We think we know what we want, but we don’t.

We think we want lower prices so we can spend less money and buy more things.

We think we want to read blogs that give us good advice on how to manage our money.

We think that controlling when and how we spend money will make us feel good.

But all we really want is a little magic.

Why Are Fountains Around the World Filled with Change?

Go anywhere in the world, even if it’s off the beaten path, and if you see a fountain you’ll also see a bunch of change thrown in there. One day I walked by a homeless person begging for change outside the Chicago Public Library and his cup was empty.

Then I walked into the library and saw a bunch of change in a water fountain.

It made me wonder if the homeless person was better off sitting next to a fountain somewhere to guilt people into giving him money.

The answer, of course, is magic. People don’t expect wishes to come true, but that doesn’t mean they don’t believe.

Apple and Disney: Magic Providers

Apple is a great example of a company that sells magic. Sure, they’re in the computer business, the music business, and the phone business—but people buy Apple products because they like a little razzle dazzle.

They like the magic so much they’re willing to pay a premium over other similar products and once they’re converted other companies don’t stand a chance.

Here is an early iPhone commercial that gets the point across with Apple’s patented simplicity:

Apple doesn’t always have the best hardware in their products, but that kind of rational argument doesn’t matter. Not when the company’s CEO goes on stage to present the latest product and does this:

Disney is the same way: it’s expensive to go to Disney but for young children it’s almost a pilgrimage to go and experience the magic of Mickey and friends.

People take their kids there for the magic.

What Am I Getting At?

I’m about to make another blanket statement: no matter what you do or what your job/hobby is, you should always try to sprinkle a little magic.

That’s why Wal-Mart changed it’s tag line to “Save Money, Live Better.” Their sorry little attempt at generating some magic.

If you’re a blogger, don’t tell people how they can generate more traffic. Tell them how their dreams can be fulfilled because of it.

If you’re an interior designer (like M), don’t tell your clients what matches or will look good in a room. Tell them how updating a room will change their lives.

It’s about thinking big, thinking abstract, and not totally bullshitting the people you’re dealing with.

It’s about giving them what they want: a little magic in their otherwise predictable lives.

Image by kennymatic

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Here is what this site looks like:

Yikes! Way too much cell phone stuff and way too little about money. I better get on it…

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• No Related Post

Routines are a great way to get things done consistently and over long-term periods of time. It’s like brushing your teeth—you do it as part of your morning/night routine and don’t really give it much thought. Whatever negatives they may have (and we’ll get to that in a second), you can’t argue with the simple reasoning that they simply work when you want to get things done.

The Good

If you want to do something consistently over and over through a certain period of time, setting a routine is a great way of going about it. Want to get fit? Set up a schedule to go to the gym. Want to read more books? Set aside the time to read an hour every day. Want to save some money? Bring your lunch to work every day.

Easy, right? Sure, as long as you stick to the routine. And that’s the beauty of routines—once you get them started it’s very easy to keep it going.

The Bad

It’s Boring. Let’s be frank here, bringing the same old lunch to work every day (which I do) gets boring really fast. Does it achieve the goal of saving money? Sure. Is it exciting? No, it’s very very dull.

If you’re not a fan of repeating the same thing over and over, then this kind of routing wouldn’t work for you. If you want to work out, you have to actually stick to the routine, which doesn’t work well for people who want to be more spontaneous or feel trapped when they have something scheduled out ahead of time.

The Ugly

You can fall into a rut. This is what I’m struggling with right now. When it comes to creative endeavors like writing, routines are your enemy. They will lull you into a sense of “getting things done,” when in reality all you’re doing is wasting time and killing your creative cells.

Sit down every day at the same time and “try” to do come up with something great to write will absolutely kill any chances you have of writing something worthwhile.

Setting aside the time to write every day and leaving that window open to new things, however, could work. But I often find myself falling right back into a rut of writing the same old boring stuff over and over again.

Not good. Very ugly.

What Say You?

Routines are great for things like exercising and saving money, but not so good for creative pursuits like writing. How do you deal with this struggle of getting things done consistently without falling into a rut?

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I had never heard of Ben Fountain until I starter hearing some buzz for his book of short stories, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. I made a note of the good buzz his book had going for him and I moved on. Then I read this article in the New Yorker about him and how long it took him to publish said book. It’s a fascinating read and it’s one of the reasons I’m content with subscribing to said magazine.

Anyway, his story resonated with me. He sat down at his kitchen table to write and 18 years later he had his book out. Eighteen years! Every writer is familiar with what happened in between: rejection and a lot of hard work. He quit his job as an attorney and devoted himself to writing—here’s a guy that’s real easy to cheer for.

Any writer wishes they could do this—stay home and devote all your time and energy to the craft. How was he able to pull this off? His wife made enough money for the both of them and she understood how he felt about writing:

…she believed in her husband’s art…

“Sharie never once brought up money, not once—never…”

“I never felt any pressure from her,” he said. “Not even covert, not even implied.”

But my favorite line is:

But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.

I love that line because most of us think of genius as something you are born with. Artists that simply create and boom—they’ve made a masterpiece. Ben Fountain’s story shows the other side of that coin. Someone who worked hard and polished his craft for 18 years. He got better and better and kept working—the man never gave up.

And all this coming from someone who hates hearing that you can achieve anything with hard work and perseverance. It’s cliché and it’s not always true: some people work hard and try hard and never get anywhere. But I believe in Ben Fountain’s story. I have to—I consider myself to be in the same boat. I’m sitting at the kitchen table right now, at 5:42am, trying to become a better writer. Trying to do whatever I can to see if there isn’t a little bit of genius in there somewhere.

[by the way, the above picture is of Ben Fountain in one of my favorite places in the world: St. Malo in France. Full circle...full circle]

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This one was a pleasant surprise for me. It’s a book written by a dance choreographer — the only dance I have in my life is when M and I watch (at her behest) Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance. In other words, when I read the author about this book on creativity was coming from a dance background, I didn’t see what I was going to get out of it.

Luckily enough, I was wrong.

One of the big things I learned from this book is that creativity is creativity, no matter how you practice it or what format it’s in. She brings up musical examples, writing examples, painting, etc. And you know what? I felt like I understood them. I got it even though I can only relate to writing.

Here are some of the things she covers that stood out to me:

- She mentions the importance of habit when it comes to creativity, and setting aside the time to “get it done.” Her routing is going to the gym every morning for two hours, first thing in the morning. That’s what gets her started. I can relate: my routine is waking up at 5:30, getting a cup of coffee, and sitting down to write. We each have to find what works for us.

- Every chapter has a bunch of exercises to get you to understand what she’s saying in a practical way, and actually practicing is the only way to really understand a lot of this stuff.

- She talks about Scratching in one chapter — I call it digging. It’s all about finding the best places to “dig up” or “scratch away” to get our inspiration/material/ideas/creative juices going. To writers she says we should be reading the best writers in the world. This is why it’s so hard for me to read shitty writers people.

- One of her exercises is to challenge yourself by pretending to take away one of your best abilities to see how you would cope with it — to see how you would rise to the challenge. It reminded me of my time in grad school and how every time I wrote a story I took it as a challenge to give the class something new and original that would get them talking/thinking. It makes you realize that creativity, at its core, is really about problem solving.

- She tells us to stay innocent. What she’s talking about is to make sure you don’t get to a point where you think you know it all or have tried it all — that’ll never happen. And staying innocent about things means you’ll venture out into the unknown and wind up creating more original things, or at least you’ll try to, which is just as hard. She also calls it being “forever the child.”

- “The more you fail in private, the less you will fail in public.” This directly applies to writers. We have the distinct advantage of being able to work alone in a room and write absolute trash. Then we can work on it for years and years if we want to without having to expose our shitty work until we think it’s good. She agrees and thinks it’s smart to work hard in private so when you’re finally showing your work off it’ll minimize failure (which is a part of being creative).

She isn’t pompous at all despite what she’s accomplished (she’s pretty famous in the dance world). The bottom of the cover says “A practical guide” and that’s just what this is. This is one of those books I want to have on my bookshelf for future reference because the process she describes applies to any creative endeavor, and I like to read about process when I’m stuck in mine (which is a lot).

If you’re someone that participates in a creative activity, you need to read this book. If you’re just curious about creativity, you might still find this interesting. Hell, you might even decide to start creating some work of your own.

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Editing is Creative

For those of you that don’t pursue creative endeavors, then you don’t know what this is all about. The rest of you, y’all know what I’m sayin’. Yesterday I managed to push through and write on, regardless of the voices. Anyway, on my way to work I was thinking about this and how, typically, the voices win and I’ll  abandon what I’m writing — accepting that it’s crap and would never amount to anything.

For some reason I had an epiphany on my way to work. Instead of trying to convince myself that a first draft (when we first put pen to paper) is actually good at some level despite the voices, it hit me that I was looking at things the wrong way. I needed to just accept that it wasn’t any good — it was a shitty first draft. The key here is to realize how important editing (or rewriting) is in the writing process. Most people like myself think of writing (and any other creative activity) as an act of inspiration where we are touched by some magical force and whatever we produce at first sitting is tainted with this fairy dust that makes it “good.” Again, that’s the wrong way to look at it. We need to accept that editing is part of the process of writing, one that we’ll worry about later.

Writing is Like Sculpting

Writing is like digging into the ground to find some clay to work with. We want to find as much as we can, no matter what color it is, how good or bad it is, or any of that. Our first priority is to just find and collect as much as we can. Same deal with writing — just get it all out onto the page, we aren’t sculpting right now, we’re just setting it up.

The next step is the actual sculpting of the clay, which is like editing. A lot of writers don’t like to think of this stage as having any creativity — instead looking at it simply as correcting spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and shifting periods and punctuation marks. Wrong. Here is where we take everything we’ve thrown on the page and we turn it into something good/great. I like to think of it as a challenge, almost divorcing myself from what I’ve written. That’s why I like to take a week or so between the writing and the editing — a lot of times I’ll forget what I’ve written, making it feel new and fresh. Now I look at what I’ve written as a challenge: take what you’ve been given and make it good.

The Lesson

Figuring out that editing is a part of the creative process is very important because it allows you to get through that first step without letting that inner critic stop you from getting any work done. So next time you’re creating something don’t worry so much about how good it is or if anyone will like it. You’ll worry plenty about that later. For now just try to make it the Shittiest First Draft you can. Why? Because without a Shitty First Draft there is no second draft, and that means there’s no anything. And something is always better than nothing.

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Writing a story is like flying a hot-air balloon: getting off the ground is a lot of work, but once you’re off it can be really cool and exhilarating. The ride is a lot of fun and you get to see some cool things from a different perspective. But —like writing stories — landing is a problem: you go where the wind takes you and picking a spot to means relying on the wind, what the landscape looks like, and how much fuel you have left. So in a lot of ways, you’re not in control all that much when it comes to landing. Lately I feel the same way about my writing.

I often have trouble finishing my stories but lately it’s been especially hard. Once I have an idea I’m excited about I’ll start writing and then it’ll all just take off and before I know it I’ve been writing for an hour and a half. It’s a great feeling and it’s one of those “magical” parts of writing I really enjoy. You start to explore different ideas and subjects you had no idea you were going to before you began.

But then I get to a point where I’m thinking about the ending and I start to have some trouble. Usually it takes me two “sittings” to get through a first draft of a story. And that second sitting is where I have a lot of trouble — it’s tough to get back to that groove I was in originally. I think what gets me in trouble is that I ask myself, “What’s the perfect ending here?” I don’t think there is anything like the perfect ending but it’s something that bothers me enough that I kind of freeze up and don’t go any further. The usual questions start coming at me: “Is this any good?” “Why did you pick this to write about?” “And you call yourself a writer?”

I have a couple of stories I’m working on right now that are going just like this. I really like them (at least the beginning of them) and can’t wait to try to get them published (which is bad because it can rush me). I have tried to step back and think about how I want to close them out but it’s just not happening.

Luckily, I just finished reading a great book about the act of being creative: The Creative Habit by famed choreographer Twyla Tharp. It deals with a lot of the problems and issues I’m going through right now. I’m going to give it its own review later on, but it’s incredible how similar all these different creative acts are: writing, painting, dancing, etc.

The good news? I know what I need to do (and not do) to get through this and finish my stories. I need to focus on the story and block out all other thoughts of perfection, publishing potential, and all that stuff. As long as I’m true to the story and I believe in it, I think I’ll eventually touch down somewhere that I’m happy with. I just hope it’s soon because I have a feeling the longer I wait, the rougher the landing will be.

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I love to travel and I love to take pictures. To me, the two are closely related. When I travel, taking a lot of pictures is how I capture those moments and take them home with me (I also just plain enjoy the act of taking them, which helps). It’s also how I share my trip with other people and whenever I want to relive some of those great times, I can just whip open my photo album and reminisce.

Taking pictures is also a creative activity — something that I like to do and gives me another way to express myself. But did you know it’s also a great frugal alternative to some other, more expensive hobbies?

Pictures are all I need

When I go on vacation, I rarely buy anything more than a t-shirt with the name of the place on it (I haven’t nailed down all my vanity quite yet). A lot of times when I get back home it hits me that I didn’t buy anything — then I download my pictures to my computer and that guilty feeling goes away. All I really need from a vacation to feel like it was worth it is my pictures. No need to spend money on anything else.

Aren’t cameras expensive though?

Right now is a great time to buy a new camera — the prices are just ridiculous. What used to cost hundreds of dollars is now affordable. I recommend that you put a little money into this and buy a good camera that will last. I have a Cannon G2, a relic of a camera by today’s standards. But when I bought it (around seven years ago), I paid $600 and it was a sweet little piece of technology. I saved all the money I had made that summer and spent it on this camera. You have no idea how hard that was for me to do — I even kept it in its original box for the first few months, wrapping it in it’s packaging after every use. That was my baby!

Seven years later, it’s one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. It has cool features I actually use, takes very nice pictures and is very durable. My only problem is that it’s a little big, but back then they didn’t come all super sleek and thin the way they do now (unless you wanted to sacrifice megapixels, which I didn’t).

As for megapixels (which basically tells you the quality of the picture it takes), the camera stands at 4MPs. Today’s models are up around 12 and are much smaller than my camera. But you know what? It doesn’t matter. My camera still takes great pictures, I’m familiar with most of the features (which means I know how to use them by now), and the size hasn’t really stopped me from taking pictures when I go somewhere (or am at home on a weekend). I gave M a smaller digital camera for her birthday that is much more convenient to record things like family events and such. I mostly use my camera for vacations or taking more creative (read: no people) shots.

But $600 is a lot of money!

It is, but not when you buy a camera that lasts this long. Plus there are all kinds of ways you can have your pictures make some of that money back:

• Sell your pictures online: There are several stock photography sites out there that let you upload your pictures (provided they are “good” enough). That’s passive income right there!
• Use your pictures to decorate your home/apartment: This one I love. When people ask “oh where is this/who took this?” and you tell them you did, it makes you feel like a regular Annie Liebovitz (or a sketchy paparazzi). Put your work in a nice frame and that’s it, you’re good to go.
• Make it a hobby: Take your camera with you and take a walk around your neighborhood for three hours. Take as many pictures as you can and when you get back, sift through your shots and see if you got anything good. Download free editing software like Gimp and you’re all set. Right there you have a full day of spending no money while having fun and doing something creative.

Sure, you could go nuts and get all kinds of accessories and other things that could make this a more expensive hobby. And that’s OK if you really get into it and use everything. But you don’t have to. You can even go online to read up on photography basics and that won’t cost you a dime. My advice? Practice — it’s the best way to learn and get better.

Next time you go on a trip, think about what you really want to take away from the place. You could shop all day long and still not capture the essence of the place the way you can with a simple picture. And even when you’re not on vacation, taking pictures can make the everyday seem unique and interesting. And don’t let anyone out there tell you only pros take good pictures — they are wrong!

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This is a duality that I struggle with a lot. Am I a writer? A blogger? Both? So today I’m taking a look at three ways that have helped me (and will hopefully help you) balance the act of writing fiction and blogging.

I write for this blog and I also write fiction. I’d like to say that these two things are my “passion,” but I don’t know if this blog really falls under the category of passion. I enjoy writing for it and I learn new things all the time, but it’s more about the thrill of publishing whatever the hell I want and having people read it. Since no one is reading my fiction (not at these numbers, meager as they are, anyway), I think the blog helps to quench my thirst for a readership. Anyway, that’s a whole other topic—one for another day.

Today I’m going to talk about how I balance the blogging and the writing of fiction. I wrote recently about my struggle to find the time to write, and I may go into that a little bit today too. This isn’t about what it takes to be a “good” writer/blogger, it’s about the actual act of writing and getting this stuff done. The interesting thing about writing for such different things is how similar the systems involved in both of them really are. Writing is still writing, no matter what you call it. So let’s get started!

1. Setting up a System to Catch Ideas

Ideas don’t come from just sitting at your desk with your head on your fist, thinking. Sorry to break it to you, but ideas come from living, from reading, and from thinking about the first two. I even came up with a formula for it.

So the most important place to start if you want to write fiction or blog about any topic is setting up a system that will allow you to capture all the ideas you have so you can write about them when the time comes (and we’ll worry about that next). Because trust me, ideas will come to you at the weirdest times and you need to be ready to jot them down before you forget. You’ll be sitting in a boring meeting at work and boom! Great idea. Or you’ll be jogging outside and boom! Another one. If you don’t have a system in mind, you’ll either forget it or you’ll stress your unconscious mind so much to remember that you’ll block other new ideas from coming forward. It’s like email—process it as soon as possible or you’ll find yourself on the nasty end of a backlog. Not fun.

So what kind of systems are there to grab these ideas and record them? Everyone should create their own tailor-made system, in my opinion. Check out mine if you want — it’s just what works for me but it may help you on setting up your own. Remember, all you want to do here is to write/record the idea somewhere that you will come back to and actually act on it later. You can sift through all of these later to see how good they are — for now the priority is to treat them all like they’re brilliant and worry about the quality later.

If you’re keen on learning more about these systems, check out Getting Things Done by David Allen. I read some of it and took away some really helpful tips. It’s basically all about these kinds of systems and how to maximize them.

2. Finding the Time to Write

The key idea here is to have a set amount of reliable time dedicated to writing. The key here is “reliable.” You need to know that the time is going to be there no matter what, because that will relax the part of your brain worried about when it’s going to take action on this stuff. I wrote about this recently so feel free to check out the full post. If you don’t do this and instead rely on winging it (an oxymoron if you ask me), then you’ll never get anything done consistently.

“I’ll write when I have time”
“Maybe this weekend”
“Tonight, if I’m not tired”

Trust me, excuses are plentiful when it comes to this stuff. So just set aside a little bit of time — whether it’s in the mornings before work or even on your lunch hour. You don’t have to be at a computer (though I recommend it for blogging, typing things up — as good as it is from an editing standpoint — isn’t fun), all you need is some paper and a pen (all my fiction drafts are by hand, still). This way your mind can focus on the ideas you’ll be writing about, not when it’s going to find the time to do it.

My schedule is every day before work. I have almost two hours set aside every morning to write and that allows me to schedule any writing projects into those two hours.

3. Standby Mode (or Getting it Done)

I debated what to call this last step because it’s kind of a weird combination of taking action and waiting.

• The waiting part goes hand in hand with reading. Read as much as you can — if you want to write fiction, read fiction. If you want to blog, read other blogs on the topic you’re going to blog about. Reading is where your ideas will come from, whether it’s directly or indirectly. So read as much as you possibly can and when you think you can’t read anymore, read for five more minutes. I don’t know of any good writers that never read, so who do you think you are. Read!
• The waiting part comes into play because our minds are unreliable. You can’t just go out and write if you don’t have any ideas. Like I said earlier, sitting in front a blank sheet of paper isn’t going to help you with that. You just have to be in a perpetual state of readiness. As a dude on MTV once said, “You stay ready, you ain’t got to get ready.” Amen.

Notice of Liability: I am not a professional writer and all advice should be taken as such. I cannot be help responsible for terrible ideas and terrible writing from following these three steps. If, however, you find yourself atop a bestseller list/top blog list at some point, and you’ve read this, I do expect some sort of mention. Good luck out there!

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I mentioned last week that I tried reading Getting Things Done, the productivity book that is so popular, but didn’t have time to get through it. There was quite a bit of response around that post so I wanted to share what I took away from the 30 or so pages I did read. Those 30 pages were a quick, entertaining read and just as I was getting into it two things happened: it got a little slow and I ran out of time. Either way, there’s one thing I read that has changed the way I organize my ideas and that’s what I want to share today.

I already do a lot of what the book describes in terms of writing things down, keeping “to-do lists,” and all that. I figured out on my own that my memory could not be trusted to remember all these ideas and thoughts that I had — that’s why I started a journal many many years ago. But as I got to writing creatively more and more, I figured out I needed a place to jot these ideas down. So I now carry a Moleskine notebook for that very purpose. All I would do is write the idea down and that satisfied me — I wouldn’t forget about it and if/when I wanted to see it again, all I had to do was check the notebook.

So that was good, but GTD says that it’s not enough. Writing something down makes it more likely that it’ll get done, but adding one small detail makes it even more likely to get done.

Instead of just jotting an idea down, GTD suggests you add the very next step that needs to be taken in order for that “thing” to be completed. So if I wanted to write a post about saving for retirement vs. living your life, I would jot down “Retirement vs. Living Your Life” and then I would add “Tue Morning.”

Now I know when I’m taking action on this: on Tue morning before work I’ll write the post out. Since I have almost two hours set aside every day before work, that’s where I can assign tasks to be completed. Having this time set aside every morning makes it easier to add the next step. Without it, it gets a little hairy.

But it also works for things like errands. I recently wrote this note down: “Call Tmobile. (Tue Lunch Hour).” I had to call about a bill and that’s when I assigned myself the time to call. I totally forgot about it once I got to work (that’s why we write these things down, remember?), and so I was surprised when my lunch hour came and “boom!” just like that guess what popped into my head? “Call Tmobile.” By writing it down and assigning it to a specific time, I kind of set my unconscious alarm to remind me about it. This time, it worked.

Another advantage of adding this “immediate next step” when it comes to my creative writing is that it gives my mind a preview of what is to come. For creative writing like fiction and essays, this is very important. Even if it’s happening subconsciously, it’s important to think about what you’re going to write before you sit down to do it (I call it “letting it simmer”). If I jot down “Start Essay on Personality (Mon Morning)” then my mind knows it’s sitting down on Monday to write this essay. It starts a countdown of sorts that I’ve found is incredibly helpful once you finally get to the writing part of it. Some people call it pre-writing — I call it “thinking before you write.” But most important, of course, is actually getting it done, which is what the whole book is about. A lot of people think inspiration and creativity are at the core of writing. And to a certain point they are, but a lot of time it’s just a matter of sitting down and cranking it out too.

It’s pretty cool that I only read 30 pages of this book and have already taken away something that has changed the way I keep track of my ideas. So if anyone else out there has read the book and thinks it’s worth it to keep reading the rest of it, please let me know if there’s anything else in there as good as this “next step,” because I think it’s a great idea and I’m already reaping the benefits of it.

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