m just trying to be a better person. My name is Earl.

I’ve enjoyed watching episodes of Earl via Netflix for a year or so, but it wasn’t until this morning, reading Charles Duhigg’s excellent book The Power of Habit, that I realized that Earl’s method of changing his life is a near-perfect model of real habit change, as supported by reams of research, a few superbowl championships, millions of now-sober alcoholics, and much other evidence.

Just trying to be a better person
Earl, played with innocence and a blind, cheerful, openness to whatever may come by Jason Lee, used to be a small-time criminal, stealing whatever he could, however he could–the dumber the idea, the better. In the series, he now spends his time hunting down people he’s hurt and trouble he’s caused, one item at a time, and making up for all those past mistakes. Compare this to Duhigg’s depiction of habit change, which has two main components: replacing the routine and cultivating belief.

Changing a habit by substituting a new routine
Habits, as Duhigg describes them, have three parts: a cue, a routine, and a reward. For example, the cue might be boredom; the routine, eating a bag of potato chips; and the reward, the physical pleasure of eating the chips.

Earl’s cue was anything that might get him some easy money or swag; his routine was committing the crime in whatever hare-brained way immediately came to mind; and his reward (when he got one) was acquiring some new stuff on his supposed path to the good life.

In present of the series, though, that’s all old news. Earl’s new cues are pretty much the same as his old ones: he hatches an idea or stumbles across a situation that provides an opportunity, but now it’s an opportunity to make up for something bad he’s done rather than a potential crime. He still uses whatever hare-brained approach leaps to mind to get the job done, but the core of the routine is different: instead of petty theft, it’s making up for wrongdoing. The reward is similar: he doesn’t get any physical wealth, but he counts his riches in karma now, and his satisfaction and pleasure at crossing off an item from his list is palpable, not to mention very similar to the satisfaction we see in flashback scenes of him successfully getting away with crime.

That’s the way to change a habit, says Duhigg: keep the cues and the rewards the same, but change the routine. Actually, I would suggest that should be amended to keeping the cues the same, change the routine, and allow for a modestly different reward: drinking a cup of tea doesn’t give the exact same payoff as smoking a cigarette, for instance, but the rewards are surprisingly similar.

You gotta believe!
It would be handy if changing habits were as simple as identifying cues and rewards and finding a new routine to sandwich in the middle, and in fact this seems to be a central part of habit change–but, as Duhigg points out, this isn’t enough. You have to believe. I’ll write about this more in separate posts, but this belief component has been identified as a key force in the psychological literature. In order to really change, we have to have a powerful faith that what we’re doing can–maybe even must–be done.

Earl exemplifies this through his faith in karma, which he pictures as a simplistic, tit-for-tat force that automatically responds to any good or bad deed with good or bad fortune somewhere in the space of the 22-minute episode. Since this is a sitcom, karma actually works that way in Earl’s world, which means that when Earl’s starves himself and his brother, runs out of gas, and has to walk miles and miles to dance with Too-Tall Maggy (whom he spurned in the 8th grade), by the end of the episode he has been amply rewarded and is back drinking cheap beer with no cigarette butts in it. This convenient help from the universe makes it easy for Earl to believe, and is the one place where Earl’s life change is very different from real world changes, even though both require belief to get through the trying times. Our belief doesn’t come as easily as Earl’s, and it can be difficult and sometimes impossible to maintain on our own without special circumstances.

How to believe without magical instant karma
So how do we come to believe powerfully enough that even when our efforts seem nearly pointless, we can soldier on? In real life, belief comes in two main forms: tragedies and groups. As I say, this subject will be worth a good bit of further discussion, but the short version is that most of us only really change when something earth-shaking happens in our lives or in the lives of people close to us, or else when we become part of a group that makes the possibility change seem real. This is why a person can sometimes quit drinking after a DUI incident or after joining AA, but often can’t when just trying to push through alone. Note that even the disaster approach may only provide enough belief to get started: durable belief often depends on having a group of people in our lives to permanently change our point of view.

Earl, by contrast, spends his time with the exact same group of unprincipled, dim-witted friends and associates who urged him on to crime in a former chapter of his life–but his remedial, absolute faith in karma carries him through beautifully.

Like Earl, many of us are just trying to be better people. As far as I’m concerned, we’re lucky to have people like Earl (and Charles Duhigg, and AA founder Bill Wilson, and others) to show us the way.

Yesterday, I posted novelist James Maxey’s response to the question “How do you write 10,000 words in a day?” Here are my own thoughts on the matter, from my experience writing that much and more. This was written before I read James’s take, but not surprisingly, it turns out that our responses have a lot of comment elements.

1. Don’t expect the result to be publishable unless you have a lot of experience writing. That’s not to say that you won’t produce something that can eventually become publishable, or even that you’ll necessarily miss the mark even if this is your first attempt at long fiction, but if you are going to be miserable if your work isn’t terrific, you may want to think twice before trying to write at this speed.
2. Be a fast typist. If you can’t type quickly already, you’ll want to do some typing tutorials to improve your speed before attempting 10,000 words in a day. In theory you can write over 1,000 words an hour if you only type 20 words per minute, but in practice you’ll need to do things like make quick fixes and notes, use the bathroom, and especially think. If you know you won’t be able to type at least 40 wpm, set your sites lower than 10,000 words per day. 5,000 words a day is still an amazing accomplishment, for example–and any personal record or completed piece is worth celebrating.
3. Clear your schedule; remove all distractions. Don’t check e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter; turn off your phone; make sure you’re alone (or at least will be left alone); prepare food ahead if possible; take care of anything pressing that might otherwise interrupt you before you start.
4. Have all the ingredients you personally need to drive the story forward. If you’re an off-the-cuff writer, that’s fine, but make sure you understand what you’ll need in terms of research, premise, setting, character ideas, plot ideas, or whatever else you use for starting stories. For instance, although I sometimes like to use outlines, if I come up with two interesting characters having an argument, I’m off and running: setting and plot can emerge for me out of those. Other people will need a few key scenes to shoot for, or will need to know the beginning and the ending. Yet others will need a full-blown outline. Know what you need. If you don’t have enough writing experience to know what you need yet, be willing to experiment, be comfortable with the idea that you may run out of steam, and keep a copy of The Writing Engine handy in order to use the troubleshooting section as needed.
5. Don’t revise yet. If your story gets off track, you can go back as far as you need and restart from there (while still counting the discarded words in your daily count if you like), or you can go back and insert notes as to what future revisions you’ll need, but don’t try to go back and fix things: you’re likely to lose all of your momentum and begin getting bogged down in editing rather than creation.
6. Have a vision. If you have a vision of what will make writing so much in such a short period of time wonderful for you (for instance, the excitement of having a finished novel draft, however rough, or exploring a story idea that you’ve been wanting to explore for a long time), you’ll have something to sustain you when you almost inevitably hit those moments of “This thing I’m writing is junk!” or “What am I doing this for, anyway?”
7. Immerse yourself in the story. The more involved you are in the story and the more you care about spending time with the characters and “seeing” what happens to them, the more likely you’ll be able to keep up the pace, and the more likely you’ll be to create something your readers can be excited about, too. Just as importantly, immersion in your story is another way of saying that you’ve achieved flow, which means maximum productivity and high quality (see “Flow: What It Feels Like to Be Perfectly Motivated“).

Photo by lscan

One reader of my interview with James Maxey, “Writing a Novel in One Week,” had this question:

This is an interesting article, but fails to answer the question that every writer must be asking: HOW? He’s writing 10,000 words a day! That’s great! Can it be done? Well, one writer was successful at it. Presumably, others can as well. How? What steps made this goal actionable?

It’s  a pretty practical question, and I passed it on to James to see what his thoughts were. Also, I have some answers to that question myself, because while I’ve never written a novel in a week, I’ve written more than 10,000 words in a day from time to time, including when I wrote the the majority of my novelette “Bottomless,” which won the Writers of the Future contest and appears in Writers of the Future, volume XX.

How do you write 10,000 words in a day? Here’s what James had to say.

Right now, I’m slogging away on a novel called Witchbreaker, wistfully dreaming of those 10k days of Burn Baby Burn. I’m once again back in my 10k words a week territory. Every novel is different, so I’m not overly concerned about my slower speed. Still, while I’m struggling, it’s easy to look back and see what my advantages were at the time.

The things that made Burn Baby Burn a fast novel are actually pretty simple:

1. I’d been thinking about the story for a long time. I had a big list of events and themes I wanted to include. I had enough material to fill a novel ready to go, and a minimalist outline gave me a structure to fit everything into.

2. The unique circumstances that kept me away from work, at home, with no other commitments will be difficult to duplicate again. One thing that’s causing me grief on Witchbreaker is that I bought a house in March that needed a lot of renovations and repairs. Those took time, moving took time, and now we’ve been working on our old house to improve its chances of selling. I have a lot of distractions, and it takes me a long time to ramp back up when I do sit down to write. That said, I’ve carved out some additional time in June to have several sequential days with butt in chair and hope to beat 20k words a week at least a few weeks this month. The more I write in a short amount of time, the better my ability to keep the narrative thread.

3. Burn Baby Burn is a fully developed novel, but it’s also a fairly simple novel. Witchbreaker is the third book in my dragon apocalypse series, and I have dozens of characters I have to keep track of, and at least seven or eight characters with story arcs that have to weave together. Burn Baby Burn really only followed the character arc for Pit Geek and Sunday. The other major characters, the superheroes, remained more or less static. They were fleshed out with backstories and conflicts, but pretty much exited the novel unchanged by the events. This simplicity also provides intensity. By the end of the book you will really be emotionally invested in Pit and Sunday. With Witchbreaker, you have a whole buffet of characters to sample. Some you may fall in love with, some may leave you cold, but all weave together in a grand soap opera. Writing an epic fantasy like this is really kind of like writing a half dozen smaller stories and fitting them all together seamlessly, which is more time consuming.

4. This is probably the biggest factor of all: I’ve been practicing. A long, long time. If Burn Baby Burn were my first or second novel, I would have almost definitely gotten bogged down. Instead, it was maybe the eight novel I wrote? The ninth? On top of what, a hundred short stories? I’ve easily written a million words of fiction by this point. If I count multiple drafts of the same works, I’ve probably got several million words under my belt. I’ve measured my output enough to know that I’ve had several peak days in the past when I did get out over 10k words in a day, usually when I was really swept up in the heat of a story. So, while 10k words in a day is still ambitious, I know it’s possible, so when I have a day where that’s my goal, I can approach it with confidence. Fifteen years ago, 10k words would have felt like a lot of writing. Now, meh. It’s about ten hours of my life. Finding 10 unclaimed hours is an increasingly difficult trick, but, when I do have an hour, I know I can trade it for a thousand words, at least. Last summer, life handed me a week of unclaimed time. I swapped them for a book.

If  you’re just starting out as a writer, your art is just like learning to play a musical instrument or learning to master an athletic skill. Talent only takes you so far. You have to dedicate the practice time if you want to get good. There really are no shortcuts.

I’ll follow up based on my own experience in tomorrow’s post.

Photo by sundaune

A recent post on Lifehacker, “Work Less and Do More by Applying the Pareto Principle to Your Task List,” reminds us of an idea that could be the secret to enormous productivity or just another mirage. Perhaps it’s a revelation for some people and a waste of time for the others. I’m talking about the Pareto Principle.

Pay 20, get 80?
The Pareto Principle is the idea that 80% of the useful results we get in life arise from only 20% of our efforts. It’s a tantalizing idea, and it seems to apply to a lot of different situations. It’s named after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who noticed that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of its population. It seems to apply to much more than economics, though, having cropped up in business, health care, software engineering, investing, criminology, and elsewhere. Some research even suggests that it’s a sort of naturally emerging dynamic, something that arises on its own in the natural world.

And yet … your mileage may vary. Is everybody on approximately the same level of inefficiency? Do we all prioritize the same way?

For a parallel, consider Stephen King’s usual approach to writing: he generates a rough draft without being concerned too much about having some sections that don’t pull their weight, but then edits to cut out about 10%. Contrarily, a number of pro writers I know typically see their work expand when they edit it, and often this is a significant improvement.

Wait a minute …
Even setting aside individual differences, I’m dubious about the Pareto Principle being a basic law of the universe. For example, let’s look at traditional employment: does 80% of the income come from 20% of the work time? Absolutely not. It could be argued that in some cases 80% of the benefit to the company comes from 20% of the work performed, but even that only holds up in special circumstances. It doesn’t for teachers, for instance, who in addition to passing along knowledge also provide an environment and structure in which kids can ideally grow and learn throughout the school day. It doesn’t apply to assembly line workers, or to farmers. In fact, the kinds of work where it seems to apply are the ones that are mainly about making choices and not much else. Maybe 80% of your investment income comes from 20% of your investments. Maybe 80% of your published writing comes from the best 20% of your writing ideas. Perhaps 80% of your impact as a middle manager at a widget manufacturing concern comes from 20% of your efforts. Elsewhere, it gets iffy.

And we can’t make good decisions all the time. While I certainly agree with focusing on the most important tasks and on the most impactful decisions, it hasn’t seemed to be the case in the world that people know which of their efforts will pay off in advance–and even when they do, they often have a lot of hard work to do to get to that payoff.

An example that refutes by agreeing
For example, this blog currently gets an average of something over 13,000 views per month. It’s certainly true that a small number of my posts are responsible for most of the search hits on the site: for example, “24 Ways to Stop Feeling Hungry” accounts for a big percentage of those 13,000-odd views. It’s also true, however, that the prominence of “24 Ways to Stop Feeling Hungry” on search engines is based in part on the general popularity of the site and the number of links to it from other places on the Internet, and those factors in turn are based on the hundreds and hundreds of posts I’ve written and published over the years this blog has been online.

So Pareto adherents might point to my blog and say “Look, this one post is responsible for a huge percentage of your visits” without understanding that that post alone would be little use without the rest of the site to support it.

To take another example, consider the non-fiction book contract I once got through the agent I got through the writing group I established from people I met attending two writing workshops. Where was the wasted time there? The writing workshops? The writing group? Getting the agent? Writing the book? I’m thinking the answer is “none of the above.”

To put it more simply and pragmatically: a lot this stuff is connected. Should we busy ourselves blindly with trivia day in and day out in hopes that it will all amount to something? Hell, no. On the other hand, we can’t get far by cherry-picking among our own efforts and trying to stick to only those with big payoffs. A sustainable, rewarding life is built on a lot of little payoffs, with big payoffs helping out now and again. The 20% of our efforts that seems to be making the biggest difference in our lives doesn’t stand alone.

Prioritization is the point
With that said, though, I think there’s a valuable point in the Pareto Principle material: it’s well worth comparing how much effort we’re putting in to how much value we think that effort creates. If you spend hours each day doing social media for your business but barely get a trickle of customers from that, are you doing it because you think over time it will build up to become a major asset to your business, or simply because people keep saying everyone ought to do social media? If I do writing exercises every morning instead of working on saleable material, is that necessarily helping my writing so much that it’s worth the lost opportunities?

What about you? Do you see a lot of 80/20 opportunities in your life? Or does the Pareto Principle not seem to hold water for you?

Graphic by igrigorik