Writing: Author Mindset and Faster Fiction with Alexandra Amor

Time, space and writing habits are the focus of many a good how-to-write book, and make for an endlessly fascinating topic for most of us keen to glean yet another secret weapon for our arsenal of writing tips and tricks. Alexandra offers more than her fair share of tricks with us today. Writers need to be selfish about their time and the space they need to write, whether that’s headspace or physical space. We chat about procrastination and the barriers to sitting down and actually writing. We also chat about my current bug-bear, the noise about how self-publishing is considered by some to be a road to riches and how people sometimes expect that they can start from scratch and churn out a book that will make then squizillionaires. What the rest of us are interested in is the value we place on our writing, what it means to us and why it matters. Add that to how creativity is one of the most foundational and creative drives of human nature. If you’ve read Julia Cameron then you’ll like where Alexandra is coming from when she talks about the spirituality of writing. You can find out more about Alexandra and Faster Fiction here (http://fasterfiction.com/) .

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Alexandra Amor

Duration: [00:43:45]

Melinda: Welcome to another episode of Writer on the Road. Today I'm with a friend of mine, an old friend of mine who has turned up in a few different places over the last few months and it's Alexandra Amor who I believe is over in Canada. Good morning Alexandra!

Alexandra Amor: Hi Melinda, how are you today?

Melinda: Good thank you. I don't know whether to be excited or terrified to have Alexandra with me today simply because she's an author mindset mentor. I've been fossicking through her blog this morning and the first thing it says is are you ready to stop thinking about writing and actually writing. I'm going maybe I don't need to talk to this woman right now. Tell us all about it please Alexandra and don't asked me any detailed questions because I might have to lie to you.

Alexandra Amor: I can say the same back. Well thanks so much for having me on the show Melinda I'm thrilled to be here and I always find it so fun to talk to somebody on the other side of the world, so yeah I'm on the west coast of Canada in Vancouver and the new site that I've got up fasterfiction.com is brand new, it went up about a week ago and the intention there is for me to help writers and people who are really maybe even want to be writers, they haven't written their first thing yet to get out of their own way, to stop procrastinating, to stop thinking about writing as you mentioned and get their bum in a chair and start writing.

Melinda: What can we say about that everybody? Everyone who's listening out there we're all writers, we all know what it's like and we all have very good intentions as well. My problem is I have people on my podcast who mention things like 5,000 words a day, do I need to talk to you Kevin Tumlinson and there's lots of other people out there who are putting me to shame, I've got Joanne Dannon doesn't do a bad job either at churning out the words, I don't even want to go into my romance writers like Amy Andrew and co because they've been writing for years and they're up to 50/60/70 books and I'm going oh give me a break but I'm still out there, I'm thinking about it and I'm going to write a book. So Alexandra I need you today. Let's start with that favorite word of ours procrastination.

Alexandra Amor: I think this is such a big topic for writers and Steven Pressfield calls it resistance, I don't know if you've read The War of Art but that's a really great book to start with and to explore the topic of why we feel such a barrier when we try to sit down and write. I think especially in this day and age when we're all so overly busy and there are so many distractions in the form of social media and all the things that we can do online that writers really need to be quite selfish about

Time, space and writing habits are the focus of many a good how-to-write book, and make for an endlessly fascinating topic for most of us keen to glean yet another secret weapon for our arsenal of writing tips and tricks. Alexandra offers more than her fair share of tricks with us today. Writers need to be selfish about their time and the space they need to write, whether that’s headspace or physical space. We chat about procrastination and the barriers to sitting down and actually writing. We also chat about my current bug-bear, the noise about how self-publishing is considered by some to be a road to riches and how people sometimes expect that they can start from scratch and churn out a book that will make then squizillionaires. What the rest of us are interested in is the value we place on our writing, what it means to us and why it matters. Add that to how creativity is one of the most foundational and creative drives of human nature. If you’ve read Julia Cameron then you’ll like where Alexandra is coming from when she talks about the spirituality of writing. You can find out more about Alexandra and Faster Fiction here.

Read Full Transcript

Alexandra Amor

Duration: [00:43:45]

Melinda: Welcome to another episode of Writer on the Road. Today I'm with a friend of mine, an old friend of mine who has turned up in a few different places over the last few months and it's Alexandra Amor who I believe is over in Canada. Good morning Alexandra!

Alexandra Amor: Hi Melinda, how are you today?

Melinda: Good thank you. I don't know whether to be excited or terrified to have Alexandra with me today simply because she's an author mindset mentor. I've been fossicking through her blog this morning and the first thing it says is are you ready to stop thinking about writing and actually writing. I'm going maybe I don't need to talk to this woman right now. Tell us all about it please Alexandra and don't asked me any detailed questions because I might have to lie to you.

Alexandra Amor: I can say the same back. Well thanks so much for having me on the show Melinda I'm thrilled to be here and I always find it so fun to talk to somebody on the other side of the world, so yeah I'm on the west coast of Canada in Vancouver and the new site that I've got up fasterfiction.com is brand new, it went up about a week ago and the intention there is for me to help writers and people who are really maybe even want to be writers, they haven't written their first thing yet to get out of their own way, to stop procrastinating, to stop thinking about writing as you mentioned and get their bum in a chair and start writing.

Melinda: What can we say about that everybody? Everyone who's listening out there we're all writers, we all know what it's like and we all have very good intentions as well. My problem is I have people on my podcast who mention things like 5,000 words a day, do I need to talk to you Kevin Tumlinson and there's lots of other people out there who are putting me to shame, I've got Joanne Dannon doesn't do a bad job either at churning out the words, I don't even want to go into my romance writers like Amy Andrew and co because they've been writing for years and they're up to 50/60/70 books and I'm going oh give me a break but I'm still out there, I'm thinking about it and I'm going to write a book. So Alexandra I need you today. Let's start with that favorite word of ours procrastination.

Alexandra Amor: I think this is such a big topic for writers and Steven Pressfield calls it resistance, I don't know if you've read The War of Art but that's a really great book to start with and to explore the topic of why we feel such a barrier when we try to sit down and write. I think especially in this day and age when we're all so overly busy and there are so many distractions in the form of social media and all the things that we can do online that writers really need to be quite selfish about their time and also about the space that they need to write whether that's head space or physical space which people very often need. I think there are specific ways to stop procrastinating and those are things that I try to share with writers to help them because I found that once I got into really good habits the easy, the writing became easier and I was able to produce more and do it more quickly.

Melinda: I've just written down some notes here everybody, I've written time, space and habits. Now I've been reading how to write books for years and the first chapter always seems to be about time, space and habits. I'm guessing all of us could do something to improve that. I read a lot of people get up and they get their writing done before the rest of the world wakes up, people who get up and write for a couple of hours, knock over their word count, then go to the gym and then play golf. Sometimes that's not reality, what about the rest of us, what about the real world? Have you got any suggestions for us?

Alexandra Amor: Yeah such a great question. I think we do always tend to idealize those people who yeah can get up at four in the morning and do two or three hours and then carry on with their day and that's not possible. The person I'm always thinking of when I'm writing a blog post or hosting a podcast at Faster Fiction is the person who's got maybe fifteen minutes, maybe a single mom with three kids and a full time job, how is that person supposed to get their bum in the chair and write.

I think what, the thing that I talk about right at the very beginning is really anchoring in with our values. How important is it to us that we write? If we can link to something that really matters to us about writing then that definitely that's the first step. One of the things I always suggest to people is that they sit down and ask themselves the question if I look ahead and think about five years from now and I haven't written anything how would that feel. Once you can kind of connect to the disappointment or the sadness that you might feel about not having written anything that might help you to get started finding even just fifteen minutes in your day to spend writing.

Melinda: I'm just about to launch a course for teenage novel writers and I've had some beta kids in there doing this course with me and I've got to tell that they're actually putting me to shame, they're up to 5/6/7,000 words and these are kids where their novels are only going to be 12/15,000 words and they're writing there, they're not scared, they're in their boots and all. I'm wondering whether we can take something from that.

Alexandra Amor: That's such a good question. I bet, like you mentioned that they're not scared, they're not afraid and I suspect that that's such an advantage for somebody at that age, we do tend to be a bit fearless and feel immortal don't when we're teenagers and then we get to be grownups and we think well it needs to be serious and it needs to be perfect and it needs to be great right out of the gate, I think that's the thought that really stops a lot of writers, this book needs to be a bestseller and take over the world when really it's your first shot at writing something. So what I like to encourage writers to do is really back way, way up and do what Anne Lamott suggests which is learn how to write shitty first drafts.

Melinda: Anne Lamott she's written a book called Bird by Bird everybody and already Alexandra's mentioned Steve Pressfield's The War of Art and now Bird by Bird these are sort of how-to bibles for most writers. We may as well just fossick through that for a little bit. Do you recommend people go to these books because there's so much online, there's podcasts, there's blogs, there's us and we're all jumping on the bandwagon with our courses, this, that and the other. Do you think sometimes the noise just sort of freezes us?

Alexandra Amor: I think it does and I think there's also a trap that writers fall into which is sort of over learning, over researching. So I think it's really important to read books about writing especially when we're getting started and even to continue doing that as we carry on our writing careers. There is a moment where we have to stop learning about writing and actually write. That's the barrier that I think a lot of writers have trouble getting themselves through or across and taking that risk and putting down their words at the beginning when they know they're going to be crappy and I can guarantee you they are and what I really suggest is that people just find a way to be at peace with the fact that the first few things that we do are going to be rubbish.

Melinda: I think I heard somewhere the first million words and I had someone on recently, one of my romance, oh I think it was, oh it was Jennie Jones romance, rural romance writer. Her first six books were practice and you just think about that and her books are like, I think they're 80,000 words long or those ones might have been 50,000 words long and you think about that and nowadays we're getting all this stuff out about churning out a book in five minutes, thirty days to write a novel, all that kind of stuff. Do you think the expectations are there right from the beginning that we do all these amazing things but it's not actually a reality sometimes?

Alexandra Amor: Absolutely, writing is a craft and I tend to use the metaphor of carpentry, if you're learning to become a carpenter or any other skilled trade like that, you don't start out making a beautiful hutch with all kinds of carving and inlay and all that kind of stuff, you start out making a table with a flat top and squared, four legs and that's it and then you progress from there.

I really do think that almost all the information that's available to us now and a lot of the noise too about that we can sometimes get caught up in about how I think there's a misunderstanding that self-publishing can be a road to riches and people expect that sometimes that they can just start from scratch, churn out a book and it'll sell a bazillion copies and that's really not the case but if again if we're anchored to the value that we have around writing to what it means to us and why it matters to us then we're willing to practice the craft and write six books as you mentioned in order to get that seventh book that we feel proud of and are willing to put out into the world.

Melinda: Sometimes we jump too soon. I was speaking to, and I just uploaded an episode with Park Howell on story, the art of story, the business of story and the story cycle. There's some really great things out there to learn because with all of us story resonates. I think it's one of the most valuable things we can do and especially with our courses encouraging people to try, trying to draw that balance between not being too difficult. We talk about creativity, what's your definition, how do you explain that?

Alexandra Amor: When I define creativity or talk about it I tend to float into the more spiritual end of the spectrum, so I really agree with what Julia Cameron says that we were all created by the great creator and therefore we are creators as well. I think creativity is such a natural human drive and desire, I think it's probably one of the most foundational and natural drives and I think when we discourage people from being creative the way that we tend to do in our western society where money matters so much more than that kind of creative pursuit we really do people a disservice and I don't think that when we teach about writing we're teaching anything new, I always think that people know how to be creative, they just have to be persuaded to reconnect with that part of themselves.

Melinda: I think Park said something about we're at our most creative in Kindergarten. I know in schools, I was talking to my students about it yesterday, they'd all come back from holidays we've got eight weeks to go until Christmas and they're not the slightest bit interesting in PowerPoints, in worksheets and data driven stuff and Park said something to me that I haven't been able to get out of my mind is we're wired for story yet we teach via data, we're expecting our kids to learn stuff by route yet we resonate with story.

Alexandra Amor: I absolutely agree I think the stuff that Joseph Campbell talks about, about the hero's journey is hard wired into us somehow, I don't know why that is but it definitely is and that's we're all so addicted to Netflix and to books and to movies and all these things. I mean it's a good addiction and it's because we are wired for story, that's and really story too is a way that we, that enables us to relate to our lives and to the world that we're living in in the present moment.

Melinda: Yeah, now Alexandra's mentioned a few books that I might just uncover, we've talked about Anne Lamott, we've talked about Steve Pressfield, we've talked about now Joseph Campbell and the hero myth, Julia Cameron is famous for her morning words where you get up and you just free write before you start thinking, I turned around to have a look at my bookshelf because I've got a whole omnibus of her books there and I've forgotten the titles of them, can you just run through a couple of the titles for me? I think it's up in my daughter's bedside table at the moment.

Alexandra Amor: So the one she's most famous for is The Artist's Way.

Melinda: That's it, Artist's Way, thank you.

Alexandra Amor: That's the one where she introduces the idea of morning pages which is something that I've been doing for years and I really believe it's part of my kind of "success" as a creative person because dumping out my thoughts and feelings and fears first thing in the morning has really kind of opened me up to be creative then in other parts of my day.

So yeah The Artist's Way is her best known one and then she has another one that doesn't get mentioned quite as often which is called The Right to Write so it's the R-I-G-H-T to W-R-I-T-E and in that one it's little short essays and then suggested exercises or invitations I think she calls them. That's one I used years ago and I would do the exercises or the invitations that she suggested and that helped to start to free me up to feel a little bit more confident about writing.

Melinda: Yeah I think the one I used, I was doing my PhD and I remember a runaway to the Whitsundays which is I guess Bay of Islands of Australia, it's beautiful up there and I remember I threw it in the car and ran away from my children and my husband to get some writing done, I think I took the one called The Sound of Paper and it was amazing, it was like this book was talking to me and that was my first book that I read of hers and then I went back and did The Artist's Way but that Sound of Paper was all about probably what we're talking about today, giving yourself permission to write, stop beating yourself up because you're not doing enough and then giving you a way through I guess your author doubts.

Alexandra Amor: Yup absolutely. I think confidence is such a big part of being a writer and at the beginning of course that's what we struggle with the most and that's one thing that I really want to focus on teaching at Faster Fiction because hardly anyone talks about that and really one of the only ways to become confident at something is to keep doing it and I think that's a step that so often gets missed. We do tend to want to take this big leap and jump from not having written at all like I said before to writing a really great book. Unfortunately that intimidates and paralyzes a lot of people I think.

Melinda: We're a fast society now, we want it yesterday. I was just thinking about I wonder if that's one of the reasons that NaNo writers becomes such a huge go-to place for people that say oh I'll go and do NaNo write and then I'll have the first draft done then I’ll be able to do this, they’ll be able to do that. There's a huge money spinning thing popping up around that courses and how top’s and all that kind of stuff around this Nano write, people are starting I guess to see it as well if I can do that I can do anything. But I'm guessing there are as many failures at Nano write as there as anything else because you've still got to do the work.

Alexandra Amor: You still have to do the work and I've never do it myself buy I always worry about people who don't have a solid writing habit set up before they start and to my mind it would be really hard in 30 days to establish the routine and the habits that you need to be a successful writer. I mean it took me several years I would say and so yeah I wonder, I think it's a great idea and there's a lot of community I believe involved when you do NanoWriMo and I do worry about people who might be sort of biting off a little more than they can chew.

Melinda: Alexandra's talking my lists of everything are growing longer here, we've talked about time and space, routine and habits and confidence and procrastination. These are all words that we could all hang on our little pin boards that we've got in our studies, I notice you've got one in the background there.

The other thing is inspirational quotes, everybody you've got to have inspirational quotes and I tell all my students to buy a T-shirt and put the name of their novel on it because every time people ask what they're doing they can see the novel. Okay, yes I'm writing a novel it's written on my T-shirt. So there are little tricks of the trade to get you in your seat each day. Do you have anything in particular that works for you?

Alexandra Amor: I think that T-shirt idea is great, I've never heard that before, I love it. I think one of the things we struggle with the most when we're starting out is feeling like a fraud, so I just wanted to mention that as well and say to people that we all feel like a fraud at the beginning then how to set up a good routine, well we've touched on a couple things so far, one of them very often writers write first thing in the morning and I think that's because they're fresh at that time but I think for each writer it's important to figure out when is the time that you have the most energy, some people are evening people, some people are morning people. So just figure that out for yourself and find the time of day where you don't feel completely sucked dry and you do have a little bit of energy.

Then the second big tip and all writers talk about these two things and it's because they work, it's either to set a word count, a goal of the number of words you're going to reach or to use a timer and to set the timer and not take your pen off the paper or your fingers off the keyboard until the time is elapsed and I would really suggest that people set those goals really, really small at the beginning. So for the timer even three or four minutes and for the word count like 200 words which is less than half a page if you're looking at a word document, set the goal small and then you can incrementally increase them.

Melinda: I'm just hearing something in the background there, I thought is it a motorbike, is it a truck, is it something.

Alexandra Amor: I live near a busy street, I think it was a motorcycle.

Melinda: That whole world count thing, it's a fascinating thing I've put in my workbook for my students, students love to count words and it's usually to get out of doing exams, so you'll see them, you've said write 250 words and they'll be going one, two, three, four