What Bar are you measuring yourself by?

Last month, I was at a two day workshop by Yael Farber at Nightwood Theatre.  She’s a writer/director/performer from South Africa.  The workshop was called “Playing With Fire” and was described as:

A unique, intensive master class facilitated by Yael Farber for actors and performing artists / creators, writers and directors interested to deepen their process and open access to their “core fire”.

It was the wording of “core fire” that caught my attention.  It reminded me a bit of shamanism and passion and creativity.  I had never heard of Yael Farber and I had no idea what to expect.  But the word “fire” beckoned me seductively.

 It was a great experience and is serving as a motivator to renew some of the passion and excitement I feel about writing.  One of the things that Yael talked about was stretching ourselves as artists.  Part of that is done by having a “bar” to measure ourselves against.  And the best bar is ourself, not others.

Only we know what we are capable of.  Only we know when we are giving 80% effort, instead of 100%.  Only we know if we are really pushing ourselves or just going through the motions.

An analogy that Yael used was going to yoga class. Because she is naturally flexible she appears to be a yoga master.  But she said that because she’s able to do those stretches, she actually has to really push herself beyond those stretches to get the full effect of them.  Whereas, someone who isn’t as flexible may actually be pushing themselves much further even if they can’t touch their toes.

It is a matter of perspective.  Your perspective.  So what if you are more flexible or talented than someone else?  Are you growing?  Are you pushing yourself?  The only time you can coast is when you are going downhill.

The key is that only you know if you are stretching yourself. 

The concept was timely, because I was rehearsing a play.   And I was feeling annoyed by the level of commitment and ability of some of the other people involved with the show.  After thinking about what Yael had said, I realized that regardless of what I felt about the others, I wasn’t giving a 100% of my ability.  I wasn’t pushing myself.  Shame on me.

I mean, I wasn’t even off book yet and I had a small part!  I decided to put up or shut up.  But, it’s hard to push yourself.  And when you use yourself as a bar, you know what you are capable of or what you should be capable of.  More effort is required.   More effort is always required!

In terms of writing, I was already on my journey to write a page a day.  The thirty days are up and the habit has been initiated.  Now, I need to keep it up.  But I need to explore ways to push myself further in my writing. 

Where do you need to push yourself to stretch yourself beyond the bar you are at?

Pass the Dip, please

In the quest to become really good at something, according to Seth Godin’s book The Dip, you need to get past the dip.  No, not the thing you dunk potato chips into.  Hmm.  Dip… The dip that Godin is talking about is that space between being okay at something and becoming a master of something.

When you discover or develop an ability like writing or playing an instrument, there is an initial period of excitement where it’s fun and you are learning new things and that causes a snowball effect making you  come back and learn more or develop more.  However, the honeymoon eventually ends and you get to “the dip”. 

The dip is the space where you are not learning so many new things, but need to develop and practice what you already know. It’s the time where you develop and enhance your skills through practice and perseverance.   It’s the lull between being a novice and becoming a master.  It can take months or it can take years.  If you want to become excellent at something, you need to get through “the dip.” 

The dip is where most people quit.

Quitting isn’t bad, as long as you quit the right things.   If you have a major goal, you will need to quit things that distract you from that goal.  You will need to quit things that take up valuable time, but don’t give any returns towards your goals.  I can hear my wife saying, “You mean, like watching TV?”  Sigh.  Yes, like watching TV.

Only you will know what things you should quit.   But first, you need to decide what the goal is.  What is the thing you won’t quit until you achieve it?  Once you know what that is, then you can start looking at the things that you can quit because they are distracting you from your main goal.  Stephen Covey said, “It’s easy to say ‘no’ when you have a bigger ‘yes’ inside.”  If you have something very important to you, like a goal you are committed to achieving, it is easy to quit or say no to other things.

It’s not easy to get past the dip.  If it was easy, everyone would be a master.  You need to put in the time to become great at what you want to become great at.  I want to become a great playwright, so in my way of going through the dip, I’m working towards writing a page a day (WAPAD). 

I’m at Day 13 of taking baby steps towards that goal.  I just completed my sixth day of writing half a page a day.  After tomorrow, I will work on ¾’s of a page a day.  Once my habit is developed of writing a page a day, I will have to keep up the habit.  I will actually have to increase the habit to more than one page a day, but that will be another habit to develop and I will take baby steps for that, too.

What is your goal?  What is that you want to reach for that will push you through your own “dip”?

Keeping the Magic Secret

When people find out that I’m a writer, they often ask what I’m working on.  If I’m in the throes of a first draft, I’ll mumble something about not liking to talk about my work.  It’s hard to explain, but I have found from experience that if I talk about a project before a first draft has been completed, I run the risk of not completing it.  It’s as if talking about it removes the need to write about it.

It’s not an unusual concept.  One of the reasons that artists create works of art is because it is a way that they can articulate an idea or feeling they have.  If you can talk about it, then what is the need to express it through art?  It’s as if you have sucked out the magic from the piece.

After I have a first draft done, I don’t mind talking about it.  Because the piece is now a thing.  It exists.  It has form.  It may not have reached its final form and there may be a lot of work (rewriting) ahead to get it to the form it needs, but it has been birthed. 

It’s as if the first draft is really part of the gestation process and if you talk about your piece too soon, you run the risk of miscarrying.  Once the first draft is done, it’s only a matter of refining and adding.  Of course, when I say “only” I don’t mean to diminish the next process.  It’s similar to the development of a child.  After they’re born, there’s years of development before they become an adult; but without the birth, there is no child and no adult. 

Similarly, although it may seem as if most of the work is spent doing the rewriting, without the first draft, there is no play.  So, it is very important to get to that first draft.  Duh, I know. 

But how many false starts have you had on the stories that you’ve written?  Do you get started but then after talking about it to someone, find that you have run out of steam?

Keep the details of your first draft to yourself.  Don’t talk about a piece until you have a first draft done.  If someone asks what you are working on, tell them you’re fleshing out an idea, but you’re not really sure where it is going yet.

If you need to talk it out, talk it out on paper.  This is the part of the magic.  Get that first draft done on your own.  The first draft is the time to make your mistakes and flounder.  You don’t know what you are giving birth to, but it’s exciting to find out. 

Once the first draft is done, the magic has happened.  Now it’s time to start the hard work.  But don’t forget to pass out the cigars and celebrate!

By the way, Day 9 of WAPAD and I moved up to a half page of script writing a day yesterday.  Hey, my daily writing has doubled.  Yay! 

Keeping the Magic Alive

Whoo hoo!  I’m on Day 6 of WAPAD.  And I did my writing quota today and it’s a Saturday.  However, even though I was only a page and a bit into my project (a musical adaptation of a one of my short stories), I have moved on to another project.  Why?  The other story excites me more.

There is a contradiction of motivations in writing.  If you are serious about writing, you must do it consistently; hence, my urge to develop my WAPAD (writing a page a day) habit.  Conversely, a project needs to excite you in some way for you to stick with it to the end.  Consistency and passion drive most works of expression.

Although, I find my musical project exciting, I’ve never written a musical.  I’ve seen a few musicals and I have an intuition that this story could work better as a musical than a straight play.  But…  There’s a lot of work involved to get this story to the musical version.  And some of those steps have been nagging away at me and robbing me of some of my enthusiasm.

Also, I want to have a play ready for the Hamilton Fringe Festival Playwriting Contest.  The contest opens December 1, 2010 and is open until February 25, 2011.  I would like to be able to submit a second or third draft of my script before the deadline closes.  Usually, I’m frantically trying to get my first draft in on the final day of the deadline.  L

So, what happened?  There are always a few ideas bouncing around my head.  I have one idea that I have been trying to formulate into a story.  And last week, as I was riding the train home, an element popped into my head which will be the catalyst to pushing the idea into a play.  I apologize for being a bit oblique in talking about the things that I am working on, but I will discuss that tomorrow. 

Apparently Isaac Asimov worked on multiple projects at the same time.  He would have a bunch typewriters set up in his writing room; one for each project.  When he got tired of a project, he would get up, go to another typewriter and start writing on that project.  How did that work for him?   Isaac Asimov wrote about 500 books.

So, for me to keep passionate about writing a page a day, I need to be working on a story that excites me.  I may run out of steam on this second story, too; but, then I will go back to the musical or start working on another story idea.  WAPAD is the goal, so I need to make sure that the things I am working on will excite me enough to come back to the blank page each day.

You Can’t Do it All

It’s Day 4 of the WAPAD and I have gotten in my quarter page a day.  It seems ridiculously easy, but I have found myself still wanting to skip it a couple of times this week.  However, I tell myself that it is only a little thing and get it done.  The key for me is to get it done before getting to work.  Thank goodness for commuter trains and a laptop.  That really helps.

Of course, I haven’t been as diligent with getting any blog entries done.  Instead of beating myself up for it, though, I’ve been philosophical.  You can’t do it all.  That’s why it’s really important to decide what’s important to you.  Playwriting is really important to me. 

I can feel a decision building up.  I love watching TV.  September is one of my favourite times of the year.  I look forward to the TV times arriving and reading the synopses of all the new shows and picking which ones to watch.  Sigh.  Being a TV reviewer would be my dream job.  But watching TV is time consuming.  And I’m starting to regret spending so much time in front of the boob tube.

At this point, I can still do it all.  My WAPAD commitment hasn’t grown to a point where it can’t be done on my train ride.  I can still waste a couple of hours in front of the TV.  But the end is coming, I fear.  

There are a lot of things related to playwriting like reading plays, reading biographies of playwrights, watching plays, being involved in a playwriting group, submitting to contests and theatres, and, of course, writing.  These are all things I should be doing or spending more time on.  My beloved TV watching isn’t on that list.  And if I am honest with myself, it is utterly expendable.

Because you can’t do it all, it is vitally important to decide what you can do.  If you have writing goals, you need to look at those things that take your time and aren’t related to writing.  Many of them are time wasters.  To start, make a note of what they are and observe how much time you are spending on them.  But be warned, you need to reduce or eliminate them eventually.

Getting up after falling down

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again, right?   Sigh.  I knew that the weekend would be challenging for me to get my writing done.  It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I blew off Saturday and Sunday.  The crazy thing is that there were a few moments that I could have written, but I didn’t “feel” like it and I let the moment pass.

However, I really want to establish a habit of writing every day.  So, I pick myself up, dust off the procrastination debris and start over.  The key to doing these thirty days is that they need to be consecutive.  Miss a day and I need to start over.   (Thanks goodness I wasn’t at Day 25 or something!)

By the same token, I’m not going to browbeat myself over missing the weekend.  To be honest, I have a page and a quarter of writing that I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t decided to start this WAPAD (Writing a Page a Day) in the first place.  Actually, after today, I am at a page and a half.  Slow but sure.

For me, it really is important to try to get the writing done as early as possible – especially on the weekends.  There is so much to do on Saturday and Sunday and there is a brief amount of time before everyone else is up and moving around, so it is important to take advantage of it as quickly as possible. 

I will be more motivated, next weekend, for sure.  So welcome to Day 1 of WAPAD – Redux.  I have done today's writing, in case you're wondering.

What do you fill your brain with? (Day 4 – WAPAD)

Day 4 is here and I’ve finished my quarter page.  Yay!  I now have my first page of my first draft written.  And it doesn’t matter if it is good or not.  It’s better not to have expectations about your writing.   But more on that in another blog.  ;-)

One of the things that makes us all unique is that we have different interests.  We all see the world through our individual lenses.  If you put a bunch of random household items on a table and brought a bunch of people in and told them to choose one of the items, chances are they wouldn’t all want the same thing. 

Just as different writers like to tell different stories, different writers like to hear different stories.   A writer writes. Yes, that’s true; but a writer also reads.  So what are the kinds of things that you read?

It’s important to do some reading in the genre that you write in; so, playwrights should read plays, amongst other things.   I’ve taken a few different types of writing classes over the years and it always astounds me when people want to become writers, but don’t read in genre that they want to write in.  Or they don’t read at all!

It’s important to read the masters, but it is important to read contemporary plays, as well.  What are the shows that are being put on in your closest Theatre mecca (New York, London, Toronto, etc.)?  It would be even better if you could go out and see some shows.

It is also important to read outside your genre.  Read things that catch your interest.  Trashy novels.  Books about gardening.  Biographies.  Those kinds of things will inform your writing and inspire some of the stories that you want to tell.  

Nothing grows in a vacuum.  You need to fertilize your imagination with stories and ideas.  One way to be inspiring is to be inspired.  Find something to read that will inspire your writing.

Day 3 – Writing a page a day (WAPAD) habit

Oh, boy.  Today was the first day that I didn’t feel like writing.  I’m on the train to work and I’m still a bit tired and I just wanted to read, instead.  But I told myself that it’s only a quarter page.  You can do it.  Sigh.  So, I did it.

I’m getting nervous, though.  If I’m feeling this challenged early on, how will I be on day 14 or day 22?  That’s the problem with some goals.  It’s easy to look at the target and get dismayed by how far the distance is. 

Keep focused on the task at hand.  For now, the commitment is a quarter page a day.  I can do that.  If there are challenges further down the road, I will address them when they come up.  It doesn’t make sense worrying about them now – I might hit my stride by that time and it will be a moot point.

I’m assuming that as my page count increases, I’ll be less likely to be able to write on the train.  Or at least write these blog entries on the train.  But, no need to worry about that yet, either.  It may just be that as my writing quota increases, I naturally modify my writing times.

In the ideal world, I would write in the morning before everyone is up.   But right now, I’m too tired to get up when the alarm goes off at 6:30.   I know, I know.  I need to go to bed earlier.  Maybe that will happen.  I used to be an early riser. 

However, instead of trying to get up earlier and write every day and maybe get to bed earlier and watch less TV and eat better and exercise and whatever else might be good for my overall writing, I’m focusing on one thing: writing a quarter page of script for four more days.  

The mind brings in all these what-ifs to stress you out.  Don’t be sidetracked.  Keep it simple.  Focus on the task.  And keep moving forward. 

Day 2 – Writing a page a day habit

I am on the train to work and yes, I have just finished day 2.  Another quarter page done.  Of course, with a script, it’s only a few lines, so it seems ridiculously easy to accomplish.  That’s part of the trick.  Start small.  Baby steps.

Each little amount done is part of a greater whole.  And even though it only feels like a tiny amount, it is more than nothing, right?  The problem with “not” having a habit of consistent writing, is that your writing output is unpredictable.  The old adage is that a writer writes.  And if you want to be serious about writing, you need to establish a habit of writing.

So much of the writing that gets done won’t be used in the end, so you need to get that “unused” writing out of the way.  How?  By writing!  If you have a habit of writing and have a big output, you won’t be so attached the few words that you write.  You will be better at seeing the right words. 

Do you have a habit of writing every day?  What are you waiting for?  Get writing!

Day 1 – Writing a page a day habit

[This entry was written yesterday, but I only got it posted today.  :-(]

Today is the first day towards my goal of writing a full length play.  The first milestone on that journey is to develop the habit of writing a page a day of script.   Previously, when I have tried setting a goal of a page a day of writing, I have used my journal writing as a measurement of that “page”.  The problem is that I usually didn’t get the script written, but I could tell myself that I had met my writing goals.

To be playwright, you need to write plays or scripts.  So, the most important writing to get done is script writing.  To start small, I have made it my daily goal for this week to write a quarter page of script a day.

In case you’re wondering, yes, I have written my quarter page.  It is my MIT.  Most Important Task of the day.  Since it is done, I can focus on other things.  Ideally, I would have a list of MITs that I should be doing.  They should be ranked in order of priority and done in batches of three.

When I get to work, I will determine my work MITs for today.  I am going to go over all the things that need to get done between now and the end of the year.  Then I will prioritize them and put the top three on my MIT list.

Time to Start

So, I finished The Power of Less by Leo Babauta.   The book starts off with a metaphor of the haiku (a poem of 3 lines made up of 17 syllables – line 1=5 syllables, line 2=7 syllables and line 3=5 syllables).   With so little elbow room to write, it is important to choose the images/ideas with the most impact.  Each word is important.

Time is finite and we all have our goals that we want to accomplish.  It’s easy to get pulled in different directions and lose focus.  Instead of losing focus, pick one goal.  It should be something that you are passionate about.   And start small.

The idea is that you pick a goal that will take up to six months to a year to accomplish (losing weight, running a marathon, writing a play, etc.).  Break the big goal into monthly sub-goals.   Break the monthly goals into weekly tasks.  And break the weekly tasks into achievable daily tasks.   It is important that the daily tasks be achievable in one day – if not, break them down into smaller chunks.  By the same token, your weekly tasks should be achievable by 7 daily tasks at most.  If not, break the task down further.

It is important to start small.  For example, If you are wanting to start an exercise regimen, commit to exercising for 5 minutes a day for a week.  The following week, commit to exercising for 10 minutes a day.  Keep those commitments and build on them slowly.

One of the ways to keep your commitments to your goals is to schedule them.  Ideally, do them first thing in the morning.  As well as your goal related task, Babauta suggests that you have two other daily tasks related either to home life or work life or one of each.  These make up your Most Important Things (MITs).   These are the things you should focus on before completing anything else; hence, it’s better to do them first thing in the morning.

Another thing is to schedule or plan when you will start working on your goal.  When I finished the book, yesterday, I was chomping at the bit to get started right away.  Don't rush in.  It’s important to plan it a little.  Build up some anticipation.  At the very least, wait a couple of days before starting.

Since I’m focusing on playwrighting on this blog, I decide to focus on my goal to write a full length play.   I’ve written one act plays, but I seem to have a glass ceiling for the full length play.   I will start on Monday.  Part of my goal to write a full length play is to get into the habit of doing some playwriting every day. 

My goal for the next month is to write a page a day of script.  But I will start small.  Starting next week, I will commit to writing a quarter page of script a day.  The week after that, I will write half a page of script.  The following week, I will move up to three quarters of a page a day.  And in the fourth week, I will be up to one page a day.  Obviously, my daily goals will be to write the amount indicated in my weekly goals.

Oh, yeah.  Leo suggests that tell people about your goals or blog about them.  Guess what I decided to do?  Blogging here I come.   Originally, I had only planned on writing a couple of blogs a week.  I wanted something that I thought that I could commit to.   For the next little while, however, it looks like I will be blogging a lot more frequently.

What would your one goal be -- the one with the most impact?  What small steps can you take to move you closer to it?

My Brain Hurts

Before I started this blog, I started reading other blogs.   Mostly they were blogs by people who had written books that I’ve read.  But of course, the domino effect happens.  The blogger talks about something that they’ve read and put a link to another blog.  Before I know it, I’ve travelled a few blogs deep and I have information overload.

That’s the fantastic thing about the internet.  Like a pinball, you can bounce from one piece of information to another.  By the end of it, though, you can feel like you’ve literally been bounced around.  My brain hurts from absorbing too much information.

There’s just too much darn information out there!  It’s exciting and it’s daunting.  I’m reading blogs by people 10 or 20 years younger than me and they’re doling out great pearls of wisdom.  But it sometimes makes me feel old.  Boo hoo.

To be honest, some of the information isn’t necessarily new.  People just talk about things that they’ve discovered or even rediscovered.  And sometimes, even though you know something, you need to hear it again.  Life is a series of steps forward and steps backward.  Sometimes you can hear something that you already know, but since it is the “right” time to hear, you might actually use it.

Part of the reason for the sore brain of mine, is that one of the domino effects of blog surfing lead me to Leo Babauta’s blog Zen Habits and his book The Power of Less.  I got his book from the library yesterday and have been devouring it.  I am going to start implementing some of his suggestions which will increase the frequency of the blog posts.

I will talk about his book a bit more tomorrow, but I just wanted to let you know about my brain hurting.  It’s a “good” hurt though; like after a good workout.

Where are you going to?

John Lennon said that life is what happens to you when you are planning other things.  The key to this is to be planning other things, right?  If you don’t have a plan or a direction, who knows where you’ll end up?  Some people say, “I don’t know where I’m going but I’ll know when I get there.”  How?  You have to know what you want to “be” able to “see” it.

I have to admit that I am a bit of a self-help junkie.  Yes, I have some Tony Robbins Personal Power tapes languishing in my basement somewhere.   It’s a guilty pleasure.   But I strongly believe in the importance of goals.  Setting goals gives us a direction to our lives.  It helps you make decisions and it helps you grow. 

In January 2009, one of the goals I had  was to become a professional playwright.  Now, part of goal setting is determining what is an indicator of the goal being reached.   You should be able to put something concrete.  For my professional playwright goal, I just wanted to be paid for my playwriting.   I figured if I got paid at least $100, I would be a professional playwright.  To be honest, I would have been happy with $25!   (I considered myself a professional short story writer, having sold two stories for $5 and $60, respectively.)

Of course, I had a bit of an ace up my sleeve, because my friends Shari and Mike had approached me to put on my play “Laund-o-Mat At the End of the World” at the Hamilton Fringe Festival.  My odds were pretty good that I was going to get paid – not guaranteed, but pretty good.  We hadn’t even been accepted into the Fringe, yet.

The funny thing is that having a feeling that I could reach my goal gave me confidence that I don’t usually have.  I had finished my second play, “Cast Party”, and submitted it to Black Box Fire’s Emerging Artists Series.  It got accepted and suddenly the second play  I had written was being performed.  I was two for two, because Laund-o-mat had already been performed at The Pearl Company.  On the same day, I found out Laund-o-mat was accepted into Hamilton Fringe.

Directing Cast Party was an experience that will probably be the topic of a couple of blogs.  It was without a doubt the worst theatrical experience that I have had.  So far.  However, I survived it and the show was well received.  And I got a stipend of just over a hundred bucks.  One hundred dollars?  I had already met my goal to be a professional writer before the Fringe started!

Laund-o-mat ended up being one of the top shows at the Fringe.  It was later selected to be part of the Best of Fringe 2009 at Theatre Aquarius (a professional theatre in Hamilton).   And although I ended up make a bit more than $100, as originally envisioned, something more important happened.  I qualified to be a full member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada!   My play had been performed 22 times.

For me, being a member of the PGC was a real indicator of being “professional”.   It didn’t mean that my plays were suddenly being put on at professional theatres or that I had broken out of the one-act play format that I seem stuck in.  But it meant that I was serious enough to join the ranks of the big guns.

This was not in the realm of my imagination at the beginning of the year.  I just wanted to be a “professional” writer and make a couple of bucks from my writing.  It was a goal and mantra that I kept for the year and informed some the actions that I took.  In the end, I succeeded far more than I had anticipated.

I got to a better place that I had “seen” at the beginning of the year.  And the reason for that?  I had a goal. 

So, take a moment. 

What are your goals?  



Why a blog?

Why start a blog?  There are over 120 millions blogs out there, apparently.  Yes, that's MILLION!  So why jump in with my supposed words of wisdom or words of disdain?  Why bother?  Because we all have a unique perspective.  We see a lot of the same things, but they get filtered by our experiences and sometimes that puts on a different spin. 

Like a choir is stronger for having more singers, I think the world is better for more people speaking out and sharing their experiences.  I guess, I decided it's time to join "the choir".

I'm a playwright.  Not a famous one or a prolific one.  I have written three one act plays and cowritten a fourth.  I'm still finding my way, I guess. But, I want to focus on playwriting.  Part of the reason is to clarify my own ideas on playwriting and another is galvanize myself to write more.  A writer writes.  A blog is a good outlet for when it's hard to do the playwriting.  At least I can tell myself that I'm doing some "writing", right? 

Inspiration and ideas come from so many different sources.  I follow a few different blogs and they have lead me to other blogs or sometimes books.   Information can really have a domino effect as one writer leads you to another.  Maybe something I write about will lead someone to discover some other  ideas which will help them create their masterpiece.

I think the most important thing about blogs is the potential synergy that gets created.  I see something and talk about it and someone reads that thing which leads them to create something else.  Who knows where this idea spreading will go?  If we're lucky, we start a ripple -- it doesn't even have to be tracked back to us.  Someone once said that you can accomplish anything, as long as you don't care who gets the credit.

So, why blog?  To start some ripples that may turn into waves.