Dave Baldwin

Henry Winkler, on the TV show “Happy Days,” was known for a particular trademark move with the comb in front of the mirror. He would walk up to the mirror, look at his hair, then shrug his arms and don a charming grin, implying that his hair was already perfect and didn’t need to be combed. Winkler’s ability to don this attitude like a comfortable pair of jeans was the very thing that made him successful in the role.

As a writer, you need to learn to see everything you write as absolutely perfect. This is essential when carrying your book forward into the marketplace. Critics and jealous people with emotional issues will do everything in their power to make you doubt the quality of the writing for which you gave months of blood, sweat, and tears. The literary narcissist doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. He can enjoy a quiet afternoon of re-reading his own words and thinking, “Did I write that? That’s brilliant!”

At the same time, this same quality can be deadly, particularly when you are in the process of perfecting and refining your book. There will be times when you need to turn off your narcissism and look at your mirror image for what it is, good, bad, and ugly.

Being prematurely starry-eyed about your literary genius while your allies are giving you valuable and necessary feedback on your work will interfere with your ability to take the criticism. It will also interfere with their ability to help you. You will get on people’s nerves, and you’ll look like a fool. Have you ever seen a bad poet render a dramatic reading of their awful lines expecting a standing ovation, only to meet with some polite golf claps while the audience avoided eye contact?

When you have earned the right to fall in love with your words, do so fully. Until then, be brutally critical of every dot on every “i.”

I just got myself unstuck this week. My blog has been limping along at the sluggish pace of one post per week for the last few months. My good friend Minling forced me to step up my game. She’s been putting up a blog post every single day since the first of the year. She took away my excuses.

Minling’s approach is simple: focus on joy. Her theme is called “365 Days of Joy.” I’ve started to appreciate the power and simplicity of her approach. I then asked myself: how could I do something like this?

My biggest challenge with blogging has always come down to selecting topics for my posts. I’ve struggled to pick things to write about that relate to my areas of expertise. I’ve held back from blogging about a lot of different things, for fear that a range of topics too diverse would confuse people about who I am and what I do.

Minling doesn’t seem to have that problem. She blogs on a broad range of subjects, but reading her posts on a daily basis hasn’t confused me a bit about who she is. In fact, I feel like I have a much clearer picture of her personal brand than I did before.

Today, as I type this blog post, I’m putting together a seven blog posts, to be posted every day this week. I’m asking myself: what would it take to get into a steady rhythm of blogging every day? What would it take to do this naturally, without having to force anything? What would it take to align the rest of my life around a practice like this?

Some people are called to play football. Some people are called to make oil paintings. Some are called to decorate homes. I’m called to write.

What are you called to do? Have you run into challenges integrating your true calling fully into your life? Share your experience here.

Don’t tell me that you need perfect peace and quiet to write. This is nothing but an excuse. Professional writers don’t let anything stop them. While some may argue that certain environments are more conducive to the writing process than others (and I would agree), a great writer can write anywhere.

Wanna-be writers are finicky about writing only under the perfect set of conditions. They have to feel energetic, be in the right mood, have the lighting set up just so, and have a room dedicated solely to their writing efforts to keep it pure and clean. These writers will spend months organizing the perfect space, reasoning that they “just can’t write with the room like this.”

If you are easily distracted from your writing, it’s just not that important to you. When, on the other hand, you are focused and determined to carry your message to its audience even if it kills you, nothing will be able to distract you from your task. An air raid siren and an elephant stampede will just cause you to slide over briefly, without looking up from your keyboard.

You’ll find yourself forming a bubble of sorts around you as you write. You’ll still be aware of what’s going on around you to an extent. You’ll learn to train you mind to let you know when something really requires your attention. This won’t really require any effort on your part; it will happen automatically. The survival instinct is hard-wired into you. Your brain will interrupt you if you really need to stop what you’re doing.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t organize your space. In fact, I think you definitely should. An environment free from distractions is beneficial, and you should be doing everything in your power that will give your writing that extra edge. But whatever you do, don’t you dare use distractions as a reason not to write. If you do, I’m raising the bullshit flag.

You might find that there are some memories that you can’t bear to write about. You might be fearful, you might feel stupid, or you might be afraid that writing about the incident will dredge up unbearable emotion. If there is an incident that you are simply not willing to write about, I know of a trick that I’ve found helpful.

If you have trouble writing about a specific incident, name that incident with a single code word or phrase that only you can recognize. Then, write about other incidents that are more bearable. Eventually, you will find yourself ready to write about the more difficult ones. If it’s a person, give them a code name – or use a nebulous code word. It’s important to make sure you use something that no one else would be able to figure out or decipher.

For example, if your teacher beat you with a belt in full view of the classroom and the other students erupted with laughter, leaving you thoroughly humiliated to the point where you cannot even speak about it, you could use the word “number two pencil” to refer to it. This technique is powerful, in that it effectively seals away the memory inside a convenient, bite-size capsule for later processing.

Refer to the code word or phrase from time to time throughout your journaling. Using the code word or phrase will remind you that the memory is still there. You don’t want to bury it forever. You simply want to store it away until such time that you can bring yourself to write about it. If you have many such incidents, make a list of code words.

This is the kind of technique that you will never understand until you just try it.

David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear. Your task as a writer is much more difficult. Making meaning disappear is arguably the most challenging magic trick anyone has ever attempted, but it’s equally valuable for anyone aspiring to create powerful words.

Have you ever had the experience of hearing an everyday word lose its meaning, to the point where uttering the word sounded strange, foreign, or nonsensical? If not, the simplest and most effective way to replicate this effect is to repeat the same word out loud over and over again, saying nothing else.

When a common word starts to sound unfamiliar, you know you have made its meaning disappear. You are experiencing the word newly.

This is an exercise that you will find invaluable to your writing.

When you do this often enough, you’ll find that you start to hear everything newly. Music will sound oddly enchanting. People’s voices will start to reveal things you hadn’t heard before. This is the magic of disappearing meaning.

When you experience sound in this way, you will start to speak differently. You will notice yourself crafting each word as you push it out of your throat. When you write with a pen, you’ll feel as if you’re writing each letter as a new art form.

This is what it feels like to create language. This skill is vital for any serious writer. The difference between creating language and ordinary writing is akin to the difference between a master chef’s creation and a  frozen TV dinner. If you’ve never tasted the former, the latter will do just fine. Once you have tasted a gourmet meal, though, there’s no going back.

The chef can concoct something delicious from any set of ingredients, but he prefers to select the best quality. He respects each dish. While he may create recipes and replicate them later, he treats each one as a brand-new creation, never allowing formula to displace art.

As a writer, you must treat your words and sentences the same way.

Try writing “I will make meaning disappear” 100 times on a chalkboard.

Great writers love pleasure, and they bathe themselves in luxury. They spoil themselves rotten, and they make no bones about it.

Do you have a weakness for chocolate truffles? Fried chicken? Pizza? Lobster? Deep fried macaroni and cheese? Red wine? Pate de fois gras? Cigarettes? Bubble baths? Single malt scotch whiskey? Cocaine? Chocolate chip cookies? These things and many others have been the downfall of countless great people. They have also brought endless pleasure to many others who managed to keep their intake at a manageable level.

Other forms of overindulgence include, but are not limited to, channel-surfing, web surfing, oversleeping, compulsive cleaning, arguing, eavesdropping, worrying, doing busy-work, checking e-mail, and a host of similar soul-eroding habits that deliver no pleasure whatsoever.

Overindulgence is dangerous to your writing not because it damages your body. A single line of cocaine, a single glass of beer, a single cigarette, and a single slice of key lime pie do no lasting damage to your body. However, all of these things can grow into habits, and all habits can kill you. Great writers don’t have any more willpower than anyone else. In fact, many have considerably less willpower.

There is no “secret” to mastering this. It’s an art form. The art of experiencing pleasure is arguably the single most important thing for a writer to learn. You don’t have to eat buffalo steak, you don’t have to learn to meditate while standing on your head, you don’t have to fast, you don’t have to pop pills, and you don’t have to shave your head.  You don’t have to do anything in particular. All that’s necessary is to fully experience what you do, and enjoy it completely.

This art takes a lifetime to master.

If you love ice cream, learn to cherish every bite of ice cream, and put it back in the freezer as soon as you realize you aren’t enjoying it that much. That is the secret to perfect indulgence; stop when you feel yourself starting to go numb. Delay gratification just long enough to make yourself long for the pleasure again. Experiment with delaying gratification for different periods of time. It’s an art.

You may notice that I didn’t mention sexual pleasure here. That was on purpose, because it’s just too damn complicated to get into on one page. But everything I said about the other stuff applies to sex as well.

You’ll know you’re really a writer when you start getting the things you ask for with eerie precision.

When your thoughts are pristine, crystal clear, and backed by a determination to produce a particular result, you will find that result showing up on your doorstep. You will know that your thoughts are clear when your words are clear and your actions match your words.

Writers have much greater chances of attaining this degree of mental clarity. Great writers know that this degree of clarity comes only from persistence and discipline.

When you can clearly see the end goal in your mind’s eye and hold that vision fixed at the top of your consciousness and you write every day, you’ll notice incredibly powerful words rolling off your tongue. You’ll notice heads turning when you speak. You’ll ask for things, even jokingly, and you’ll get them.

Ask yourself: if you knew that your words commanded the power to move mountains, what would you do with them? If you could ask for anything you wanted and know that you would receive it, what would you ask for? Most people cannot even conceive of their own words having this kind of power, so they don’t bother to do any serious or rigorous thinking on this subject.

There are some people who might respond to this inquiry by saying, “That’s easy! I want to win the lottery.” This is an example of what it looks like to be lazy, cynical, and determined to stay unhappy.

Great writers quickly become bored with ordinary pursuits. They feel a burning desire to innovate. They are enthralled by the ideas they conceive, as well as the process of bringing them into fruition. If you had a billion dollars to play with, what sorts of pet projects might you see yourself investing in? The more ridiculous and impractical, the better.

The bigger a wish you dare to make, the better your writing will get.

“Just as dogs love to chew bones, the mind loves to get its teeth into problems. That’s why it solves crossword puzzles and builds atom bombs.” – Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

Your mind is a potentially useful machine, but when employed for the wrong purposes, it just makes a bunch of irritating and potentially destructive noise.

If the writing process is devoid of joy, or if it seems too complicated, this is a strong indication that you are allowing your mind to have too much control.

Your heart, and only your heart, can communicate with anyone. Your heart has a message to carry to the world. The role of the mind is to package and translate that message into words.

Your heart’s language is too simple to be understood by the mind. The mind’s language is too complicated to be heard by the heart. The two need to work in tandem.

If your heart is filled with poison, your mind will construct words and phrases that hurt people deeply.

If your heart has nothing to say, your mind will spin empty words all day long.

Therefore, an important skill for a writer is learning to recognize when the heart needs attention.

The mind will voluntarily bow out when it recognizes that it has nothing useful to contribute. Unfortunately, the mind often takes years or decades to recognize this.

Feeding your heart might look like painting, cleaning the house, doing mindless and repetitive tasks, sleeping, having a conversation with someone you love, taking a walk outside, or any number of other things.

Your heart will let you know when it’s ready to write.

When you tend to your heart regularly, you will have no issue with writer’s block.