I get tons of comments/email in response to this post on how to write a book. Here’s another interesting, and life-grounding, question from the mailbag:

I found your website hand thought it was awesome. I watched your videos and decided I could use some advice from you.

My house burnt down 3 weeks ago in Burnsville, Minnesota. I lost a 38 foot RV, a 69 Plymouth Fury Convertible, and monster truck and trailer in the driveway and my 16 years old sons car he worked on so hard and never got to drive. I also lost 5 animals in the fire and that really hurts. I still have my 3 children ages 23, 16 and a 10 year old daughter who is having night mares with all this life changing overnight experience. Guess what? I want to write a book about my life and how it changed so quickly. I am very grateful we are all alive and ok. Like everyone else I dont know where to start. I am living my worst night mare in a hotel gong on a month. We have nothing but the cloths we were wearing that day. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Please contact me.

Very sorry to hear about your loss. I do hope there are local government agencies or non-profits that can offer you some assistance. Books aside, I do wish you and your family a better October.

On starting: there is no single easy way to start writing. There are some tricks to try, and I list my take on them in this essay on writing hacks. But everyone is different. How you start doesn’t matter, but if you wait for a perfect easy way to do it, you’ll likely never get started. If that essay doesn’t help, here are some additional tricks:

• Plan to come back. One trick that helps is to remember that the real work in writing is editing. I plan to come back later and revise, cut, rewrite and do all kinds of work later on. The “writing” part is just the beginning and believing this has a freeing effect. When I sit down with a blank page I have no preconceptions. I just start writing and plan to figure it all out later once there are a few pages of rambles and rants to work from.
• Go chronological. In your case you’re writing about things that have happened, or are happening to you. Great. Pick a date, say a week before the fire, and write about what happened every day from them to now. It could be as simple as two or three facts per day, or memories per day, or your recollection of your thoughts on those days, whatever you like. But anchor on time as the spine of your writing. It creates an easy way to divide up your memories, and to trigger thoughts or recollections. You then might choose to go to your family and friends and get their stories and recollections on every day, giving you even more material to work from.
• Keep a notebook with you. Have a place to write down ideas and thoughts about your experience and keep it with you all the time. Your rule should be whenever a thought crosses your mind, no matter how strange or personal, you write it down. Worry later if its good or interesting, but in the moment, commit yourself to writing something down. I have piles of old notebooks, and go through one every few weeks.
• Read other memoirs of experience. Many great writers have written books about their personal experience with tough times. Check out Joan Didion’s The year of magical thinking, about her experience with having two loved ones become seriously ill at the same time. It can help to see how other writers have tackled the same type of writing you’re going through. Worst case, you can critique their handling of personal crisis and write about that :)
• Write every day. Even if it’s just for 5 minutes, even if it’s just a sentence or a few words, sit down and write every single day. You have to get used to how it feels to sit there and that only happens if you put your ass in the chair every single day. Find a slot in your schedule that you can protect (early mornings or late nights often work) and ask family to respect that time.

I hope that helps get you started. Best wishes.

Have a question for the mailbag? Leave a comment or contact me here.

Posted in On writing, mailbag | 1 Comment »

Here’s a recent item from the mailbag/comment bag. Arjun wrote:

How do i free myself, kill my inhibitions and break away from any kind of mental consciousness i keep facing every time i want to do something really badly. I’m simply afraid, man. Afraid, i might hurt somebody or offend someone who i care for, might come across as selfish. Your talks are fun and exciting and an adventure in itself. Now, please help me in figuring out a way to just free myself from my other self. The lamb leads the lion in me so to speak. How do i reverse that relationship? I eagerly await your reply. Thanks so much man. Your the Man!

I’m not a self help guru, but that might be a good thing here as I don’t have a nice, kind, warm fuzzy fluffy answer for you.

I recently went to a bachelor party at a rented luxury house on a lake in Texas. On top of the boat dock, 20 feet off the ground was a swing: you grabbed the trapeze handle, swung out over the lake, and dropped into the water. Sounds cool, but it looked terrifying. Something about the angle of the water from that vantage point made it look unnatural. The result? A gaggle of 30-something year old men, standing on the edge, trying to build up the guts to jump.

One guy had done it. And when it was my turn to try I knew I had to turn off my brain in order to do it. Switch it right off - and decide before I put my hands on the trapeze that I was going to just jump without thinking. And that’s what happened. I jumped, and it was not nearly as scary doing it as it was thinking about doing it.

Two of my friends however spent the next hour, literally 60 minutes, standing on that ledge, the hot Texas sun beating down, looking down, trying different ways to think through the problem. A strategy set up to fail as this was not about thinking. While they never jumped, it was impressive to watch them fight a battle in their own minds for that long.

For some things in life there is no planning. No way to rationalize. It is either done, or not done. And the trap is the more you think about them, the larger the fear of doing them becomes. The trick is to be able to turn off that voice and operate without it. Create courage by denying the rational mind. And its a kind of self-knowledge to recognize when shutting off your mind is the only way to achieve what you want to achieve.

In your case things are perhaps easier. You can test your fear. Ask your friend if they’d be hurt if you wrote a book. Ask the people you care for if they can support you in trying to live your life differently, or to take a certain risk. GO AND ASK. If you never ask then the fault is yours. If you do ask for support and don’t get it from your closest friends, then you need to find new close friends. Ones who want to help you grow and be happy. Either way, in taking action you win. But in being passive and worrying, complaining, imagining, you make your own mind a trap, like my friends by the ledge.

Got a question you want answered? Put it in the mailbag or leave a comment.

Posted in mailbag | 6 Comments »

Some recent e-mail about my essay on how to learn from mistakes. Brian wrote:

I enjoyed reading your article “#44 - How to learn from your mistakes”. One other category of mistake I would add to your list, really a continuation of the “Stupid” mistake, would be “Habitual”, or “Automatic”, whichever phrasing you like better. This is the case where you repeatedly make the same mistake(s) out of habit, it’s automatic. Take the person who wakes up every Saturday around 2pm and says “Gee, I wish I didn’t drink so much, why do I always do that?!”.

These are mistakes that we regret and always ask “Why do I keep on making the same mistake over and over again?”. From my personal study, I feel at the moment that the answer lies in making a new habit of pausing before we make a decision, and imagining the possible outcomes of the action and making a CONSCIOUS (rather than automatic) decision this time.

Absolutely - In fact Leo Buscaglia, in one of his books (I think it’s Living, Loving and Learning) talked about how being healthy depends on making more of our behavior choices. To grow as a person, in his estimation, hinges on seeing more and more of our own behavior, and even emotions, as choices and taking responsibility for them, instead of blaming others, or perhaps, the entire universe.

I’m at least at the point that when I wake up at 2pm on Saturday, I know full well why I made the choice :)

Posted in Essays, mailbag | 1 Comment »

I get a lot of email, and sometimes lots of blog comments. Some of it is very nice, has feedback and useful criticism, or suggestions for things to write about, and I’m grateful for it. Some are requests for speaking engagements which I make a living on, also awesome. A good chunk are requests to read, review, or watch things other people have done, which is fine if it’s not a generic piece of PR spam. And then there’s a pile that’s is harder to classify: I’m being asked for something, but it’s not entirely clear what it is.

Here’s a recent favorite that appeared in the comments of my post on how to write a book:

I PUT MY ENTIRE COMMENT IN CAPS LOCK SO IT WILL GET YOUR ATTENTION. (please read this!!! and help!!!) OK. I’M A MINOR (14) AND I WROTE A BOOK. I STARTED WITH JUST A PEN AND PAPER AND I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO BEGIN WITH A PUBLISHER. CAN PUBLISHERS STEAL IDEAS OF BOOKS? DO I NEED MY BOOK COPYRIGHTED? (please don’t think I’m stupid!) WHILE I WAS DOING RESEARCH, I READ THAT MINORS CAN’T GET BOOKS PUBLISHED AND I WANT A KNOWN PUBLISHER TO READ MY BOOK. MY BROTHER, WHO IS ALSO A MINOR, IS WRITING THE SEQUEL TO MY STORY. HOW DO I GET A PUBLISHER TO NOTICE ME? YOUR ARTICLE WAS DISCOURAGING, BUT IT WAS AN EGO DEFLATION THAT I REALLY NEEDED. PUBLISHING MY BOOK IS GOING TO BE HARD, AND I NEED ADVICE FROM SOMEONE LIKE YOU, SOMEONE WHO’S BEEN THERE, DONE THAT IN THE WRITING BUSINESS. (Sam)

Dear Sam:

First off, Caps lock BAD. Very BAD. Don’t do it. Yes, you want attention, but there is good attention and bad attention. Good attention, in this case, is to seem smart and like you’ve done your homework so I’ll want to give you advice. Bad attention is to seem crazy, annoying, helpless, confused and random (which writing in ALL CAPS make you seem). Luckily your comment was so funny and genuine, it outweighed the bad stuff.

And on to your questions:

You mentioned “I WROTE A BOOK”: Really? How long is it exactly? Most books are 50,000 words or more (roughly 200 pages). Of course there are many published books that are shorter, but if all you have are a few pages, as far as a publisher is concerned, you have a short story on your hands, not a novel or a book. But then again, if you can find your local kinkos, you can make a book of any size you’d like. If I were 14 I’d be my own publisher - it’s faster, easier, and probably more fun.

Can publishers steal ideas? This is so unlikely it’s not worth worrying about. Can’t think of a single instance of this actually happening. It’s more likely another writer will “steal” ideas, but that’s unlikely too. Provided you can prove when you wrote what you wrote, it’d be pretty hard for a publisher to get away with it anyway. I bet you a zillion dollars you should be worrying more about finishing your book, and writing well, than about your ideas being taken from you.

Minors and books: There is no law that says a minor can’t write or publish books. There have been plenty of young writers who have had books published (Paolini was a teenager when his first novel was published).

Sequels: I was quite impressed you’ve got your brother working on the sequel before the original is finished. Perhaps you can get your sister or cousin to work on the prequel?

How to get a publisher to notice you: Start by rereading my post. They don’t find you, you have to go and find them. Find publishers that makes the kinds of books you want to write, go to their website, and find their information on submissions. But dont worry about publishers until your book is almost done.

Posted in On writing, mailbag | 4 Comments »