persistence

Hi, Steve Barnes here with Life Writing Live. Boy, the last two weeks have been so busy, and the next couple weeks are going to be equally busy. So I'm right in the middle of it. So we're going to talk about a lot of different things here. And I just wanted to remind you that if you enjoy these talks, if you enjoy the subject and the presentation, the way we're doing this, please share this video. Sharing the video, we take a look at the shares this. That's how we know which topics and presentations are working for people. So weekend before last, I gave a presentation at the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society on how to write a book, a year with a sentence a day. And I've been ever since then. Basically, I found a really great app for my phone that allows me to record videos, not videos, record the audio, and then upload it to get it transcribed. And that makes things very, very, very convenient. So what I did was I had it transcribed and then I took the transcription and began to lightly edit it. And so that's what's been appearing on my blog and on my Facebook page over the last couple of weeks, is the lightly edited transcriptions. Then I'm going to take those transcriptions and the comments that people made about things in connection with it and turn that into a book. It's going to be a relatively thinking about some things, about the length of Ray Bradbury's classic book, Zen and the Art of Writing, and in other words, 50 pages, maybe something you can read in an hour. Because I want people to be able to get the meat of this as fast as possible. So that is very satisfying to me because the things that I've learned in this sense, I've reached that point in my life where I want to give those things away as quickly as possible. So what I wanted to talk about is Step six. And I'm deliberately not going over all six steps in each video. I'm going to choose one step and kind of emphasize it today because it was. It represented the last step of six. And that is to repeat a process 100 times, the process that I that I lay out. Let me tell you where this came from when I was early in my career. First of all, you know, for those of you who don't know, my name is Steve Barnes. I'm a professional novelist and a father and husband and martial artist. And to a certain degree, I try to live my life in a way that any value I have in any one of those arenas is available in the other arenas as well. So you Know, a lot of my philosophy comes out of that. When I was starting out my career, I dropped out of college, you know, got a job in Hollywood and started writing stories and started writing and writing and writing. And I was working just, you know, menial jobs. Anything I get working at a bookstore, working here, working there. No career path stuff. Because the career that I chosen for myself was to be a writer, a novelist, you know, Hollywood writer, saying, I'm going to get rich doing this. Because I'd always had these dreams, and I'd always been a good storyteller, and I tried to work at getting better, at being a storyteller. So I figured this is what it is I wanted to do, but I also wanted a family, and I wanted a home. I wanted some security. So the question was, well, can I make it doing this? I mean, that voice was definitely in my head, and I had limited amount of support for what it is that I wanted to do with my life. There were people who would support me. You know, I had friends who enjoyed the writing that I did. I had a couple of teachers. Mrs. Otterness, I remember in junior high school, supported my writing. But there were many who basically took the position that I could not do it. And as I've said to people before, for almost 20 years, I was the only black male science fiction writer in the world. So far as I could determine, Chip Delaney had left the field. So it was me and Octavia, and it was unspeakably lonely and unspeakably frightening because there really was the possibility that I couldn't make it, that the. The world, the field, the market, the industry would not be responsive to me. So let's. Let's take race out of the equation. I didn't know, just as a young writer, I didn't know anybody who'd made a living as a writer, you know, so what exactly do you do, you know? How do you get there? I literally had no idea how to do it. So I began bullying my way forward. But every time I sent out a story and got a rejection, the voices in my head would tell me, this is the beginning of the end. That, see, you can't do it. You never had any talent. You never had any ability. This is an impossible dream. And those voices can be monstrous, and they may steal your heart. And I've had the same voices in my head, you know, when my first marriage died, you know, no one will ever love you. There's something twisted and broken inside you. You know, when I had no father and my mom would date A guy. And I would, you know, God, I was desperate for male attention and affection. You know, just, am I such an ugly thing that no one wants to be my daddy in martial arts? It took me 17 years to earn my first black belt. I was dealing with so much fear and uncertainty. And I clearly remember, you know, thinking, there's no way. I'm never going to get over that line. I'm broken. I can't do this. And the same thing was true with my writing. It was that sense of, what if they're right? What if they're wrong? What if I don't have what it takes? Fortunately, I came to a decision. And that decision was, I'm going to set some arbitrary number, and until I have written that number of stories, I'm not going to evaluate whether or not I have the ability to do this thing. I will suspend judgment, and I will tell all the negative voices in my head to go to hell. The question was, what should that number be? Well, my research had suggested that the average published writer, professional writer, was. Wrote somewhere between 25 and 30 stories before they began to sell, or at least, you know, they'd submitted that many. You know, I don't know how many they did before they started submitting. But if that was true, if about 30 was the average outside, I decided, I will triple that number. I'll more than triple that number. I said, I will set an arbitrary number of 100 stories, and until I hit 100 stories, I will simply consider that my job is to stay on the path, keep working, keep striving. And what I was doing was I was creating room for all the demons in the back of my head, the demons in my heart, the doubting voices, giving them room to scream and shriek and claw at me without damaging my belief, because my belief in myself was hanging by a thread. You know, it was. It was nothing but ego. People who knew me back in those days could tell you just, you know, how egotistical I was in the sense of being cocksure, knowing that I'm going to do this, and that is because I needed that to battle against the voices in my head that said, no, you won't, and 100 stories. So I wrote and I polished what I wrote, and I submitted them. I kept reading, I kept working, and I worked my day job, Think about stories on the bus, come home and write. And I did this, and I kept writing and submitting and writing and submitting and writing and submitting, and. And I made it to about story number 23 when I sold My first story. I sold my first story. I was about 27, 28. I sold my first story. And even though I was still getting rejections, I knew something else. The average writer did not publish until they were about 32. I was just about five years ahead of the curve. And so despite all of that insecurity, I could kind of grin about that. I kind of smile about that. It's like, oh, maybe I have something. Maybe I have a little spark of something. And let me tell you something. You know, you go through this process. You submit stories, and mostly you get rejection slips. And then one day you'll get a rejection slip note from an editor saying something like, nice try. You know, we'd like to see something else from you in the future. And that tells you getting closer to your goal. So it's critical to give yourself room to succeed, to give yourself room to fail before we succeed, to assume that, no, you don't have the ability to do this now, but you can acquire the ability. You can learn, you can grow, you can change, you can research, you can get better allies. You can strengthen your emotions. You can do it faster, harder, better. That you can learn that. If you take a look at the other things that you try to do in your life. Walking and talking and riding a bicycle, making love, whatever it is that you've learned along the path, you were clumsy when you first started, and then you gained skills. And while you're gaining those skills, hopefully there was somebody who told you, we believe in you. You can keep going, keep doing this. You fell down, you skinned your knee. It's okay, get back up again. Think about a baby trying to learn how to walk. How many times does the baby fall down? Hundreds. And if mommy and daddy are scared when baby tries to walk, baby will stop trying. But if every time baby walks or tries to walk, takes a step, falls down, baby looks at you and you say, good baby. Wonderful. Yay. The baby will laugh, and they'll begin to associate trying with pleasure instead of failing with pain. And this is what you need. You have to believe that even if you aren't where you need to do right now, there is a path you can take. That if you stay on that path, you'll get better and better. Better. And if you believe that and if your path is true, you'll get there. You know, it felt. There's so many different things that are going on right now, and I get overwhelmed sometimes, so I have to be sure to write down on paper everything that I need, you know, all the goals that I have and why I have them, why they're important, and then how everything that I'm doing relates to one of those goals. And every one of those goals relates to some core emotional need. There'll be two different needs, basically, you know, to survive or to connect. Those are. Those are the most powerful needs that I have to. You know, connection is service. You know, what can I do for my audience? What can I do for you guys that come on here and listen to me. Let me know what it is that I can do for you, whatever it is that you're trying to do. I believe that there are these minimum doses of action that if you take them every day, you'll get to your goal. And if you can define that minimum action and that minimum action is smaller than the number of valid excuses you can find, what will happen is the fear. The things that stop you from achieving will be exposed as fear. And it's not that the fear is easy to deal with. The fear is easier to deal with than the doubt. If, you know, I could do this if I were not afraid, then you can begin to gather the resources necessary to deal with your fear in a healthier fashion. And once you've done that, it's very hard to stop somebody who doesn't let their fear stop them. So don't let your fear stop you. Don't let your doubt stop you. Give yourself room to fail again and again and again and again. Find out what the average number of failures is in your industry before people actually make it triple that number, and just say, I'm going to keep doing it. The same way that you were determined to walk when you were a baby, Same way that you would talk to a child of yours who's trying to learn how to walk. Would you tell them to give up after they'd fallen down a dozen times? No, you'd say, keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. And then one day they would walk, and then they would run. And you've done your job, which is to prepare your child to survive without you. Or you've done your job to yourself, which is to give your. Your dreams room to grow. Don't kill them when they're tiny. Protect them until they're strong enough to protect themselves. Like. Like the Khaleesi with her dragons. She protected the dragons until the dragons could protect her. All right, that's all for today. I will be talking back with you again soon. Once again, if this talk and these talks have been useful to you, be sure to share. That's how we know you. Take care. If you want to know more about the writing program, you can get a free lecture on the whole thing@www.lifewritingsentence.com. take care, guys. Bye Bye.