Starting Fresh!

Hello friends!  Hope you all had a marvelous New Year.  I know it's been quiet around here.  Sorry to leave you all in the lurch!  I meant to start posting again on Monday but I was struck down by a new year flu (blech) for a few days, but now I'm back to normal and ready to start posting again.

Everyone and their mother is posting about writing resolutions, but I thought I'd do something a little different.  First off, I'm not sure I want to share all my goals and resolutions (mostly because I'm bound to have a #gabifail or two so this way I save myself the humiliation of having to admit it in public.)  But more importantly, I think resolutions aren't just about setting goals and striving for them, but about a change in attitude and outlook.  Instead I've come up with a 2011 plan.

Picture Credit

2 Manageable Goals: 

• First, I'm doing the 100+ reading challenge for 2011 and I'll be posting the books I read here.
• Second, this year I will finish the edits on my WIP.

0 Comparisons:  I'll admit it, I can't help but compare myself to the people around me.  I try not to--I really do--but it's almost like a reflex and I can't help it.  The college bulletin arrives in the mail and I always feel super-inferior because I haven't discovered a cure for cancer, I haven't finished a triathlon in record time, and I haven't sold my start-up company for billions of dollars.

But then I started thinking... even if I knew how to do all these things, it's not like I would actually want to.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm very glad there are people out there coming up with cures for cancer, performing amazing physical feats like a triathlon or building start-up companies that give other people good jobs.  I'm glad these things are happening in the world.

And I'm also glad that I don't have to be the one to do it.

This year, rather than letting these things get me down, I've decided I will not run away from the college bulletin.  I will not pathologically avoid Facebook.  When I see someone accomplish something great, I'll send happy "Thank You" vibes to that person for doing it because it means I don't have to.  And that means more time for writing.


1 New Approach to Creativity:  This video is super-inspiring!  It's a bit on the long side but it's SOOOOO worth it.  It's totally changed my attitude toward the idea of genius and creative success.

1 Quote:

"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
         ~ Randy Nelson, Pixar

Work In Progress

I don't usually blog about my current writing project because I'm always scared I'll jinx it if I talk about it too much.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not a superstitious person.  I have a black cat that crosses my path on a regular basis, Friday the 13th is one of my favorite days of the year and I cross my eyes and make faces regularly, just to make sure I won't get stuck that way.  But there's something about talking about my WIP that gives me the heebee-jeebies.

Now I'm in the final sprint--only a few hundred words away from finishing--so I feel OK about sharing with you all.  In fact, I feel more than OK, I want to share because that way you'll understand why I've been a bit more MIA than usual these last few weeks.  Still, part of me is a little superstitious about talking about my WIP so I've decided to tell the story in pictures, starring baby animals (because baby animals make any story that much cuter).  Here it is.  The progress report of my WIP (title to be revealed later) told in pictures.

Enjoy! <3 <3 <3

At first, things were going swimmingly.  I finished my thesis,
had a solid outline, and was writing along.  La la la la la...

Then, as I was climbing fast toward the climax, I made a fatal mistake:
I looked down.
"Yikes, it's pretty high up here."

Lucky for me, I have some great writing buddies
who weren't afraid to give me a pick-me-up.
I kept writing.

Even so, there were times I just wanted to curl up inside my shell.

Then, I finally made it to the final showdown!
Good thing I'm trained in the art of pen-wielding,
because my villain turned out to be a piece of work.
"Take that, evil character!"

 

Now I'm sprinting to the finish line.
1200 words... 1100... 1000...
And pretty soon I'll type the two most beautiful words in the English language:
THE END.

How about you?  How's your writing coming along?  Any NaNoWriMo folks out there?  If so, how's the experience been treating you?

Write on!

What's your Holy Grail?

As we gear up for DIY MFA, we'll be talking a lot of about goals.  Yesterday we focused on operational definitions for our goals (i.e. small concrete and measurable steps that represent the bigger, abstract goal).  Today we'll be emphasizing the flip-side of that idea, namely the Holy Grail.

What's a Holy Grail, you ask?  It's that elusive dream, that unbelievable quest that shapes all your creative goals.  Julia Cameron (of The Artist's Way) calls this her True North.  I call it my own personal Holy Grail.  It doesn't matter what words you give it, the idea is the same.

Two people might have similar goals but a very different Holy Grail.  For instance, two writers might both want to get published but to one, the Holy Grail is winning a Pulitzer while to the other the Holy Grail might be getting on the NYT Bestseller list.  Notice how both writers have parallel small goals (getting an agent, editor and having their book published) but ultimately the differences in their Holy Grails will shape how they approach these intermediary steps.  Even if they never reach that ultimate goal, the Holy Grail will influence the goals that lead up to their ultimate success.

But wait, you say.  Didn't we just spend all of yesterday figuring out small, concrete, manageable goals?  Are we supposed to give up on those all of a sudden and go after wild and crazy dreams?

No.

Here's the secret: The Holy Grail shapes your goals, but it doesn't define them.  So go ahead, dream big.  Let your mind go through all those fanciful scenarios you would never admit to anyone.


Your task for today:  What's your Holy Grail?  Write it down and post it somewhere where you can see it every day.  Here's mine.

Measuring Success

One topic that we'll come back to many times in the DIY MFA is this idea of measuring success.  Unlike a typical MFA, where you can measure your success through grades, a diploma or post-graduation opportunities, the DIY MFA is, by definition, un-measurable since different people would consider different things to be "success."

This brings me to a concept that I first learned about in Psychology 101 in college: Operational Definition.  In psychology, you're usually dealing with outcome variables that are very abstract and difficult to measure.  Stress.  Anger.  Fear.  Part of the reason these variables are so hard to measure is because different people experience them in different ways.  It's up to the psychologist to find another variable--one that's concrete and easy to measure--to approximate the variable we really care about.

For instance, you can't ask a bunny if it's hungry because it's a bunny and it doesn't speak English.  You can, however, count how many carrots it eats in a given time period.  More carrots = more hungry.

Similarly, while you can ask human subjects if they were hungry (say on a 1-10 scale), you could run into problems.  First: what might be a 4 on the scale for one person might be a 2 on a hunger scale for someone else.  Second: people sometimes lie.  If, however, you give everyone the same "snack" during the experiment and then secretly measure how much food is left at the end, you can have a reasonable indicator of who was hungry and who was not.  When you spread that data over a large sample, you can account for individual discrepancies and your concrete measure (weight of leftover snack) actually becomes a very good indicator for your abstract variable (hunger).

OK, I didn't mean to get overly technical, but there's a reason I'm going into all this detail.  The fact is, DIY MFA success is an abstract outcome variable, making it difficult to measure.  If we set smaller, concrete goals, on the other hand, we can have a pretty good indication of whether we've succeeded or not.  As we work on putting together our DIY MFA individualized programs, remind yourself to keep your goals concrete.

Why is it so important that goals be concrete?

1. Abstract goals are hard to measure.  Telling yourself "I'm going to become a better writer" is all well and good, but how will you know when you get there?  Instead, you could try: "I'll write and edit three stories in the next three months" or "I'll submit one story to 10 literary magazines."  Then with a simple checklist you'll know if you've succeeded or not.
2. Vague goals are scary.  OK, maybe I'm more of a wimp than most people but nothing freaks me out more than a vague goal.  If the goal is too amorphous, it's easy to get overwhelmed, but if the goal is concrete, it automatically becomes more doable.  "Write a novel someday" sounds scary.  But "write five pages a day"?  Well, I know I can write 5 pages today and I guess I could do it tomorrow too and probably the next day... and you get the idea.
3. Checking things off the list feels good.  If you're measuring success with small, concrete goals, it means you get to check things off the list more often than if you look at it as just one vague goal.  If you look at success as one big goal, then that's only one thing you get to check off the list but think of how many checks you'd get if you broke down that goal into small, concrete goals.
4. Concrete goals make it easier to track your progress.  Say your goal is to write a novel, but you break it down to 5 pages per day, six days per week.  That means, in 8-10 weeks you should be pretty close to finishing the whole thing.  If you stick to your weekly goals, you should have a good measure of how close you are to finishing your progress.

During DIY MFA month, I want to accomplish the following abstract goals (broken down into concrete goals):

• Finish my novel (8 chapters left - 2 chapters or approx. 4000 words per week words for 4 weeks)
• Read more (one book per week for 4 weeks)
• Submit a short story (Submit A.H. to 5 markets per week for 4 weeks, total of 20 magazines)

What abstract goals can you break down into concrete goals for DIY MFA?