Tag Archives: writing

Milieu, Ambiance, and Writing

Are milieu and ambiance important, perhaps even necessary, for the act of writing?

Milieu means surroundings, environment. Ambiance means the mood created by an environment. As a writer, you strive for a creative, productive mood, particularly one that results in a string of words soon to become a best-seller. Before sitting down to write, do you arrange a milieu conducive to achieving that ambiance? Let’s examine the aspects involved.

Sight

You don’t gaze at the screen or page all the time. Now and then you glance up. When you do, what visual surroundings do you prefer to see? Do you lean toward a natural view—vistas of the outside world including trees, flowers, mountains, lakes, etc.? Or are you the decorative indoor type—furnishing your writing space with paintings, knick-knacks, posters, figurines, or other delights for the eye? Perhaps visual clutter distracts you, and you seek a bare, spartan environment. Or do your visual surroundings matter at all?

Sound

Does noise, or its absence, harmonize with your writing? Some writers hate sound of any kind. Even the ticking of a clock or the hum of a fan disturbs them. Others prefer the quiet murmurs of nature—twittering birds and babbling creeks. Others put on recorded music, a background soundtrack of their writing passion. Perhaps, for them, certain songs match the rhythm of their creativity. Other writers tap into music more in tune with the specific mood or setting of their work-in-progress.

Smell

Scientists claim a strong link exists between odor and mood. Do you follow your nose to improved creativity or prolificness, or both? Do you achieve your optimum olfactory atmosphere via flowers, perfume, potpourri, or incense? Perhaps you turn your nose up at fragrances altogether, not caring one whiff about them.

Touch

Does the tactile sense reach out and poke your creative nerves? Does it help to stroke the fur of a pet or stuffed animal? Is the comfiness of your chair a factor? Maybe the feel of a pen in your hand rubs you the right way.

Taste

Bundled with smell, taste hits the spot for some writers. We’ve all heard accounts of authors who required alcohol to write, but I’m not sure I swallow that. In fact, I’d caution against forming a strong association between writing and tastes. Once that mental link gets established, you’ll strive to write better by eating or drinking more. Too much food or drink can harm your health.

Locale

For the above sensory factors, locale plays a role. Do you write outdoors, preferring a natural setting, disdaining the artificial? Or is the indoor milieu more your style, a place you can shape and adjust as you please, without the bother of insects?

Mental State

We’ve been assuming a process of ambiance—allowing the milieu to create a mood. Perhaps, however, you attain your optimum mental state in a more direct, way. Maybe you reach your creative mood through meditation. Or, more simply, you read and think about what you’ve written before to put yourself in the right frame of mind to continue on. In other words (with apologies to Decartes), you think, therefore you can write.

Experimentation

Maybe you haven’t a clue about the answers to any questions I’ve asked, but you’d like to find out. No problem. Do what a scientist would do—experiment. Try out different milieu and assess the resulting ambiance. Compare the way you write in these different environments. You’re not looking for surroundings that you find most pleasurable, but the one that results in your best prose. Readers, of course, may differ from your assessment and then you’ll face an interesting choice—go with what you prefer, or with what your audience wants.

As for me…

Throughout this post, I’ve proposed things for you to consider as you write. You might be interested in my choice of milieu and its ensuing ambiance. Why you’d be interested in that is a question only you can answer.

I favor the make-your-own-mental-state approach without regard to any milieu. I like to think I can write anywhere. However, if I should, one day, discover just the right environment to generate a best-seller, that would lock in that particular milieu and ambiance for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 3, 2024Permalink Leave a comment

Procrastinate to be Prolific?

Been meaning to blog about this, but kept putting it off. This article by Loizos Heracleous and David Robson cites studies claiming procrastination can benefit creativity.

The authors quote Agatha Christie as saying she often thought of story ideas while bathing. I suspect many writers have experienced a similar phenomenon. You’re writing and get stuck. You take a break and turn to some dull activity, such as mowing the lawn, cleaning the house, showering, etc., and Bang! The solution comes to mind. Often you don’t even realize you were thinking about it.

The article discusses several studies that bear this out. Researchers found that taking a break from a creative task and performing a different, humdrum task allowed participants to return to the creative task and perform better. Oddly, those that rested instead of working on a humdrum task did not do as well.

Odd that the human mind works this way. I’ve blogged before about how weird that is. You could spend time puzzling about it or analyzing this brain quirk, but perhaps your time’s better spent accepting it and using it to your advantage. When the words won’t spill out, back away and pursue some mundane chore for a while.

However, I urge you not to draw the wrong conclusion from this discussion. You’re thinking, “Well, if procrastination works that well, I’ll spend years putting off writing and end up a best-selling author.”

Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. In fact, I wish the article hadn’t use the term ‘procrastinate’ at all. The word means to postpone, to delay, like when you have homework due and you watch YouTube videos instead.

We’re talking about something different here. When you get stuck while writing and choose to do gardening instead, you’re not really postponing anything. You’re still writing in the sense that your brain is thinking of creative solutions.

To paraphrase the math genius, Yogi Berra—writing is 90% mental; the other half is physical. Your body may have walked away from the keyboard, but your brain still writes.

Put another way, if you aim to be a prolific writer, you must write a lot. But not all writing time involves stringing words together. An observer might think you’re washing dishes, but you’re really stringing ideas together. Just tell that observer you’re not procrastinating, you’re writing in your mind, just like—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 6, 2023Permalink

Stories from the Grand Hotel

If you’d love to write a story, are unsure what to write about, and you think every possible story has already been written, don’t worry. So long as you don’t plagiarize, there’s room in the world for your story.

It may seem like writers before you already used every possible plot, character type, setting, theme, mood, and style. Maybe they have, but not in the combination you’ll use. None of the previous authors brought the distinct flair to their stories that you’ll bring to yours.

What does this have to do with the ‘grand hotel’ mentioned in this post’s subject? Everything.

In 1924, German mathematician David Hilbert introduced what’s come to be known as the ‘paradox of the Grand Hotel.’ Imagine a big hotel, so big it contains an infinite number of rooms. You arrive at the front desk and ask if you can have a room for the night. The receptionist says the hotel is full, with every room occupied, but there are vacancies.

That makes no sense, but the receptionist picks up the public address microphone and directs all guests to move from their current room to the next higher numbered room. The receptionist then offers you Room number 1. Problem solved.

You enjoy your stay there. The next time you’re in town, you go to that hotel again. You forget to get a reservation ahead of time (again), and this time you’re accompanied by an infinite number of friends who all want separate rooms.

The receptionist again says the hotel is full, but also says there’s no problem accommodating you and your friends. Over the PA system, the receptionist instructs all current guests to move from their room to the one with a number two times their current room number. The receptionist then checks you and your many friends into the odd-numbered rooms.

You get where I’m going with this. We live in a world filled with an infinite number of stories, and they’ve all been written before. Even so, there’s room for yours. Since it will bear similarities to previous stories, lawyers would call it derivative. Don’t copy character names or significant sections of text from previously published work—lawyers call that copyright infringement. Stay clear of plagiarizing, and the possibilities still go on without end.

In fact, even if your brain teems with an infinite number of story ideas, you can write them all (well, as many as a human lifespan allows). The world can accommodate an infinite number of writers, each writing an infinite number of stories.

Write as many stories as you can. There’s room for them all, as well as those written by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 17, 2022Permalink

Mind the Gap

In the London subway system, iconic signs exhort patrons to step with care across the space between platform and train with the words “Mind the Gap.” Not bad advice for time management while writing, either.

Here I refer to a different kind of gap. Inspired by Andrew Gudgel’s post on June 3, 2019, which he based on Samantha Leach’s article in Glamour, I’m referring to a gap in writing productivity.

The blogpost and the article state that author Danielle Steel writes 20 to 22 hours a day. That’s not a typo. My math says Ms. Steel uses between 83% and 92% of all available time for writing. On occasion, she goes the full 100%. Put another way, in an average 8-hour period, Ms. Steel writes for 7 and squeezes the rest of her life activities into the remaining 1 hour.

I suspect very few other writers (perhaps none) maintain that schedule, so let’s consider that an upper limit of what is possible. Is Ms. Steel’s time well spent? Well, she’s the best-selling living author. She’s written over 141 novels, all of which were best-sellers. Yes, I’d say she’s used that time productively.

Right now, you’re mentally comparing your writing schedule to Danielle Steel’s and feeling rather inferior. You’re thinking you need more than 2-4 hours of sleep each day, and there’s also eating, showering, dressing, and undressing to consider.

That’s the gap I’m talking about—the writing schedule gap between you and Danielle Steel. If you keep thinking about that gap, you’ll get depressed.

Still, in a detached way, you can see how someone could get there. Say you enjoyed writing and wrote a debut novel that became a best-seller. You’d feel a strong incentive to write another. If that novel also succeeded, you’d be motivated to repeat that process. If nothing else in life gave you as much satisfaction as writing, and if all you got was positive feedback for doing so, you might end up writing for 20-22 hours a day, too.

To avoid comparison envy and anxiety, I encourage you to focus on a different gap. Forget about Danielle Steel. Think about how much you write every day, and compare it to where you were before becoming a writer. That’s the gap that matters. That’s a gap you can work on improving.

Writing Productivity Gaps

By instinct, I prefer metrics where more is better. The less=better metrics—golf scores, unemployment rates, the you-to-Danielle Steel work-hour gap—just feel wrong to me.  

As the London subway signs say, “Mind the Gap,” but mind the right gap. Always here to provide uplifting advice and encouragement, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 30, 2022Permalink

Practice Makes Perfect?

We know practice can help us improve our abilities in various areas. Yet many people believe they can sit down and write a blockbuster novel without any writing practice. Maybe you’re the rare exception who can, but most of us need practice.

Not just any kind of practice. Good practice helps. Bad practice not only wastes your time, but it also hurts by ingraining poor habits. This wonderful blog post by Barbara Baig inspired the one you’re reading now. She calls the two types naïve practice and deliberate practice, so I’ll stick with her terms.

When young, I played the cello. I don’t play anymore, but I enjoyed it while I did. Early on, before I learned how to practice, it felt like drudgery. My mom said, “Someday, when you play in Carnegie Hall, remember to tell the audience that you owe everything to your mother, who made you practice.” Sorry, Mom, that opportunity never arose.

Practice, in those early years, consisted of my playing a piece from start to finish. Once I did that to my satisfaction—a rather low bar—I moved on to the next piece. In Ms. Baig’s blogpost, that’s called naïve practice. Over time, I discovered an interesting thing. Whether in practice or performance, I played some passages well, without effort, consistently. However, I stumbled in other spots—the same spots, and the same sort of stumbling, every time.

I tried practicing a different way. I focused only on the rough spots, playing them over and over, then backing up and leading into them, then continuing on after them to ensure transitions both ways went smoothly. In this way, I developed ‘finger memory.’ My fingers knew how to play the difficult passages with less conscious thought on my part.

My skill as a cellist improved after that. I’d learned the secret of deliberate practice, and nearly all my practice time served to better my playing, rather than to reinforce poor playing.

What does this have to do with writing? Everything. You may be getting plenty of writing practice—story after story, novel after novel. But perhaps you’re not reaching a large audience, not achieving hoped-for sales.

Perhaps you’re putting in naïve practice, doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get better that way. Improvement might happen, but there’s a quicker path.

Use the deliberate practice technique I mentioned above. First, identify the stumbling points in your writing, perhaps from a critique group, or a trusted beta reader. You might also learn something from online reviews of your stories.

Knowing your weak points, assign yourself some brief writing exercises designed to work on those particular problems. Here’s a list of examples:

  • Weak in characterization? Flesh out a character in extreme detail.
  • Weak in setting description? Visualize a setting in minute detail, then pick three facts that really make the setting vivid.
  • Weak in working out plots? Outline the plot of your favorite story, or one you just read. What do you like about that story’s plot? In a similar way, outline the plot of several stories you’d like to write.
  • Weak in use of the senses? Take a scene from your Work in Progress (WIP) and put all five senses into it.
  • Weak in comparisons? Find three to five things in your WIP that are hard to describe or visualize. For each one, brainstorm twenty similes or metaphors you could use to make it clear to the reader.

They say practice makes perfect. You may never achieve perfection, but getting closer to that ideal may prove good enough. Deliberate practice may get you writing, and playing the cello, better than—

Poseidon’s Scribe

December 5, 2021Permalink

Negentropy and Writing

Do you recall one of your physics teachers mentioning the concept of entropy? Today I’d like to discuss its opposite, negentropy, and how that applies to writing.

Entropy depresses me. I dislike the idea that energy changes into less and less useful forms, that order becomes chaos, and that the universe eventually runs down and stops.

Negentropy seems more fun. While we all wait for the universe to wind down, we can take tiny chunks of it and turn chaos into order within those chunks.

I ran across this article by Dr. Alison Carr-Chellman where she explores the concept of negentropy as it applies to everyday things like cleaning your room or making your workplace run smoother. I wondered if her concepts could apply to writing fiction.

Writing, itself, epitomizes negentropy. The inputs—life experiences, a brain, and writing implements—get converted to a single output, fiction. Chaos becomes order.

But is your fiction-producing process smooth and efficient? Are you losing energy along the way? Think about achieving maximum output (published fictional stories) for minimum input (personal time and energy).

Dr. Carr-Chellman provides five steps for improving that efficiency (she calls it ‘minimizing energy loss’). I’ll discuss each as they apply to writing fiction.

1: Find the entropy. Think of the steps involved in getting to a published story. Which of those steps (examples: researching, editing) take the most time for you? Which do you put off or rush through (ex: scene setting, choosing a title) because you hate doing them? Which steps do you agonize over (ex: submitting, marketing) because you don’t understand them well?

2: Prioritize the losses. Identify the biggest entropy problems, so you tackle them first. Not only will this provide the best gains in efficiency, but your success will embolden you to solve the others in a similar manner.

3: Come up with a plan. For the steps taking too much time, consider self-imposed time limits. For the steps you hate, give yourself small rewards for completing them. For the steps you don’t understand well, learn about them from TED talks, YouTube videos, books, or internet searches.

4: Try it out and pay attention. As you implement your improvement plans, track how they’re working. Did you put more energy and time into the plan itself than the improvement warranted?

5: Go beyond fixing and maintenance. As you plug all these energy leaks and achieve a smoother process, consider the bigger picture. Perhaps you’ve now developed a very efficient method for selling low-grade stories. That may not have been your desire. It’s not worth optimizing a process that doesn’t result in the output you want.

If you start implementing negentropy into your writing now, you stand a great chance of optimizing it before maximum entropy brings about the heat death of the universe. That event may happen as soon as ten to the hundredth power years from now. That’s a googol years. Best not to schedule anything in your personal organizer for any date after that event.

Negentropy, turning chaos into order. That’s the main job of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 12, 2021Permalink

Engineers Can’t Write

My college degrees are in engineering and my career was in an engineering field. I’ve never received a degree in writing or literature. Now I write fiction. Is that even allowed?

At one point in my career, I had a boss who’d say, “Engineers can’t write.” He was, of course, referring not only to fiction, but also the sort of nonfiction engineers must write—specifications, instructions, memos, emails, etc. It pleased him that I was an exception, but daily experience with others only proved his rule 99% correct.

Not many engineers write fiction as a spare-time hobby, but I did, and now it’s my sole retirement job. I believe stories written by engineers often suffer from common deficiencies that make their stories unappealing to editors and readers. These deficiencies result from the rigorous thought processes of the engineering mindset. In particular, engineer-writers:

  • emphasize things, particularly human-made things, not people or emotions;
  • focus on actions, not internal motivations; and
  • over-explain, in detail, how gadgets work.

The essence of engineering is problem-solving, and engineer-writers often pen stories in which the protagonist solves a complex problem. The problem tends to involve things, not people. The story often glosses over the protagonist’s emotions and desires. The feelings of other characters, if mentioned at all, involve amazement or admiration for the brilliant main character.

An Engineer’s Guide to Writing Fiction

Perhaps you’re an engineer who wishes to write fiction, but hasn’t been successful yet. Here are some pointers:

  1. Think of ‘success in writing’ as you would any engineering problem. The end objective is to create a manuscript that maximizes the emotional response and enjoyment of end users (readers). These readers may not think like you. The only raw materials at your disposal are words.
  2. Keep in mind what readers care about and what all classic fiction emphasizes—characters. Show your readers what your characters dream about and long for. Show readers your character’s fears, vulnerabilities, feelings, and doubts.
  3. When writing fiction, you’re leaving your neat and logical world of machine parts, where rigid physical laws and mathematical equations govern how materials and subsystems interact, where you work within the laws of nature to benefit people. You’ve entered the infinitely more complex and messier world of human emotion, motivation, and fantastic imaginings.
  4. It’s fine to include machines and vehicles in your tales, but go light on the descriptions. Pick a few key details to mention, just enough to give an impression and let readers imagine the rest. You don’t have to explain how it works; trust readers to go along for the ride. How your characters feel about the machine is more important than the machine itself, so describe it through their thoughts.
  5. You didn’t learn engineering in a day, and writing good fiction is no different, no less complex. You’ll have to learn the craft. Read fiction within and outside your favorite genre. Read books about writing. Go to writers’ conferences. Join a fiction writing critique group.

 Now that I think about it, I believe my former boss was wrong. Engineers, like you, can write. Not only can you write good fiction, you will. Many others have, and since I followed their path, you can follow—

Poseidon’s Scribe

May 30, 2021Permalink

Writing Without Electricity

Recently I endured a power outage lasting over 38 hours. I’m not complaining about the outage. Many people have gone without electricity much longer than that.

Up until the dawn of the 20th Century, all people went without electrical power for their entire lives. However, many of us have become dependent on those tiny electrons flowing through wires, and it’s a major disruption when those particles stop moving.

Like most people, writers fall prey to this dependency We type on computer keyboards, we conduct research online, we write by the light of electric bulbs. It’s hard to imagine writing without these things. It is even possible?

Yes, of course it is. I wrote the rough draft of this post with pen and paper. I could have written it by candlelight, but used battery powered lights. Later, when the emergency was over, I transcribed and edited it on a computer. In fact, I create most of my first drafts—fiction stories and blogposts—using pen and paper.

I’m not suggesting you do that. You should write by whatever mechanism suits you, using the tools you prefer, when available. (Note: chiseling words into marble can be slow going).

All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t lose hope when the power goes out. You can satisfy your urge to write by different means.

You might even enjoy the pen-and-paper method. Freed from the computer, your writing might take a different direction. You might write about different subjects or explore new tones, settings, characters, or themes.

When the power comes back on, you can revert back to your accustomed methods. But you’ll always know you have a reliable backup.

The electricity’s back on here, but who knows when it will go out again? At least a simple power outage won’t slow down writing progress for you or for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 21, 2021Permalink

7 Things to Know Before You Retire to Write Full Time

It’s tough to write part time while still working at your day job. I know. I did it for several decades, all the while dreaming of how prolific I’d be and how much money I’d make when I retired.

Well, I’ve been retired for nearly three years. How’s it going so far?

In truth, things aren’t as good as I’d hoped, nor as bad as I feared. Still, I’ve learned some lessons.

If you’re still laboring in a day job, looking forward to retirement when you’ll write all day and rake in those large-advance contracts, perhaps you’ll benefit from my seven take-aways:

  1. Writing time will increase, but maybe not to full time. There will still be other things to do, the non-writing parts of life. Those won’t stop.
  2. There will still be reasons not to write. If you’ve been good at making excuses for avoiding things you should do, you’ll still do that in retirement. You might become better at it.
  3. Becoming rich may stay a dream. For most of you, writing will not provide much supplement to your retirement income.
  4. It may be harder to discipline your time. While you’re working, clocks rule your life and you squeeze writing into the available hours. When you retire, you’ll have more time, but it’s easier to waste it.
  5. You may have to adjust to life without a boss. During your working years, you’ve gotten used to having a supervisor tell you what to do. Can you manage your own time without a boss?
  6. Others might have a say. Perhaps your home companion’s vision of your retirement doesn’t include you sitting alone and typing for hours on end. Best to settle those issues before retirement day.
  7. You might get bored with writing. That hasn’t happened to me, but it could. Do you have a Plan B if you tire of the writing biz?

I don’t mean to give you the wrong impression. I’m enjoying my retirement and I’m writing more than I used to. It’s been great. Maybe, for you, retirement will provide the time you need to achieve the writing success you’ve dreamed of. I hope so. But it’s good to have realistic expectations.

Writing always starts with dreaming. But at some point, you’ve got to put words together using whatever time you have. If you still have a day job, write when you can. Don’t waste valuable time fantasizing about retirement, like—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 15, 2020Permalink

Quit and Start Over?

Songwriter Robert Lopez once wrote, “The temptation to quit and start over infects every creative process I’ve ever been in. Frustration and boredom always fuel this self-doubt.” Let’s analyze this as it applies to writing fiction.

First of all, I think we can agree Mr. Lopez speaks with some authority about the creative process. He’s won multiple Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards, the only person to have done so.  

I suspect nearly every fiction writer knows the experience he alludes to. You get partway into a story, then pause and reflect on what you’ve done so far. Your story looks terrible now. You think it would be better to abandon that draft and start fresh. You’re torn between the fear that no amount of editing will improve the current version and the fear that a new draft won’t be any better.

It’s appropriate that Mr. Lopez used the verb “infects,” invoking the metaphor of viruses and sickness. The temptation to start over does seem like that—spreading inside you, overwhelming your immune system, and making you miserable.

We’ll get to the frustration, boredom, and self-doubt soon. First, let’s examine what happens initially in the process of creating a short story or novel. You come up with the idea, then add to it in your mind. Enthusiasm takes over as the mental picture of the finished work crystallizes. It’s going to be great.

You begin to write, but you find out enthusiasm is a tough emotion to sustain, certainly for a novel, but sometimes even for a short story. The words you’re writing don’t match the gloriously perfect story in your mind. Compared to that ideal vision, the real version stinks. That gap in quality between real and ideal causes the frustration.

As your enthusiasm continues to fade, you lose interest in the story and become bored with it. Your muse moves on to shinier objects and even the thought of continuing the story becomes too much to bear. You’ll do anything to avoid working on it, including the most hated household chores. In this way, boredom has fueled your self-doubt.

Now that Mr. Lopez has put his finger on a very real and universally experienced problem with the creative process, is there a solution? When these negative feelings overcome you, should you edit the draft you started with, or abandon it and start over?

I suspect it’s a very rare occasion when the right answer is to quit and start over. The real problem is, you are no longer in the right frame of mind to write well. What the situation calls for is a break. You should stop editing that story and do something else. Look at the story the next day with fresh eyes and a sunnier mood. You’ll see some things wrong with it, but just maybe the original enthusiasm will return, that zeal you felt when the story was just an idea.

Maybe you’ll decide the problem isn’t a gap between the ideal vision and the faulty reality. Perhaps the vision wasn’t so ideal after all. Don’t be afraid to alter it and work to capture the new vision. This isn’t starting over; this is making a change in light of a new realization.  

Even though writers aren’t immune to the problem Robert Lopez identified, and self-doubt is bound to infect you at some point, you can pull yourself out of it. Most likely, you can salvage the draft you’re working on and won’t have to abandon it to start over.

That’s been my experience with the creative process of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 13, 2019Permalink