H is for Habits

Sometimes, rarely, success is a gift to the person receiving it. Call it luck. Like lightning though, the odds of being hit are highly unlikely and almost never in the same place twice. Better to develop a work ethic and rely on that for success instead. While it does not guarantee success, at least it is more consistent.

The "H" word was almost Harlan Coben. He's one of my favorite writers. Reading an interview of him got me thinking about "H" word habit. When asked about his success, he talked mostly about "hard work" involving his back side in a chair every day, with some sort of typing device in front of him. It seems he is also in the habit of writing about things he knows. Like basketball, life in New Jersey, kids, and the suburbs. He does an exceedingly good job. I do wonder though where he knows the sociopath that he based his character "Win" upon. That guy is a load. A load of strange attributes, but paired with Myron they make one of my favorite all-time set of partners.

Nothing fancy today. Habits are simple. I think writers need them, but more important they need to stick with them until the book is done. They then need to be resumed when the next book is started.

G is for Goal

I just read an article about one of my favorite authors, Harlan Coben. Hope I got this name right. A and E are hard to keep straight. An immensely successful author that keeps it simple in spite of his success. I would suggest the opposite - his simplicity in writing is what keeps him successful. His character, Myron Bolitar, is the only character I know, besides my group of Shoshone high school girls in the Lemhi Valley, that plays basketball as part of the setting in a book.

Goals are simple things, part of what I think every writer should use. Maybe Mr. Coben does too. An entry a day in the case of this 26 consecutive day challenge. The large size of writing a book is intimidating when viewed as a whole. The simple tool of setting a goal helps reduce that size and intimidation. One page today. One chapter this week. One thing at a time done over and over. Soon the habit starts and soon that big immense thing always murky and vague in the future is halfway done, because of the many small goals you set and achieved on the way to getting that novel of yours done. Try one. Set one. Complete one. And then do it all over again.

Why Writing?

So our youngest daughter is a ninth grader. First year of high school. She has a language arts class. Seems like a typical LA class, not much changed from the classes I vaguely remember taking back in the day. She comes home with an assignment to write three poems.

She does.

I know that as a parent I am hopelessly biased, but nonetheless her poems were wonderfully shockingly good. Heartfelt and well written, they were a view into the world of a young teenager.

Anyway, life goes on and a few days later we're talking again about something school related and she says, "...Dad that's all school is - is memorizing. We sit there all day. At night I memorize [x] and the next day we take a test...." Again, not all that far from what I remember of my days in the class room. By and large rote memorization and then regurgitation of said facts is what many think of as education.

I have a point and I'm getting to it I promise...

The 3/1/2015 Sunday paper comes along and "Pearls Before Swine" by Stephen Pastis, has Willy and two characters talking about studying for a history test. All three question the worth of history. The column ends with the mouse character whipping out his smart phone and googling the answers to the history questions that Willy asks. Ridiculously easy with a few seconds on a phone keyboard. The point driven home being one of the worth of traditional education, when in so many cases in these times, all you have to do is whip out a device and do an online search for the answer. Many would say that traditionally storing facts away in a young cranium is now of questionable value, as simplistically illustrated in this comic. That I really like by the way.

For me this is a valid point. Should the bulk of education still consist of fact recitation and regurgitation, followed by forgetting said facts and likely never using them again? If not, what should education become? A HUGE questions to which NO absolute answers have emerged, only a few smaller relative answers.

Now my point......

Why write?

Man, woman and child should write because the act of writing, simplistically and with much being left unsaid, is analysis and raw creative effort. Writing is not a fact you memorize and spit up on a test. Writing poetry is delving into your brain and creating something original and unseen. Some NOT memorized. In clichéd consultant speak you are "adding value". I think you are. I think my daughter did. She did it amazingly well and in a way that shows the power a young brain has when it leans into something and really wants to create in lieu of memorize.

To me that makes writing, one of humanity's first great creations and possibly our most used commodity, something that is special and worth the effort. You can't memorize, you have to sit there and work your brain until words come out on paper or screen. For me, in a time where so much education is still fact-based memorization of ever-lessening value, writing endures as a skill well worth developing in brains regardless of age or place.