David Amerland's Blog: David Amerland on Writing - Posts Tagged "writing"

Writers, despite appearances, hate the limelight. We usually have our ideas alone, at moments we least expect them. And we write alone. And struggle with whatever inner demons stop the purity of our thoughts from making it to the page. And then, when we’re done. When we have fought the good fight and convinced our agents and publishers and editors and the book’s all done. The last thing we really want is to step onto a public stage and shout out about it.

It’s kinda ironic given than fact that I am writing this on a very public platform with the expectation of achieving the exact opposite of invisibility. I shall get to the why, in a minute. But first the how. Because we, as writers, always write from conviction, the outcome, whether it’s a book of fiction or non-fiction, always contains large chunks of us in it. Writing is the one area where we cannot hide.

Writing is also the one profession where distancing yourself from the outcome of your labours, though desirable, is practically impossible. Everything a writer writes is personal. From the phraseology to the syntax, from the grand ideas to the little asides. As a result, when the book we worked on finally comes out we want to have nothing to do with it. We consider that, as writers, we’re done. The work really needs to speak for itself.

If it’s great, it’s a job well done. We don’t want to know beyond the sales and the reviews readers post. Constantly receiving praise makes us feel awkward (though it is always appreciated). The tiniest form of criticism devastates us (we take it way too personally). If it’s not well received we really want to curl up and die somewhere. Preferably deep underground.

None of these feelings change. But the world has. We’re now more connected, more transparent and more visible than ever before. Even if we do not blog readers can reach us through email, they can follow us on Twitter, stalk us on Facebook and connect with us directly on G+. As writers, ideally, we still want the world to go away and leave us alone (oh yes, and read our books too). Transparency and connectivity however now demand a presence.

Traditionally a writer has been an unknown quantity. If he was uber-popular there was a sense that at least he was writing something decent (never a total guarantee). If he wasn’t, the odds of knowing what he was about were small. Either way a reader took a chance buying a book. The fact that so many readers were willing to take that small leap of faith is more indicative of our lack of choices when buying a book than anything else.

In the new world that’s rising writers are way more visible (or they ought to be). If we really want our voice to be read then we have to make sure that it can also be heard and social media provides an incredible platform to do just that. It also begs the question of what happens when we’re no longer invisible as a writer? When readers ask our opinion, lavish praise upon us, want to know when our next book is coming out and recommend us to their friends we find ourselves on a platform where we have to work out entirely new ways to behave.

Writers act as either filters or guides (and frequently there is an overlap here). We either act as a kind of collective subconscious, filtering reality in a way that most people think it should be (or wish it should be) or we take readers forth into brave new worlds, showing the way things will work and how they shall function, helping them synthesize new ways of behaving.

The argument has been that this process is done best when the writer is left alone, fighting whatever inner struggle is necessary to get the job done. The idea behind this inaccessibility was that the moment a writer is visible he also becomes self-conscious and the potential of attention to destroy his ability to write (which has given rise to the myth of writer’s block) rises.

Well, there is an old-fashioned British expression that I think beautifully sums up my ideas on that argument: “poppycock” (and you’ll have to Google the etymology on that one). Certainly working in plain sight is challenging. Responding to praise or criticism is a skill in itself. Becoming accountable for the efficacy of your art is damn hard. At the same time the labour of writing, shared with your readers, becomes way less burdensome, the struggle with inner demons lessens and a writer and his audience become, to some extent, co-creationists, informing each other’s worldviews and opinions.

Writers get to know first-hand who their readers are. Readers experience a writer’s sense of values, drive and personality. Visibility, as it happens then, increases a writer’s ability to act as a filter or a guide, rather than just the opposite. It makes the part of being a writer a little harder but by banishing isolation it turns the writer from the solitary creature of the industrial age to the troubadour of the community that he’d always been in the past. That is a win for everybody in my book (pun intended).

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Before the web came along a writer used to write and then rely on his publisher to do the marketing for his book. The publisher would usually set up a few book signing opportunities but the bulk of the selling would be done through the trusted sales channels developed by the publisher over the years. The writer was there to, well, write.

It was a relationship that was apparently made in heaven because, just like in the best relationships, it divided the labor of love required to maintain it and bring its purpose into fruition. Just like the best of relationships, beneath the surface, nothing was what it seemed. Publishers, with their team of sales people and distribution deals, worked on the path of least resistance. They sold books that turned a profit for themselves but did not work hard to help the writer increase his sales. Writers, content to do what they loved and get paid, did the bare minimum. They appeared at the book signings and interviews set up by the publisher but did little work to promote themselves or their books beyond that.

Relationship on the Rocks
What’s brought about a change, as always, are circumstances that made it impossible to pretend that the relationship, as it was, worked. Publishers, strapped for cash and looking for quick gains seized on social media and pushed writers to the front. Writers, tired of not selling beyond their usual audience, thought the time had come to reluctantly step into the limelight.

And this is where things get interesting.

Without a doubt, social media has changed everything. By stripping away the traditional barriers that kept writers and readers away from each other it has made the complex marketing mechanism publishers had in place, redundant. Suddenly the writer has become the publisher’s best marketing aid.

Considering that marketing also helps the writer this should not much change things except it has. For a start it allows the writer to use his place on the web to talk directly to his readers (which is why Google Semantic Search: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques That Get Your Company More Traffic, Increase Brand Impact and Amplify Your Online Presence became a best-seller before publication. It then allows the writer to realize that writing is not quite as unique an ability as he may think it is.

This stripping back of layers of misconception is not without its problems. A writer close to his readers enjoys their ear, partakes in their concerns, gets their opinion, becomes (in the social media sense of the word) their buddy. The closeness changes the traditional alchemy of the roles. A writer who listens closely to his readers is attuned to their needs and understands what they like but, at the same time, he is influenced by their opinions and becomes subject to their direction. That is problematic.

A writer is at his most valuable when works not to write a book (that is a byproduct) but to realize a vision. Whether that vision is a non-fiction book that becomes a handy aid, a fictional masterpiece that sets popular culture on fire or a technical tome that documents a subject, it is something that resonates deeply with a perceived audience need and becomes, in the hands of the reader, a catapult that will launch them into a new orbit.

When a book does its job, it enables the reader to feel, think, act or analyze differently. It is the trigger than unleashes the reader’s superpower. That’s why writers, ultimately, write and why readers buy their books.

The ability of social media to bring writers and readers closer to each other is certainly seductive and it is both desirable and appealing. But it should always be the channel through which a writer explains his vision rather than the means through which he transformed into a salesman peddling his wares.

For a writer, writing is an extreme sport filled with fear. It has the adrenaline high of ascending new heights, diving into territory inherent with risks and coming out feeling fine, and the post-adventure mood dips of a work being over, a book having been completed, a ‘chapter’ survived.

But there is a little more to it than just that. Because writing is a synthesis of ideas the moment you commit them to paper you also stamp them with your personality. They become an indelible part of who you are, elements to your identity that you cannot shake off, or replace without leaving fatal holes behind.

The fear of committing all that to ‘paper’ for the world to see is counterbalanced by the fear of the ability that defines you, which no one fully understands (not even yourself), vanishing. Evaporating one day. Disappearing as mysteriously as it appeared.

In the days when the struggle of writing took place in the dark, away from prying eyes, writers wrestled with these inner demons and found solace in drink and drugs and other vices. Activities that writers as diverse in subject and style as Hunter S. Thompson, Philip K. Dick and Hemingway would use as springboards: when you touch upon the lowest depths of your human frailty you find the resolve to make one more push, rise one more time, to the heights of the vision granted by your mind’s eye, until you really cannot any more.

These days are a little different. A writer writes in a very public way. Not only are works and thoughts and ideas shared with their readers but the readers themselves become part of the complex construct that guides a writer. And the fear then intensifies. What if my next book, story, chapter is not liked? What if I cannot see the next trend? What if my readers desert me? What if I simply cannot write any more?

Implicit, within that last question is the acknowledgement of the difficulty of defining what writing really is. It’s not the ability to spell, nor the skill to string words and sentences in a grammatically correct order. It’s more like the ability to see something beneath the surface of the world, abstract it, and then render it in a code that increases access to it, by those who see it.

Because no one really knows how this is accomplished, no one can tell you how to avoid losing it. So writers live in fear. Fear that the next work may be their last, fear that their skill is driven by the consumption of a perishable commodity they are busy using up. Fear that one day, they will wake up and be writers in name only…

Writers have never been leaders in the conventional sense of the word, but writing has always lent itself to the propagation of ideas. An effect that has turned writers sometimes into heroes and sometimes into villains. Would Martin Luther really have changed the world had he not written his The Ninety-Five Theses, criticizing the selling of indulgences, in 1517? Would Hitler have achieved his notoriety had he not written Mein Kampf in 1925.

It is ironic perhaps that I have chosen, for my example, the two people who most lend the lie to my opening sentence. It would have been way easier to talk about Karl Marx whose Das Kapital, first published in 1867, precipitated an entire ideology that became a global political movement, or Charles Dickens whose writings not only may have helped seal the ideas of the French Revolution (in A Tale of Two Cities) but also helped create broader social reform in Great Britain through A Christmas Tale and Oliver Twist.

The point is that writers do not work in a vacuum. We are always actively involved in the perception of the development of society both in terms of where it is and where we may ideally desire it to go. And therein lies the reason which made me choose Luther and Hitler to begin with, for the “we” which writers choose to point to is very rarely identical to the “I” they may personally believe when alone, inside their heads late at night.

Martin Luther may have wanted to start a dialogue around the questionable practice of selling indulgences that retro-actively pardoned the sins of already dead relatives but a revolution which would lead to a schism was probably the furthest thing in his mind. Hitler wanted to make enough money from the sale of his book to get himself out of debt but leading to the Holocaust, at the time, may not necessarily have figured on his mental horizon. Charles Dickens was very much part of the establishment he was criticizing in his writings and Karl Marx came from a well-off middle-class family whose values he upheld.

So, were they lying? Are writers schizophrenic? Do we present views and ideas in our writings that may not necessarily agree with what we really believe in? Here I can only lay down the evidence of experience, both my own and that of fellow writers I have discussed this very same issue with.

While we do not necessarily lie, our writing, always, is shaped by an awareness that we act as a filter for our audience. We reflect back at them what we see and hear and feel in them. We create the paths that point to the world we all want to head towards to, rather than the ones we want it to head to. The Reformation took place not because Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet but because the world around him was ready to make it happen. He just filtered their desire, subconsciously acting as their beacon. Nazism rose to power because Germany was struggling under the yoke of incredible fines and restrictions imposed by the victorious allies after WWI. Marxism happened because Capitalism was inherently brutal and unjust. The catechism goes on and on and on and each time, its point is that the change that happens is the change that must happen. The writing then becomes the articulation of pressures barely felt and desires that are left unvoiced.

Like diviners, writers are sensitive to context and produce content that distils the essence of the trigger points that make them write. Because we believe in our writing we can then, mostly successfully balance the contradiction of personal beliefs that do not always countenance the theses we present.

Do we worry that we’re sometimes wrong? Or that we take on too much? Do we obsess over the correctness of our perception? All the time. It makes us irascible, inherently insecure, inwardly unstable. At the same time it serves to keep us humble. When your opinion, ideas, thoughts and insights are bandied around by thousands like gospels. When memes are made out of what you said and quotes are passed around, it can go to your head.

It is always worth remembering that ultimately, as writers, we are only as good as our ability to listen to the whispering voices of the millions around us. To mentally eavesdrop on their thoughts and read their concerns. The moment we lose that, we become just instruments. Maybe we can write well. But we are no longer writers. And just for the record, we are never really leaders.

Writing is very much like golf or athletics. It takes a lot of hard training to lead to the performance that is a book. And just like in golf you can’t turn out a world class performance at a moment’s notice or break an Olympic record while training in your back yard, a book is the result of a culmination of states that an author is subjected to.

So, how does a book happen? How do you get from the act of writing squiggles on a screen (these days) to suddenly putting together sentences that resonate in the minds of readers sufficiently to not just make sense to them but allow them to use them as scaffolding of their own for their minds to reach higher?

This is the area where writers, golfers and athletes agree. To do what each does takes talent, inclination, will power, persistence and the ability to synthesize everything that is part of what does in a way that effaces the self and allows the act itself to surface. Golfers and athletes call this feeling “being in the zone” and it has given rise to an entire branch of psychology where the concept of Flow is closely examined and the conditions of its emergence analyzed.

MRI scans of the brain, caught in the act of performing at that level, show areas of it lighting up that normally wouldn’t which suggests that what really happens is that many of the obstacles we generate ourselves (the critical monologue inside our heads, the self-doubt, the uncertainty) vanish under the pressure of external circumstances that suddenly require our full attention.

Provided you have a modicum of writing skill and have spent the endless hours required to do your research, think about it, analyze its impact and see where the dots you’ve joined lead you, you’re still not quite done. Writing, like everything else, requires all the false starts where the writer has to forget about what he is and focus on what he is doing, and usually, just as fatigue, desperation, the pressure of deadlines and the tyranny of word counts pile up, the magic kinda happens.

Whatever part of the brain was busy getting in the way, just stops. Exhausted, it shuffles out of the way and what is suddenly left is a writer and his words. A clear road being formed to a conclusion, things falling seamlessly into place seemingly from nowhere: a book being written.

I’ve discussed this with writer friends countless times and it is always the same. Whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, the process requires that sense of pressure, the focus, that feeling of the world falling away and the vision of the book coming into crisp, clear focus.

So, next time you’ve written your thousand words and feel sorry that you have to scrap them. Or, when you hit a wall and have written yourself into a corner, think that really it’s part of the process. There is a work that needs to somehow be formed. The elusive state of mind required needs to be worked at, to arise.

Well two actually. I am working on two books. I am in the process of carrying out editorial changes in one and putting together a complex, expanded outline in another that is part of the requirement for the discussion on it. So, why am I writing this? Why, at 3.00am when I have had a long day that started with a business meeting and has been followed up by over ten hours’ of writing, am I doing more writing as a break?

Well, because this is my mental recharge. The brain gets tired, like a muscle. It gets tired not from working (because unlike a muscle it never stops) but from working in a certain way, thinking about specific things, going over grooves it has already worked on again and again.

Structured work and order, it seems, the things that make our civilization functional are anathema to our brains. And this writing I am doing now is about as far from structured work as writing can get. Instead of starting out with something to say, some meaning to confer I am using it as a data dump of a sort. Unforced writing that allows me to see what I think which in a way also makes me aware of how my mental equipment functions.

I know it sounds a little clinical and probably more than a tad insane but when you work inside your head for hours and hours at a time you forget that there are processes taking place there which make what you do possible. But because your work relies on them, hooking them, occasionally and dragging them to the surface makes it all the more possible to refine them and actually make writing (and thinking) better.

When you work on a book and you have planned everything out and you are putting flesh to an idea and a surmise that before was mainly bones something funny happens. Your brain goes into an altered state where the words you write are not quite the words you want but rather the words dictated by the task at hand.

I know it sounds weird to say that as an author I don’t quite control the words that are supposed to be part of my job but what I’ve noticed is that afterwards, when I am editing, when I go and read what I’ve written I am as surprised by the insights or the points being made as, I suspect, the reader is when they first read them. It’s not that I don’t know what’s being said, after all the stuff has been inside my head, but some neurochemical configuration inside my head has made it possible to express it in ways that are novel even to me.

That’s why I am writing all this now. Capturing a snapshot of the writing mind is what writers always aspire to in the hope that we will, somehow, recreate the state of it, at will. Well, we shall see. In the meantime, the next book? All to be revealed in a few days.

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“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” That’s how R. R. Martin explains books in “A Dance With Dragons”. In the age of the internet when trillions of web pages, each full of its own brand of insights and wisdom, are within arm’s reach of us at all times reading a book, in whatever format, seems a little antiquated.

As a writer you’d expect me to instantly tell you to read more and buy more books, often but that’s not quite what I will do here. After all, this is the age of transparency where social media has created a level playing field for us all. A writer is also a reader at some point and then his choices of what to read and when, become every bit as eclectic and dictated by need and circumstances as that of any other reader.

So, on World Book Day, I will readily admit that the question of “why should a reader buy a book” is one I have struggled with often. Writers write books for as many reasons as there are writers. Some write the books they would like to read. Others write books because they are compelled by a burgeoning force inside them that feels like a demon clawing at their innards, itching to get out. Others still write because a book is something that they find compelling. Its length and ability to form a deeper binder for their content than say a web page or an article that comes out in print. All serious writers write to make a living.

So, whether the book is fiction or non-fiction, whether it has been written due to an insatiable force that demanded its creation or was the result of something a little more planned, in order to work, each one has to answer the same question: does it have real value? Does it answer a question? Solve a problem? Open up the reader’s mind to greater possibilities?

Because a book has some length, out of necessity it also needs depth. Depth adds weight to it (and I am being a little metaphysical here) which means that whether it is fiction or non-fiction, without a structure that provides a progression which can lead to a revelation of sorts for the reader (the aha! moment all writers strive for) a book would collapse.

Consider that it’s fairly easy to carry an argument, any argument over the space of 1,000 words. This is what makes articles so easy to read and so great to engage with. Anything presented within them has been curtailed and shaped to some extent. The writing and editing that creates them speaks, at times, of blind spots and omissions or unarticulated knowledge and wide assumptions. This is as it should be. An article can move a reader to tears or have her screaming with frustration but it should never be just consumed with indifference. That would be a waste of time on both the reader’s and the writer’s part.

A book on the other hand is more balanced. There is plenty of space within its length for the scope of the arguments that support it and the ideas which gave it birth to be examined from every angle. So, if an article is reader-bait, a tease intended to make a reader, struggling with information overload, react; a book is a full treatise. The writer performs open-cranium surgery. He delves deep within his thoughts and ideas and instead of pulling some out to package and present, he carves a path and invites the reader deep inside his innermost territory.

Dr Seuss described this well when in “I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!” he wrote: “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.” Bearing in mind just how lonely an enterprise writing can be and how the writer who’s truly invested in his readers works hard to find ways to render the immaterial nature of his thoughts visible a book is also a vehicle of deeper communication. Readers get to know the writers they read, understand what’s important to them, feel their thoughts and get a sense of their priorities and, because the world of today is truly connected, that in itself helps break down barriers and forge new connections. Readers who Tweet to their writers or find them on Facebook or Google+ create a direct, immediate layer of feedback that for the writer, who usually works in the vacuum of his craft, can change everything.

In Shadowlands, William Nicholson wrote: “We read to know we're not alone.” It’s great to know that now we also write for that same reason.

The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions

It’s no secret that I use the Goodreads blog to talk about writing which makes this space a lab, of sorts, and myself the subject. So, when I Tweeted that I had got sucked into my own book (https://goo.gl/62X7wv) I was being honest despite it sounding weird.

I know you’d think that the writer of the book knows it inside out, has polished its every word and knows exactly what each page contains and on the whole, in a general sense that’s true. At the same time the writer reading the book, as a finished product, months after it was finally finished and sent in to the publisher is not quite the same person who wrote it.

To understand this we need to do two things. First, establish what writing actually is. And second understand that beyond the mechanics of writing there is a neurobiological activity that is linked to its performance.

Writing is a form of communication. The father of information theory, Claude Shannon, stated that: “The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.”

By using writing, a means of remotely representing a ‘message’ the writer has perceived, the problem of communication is multiplied several fold. A writer isn’t just a writer. He’s an encoder, using semiotics (https://goo.gl/2DS1UI) to distil and encode a message which then needs to be unpacked, decoded and experienced by someone the writer has never met and may be culturally and linguistically, even, removed from him. To make matters even worse the receiver of the writer’s message may not even be in the same timeline as the writer any more.

We know that writing works. So, the problem presented above is academic, at least where Terran writers and readers are concerned. But that leads us to ask exactly how? How is it possible for someone we have never met, who may have even lived hundreds of years before us, in a world technologically and culturally different to ours, be able to touch us with words that paint pictures inside our head?

The clues come from the neuroscience of writing (https://goo.gl/hvcpQU) where the moment a writer’s words resonate with the reader, the neural signature of the reader’s brain is very similar to that of the writer’s at the time of writing. When Jane Austen writes that “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” her words light up the same neural centers in her readers irrespective of the time they live in, the gender they possess or the age they are.

While we could argue that a 21st century digital marketer living in downtown Manhattan inhabits a reality that is decidedly different than that of an 18th century lady living in Georgian England the truth is that the picture compiled by our mental connections as different centers in our brain talk to each other makes as much sense today as it did in 1797 when "Pride and Prejudice" was written.

The similarities stem not so much from culture or education or even language, all of which have evolved significantly in the intervening time, but from the simple fact that the fundamental neurobiology of Jane Austen, the person, is pretty much the same as that of any other person walking around today. The way she thought her readers felt about marriage, relationships, security and courting is not significantly different from the way we feel about them today even if we have replaced the courtship protocol of dancing at a ball with swiping right on the Tinder app.

If emotions, feelings and perception are generated through our neurobiology which then gives rise to thoughts, ideas and values how does my opening statement of being surprised by my own writing fit in? We’ve seen that a writer, in order to write, must not only get his own brain under control but he (and I am using the gender pronoun symbolically here, out of convenience) must also understand and mentally structure all the information he’s absorbed. He then must filter that information through the needs of his readers.

In psychology, all this involves the activation of specific mental processes such as mental modelling, mirroring and empathy. The writer’s brain then works not only as a filter through which reality is perceived but a simulation machine that understands what the readers understand and then renders everything through a commonly shared language of word-pictures.

To do that the writer’s brain has to work in a state of excitation. Anaïs Nin alluded to that when she said about writing “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” Similarly, Lloyd Alexander commented that “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”

Writers create entire rituals that allow their brain to warm-up and reach that level of performance and just like world class sprinters can’t just show up at a dinner party and break a world record in sprinting (they’re just not psychologically prepared for that) so do writers (I surmise, extrapolating from my own experience) can’t just switch on the state of mind that enabled them to write the book they did, when they were in the full flow of exercising their craft.

That makes writing a performance art. Each time it takes place it’s fresh, unique and ephemeral. With the added bonus of a permanent record left behind.

The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions

Writing, from a certain perspective is easy to understand. You need some kind of implement (it can take any guise you like) and a blank slate to record your thoughts on. That’s it.

But that is not it. While the paragraph above describes the technicality of writing it doesn’t describe what it really is. To understand why not consider that writing, the action, is an expression of writing, the thought. You can have writing without thinking and thinking without writing and while both are perfectly valid in their own right, the art form that we consider to be writing which transforms the person performing it from a scribe into an artist, takes place only when the two converge.

Which sort of begs the question: if writing is the convergence of thinking and acting what is there prior to it? The answer to this is chaos. Chaos means that whatever exists does so with no discernible order to it. And that is actually what defines writing. Thinking too can be chaotic. We can all easily let our thoughts meander inside our heads, we can free-associate, perform mental stream-of-consciousness exercises or daydream. But in order to think about something in detail we need to understand it and in order to understand it we have to categorize it.

Categorization creates entities, ontologies, taxonomies and hierarchical layers of values where things become abstracted into representations and symbols all of which denote specific values that, at some point require context to give them true meaning and intent to make them useful.

The twin lenses of context and intent are found in various proportions in every human activity that holds meaning. It is no coincidence, for example, that we form inner monologues inside our head that create a narrative structure of our own lives. Narratives hold several layers of meaning, both literal and abstracted. The literal ones arise out of their content and its structure but the abstracted ones come out of the ‘moral’ of each story and its significance to the context of the culture within which it becomes embedded and its intent in so embedding it.

Would The Odyssey, for instance, hold much meaning to a desert dweller who has never seen the sea? Or to a proverbial Martian who has never heard of Troy, a woman called Helen and a man named Ulysses who was responsible for ending a ten-year-long war? Reading the writing would be easy enough but understanding what it means beyond what it relates would require an awareness of culture and its importance. It would need empathy with beings long dead and some understanding of their feelings.

To convey all that then writing needs not just detail what happened. It needs to create a narrative that is sufficiently evocative to create its own context and, inevitably, intent. Reading The Iliad, we are aware of the devastating beauty of the fabled Helen who runs away with Paris to Troy and, in the process, we become aware of the power of love and the ability of passion to blind oneself to personal responsibility and the consequences that arise out of our own actions.

So, writing is a highly encoded form of communication that takes place from one mind to another. It may require some kind of hard coding in between. But it is in the accuracy of the decoding that the true ability of the encoder is measured. And it is here that we truly get to test the ability of one mind to imagine the capabilities of many others.

That’s what makes writing magical and a book a gateway into another world.

The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions

There is a truth that few writers will utter and, maybe even fewer will articulate. In order to sell our books we need to market them and marketing is an activity that most writers detest. This is not the truth I am talking about here of course but it leads up to it so I really need to start from the obvious.

Writing is hard enough without adding all the different tricks and tips of marketing on top of it but unfortunately a book that’s not marketed is one that isn’t read and a book that’s not read is not worth the paper it’s written on. That much should also be obvious so the deeper truth about that writers struggle with is one that’s associated not with the need to market the books we write but what marketing is associated with in order for a writer’s books to sell.

I know this is where it gets confusing so I will actually spell it out: Writers, to succeed, need to market themselves and not their books. Books sell only if writers are liked. This is a unique aspect of marketing that maybe few manufacturers have to really deal with. Sure we may think that Nike underpays its sales people and squeezes its Chinese manufacturers but as long as we associate its products with a perceived value and we don’t see dead bodies dropping anywhere, we are willing to (mostly) overlook that. Or, at least enough people are willing to do that to not make too big a difference to the manufacturer. But a writer who’s not liked immediately taints everything he or she has to say through the writing.

This leads to the interesting problem of the personality cult. In order for a writer to build a brand he or she will have to project and keep on projecting different facets of their personality. And in doing so get a buy-in from potential readers who buy into the values, voice and perceived status (and wisdom) of the writer. Building a personality cult for writers who are adept at understanding how different social elements work together is not a very difficult thing to do which is exactly the issue.

We write because we want our thoughts to resonate through the writing. If we wanted people to listen to us and admire us sufficiently to then give us their attention and purchase whatever we peddle we’d become orators or, at the very least, street market hawkers.

It is an interesting conundrum because it generates a tension between what we want to do as writers, which is write, and what is demanded of us, which is a whole lot of activities that fall under the label “not write”.

Now, it’s no secret that on top of my writing I often give talks to business groups and high-level execs, produce videos, do interviews and consult with large companies. All of these are activities that take me away from my writing and, should I let them, are quite capable of destroying the writer and leaving me only with the speaker/analyst part of my persona.

It’s taken me some time to resolve the tension and reconcile them all and I started by doing another obvious thing: I embraced them. By doing more talks, more presentations, more videos and interviews and still making myself find the time to write I filled all the available attentional space in my mind. I starved uncertainty and doubts until they were too feeble to distract me with their clamor and I took the time it needs to build away from self-criticism. But that’s not the solution that worked for me however.

What worked was in how I saw myself. Sure, I could have gone down the cult leader path (maybe) but what really worked for me (and it might just also work for you as a writer) is that I saw what I do as an exploration and myself as an explorer.

By a confluence of coincidences my current situation in life, career choices and background have placed me in the position where I can exploit my differences for the benefit of others. In chasing my curiosity down different paths such as “What would a business person need to ‘get’ in search” or “How do snipers think that we can benefit from?” I get to experience different worlds, find out how things work, discover amazing things and share everything with my readers. It is a form of self-indulgence. What kind of exploration isn’t? But by presenting the findings rather than who actually found things each time I get to bypass the personality cult trap and that, for a writer, is a liberating experience.