Writers: You already know you should be writing every day. These things don’t count as writing:
Writing marketing copy for your last book
Reading book reviews
Pruning your wish list at Amazon.com
Commenting on blogs about books and/or writing
Researching source material for your new book
Editing what you wrote yesterday
Reading books about how to write
Outlining the plot of the book you want to write
Reading blog posts about writing
Reading great literature
Reading trash literature
Reading biographies of writers you admire
Talking with your editor
Networking with other writers about writing
Shopping for or buying a new journal
Shopping for or buying a new pen
Reading reviewing of journals
Reading reviews of pens
Searching ebay for new journals or pens
Looking for a quiet space where you might write one day
Reading reviews of local coffee shops where you might write one day
Trying out distraction-free writing software
Adding writing to your to-do list
Adding a writing project to your GTD outline
Meditating on how it will feel when you actually do some writing
Discussing how you never write but really really want to with your friend/spouse/therapist
Researching a hack that will make you write everyday even when you don’t feel like it
Reading this blog post

What counts as writing: moving your hand across the paper or keyboard and letting words out

A writer friend confessed that she had begun to think that “raw talent is the main determining factor of how good a writer you can be, and not just practice and time.”

No way. Here’s why that idea is wrong, and how you can prove it to yourself.

Getting better takes practice and time. But the only writers that really practice with the right mind–one that is open for change–can profit from the time and practice. I mean, I could practice for 50 years and never be Shakespeare, but I would be 50 times better than without the practice.

Prove this to yourself by trying to imitate Alice Munro. She is all short stories. She can do more in a paragraph than most writers do with a whole book. Seriously. She can communicate an entire personality and make you feel like you know everyone in the story before she’s written two full pages. It is amazing. And while plenty of good writers do that well, Alice Munro is a master of it.

Her stories keep everything moving right along but the reader is learning so much about the characters that make them
real at the same time. In these days of short, to-the-point writing–Faulkner would never be published today–it is a key skill, essential to getting your fiction (and non-fiction as well) the attention it deserves, both from traditional publishers and readers. Your writing will feel more fresh and current if it steps with the times, if it feels like it was written today or tomorrow instead of ten or a hundred years ago.

So if you want to get better, try to imitate Alice Munro. And watch how time spent copying her style pays off by improving your own work.

How well do you know your characters? Whether you are working on fiction or fact, you can’t write well what you don’t know well. If you don’t understand what your characters are doing, who they are, where they came from, do you think your readers will?

I don’t expect you to know what everything means in some sense of cosmic significance. You don’t have to be a third person narrator God. But you do–at the very least–have to see what is happening. If there are tears in the corner of her eye, just there, write about them. Who cares if the reader doesn’t need to know that once the story is finished? That’s why God made editors, and why He gave you time for cutting and rewriting. If it’s unnecessary later, it’s gone.

But if it’s not, if it is really the little glimpse of something coming only later, after some big reveal or expected twist or unexpected turn of phrase, then congratulations! You just became the master of foreshadowing. And a more interesting writer.

But that doesn’t happen if you don’t know your characters. Knowing them means watching them. Looking through their scrapbooks. Reading the labels in his shirts. Studying how she applies her make-up. And then writing it down. Significance–and vital, living writing–comes from this.

It would be easier to write if you focused on how your voice is unique to you. It’s a cliche, I know. But it’s a cliche because it is true. Lies don’t become cliches.

Your voice has been crafted by every experience you’ve ever had–all those repressed moments of disappointment, every experience that lifted your heart into your throat, all the pain that squashed your joy–everything that is yours is also no one else’s. No one could have had, and no one else has had, your life.

Write as only you can. If you write like others, you will be ignored, and rightfully so. I can pick up hundreds of books in any bookstore where authors are trying to write like someone else.

Can’t you find your voice? Here’s an exercise I discovered years ago: imagine you have one chance to speak to a large crowd gathered to meet you. One sentence is all you’ve got. After that sentence, the crowd will decide to stay for one more sentence, or to leave. Over and over again.

If you waste the chance trying to sound like someone else, they’ll find someone else. But sound like yourself, put effort into the opportunity to have their attention focused just on you, and you’ll keep them.

Now go write.

Faulkner thought that Hemingway was so popular (compared to him, at the time they were both alive) because Hemingway set the bar so low for his own work. Faulkner’s favorite of his own writing was where he aimed the highest, no matter how far he fell short. He called them his most splendid failures.

Your competition aims for mass appeal and gets it. But you should aim for a more discerning audience, and must intend to, because you want to write for a smarter, more selective audience. Let your competing writers get away with more because his audience has a pallet only for what is commonly provided. Soar above what is common.

And it is moments like this where literary trivia can be useful, even buoyant, that make my day worthwhile.

The written word is the optimal medium for your ideas. And your ideas are what set you apart from everyone else.

Sometimes when you write about your ideas, the words get in the way. When the words you use distract the reader, they are not letting your ideas flow. That is a problem. That is a problem that an editor can help with.

A good editor can help you get the words down on the page. For many of my clients, knowing that I am there to help filter out the words that aren’t working is freeing knowledge. A good editor is like a safety harness–you take more chances knowing that missteps will not kill you. And when you take more chances in writing down your ideas, your ideas get better.

And your writing gets better. Better writing attracts the best readers, who give you great comments, improving your ideas even more.

So if you want to have better ideas, hire an editor. It’s not an intuitive relationship to most people, but once you see the connections, it’s hard to refute.

A Wisconsin judge rules that the long-standing (since 1952) National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional, and is anyone surprised that plenty of conservatives online are complaining?

Sure, there is historical precedent for the National Day of Prayer, all the way back to the Continental Congress, making the practice older than the United States itself. But there’s historical precedent for lots of things that we no longer do, like owning slaves or having more than one spouse. So don’t argue based on precedent; precedent doesn’t guarantee correctness.

And yes, this decision was the result of an effort by a small but determined minority (the Freedom From Religion Foundation) but that’s hardly a criticism of the decision. History abounds with examples of minorities bringing practices into focus for the purpose of aligning them with higher principles, one of which is religious freedom.

If you want to pray, then pray. Pray today, tomorrow, and pray on May 6, which would have been this year’s official day to pray. But if you don’t want to pray–for whatever reason–then this year, finally, you won’t have the U.S. government telling you how you ought to pray on May 6, or any other day. That is progress. This is a nation coming to grips with higher principles, learning to stop “encouraging” a practice that it has no business in.

I’m not suggesting that everyone keep his religion to himself. I’m suggesting that our government does no one–Christian, Muslim, Agnostic, nor Atheist–any favors by encouraging anyone to pray. Pray if you want to. But don’t expect the government to get involved one way or another. It’s just good sense to keep the government out of your (or my) religious practices.

It took me about 34 years to learn that I don’t need to buy a pack of peanut M&M’s just because they are right there next to the check-out line. 34 years to learn to choose not to spend my money on impulse purchases. At least not on impulse purchases of candy. My bookshelf betrays me as a not-yet-recovered impulse book buyer.

If you can choose only one of two things, and you aren’t satisfied after you choose, you learn to choose better. That’s what finally worked for me–my dissatisfaction with how I felt after eating M&M’s taught me something.

If you want to teach your children to make good choices, teach them how to handle limited resources, like their money, well. My parents started me out with an allowance of a few dollars a week, but that was the 1970’s. Decades later, I was still buying M&M’s. Their approach to an allowance didn’t work for me. Here’s what I learned from their mistakes:

1) Give your children their allowance; don’t make them ask you for it.

At ten years old, I had been receiving an allowance for several weeks but hadn’t actually held the first dollar. So, one afternoon at a music store, I asked my father for my allowance. He asked me why I wanted it. Think about that–when was the last time your employer asked you to explain how you were going to spend your paycheck?

2) If your child doesn’t control the money, they might as well not have any.

I didn’t ask my father how he spent his paycheck. I just explained that I wanted to buy an album–Elton John’s Greatest Hits. He said no. Just like that. No reason given–he had cash, he always had cash. We had time for me to shop–my mother was in a shoe store next door for over 45 minutes. The simplest explanation was that he did not want me to buy the album–did he not approve of the music? I learned nothing, except that he still controlled the money even though it was “my” allowance.

3) Preventing mistakes prevents learning from mistakes.

If I had bought that album, I think I would have been disappointed soon after. My best friend already had it. That was the only way I discovered music then–through friends. And I had already heard every song about 25 times.

What I wanted, in retrospect only–I had not yet been cursed with the full extent of my coming self-awareness–was to own the album. To hold it in my hands anytime I wanted. I wanted to meet a need by spending my allowance, a poor use of money at any age. But, had I been allowed to make that mistake, I might have begun to learn to avoid that mistake before I was in my 30’s.

There’s a lot of hoopla lately about Texas and their history textbooks. Or more precisely, about the Texas State Board of Education and the textbook standards they recently voted into office. The new books are supposed to be more accurate. That means less Roosevelt, more Reagan, less Jefferson, more Confederacy. Or so Roger Ebert says.

This Texas textbook controversy is just the latest culture war skirmish. But if you want to understand what textbooks do, why they matter, and maybe why they don’t have to matter so much–beyond Texas–read on.

1. History textbooks never offer objective truth.

I spent about a third of my college degree on history. When I chose that major, I expected to get plenty of reading time, plenty of facts, and a wealth of understanding about how and why people did what they did, way back when. It took me about a semester and a half to achieve complete disappointment.

Disillusioned disappointment, actually. Historiography disillusioned me; that -ography is the study of how people and countries and everyone changes their collective story—their history—over time. Changing the past happens every generation or so, or even several times in a generation. It’s so natural and common that it would be completely weird if Texas wasn’t revising the past.

So my disappointment came when I realized that there’s a lack of objective truth that no amount of learning can fill. I was disappointed to learn that there is not just one story, not just one reason why, for anything, for everything.

The past is more our collective invention than anything else.

2. History textbooks always have a point of view.

We take our invented past, our collective story, and we put it into textbooks.

We make guesses about the past and write our history, based on what someone wrote, or what someone said, or what someone thought someone said, or maybe even what bits of the past suit your current philosophy.

It’s the last option, more than you’d think. It’s natural. It’s what we do. We learn some facts, we try to analyze them, but everything we think, everything we say about our experience or the collective American experience, has a perspective. Is anyone surprised that Texas by and large thinks Christianity influenced our founding fathers more than what they read in textbooks written before the modern age of Right-Thinking-Christians versus Everyone-Else-Even-Moderate-Christians?

The past is more our collective, changing invention than anything else.

3. History textbooks don’t discuss current events, but they do change them.

Our country’s founders framed our nation in the Constitution. And then they passed the country and the Constitution on to the next generation. Knowing more about who they were and what they said and in whom they believed doesn’t necessarily inform our choices now.

But what we tell our children, what we teach our children if we teach them anything, in large part determines our future. The stories they learn now will shape their thoughts, feelings, and opinions on everything that comes along later.

You’re here today. What do you want today? What do you want your child to believe, and act on, later?

4. History textbooks can become less important than they are.

Other states use the books that Texas chooses because those textbooks become the cheapest ones. But that happens only when local parents like you allow it to. How about going to a local school board meeting and asking for better textbooks? They (and you) are abdicating a responsibility to choose well by choosing only on price.

But insisting on better textbooks is only a tiny step. Real improvement comes when you get involved personally, well beyond simply griping about Texas textbook standards on your Facebook status.

Your child has questions. Find our what they are. Try to answer them. Try to find the answers with them. Teach your children that challenging the story is the best skill that school can teach them, even if it is not trying to. And if your child doesn’t have questions, then your first question is, “What happened to his curiosity?”

If you don’t know how to investigate and research, how did you find this post? Do that for your question. Google it. Go to Wikipedia. Ask your friends for help in finding resources.

Your local teachers will love the help. Start by asking your child’s teacher his first name. Find out what she needs and how you can help her get it. This conversation is not about you pushing a specific story or book or point of view into her classroom. This act is about you getting involved at home and at school by connecting. And then helping your child and his teacher use the best resources well, not just the cheapest, most convenient ones in all the traditional, rote-learning ways.

Textbooks establish merely the starting point for learning. They become an ultimate authority only when teachers and students and parents stop questioning and stop learning and stop talking.