This is a critical moment. Each time I finish a section I get a little hit of euphoria. That feeling of accomplishing a goal makes me feel good. I also break my projects into folders. A folder will have from two to ten sections. On average, my folders are five sections of around five hundred words. Breaking down the sections into anything smaller would be a little too much. I find that this is the perfect size for how I motivate myself.
Instead of writing to a timer or word count, I work my way through a folder, and when I’m done, I can close that folder. I know that I don’t have to look there again, and that feels magnificent.
This gives me a feeling of accomplishment, but it also helps me stretch myself. When I’m feeling a little tired and thinking of quitting, I push myself to at least finish that folder. When it’s done, I can turn off the computer for the day and feel really good about myself.
You can break your goals down by word count, time, or sections. I like to do all three. This means that I get that good feeling several times an hour. It’s a great way to stay motivated.
Chop your goal into as many pieces as possible.
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Ritual
I’ve already mentioned that I’m a big believer in ritual. It’s the key to maintaining your writing habit. Writing is a lonely profession, and without structure, distraction can quickly rear its ugly head. This is the first time I’ve ever written a book outside, using dictation. But I already have a ritual.
I start by putting on my recording clothes. I make sure that I have the equipment that I need: iPad mini, lapel microphone, iPhone and my slippers. I want everything I need to take to the dock prepared ahead of time. I always take my slippers off at the exact same spot on the dock. I set everything down in the same place, and I always do things in the same order. Not because I have some type of O.C.D. problem. It's the opposite.
My mind suffers from entropy. I have to impress structure on the chaos around me in order to maintain my habits. There's a huge part of me that would love to turn off this recording, set everything down, and jump in the water; to swim right now and just enjoy the ocean.
There are fifty things I could be doing that would be a lot more fun than recording. As much as I like writing this book, going for a swim in the ocean is a lot more fun. The sky is perfect right now. Before starting this section, I took out my phone to take some pictures of a rainbow right in front of me. And now there's this other incredible black cloud. It doesn't look real; the sky so amazing. It looks like a painting. It almost doesn't seem like what I'm looking at is something that could happen in real life. Why wouldn't I want to jump into it?
Only my infrastructure of habit and ritual is keeping me here with you.
Instead of just focusing on one massive habit, start small. You can build your rituals one step at a time. When you have one small habit, you can easily measure success. The key to every part of this process is making your goals, habits, and targets as small as possible.
Here is a simple but powerful writing ritual example.
Every day I put on my special writing hat. Then I drink a cup of tea and listen to my favorite song. I then go to the bathroom and from there, straight to my writing nook.
This might seem simple, but this ritual is enough to prepare your body to write. You will find getting into the zone very easy.
You can also establish infrastructure to keep your focus. Checking email once a day is part of my infrastructure. My early morning email ritual has replaced my old, bad habit of checking my email constantly. With this tactic, you get the task done and then the distraction is removed for the day.
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Infrastructure
My children are at a very young age. They need to know when I'm writing and when I'm not; when I can play and when I can’t. They can't always tell, which is why their mother is there to help us. She is part of my infrastructure. She has learned to recognize my habits when I’m at the computer. Sometimes I’m happy to have a visit, and sometimes I need to stay in the zone.
My daughter is getting pretty good at knowing when it’s ok for her to come and play. She has learned this from experience. By telling her when I’m in the zone and when a visit is ok, she has learned most of the signs.
I love working with one of my children on my lap or sitting next to me. I spent hours looking at images to choose the cover of this book. That’s a magnificent time to listen to music or put on a television show and have them with me. Choosing photos is not mentally intensive, and I don’t have to do a lot of keyboard work.
But if I'm in a very intense writing session or if I'm on a phone call, I can't give as much attention to my children; I need to focus on the work project. My family knows that the headphones mean I can’t be distracted. They know not to break my focus when I’m in a writing sprint.
My family loves me, and their distractions are never malicious. When you work from home, you have to create clear boundaries. I don’t drive off to work in the morning, so my children need other signs to know when I’m working.
It is worth talking with your family about your daily goals. When they know what you are trying to accomplish, they will be far more accommodating.
As you experiment with the best times of day for writing, the best methods and locations, you will find what works best for you. When you have found the best writing situation for you, plan out your goals, micro goals, and rituals. Build your infrastructure and set it in stone.
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Achievable
All of these steps work together to make your goals achievable. Your ritual can become part of your daily goal structure. It should be an integrated part of your life.
When you finish that cup of tea, you will feel a sense of accomplishment. You will start to feel good about yourself, and your mind will start to slip into the zone. That’s your first micro step, and you should feel good when you take it.
Breaking your ritual into pieces helps you relax. Thinking about how much you have to write today or your next sprint can be overwhelming. If you get nervous, your writing will suffer.
The power of ritual is that it requires focus. We establish rules for each phase of the ritual, and they become sacrosanct. When you drink that tea, only think about that tea. You aren’t allowed to think about work. It’s against the rules.
“This is my cup of tea, and this tea is very important to me. I never write while I drink my tea. This time is precious.”
It’s not the tea itself that becomes important, but how you approach each step in your ritual. During your pre-writing ritual, it’s forbidden to think about work. Don’t think about the future or that next scene. This will keep your ritual pure and ensure that when you sit down at your computer or turn on your microphone, you are relaxed and ready to slip into the zone.
If you have followed the rest of this process and turned your giant project into small, 500-word sections, then you can stay relaxed. You transition from your ritual to a small writing goal. You don’t have to think about this giant book, deadlines, or your goal of writing 20K today. You can just focus on that one section, and this will keep you relaxed.
Just think about one goal at a time. Combining ritual with proper goal-setting leads to perfect habit development. My friend Steve calls this process habit stacking, but I've always called it ritual.
We build a series of things we do that end with our habit of success.
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Action Steps
Set your first writing goal now and be very specific. Include a word count and a due date.
Break down all your current goals into smaller, manageable pieces.
Continue building and refining your ritual until it is perfect.
Use your small goals and new ritual to transition into the zone each time you start a writing session.
Keep track of your writing results when you use your ritual and when you don’t. Always track your results in your notebook.
Create an infrastructure that the people you live with unders
tand, so that you are able to keep your ability to get into the zone protected.
Part XIX
Energy
I believe in luck and fate and I believe in karma, that the energy you put out in the world comes back to meet you.
- Chris Pine
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The Lost World
Writing is as much a physical process as it is a mental one. If I sit in my chair for too long, sometimes my legs hurt. I live on a tropical island, and that means it’s always hot here. It can become very sweaty, and my legs get sore. I sweat into the chair. In the tropics, these things happen. My back can start to hurt. I can hurt my knee, my elbow, my wrist. All these different parts of my body will start hurting from sitting in a chair too long.
Medical studies have shown that sitting is a negative health indicator and can cause a heart attack. Sitting too much is a sign that you'll die young. It's now become something very dangerous, and it's kind of scary to think that sitting is bad for us.
Our bodies were designed for a world where we moved around all the time, where we are physical; back in the day, we had to walk miles and miles every day to find something to eat. We were designed to live outside, but we live a life now where we spend all day sitting in cubicles, sitting in dark little squares like mushrooms, and we don't move around very much. We don’t face physical challenges. All this sitting around makes us accumulate stressors in our body that limit our ability to write.
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Living Abroad
Earlier today, after lunch my stomach was upset for about two hours. One of the “exciting” things about living in a country that's undeveloped is sometimes, in fact very often, the things that make it into my food chain will upset my stomach.
It's just part of living in a country that has a very different set of infrastructures behind food procurement. When my stomach hurts, I can't sit in my chair and work. It's a physical problem. These things can happen to us whether it's medical, whether it's physical, whether it's energy, or whether it’s emotional. These factors are very, very important, and we want to be aware of them and admit that they are real and take actions that will help us stay in the right state of mind, to stay healthy.
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Creative Flow
As a writer, you need a steady flow of creative ideas coming into your mind. You need to actively bring the right kind of creativity into your flow. I read an entire book nearly every day. I'm running tens of thousands of words through my mind, and this keeps my ideas fresh.
I'm always absorbing new ideas, knowledge, and information. Reading is the best way to maintain and grow my vocabulary.
Reading is a habit that helps me with my career, and it is also a great pleasure. I love reading because it gives me knowledge while recharging my emotional batteries.
I also get a great deal of my emotional energy and inspiration from living on a paradise tropical island and being able to work outside so often and spending so much time with my family and kids and being able to work from home. I am fortunate to have a lot of really positive things in my life.
When I was younger, I struggled with depression, and I still deal with flickers. I developed an entire infrastructure for how I deal with depression anytime I get hit by it. This book isn't about that, but I have an entire podcast episode about exactly how I deal with it. If you want to find that episode, I'll post a link on the 20K page, and you can certainly find it on iTunes as well.
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Poisoning the Well
As much as we want to bring positive, creative energy into our lives, we must be diligent about blocking negative energy from infecting us. The more we expose ourselves to negative energy, the more it can infect the way we think.
When I was in high school, I started to notice that I would always feel bad about myself after hanging out with one of my friends. I would come home feeling fat, dumb, and ugly. It took me a long time to figure out what was happening. For too long I assumed the cause of my negative feelings was internal.
Only after I went away to college and had friends that made me feel good about myself did I notice the difference. When you live your life in the shade, you can forget what the sunlight feels like. When I came back the next summer, I realized that this friendship wasn't good for my psyche and I terminated the friendship.
Ending a friendship is not easy, but I realized that keeping him in my life was doing me far more harm than good. We would have a bit of fun when we spent time together, but the emotional price was far too high.
We all let things into our lives that affect us emotionally. For some people their poison of choice is politics. It's very hard to be in a good state of mind if you read a lot of intense political websites. Whether you're on the left or the right is irrelevant. If you are someone who's very obsessed with politics, the news can affect your emotional life in a powerful way.
We always feel like we need to know the news; that we need to be aware of what's happening out there and to stay on the cutting edge. In reality, only two things in the newspaper will actually affect what you do today. One of them is the movie listings and the other is the weather! We want to know about everything else, but it doesn't really affect our lives or what we will do today.
If I get caught up (and it's very easy for me to be distracted by the news), I'm one of those people that can spend all day reading news websites, and that puts me in a negative state of mind because no news is good news whatever side of the spectrum you're on.
Newspapers, news blogs, whatever, they're all in the business of negative because negative is what sells. Ninety percent of the news is negative. So no matter what you believe in, which newspaper you follow, it doesn't matter. The majority of the stories, the majority of the content you put into your life, into your soul, is negative and it will wear you down. It will suck the life out of you.
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Affecting Your Emotions
The books I read affect my emotional state. If you get to know me, you can tell what kind of book I'm reading by my behavior. I mostly like to read science fiction, thrillers, and hard-boiled detective stories. I love metaphysical detective stories. If you have a detective, and he's a wizard, shapeshifter, or anything supernatural, I'm totally into it. I'm the guy who reads all of those books.
You knew there was someone out there who was into all of that; it's me that reads all of them. There are not enough readers yet for Amazon to create a category, but I'm waiting for it. I'm always looking for that type of story, and it's growing and growing as a category. Only about twenty authors are writing these kinds of stories, and I read all of them.
If I’m reading a story, especially a thriller about a serial killer, and it's scary, I act very differently. I'm more skittish. I don't like walking around my house in the dark as much, and I flip on every light as I walk through my house. You're probably the same way.
When I was a little kid, and I watched a karate or a ninja movie, I would come home and start doing kicks in the front yard.
The things we watch and the books we read affect our state of mind. They affect what we're doing. Pay attention to what you bring into your mind because it will affect your tone. If you notice that your tone is very negative, think about what you’ve let in. You might let the influence of the movie you just watched alter the scene you are struggling to write.
I was working on a project, and I noticed that my tone sounded very angry, and I realized it was because I was researching another project about conspiracy theories and surviving an apocalypse. When you get into that stuff, you become very paranoid, so I was writing in that state of mind.
I try to write in many different categories and niches. I match the state of mind of my audience, so I get engaged. When I'm writing a book for women, I become very emotional. I react in a very different way when writing a book for men where I try to hide all my emotions.
The things I write affect me as much as the things I read, and I discovered that the tone of voice in this entire project was way
off, so I had to rewrite everything. It was totally wrong, and it came across fairly angry because as usual, I was working on another project. I was a step ahead, and it affected me.
If you notice that your tone is very strange or that something is wrong with your creative output, it's most often caused by your creative input. Lack of energy and bad emotions can both be very detrimental.
If you want to write books about science fiction but you only read books about fantasy, your thoughts, your mental rhythms will get mixed up. Now don't get me wrong: I'll probably still read it, and I'll probably still love your book, but if you notice your writing is doing something a little bit strange or a little unexpected, most of the time it's caused by one of these two factors.
One of the great things about adding dictation as part of your product creation cycle is that it frees you from the chains of your desk, and it allows you to become mobile and physical. If I don't exercise for about two or three days in a row, I get depressed. It affects me emotionally in a very powerful and very negative way. My mood will change, and the way I interact with my wife and my children will go south.
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