Irrelevant Talent

Guest Post: I am so excited for todays guest post because it's my long time friend Robin Weeks, who is shopping a fabulous book that I'm over the moon about. But today she's sharing her notes (with permission from the presenter) on a class at LDStorymakers that I was SO bummed I missed. So without further ado, Robin.

I met Shelly waaaay back at BYU when she auditioned for my Mask Club class project. She played Elle in the Theatre of the Absurd play The Dialogues of Il and Elle. (I know you’re all shocked that Shelly was perfect for an absurd theatre piece.) Then came the long, dark period of my life when we fell out of touch. There was less laughter. A dearth of absurdity. Not enough Shelly by half. Then, then came the happy day when I ran into her at last year’s LDStorymakers conference. I was smart enough to get her contact info and my life has been better ever since.

This year’s LDStorymakers theme was Building Better Writers—inspired, no doubt, by the “under construction” lobby we had to pass through to get from one end of the conference center to the other. Shelly and I ran into each other while crossing through this lobby Friday night, and it was the perfect place for a photo-op.

During the conference, since I’ve recently realized that it’s high time I learned to outline, I attended almost every class on plotting I could find. But there was one class that wasn’t on plotting that I am very glad I made time for: Howard Tayler’s class on How to Practice: An Exercise in Rendering Talent Irrelevant. When I mentioned it to Shelly, she asked (pretty please) that I blog about that class for our little blog swap today. I’m happy to oblige, but I gotta say: this is going to be mostly quotes, since Howard provided some excellent links to his sources and they’re all online. I’ll give you the sources, too. (Shelly says Howard gave blanket permission for anyone to disseminate the content of his class, so I’m trusting her on this.)

Editors note: Exhibit A

Intelligence vs. Effort

Howard started by telling us about a study that sought to find out if it was better to be smart or to work hard. This blew my mind (I did all the bolding below):

[Carol] Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.”

Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.

Why did this happen? “When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote in her study summary, “we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” And that’s what the fifth-graders had done: They’d chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.

In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice. The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the study’s start, responded differently. Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn’t focused hard enough on this test. “They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles,” Dweck recalled. “Many of them remarked, unprovoked, ‘This is my favorite test.’ ” Not so for those praised for their smarts. They assumed their failure was evidence that they weren’t really smart at all. “Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable.”

Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.

Read the entire article on How Not to Talk to Your Kids here.

The take-away from this? As Howard said, it’s 5 words: You Worked Hard On This. Memorize it. Use it. Tell it to your kids. Save the future.

Free Practice Beats Paid Involvement

First, the graph:

 Source 

Howard used the example of cooking. When you first start learning to cook, you learn a few basics very quickly, but your skills (performance) aren’t all that terrific. Then you start to practice cooking and, during Domain II, your skills increase for a while and then plateau. You’ve gone as far as practice can take you. Then, you get a job as a chef (Domain III) and your skills take another jump, because you’re doing it full-time. But then you plateau again.

Why do you plateau again? Because you’re not getting paid to improve: you’re getting paid to produce. And because you get paid the same amount for doing less than your absolute best.

If you want to improve again, you need to regress back to the practice domain. For example, Howard was making good money drawing his Schlock Mercenary comic strip. He’d taught himself how to draw over several years and had reached the point where he could draw just about anything with a high level of competence. His drawn hands, though, weren’t really all that terrific. One day, he decided to improve his drawing of hands, so he sat down and drew hand after hand after hand—hundreds of hands that he wouldn’t get paid for. Eventually, his hands improved so much that he was asked to illustrate a card tricks how-to book. (!!!)

Then he asked us if we thought he was now drawing hundreds of free knees and feet… and no, he’s not. He’s not getting paid for that. (Tee-hee.)

The take-away for writers: If You Want To Improve, Do It For Free. For instance, instead of writing the one plot required by my WIP, I should outline six plots—then I’ll have one good plot and five plots that taught me how to plot. (This, incidentally, was eerily similar to the advice I got from the plotting class with J. Scott Savage, Robison Wells, and James Dashner.)

Don’t Force Creativity… Except When Necessary

Howard’s final point came from Jonah Lehrer’s work on creativity. Specifically, this article on How to Be Creative.

Howard summed this up as follows: Relax. Concentrate. Repeat.

The longer summary is a lot more complicated, but it relates to Lehrer’s studies of how creativity works better when we aren’t trying to force it. Which is why we can make connections between random things when we’re focusing on something else.

On the other hand, as Howard pointed out, sometimes we just have to sit down at the computer and bang away: we can’t always wait for inspiration to strike.

Still, if you have the time, the article has a lovely list of creativity boosters:

1.      Blue calming paint for creative insights, red paint for analytic problems

2.      Get groggy—you’ll score up to 50% better on creative tests.

3.      Daydream

4.      Imagine yourself as a 7-year-old to enhance divergent thinking

5.      Watching stand-up comedy enhances insight

6.      If you imagine a puzzle came from far away (like Greece), you’ll have more insight

7.      Use general verbs when describing problems (“moving” instead of “driving”) to avoid limiting your options

8.      Work in an open space instead of a cubical

9.      Travel to other countries to boost creative insight

1.      Move to a bigger city

Howard ended with the following take-aways:

·       Efforts to improve will make a different in performance

·       Failure does not mean the absence of ability

·       Find an expert to help you focus your practice

·       Pay it forward: be the expert for someone else

·       Save the future: tell a child “you worked hard on this”

Also, instead of telling our children that everything they do is wonderful and perfect (even when it’s pretty darn good), that it’s okay to point out that the hand they just drew in their fantastic picture didn’t really look like a hand. Kids don’t need to believe they are talented—they just have to be told “You Worked Hard At This.” And you can work harder to get even better results—especially if you have an artist father who can show you how to draw awesome hands.

I’ve already changed the way I talk to my own children . . . and I’m starting to train myself to think of myself as a hard worker instead of someone who is “smart” or “talented.” I can’t control my intelligence or my children’s intelligence—but we can control how hard we work with what we have.

Also, Shelly rocks. Just sayin’.

Aww thanks :)

Teach & Talk Tuesday: Katie Mitchell

Guest Post by the cute Katie Mitchell at I Write, Therefore I Am

 Hello fans of Shelly and Chad!  My name is Katie, and I write poetry over at katiespoetry.blogspot.com.  I decided to share a poem that I wrote a few years ago, but have not yet shared on my blog. Most of my poems deal with personal experiences, and this one is no exception. Last week was National Infertility Awareness Week and I decided to share this poem in honor of men and women everywhere who live with this disease. 

Waiting

Am I pregnant

How will I know

Will I appear to have

A mother's glow

Will I have the joy

Of a special spirit inside me?

Day after day

The waiting gets harder

I look to my heart

For the long awaited answer

Will I get pregnant

How will I know

I rely on my heart

To tell me so.

Teach & Talk T-day: Randy Lindsay

Guest Post by Randy Lindsay. You can catch him on his blog or twitter.

Film Based Plot and Character Development

by Randy Lindsay

            Hold on a sec. This doesn’t look like my blog.

            Oh, that’s right! I’m guest blogging for the delightsome duo of Shelly and Chad. Whew, I thought I walked into the wrong place. How embarrassing would that have been?

            < Randy looks around the blog and nods his head in approval. >

            I really love how they . . . use plenty of pictures to keep the page vibrant. It sort of figures that Shelly and Chad would each have their own side of the blog. Isn’t that nice that they have “Awesome Stuff” that links to other blogs.

            < Randy looks in the direction of the readers and stops dead. >

            Riiiiight. The guest blogger thing.

            I’m here to discuss movies. If you’ve had a chance to check out my blog you probably noticed that I do movie reviews and frequently post about film related topics. There are some excellent lessons that novel writers can learn from Hollywood about plot and character development.

            Or in other words, this is what I learned about writing from eating popcorn in the dark and watching movies.

            When done correctly, movies are a marvelous platform for storytelling. By necessity, plot and characterization have to be compact because of the limited amount of time that can be devoted to them. This requires a tighter writing discipline than many novel writers have had a chance to develop.

            “Opening Image” is a concept that I have borrowed from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat. His book is intended to help people craft screenplays, but I believe that most writers can benefit from it. The opening image gives us a quick flash of the hero and the world while setting the tone for the film. This is often done during the credits.

            When applied to novel writing it means that you have a page, or two, to give the reader a glimpse of the overall story. The audience is treated to a visual blast of what the hero normally does, how he normally acts, and the way that people respond to him. You are creating a snapshot of the story.

            Think visually. Picture your protagonist. Then cram the essence of what he does on an average day into a few paragraphs. Once you do this, go back and tighten it up. Make sure the protagonist’s personality shines through. Then tighten it up some more.

            Here are a few examples of successful opening images:

            The Warriors – opens with a view of the neon lights of Coney Island’s Wonder Wheel. The cinematography and the carnival music give an other-worldy feel to the scene. Credits are then interspersed with shots of the members of the Warriors gang on a subway train to Queens. A quick consultation of a subway map on the train shows us that it will be a long way home for these travelers if something goes wrong. A quick bit of dialogue between the Warriors not only reveal their character to the audience but informs us that they will be attending a huge meeting that has been setup by the leader of the biggest gang in New York. Shots of other gangs boarding similar subway trains established the gang-filled landscape of the story and the dark camera work sets the mood.

            By the time the credits have ended the viewer knows exactly what is going on in the story and is ready for the inciting incident. 

(This is one of the snapshots of a rival gang that is displayed during the opening image.)

            Major League 3 – opens with Gus Cantrell pitching a game in a minor league park. He struggles with his pitches and is ejected from the game for cheating.

            That’s it. This is a story about a baseball player at the end of a long career in the minor leagues. The audience is immediately thrown into the casual setting of a minor league ball park where the majority of the story takes place. Bob Uecher provides the sports commentary during the game that tips us off that this will be a comedic look at the topic. And when Gus resorts to the use of a “frozen ball” to strike-out a batter we glimpse the unconventional nature of the hero.

            Once again, in a very short period of time we are ready for the inciting incident.

           

(This is actually a photo from a scene at the turning point of the story-arc.)

            If you can picture the scene you’re writing the chances are it will come out more vividly to the reader. Once you have an opening image in your head the description, lighting, sounds, and body motions should all translate nicely to the written page and your story will be richer because of it.

            Next time you sit down to watch a movie pay special attention to the first couple of minutes. Watch how Hollywood develops the base story in an incredibly short amount of time. Then take a look at your work-in-progress and see how you can do the same thing for it.

Teach & Talk T-day: Melanie Fowler

Guest post by Melanie Fowler

What's your adventure?

Adventure. A word often heard to describe something very exciting, bold, risky, or an unusual experience. You may often wonder, if anything at all adventurous has happened to you. But something adventurous has happened to you. You live. Your life is an adventure. If you look around you, whether at work, school, or at home, something is happening. There are people all around you. People with quirks, funny laughs, weird hairdos, or strange clothes. Look up, admire the ceiling or sky, is the ceiling speckled, sparkly, rough or smooth? What color is it? What does the sky look like? Is vibrant blue, or is it dull, with a thick lining of clouds? Take off your shoes and feel the floor beneath your feet. Everything has a sense, a feeling, a color. Listen to people talk around you. Each person has a unique way of speaking, a way of movement. Everyone is different, unique. Everyone has a different adventure they're living. 

One of the reasons I write, is because of one adventure I went on many years ago with my sisters. It was an adventure with four different colored poodle skirts and, an empty summer in my backyard. When you write, think about all of the details that happen in your life. Think about the people you know. Learn from them. It will make you a better writer.

Your life IS an adventure. Now, how are you going to write about it?




Melanie Fowler, writes YA and MG. She aspires to travel the world (because she's already been to the moon), and write a symphony. She has a loving husband and two wonderful children, and she creates adventures out of everyday life.

BLOG: http://melanie-fowler.blogspot.com/
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/#!/meljcfowler
FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003503953727

Teach & Talk T-day: Betsy Schow

Guest Post by Betsy Schow

 I recently, lost 75 pounds of fat and about 1000 pounds of self loathing and feelings of failure. I ventured off the couch and accidentally ran a marathon, climbed a mountain, and wrote a book. Now I'm trying to take on the biggest challenge of all, using online media. You can be my Facebook friend- Author Betsy Schow. Or follow my twitter feed that I haven't figured out yet- @betsyschow http://betsyschow.blogspot.com/ http://finishedbeingfat.blogspot.com/ http://mormonmommywriters.blogspot.com   

Premeditated Murder: Killing the voice of doubt

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Except for the time I wanted to a princess. Or an astronaut. Or a princess astronaut in a pretty pink and purple space suit with a tutu. While that would have been awesome, mostly I longed to be a storyteller.

I had big plans. I was going to write the best book that nobody ever read, and there was only one thing stopping me. No, it wasn’t the kids or the fact that I actually needed to go to work to pay the rent. The obstacle in my path was me. Or more precisely the little voice in the back of my head that scoffed at the idea that I could ever be a writer.

The past fifteen years or so repeated a vicious cycle. Brilliant ideas would pop into my brain, and before I knew it there were 15000 words on the page. I would read it over the first time and little visions of best-seller lists danced in my head. I would re-read it a second time and start picking out my rotten grammar. By the third and fourth read through, the process had devolved into one big bag of horse pucky. That little voice in the back of my head would snark, scream, and snort.

Why would anyone pay good money to read anything you wrote? What’s the point, you could never actually finish a book anyway. You are a waste of time, space, and good vocabulary. Give up, if no one ever reads it, they can’t tell you it sucks.

I would avoid the keyboard until I found the courage to try again, but the little voice remained. Finally, I decided this could not continue. Swiping a page from Hamlet, it was time for a murder most foul. I needed to kill off the voice of doubt.

Putting ink to paper, I crafted the most elaborate and devious murder scene ever to see the light of day. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say it involved acid, acupuncture needles, and a goose (geese are vile and foul feathered creatures). I think I scared the bejeezus out of that little voice because it stopped bugging me after that. Now it knew that I meant business.

Maybe the voice in your head is the kind that yells “Get the heck out of my way”, in which case you are probably a best selling author already and good for you. But if you too have a little demon that keeps you from your goals, it’s time to make it sleep with the fishes. Plan it out. You’re a writer for goodness sake, be creative. Knives, explosives, paper cutting it death… the sky’s the limit. Show that voice that you can write and that you are the boss.

Four months after my premeditated crime, the cops still haven’t caught up with me. A publisher did though, and my first book will be on the shelves in January 2013: Finished Being Fat: An accidental adventure in losing weight and learning to finish. The second book, a fiction cozy, is scheduled to be released in April 2013. Amazing the things we can accomplish when we get out of our own way.

Sometimes, I can still hear a faint echo saying, You suck, give up. Concentrating, I’ll picture the red eyed goose with fangs and the voice disappears again.

Teach & Talk T-day: Jeigh Meredith

Guest Post by Jeigh Meredith. She lives in a fantasy world most of the time. In order to appear "normal", she decided to make her world into a "story" and tell people she was a "writer". When she's not visiting the depths of her mind, she spends her time trying not to talk to herself in public, bathing her children once a week, and reading freakishly fast.
Her blog: www.writerbrained.blogspot.com and Twitter @jeighmeredith

How to Train Your Story

I’ve changed the beginning of my story, oh, pshhhh, let’s see…a lot of times now. I think it’s pretty close to where I want it to be, but it took a long time to get here. (And lots of weeping, and slaughtering of sacred cows, and writerly re-stitching [and I’m not so hot on sewing.])

I thought, in my first draft, that my beginning was great. So great. And then, it turned out it was not great. Not even good. I was confused. I’d read that the beginning should have an inciting incident, something to propel the protagonist into the story. At first, it was too weak. In later drafts, I just started with a bunch of explosions, because explosions=action and action=propellage. It was too explody.

After a lot of angsty pondering/sulking, I watched “How to Train Your Dragon”. My story-starting-incident-inducing-action-protag-propelling lightbulb blazed to life. It made sense to me. Now, I realize HtTYD does, in fact, start with explosions. But beyond that, what it has is a good pace, excellent description, and world-building that draws you in naturally. I love it. Here are some of my favorite lines:

“[The village] has been here for seven generations but every building is new.”

“That’s Stoic the Vast, chief of the tribe. They say that when he was a baby, he popped a dragon’s head clean off its shoulders. Do I believe it? Yes I do.”

“Astrid.”

I love these parts because they move the story forward. Why are the buildings new? Oh, because of the dragon raids. He’s intimidated by the Chief, who happens to be his dad, which gives insight into their relationship. He is totally gone on Astrid. And she is totally out of his league.

What it made me realize is that many little parts can lead up to the inciting incident. I don’t have to start my protag on the top of a cliff and throw her off in the first paragraph. All of these parts of Hiccup’s world—the dragon raid, his tense father/son relationship, his unrequited love for Astrid—were established parts of his world. All this ordinary but engaging Viking scene needed was a wrench thrown in the mix to start off the story.

Now, the explosions in my story don’t start until chapter three, where they belong. I feel good about my beginning because I’ve allowed the wrench to be thrown in naturally, alongside the everyday stuff, where it belongs.

And whenever I get stuck, I just jump on my Night Fury and clear my head out in the open air. Try it, guys. It really works.

Teach & Talk Tuesday: A.M. Supinger

Guest Post: Today on Teach and Talk we are in for a treat. Maybe I should have called it Treat T-days :) A.M. Supinger from Inner Owlet has written for us a piece of creepy flash fiction. If you like what you read hop over to her blog and read more of her short stories. Plus she has a some stories in a new FREE anthology. More detail HERE.

Treeline

Nina stared out from the porch of her hovel, pupils dilated against the heavy darkness. She felt the strain pound into a headache as she tried to catch sight of movement.

Something was out there. 

Her home was tucked into the forest's depths, away from other people. She did not like her kind, their wasteful ways. Instead, she made her place amongst wild things. Dangerous things. The animals and not-animals that lurked the forest weren't always friendly, but she knew how to cope with them. It was the something beyond her garden that bothered her.

It stalked her.

Earlier, while the sun had been high, she'd seen scales in the woods. A flash of metallic blue so abruptly there and then gone, she might have imagined it. But then, at sunset, a rasping screech, like claws scraping stone, filled the forest. It was not a sprite or demon—those defended, but did not stalk.

This something acted more like a man. A shudder forced her eyes closed and her heart skidded. Men acted more foully than the worst creatures housed within the forest. She'd been normal, once. Long ago. She'd been young and nubile and beautiful. But men did not care for beauty, except what they could reap from it, and she'd been long scarred by her unlucky face and form.

Hidden from the world of man, she no longer knew or cared if she was beautiful. She certainly wasn't young. Her body and mind were peaceful and solitary, and this stalker threatened that. Her eyes flicked again across the shadows lining her home. The wall she’d built to keep out the critters seemed impotent now, even though nothing in the darkness moved.

In silence she sat, all night, until the sky lightened. With every hour that passed the black sky blurred into purple, then blue, and then the red sun blazed above the tree line. Finally, she sighed. That something may have only been a passing dragon on its way home. If so, she was glad to be rid of it. Dragons were nasty pests.

At ease in the burgeoning dawn, she stood to go inside—but an icy warning in her heart froze the very blood in her veins. Chilled and knowing, she paused. 
With all her attention focused on the trees, she'd never once imagined that her house was the danger.

With resignation, she inched her chin to the side so she could see her door. 

Blue eyes stared back.