David Amerland's Blog: David Amerland on Writing, page 2

Writing And Marketing

As usual, when I head into this space, it is an aside to some other activity I am engaged in. A particularly hard section in a book I am writing where I am stuck, an article that just doesn’t want to make sense no matter how hard I try to word it or an idea that’s swirling around my head looking for that opportune time to be born.

So, here I am, thinking but not thinking; or at least not overthinking which is not that weird because writing is something I do without thinking because I think so much about it when I am not writing. And the reason I am here now is because I am seizing the gap between more productive and profitable writing activity to actually put down one of the insights I had while writing about things other than writing.

And here it is: There is a very direct correlation between writing and marketing. We’re in a world where the transactional nature of every relational exchange hinges upon the strength and quality of the initial connection. Trust, empathy, humanity in other words is key here.

Businesses have a problem with that. Understandably so. How to square the fact that you are geared up to be completely transactional, balancing supply chain logistics and production costs against bottom line returns, with the need to now also take into account the volatile and fluid nature of a relationship that’s predicated on feelings, instead of need?

You see the problem?

Writers actually face the exact same issue. Let me explain. Writing and editing are two sides of the same coin. You cannot do just one. It will be incomplete. So one cannot exist without the other. Writing is, however, all about the writer. She will put in there what’s important to her. It is her vision, her thoughts, her ideas that materialize on the page, take concrete form and exist.

Editing is all about the reader. It respects, of course, the writer’s words and thoughts and vision, but it polishes them here, bends them there, slightly reshapes their direction until they fulfil the need of the reader. To write you need passion. But to edit you need empathy. Passion makes you selfish. Empathy takes you out of yourself and makes you feel humble.

It feels like a tag of war. But it isn’t. A writer reconciles the two by being in the service of the words. The words need to work equally for the writer and the reader. Otherwise all that passion, no matter how intense and fierce it may burn, will be wasted.

Similarly, marketing needs to convey whatever product, brand or service it markets; but that is not enough. To work it needs to resonate with its target audience. Marketing requires focus, passion, maybe selfishness. But in order to resonate it needs real empathy. If you do not feel your target audience you can never hope to write for them, or sell to them, anything that matters.

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

Book Reviews and Book Writing

Let’s start with some complexity: writing is part of an unwritten contract binding writers whose job is self-explanatory with readers whose job needs to cross over into the writer’s domain in order for the writers they like to continue to write. Confused? Let me explain.

There is little point to my writing anything if there is no one to read it. Writers need readers. But readers don’t just appear like snowflakes falling from the sky. In order for someone to make the decision to give you their money and buy your book you need to connect with them at a level that makes the associated uncertainty and calculated risk negligible. This is bridged by trust which, in those cases where it is not formed as part of some kind of already established relationship, it is calculated through either extended contact or social proof.

Extended contact is certainly possible. As a writer I put out a lot of useful content that has practical value to readers which I publish on my blog. My reason for that goes beyond the purely transactional. I genuinely want to help others because I have been helped by the generosity of many in the trajectory of my own career so this is part of my giving back. In addition it provides a handy means through which readers and potential readers get to know me and when they engage either through comments or emails, I always take the time to interact.

Social proof is, really, nothing more than reviews. And here things get tricky. Most readers think that once they buy a book their job is done, after all, they have forked out money and given their trust so that should be it. Unfortunately it isn’t. Readers also have a responsibility to themselves, other potential readers and the writers they like (and even those they do not) to provide as honest a review as possible.

This makes it tricky because readers now have to write. Although sites like Amazon try to make the process as easy as possible, with reminders and channels through which a star rating system and a couple of words are enough to pass as a review, it still takes time and effort and thinking and all of this are obstacles that a busy reader with a life to live and a living to earn, barely sees as his remit.

So that leaves us at this impasse. Writers really need reviews from readers in order to increase the visibility of their books, establish a connection with their readers, better understand their audience, improve their own writing and continue to hone their craft. Readers think that writing is only what writers do.

Here are a couple of inescapable truths: Reviews are hard work and they put your name, as a reader, in the public domain, in writing. Reviews are a bridging point between writers and readers that shows exactly how successful the former has been at communicating with the latter.

If you read a book and write a review afterwards you will, usually, have to think a little about the book itself and its overall structure and message. That will help you, as a reader, but it will also help the writer. You will be giving something back from what you got.

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

How To Save Your Life If You Write For A Living

For every writer comes a point where writing becomes an escape as opposed to a road of discovery. At that point two things have happened and they are both a trap. First, some level of technical accomplishment has taken place as far as writing is concerned. Crafting expressions has become easier. Choosing words is no longer quite the struggle it used to be. Second, writing has started to feel safe. The space where a writer burrows into in order to hide from the world.

Both of these spell “comfort zone” and for a writer they are a mental death. It’s like trying to live life from a rocking chair pulled up in front of a cozy fire. It may feel like life, but it’s not. Similarly, “comfort zone” writing is not writing. Sure, all the vital signs are there: words get created, pages get filled up, but nothing of note ever takes place.

I wouldn’t be writing any of this, of course, were I not all ready with a cure. Having experienced the allure and felt the pull, I have kinda smashed the figurative rocking chair to bits and put out the cozy fire. How? Why?

The last one first: writing is never easy and good writing is incredibly hard. It really feels like you’re pulling out teeth which is not far from the truth. A writer’s words uproot the truth from deep within the weeds and hold it up for everyone to see. Rooting for it is painful; full of false starts and stops and self doubt and the writing itself feels like your own lifeblood is just flowing out – it’s that draining.

Cozy was never designed to be part of the experience.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way here’s how I do it: I write 5,000 words a day. I write posts and articles and blog posts and drafts. The first 1,000 words or so come flowing out and they feel right and they are, every time I look at them later in the day, utter drivel. The kind of rubbish that sounds OK until you actually start to think about it.

That leaves me with about 4,000 words of meaning to arrange in a way that addresses our deep need for sensemaking. Just like these 500 plus words, this gets down later, when all I want is to stop. When the double-espressos course through my veins like wildfire and when my fingers threaten to dance across the keyboard faster than my mind can think. Late at night, when just staying awake is a struggle, the struggle makes everything real.

There’s no moral here. I found my ‘hairshirt’ and I am making it work for me. If you write for a living, like I do, you need to make sure your words are alive, their sound screeching across the consciousness of those who read them. Anything less than that and you do your craft a disservice and disrespect your readers. Worse still: you are officially dead; your writing (and your life) only pretend to be alive waiting for time to catch up.

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

So, Why Don’t You Write?

Those of you who follow this blog know two things about me: First, I use this as a form of therapy. It is the only blog I use as a monologue to myself where I externalize my thoughts on writing, writers and the writing process. Second, I haven’t written anything here since September last year. These two things are related.

It’s not that I haven’t been writing. I have. To the tune of approximately 2,000 words a day as I build up to my goal for this year of actually writing 5,000 words per day, every day until the end of December. At the same time I’ve been procrastinating. There are books that need to be written and I am not yet writing them and posts that really need to be added here and I am only now getting to them. And the reason is I’ve been afraid. Not deadly afraid for my life kind of fear, nor that special fear you get when you’re alone in a dark place and think you’ve heard a noise in the darkness you’ve never heard before.

Writers get a different kind of fear. It creeps up on us not because we fail but because we sense that we have begun to succeed. The moment we have an audience, the moment a book catches attention and the response begins to come back and it is mostly positive and mostly encouraging and mostly inspiring we freeze up. To us, the moment this happens, we are like a deer in the headlights.

I will try to explain it. Each book is a journey. Each journey is a piece of us. A writer doesn’t just put words in a book, that is an easy thing to do. He puts in ideas, and thoughts, discussions and hopes, dreams and expectations. It is a largely unconscious process that takes place as words go from inside the writer’s head into the vehicle that will capture them, freeze them and deliver them to be consumed by the reader.

This process works best when we are unaware of it: that’s when the ideas and the thoughts consume us and the dreams and the hopes drive us. Writing then takes place and hard as it is, it is also easier and feels truer. And then the attention comes. And suddenly the realization dawns that the journey is being shared by countless others who also bring their hopes and dreams, thoughts and ideas with them.

And that’s when the questioning begins: Am I up to it? Are my words good enough? Can I pull it off and write another book like that? Will I be sufficiently good, perceptive, smart, insightful to capture all those dreams and hopes readers have? Will my agent be impressed? Will my publisher love it? Will the reviewers say it’s amazing? And because the answer to all these questions is, invariably, “maybe” doubt seeps in and that’s the point where the writer starts to worry not about writing the book that needs to be written but whether his best work is behind him and he is now on a downward spiral.

Those of you who read The Sniper Mind know, of course, that all pressure is generated internally. We do this to ourselves. For me, who actually wrote it, the pressure becomes even greater because it suddenly provides a baseline to judge all my new efforts by. Did this sentence sound profound? Was this new insight sufficiently smart? Will this new idea resonate with everyone? Am I actually hitting the mark?

I am writing here again; so you know that I have an answer to all these questions. It is provided by the title of this particular blog post but it was a change in context that actually helped me see it. For me writing and breathing are synonymous and I don’t find either an easy thing to do (I will explain that last bit in another blog post, some other day). Suffice to say, for now, that I need to do both to actually feel alive.

Put like that the choices became obvious: life or death. And if life then everything else that comes with it is part of its process which is what it is. Death only comes when we get to the part of the journey that is clearly “not-life”. And by all this I mean that basically in my writing I am just doing my absolute very best, delivering each day without holding back. By focusing on that I don’t worry about how my writing is perceived or whether I am living up to some self-imposed standard to impress my readers or if my agent, publisher and reviewers think I am doing a wonderful job. I am driven by what I seek.

Truth is always liberating and writing should always be about truth. It is then at its most true.

Writers, Writing and What All This Means

Talk about writing to a writer and we are not really talking about a physical activity. It’s not about the dexterity with which fingertips find keyboard keys or hands handle a pen or a pencil or, god forbid, a fountain pen. These are the skills of a scribe or even a calligrapher, people who make it their life’s intent to breathe beauty into an activity whose physicality is frequently overlooked.

So, when we are talking about writing we are actually talking about the invisible part of the craft that writers put into their work which is, as it happens, non-writing. I know it’s paradoxical and probably fairly unique. We look at chefs to learn how to cook better and though we admire the way they peel an onion without tears streaming down their face and gasp at their dexterity with the skillet we don’t think that these things, ornate, overwrought, showy as they might be, have little to do with the true nature of their craft.

Similarly we admire how carpenters work with wood. The sawing and the hammering. The chiseling and the mortise-joint creation. We don’t see these things as incidental to woodworking or anything less than the bulk of the skillset that transforms someone from a person holding a hammer and looking for nails to a true carpenter.

But come to the writer and we somehow know that what that person does is invisible. Maybe even unquantifiable. And this makes writing something amazing we can marvel at, talk enthusiastically about and consider powerful enough and dangerous enough, when it works, to occasionally ban books and put out fatwahs on writers. At the same time it makes writing something which because it is invisible becomes easy to deprecate and reduce into an act that requires tools and actions to take place. ‘Writing’ then becomes a case of filling a blank space with squiggles through a word-producing activity which means that anyone equipped with the right equipment is capable of doing it.

So, why do we need the writer?

Now, I am answering this question through my own perspective of a person who knew he wanted to write from age 12. Who actually felt it as a physical need. Who would, if he couldn’t write, feel a pressure building inside him like a volcano in need of venting. The person I was back then did actually write and often. Often enough, in fact, to have finished two fiction books by the time he made 15 and a volume of poetry by 16. But none of that, in retrospect, was (or is) actually worth reading.

From a purely material perspective of course writing did, indeed, take place. Words were produced and they filled notebooks and folders and binders which then took up physical space in desk drawers. Something was created out of nothing. Those words captured (and, arguably, conveyed) some passion and insights and ideas. The explosive ingredients that made up the physical need to write so imperative.

The reason I don’t, now in my more mature years, consider that writing or, at least writing worth reading, lies in the better understanding my older self has of the process of writing and its purpose. As a young writer-to-be, back then, experiencing the call of my future profession I knew that there were things I had to say that only this medium could adequately capture. At the same time as a young writer I was still raw, unprepared, still short of the memories and understanding that were needed to transform my scribbling into writing worth reading.

I will here, of course, bring up the metaphor of wine and ageing and bread that has to rise and be baked and then cool before being ready to consume and true as these might be in terms of illustrating the premise of reaching a point where a product is fully fermented or completely baked they don’t really explain in depth what I mean. So I will, actually go deeper.

It’s not that I am now smarter than my younger self. Sure I know a heck of a lot more, but I have also forgotten a heck of a lot and I am not even aware of it. Nor has the passage of time itself imbued me with some temporal aspect of maturity or wisdom. What has changed and what is changing still for me is the neural density of the connections my brain has made.

Writing, in truth, is mental activity. Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction it requires the writer to stand in the middle of his world and act as a bridge over some of its deepest chasms. And in order for the writer to do this successfully he (or she) needs to pull the nifty trick of seeing himself or herself through the eyes of the reader, of seeing the world through the eyes of the reader and then rendering what he or she sees in terms that the reader can then understand what the writer has glimpsed.

I’ve said before, here, that writers are, essentially, modern day explorers. We are also teachers, prophets, mystics, oracles and minor gods. All the entities in fact that in the ancient world would have been used to divine answers to the questions about the state of the world and the options lying in the future.

Writers pull off the act of writing through the wiring in our heads That wiring sets us apart not just from the readers we are so deeply empathetic towards but also from our younger writing-unready selves who glimpse the potential of what we can do and who we could be but have yet to learn to filter the data we process in a way that makes sense not just to us, as individuals, but to us as writers.

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

The Writer’s Inner Struggle

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.

Chaos, Writing, Thinking, Creating

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

The Writing Brain

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

Do Judge A Book By Its Cover

There is an inherent hypocrisy in the request of a writer to not judge a book by its cover. Let me elaborate. Everything happens in context. A writer writing a book is like a clam producing a pearl. Some stimulus has created the need for a response. Writers write to be read, or rather we write so that those who read our words derive some direct benefit from them. That means that everything we choose to put in a book (and that includes the title) is there for a reason.

This brings me to “The Sniper Mind”. When I first came across the body of research that looked deep into the minds of snipers as they juggled all the variables that go into the making of a shot and judged whether or not to pull the trigger, my working title was “The Sniper Moment”. I was thinking, at the time, that the person behind the gun was not only pulling all the variables around him into a critical moment where he’d have to make a decision under the most difficult circumstances imaginable but he also was, at the moment in time, totally “in the moment” in a Zen sense of the word.

It took me three years to get from the early stages of neuroscientific research to the point where I was deeply familiar with the concepts and the dynamics involved and had spoken to dozens of snipers about their skills and mindset and philosophy of life. In that time two things happened. The book “American Sniper” was published to some controversy and a lot of success and it was followed up by a film that only seemed to feed the controversy around the subject of snipers and what they do, and the research being done by neuroscientists expanded to include fighter pilots, ordinary soldiers, baseball players, basketball players and gamers.

The brain, it seems, only has so many circuits to help us make a decision and they are the same irrespective of whether you are a sniper or a gamer, a fighter pilot or a baseball player. As the research hours accumulated and the sniper interviews piled up I could have chosen to call the book any number of alternative names: “The Thinking Business Mind”, “The Decider”, “The Controller” and (at one time a favorite of mine) “The Mind in the Machine”.

None of them would have worked quite as well as “The Sniper Mind”. Why not? Well, if you’ve read the alternative titles above, however evocative they may be you already know they don’t throw up the same visceral response. And I already know what you’ll say because the discussion came up as I explained my reasoning to the marketing team of my publisher whose role is to play devil’s advocate in these matters. “Sniper” is an evocative image. Hugely romanticized by the popular press it is also often vilified by it. So in terms of impact, love it or hate it, it would be unlikely to leave those who came across it indifferent.

And by adding the dimension of “mind” a term that is in itself frequently misunderstood, misinterpreted and misrepresented, the title acquired the kind of ambivalence that sparks off the reader’s perceptions and creates a reaction.

Now, you will think, didn’t I just say that the love/hate think was 50-50? Does that not mean that perhaps by going with this I would be A. Consciously alienating a large portion of my potential audience and B. Maybe eschewing a female readership at a time when most book buyers are women and the publishing trade itself is experiencing a crisis?

These are all valid questions. If I were a better marketer, or rather if I were the kind of marketer who only wants to sell books I would have titled this one: “Twelve steps to becoming smarter, sexier and more successful” which, in a sense, is what this book is with each one of its chapters. Now I didn’t and here are the reasons why: First, I too came into this area with some preconceptions of my own. Second, in interviewing so many snipers over such length of time I came to appreciate the stoicism that characterizes them which makes them such easy targets to vilify.

No book is without intent that exceeds the specific remit of its content. This one is no exception. Sure, I want each reader to pick it up, finish it and walk away feeling smarter, more empowered and more capable than ever before. But I also, really, want more than that. If we are truly to be worthy of the evolution of our powerful brains we should also understand how biases blind us and heuristics make us prone to snap judgements.

If we are truly worthy of the future we must then understand that no human being is any better or any worse than any other. That we are all, at core, the same, separated by training, circumstances and environmental pressures and guided by choices. What makes us who we are, lies in the choices we make under sub-optimal conditions.

Wrapped up then in “The Sniper Mind” allure that the title conjures for some is the need for a deeper conversation about the righteousness of armed conflict, the responsibility we bear when decisions to go to war are made in our name by those we have chosen to govern us, the orthology of what we think we understand by the words “The Sniper Mind” and the debt that all of us, undoubtedly, owe to every man and every woman who picks up arms and goes into battle.

I know, that’s a tall order. We have to start from somewhere and this book is an unusual one in that it crosses over into many areas making it hard to pin down but, hopefully, easier to talk about. And we need to talk about all it covers. The subtext of its context and the revelations of the research that backs up its premise.

Having the title it has now is my conversation gambit. You see now why it’s hypocritical to say “Don’t judge a book by its cover”? The cover (and its title) is very much part of the writer’s intent. The book’s aspirational premise. So go ahead, judge it (if you must) but be prepared to talk about it too. After all, judgment without any conversation is like a book without readers: it’s a construct that only strokes the ego of its creator and then for a short while only.

And we ought to be better than that.

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

The Many Faces of The Writer

As you know, by now, this blog. is my ‘therapy’. I get here whenever I feel the need to look at myself and examine my craft, ask myself “why am I writing?” and examine the cascade of uncomfortable questions that include “who are you really writing for?” and “does anyone care anyway?”. These are not really meant to put a writer’s mind at ease but then again this isn’t what this blog is for at any rate.

A mind at ease with itself and what it does rarely gets to examine the reasons behind its own existence and by not examining the “why” of its “what” it somehow manages to blithely go along its way convinced that it is performing a vital task and conducting itself admirably well in the process.

So, if I am here because I doubt you have to ask yourself why should you even bother reading any further? After all, as a reader, you’re not here to indulge anyone Your time and attention are valuable commodities. Your need is to be educated, entertained or informed in some concoction personal to you and of value, again, only to you. I accept that argument but there’s something else.

Just like there is value in following the quest of a priest who doubts his faith because we believe that somehow in his internal struggle we will glimpse more about the existence of the divine than in all of the rehearsed presentations of organized religion, so is there real value following a writer struggling with his existence. In that struggle we truly see whether there is a need for writing or not and it is in that struggle that we might hope to understand its true value.

So, here we are. On the final stretch to the launch of my latest book “The Sniper Mind”, already pre-selling well on Amazon and as I am wading through the research for my next book (which for now must remain a secret) I am being forced to examine “why?”. This is the kind of question where answers such as “you need to make a living” or “it’s your job” don’t truly satisfy. In order for me to really get it together I need to have a sense of my own purpose and that has to transcend the fact that, like everyone else, I need a job.

In examining why writers write, writers also have to grapple with what they write about. How do they choose their subjects, how do they develop their arguments. The facile thing here is to say that “I write the kind of books I’d like to read” but that too is self-indulgent and it evades giving an answer. After all, given the fact that I carry out the interviews and I do all the research, I then barely really need to write the kind of book I want to read. I am in possession of its source material. So, no. While writers may write books in the kind of style they’d like to read, the books they write are not the books they want to read. Which means we need to go a little deeper.

My take on this is that whether writing fiction or non-fiction. The writer brings to the table the tools with which the moment can be faced and the future can be fought for. Grand, right? Think about it for a moment. Fiction is all about cautionary tales disguised as entertainment. Through it we get to explore that what-ifs that we can’t explore in any other way (and you only need to think of the success of “Harry Potter” or “Fifty Shades of Grey” to realize this particular truth). Non-fiction is all about equipping us with the tools we need, the know-how required to move in the direction pointed by the moral compass of fiction. Both types of book are about enabling and empowering us to accomplish what we want.

And that’s the exact point. In answering the “why?” – why do I write? Why do I choose the subjects I choose? Why do I believe this is the right book to write at this moment in time, I have to take into account not me, the writer, but you, the reader. I have to accept that in part I am responsible for the choices I make in a book’s subject matter and in making those choices I hope I have correctly read your collective need for that particular subject matter.

In order to read that as correctly as possible I have to work hard to “read” what you need in what you say and do, and don’t say and don’t do. And that keeps me both grounded and focused. Writers always feel the need to write but when they make the decision to write a book they should always be guided by the needs of their readers, not their own. This makes the books they write vital and it makes the craft of the writer a service to his readers so when the demons of doubt come (and they will) the writer who knows himself will be able to face them down not because of who he is, that really is immaterial, but because he has a good grasp of who his readers are and their need will always be above his own.

And if you liked this candid shot of the writer's struggle, shoot me a question. I will reply.

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