Category: Writing

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What Novels Show Us About The Way People Talk To Each Other

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Tuesday, 5.40am

Sheffield, U.K.

An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind. – Mahatma Gandhi

What happens when two people talk to each other in a novel?

Take a detective story, for example – there are characters you will come across again and again.

There is the pompous, overbearing and arrogant superior.

And there is the fiercely independent protagonist, haunted by the ghosts of her past.

How do you build that story, show the conversation?

Dialogue in a story is built on conflict

A novelist throws away all the real-life words, all the “ums” and small talk and leaves in the dialogue that matters, which the characters shoot at each other like arrows from a bow.

Each line is meant to pierce, to wound, to provoke a reaction.

If the lines didn’t make you feel angry at one character and sympathise with the other the novel would be dull and lifeless – the conflict is what wakes you up and draws you into the story.

Behind every well crafted line, behind every armour piercing delivery, is an unspoken aftershock of implied intent.

The clueless person in charge, for example, has total belief in their own competence, has manoeuvred their way into a position of absolute power in that situation and acts with what they believe to be good intent towards others which, for them, is the same as what’s good for them personally.

The tortured hero, has a history of her own, with a background and experiences that makes her distrust people like the person in power – people who have betrayed her in the past.

And so she keeps things from the questioner, responding to questions with questions or carefully veiled answers, which in turn causes the person in charge to get angry and push further which in turn causes more resistance – and now you have conflict and the start of a story.

Does this mirror what happens in real life?

Making your point

Have you ever been in a meeting where a lot of people had a lot to say?

The topic was an important one and different people had different approaches and ways of thinking about it.

Each one barely listened to what others had to say, they were too busy waiting for their turn to say what they thought.

And, wherever possible, they were quick to point out flaws they thought they saw in the arguments of others.

This is perhaps the norm rather than the exception with meeting.

People often talk to win, not to share and listen and learn.

Decision is reached based on what the people who control the levers of power think, rather than what kind of consensus is reached.

The person with the loudest voice or the most dominating personality often carries the day.

This approach, it has to be said, is a masculine one, focused around the idea of winning.

But the opposing approach, a feminine one, has issues of its own.

A feminine approach may be better at talking and listening, letting people say their piece without leaping to conclusions.

But it’s not necessarily non-judgemental, politics and gossip and relationships will play their part in how the levers of power are distributed and how decisions are taken.

Unsaid or implied conflict is still conflict, whether aired in a masculine or feminine way.

Does this kind of conversation really help us understand each other better, or do we instead get better at arguing our own point of view?

Take your position and dig in

This conflict ridden approach to communication is the one we see most often all around us – from the home to the workplace to the people who run the country.

The process of debate and argument is supposed to lead to better, mutually agreed outcomes but all too often leads to simply showing you who is powerful and who is not.

Think about the last discussion you had with your child, for example.

Was it resolved through the peaceful use of a negotiated settlement or was it ended through exercise of power – with you imposing your will or them walking away and refusing to engage?

A refusal to cooperate is also a power play – one that people with less power can use quite effectively.

In fact, politicians these days have learned that their objective is not to do what is best for their people.

Their objective, as professional politicians, is to win.

So, they only talk to the people who will support them anyway, who agree with their views, and to people on the fence.

The other side is of little importance.

What matters is that you fortify your position – you dig in and stick to your guns, your arguments, whatever the attack.

But what do you do if you actually want to understand the other person’s point of view?

We’ll look at that next time.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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How Do We Tame Our Brains?

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Monday, 5.36am

Sheffield, U.K.

Everything we do, every thought we’ve ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find. – Neil deGrasse Tyson

What do we know about our brains?

Dedicated people have spent and will spend lifetimes trying to understand that, working to generate science about what happens in the brain and how it works.

But there are some things that we can see for ourselves.

There is clearly something about the human brain that is different from most animals – we have extra bits that do things most animals don’t seem to bother about.

If we know there is a difference, how does that helps us understand the way we communicate?

Animals and their responses

The natural world encourages its inhabitants to focus their attention on developing the ability to stay alive.

In the wild most creatures learn to develop a healthy distrust of anything new.

They spend time looking for food, avoiding predators, marking and defending their territory and finding a mate.

Many species evolved to live in groups and some developed the ability to use sound to signal intent.

Birds sing to attract mates, monkeys call to warn others of approaching danger and lions roar to warn off contenders.

It’s tempting to superimpose human feelings – fear, anger, lust – onto animals but whatever it is they actually experience what we can see is that they use sound to express themselves.

And that sound making is not about reasoning and thinking but about making it clear what their feelings are about the situation – there’s danger approaching, I’m ready to mate, you’re in my space.

Realising that sound is first and foremost about feelings may help explain a whole lot about how humans miss the point when they talk to each other.

And you can first see this happening with children.

Children and their responses

A child’s brain comes with the newer components that make up a human brain, but at the beginning they’ve not been programmed yet.

A child responds instinctively from the moment it’s born – seeking food, crying when scared or hungry or tired, and quiet when it feels safe.

Once again, sound is inextricably linked to feelings in a baby and it that strong link remains as the child grows up.

If you have children you will know that you spend most of your time trying to help them get better at managing their feelings – and you know how they feel because their volume levels go up.

The few moments after a child wakes up, you as a parent wait for the first request to come in.

“Can I watch TV?”

If you say “No,” there’s an instant emotional reaction – a foot stamp, a frustrated outburst, maybe tears.

Children aren’t shy about showing you how they feel.

As we get older, these feelings don’t disappear – but we get better at hiding the way we feel from others.

Adults and their responses

We help our children and spend our time as adults working on taming our brains, managing our reactions to things that cause us to feel in certain ways.

We learn how to do this from others, from society.

We learn by watching what the adults in our lives do, modelling their behaviour.

Often, however, do we learn to manage our reactions or do we just learn how to hide them better under learned patterns of behaviour?

We learn, for example, that if someone attacks us we should call the police instead of fighting back.

That doesn’t stop us feeling angry and wanting to attack – but the layers of socialisation, the programs we have loaded into our brains over time help us respond differently.

As adults, we may learn how to mask our feelings with a veneer of behaviour – and the way we do that is often through language and habit.

Societies have developed habits over the years like having norms for what they consider good habits.

They’ve also come up with language that helps them express themselves more effectively.

But we still can’t control the kind of reactions and feelings people have when they see what we do or listen to what we say.

For example, you may have grown up with the idea that it’s good manners for a gentleman to hold a door open for a lady.

A modern, independent woman, however, may feel like she doesn’t need any man to open a door for her – that’s a patronising way of saying that she can’t do it herself – and gets angry at the gesture, which was intended to be good manners.

Or take a statement like, “Pass the salt.”

For a native English speaker, that’s rude – where’s the please?

People who speak languages where there is no separate word for please – where politeness is built into the structure of the language itself – find it hard to understand that they’ve caused offence simply by translating what they want to do into the equivalent English form.

With communication, feelings come first

If you want to get better at communicating with others and, in particular, getting better at listening, you have to realise that the sounds we make show the feelings we have first and foremost.

The thinking and rationalisation comes later.

The right word, the right reaction can cement a lifelong friendship while a stray word, the wrong gesture can permanently dent a relationship.

And the only way we can really understand the others around us, from our children to our co-workers is to take the time to listen to them.

And there are very few models that tell us how to do this effectively.

We should start looking for some.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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Introduction to the “Listen” Book Project

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Saturday, 6.30am

Sheffield, U.K.

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it. – Jiddu Krishnamurti

Two days ago, on the 6th of August 2020, I finished the first draft of my first book project.

Yesterday, I tried to reflect on the experience, thinking about what went well, what didn’t and what I would do differently.

And today I wondered… what should I work on next?

The art of listening

As I looked through my files I found a folder of slips that I had been collecting around the idea of being a better listener.

The art of listening seems to me to be one of the most important skills that we could learn or teach our children.

Being able to understand and empathize with others will help you become more successful at whatever you do.

But are you sure you even know what the word empathy means?

I was confused about it for a while.

Many people think that empathy is the ability to feel what other people feel – but it’s not – that’s more akin to sympathy.

Empathy is the ability to understand how someone else sees and thinks and feels about their world.

You don’t need to agree with people to have empathy with them.

You gain empathy through listening and asking questions and reflecting on what you’ve heard.

Human beings are the only creatures we know of with this ability, and we use it in a variety of ways and in a variety of fields.

For this project I plan to draw on fields including biology, history, journalism, teaching, child-rearing, law, psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, religion, negotiation, sales, philosophy, anthropology, language, culture, engineering, design thinking and systems thinking – and any others that may be helpful in learning how to listen better.

Planning another book

I felt like I raced through my first attempt at writing a book, going over things quickly and talking about things rather than talking through them.

I think this will show up in the edit.

I think I will come across passages where I talk about something without having introduced or explained it first.

I tried to link the various posts as I went along, referring to the previous one and talking about what came next, a technique I learned from a YouTube video series, but I’m not sure it was the right approach to take.

Instead, I think I might try and think in terms of “nuggets” or “information blocks” – each post containing a self-contained class of ideas and methods that you can call on when you want and combine them in an order that works.

In case you missed it, that’s an object oriented metaphor from programming, which could be a novel way to look at structuring a book – something else to explore later perhaps.

When the individual classes/nuggets/blocks are done I can link them together following the structure of the book and add any linking information needed to bind it all together.

The act of rushing through the writing, trying to get it all down in one sitting has also led to longer posts – posts that are harder to read and probably will be harder to edit.

I feel like it’s probably worth trying to cover less but go deeper with each post – because what I want from each post is for it to be useful for someone reading it in its own right – rather than having you go away and read ten more to figure out what it’s talking about.

And that’s going to take some practise and perhaps more planning up front to distil the essence of the idea into what I need to cover.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve given myself a million words to get better at this writing thing, and so far I’m on 866,659 words, so there’s still 150,000 or so of practise time left – about a year’s worth of writing.

Research methods

The other thing I’d like to do with this project is get better at managing the research around the book – becoming more intentional about the sources I use and how I use the ideas that are in them.

This relates to the epistemology – the means to gain knowledge that are used here.

I started life being trained to see the world as an engineer – full of problems to be solved.

I have since learned to see the world as complicated and confusing, but one where we can make a difference if we take the time to understand one another.

Logic alone will not help us do this, maths won’t, technology won’t.

If we want to address the little and big problems in our lives – from the kinds of relationships we have with our spouses and children to the challenges of climate change – we will have to do that by understanding other people better.

And that starts with being able to listen, really really listen.

Listen

So, the working title of this book is “Listen: the art of understanding others” and over the next sixty to eighty days I’ll be working through the first draft in these posts.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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Reflecting On The Process Of Writing A First Draft Of A Book

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Friday, 5.46am

Sheffield, U.K.

We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience – John Dewey

On the 26th of May 2020 I set out my intention to rough out a first draft of a book in blog posts over the next sixty to eighty days.

On the 6th of August I wrote the final post.

I now have a body of work, 60 posts exactly with 69,979 words written over 72 days.

At this point, it makes sense to stand back and reflect on the process I’ve followed, what’s gone well, what’s gone badly and what would I do differently the next time.

Having a plan makes it much easier

I have always struggled with structure and outlines – I find that having to do something in a certain order is constricting and takes the joy out of just writing.

But if you just sit and write then you struggle with focus and what you come up with ranges all over the place – it’s like shooting in the dark.

In the days before I started writing I wrote about slips of paper, and I started working on the book by jotting down topics on these slips.

A typical non-fiction book runs to 45-50,000 words and might have 30 odd chapters, so I needed at least 30 slips to tell a story.

I’ve done this using a mind map or made lists on a single sheet of paper before but those ideas didn’t really go anywhere after that, they remained locked on that sheet of paper.

But having them on separate pieces meant I could just put things down as they came to me.

Once I had a pile of slips it was pretty easy to put them in order – you pick up two slips and ask which comes first, following the advice of Pirsig in Lila, and the answer is usually obvious.

And then you pick up the next slip and compare again and pretty soon you have it all organised.

Writing down the slips took a couple of days at most and I used a cut up cereal box to keep them in, as you can see in the picture below, which also has one of the first slips I wrote about.

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Having this box of slips definitely made it easier to write – all I had to do was pick up a new slip every day and sit down to write.

Writing at the same time every day works

I used to write in the mornings, then I switched to the evenings and then switched back to the mornings.

For three years I’ve tried to write a blog post every day – and the only that’s been possible is to have a routine.

My routine is quite simple, I start with freewriting – three paragraphs of anything to warm up – and then I start the main piece.

I did wonder whether I should use a different time to write and keep the blog time to do the kind of thing I’d been writing so far – but I don’t have that much time so I decided to go with the blog posts.

It does seem like it’s made it harder for some readers – the posts are longer, and perhaps less interesting in themselves because they fit into this overall book structure rather than being self-contained pieces.

Still, this is something I’ve had to do, work I needed to get done so I decided to do it this way.

And it works, day after day you move forward slip by slip.

The early days seem slower and there is a lot to go through but steadily, inexorably, relentlessly, you can move from start to finish and end up writing the first draft you wanted.

That is perhaps the biggest benefit from having the structure and box of slips – it takes much longer to write than to think – and if you get some of the thinking out of the way you can just get on and do the work.

It’s when you have to think and write at the same time that it gets exhausting – and I didn’t find that with my writing.

It helps that I gave myself three years to practice writing and find some kind of voice – find a way of writing that was natural and flowed rather than something that was stilted and flowery – where you write because it’s the way you think you should write rather than writing the way that you actually think and feel.

The other thing with a first draft is just to write – when you’re stuck write about feeling stuck and eventually you’ll get past that and get to the good stuff.

Later, in the edit, you can simply delete the stuff you don’t want to keep from the beginning.

But is it any good?

Every creative person, every writer, feels like what they’ve done is rubbish.

When I talk to friends about the book and they ask if they can just read the posts – well, of course they can, it’s all online.

But I feel the need to explain the book, apologise for the content.

And that’s natural.

But here’s the thing – the content needs to stand on its own, I can’t always be there protecting it from the world.

Everything that needs to be said needs to be in the book – and that’s what the editing process is for.

In fact, all the problems with your first draft are things that you can address in the edit.

I don’t feel like there is enough research, enough stories, I’m concerned about the structure, whether the chunks of information are right, whether there is enough detail or too much detail.

Writing in a blog format is different from a book – you tend to use sentences like individual bullets in a blog rather than a coordinated burst as a paragraph in a book.

Should I have edited as I went along?

I now have a file with nearly 70,000 words that I need to cut down to a normal book size.

Should I have edited as I went along – would that have made life easier?

I’m not sure about that – the structure of the book hasn’t changed much from first structure that went into that box of slips.

But I have gone back and looked at how the topics relate to each other, building up models of the content.

The models I’m talking about are conceptual ones – this paper on reflective practice has more details on the approach I take.

It’s hard to do that without having enough content there.

What I did do is write some programs to help with the editing process.

We’ll see how that goes but that’s for the next time.

What would I have done differently?

The first thing to do is take better notes when I read – follow the ideas that you will find if you look at things like commonplace books and zettelkasten.

This is the idea that as you read you pick out the best bits and save them for later use – which is really all about getting better at organising the research and ideas you find so you can better use them in your work.

The other thing that I would do is to perhaps think harder about what goes on each slip of paper.

For example, a single sentence might get you to write a thousand words – but they might not quite hang together.

There is a reason why you have things like a beginning, middle and end – the structure helps the reader get through the material and get something of it.

That thing they get – the outcome – could be clearer in each slip, and so make it easier to write in a way that helps that outcome to happen.

Then again, this is something you can fix in edit – as you go through the material and see if all fits together, taking out stuff that doesn’t and patching in stuff that’s needed.

Which is why it perhaps does make sense to get the first draft out, put it aside for a while, and then come back to it.

It’s giving yourself some time and space so that when you next read the material it’s like reading someone else’s work and your job is now to edit and improve it, not to defend it.

Final thoughts

If I were to write a first draft again, which is going to happen because I plan to do this for the next few decades, what are the steps I would take?

  1. Take good notes – get better at collecting and organising research
  2. Use slips of paper to plan and structure the book
  3. Write at the same time every day
  4. Look at the structure and how the ideas are related as you go along, but don’t edit for content yet.
  5. Keep writing, even if you feel it’s rubbish. It’s a first draft, it doesn’t have to be perfect or good – it just needs to come into existence.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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What Does James Patterson Have To Tell Us About Writing And Business?

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Monday, 9.19pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I’m very conscious that I’m an entertainer. Something like 73 percent of my readers are college graduates, so you can’t condescend to people. You’ve got to tell them a story that they will be willing to pay money to read. – James Patterson

If you read my last post you may have noticed that I got a little carried away on the subject of pencils.

James Patterson writes with a pencil.

That made me like him again – because last summer, as I sat in a field in France reading one of his books, I was a little put out when I found that he doesn’t write most of them himself.

And it turns out there is a reason for that – a very good one.

Patterson, in case you didn’t know, is a prolific and wealthy author.

But, what caught my eye as I read about him was a question in an interview that asked him whether his advertising background made him a better writer.

He said, “The most valuable part of the advertising process was understanding that there’s an audience. I write commercially, commercial fiction, and there’s an audience, and I like the audience. I don’t condescend to them.”

That’s something most of us don’t get – the fact that if you do something as a business then there’s an audience.

If you haven’t got an audience you haven’t got a business – you have a hobby or a passion, but not a business.

And this comes across in the quote above.

Patterson doesn’t call himself a writer – he thinks of himself as an entertainer.

This is the difference between thinking in terms of what you do and What you do for someone else.

What you do is a feature, what you do for someone else is a benefit.

This is worth keeping in mind whatever it is you do – and trying to articulate clearly.

For example, if you’re a management consultant – that’s what you do.

What do you do for someone else?

What’s the equivalent of “entertainment” in your business – is it “problem solving”, “cost cutting”, “revenue generating”?

And, quite importantly, is that something people get – are they willing to pay money for that thing?

It’s quite possible that what people get from you is different depending on the situation they find themselves in.

But I do think that this simple approach helps us understand whether what we are doing is commercial or not.

Is it something we do because we want to – because it’s interesting to us and we enjoy doing it?

Or do we do it because there is a need – people willing to part with money in exchange for this thing.

Or, happily, is it both?

People buy Patterson’s books because he promises them a particular kind of reading experience.

So what if he hires people to help him get down the words – you still get a Patterson novel – and he handles quality control.

That way you get more to read than he could write himself and everyone’s happy.

Aren’t they?

Now, after the commercial discussion, the rest of Patterson’s suggestions are easier to grasp.

Routine matters – write at the same time in the same place every day.

Do more – write as much as you can, figure out plots and outlines before you go deep into something, try and get better at seeing the big picture and doing the detailed work.

Stay busy – work on multiple projects and make sure there is something you can turn to rather than just finding yourself blocked on the first page or at a particular point in your work.

The interesting thing about these four points is that you can start anywhere.

Pick up a pencil now and start doodling, writing – and you will have started the creative process.

Get up early tomorrow morning, or work late tonight – and start the first day of the routine you will keep for the rest of your life.

Look through your list of things you want to do and set up project folders – create the space and the system to manage your creative output.

Or spend some time studying your audience – the people who buy the thing you are selling – get into their heads and listen to what they’re saying so you can create a product they want to buy.

You can start anywhere – but to build your career or your business, you will need to master all four elements.

And a few others, probably.

But you can start by picking up a pencil and getting to work.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh