The Impulse Factor: Hacking the novelty-seeking brain

Maybe you can relate. I was raised by aliens and so I know little of social norms. I usually guess and then I beat myself up rather than consider that my equipment is more or less normal.

Or at least I assumed it was normal.

But then I ran across a book, The Impulse Factor, which posits that about a quarter of us naked monkeys process dopamine poorly. That poor processing causes us to misbehave in search of the dopamine jolt we sorely need in order to feel normal. The book's author says the mutation behind the dopamine problem coincided with the diaspora of homo sapiens from Africa; in doing so, he joins a legion of non-fiction authors who claimed to find the one 'it' that drove the formation of human civilization. Earlier 'its' include coal and salt, so I'll let that pass.

What's especially intriguing for me, a poster child for those who bear the mutation (witness: can't sit through a meeting, pedalled cross country by myself, will try anything but heroin and meth once) is that short deadlines make our faulty little brains work really, really well. So all that procrastinating was actually just me biding time until my smart brain kicked in.

So now I'm toying with how to use the power of the smart brain without screwing myself on short deadline. There's a great essay on Structured Procrastination that meditates on how to use said downtime for good rather than for evil. Last night, I experimented with deliberate, structured procrastination by reading 200 pages of a friend's manuscript. I think the approach might be a winner. Instead of watching crappy ol' TV, or trying to play keyboard in my freezing garage apartment (don't ask) I could find inspiration by reading another human's work of art, rest my brain and prepare for a productive next day.

And the next day, when I did sit down to write, I knocked out 3,000 words of—get this—pleasurable prose. Incredible.

Now I'll be the first to admit that all these lifehacks work sort of OK some of the time. Productivity and flow, for me at least, are moving targets. Sometimes it's the bottom of the hour hack, sometimes it's the avoiding of all the evil timesucking web sites hack, and sometimes it's just reading late into the night and filling the proverbial well.

The 3 building blocks of happiness: What writers need to know to make it through the day

Martin Seligman posits that there's more to mental health than the mere absence of the mental wackies. For more than 30 years, the director of the Positive Psychology Center of the University of Pennsylvania has been studying the psychology of happiness, and happiness, he maintains, is the result of experiencing meaning, engagement and, to a lesser degree, pleasure in one's life.

The meaning piece explains why parents of children, be they flesh or creative, can sport those haunted, tortured expressions and still claim to be happy. Seligman's ideas also illustrate why engaged Golgafrinchans who create no value in society—think motivational speakers, day traders or middle management—say they're pretty happy despite the fact that they occupy a near vacuum of meaning. And why a brilliant steak dinner at the end of the day tastes so good, but it doesn't go very far in creating happiness in the absence of an engaged, meaningful life.

Trying to find a dynamic balance amongst the three seems the way to go. Enjoy flow (the ultimate sense of engagement) when it happens, and don't sweat it, writerly crowd, if the writing hurts most of the time. At least it's meaningful. And if the going gets too rough, pull a pleausurable pint of Guiness or grab a bag of Dove chocolate and try to relax. It might only be a small dose of happiness, but even a small dose can be powerful.

Introduction: A person inside my head.

Somewhere inside of me, there's a little black girl of about 8 or 9 years of age. Her hair is caught up in ties, little balls of fluff on all sides of her head. She knows that she's not meant for anything fine the way she knows how to breathe. And she draws with a stick in the dirt whenever she gets the chance, draws her family such as it is, draws the sycamores around her, and sometimes, with her mind, she draws shapes in the clouds. She is barely aware that she does this. She does this because creation is as much her birthright as the wind is.

I don't know how many more years this girl lives, what children she bears or whether her life ends as it began – in slavery. I just know these bare facts, know her unconscious acceptance of the circumstances of her short life, the art she makes in the simplest of forms, the wind on her black skin, the hard work she endures and the losses she suffers as a matter of course.

We have these birthrights, these few things: The capacity and impulse to create, skin that feels the wind, the opportunity to love, if only to love ourselves. We have inner workings that accept the gifts of the world – the calories and the oxygen. The workings by themselves tell this truth: We belong. We utterly belong no matter what; we were longed into existence by a force greater and truer than ourselves and then, regardless of appearance or contribution, we are loved every single day of our short silly lives.

WTF is the problem?

I wrote a query back in June and just sent it today. It was a good query - simple, direct, to-the-point. And I'd already completed it. For some reason that I can't begin to explain (other than bone-jarring terror at putting myself out there), I had kept it back until just today.

So please...please leave a comment if you have any ideas about why I'm so frickin' silly.

Creativity and Love: Taking it one day at a time.

I was driving around today, wondering aloud if I'm one of those crazy girls. You know the type. The kind that want to use whatever God gave them to get male attention.

No way, I thought. If I'm self-aware enough to wonder, then I can't be all that nutty. But then again, I was saying this aloud, hoping the people in the other cars assumed that I was wearing an invisible blue tooth device.

In the end, I decided - again aloud - that I might have a few isolated pockets of nutty.

Here's the biggest one: When creativity starts to scare the sh!t out of me, I start wanting to date. Or be admired. Or have someone check out my gams. Like I'm gonna have to keep my gams covered so I don't lapse into the gam-checking-out wanting.

Dating is a time-consuming, soul-rending process that has been absolutely deleterious to my creative endeavours ever since I started pursuing them professionally. Being with Art was good because he was a brilliant writer and a supportive mate, but even starting things up with him was a distinct pain in the ass. Super distracting.

So...for the time being, I'm taking it one day at a time. Whenever I want a little hit of male attention, I'll try writing a song (I could use the practice anyway - my songs are awful). And whenever I fall into one of those involuntary crushes that have been plaguing me since I was 6 freaking years old, I'll ignore him and send a query to Marie Claire. Or go for a walk. Or rearrange my geraniums.

So wish me luck. One day at a time.

St. Exupery in the flesh

The closest I've come to getting a tattoo in recent memory was after seeing this web site:
Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos. Most of the tats are very pretty, and some are downright inspiring. If I ever secure a very favorite quote of five words or less, I'm so going to go there. Just watch!

Chunks for Every Temporal Budget

I talked about hour-long chunks before, but I wanted to point out that I also use chunks of time between 5 minutes and 8 hours effectively. Today, I'm using half-hour chunks because after moving, I'm behind in EVERY area of my life, and need more chunks than there are hours in my work day. The biggest drain on my productivity (besides wanting to do ANYTHING besides write) is an anxiety that I won't have time for whatever it is that I need to make time for. But if I can convince myself that I'll only be doing it (it being folding clothes, cleaning out my dad's truck, blogging, whatever) for half an hour, then I don't have to feel guilty that I'm not billing (and therefore eating).

And here's the other, more important part of the equation. Those of you out there who are into productivity writing (generally the same people who, like me, are procrastinating by reading all the really good stuff at lifehack.org) have heard of Pareto's principle, or commonly, the 80/20 rule. F'rinstance, I got 80 percent of my writing done today in 20 percent of the time I spent doing it. Twenty percent of the people control eighty percent of the world's wealth. Only 20 percent of all you all out there have well-thought-out goals, and of that 20 percent, only 20 percent (or 4 percent total) write them puppies down.

That sort of thing.

So if I know that I only have one hour (or even a half an hour) to write that press release for my client, my time's going to be spent more productively than if I give myself four hours. It'll take an hour either way, but in the second scenario, the hour will come after three hours of inwardly howling about my crap luck to be writing a press release.

So there you are. Hour chunks. Or half-hour chunks. Or even five-minute chunks (as when I had a house and would spend five minutes straightening each room first thing every morning). Or, if you must, eight hour sleepy chunks so you awaken dewy fresh each morning.

On the care and feeding of the creative life - PART 1

It's been an interesting couple of months. I stopped my magazine for awhile and now with the help of a new partner, I'm fixing to restart it. I got invited by my landlordette to be homeless. I stopped a relationship and had a not-so-shiny rebound. I didn't even know what a rebound was until this year. Seriously. I thought rebounding was the province of effete goth people who listened to minor key electro-pop music. You know, music like Dido, a chanteuse with great skills at song-writing and bad skills at love.

I've been listening to Dido for weeks.

And so, what with my life falling down around my ears and all, you can imagine that maintaining my productivity and creativity has been a challenge. Oh, I'm writing really bad love songs and journaling my ass off, but the most important bits, the bits where I take authentic action towards driving my career as a publishing writer, sometimes fall prey to these depressed tetris-playing, Dido-blasting jags that go on for far, far too long.

And so, since I've been sucking a little, I figure I can ALSO find a way to suck it up.

In the past, when I was teaching school and had to be 'on' – broken heart or no (and there were a few) – I discovered that feeling like dookie didn't mean that my output was going to be any better or worse than it would normally. Simply put, creative/social juice or the lack thereof determines the level of fun I'll have but not the quality of output.

Based on that bit of hard-earned wisdom, I knew I just had to find a way to 1) think my day through and 2) follow through, regardless of my level of pain or distress. In my next post, I'll tell you what I came up with.

On the care and feeding of the creative life - PART 2

In PART 1, I described my emo-roller coaster rides and how I wanted to manage them with regard to my creativity and productivity. Here's what I've come up with.

Hour-long chunks. See, there's 8 of them in a day, so if you allot an hour or so to all active projects, you can get a heck of a lot done in one working day. For example, Saturday I scheduled one hour for journalism, one hour for http://www.readitnews.com/ and one hour for my commercial work (Accounting for the limited hours: I had a wedding that afternoon - in fact, I'm typed a draft of this entry out at the Juniper Well Ranch).

Starting to work wasn't easy. For some reason, when I sit down to commence my day, I often feel a paralyzing anxiety wherein I become terrified to make a decision of what to start. The one hour chunks mandate I do something, and since none of the chunks are long enough to actually create a protracted suck experience, I'm finding that I can actually start and then subsequently don't need to procrastinate too much.

The other part of it is that the the short intervals demand that I pick the most important thing to attack and then stick with it for the duration. It actually forces a bit of unconscious prioritization. I'll never get it all done in one sitting, so I have to chose the the things with the most juice to get to.

While this is a new experiment whose success is uncertain, quite a few of my old experiments have worked, and so I have hope. This is, in fact, an expansion on a old approach wherein I spent .5 - 1 hour writing and playing music in the morning. And about the same amount of time cleaning beforehand. I've been doing that routine for months now with wonderful success.

I'll keep you posted on how well it works.

Vivan art and creativity, but don't confuse them

I was going through my old email account when I rediscovered one of signature lines, a quote:

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." The quote has everything to do with my morning practice.

In the last 5 months, I've begun my day by cleaning my soon-to-be ex-casa and then sit down for 1/2 hour to be creative - a prescribed period of time when it's ok to make mistakes. After brewing a cup of tea, I sit down to my Pocket PC to write (I use my Pocket PC because it's so much easier to be creative with a computer lacking Internet). I take solace in this scheduled time; there's nothing in all the world that I'm supposed to be doing besides creating and that takes the pressure off.

For me, it's super important to create a scheduled practice to make sure my writing, that thing that's so important that I've made countless sacrifices to keep doing it, actually happens. And I've found that doing the important stuff first thing is the key to making sure it doesn't slip through the cracks.

The practice worked very well while I was creating - I could write anywhere from 300-1000 words depending on how easily the writing was flowing. But then I finished the story I was working on, and I faced a conundrum. Do I start creating something else, or do I spend that 1/2 hour doing art, the deciding what to keep?

For the time being, I've decided to do what inspires me, which means I've spent the last two days doing art - cleaning up my mistakes and creations from last week and turning them into something that I'd be willing to show my friends, and eventually, if all goes well, the world.