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LifeWriting Articles
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Written by Steven Barnes
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Friday, 20 August 2010 07:09 |
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The most elusive quality of excellence, of peak performers worldwide and throughout history is that thing called "Mastery." What is this thing, and is it possible for ordinary people, however committed, to touch this exalted state? The answer is "yes," but I've got good news, bad news, and more good news. The first good news is that the path is deceptively simple. The bad news is that it is hard, and can be painful. The last, good news is that those on the path have no real competition—very few people are actually willing to be excellent in life. They want to talk about it, and dream about it, but are unwilling to actually pay the price. And this, as I've said, is very good indeed for those of us who are. The first thing we must do is devise a useful definition of "Mastery" whether we are talking about this quality in the domain of writing and the arts, of interpersonal interactions, of intellectual pursuit. Then we must throw light on a pathway to this quality that will enable us to reach our peak potential. Try this description: "Mastery is the ability to perfectly match energy and attention to the task at hand." In other words, if every task has a perfect "profile" of attention and ability necessary to complete it, if you bring either less or more of yourself to the task, you may well complete it, but you will struggle and waste energy—or not perform properly at all. Or try this description: "Mastery is the ability to perform instinctively and instantly in the manner you would perform had you a month to consider your actions." In other words, to have instant access to your own deepest capacities. In other words, Mastery is the place where intellectual or physical or emotional preparation meets pure instinct. The reflexes of an animal, the emotional purity of a child, the intellectual focus of a scholar. An incredible goal, designed to create incredible results. And the achievement of that goal is exactly what I.D.E.A. is about. Instinctive Designation of Energy and Attention. The deliberate cultivation of instinct, energy, and intellect to maximize your results as a writer, athlete, businesswoman, human being…whatever your goal. The theory is both childishly simple and devilishly difficult, but is your key to accessing your deepest wisdom. Basically, I.D.E.A. says that you develop your instincts by giving yourself deep feedback about the way you are currently operating in the world. To strip away illusion, and operate in a "truth zone" about the person you are and the world you live in. As the ancient Samurai Musashi Miyamoto once put it, "Do not think dishonestly." A commitment to total truth will tear the blinders from your eyes, possibly for the first time in your life. Sounds simple? Just wait. Here's the bad news. In order to be certain that you are accurate in your assessments, you must take responsibility for your life, and the results you have achieved (or occasionally endured!) in all three major arenas of your life: body, mind, and spirit. 1) Body is fitness and health. Your body should be in alignment with your own values, or you should be engaged in a daily process of cultivating the physical health and beauty and performance that WOULD reflect your values. Want to know if you are? Strip to your underwear and look in the mirror. If you are attracted to what you see, you are in alignment with your values. If you aren't, you aren't. It's as simple as that. 2) Mind. Mind manifests most clearly in our education and career. Any worm will move away from pain, and toward pleasure. Believe me, if you aren't working at a career you enjoy, it isn't due to lack of intellect. In such a case you may have emotional conflicts, value confusion about safety, freedom, and responsibility, and it would behoove you to commit to healing them. The core question: if you won the lottery next week, would you still be at your job next year? If not, you should accept the challenge of crafting for yourself a career path that IS that attractive. 3) Spirit. Just as grass bending can signal the presence of wind, the relationships we have with other human beings in THIS world can help us understand our connection to the divine. The most important relationship to address is the one with our most significant other, our husband or wife, or lifemate. The history of this aspect of our lives tells us an enormous amount about our inner world. The most important question: If you viewed your partner (or the average of your partners, over your relationship history) as being your mirror image, what would that say about you? And don't protest that they aren't, that there's no connection between you and the most important person in your life. What a joke! Our relationships measure our honesty, passion, intelligence, self-respect and general energy Take responsibility here. If you're happy with your relationship, pat yourself on the back! And if you're not…you have work to do. You need not tell another human being what you learn if you look at these three arenas, but YOU need to know. You need to come to some conclusions about how and why you are in the life space you are in. The answers to these questions must be consistent: in other words, you are willing to judge other people by the same standards you hold yourself to. In all likelihood, engaging in the I.D.E.A. process will give you vast compassion for other human beings: we are all battle-scarred, we are all magnificent, we have all failed, we have all succeeded. And we move on, toward the light. For an artist, and we are all artists, this process opens the door to a level of understanding most human beings never approach. If you walk this path, it's important to avoid guilt, blame, and shame—these emotions have no place in the evaluation of our lives. They merely cloud the issue. Meditation, dream diaries, therapy, or talking with good and supportive friends might be valuable to help move through the pain and confusion. What I promise you is that if you walk this path, you will be one of the very very few human beings on this planet who are actually committed to excellence. Mastery can be lonely…but as you climb that mountain, moving toward a more and more rarified level of performance, you will begin to meet the other climbers. And they will extend their hands to you, and welcome you into an extraordinary family...one bonded not by blood, but by spirit. ## I.D.E.A. is only one of the unique tools in the Lifewriting Year-Long program. Order your copy today at: www.lifewriting.biz Dark Dream 906 Ashworth Pl Glendora, CA 91741 US |
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David Farland
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Written by David Farland
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Sunday, 15 August 2010 07:30 |
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News Update: The Daily Kick Writing Groups voted to have each person assigned to a group when the writing group forum is first opened and then they can leave their groups at any time an join a group of their choosing. For more information on how your groups will be assigned go to: http://www.amberdine.com/forum. ### Update on Self-Publishing Venture Okay, last August I did my first self-publishing venture, and I promised periodic updates. This past week I delivered the last of my books to my distributor. I’m all out. I don’t have a single book left, though for those who would like one, there are still a few copies available through Deseret Book. My initial print run was 3066 copies, and those are out the door. As you may know, selling that many copies for a self-published book is very rare. I’ve heard that if you can sell a thousand copies, you’re doing very well. I’m sure that my name recognition helped. The book has of course earned back all of my costs for research, printing, and promotion and has even made a small profit—not enough to completely justify the work. The truth is that I would have made a lot more money writing a fantasy novel, but it was fun to do something different, and I didn’t go bankrupt writing the book. Beyond that, the book garnered rave reviews and won the Whitney Award for Best Novel of the Year, so even though the book hasn’t made me much money, it has enlarged my reputation. Now I’ve got to decide on the next step. Do I bring it out in trade paperback, or do I sell the rights to a mainstream publisher? I’m leaning toward the latter. I am talking to my distributor now, trying to decide whether to go ahead on a new print run. If I do go for a trade paperback, it will probably be more profitable than that first print run. After all, I’ve already earned back the money spent editing the book, creating a cover, researching it, and so on. Those expenses ran at something close to $10,000, so putting out a new edition makes sense economically. I just have to see whether pre-orders would justify the added costs. This approach was my initial plan, but I have to admit that it is now a bit muddled. I have a competing author who initiated a whisper campaign against my book, seeking to get booksellers to keep from carrying it. She’s been pretty effective, and if she hasn’t poisoned the waters completely, she’s at least muddied them good. So I’m also looking at going with a mainstream publisher. I have the book out to an agent. I advised him of the controversy, the rave reviews, and the award. We’ll see if he thinks it has potential for the national market. There is of course one last course of action—to let the book go out of print completely and just continue selling it only as an e-book. This of course would be the easiest thing to do. In any case, I hope to keep you posted within the next week or two of my decision. David Farland’s Daily Kick in the Pants—Managing Audience Expectations Several times over the past week, I’ve been reminded of the importance of managing audience expectations. For example, a few nights ago I caught the end of "America’s Got Talent," and caught a couple of acts that I found interesting. The first was from a goth magician, Dan Sperry, who did a delightful job of being weird, creepy, mesmerizing and ultimately frightening—as was his goal—but perhaps succeeded too well, at least for one of the judges. Dan did a very strange act where he swallowed a lozenge, then flossed his Adam’s apple—pulling the skin of his neck from side to side as he flossed, only to have the lozenge pop out of his throat. Howie Mandel watched the act with creeped-out fascination, but when Dan tossed the discarded floss and lozenge to Howie at the end, he totally freaked—leaping out of his seat in pure fright, which caused Sharon Osbourne to collapse into uncontrolled hysterical laughter. (Howie is literally a germophobe with OCD) Dan’s magic act was terrific, but his showmanship —his effect upon his audience—was even more wondrous. With most magic acts, if they’re well done we might say, "Wow, how did he do that?" But Dan Sperry delivered so much more than that. Following Dan came a 10-year-old girl named Jackie Evancho, whose astonishing voice is undoubtedly the best that I’ve heard in my lifetime from a child, hands down. Yet I found the lead-up to her performance to be rather uninteresting, compared to that of Susan Boyle. You see, Susan wowed us, but before she did, the lead-in pretty much had us convinced that her performance would be ridiculous. By lowering our expectations, by preparing us for an appalling performance, the power of her voice came to us as a total shock. As authors, we too need to learn this trick of under-promising and over-delivering. There are a lot of ways that it can be handled. For example, let’s say that you’re going to write a powerful romantic scene. You might look at how you can misdirect your audience. Perhaps you can prepare the reader for a "terrifying" scene that suddenly twists into romance, or you could pick some other negative emotion that you could play upon—tedium, disgust, loneliness. Or, you might have your protagonist imagine how her night will go—imagining that the night will be romantic—only to blow away the reader with a scene that surpasses all hopes, all expectations. So on a microscopic level, we need to learn to control our reader’s expectations on a line-by-line basis. On a novel-by-novel basis, authors also need to learn to control audience expectations. A couple of times this week, I’ve gotten emails from young authors asking, "Would you please go to my web page and consider buying my book? I’m trying to save it from literary oblivion." While I understand how the author feels, I sort of wish that the author would have something enticing to say about his or her own work. Perhaps a quote from a reviewer might help, or mention of its standing to win some award. At the same time, you don’t want to promise the reader too much. You don’t want to claim that your work is guaranteed to be the best book the reader has ever read. (I’ve heard that one a lot, too, and it really makes me want to hang on to the contents of my wallet.) Obviously, if the reader’s expectations are too high, they can never be met. Years ago, when Peter Jackson was chosen to direct Lord of the Rings, I was fascinated by the buzz in Hollywood. I’d seen Peter Jackson’s movie Heavenly Creatures, and I thought that he was a reasonable—and exciting—choice. However, people who were totally unfamiliar with him worked hard to lower expectations. I was taking a meeting at one of the major studios at that time, and I recall one studio VP scratching his head and asking, "Who the hell is this little ----? Why didn’t they get a ‘real’ director?" Even Peter Jackson worked to lower viewer’s expectations. I expected great things from him, but in one early interview, he was asked how he would handle the problem of having too-few female characters in the movie, thus cutting out the potential female audience. He responded by saying that he would expand the role of one of the elf princesses, making her more of a warrior, "sort of like Xena, but with bigger (breasts)." At the time, I wondered if it was only a sick joke, or if Jackson really was an idiot after all. Now, I suspect that he was cleverly making sure that he didn’t try to raise fan’s hopes too much. He already had a vision of the film, and he knew that it was compelling. Even when it comes to entire careers, an author needs to learn to control his or her audience. When you write your first novel, you want to come onto the scene with a bang. You need to get as much attention from critics, reviewers, and readers as possible. You want to create a stir—but guess what? If you come out and write "the best novel ever," your career has nowhere to go but down. Very often, I’ve seen new writers who compose five or six books before they get one published. However, as soon as an editor buys a book, very often the editor will ask, "So, what else have you got?" The author then pulls out one of his early "trunk novels," and asks, "What do you think of this?" Well, there might have been a lot of growth in the author between his second novel and his sixth, but the editor will often agree that "This is pretty darned good!" So the trunk novel comes out second. The first novel might well then raise audience expectations, only to have them dashed by the trunk novel. Thus, a career is pretty much ruined. Don’t let this happen to you! Resist the urge to sell your trunk novels. You might gain a short-term monetary reward, but you’ll do it at the expense of your career. Instead, you need to work hard to beat critic’s expectations on your second novel, and again on your third. You want to establish a pattern of excellence. In short, at every turn, you need to learn as an author to manage your audience’s expectations.
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