Ayana Mathis tells how to keep going, no matter what the journey

http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/Oprahs-Book-Club-Ayana-Mathis-on-Overcoming-Obstacles 6 Things Ayana Mathis Knows for Sure About Sticking With It The author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie explains how to keep going, no matter what the journey. As told to Leigh Newman 1. Sometimes You Need a Manual A really incredible book—even if its subject matter has nothing to do with your situation—can help you to understand your life and circumstance more clearly. For me, one of these books will always be Toni Morrison’s Beloved. While working on The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, in fact, I used it as a kind of manual, to instruct me as a writer. For example, I was struggling with the use of time. Toni Morrison is a master at moving between the past and the present in brilliant leaps that never confuse the reader. Her novel became a teacher to me, demonstrating how what has happened to a character 10 years ago factors into what is happening right now. This is something characters do on the page, but people also do it in real life. We are all an aggregate of our past and present, of personality and upbringing, race and class, the list goes on. Understanding the ways in which these things impact our present situation is crucial to getting by and getting through. 2. When in Doubt, Cook Italian When you’re working on a project for months and months—whether it’s a book or anything else that requires a sustained effort—it’s easy to get discouraged. The rewards are few, and you feel as if it's never, ever going to be done. At the end of particularly trying days, I head into the kitchen and cook something that’s fast, delicious and not particularly hard to make. Spaghetti alla bottarga is a slightly obscure but amazing dish I've made over and over. You sauté some garlic and cherry tomatoes in olive oil, toss in cooked pasta and grate the bottarga (fish roe) while everything is piping hot. In about 20 minutes, I can see (and eat!) the fruits of my labor, which makes facing the next day’s long slog so much more endurable. 3. Friends Make Everything Easier—and Smarter A few years ago, I met a writer named Justin Torres in a creative-writing class. The evening of the second session, he read a story called “Niagara.” Listening to him, I thought, “My God, who the hell is this guy?” I was gob smacked. The story was shockingly good. (Several years later, he published the brilliant We the Animals.) Over time, Justin and I became very close. We can talk about anything from, say, Friday Night Lights on NetFlix to the particular challenges faced by writers of color. Having friends who are just a little smarter than you or a little further along in their goals is crucial when you’re trying to do something difficult. These kind of intimates set the bar a little higher. It isn’t simply that they inspire you, it’s that their example makes you aspire to do better and be better. 4. Accept the Fits and Starts One the most challenging things in life is learning a new language. I lived in Italy for five years in my late twenties and early thirties. I wasn’t writing during that period. I got a job with a tour operator in Florence—and I had to learn Italian. The interesting thing was, there were days when I could chatter on about anything under the sun, only to find that the next morning, I couldn’t even order a coffee. Acquiring any skill is like this: You make a little progress; then you lose ground; then you make a little more progress. Accepting the fits and starts is the only way to keep yourself from giving up. 5. When Your Tank Gets Low, Refill with Beauty When I was young and broke, poetry kept me going. A poet named Yusef Komunyakaa saved the day. Whenever I needed to recharge, I turned to his collection Magic City. Like me, he had grown up with only his mother, so in his work I found some echoes of my own experience, but more importantly, he writes vividly about childhood and the strangeness and magnitude of a child’s imagination. The first poem is called “Venus’s-flytraps.” It’s about family secrets, but there is such mystery in the poem—it perfectly describes the way a child fills the gaps in her knowledge and understanding with make-believe and imagination. For anyone who has had difficulties as a young person—which is all of us; I can’t think of anyone who had a perfect childhood—it is especially powerful. Painful events are articulated with such breathtaking beauty. The language soars above the darkness being described—and it takes you with it, so that you too are flying. 6. Sing! No Matter What When I was a little girl, I was often asked to sing solos at my family’s church. I loved to sing, but I was also knee-knocking frightened of getting up there. My mother would have to take me aside and talk me through my nerves. She’d say, “Whatever you’re most afraid of is the thing you most need to do.” While working on Hattie, especially those early chapters when I was feeling my way into the book, I'd think, "What am I doing? I am not equal to this task. At all." Later, after I had gotten an agent, the fear became, "She'll hate it. Publishing houses will hate it. I'll have put myself out there and it'll be a great big humiliating flop." I knew I had to get over my fear. It wasn't so much a matter of conquering it. I don't believe that's how things work, because fear doesn't go away. You have to do what needs doing in spite of doubt, sometimes even in spite of terror. So I’d think about what my mother used to say to me. And it helped—just like it did when I'd have to walk to the front of the church and sing “Amazing Grace” when I was a little girl. Where to find the Oprah's Book Club 2.0 version of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie Read more: http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/Oprahs-Book-Club-Ayana-Mathis-on-Overcoming-Obstacles/2#ixzz2JgEnrYZ6

How to Raise the Stakes in the First 50 Pages of Your Novel

How to Raise the Stakes in the First 50 Pages of Your Novel By author Jeff Gerke (The First 50 Pages). After successfully engaging the reader, which is Job 1 of writing a novel, Job 2 is to create suspense. When your reader is engaged with your hero and your story world, you can afford to coast along a bit before that engagement begins to diminish (not that you would intentionally do so). But before too long you're going to need to continue reeling in the reader. He won't stay with you for the whole book if he gets bored after the opening. Suspense means different things for different novelists-and different genres. If you're writing a thriller, you'd better have a roller coaster going pretty much from Page 1. If you're writing a romance, the suspense is likely driven by whether or not the hero and heroine will finally get together-it's of the will she or won't she variety. In an action/adventure, suspense might be in finding out if the hero will save the world or achieve his dream. But no matter what type of novel you're writing, there had better be some kind of suspense in it. The reader must be asking, "How will this turn out?"-a question preferably followed by: "I have to find out, and I can't go to bed until I do!" Some suspense will be created simply by engaging the reader with the main character. We keep reading because we want to see if he reaches his objective, whatever that may be. Another surge of suspense will be generated when you introduce the villain-that equal and opposite force that's going to cause fits for your hero. The mere presence of a person who stands to hurt our hero in some way will raise our excruciatingly wonderful anxiety. And excruciatingly wonderful anxiety would be a very nice definition of suspense. We can't stand it, but we love it. Let's look at some other ways to elevate suspense in the first 50 pages of your novel (You can find even more excellent tips in Jeff's book, The First 50 Pages). Establish What's at Stake. If I told you I was going to give you a million dollars, you'd probably be thrilled. If I told you I would give you a million dollars if you could get to Clipperton Island (a tiny atoll about 800 miles southwest of Acapulco) by noon tomorrow, you'd start feeling something else. That something else-an almost frustrated kind of urgency tinged with the possibility of a great payoff-is what you want your reader feeling as she reads your novel. There's a very simple formula for creating the stakes (and thus suspense) in your story: Show your reader something she wants, and then threaten it. Show her a man longing to be reunited with his son. Show the son wanting to be back with his daddy. Then have someone abduct the boy and smuggle him to another country. Aaagh! How will that man find his little boy? We want to know now! Show a woman locked into an engagement with an awful man. Show her meeting a wonderful man she really loves and who loves her back. Then bring tremendous forces into play so that the woman feels she must marry the first guy no matter what. No! It can't be! Show us a ragtag group of freedom fighters who want only to live free of tyranny. Then show the evil Empire arriving with their Death Star to destroy the rebels' hidden fortress. Can they be stopped? You see how it goes. Make us care about something, then put that something in danger. As these examples show, the danger doesn't have to be life and limb (though it can be). The prospect of the hero not getting what she dreams of (and what we've come to dream for her) is terrible enough. CLICK HERE FOR MORE TIPS ON HOW TO RAISE THE STAKES IN YOUR FIRST 50 PAGES

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How to Create a Breakthrough in Any Area of Your Life

How to Create a Breakthrough in Any Area of Your Life: Manage Your Strategies, Your Story, and Your State Anthony (Tony) Robbins November 26, 2012 Question: One of the toughest things about chasing the dream is managing the disciplines of persistent action and hopeful patience that are required to ultimately see the vision come to be. This is an area of huge tension. How do dream chasers manage that tension and thrive? Fulfilling your dreams and your ability to thrive in the areas of your life that matter most can be simplified by breakthroughs—a moment in time when the impossible becomes possible. If anyone wants to thrive in any area of their life, they have to reach a point of breakthrough where they will not settle for anything less than extraordinary in that area. Whether someone wants a breakthrough in their: Business Intimate life Emotional well-being Health Finances Career There are only three areas to break through in order to feel lasting success. One breakthrough area is your STRATEGIES. I personally live for finding strategies—those shortcuts that help people get more done in less time. What is it that gets some people to succeed while others fail who seem to have equal enthusiasm or passion for the tasks at hand? They have insights, distinctions, and strategies that allow them to achieve more quickly. For example, take someone who was born very poor, without an education, and had emotional and financial challenges but found a way to be highly successful and living an inspired life. I don’t believe that’s lucky—luck is what you do for a day or a week—strategies are what make it consistently happen for decades. A strategy can be found in the simplest or slightest distinction and it can happen in an instant. As I described above, there are three elements that effect the long-term success or failure of a person and whether they break through or not. For example, there are hundreds or even thousands of strategies out there for losing weight, and frankly most of them are proven to work—if you work them! We’re not hurting for strategies. There are fitness clubs on every street, dieticians, health coaches, training videos, audios, books, etc. Yet 65% of the United States is overweight and 33% is obese, and those numbers are only growing geometrically. I would suggest to you that the problem for most people is not that they don’t have a strategy—it’s that they’re not using a strategy that works for them or acting upon it. Why? Because they have a disempowering STORY. We all have stories—narratives we tell ourselves about why we can or cannot do or achieve something in our lives. Whether we believe we can or can’t, we’re usually right, because our expectation controls our focus, perceptions, and the way in which we feel and act. When a person succeeds it’s because they have the right strategy, and they found it usually because they have a story that it was possible or they could make it happen. Often people are not losing weight because they have a simple story that says, “I’m big boned.” With that as your core belief system you are never going to find a strategy, and even if you do you won’t follow through on it. Your story may be true—you may have been through a horrific experience--but that’s not the reason why you can’t have the life you want. For example, you might have had a bad breakup five years ago, but that’s not the reason you haven’t found the passionate and loving relationship you deserve. A disempowering story is one of the things that controls people and makes them stuck in their beliefs. Most people tell a story in a selective way so they don’t have to ever maximize their effort towards a strategy because they're afraid they will fail. In order to get out of a story you have to be triggered by hunger and desire—if someone wants something strong enough they will break through the story that’s limiting them. Of course, whether you have an empowering story or disempowering one is influenced most powerfully by the mental and emotional STATE you’re in at this moment in time. As human beings we all develop emotional patterns—moods—that are mental or emotional states that tend to filter how we look at our lives. This influences the stories that we make up about who we are, what we’re capable of, or what’s achievable or not. The states we go into most often then become the most powerful filter of all that will determine whether we find the strategies necessary to succeed and whether we come up with a story that will empower us. The big question then becomes, what is it that we can do to change our state of mind when we’re not able to maximize our true potential? One of our greatest scientific discoveries has been that you can change your emotional mood by a radical change in your “physiology.” For people who are experiencing stress at any given moment, a form of relief can be to simply change your physiology—take a couple of deep breaths. Most people only use 20% of their lung capacity taking small short breaths, but 70% of the body’s toxins can actually be released when taking a full breath! By taking the time to fill your lungs and release, you can not only improve your health but also radically decrease the anxiety related to that moment. There are many ways to change your physiology and in our seminars we prove this time after time by taking people who feel depressed and having them make a radical shift. Intuitively we know this can be changed not only by the way we move, but our breath and body temperature as well. The second thing that affects our state is what we focus on. For example, if you’ve been at a funeral honoring someone you cared about and everyone is in a sad state and afterwards someone shares a story or anecdote about something that person did that was extremely humorous, suddenly everyone goes from tears to laughter. In an instant our states can be changed by what we focus on. What’s wrong is always available—but so is what’s right. Whatever we focus on effects our state and our state then effects the story we have about who we are, what’s life about, what’s possible and what’s not. From that story we will often determine whether or not we will maximize our capabilities and the strategies that will help us achieve what we’re truly after in a sustainable way. Learning to put yourself in a peak state consistently is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself and your life. It can transform your stories and give you the strategies to breakthrough. This is a huge focus that we just don’t tell people but what we train people to do with their minds and bodies in an instant, on cue, so they can shift the quality of their performance. Whether it’s a peak performance athlete like Serena Williams, MMA champion Jon Jones, a president of a company, a parent, or someone in prison—if we’re going to shift our life it comes down to these three fundamentals. Change your strategy, change your result. Change your story, change your life. Change your state—you change it all!

The-stress-of-relaxation

The stress of relaxation

November 20, 2012

Dear Sherrie,

Artists go to their studios for a variety of reasons. These can include a desire for wealth and fame, a deep-seated passion for art, a need to communicate ideas, the love of process and play, a sense of societal obligation, the fear of having to take a regular job, prior failures or incompetence in other professions, distaste for conventional work, a feeling of comfort and sanctuary that comes from private creativity, trying to get away from someone or from people in general, a need to explore one's own potential, avoiding domesticity or less-than-challenging pursuits, familial, parental or peer expectations, etc. For many creative folks, the need for garden-variety cash flow may be rather down the list. 

Recent research seems to show that a small but significant subset goes to work because relaxation stresses them out. Apparently some "driven" folks may just have a need to be busy. They have what psychologists are now calling "relaxation-induced anxiety."

I'd appreciate if you didn't mention this to anyone, but I have it. When I was in grade five I gave a show-and-tell called "Bobby's Hobbies" in which I explained my drawing, painting, bird-watching, woodland exploration, collecting of stamps, seashells, beach wood, mechanical gadgets, mushroom spore-prints and broken clocks. I was as busy as a one-armed man using dental floss. Our teacher, Miss Ayliff, a certified joy-denier if there ever was one, told the class, "All work and no play make Bobby a dull boy."

Christina Luberto, head of a current relaxation study at the University of Cincinnati, thinks that the paradoxical increase in anxiety as a result of relaxation is more common than we might think. In her study, individuals were asked to fill out a questionnaire called The Relaxation Sensitivity Index. It turns out that people with high relaxation sensitivity were also high in anxiety.

That was me in grade five--anxious. Relaxing gave me the unpleasant feeling of losing control. In later life I've come to see control as a mixed blessing but also key to generating creativity and finding success.

The Miss Ayliffs of this world have got it quite wrong. As studio proprietors, we learn that work is play. With no boss, no committee and no band of demanding customers in the waiting room, it's a dream of a job. And I'm not sure, but I don't think it makes you dull.

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "We wanted to develop a test to examine why certain individuals fear relaxation events or sensations associated with taking a time-out just to relax." (Christina Luberto) 

Esoterica: In my studies of artists' motivation, I've found that the reasons given are not always the real reasons. Artists need to find and understand the primal truth of their own motivations. The more I look at it, the more I realize that habits do more to form success than perhaps any other factor. If you happen to be one of those artists who regularly avoids lethargy and laying about, you may have been blessed with the habit of work. Don't be anxious about it.

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A Trip To Santa Fe, New Mexico - Photos & music by my husband, Angelo Miranda.

60 NaNoWriMo Writing Tips in a Single Post

NANOWRIMO, WRITER RESOURCES 60 NaNoWriMo Writing Tips in a Single Post By Jason Boog on November 1, 2012 3:42 PM http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/nanowrimo-writing-tips-in-a-single-post_b60041 Here's the link so you can click on the tips and read more. Sorry, but it wouldn't come up here. SM National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) launched today as writers around the globe try to write a 50,000-word novel draft in a single month. To help the GalleyCat readers taking this challenge, we will be offering one piece of NaNoWriMo advice every day this month. Last year, NaNoWriMo writers wrote a collective total of 3,073,176,540 words. The writing marathon has generated 90 published novels, according to the organizers. Our first tip is simple: follow our advice from the previous years! Since 2011, we have collected 60 pieces of advice for marathon writers. You can explore all those writing tips below–tune in tomorrow for some fresh advice. 30 National Novel Writing Month Tips from 2011 1. Write in the Cloud 2. ‘Don’t Finish.’ 3. Cliche Finder Stops Cliches Before They Start 4. Take the Fantasy Novelist’s Exam 5. Use a Name Generator 6. Seek Library Write-In Support 7. Consult Role Playing Game Plots 8. Best Pandora Stations for Writing 9. Use the Brainstormer App 10. Dictate Your Novel Draft 11. Use Foursquare for Inspiration 12. ‘Failure Instructs the Writer’ 13: Use the Online Graphical Dictionary 14. Write ‘TK’ for Missing Facts 15. ‘Everyone Has a Certain Amount of Bad Writing to Get Out of Their System’ 16. Use a Plot Diagram Tool 17. Test Your Characters 18. Use the Reverse Dictionary 19. Use Correct Writing Posture 20. Start a Writing Bible 21. ‘It’s Not a Sprint, It’s a Marathon’ 22. Use Your Smartphone for Novel Writing & Editing 23. Turn Your Computer Into a Typewriter 24. Use Write or Die for Motivation 25. Relax with a Literary Drink 26. Browse BibliOdyssey for Inspiration 27. World of Warcraft Procrastinator Support 28. Request a Free Book Cover 29. Lulu Titlescorer Tests Your Title 30. Share Your Final Sentence 30 National Novel Writing Month Tips from 2012 1. Read 30 Tips from Last Year 2. Use the Reference Desk 3. Type a Poem 4. Make a Mind Map 5. Reward Yourself 6. Seek Figment Support 7. Download Seven Free Writing eBooks 8. Get a Literary Butt-Kicking 9. Write What You DON’T Know 10. Fight a Word War 11. Write in the Same Place 12. Download the Free Writing Cheatsheet 13. “Obvious to you. Amazing to others.” 14. Listen to Spotify: NaNoWriMo Tip #14 15. Take the Random Cliche Test 16. Consult a Plot Doctor 17. Fix Your Computer Screen Color 18. Join the Typewriter Brigade 19. Fill Out a Character Chart 20. Meet Your Deadline with Kittens 21. Use the Symbolitron 22. Make a Spreadsheet 23. Explore the World with Globe Genie 24. Write with Your Neighbors 25. Try Communal World Building 26. Write by Hand 27. Adopt an Idea 28. Explore the Onomatopoeia Dictionary 29. Swap Your Novel 30. Keep Writing Every Day