Bonus Reason: You can do your “homework” out by the pool.

You can stop feeling regret about not getting around to writing and start feeling proud of the progress you make! The rest of your summer will be so much more enjoyable because you’re taking action.

“The quantity and quality of material presented [in Entering the Flow online class] were impressive, but the instructor’s responsiveness really made the material come alive. The trance writing instructions were specific and provided an entrée into a new way of approaching fiction.”

“Rosanne’s promotion of Product, Self-Care and Process is so smart!!! I would never have thought of ensuring that I include each three as part of maintaining balance as a writer (and person!). And, the tools she provides to help us plan/track these areas are wonderful.”

“Thank you for your amazing enthusiasm and constant encouragement. You created a safe environment for the unveiling of our writing fears so that we could acknowledge and confront them constructively. I am a better writer and a better person for having been a part of the Around the Writer’s Block class. I have grown so much over the 8 weeks and strongly recommend it to anyone struggling with their writing habit.”

“The Writing Habit literally revolutionized my writing life. I produced more new writing than I have in months. In addition, I’ve started a long-term revision project, began a major overhaul in my writing space and re-established a daily writing regimen I ‘lost’ about two years ago.”

Check out more testimonials

“I need more discipline.”

“When it comes to my writing, I just don’t have the will power I need.”

When students in my Writing Habit and Around the Writer’s Block classes say something like this – and at least one or two always do – nearly every other student nods in agreement.

“I’m not big on discipline,” I tell them and a few look relieved. “And frankly I don’t trust will power. It has failed me too many times and always just when I need it most.” More students nod.

“That’s why I rely on writing habits; they’re easier and far more reliable.”

Decision Fatigue: Too Tired to Think Straight

It took me years of frustration and unmet goals to realize that discipline and will power weren’t going to give me what I wanted. Now I have years of experience to back my intuition that habits do what will power can’t. And I’m delighted to find research that supports my “ocular analysis.”

Recent research has identified the neurological basis of what I observed: social psychologist Roy Baumeister calls it Decision Fatigue.

Every time you make a decision, you use a tiny bit of a limited supply of cognitive ability to make decisions. Making a decision, it turns out, is like lifting a dumbbell. The first time, it seems like nothing; the fiftieth time, you feel the burn.

By the end of an average day, you’ve made at least 200 decisions just about food alone. You make thousands of decisions a day (e.g. when will I open email, should I answer this email now or later or never, what should I say and how should I phrase it, is it time for lunch, where do I want to eat, how many calories are in the sandwich versus the salad, is that guy going to swerve into my lane, should we go to the cabin this weekend, do I need to cut the grass…)

No wonder you’re mentally exhausted by the end of the day.

Why Will Power Will Fail You Every Time

“Will power” is what most people call the ability to make a decision to resist temptation.

The problem is that we face so many temptations that deplete our will power. Furthermore, most of those temptations don’t go away. You don’t just decide not to eat a doughnut once; you have to keep deciding to not eat the doughnut.

It’s no surprise that so many weight-loss efforts fail in the evening when your decision-making capability is at its lowest.

Low blood sugar makes the situation worse. Research shows that the brain’s supply of glucose remains constant despite dips in the body’s overall glucose levels. But when overall blood sugar dips, the brain uses glucose differently, activating very different areas of the brain.

As a result, your brain starts seeking immediate rewards like ice cream or walking away from a challenging task and ignores more long-term goals like losing weight or writing.

Why Habits Work When Will Power Won’t

Every time you make a decision, you deduct a tiny bit from the supply of decision-making capacity. Every time you call on your will power to resist a temptation, you weaken it.

Unlike discipline and will power, habits are strengthened every time you practice them. Every repetition insulates the neural pathway for that behavior, making that pathway more effective, which in turns makes it easier to repeat that behavior.

Habits don’t require decisions – you just do it because you do it. There’s no debate about whether you’ll write today, so you’re not relying on limited decision-making energy.

Even better, when you have a writing habit, you never ask yourself if you’ll write, so there’s no chance you’ll decide not to write.

The Catch-22 in this is that you need a certain kind of discipline and will power to build a new habit. So it’s a good strategy to do the behavior you want to become a habit first thing in the morning. You don’t have time to wonder if you’ll write, you just show up and put in your time.

Putting your writing first means you don’t have to keep deciding all day that you will write later. And you don’t have to face the temptation to put your writing off for another day when your will power is at its lowest.

Another great habit-building strategy is to enlist a partner. People who have workout buddies are far more likely to get to the gym than those who don’t. And writers who tell another writer what commitments they’re making to their writing are far more likely to honor those commitments.

By the way, we make those commitments in the Writing Habit and Around the Writer’s Block classes. Please join me in exploring the information and strategies that will help you create and sustain writing habits that will sustain the writing you want to create.

Visit the Loft or call 612-379-8999 for more information or to register.

You should now have all the clues you need to solve the Crossword Secret Phrase.

Be sure to bring this Secret Phrase with you to the Around the Writer’s Block Book Launch part on August 4. Feel free to email me (Rosanne@RosanneBane.com) if you want to confirm your solution.

Summary of all the clues:

1. The first word in the three-word phrase is 1 Across, the second word in the phrase is 2 Down and the third word is 3 Across just as it’s shown here.
2. 1 Across includes 4 out the 5 vowels in English (a, e, i, o, u).
3. Every word contains the letter “S”.
4. No other letter is repeated in all three words (but three other letters repeat in two words)
5. 1 Across is derived from the French word for “wooden shoe.”
6. 3 Across: falsehoods
7. 2 Down: eternal
8. 1 Across: wrecker or one who ruins

You’ll find other puzzles for different Secret Codes at the AWB Facebook Page and in upcoming issues of my Imagination InkLinks creativity newsletter.

Solve one secret code and your name is entered the drawing for free copies of the Around the Writer’s Block or other prizes at the  Book Launch Party on August 4. Solve two Secret Codes and your name will be entered twice; solve three Secret Codes and your name will be entered three times.

At the Book Launch Party, you can play different brain games to have fun, mingle, laugh and score points on your Brain Card.

Every time you fill a Brain Card (you’ll score points by winning brain games at the party, being one of my students or coaching clients, subscribing to this blog, etc.), your name is entered for the drawings again. (There’s no limit to how many times you can enter the drawing. You don’t have to be present to win. If you can’t make it to the party, just email the secret codes to me by August 3 and I’ll enter your name.

“I thought you did that yesterday,” his wife protested.

“I wasn’t done,” Ted replied.

Everyone laughed at Ted’s story, but I thought, “What an intriguing idea – to do nothing all day and not be done doing it.”

I need more time to do nothing. We all need “nothing time” if we want to create.

Creative insight rarely comes when we’re actively trying to figure something out. It comes when we’re in the shower or walking the dog or lying in bed half-awake. When we allow our minds to wander, when we daydream, when we’re doing “nothing,” when our attention flits from one thing to another seemingly without direction  — this is when we recognize new connections and possibilities.

Research shows that different areas of the brain become active when we’re “doing nothing.” These areas are key to creative insight. We need to stop doing what we usually do so our brain can shift gears. Some of us need to schedule “unscheduled time” so we find balance.

Here’s how Brenda Ueland says it in If You Want to Write:

“So you see the imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering. These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas. . . . But they have no slow, big ideas. And the fewer consoling, noble, shining, free, jovial, magnanimous ideas that come, the more nervously and desperately they rush and run from office to office and up and downstairs, thinking by action at last to make life have some warmth and meaning.”

So if you’ve been rushing, over-busy or distracting yourself with electronic input like this blog, stop. Go spend time outside or in your garage or wherever it is you do nothing best.

To help you, I’ll stop writing and go walk my dogs–

Summary of the clues you’ve received so far:

1. The first word in the three-word phrase is 1 Across, the second word in the phrase is 2 Down and the third word is 3 Across just as it’s shown here.
2. 1 Across includes 4 out the 5 vowels in English (a, e, i, o, u).
3. Every word contains the letter “S”.
4. No other letter is repeated in all three words (but three other letters repeat in two words)
5. 1 Across is derived from the French word for “wooden shoe.”
6. 3 Across: falsehoods
7. 2 Down: eternal

Be sure you’re subscribed to get the rest of the clues!

You’ll find other puzzles for different Secret Codes at the AWB Facebook Page and in upcoming issues of my Imagination InkLinks creativity newsletter.

Solve one secret code and your name is entered the drawing for free copies of the Around the Writer’s Block or other prizes at the  Book Launch Party on August 4. Solve two Secret Codes and your name will be entered twice; solve three Secret Codes and your name will be entered three times.

At the Book Launch Party, you can play different brain games to have fun, mingle, laugh and score points on your Brain Card.

Every time you fill a Brain Card (you’ll score points by winning brain games at the party, being one of my students or coaching clients, subscribing to this blog, etc.), your name is entered for the drawings again. (There’s no limit to how many times you can enter the drawing. You don’t have to be present to win. If you can’t make it to the party, just email the secret codes to me by August 3 and I’ll enter your name.

“Break out of the box by stepping into shackles.” – Jonah Lehrer

In the previous post, Do You Know How to Walk Away from Writer’s Block?, I suggested you free yourself by surrendering expectations — now I’m going to propose that you can free yourself by imposing limits!

Poets do it all the time. The sonnet, haiku, sestina, villanelle, quatrains, even the common limerick: poets impose plenty of structures and constraints to keep their writing life interesting.

Prose writers also challenge themselves with constraints on length – no more than 500 words for short shorts (or even 100 words by some definitions) and a bare minimum of 50,000 words for a novel, with short stories, novellas and novelettes in between – strict adherence to a specific point of view – first person, third person limited, third person objective – and a variety of genre, structure and content limitations.

One of the appeals of writing my novella was the challenge of conveying plot twists through the POV of an elderly, first-person narrator whose memory was being intentionally manipulated and who therefore became more and more unreliable as the story developed.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Why make writing even harder with all these limitations?

Making It Harder Makes It Easier

According to Jonah Lehrer in Imagine, constraints push us to new creativity. “You break out of the box by stepping into shackles,” he writes.

“Unless poets are stumped by the form, unless they are forced to look beyond the obvious associations, they’ll never invent an original line,” Lehrer continues. “When a poet needs to find a rhyming word with exactly three syllables or an adjective that fits the iambic scheme, he ends up uncovering all sorts of unexpected connections; the difficulty of the task accelerates the insight process.”

In Around the Writer’s Block, I review research by Teresa Amabile, one of the world’s leading researchers on creativity, that shows how significant it is that writers/artists choose the constraints themselves or at least perceive external constraints as interesting, exciting challenges.

It’s the attitude of asking “What I can do with this?” as a genuine and intriguing question rather than a rhetorical, there’s-no-way statement that allows us to make creative constraints work for us instead of blocking us.

I’m still impressed with Derek Hough’s ability to combine the seemingly impossible elements of the Paso Doble with 50’s music that I highlighted in the Do the Im-paso-ble! post two years ago.

What’s your im-paso-ble writing task? What limitation could free your writing?

The only thing that can create writer’s block faster than an expectation of being good is a demand to be good.

Surrender your expectations of writing something good and just write.

Quality vs. Quantity

In Art & Fear, Ted Orland and David Bayles tell the story of a ceramics teacher who told his class that half of them would be graded on the sheer quantity of pots they created and the other half would be graded on the quality of the pots they created.

Students in the first group would receive an “A” for fifty pounds of pots, a “B” for forty pounds and so on. Those in the second group would receive an “A” only if their one pot was perfect, a “B” for a nearly perfect pot, and so on.

As you’d expect, the group being judged on the quantity of their work produced more. Unencumbered by the expectation and demand that they do something great, they were free to make lots of pots – to throw them and see where they landed, if you will.

What you may not expect is that the students who made the very best pots were not in the group being judged on the quality of their work, but those who were going for quantity of work.

Surrender Makes You Free

In the process of making lots of pots, the students made some bad pots and some good pots. They made mistakes and learned from them. They tried new techniques, experimented and played around. They made some truly awful pots and the very best pots in the class.

If, at the beginning of the day, you asked students what quality of work they would create, the group being graded on quality probably would have said something like “Well, I may not make anything today, but when I do make something, it’ll be really impressive.”

The group being graded on quantity would probably have shrugged and said “I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.”

It shouldn’t matter to you either. You never know what you’ll produce on any given day. Writers, like any artist, always hope and intend to do good work, but if we expect and demand good work, we’re most likely to create nothing at all.

Really good work is almost always happy accident.

So since you can’t predict when you’ll do write really good stuff, the best you can do is to create a lot of writing.

Make mistakes and learn from them. Experiment, try new techniques and play around.

In the process of all that creating and playing, you’ll make some bad work and some good work, some truly awful stuff and the very best stuff you can write.

3 Across: falsehoods

Summary of the clues you’ve received so far:

1. The first word in the three-word phrase is 1 Across, the second word in the phrase is 2 Down and the third word is 3 Across just as it’s shown here.
2. 1 Across includes 4 out the 5 vowels in English (a, e, i, o, u).
3. Every word contains the letter “S”.
4. No other letter is repeated in all three words (but three other letters repeat in two words)
5. 1 Across is derived from the French word for “wooden shoe.”
6. 3 Across: falsehoods

Be sure you’re subscribed to get the rest of the clues!

You’ll find other puzzles for different Secret Codes at the AWB Facebook Page and in upcoming issues of my Imagination InkLinks creativity newsletter.

Solve one secret code and your name is entered the drawing for free copies of the Around the Writer’s Block or other prizes at the  Book Launch Party on August 4. Solve two Secret Codes and your name will be entered twice; solve three Secret Codes and your name will be entered three times.

At the Book Launch Party, you can play different brain games to have fun, mingle, laugh and score points on your Brain Card.

Every time you fill a Brain Card (you’ll score points by winning brain games at the party, being one of my students or coaching clients, subscribing to this blog, etc.), your name is entered for the drawings again. (There’s no limit to how many times you can enter the drawing. You don’t have to be present to win. If you can’t make it to the party, just email the secret codes to me by August 3 and I’ll enter your name.

At 8:00 am today, I opened an email that says and I’m quoting word-for-word here:

One thing I know for sure, Rosanne, is that with time everything becomes clear, all questions are answered, what’s broken is restored, new trails are blazed, hearts are mended, love returns, and you will look over your shoulder, with a tear in your eye, at life’s utter perfection.

And best of all, Rosanne, time is one thing you have plenty of. Trust me.

The Universe

I believe in the possibility of meaningful coincidence, so I’ll take this and the insightful comments I’ve already received on the “Now What?” post are parts of the “a-ha” insight I’m looking for. I’m still eager for more input, so please add your observations. Thanks!

P.S. You can request notes from the Universe, too.

So if you’re frustrated with time like I am or with something else and are willing to consider that this turmoil might be a step in the right direction, what do we do now?

“Just Keep Swimming, Swimming, Swimming”

As Dory in Finding Nemo tells us, we have to just keep swimming, that is, keep looking. In other words, you do your research.

You research until you can’t hold any more information, until you start forgetting what you know. Dory may have had an advantage in this – she was a natural at forgetting.

Part of finding a new insight is letting go of how you currently see the problem, forgetting everything you think you know about the problem.

Fortunately, I recorded the “Does Time Exist” episode of the Science Channel show Through the Wormhole (watch the entire episode) and that certainly helped me forget what I thought I knew.

This discussion of the physics of time  left me even more confused about time. Which, Jonah Lehrer assures me (and as I assure so many students), is a good thing.

Out With the Old

All the confusion and frustration has convinced me to abandon my old paradigm about time. I stop myself as soon as I realize I’m telling myself the old ideas that don’t help: “I don’t have enough time, there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it, time flies, where does the time go, it’s the end of the day and I’ve got nothing to show for it, I should be able to manage my time better, I need better time management tools….”

I don’t have a new paradigm yet. I still don’t know what time is or how to talk and think about it. I’m still waiting for my breakthrough, my “a-ha” insight about time.

But refusing to entertain my old assumptions about time helps. For the past couple of days I haven’t felt rushed, overwhelmed and desperate for time. I feel a lot less stressed and a lot less frustrated. Maybe that’s my breakthrough.

What Do YOU Think?

What’s your paradigm about time?

What metaphors do you use for time? What sayings about time (like “time flies when you’re having fun”) are engrained in your mind?

How do you feel about time? Do you feel like you have enough time for writing and other things you enjoy?

Please comment – I really want to know what time is for you.