2nd "Lifewriting for Writers" principle: Write 1-4 short stories per month.

Hello there. Steve Barnes here with Life Writing Live. You know, this is. I'm keeping my promise, keeping my promise to do this more often. So far, so good for the year. I'm going to actually try to center it around noon just so you could kind of get used to me being here. And if you have comments or questions or requests, you can ask them. These are going to be short and hopefully sweet. And I hope that everybody out there is feeling good and hopefully you've made some plans for the year and you're starting to take those actions that will help bring your plans to life. That's the whole thing. And I think that I mentioned that my goal is to improve myself by 10% overall. Now, there's no strict quantification of any of that. Obviously there is, you know, subjective elements involved in that, but it works for me to think that way. It means I push myself a little harder physically or actually, it's not a matter of pushing myself harder. It's developing the capacity to push myself harder and recover from it. So at this point in my life, recovery is more interesting than how hard can I push myself? It used to be, how hard can I push myself? Because when you're that age, you can work hard all day and party all night and sleep five hours and get up and do it again. I'm not at that days in my life anymore. And one of the things that hurts people the most is when they can't admit that. So I'm admitting that. And so I am constantly looking for ways to help my body recover from what it is that I'm doing. And hopefully we'll kind of get into that family wise. That's my sense of peace and meditation, my relationship with my wife and my relationship with my family, especially my son and daughter. In career wise, I just want to jump that up a level. I have some very specific things I can measure that in terms of sales or number of things published or the amount of money made, things like that. So that's relatively easy to quantify. Today, just talking about the Life Writing for Writers process, again, the first step is to write at least one sentence every day. That's to get you in the game. If you're writing at least one sentence a day, then I can work with you and I can help you. And there are any number of different things that can be done. The second step is to write one to four short stories a month. Now, the truth is, if all you can write is one sentence a day, a 30 sentence piece of flash fiction is absolutely doable so literally, you could write a story a day or 12 stories a year just writing a sentence a day. But let's, you know, stories that are the kind of length that most people think about when they think about stories are longer than that, of course. But what you'll find out is that if you do a sentence a day, you will automatically create the room to write more than a sentence a day. So it's a little bit like saying you're going to get dressed and go down to the track and run one lap when your goal is to run a marathon eventually. Well, if you do all take all the steps necessary to run one lap, you're probably going to run 2 laps, 3 laps, 4 laps by the time you get down there. If you've done everything else, it's relatively easy to motivate yourself to do more. So that's the thing. Now, when people talk about short stories, the typical argument is, my ideas come out in trilogy length, or my ideas come out in novel length, or I want to write screenplays. Well, all of those things are ambitions to do huge things. Let's say, if your ambition is to write a novel, that's like saying, I want to run a marathon. Well, that's all well and good if you're already a runner, but if you've never run, then you need to run around the block first. You know, you need to, you know, what equipment do you need and how much do you need to hydrate? And what happens, how do you need to warm up, how do you need to cool down, how do you need to stretch, how much rest do you need, what kind of food do you need to eat? On and on and on and on. There are lots of different things that you will have to learn if you go slowly. If, on the other hand, you do like some unwise people do every year, they've never run and they decide to run a marathon and they kill themselves. And then they. It's like, oh God, I guess running isn't for me. No, it's not for them because they did not work their way up to it. Same thing is going to be true with writing a novel. If you learn how to write a short story. Everything you need to learn about writing novels is contained in micro form in a short story. And you can finish a short story in a single day or a single week, let alone a single month, whereas a novel can take years. I've known people who have unfinished novels that they've been working on for decades, and what they never did was tell the truth. That they're afraid to finish, that they don't know how to finish, that they have emotional blockages or mental misconceptions or executive function, lack of executive function. That if they'd ever said, listen, I'm scared to finish this, and I have a hard time, I'm kind of. I'm confused, they would then be able to go out and get the resources necessary to solve those problems. I mean, that's what intelligence is. Intelligence is problem solving. So you want to set up a situation where every day you're becoming more and more conversant with your problems, with what looks like on the inside of your heart, what it looks like on the inside of your head, and beginning to know yourself and say, okay, I have a hard time keeping commitments. When I do keep commitments, it's because I made them to somebody else or because there is some pain involved or because there's a big reward involved. Learning how to. You do what you do is learning how to operate the machinery of your heart and your head and your body. Once. If you keep track of these things, if every day you engage yourself with your body, you engage yourself with your heart, you engage yourself with your mind, you start getting information, you start getting feedback about who you are, what works, what doesn't work, under what circumstances do you function? Well, for instance, my wife Tananarive, has a psychological aspect that I call obsesso. When obsesso kicks in, obsesso will work 10 hours a day and think it's tap dancing. I mean, just think it's for fun. And there are very specific. And also, obsesso is brilliant. Obsesso can do anything I've never seen. Once she clicks into that place inside herself, nothing can stop her. Tananarive is just amazing. So one of the things I asked her is, under what circumstances does abscesso kick in? Well, for one thing, when she is doing things that connect with the values that her mother taught her, in other words, that she learned as a little girl, obsesso is much more likely to kick in. It has to be totally ethical. It has to be to the benefit of her family or her community. There are any number of things that's not entirely true. Sometimes it's just for herself. That's true. It has to connect to something she. She wants or that she wants to do for the people that she loves. So that means that anytime she wants to achieve a level of excellence, if she can find a way that doing that thing connects with the values that she learned from her mom or a way that it helps her family or a way that it's fun. There's more and more chance that obsesso will show up. Obsesso does not show up on demand. Obsesso is like a cat, not a dog. It doesn't just come when you whistle. So learning how to court your own creative muse. Critical. Learning how to motivate yourself. Critical. Learning how to gain greater clarity on what you want to accomplish. Critical. And what I want you to accomplish. What I want you to do is say, I'm going to write one to four short stories a month. If they're really short stories. I mean, I'm trying to make. Talk about two pages. If you write. If your goal is to write a two page, a three page short story every week, in a year, you're going to have turned out over 50 short stories. That's a blistering pace. That's enough time to become truly expert. And if you're following the rules of this game, you're really going to understand how to do this by that time. So that's all I wanted to talk about today. Continue to ask me questions and I will try to answer them. We're going to go over the other six steps. Maybe I'll do two more steps tomorrow so we get finished with this the first week. I want to remind you that our podcast is starting on Sunday, Sunday the 9th, I think it is. And you can, once it's up, you'll be able to pick it up@lifewritingpodcast.com lifewritingpodcast.com Totally free. I can't wait to see you there. Take care and I'll talk to you tomorrow.