The Writing Sampler
By
Bryan Cohen
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Bryan Cohen on Smashwords
The Writing Sampler
Copyright 2011 by Bryan Cohen
Discover other books by Bryan Cohen:
1,000 Creative Writing Prompts: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/34347
Sharpening the Pencil: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/50078
500 Writing Prompts for Kids: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/50319
Writer on the Side: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/52955
Smashwords Edition License Notice
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
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Table of CONTENTS
1,000 Creative Writing Prompts: Ideas for Blogs, Scripts, Stories and More
Sharpening the Pencil: Essays on Writing, Motivation and Enjoying Your Life
500 Writing Prompts for Kids: First Grade through Fifth Grade
Writer on the Side: How to Write Your Book Around Your 9 to 5 Job
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I am a big believer in giving people cheap and practically free stuff, especially when it comes to information. Several motivational writers of the past like P.T. Barnum (you know, the circus guy?) made sure that his work was public domain so that anybody could read his tips and tricks about life for free. While I’m not quite ready to enter the public domain quite yet (I might wait until I can purchase my first elephant), I am interested in giving people an inexpensive sample of my work to get a basic grasp on my writing and my philosophies.
The Writing Sampler is a sneak peak of all four of my books on writing: 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts: Ideas for Blogs, Scripts, Stories and More, Sharpening the Pencil: Essays on Writing, Motivation and Enjoying Your Life, 500 Writing Prompts for Kids: First Grade through Fifth Grade, and Writer on the Side: How to Write Your Book Around Your 9 to 5 Job. If you own one of those books, you will be getting a look into the basics of the other three. If you’ve never heard of me before, then this is your chance to “try before you buy.”
I wouldn’t call myself an expert in the field of writing motivation, but I’m definitely a student into the destruction of writer’s block. When a writer is having writer’s block, it’s typically easy to see why. It could be the result of emotional turmoil, a malnourished stomach, an unhealthy dose of fear (which I would say is 90% of all writer’s block), or any number of temporary conditions. I personally believe that all temporary conditions like these can be demolished by taking care of yourself in one or a combination of different ways.
Prescriptions for Writer’s Block
Here are just a few of my recommendations for particular types of writer’s block.
Fear: Face your fears by doing what it is that terrifies you about writing. Repeat once a day for thirty days.
Sadness: Focus on the people and things in your life that you are grateful for. Think about your own positive qualities. Smile, laugh and repeat.
Low Energy: Eat some fruits, vegetables and raw nuts to keep yourself fresh throughout the day.
Lack of Ideas: Try out a few of the prompts in the two book excerpts in this volume.
Distractions: Remove yourself from the distractions. Continue writing.
Most of these prescriptions are relatively obvious. Which means that the real way to get through writer’s block is: step back, identify the problems, use your brain and then listen to your brain. If I had followed this simple advice when I left college, I might have written a dozen books by now. Thankfully, I stumbled upon it through extensive reading, listening and other types of learning. If you are thick-headed like myself (which is an apt description for me, just ask my friends and loved ones) you may need some more convincing.
The Top 10 Ways to Use These Books
Here is a little “Top 10” list of what I hope you’ll be able to do with The Writing Sampler. Even if you only use these samples of my books on writing to do one of the ten methods listed, I think that your writing might be better for it. While I don’t have a fancy celebrity reading this list, like David Letterman might, feel free in your head to put these words into whatever celebrity voice you wish.
1. Take an Idea, Run with It
This Sampler contains over 60 prompts from my book 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts: Ideas for Blogs, Scripts, Stories and More. My hope with these prompts is that you read one of them that can inspire you. I once received a message from a writer who took one prompt and wrote 20 pages right off the bat. I’m not saying you’ll be as fortunate, but one idea can quickly lead to others until you have an avalanche of thoughts rumbling down the hill and onto your page. Let me think of the first idea for you with the prompts and then you can do as you wish from here on out.
2. Come up with a Goal or Goals
I include a good chunk of my goal chapters from my Writer on the Side: How to Write Your Book Around Your 9 to 5 Job and Sharpening the Pencil: Essays on Writing, Motivation and Enjoying Your Life here in the Sampler. Why is this topic so important that I discuss it in two of my books? In short, having clear, positive goals dissolves writer’s block. Goals provide a direction that can push you past procrastination and fear, the two biggest obstacles to consistent writing. Use the tips and tricks in the Sampler to both create and implement these goals.
3. Create Writing Drills
To become a writer you need to write. If you’re out of practice the first thing may not be to enter into lengthy, tiring writing sessions. You may want to wade into the shallow end of the pool by devising a few writing exercising. Try writing for 10 minutes with one prompt each day for an entire week. The following week, try upping the ante to two prompts and 20 minutes and so on. Of course, you don’t have to solely use the prompts to create these exercises. Sprinkle them into your drills as you see fit.
4. Write with Kids
This book includes around 40 prompts from my 500 Writing Prompts for Kids: First Grade through Fifth Grade. In that book, I suggest that parents and teachers try writing along with their kids using the same prompts. This inspires a sort of “monkey see, monkey do” effect, helping your kids to enjoy writing because they see their mom, dad, teacher, older sibling or guardian doing it. Writing with your kids gives you something to talk about and share together. Also, if you set a time to do it every day or several times a week, it trains both of your brains to get into that writing mindset. If you don’t have kids of your own, you can write with a niece or nephew or a student that you tutor.
5. Create a Challenge
I love setting large, seemingly impossible goals for myself to achieve. A few months ago, I set the goal of writing 2,000 words a day for the entire month. I didn’t allow myself to take any days off, including the weekends. While some of the days were tough, the benefits of this challenge, which included finishing off three separate books, were indispensible. Try setting a challenge for number of words, how many minutes you write, how many days you write in a row or something similar. You can use the prompts for this purpose or you can use some of the other exercises within for goal-related challenges.
6. A Writing Purpose
In my book Writer on the Side, I talk about how the next logical step up from setting a goal is creating a purpose. Personally, my writing “purpose” is to inspire others from my words to help them to push back any blocks they have created for themselves in their lives. Your purpose might be to create engrossing adventure novels so that people enjoy them. You may want to create a wild, imaginative world so that children will be encouraged to read. Whatever purpose you choose, it is very important to choose one. Write that purpose down and say it out loud whenever you don’t feel like writing that day.
7. Life Improvements, Writing Improvements
Personally, I believe that it is silly to think that writer’s block and other writing-related difficulties are not connected to the whole life of the person writing. “How to Beat Writer’s Block” kinds of books are treating the symptoms and not the cause. If you get your life in order, you are more likely to be an effective writer. I have included some tips about strengthening your life as a whole in this book and they are fleshed out more in Sharpening the Pencil. Use these tips to patch up some of the holes in your life and watch your creativity blossom.
8. Write with Friends
This is a great alternative for the “Write with Kids” idea if you don’t have any kids in your life. Some people join a writing group to encourage that they get their writing goals completed every week. If there are no writing groups in your area, you can create your own with friends and fellow writers. Try working on the same prompt or different prompts at a given session and make sure to read your writing out loud to each other. As with all other walks of life, strength in numbers can help you to push past the crippling effects of writer’s block.
9. Your Inner Child
The excerpt in this book from my children’s prompts book 500 Writing Prompts for Kids, is geared toward those in elementary school. If you are working on a book that has child characters, these prompts can be used to think like a kid again. Imagine how a child would respond to a certain prompt. This can be a fantastic exercise to ensure that your child characters are realistic. Writing based on these prompts can also help you to remember long-buried childhood memories that can help you to generate new writing ideas.
10. Spread the Word
I once read in Steven Covey’s book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that you learn 90% of what you teach. This is one of the reasons I got into writing about writing, because I wanted to make sure I was the most motivated writer on the face of the planet. If you want to learn the skills of a motivated writer, talk about the concepts here in the Sampler with others. Teach a friend who is struggling with motivation in another area. Not only will this make you feel good, but you will help to solidify these concepts in your own mind.
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Thank you for taking the time to check out The Writing Sampler. For more information on my books, visit http://www.build-creative-writing-ideas.com. And as always, happy writing!
Sincerely,
Bryan Cohen
Author of The Writing Sampler
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LEGAL PAGE
This publication is protected under the US Copyright Act of 1976 and all other applicable international, federal, state and local laws, and all rights are reserved, including resale rights: you are not allowed to give or sell this book to anyone else. If you received this publication from anyone other than Bryan Cohen, Smashwords or Build Creative Writing Ideas, you've received a pirated copy. Please contact us via the website and notify us of the situation.
All contents Copyright © 2011 by Bryan Cohen. All rights reserved. No part of this document or the related files may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Limit of Liability and Disclaimer of Warranty: The publisher has used its best efforts in preparing this book, and the information provided herein is provided "as is." Bryan Cohen and Build Creative Writing Ideas make no representation or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaims any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose and shall in no event be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
Trademarks: This book identifies product names and services known to be trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks of their respective holders. They are used throughout this book in an editorial fashion only. In addition, terms suspected of being trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks have been appropriately capitalized, although Bryan Cohen and Build Creative Writing Ideas cannot attest to the accuracy of this information. Use of a term in this book should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark, registered trademark, or service mark. Bryan Cohen and Build Creative Writing Ideas are not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
Finally, use your head. Nothing in this book is intended to replace common sense, legal, medical or other professional advice, and is meant to inform and entertain the reader. So have fun with the book and happy writing!
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1,000 Creative Writing Prompts
Except from Chapter 7: Literature and Genre
Creative Writing Prompts: Writing
609. Describe the best piece of writing that you’ve ever constructed. What makes this the best in your mind? Also, write about what you think you would need to do to top it.
610. Describe the worst piece of writing that you’ve ever constructed. What did you learn from writing this piece?
611. Write a scene or story that is intentionally bad in every possible way.
612. Talk about a time in which someone praised your writing and how it made you feel. Describe the scene and the reactions of anybody else in the room upon hearing these words.
613. You have just won an award for your writing and you must give an acceptance speech that is worthy of your talents. Write your speech in its entirety and include an on-camera interview afterward for good measure.
614. Write a poem or a short story for the love of your life, past or present.
615. Talk about how your writing style has changed over the years. Write the same paragraph in your style from ten years ago, five years ago and from today. If you are especially young, this exercise can be extremely silly and fun :).
616. You have been given a magical pad of paper that makes everything that is written on it into reality. What do you write and what is your reasoning behind it?
617. Imagine a world in which writing was prized above athletics as a worldwide televised sport and you are one of the top competitors. Describe this world and what your “writing workout” would be.
618. How does writing fit into your life? Is it a hobby, a profession, a dream or something else? Write about this priority and if you would like to shift it at some point.
619. You have just had the burst of writing inspiration of a lifetime. You have negotiated your way out of your regular job for an entire week (with pay!) and you sit down to write. Describe your whirlwind of words, what you write about and the repercussions of your finished product.
620. Write the table of contents for your memoirs that you will be writing at the age of 80.
621. Talk about a time when a piece of writing changed you. Whether it is something you wrote or something you read, these words spoke to you and made you a different person. Describe how and why this piece made the world a different place.
622. You were digging around through some old stuff and you found some of your writing from long, long in the past. You cannot even remember writing it but it is truly amazing. Talk about what you do with it, who you show it to and what eventually happens as a result.
623. Guess the five strangest words that you include in your writing that you feel are quite unique to you. Write these words down and talk about how they made it into your standard writing vocabulary.
624. Talk about a time in which someone was overly critical of your writing and how it made you feel. What did you learn from this critique?
625. You are stuck in a room for two hours with the strongest critic of your work of all time. You have a copy of the work that he hates with a passion under your arm and he immediately lays into it. Describe those two hours.
626. A publisher has absolutely fallen in love with your writing. He says that any five books that you wish to publish are guaranteed (with a large advance). What are the five books that you choose: titles and descriptions? Talk about how you decide to write these five “dream” books.
627. Imagine that you have joined a writing group in your area. This group is full of writers from different backgrounds and skill levels. You present your most recent piece of writing to the group. How do they react and what are all of their comments?
628. The writing from your computer’s hard drive was somehow sent out to all of your friends, family and acquaintances. This includes the stuff that you’re afraid to share with everybody. It’s out there and there’s nothing you can do about it. What are some of the comments, compliments or concerns that you receive from these people?
629. You receive the beginning of a mysterious story or scene through text message and e-mail. The story is incredibly engaging but the author is untraceable. After weeks of the messages arriving, the author says to have the story published under a fake name and for you to take all of the profits. What do you do?
630. Imagine that you have been transported several centuries earlier without the use of a computer or a typewriter to write your words. How do you stay on task with an aching hand and a leaky quill? What do you write about? Describe the scene in extreme detail.
631. You are in a room with the five living writers who inspire you the most. What do you talk about?
632. You are in a room with the five deceased writers who inspire you the most (go with it). What do you talk about?
633. You live in a totalitarian state in which writing anything too provocative could get you killed. You refuse to take it safe and under a pen name, you write something that shakes the country to its very core. Describe your writing’s impact and how the future of the country continues.
634. In an ancient time, you are the personal writer to the King and Queen of your country. What do they require you to write and what is your day to day life like living in the castle?
635. How do you feel that writing will change 200 years in the future? 1,000 year in the future? If you lived during that time, with your predictions holding true, how would you thrive as a writer?
636. Seemingly overnight, the world has become completely obsessed with writing! The economy is now completely focused on writing, both imports and exports. Children have scorned television and Facebook to take up writing. How does this change your life and how does the future play out in this new writing world?
637. What would your writing have to accomplish for you to consider yourself a true success? Describe that accomplishment and where you would go from there?
638. John Milton wrote the epic poem “Paradise Lost” while he was blind. Describe how you would write such a masterpiece with a major disability. Would it be a driving force of motivation or more of a supreme hindrance?
639. Many people say that they’ve done everything they can when it comes to becoming a full-fledged writer. Write a story about a person who has actually done everything he or she can. This may include submitting manuscripts to publishers, writing an eBook, taking course or anything else you can think of.
640. What is your favorite work of art about a writer? This can be a painting, a movie, a book, really anything at all. Write about how it impacts you as a writer.
641. What is your best quality as a writer and how did it become a part of your writing?
642. What is your worst quality as a writer and how did it become a part of your writing?
643. Name three attributes that you think would make you a much better writer if they were added to your persona. Talk about how you think you could obtain these new skills or traits.
644. Talk about three habits you have as a writer that you feel like you would be better without. How could you get rid of these or how do you think you could turn them into strengths.
645. If you had grand control over time, space and money, how would you change your life to suit your writing? Talk about a day in the life of this new writing-structured existence.
646. What is something in the world that inspires you to write? Why does it have this effect on you?
647. What is something in the world that makes you not want to write at all? What is it about this that makes you stop cold in your tracks?
648. What is the thing that you love the most about writing? Explain how it came to be this way.
649. What is an aspect of writing that you absolutely hate? Is there any way that you could make this aspect more fun and enjoyable?
650. If you could choose someone in history or someone living today to write a biography about, who would it be and why?
651. If you were teaching a child or a novice about writing, what are a few things that you would teach him or her and why?
652. If you could condense what your writing is “about” into one sentence, what would that be? Talk about why this explains your writing to a T.
653. How do you want your writing to affect people? Why? How does it affect people now?
654. Why are you a writer and describe how you came to make that decision about yourself.
655. What kind of writer would you call yourself? A poet? A journalist? Explain the type of writer you think you are and how that affects your writing.
656. If you were incapable of writing, what would be another way that you would express your creativity? Explain a day in the life of this new form of expression.
657. While dreaming you think of the most amazing novel you have ever conceived of. As you wake up, you scramble to a notebook and begin writing. What happens next?
658. Write about five characters that you would like to come to life (that you or someone else has created). Create a scene of these five characters coming together and interacting.
659. Were you ever taught something about writing that you wish you hadn’t been? Something that later held you back? Go back to the day you were taught and write a scene about you being taught the opposite.
660. Pick a piece of your writing that will survive forever. What it is it and why do you think the people of the future need this?
661. Talk about a time when the use of substances affected your writing. This can be caffeine, alcohol, drugs or even just an extra large portion of pie.
662. You stumble upon a large pile of papers written by your writing enemy. You find a sheet of paper that heaps a great deal of praise on you and your writing. Talk about finding the praise and what you say to your “enemy” about it.
663. Put yourself in the shoes of a famous writer. What do you do for a day with his or her fans and fame?
664. Re-write a scene from an awful book or movie. Make it better or play up the things that made it awful.
665. Talk about a time when your emotions affected your writing. Did they affect them positively, negatively, subtly or some other way?
666. How do other people affect your writing? Talk about how a different people in your life change your writing after you interact with them.
667. Write a scene that portrays your ideal writing conditions.
668. Write a scene that portrays the conditions that make you not want to write a word.
669. Make a list of five things that you regret not having written about. Write a scene or story about one of them.
670. Write a paragraph or two that you would write to somebody who is down on their luck.
671. Imagine that you have a writing staff that takes care of all the annoying parts of writing. What do you do with the time you have set aside for writing without all of those hassles?
672. Write a piece of satire that makes fun of your own writing. This is a great way to point out some of your own flaws and learn to grow from them.
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Excerpt from Chapter 4: Life Goals, Writing Goals
How to Be Successful
A lot of people think that they are complete and utter failures at life. They know that they have a few good things going, whether it’s their friends or family, career or money, etc., but they don’t feel as though they’ve been successful with their time on this planet. Many had a plan that they have not been able to implement or that they abandoned long ago. Some are living that plan and yet they still believe that they are not reaching their potential success. How can you reach your lofty expectations without disappointing yourself?
You can’t.
That’s right, you can’t.
Before you get all, “Bryan, when did you become so doom and gloom,” let me explain.
Most people have a definition of success that is unfair to them. See, a lot of us are conditioned to believe that success means not failing. The top tier honor students in college and high school think that anything less than an A is a total failure. Many actors and actresses see anything less than a leading role in a play or movie as a complete disappointment. And even some writers I know think that if they haven’t been published, sold thousands of copies, and had their book optioned as a movie, then they are let down by their lack of success.
Does anyone else see a problem with this extremely broad definition of failure and this narrow definition of success?
Is all of life some giant difficult class that you need to get an A in to feel good about yourself?
Hell no! The first few businesses Bill Gates came up with were failures, Donald Trump has gone bankrupt several times, and writer Akiva Goldsman won an Academy Award for writing several years after writing one of the worst movies of all-time, Batman and Robin. If they had considered themselves destitute failures when they had their major life setbacks, they wouldn’t have become the societal definition of successful.
So, what needs to happen for you to not feel as though everything below perfection is failure?
You need to change your definition of success. Here are a few ways to make that happen.
Change Your Attitude
Which of these two attitudes do you believe will help you to lead a happier lifestyle?
1.
I am a single person on this globe who only knows a very small
percentage of the population and I can’t really trust anybody until
I get to know them.
2. I am connected to everybody with a great
underlying consciousness. The people I haven’t met yet are somewhat
like a part of myself and that means I can both relate to them and
help them.
Even if you are one of those “people haters” you can probably reason your way to knowing that number two sounds like a pretty good option. We are all in this thing together whether we like it or not. So, we might as well like it!
In Earl Nightingale's “Lead the Field,” he suggests a thirty-day experiment in which you treat everybody you come in contact with as the most important person in the world. I attempted the experiment and noticed a big change in how people treated me. Other people wanted to share their lives with me and they wanted to help me achieve my daily tasks. I found myself being more productive because I had the help of everybody around me to succeed with my goals.
After the thirty days, I slumped back into my old way of being and I missed the support. I wanted to go back to treating everybody well but there was something missing. It was a hollow exercise. Sure, in general, I care about people and I want them to be happy, but I was doing this experiment primarily for myself.
I came across an article by Steve Pavlina about a new way of looking at your relationships with other people. His wife had been living a sort of “friendship abundance” principle for many years. It wasn’t about treating other people as if they are your friends. It was about believing that everyone is like a part of yourself and that they are a part of you. It’s about knowing that you and these other people are connected. Once you believe that all people are connected instead of separate, helping other people and treating them well becomes like helping and being good to yourself.
I wanted to put this into my life. The reason for adapting this way of being was because it was just plain better than what I had previously believed. This way of thinking about people made me want to help them and to feel better about life. Why not implement it? If it didn’t work, I could always go back to the way it was before.
Taking part in the experiment was the first step. Reading the article about this new way of thinking was the second step. Learning to implement the principle into my life? That step has lasted nearly two years and I am still working out the kinks :). Since I’ve made the change though, it has opened up so many possibilities and it has created and strengthened so many of my relationships that I could never see myself fully going back to the way it was.
In changing my beliefs about my connections with people, I feel as though I have become more successful.
Change Your Values
Reading Stephen
Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People changed a lot
of things for me. One of the changes was the belief that I needed to
live a life that was centered on strong principles. I had already
begun thinking differently about the people I came into contact with
on a day to day basis, but what about the people I already had
relationships with?
At the time of writing this essay, I have been dating my girlfriend for four years. There have been times when it was one of those on and off affairs with breakups and heartbreak followed by passionate reconciliations. We kept breaking up because of fear and then getting back together because of a combination of fear and love. For a large portion of the relationship, I had my foot half in the door and half out, keeping my eyes and ears open to other opportunities.
When I wasn’t getting what I wanted out of the relationship, I would start an argument and make an effort to hurt her worse than I felt I was being hurt. This was one of those things that I wanted to change about myself, but I had no idea how.
Covey wrote about the tale of Holocaust survivor and Professor Viktor Frankl. When he was put into the concentration camps during World War II he was stripped of everything. His dignity, his family, and his health. One day, he was sitting down at the camp, completely naked, broken, and in pain. He thought to himself, “What do I have left that they haven’t taken away from me?” What he discovered was monumental. He realized that he had the ability to choose how this was all going to affect him.
He determined that there is a space between stimulus and response where we can make a choice of how we are going to react. We have a neocortex, unlike most animals, that allows us to use logic and reason instead of the emotional, limbic, part of our brains.
This was the first part of my puzzle. When I felt attacked by my girlfriend, I didn’t need to respond back with a greater, more painful attack out of fear of being hurt. I could respond any way that I wanted to. Sure, I had conditioned myself to respond in this counterproductive way for a long time and I would need to uncondition myself, but now I knew that I had a choice. But what would I choose?
Another great passage in Covey’s book clued me in. A man he had spoken with at a conference told Covey that his marriage was failing and that they didn’t love each other anymore. He and his wife were considering divorce. Covey asked the man, “Why don’t you love her?” He responded, “I told you, there isn’t any there.” Covey went on to explain that love is a verb. You need to be there for her, care for her, and listen to her. You need to actively love her if you expect to get the noun “love” in return.
And there it was. I replaced my fighting with active loving. My relationship has never been better.
I started replacing most of my unproductive responses with active loving across the board. By that I mean that I started to actively care for the things that were causing my problems. I started tackling things that had been holding me back in my life. One day I was frustrated about my lack of organization. But I replaced my typical response of anger with one of industriousness. I spent an evening throwing out old papers and reorganizing all my possessions. When I didn’t feel good about my health, I changed my reaction from one of self-pity to one of action, and I would almost immediately go to the gym.
By taking advantage of the space between stimulus and response and by applying action, I have been able to deal with many of the areas of my life in which I felt I was a failure.
Fail
My last tip is to fail. Fail gloriously. Fail like nobody has ever failed before. The important rule about this step though, is to go for it 100% when you fail.
I’ve produced a couple of plays and improv shows in Chicago, and while I was able to make them kinda-sorta successful, I never felt as though I put myself into them completely. I came up with big ideas but then I never whittled them down to all the minor details that can make a show really interesting from beginning to end. I said to myself, a few shining moments are all I need. During and after these shows, I never felt a full feeling of satisfaction. I tried to convince myself that these were successes, but I never truly bought it. This was all because I didn’t go 100% for them.
About a year and a half ago, I began working on a project that I can’t talk about very much due to legal reasons. Let’s just say, that if it happens, it will be ten times bigger than the biggest project I’ve ever worked on with a budget nearly a thousand times grander. And during this project I have had some major stumbles and learned some life lessons.
The funny thing is I have felt more successful during this project, with all its failures and setbacks, then anything I’ve ever done before in my life. I have fully put myself on the line and it feels quite good. By letting yourself fail, you allow yourself the opportunity to learn and grow.
So even if you start changing your life and your definition of success to make things better for yourself: failure ain’t so bad. Failures now that allow you to become stronger will make it so that your later successes will be greater.
If you can find your own way to deal with other people, to deal with yourself, and to let yourself fail, you may find that the way you start living is pretty darn close to your original definition of success.
Self Motivation Skills
I'll admit, I sometimes try and fail when I attempt to motivate myself. There is no 100% success trick that will cause you to be motivated 24/7. This is the kind of thing that will often make the "newly motivated" (those who have recently become more conscious) discouraged and cause them to slip back into old habits. This is especially true when you look at those who seem to have an endless supply of motivation that dwarfs your own. Like writing, acting, dancing, or cooking, motivating yourself is a muscle that needs to be trained up with certain skills. Here are some self motivation skills that can improve your productivity.
1. Stepping Back
This is one of the most important self motivation skills. Stepping back means developing the ability to stop what you're doing, thinking, and feeling and taking a look at a situation as if you had a bird's eye view. The completely unconscious among us (those who rarely think or act for themselves) have a hard time doing this. Like a mouse or a horse they will act on emotion and instinct and nothing else. Stepping back is like hitting a big pause button on life and watching the scene unfold. This is especially useful if you are doing something unproductive or unhealthy (playing on the computer, having a long pointless conversation, eating an entire package of cookies). If you can step back from the situation mentally (and physically if needed) you can stop the poor choice of activity or emotion and figure out a new course of action.
2. Asking for Help
If this is self motivation, why would involving someone else be so important? There are times when stepping back is not enough and we realize that it will not take us long to fall back into the bad habit that is getting in our way. If you can find a contact (whether it be a significant other, a friend, a co-worker, or a family member) who is positive and a good influence, you can get yourself out of a self motivation rut. On days when I have to work late, I will often lose my motivation around the 6 PM mark. It is at this time that I know I can call my girlfriend to help re-instill my self-motivation skills. Sometimes just having someone to tell you "You're doing well" and "I think you can do it" is enough to get you back on track. Don't take this as an opportunity to have a long conversation that gets you off track and off schedule. Be upfront about why you're calling, texting, or e-mailing, "I'm a little down (unmotivated) can you give me a quick pep talk so I can get back in the swing of things?" This is not often something that will work with a negative, sarcastic, or unhappy associate.
3. Creating A Life Purpose
While I could talk about setting goals here, this is the most important fire to light as far as self motivation skills go. What I mean by a life purpose is your opinion of why you were put on this earth right now. This can change from year to year or stay the same throughout a lifetime. Currently, my life purpose is to help people improve themselves and to give people opportunities to succeed with their passions. Whenever I'm feeling low or that what I'm doing isn't making much of an impact, I reassert my life purpose. Having a big grandiose purpose is fine, even encouraged, because remembering that I genuinely want to achieve something great and exciting reminds me that life is both difficult and rewarding. This can help me push through a self motivational block and may provide some extra will power for a couple of hours. This purpose can be broad or specific ("healing the world" or "ensuring that children have clean water throughout the world"), simple or complex, new or old. What is important is that its positive and that you identify with it strongly.
Take these three self motivation skills and run with them to improve your ability to work throughout the day. It will take some time to make sure these are a part of your life, but once they are, the amount of time and happiness they will save has an unlimited possibility.
The Power of Thinking
Most of you reading this have never been taught how to think. You may have learned some facts, figures and formulas, some tips and tricks, but there is no class in college called “Actual Thought.” I am going to talk to you about my thoughts on thinking (tee hee) and the possible applications of this thought. It is my opinion that adding time to think to your life, can help you progress in almost every aspect of it.
In my personal development path, it was recommended that I listen to the works of Earl Nightingale. Earl Nightingale was a radio personality and a speaker who is the only person to ever receive a gold record for a spoken word recording.
I found a copy of Earl Nightingale's audio program “Lead the Field” and started working my way through it. There were many great and timeless concepts on the program: the money you make is equal to the service you put out, your acres of diamonds are typically right in your backyard, etc. The one that struck me almost immediately was the power of thinking.
Mr. Nightingale suggested that you put aside just an hour a day for thinking. He said to sit down with a cup of coffee (which, I wouldn’t do myself because I gave up caffeine) and a sheet of paper and just write down my thoughts. He gave me the opportunity to write down things I thought of that could make my life better and more efficient. In my years of schooling, no teacher had ever asked me to do that.
Sure, I’ve brainstormed for a paper before or gotten into one of those ridiculously unproductive group projects where just one person ends up doing the work of four. But I had never just been sat down with paper and pencil and told, “don’t worry about other stuff right now, just think about yourself and your future.” The results were incredible.
I began to brainstorm new ideas to improve different aspects of my life. I figured out how I could afford to go on a mostly raw food diet and how I could spend more time with my girlfriend. I came up with ideas for my theatre/film company and how to become more efficient at what I was doing. My days ended up being planned better and I felt like I was starting to accomplish nearly twice the amount of work that I had previously been doing. I was starting to get ahead of where I was and I have never looked back.
Now, some of you will read this and say that an hour a day is way too much time to give for just sitting around and hoping for some brilliant thought to hit me. Fine. Give it ten minutes a day for a week, and if you make it through that, try a month. If you find that you have been able to get more accomplished as a result, bump it up to 20 the next month. Then thirty. I have a feeling that you’ll find it so worth the time that you will naturally try to incorporate it into your schedule.
Now, once you get this into your individual repertoire, how can you further apply this principal?
You can bring other people into the mix. And while they might not jibe with it at first, they will understand the benefits of it after they see the positive consequences.
Some examples:
Sit down with your wife/husband/partner/boyfriend or girlfriend and think about how you can make the relationship better, stronger or just plain more fun.
Sit down and talk with your child and ask him to think about how you can be a better parent to them and how they can be a better kid to you.
Do some thinking with members of your family.
Try to hammer out some thoughts with a co-worker or even with your boss!
An enemy or a perceived enemy is worth sitting down with and doing some thinking.
Just as with everything, I am sure that you have even more examples in your own life. I think that you should make every effort to improve your life in this way. What do you have to lose? If there is something that you are trying to avoid talking about, you may as well get it out in the open (it’ll come out anyway and when you least expect it otherwise). If you think that a person won’t be interested in “thinking” with you and you are afraid of the rejection then you might as well go for it. The possibility of a one-time rejection is not nearly bad enough to offset the potential gains of a new established habit of actual thought.
If you are able to add thinking to your life and your relationships, you can essentially make every part of your life more efficient.
As with all of the ideas you find in this book, I would try them for 30 days and see how they work for you. I mean, let’s face it, you wouldn’t have stumbled onto this site if you didn’t need to change things in your life a little. Integrating something like this into your life is hard at first, but it may help you make the changes you’ve needed to grow in your day-to-day lives and relationships.
You should go for it…I think :).
Keeping Up and Moving Forward
Three years ago, if I had come across my own website, I would have read it for about a day and then forgotten about it. Reading it wouldn’t have been a priority for me even if I thought it was the most interesting, informative, wonderful site in the world :). The reason I would move on to something else is because the site may have been important for my future but it was certainly not urgent. There were no immediate deadlines to improve my motivation; there was no swinging pendulum coming down toward me. Sure, putting effort into improving my time management and my writing abilities would have helped me become a better writer, but who can find the time in this crazy, fast-moving world?
By completing all my daily tasks I was doing an average job as a creative person. Half the people were doing more than me, and half of the people were doing less than me. I was not being successful or unsuccessful. I was just being. All I was doing was getting by.
What I didn’t realize at the time though is that taking care of those important but less urgent tasks is what makes a person exceptional.
In Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey talks about the difference between Production (P) and Production Capability (PC). He uses the tale of the Golden Goose.
A farmer finds a goose among his livestock that produces golden eggs. Every day it lays another pure golden egg. This is the production. The goose lays golden eggs for a good long time and the farmer becomes extremely wealthy. After a while, the farmer gets greedy and impatient. He kills the goose to open it up and get all of the eggs at once. There are no eggs inside. He has killed his source of gold. He has killed his production capability and now he will have zero production to show for it.
The moral of the story is that without taking care of your production capability, production will suffer.
If you don’t write for three years, and then decide you want to pen a novel, chances are it will be much more difficult than if you had been doing writing exercises once a week during that time. Your P will be slow because you did not care for your PC. This, of course, frustrates you and makes you think all sorts of crazy thoughts like you weren’t meant to write or that you aren’t any good. But really, you’re only out of practice.
Covey uses this concept of P/PC as he describes four different types (quadrants) of tasks people do throughout the day in an attempt to manage their lives. Today, I will only discuss Quadrants I and II.
Quadrant I tasks are those that are urgent and important. These are the ones with deadlines and the pendulum. The reason I didn’t take time to develop my long term skills of motivation and productivity was because I was too busy on my daily Quadrant I activities: my production.
Quadrant II tasks are those that are important but are not urgent. These are the long-term development tasks. These activities are the PC, the production capability. If you are a baker, Quadrant II tasks could include learning new recipes, trying a new mixing technique, or deep cleaning your oven. A teacher’s Quadrant II might involve updating lesson plans, learning new ways to reach students, and consulting the old teachers of your students to get suggestions of how to help them.
If you are a writer, some Quadrant II goals might be to experiment with different genres, to learn how to market yourself for publishing, and to improve your daily writing productivity.
Covey believes that to be a “highly effective” person, you need to move Quadrant II activities to the top of your priority list.
Now, how do you do this if you are a destitute writer who is balancing seven hundred things at once? The counter question: Do you want to be an amazing writer or just one who gets by?
Drop a few hundred tasks. More often than not, very few of those many, many (probably not actually seven hundred :) ) tasks will actually help you advance in your career. Work some Quadrant II tasks into your life. If you could learn one skill that would help you as a writer and help your career, what would it be? Learn that skill. Or work your way up to learning that skill.
I still have plenty of Quadrant I tasks in my life, but one of my current goals is to primarily focus on Quadrant II tasks in the future. I don’t expect to rid myself of all these urgent, important tasks. Unless you are a multi-millionaire with a large staff, you probably can’t get rid of Quadrant I entirely. But I know that if I continue to work on my development as a writer, my production capability, I will become better.
Start adding Quadrant II to your daily to-do lists. Find a way to focus on your capacity for writing and improving your abilities at least some of the time. Fifty two weeks of consistent development will make you a much stronger writer than one who finishes his standstill tasks every day of his life.
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500 Writing Prompts for Kids: First Grade through Fifth Grade
Except from Chapter 2: Imagination
Let’s face it; this is really the best age group in which to cultivate imagination. Later on, a lot of kids become teens who think imagination is stupid and they focus on television and the Internet to come up with all the creativity. This is the best time to build the imagination up as large as possible so that your kids don’t grow up to be crusty, boring adults like us.
Cartoons
51. Who is your favorite cartoon character and why? Imagine that you and this character went on
an amazing adventure together. Talk about the entire day in which you are together from beginning to end.
52. What would your day be like if it was animated? Would you bounce and fly to school? Would your teachers and classmates make funny faces all day long? Describe your world as if it was a cartoon in full detail.
53. Some cartoons have wacky sound effects that make everybody laugh. Imagine that everything you did was accompanied by a silly and strange sound. What are some of the sounds and what would you do about everyone around you laughing all the time?
54. You are an animated super hero ready to take on the world and stop bad guys. What would a day in your new super heroic life be like?
55. Describe what a cartoon version of you would look like. Talk about your hair and your face and your clothes. What would your animated room look like? Tell every detail possible.
56. You have been captured by an evil cartoon villain! Luckily, all of your favorite cartoons from different shows are coming together to rescue you. Who are the villains and who are the heroes in this story? How do they eventually rescue you from the clutches of evil?
57. If you worked for an animation company, what type of cartoon would you make? Try to come up with something original that has never been done before!
58. Slowly but surely, everything in the world has started to become animated and you have to stop it. What do you do to discover what is causing everyone to become hand-drawn and how do you keep it from taking over?
59. If you could make one cartoon character come to the real world who would it be and why? Since this is a new experience for the character, how would you describe the differences between the animated world and the real world to him or her?
60. You have been given a magical pencil. Everything you draw with this pencil comes to life! What do you draw? Tell the story of the things you draw and what you do with your newfound power.
A New World
61. You have become the King or Queen of the entire world! How do you plan on changing things with your newfound power? How would everything change in your home town and in the rest of the world?
62. All of a sudden, everybody in the world has the power to fly just like a superhero! Obviously, this changes the way you’re going to get to school, but how does it change the other things in your life? Are you a particularly good flyer?
63. One day, you wake up to find that you have gone 10 years in the future and that you’re 10 years older. What is life like in high school or college? Who are your friends? How has the world changed in a decade?
64. Upon returning home, your parents give you the fantastic news that they have won the lottery, which means that they have won over a million dollars! How does your life change with all of that money? Do you move into a bigger house and have better toys and games? Go into extreme detail.
65. As you go to feed your pet snake, he begins talking to you in English or some other language you understand. You begin to notice that all animals have started talking to you. What do they say? Do they ask you for anything? How do you use this new ability to change your life for the better?
66. World peace has been declared and as a result all fighting between countries has stopped for good! Now that nobody needs to go to war anymore, what are some of the things that the countries should focus on? Stopping world hunger? Curing all diseases? Without fighting, how will the world change?
67. On a bright and sunny Friday morning, an alien spacecraft lands in your backyard. All of the news vans in the city come to your house as the aliens come out to greet you and your family. What happens next?
68. A package arrives at your house addressed to you. You open it to find that it is an autobiography written by a version of you from the future. Not only does it say everything that’s ever happened to you, but it details the next 30 years of your life! What do you do? Do you read it? Do you ignore it? How does your life change after getting this package?
69. After a big flood of the polar ice caps, your town has become … a water town! Everybody takes boats everywhere and has to learn to swim really well. How else does your life change in this new water world?
70. You have become the most popular kid at school. How did it happen? How has your life changed since your popularity went through the roof?
Time and Space
71. If you could live at any time in history, when would it be and what would you do there? Would it be the time of the dinosaurs? The Wild West? The days of American Revolution? If you can’t pick just one, feel free to write about a few.
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