Writing

This is the question

Creativity, Life / /

Probably a million men were more qualified

When Harry Truman chose Dan Acheson to be the Secretary of State, Acheson said he was worried that he “was not qualified to meet the demands of the office,” McCullough writes. “This, responded Truman, was undoubtedly so, but then he could say the same for himself, or any man. The question was whether he would do the job?”

In casual conversation Truman would often say there were probably a million other men who would make a better president than him. “But that was not the point. He, Harry Truman, was the President.” He had to answer the call. “I have a job and I have to do it,” Harry would say. “And the rest of you have to help me.”

Fill up a bunch of pages with blah-blah-blah

One of the most damaging ideas to creativity is to think that if you can’t win, you shouldn’t play. “I wish that Harper Lee had kept writing,” Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Big Magic. “I wish that, right after Mockingbird and her Pulitzer Prize, she had turned out five cheap and easy books in a row—a light romance, a police procedural, a children’s story, a cookbook, some kind of pulpy action-adventure story, anything. You might think I’m kidding, but I’m not. Imagine what she might have created, even accidentally, with such an approach. At the very least, she could have tricked everyone into forgetting that she’d once been Harper Lee. She could have tricked herself into forgetting that she’d once been Harper Lee, which might have been artistically liberating.” Gilbert goes on to say she wishes somebody had given Ralph Ellison and Scott F. Fitzgerald the go-ahead to just write anything and put it out there. And “any other creator, famous or obscure, who ever vanished beneath the shadow of their own real or imagined reputation. I wish somebody had told them all to go fill up a bunch of pages with blah-blah-blah and just publish it, for heaven’s sake, and ignore the outcome.”

How sly of him to teach

Trying to get inside the character of Walter White in Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston needed to understand Walter. Walter was brilliant. He could have done anything he wanted in life. He started the company Gray Matters Technology with a friend, only to give it up and become a teacher. But why? Was it because he was afraid of failing? “What if everyone you knew growing up said you were destined for greatness, you couldn’t miss, and then you missed?” Cranston mused. “That’s not just failure. It’s collapse. It’s catastrophe.” Maybe that terrified Walt.

“And then I thought: How sly of him to teach. Why? That profession is unassailable. He could get away with saying: ‘I didn’t want the corporate world. I wanted to give my passion to the next generation. I had a calling.’ Teaching is a calling for many people. But not Walt. He was hiding out. Had he become a truck driver, people would have criticized him. But a teacher? Untouchable.”

The question is not whether you’re the best, or even whether you’re good. The question is will you do the job? Will you do the work you were called to do?

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A few thoughts on doing deep, focused work each day…

Creativity / /

-Don’t let your job and other responsibilities hold you back. You can be a professional writer one hour a day.

-Know what you will work on that day. How has Ryan Holiday been able to write more than a dozen books in as many years? He says that when he sits down to write, his goal is not, “finish the rough draft,” or “write until noon.” His goal is “write section 2 of chapter 3.”

-Set a stop time. Writing without a stop time is torture, Jerry Seinfeld said. “It’s like if you hire a trainer to get in shape, and you ask, ‘How long is the session?’ And he says, ‘It’s open-ended.’ Forget it. I’m not doing it.” If you’re going to sit down and write, there has to be a reward for that. “And the reward is the alarm goes off and you’re done.”

-Write every day. It adds up. Simon Sinek put it like this: “It’s like exercising or brushing your teeth. You don’t get in shape by going to the gym for 8 hours a few times a year. You get in shape by going to the gym for 30 minutes four or five or six days a week.”

-If you can, write at the same time each day. This will train your subconscious—your creativity—to kick in.

If I could share only a few of my favorite writing tips for showing up and staying on track, it would be these:

Creativity / /

-Be less concerned with writing well and more concerned with sharing good ideas.

-What, exactly, are you trying to say? Say that.

-Good writing isn’t about something. It’s for someone. Pretend like you’re writing to a friend.

-The biggest problem writers face, says Ryan Holiday, is that they have nothing to actually say. Writing for the sake of writing isn’t the point. What can you not not say?

-Don’t worry about finding your voice. Just write as clearly as you can. An authentic voice follows clear writing.

-If it doesn’t excite you, don’t write about it.

-At every stage of the writing process, ask yourself, what is this thing about? What is the theme? Sometimes finding the theme is hard. You may not even know the theme while you’re writing. But never stop trying to find it.

-Writers don’t get writer’s block. Writers get caught up in thinking about whether their writing is good or bad.

-Steven Pressfield said to sit without hope and without fear. To work at your desk without the hope of writing something good nor the fear of writing something bad. He explains, “When I sit down to write in the morning, I literally have no expectations for myself or for the day’s work. My only goal is to put in three or four hours with my fingers punching the keys. I don’t judge myself on quality. I don’t hold myself accountable for quantity. The only questions I ask are, Did I show up? Did I try my best?”

Whenever I think I’m wasting time by journaling, I read this list of reasons why I do it:

Journal / /

-Paying attention to my life = happiness

-Self-reflection is the highest form of living. Epictetus said we differ from animals and plants in two ways: we can reason and reflect—two things animals and plants don’t need because they were made to obey, not command. Animals can look only outward and dream. Humans can look inward and, as Carl Jung said, awaken.

-I don’t journal to “be productive”. I journal to calm and prepare myself for the day (ironically making me more productive throughout).

-You can’t be your best on autopilot. None of us are perfect. And because we’re not perfect, we can always improve. And because we can always improve, we have an obligation to make a constant effort to improve. Journaling helps us make this effort by taking us off autopilot for a bit.

-There’s only one rule when it comes to your journal: fill it. Journals should be messy. If the inside of your journal is clean and neat and completely coherent, you’re probably doing it wrong. Austin Kleon put it brilliantly when he said his journals are crapholes where he goes to dump his brains out.

-Time rushes by like a raging river. The only way to slow it down and savor it is to slow ourselves down.

-Your subconscious knows you best. It’s wise. The problem is that it’s terribly quiet and shy. It often won’t respond to direct questioning. Journaling creates a patient, quiet, purpose-free space for your subconscious thoughts to roam freely. Only then, in familiar solitude with you, do they feel comfortable to speak up. (And when they do, they’re assertive.)

-If we don’t monitor our thoughts, we become vulnerable to their influence and control. We can end up living in the worst way: unconsciously. Lusting for money, worshiping material things, seeking power, thinking you’re the center of the universe…what’s insidious about these things “is not that they’re evil or sinful,” said David Foster Wallace, “it is that they are unconscious.” Journaling rewires our brains consciously.

-By dumping out our thoughts and feelings, by laying them before us, we’re able to sift through, untangle, and examine them. And discard the ones that no longer serve us.

–Epictetus said our predicament is that time and again, we lose sight of what’s important. The truth never changes. Wisdom is always the same. Our brains are just exceptionally good at forgetting. Journaling helps to keep the important stuff front and center.

-Problems don’t need to be completely resolved for you to gain some relief from them. Sometimes we can loosen the grip of a sadness or a fear simply by naming it, by tracing its outline and examining its contours. “What we call depression,” Alain de Botton said, “is in fact sadness and anger that have for too long not been paid the attention they deserve.”

-Great things are happening in slow, inconspicuous ways. The trajectory of your life is made up of subtle, nearly imperceptible actions. It may not feel like it at the time, but the small moments you spend each day writing in your journal, working on yourself, are adding up in unfathomable ways.

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Some recent takeaways on writing/creating:

Creativity / /

-In Lynda Barry’s What It Is there’s a short comic strip of a writer deep in thought, trying to figure out what she should write a book about. Ten years later, someone asks what her book is going to be about. “Shh! I’m still thinking,” she replies. We can’t think our way to good ideas. We have to roll up our sleeves. We have to do the work in front of us.

-Make time each day for your own work, and wear yourself out doing it.

-Don’t think about how long it’s going to take. Just focus on doing a little work on it each day.

-The best way to serve the world is to serve your work. And the best work is the work that connects the divine with the human.

–Haruki Murakami said the best way to express yourself as freely as possible is not to ask, “What am I seeking?” (which causes you to ponder heavy things and slows you up), but to instead ask, “Who would I be if I weren’t seeking anything?”

–The difference between genre and style. Genre is a category. Style is the life and humanity you give the art. As Jerry Saltz put it, “Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ is a classic country song; the vulnerability of her performance is what makes you die inside when you hear it.”

-The better story wins.

-Relax. You can’t read every book.

-A great way to live: follow your interests and share them with the world.

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