New Page: How to Cope With Clueless Questions, Crass Comments, and Crazy Conjectures

Oh, the things people say to writers!

• “What do you do?”
• “What do you write?”
• “Is there any money in that?”
• “Where have you been published?”
• “How’s the book coming along?” (Alt: “When will you be done with that thing?”)
• “Why don’t you just sit down over a weekend and just finish it?”
• “You should write like Stephen King!”
• “You should put a vampire in it!”
• “Why don’t you just go on [popular TV show]?” And, the ever popular,
• “When are you going to get a real job?”

These are the kinds of (often, but not always) well-meaning questions, comments, and conjectures that bedevil writers. A little planning can help a lot in terms of coping, however. Below are strategies for: (a) increasing your tolerance for difficult questions; (b) maintaining conversational boundaries; and (c) dealing with hostility.

Read the rest here.
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Summer 2013 Workshops: Hartford, Hyannis, Boston, and Online!

Check out the Events Page and register soon!
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Academic Mug Shot

Those who need to know what this means will know what it means.

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Many Authors Also Can’t Figure Out How They Wound Up With Weird Covers on Their Books

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Michael Chabon on True Novelists versus “Rebel Angels”

From Wikipedia:

In a 2012 interview with Guy Raz of Weekend All Things Considered Chabon said that he writes from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. each day, Sunday through Thursday. He tries to write 1,000 words a day. Commenting on the rigidity of his routine, Chabon said, “There have been plenty of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years, but writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every day. If you want to write novels, they take a long time, and they’re big, and they have a lot of words in them…. The best environment, at least for me, is a very stable, structured kind of life.”

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The Importance of Perception to Productivity Work

People carrying a backpack or other weight typically estimate hills to be much longer and steeper than they really are, to a greater degree than unencumbered people.

It also turns out, however, that if someone puts a backpack on your avatar you will experience virtual “hills” as being longer and steeper than they really are. This is crazy! Don’t forget that, since both the avatar and hill are virtual, no actual energy is being expended other than for keyboarding! But we perceive an energy expense.

However, the effect is true only if it’s an avatar customized by you to look like yourself. I’m guessing that’s because, in the process of interacting with your virtual doppelganger, you’re also identifying yourself with that online persona and getting invested in the outcome. One can therefore reasonably speculate that perfectionists, who tend to overidentify with their work and get overinvested in their outcomes, are literally creating for themselves more of an uphill climb!

And the clever researchers, Sangseok You and S. Shyam Sundar, managed to demonstrate that literally. Welcome to the fascinating future, where we’ll see a lot more actual testing and quantification and delineation of heretofore untestable psychological, philosophical, and even historical precepts, thanks to virtual reality!
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For Kids: Fern’s Writers Block (from Arthur)

Note Fern’s situational perfectionism, caused by:

*being told her story will be the “main event” at the next day’s Fiction Forum

*being told a famous author will be there

*being labeled as “creative.” Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck says that when you praise kids for attributes–by calling them, for instance, “smart” or “creative”–they freeze up, in part because they have no control over those attributes (which are vague, anyhow), and are afraid they won’t be able to repeat their success. Instead, praise them for effort–for concentration, effort, strategies–and for specific results, and you’ll likely motivate them to work even harder.

*note also the catastrophizing: Fern imagining the event as being disastrous. (In fact, imagining Shakespeare attending your reading and dissing you is some world-class catastrophizing! I’m actually a bit worried about the writer who came up with that script!)

If I were Fern’s mom, I would remind her that:

• She’s written many wonderful stories, and will no doubt write many more: that no one story is very important, even if it happens to be heard by a famous writer.
• Most writers follow the same path: that everyone was a beginner once, and that most people find it hard to show their work, especially to strangers, and especially to more “important” people who might judge them.
• That she’s not just a writer, but a wonderful person who has a lot of other interests and accomplishments.
• That this will only be one interesting event out of many, in many arenas, in her life.
• That, regardless of the outcome of the reading, I will continue to love and respect and admire her as much as ever.

I would also encourage her to have fun writing her story and not worry about how it will be received. But if she is anxious about the event, I would work with her to help her create options for herself. Maybe she can ask the teacher if she can:

• Read a prior work she feels confident about.
• Read an excerpt from the story instead of the whole thing.
• Have the teacher read her story.
• Have other kids read their work as well. (Takes the pressure off her as the soloist, and creates lovely opportunities for the others.)
• Not read at all.

How about it, parents! Did I get it right? Did I leave anything out? How would you support your kid if she or he were in Fern’s situation?

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On the Other Hand, This Little Duck Seems Plenty Empowered

Starting tomorrow, we’ll resume our normal non-duck-centric programming.
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“Mean” Duck Mom and Unhelpful Bystanders!

So…check out this video of a mother duck forcing her ducklings to jump down a high ledge onto a concrete walkway:

Ouch! I found it painful to watch.

The Mom Duck is just doing her thing, but I’ve seen similar videos where a kindly bystander finds a plank or other mechanism to give the baby ducks safe passage. (Some perfectionists, and I’m not kidding, would call that “cheating.”) Here the bystanders don’t, and I wish they had.

Whenever you witness yourself or someone else being disempowered try to create additional options.
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