What Are You Not Including In Your Definition of Writing?
Five things you probably aren’t including in your definition of writing, but are intrinsic to the act:
1. FOOD
If you’re a writer, you’re a cognitive professional.
Cognition is not a mystical, magical or ethereal process: it’s a physical one centered in a physical organ: the brain. A MMA fighter or long-distance runner or football player or gymnast will all eat different diets, diets specific to their profession.
So why wouldn’t a writer?
Eating a certain way is simply part of playing football at peak performance. There are ways to eat that are part of thinking and writing at peak performance. Eat for your brain.
Since I’m not a doctor or nutritionist, I’ll let you do your own research and consultation, but here are some basic guidelines:
MORE vegetables, legumes, fish, nuts, tea and antioxidant-rich foods like blueberries.
LESS dairy, sugars, fried foods and fake foods (Cheetos, Twinkies, etc. - foods that can’t be “picked” or “caught”).
In general, the better it is for your body, the better it is for your brain.
The key is adherence: making small changes you will actually stick to will always be better in the long run than sweeping changes you drop after a week.
2. EXERCISE
I repeat: the better it is for your body, the better it is for your brain. The two are linked in a million (probably more) ways. The healthier your brain’s support system (your body), the healthier your brain. The healthier your brain, the more efficiently it works. The more efficiently it works, the better you think. The better you think, the better you write.
This is especially important in a profession that traditionally requires long stretches of sitting still in a chair staring at a computer screen/typewriter/piece of paper.
Try working standing up. Get a $2 kitchen timer and set it for 45-60 minutes at a time to remind yourself to get up and walk or jog around the block before resuming work. Drink massive amounts of water while you work so your bladder will force you up regularly. Or go all in and try writing on a treadmill.
3. SLEEP
See above. Body good=brain good=mind good.
4. ORDER
Creating any sort of art is a process of forging cosmos from chaos.
If your environment is chaotic, then the part of your brain creating order on a blank page and discovering unexpected connections between ideas is having to deal with two chaoses: the creative aether and your physical surroundings. It’s multi-tasking. Which the brain can’t actually do without drastically reducing the quality and speed of processing. Multiple studies have estimated multi-tasking reduces your IQ by 10 points and reduces productivity by about 25%.
“But it only looks like a mess to you. I know where everything is!” you’ll say. I know because that was exactly what I used to say. And you probably do. I did. But I had to actively hold all that information in my mind (“contract for Project X is about two-thirds down Pile A,” “research for Project Y is in Pile B and a little bit on Shelf C,” “printed confirmation for con pro badge pickup is in Bag D, in the corner,” etc.). Which was mental attention not being focused on the task at hand: writing.
Put it all in a file cabinet, and all you have to hold in your mind is the alphabet. We’ll get deeper into this with mental models below.
So do it. Banish the clutter from your workspace. You don’t need a complex system. In fact, the simpler the better. Try a filing cabinet. Try a checklist. Try a set of boxes.
You may take comfort from your mess. I did. But comfort is, in my experience, the enemy of improvement. Improving your game requires stretching and discomfort. I once participated in a training regimen designed to prepare for Navy SEAL physical entrance exams. It was not uncommon for me to find myself on my hands and knees in the grass, before the sun had even risen, puking violently. I was extremely uncomfortable. But by the end I could run so much farther and faster, could swim so much farther and faster, was light years stronger, leaner and fitter than when I’d begun.
No pain, no gain.
5. STUDY
No one is such an accomplished writer that they can’t learn more about their craft. Being writers, many of the greatest writers to ever live tended to write down their thoughts on what they did. Which means, thanks to the written word, you can study with the greatest writers of all time, both living and dead.
So do it. Don’t ever stop learning. Learn and learn and learn some more. While there is certainly an intangible element to it and perhaps some unquantifiables like “talent,” most of writing is a discipline that can be mastered like any other.
And here’s something that happens as you study: you add new mental models (AKA analytical rules-of-thumb, or analytical frameworks or heuristics) to your toolbox. Think of a mental model as a personal (or communal) algorithm. It’s a single principle or thought that contains a complex web of other interconnected ideas and outcomes.
For example: chess. Chess masters don’t think move-by-move like us amateurs tend to. They think in blocks of moves. A single action on the chessboard represents an entire series of future and inter-connected moves in their mind. With the processing power it takes you or me to consider 2-3 moves at once, they’re considering 20-30 moves. Just 2-3 blocks.
Another example: blackjack. Hi-lo card counting reduces 52 possible cards to 3 values: +1, -1 and 0. These 3 values are reduced to a single number the card counter has to keep in her mind. Like my earlier alphabetical filing example, an extremely complex system (dealer, 5-7 players, usually multiple 52-card decks shuffled together) is here reduced to a single number.
Warren Buffet’s right-hand advisor Charles Munger is famous for his 80-90 mental models, cribbed from disciplines as varied as physics and evolutionary biology, which give him, in Buffet’s words, “the best 30-second mind in the world.”
He uses his mental models for investing, but the same method works for storytelling: mental models allow us to quickly parse out complex skeins of structure, character, information and parallel events.
Here’s a few writing-pertinent mental models off the top of my head:
Alan Moore’s Page-As-Stanza. Sixteen-grid. Nine-grid. Four-tier. Container Series. In Medias Res. Chyrons. The Sekhmet Hypothesis. The Levitz Paradigm. Saving the Cat. Writes of Passage. Working Backward. The Hero’s Journey. Don’t Write Action Scenes. Three Acts. Four Acts. Five Acts. Lester Dent’s Master Pot. TK. Archetypes. The MacGuffin. Chekhov’s Gun. Red Herrings. The Three Unities.
Not to mention the mental models of productivity and time-management that will help you implement any of the principles in this post:
Ockham’s Razor. The Pareto Principle. Sturgeon’s Law. Parkinson’s Law. Hofstadter’s Law. The 100% Factor. The Principle of Priority. Big Rocks. Swallow the Frog. Contexts. Dreamlining. Adherence. Minimum Effective Dose. The Bike-Shed Effect. Resistance.
So there you have it.
Five areas that, if you’re not including them in your current definition of “writing,” you should.
Now back to work.
