Xenosthesia.com

Inspiration to Write

Have you ever felt the urge to write a novel? Feel like you don’t have time for that? Do you think such a large project is too time consuming?

The average person types around 40,000 words in the form of emails each year.

Does knowing that statistic change your mind?

If you’re the frequent emailer of this statistic, you could easily write a novel in a year.

A decent novel is 40,000 to 70,000 words long. 90,000 and more words is professional level. If you’re starting out, you don’t need to aim for professional level. Aim for a moderate amount of words. Aim for that 40 to 70 K. This is a reasonable goal.

Here’s a good way to break that larger goal into smaller goals: write an outline.

Within the outline, break up the action/events into chapters. Make a goal of 20 chapters. If you then make a goal of 2,000 words per chapter, there’s your 40,000 words. Bam!

You may have realized already that you’ll have to do more than one chapter per month to achieve your goal within one year. Wowee zowee, that’s a lot! However, if you start out with two per month, you’ll be in fine shape. Don’t worry too much about it. The main thing will be to maintain any momentum you gain. Things can change in a year. Obstacles can get in your way. You might fall down. Your urge to write may wax and wane. There are as many ways to stop writing as there are reasons to start. Keep your momentum.

Another thing to consider is the time and place. Just like any healthy habit, you’ll need to schedule the time and reserve a location. Possibly you have time during lunch for writing. Maybe you have to block out an hour or four in the evening. Whatever the case, make sure you let others know you have a scheduled time for writing so you’ll have fewer interruptions. Find a specific place where you can either have the stimulation you need or the lack of stimulation, whichever helps you most.

Finally, reward yourself at intervals. If you get four chapters written in the first two months, give yourself some positive motivation. Writing rewards are different for every writer. Some go for chocolate. Others will buy themselves a new pen. Still others will buy themselves a new pair of shoes. Whatever thrills you.

Whatever inspires you—do that.

buymoreandsave

Encased in marketing chestnuts so hard as to need a hammer drill to escape.

But which hammer drill?

The top brand?

Recommended by four out of five?

A similar generic?

A cheaper, well-known brand?

Or will the need to get out require a much bigger lever? A much bigger hammer? Will the task require Mjolnir itself?

How long the m-junkies pile it on will determine how deeply sunk you are. How deep you are will determine how much power you need to get free.

If the sales machine gets any more repetitive, everyone will forget their own language, like in those moments when you hear a word and it turns to nonsense in your brain. Like when you find out Hi means yes in Japanese—except they spell it h-a-i—then suddenly two words don’t make sense.

When everyone forgets, no one will know how to even ask for a hammer drill, unless it’s in marketing terms.

Great value.

Convenience.

Advanced prime innovation.

Rolls

When you were a child, you found the middle of the toilet paper roll fascinating. Maybe you sent a marble through it, or a Hot Wheels car. You might have even taped two tubes together and imagined they were binoculars. It was a simple thing, but it was limitless in your imagination.

Not long after, you upgraded to the paper towel roll. Longer than the t.p. roll, the tube in the center could become a spyglass, a telescope, a periscope, or a longer ride for your toy car.

Then came the day your eyes grew ten sizes bigger than normal. It was the day you saw the tube at the center of a roll of wrapping paper.

Your brain went crazy with ideas. It said to you, “Look at the size of that thing.”

You didn’t care about the wrapping paper that came before, which died at your hands for birthdays or possibly Christmases, when it was ripped and shredded and quickly discarded. What really mattered then was the giant cardboard tube which you discovered hiding in the center of the wrapping paper roll.

Whether you made it into a tunnel for your Littlest Pet Shop toys, or a Lightsaber, or a super long track for Hot Wheels, you knew this was the best present you ever had. It was better than many of the previous presents you unwrapped. And why? Because it fueled your imagination.

Isn’t it funny how some of the best toys were found objects? And wouldn’t it be funny if some smart parent wrapped up the wrapping paper roll tube to give that to you instead of the fancy toy?

Save It For Later

Photo by Katherine Mihailova on Pexels.com

We all could learn something from the woman who takes out a stick of gum and tears it in half. Everyone knows a woman like this. She only chews half and saves the other half for later. She’s amazing. She’s the opposite of the kind of person who eats an entire package of cookies and finds out after the binge that there were 20 servings in the package.

She may or may not care how large a serving size is, but she does know how much she wants. Once she arrives at what she wants, she’s done.

This is a form of intelligence the IQ tests don’t measure. It’s an intelligence higher than is measurable.

She’s the kind who might not have any cookies at all, or she might have only one and then say she’s full. No one can tell her she’s wrong. No one can say she’s lying, because no one even knows how she has such masterful self-control to limit herself to only one cookie. Whether she’s doing it to dazzle you or because she really doesn’t want more is a total mystery.

Higher intelligence is often a mystery. How does she arrive at the smallest portion and find satisfaction? Most people want more, only to find their intelligence lacking. More in one area gives you less in another. So how does the woman who chews half a stick of gum know this? She knew it all along. Where did she gain the knowledge? Was she born with it? Was it passed down genetically? Did her mother have the halving gene? Is the skill one which can be taught? Can another person learn how to save half of everything? If so, how do we get this kind of woman in a teaching career?

We could all learn something from her.

Ten Minutes To Write, Two To Read

Wise writers know when to cut out the fat.

The great thing about shorter posts is that you don’t have to devote a lot of time to read them. The longer ones might go unnoticed because, well, too long. Bigger isn’t better in every case.

Likewise, TLDR is not a prescription for anything. It’s not some medical professional’s initials (not in common use anyway). And it’s not a secret code. It simply means: Too Long, Didn’t Read.

If you find an excessively wordy article out there and you feel obliged to read it, but it simply doesn’t capture your interest, then you might tag it with the TLDR.

There’s another, older acronym which means the same thing, only in a different tone, and that is this: KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Professional writers often have a structure within their writing which allows you to “skip to the end” and get the larger idea through a summary. When a summary is available, a wise writer will also include a foreword of sorts to summarize, in case they have readers who don’t want to skim-read the entire article yet still glean something from it.

In case a person has the reading style of “skim ’til you find something juicy,” some writers will employ the Easter Egg Method.

They know their work is too long for anyone except the most devoted students, so they’ll leave a treat somewhere, or multiple treats at varying intervals, in the work.

Amateurs, of course, will do none of the above. Amateurs wax long on words and wane on quality, leaving no treats at the two ends or anywhere in the middle.

So, before this article gets too long for even my short attention span, I’ll end with this nugget: Wisdom is not to make things seem complex, but to make the complex seem simple.