Author: adamgfleming

The author lives in Goshen, Indiana with his wife and four children. He is self-employed as a leadership coach working with business executives, writers and other artists, and spiritual leaders. His clients enjoy business growth, increased vision and purpose, work/family lifestyle balance, and freedom from writer’s block.

Writers: Dig Deep for Longer Impact

90,000 words deep in my next novel, which looks like it might be a 180,000-word + trilogy by the time it’s done, I’ve been re-reading the Postscript to The name of The Rose by Umberto Eco. If you’re a fan of Stephen King’s On Writing, you ought to read Eco’s Postscript, too. Even if you don’t want to invest in the time to read the actual novel Eco wrote, (deep, heavy, erudite, over your head half the time, even the translation into English often leaves bits in Latin, German, French, Italian, maybe Greek) his words about the process in the Postscript are helpful for all writers and you can buy the Postscript by itself! (see link above). Consider this quote:

Eco was asked which of the characters he identified with in his novel, and he replied, “For God’s sake, with whom does the author identify? With the adverbs, obviously!”

Obviously (heh, heh, that’s an adverb). I’d always heard it said that you should work to eliminate adverbs (Stephen King says so, so it must be right) but now I understand why. Don’t tip your hand: good writing allows the readers to decide how they feel about the characters. Lovingly, you must compassionately and thoroughly eliminate your adverbs kindly, so your readers can happily do their job engagedly.

A well-placed adverb can quickly set the tone, but a poorly placed one will even more speedily ruin it. Forcefully err on the side of cutting this garbage out!

Eco set his mystery, The Name of the Rose, in a monastery in the 1300s. He did so much research on the monastery that the conversations his characters have are timed to last just as long as it would take to walk from one building to the other, or whatever. That means he had to know how many steps there was, say, from the kitchen to the library, in this heady Clue!-style whodunit.

I realized my next novel, which starts in 1977, feels pretty real, but I have some back story that’s going to need some deeper understanding of events in England between 1602 (around when the King James Bible was translated)  and 1662 (when the Puritans finally got kicked out of the Anglican church) so I went and bought five books. A book of Puritan sermons, from 1662 on Bartholomew’s Day (the last day all these Puritans preached in the Anglican church). One in particular on a study one Puritan preacher did on the book of Hosea. And more. I might end up needing another five books after I read these. I’m inventing my own sect of Puritans which is a complete fabrication, but if I want it to feel real, I have a lot of pre-work to do to set it authentically. It’s an offshoot branch of Puritanism which needs to break off from real historical events. So, if you want your work to have long lasting impact, you may have to pull back from cranking out the word count and consider how well-constructed your world is. Remember, the reader may not need to know any of it. A rookie mistake is to think that everyone who’s reading it wants to know it all. (This is why some people hate Moby Dick: it’s full of detail about whaling that you probably don’t want if you’re just in for some adventure.) But you, the writer, you need to know all of it.

Fusions in the Void, Part 9. Iron Hand and Carbon Heart: Steeled Resolve

He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.

— Louis Nizer, 1948 (often misattributed to St. Francis of Assisi) 

The longer title here is “Iron Hand and Carbon Heart: A Steeled Resolve”

Steel is made of iron and carbon (and small amounts of other elements). Adding chromium-oxide gets you stainless steel.

The Iron Age began around 1200 B.C. in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) and steel came along roughly eight hundred years later in China. Iron is convertible to steel and becomes strong because of its excess of ductility –meaning it has properties which allow it to be stretched into wire. In other words, if you take a cylinder of iron and pull from either end, it will stretch a bit before it breaks. You can add carbon without losing structural integrity, and it makes the entire thing harder.

So what do I mean by the phrase “iron hand and carbon heart”? First of all, I’m not talking about the old cliche ruling with an iron fist. The work we do has to have a certain strength. The control we exert via our hands includes a measure of strength, but also skill, dexterity, flexibility and malleability. When we close our hand up into a fist, we become unreceptive to other influences. We think we’re getting harder, but really we’re getting weaker. More breakable. Cooler heads will prevail: the goal in keeping our heads cool is that we must remember that our hands really do have an excess of ductility. Something really could be added to what we do. Effort alone won’t get us where we hope to go, and we have to keep our hand open and extended to take hold of it.

Who would think you could add something as organic as carbon to make iron harder? It must have been discovered by accident! But this is our heart. This is the human component. Empathy and passion, things of the heart, things of carbon, must be added to our strength, skill, dexterity, etc., if we are to work as artists at whatever we do. This is no accident, but it’s also no easy task.

In the Void we experience this pain as though we were being stretched into a wire. Twisted, spun out, narrowed. What’s happening in our hearts here is that we’re finding out what we’re really made of. I read a secular coach’s blog once in which he asked the question regarding finding purpose in life: “What sort of sh*t sandwich are you willing to eat?” In the Void, you’re finding that out. You’re finding out just how far you can stretch, and you’re also mixing in your carbon. The minute you can’t take it anymore, you quit, you break. But if you can take it, and mix the carbon of your heart in with the skills you’ve learned, then you’re right on top of this fusion. The iron of your hand and the carbon of your heart. They come together in the Void to leave you with a steeled resolve. When you emerge from the void, you’re (mostly) impervious to the ill effects of success. Instant success means you didn’t get the fusion, you didn’t get steel. People who have instant success don’t have an appreciation for it, and they don’t maintain their stainless resolve to continue doing excellent work the way someone who has a steeled resolve will do. They know that the success isn’t about them, it’s about what happened in the Void. It’s about a fusion they fought for.

Paper beats rock, and steel beats iron.

Tying up loose ends in the final draft stage of writing

Wednesday morning I got up at 5 AM fully intending to get all the final stuff I needed over to Iva (my editor) so we could print the galley proof and see what this book looks like in the flesh — that is, with ink n stuff on paper n stuff.

There’s always more than you thought. Monday I had sent her my final revisions (third, fourth or fifth draft? Lost track.) Wednesday I was looking over the .pdf and found that she’d missed all my revisions on one chapter. The rest looked great. By 7 AM I thought I was done. Later in the day I was working to find one or two more illustrations, adding a link to a friend’s blog, re-captioning a bunch of illustrations … the list went on. The better job I do on the details, the better the galley will look. The better the galley looks, the more likely we can publish it after seeing the galley, without revisions. (Yeah. Right.)

I have this love/hate relationship with the details. There comes a point when you take that book and send it to the editor and say “I want nothing more to do with this steaming pile of horse radish, you deal with it” and then they punt it back to you for revisions a few times, and finally right before the end, the very bitter end, the end with coffee dregs gagging you, you just want to say “give control back to me NOW because this has to be perfect” and they do, because it’s yours to screw up if you must. Like, I had this crazy idea that we’d break the rules and NOT underline the title of a certain book which is mentioned multiple times in one particular chapter. (I have my reasons, mainly that underlined stuff looks like a web link these days. I’m about done with underlining.)

In coaching, we say that leaders take responsibility for their lives. Well, that goes for writing too: writers take responsibility for their manuscripts. You have to give it up to the editor to some degree, and you have to also realize that no editor is ever going to care about your book the way you do, just like no renter ever takes care of the place the way an owner does. When the book is done, Iva will go off to another project while I try to sell the darn thing.

This is the time when people start asking you “are you excited” and your primary reply is “I’m exhausted” but of course there is exhilaration as well. Then there’s the whole “now I gotta market this thing” stuff that has you tied up in knots. Dealing with loose ends while you’re tied up in knots, and people think a writer’s job is easy. Ha.

But I have no complaints. Getting that book in your hands is one of the most satisfying things a person can do.  Flipped on the radio Tuesday and caught the tail end of an NPR article. They were saying that 20% of books are now read on e-readers. I know there are lots of gurus out there saying that you can make a living selling e-books, but that’s mostly for people writing genre fiction, the $0.99 garden variety, here-today-forgotten-tomorrow pulp fiction which has come roaring back from the 1920’s. I contend that if you’re going to be any sort of a speaker, coach, trainer, doing any conferences, basically if you’re going to be in front of people AT ALL, you better go ahead and invest in some paper copies. Sure, it’s overhead, but it’s also still how 80% of your readers will prefer to consume your work.

Plus, there’s that feeling you get when you hold your book in your hands like an infant, warm, cuddly, crying out “somebody read me!” That feeling that makes your toes tingle with glee. That feeling of “oh Lord may the world appreciate everything I love about this baby at least a tenth as much as I really hope they will” is similar to the feeling parents get when they hold that infant and say “the world is cruel, little one, but pay no attention to the critics.”

The critics, after all, are spending their time criticizing rather than writing their own book.

In a few days the final touches will be finished. We’ll cut the cord, tie the knot, and send this book out into the world to live in a straw or brick house like a little pig, or watch her go in her cute little jacket to visit grandma and hope that it doesn’t get eaten by the big bad wolf of international Internet indifference. Good luck, little book. And God bless you!

Oh, yeah. The publisher told me yesterday he’s thinking of translating it into Spanish already.

“Yeah, I wrote this book. I can’t read it, but I wrote it.” Hmm. I kind of like that.

Writing about Writing is Writing

It’s popular to say that writing about writing is not writing.

I’ve decided I disagree.

Because writing is part of making art, and because making art aids people to become more self-reflective, writing about writing is just another level of being self-reflective.

Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t have disciplined times to work on our fiction. But writing about the work we’re doing on fiction can be a huge part of getting past writer’s block.

I’m not completely prepared to say what causes writer’s block, or even define it. I just think that writing about writing, the meta-work of a writer, could be extremely good for you and could even be considered writing.

This is a philosophical concept I think ought to be called meta-writing.

I’m coming around to this once again as I read the postscript to The Name of A Rose, by Umberto Eco. His entire novel is a book about books. He spends the entire novel writing about the written word. Of course, there’s a murder mystery and a fairly decent performance by Sean “Shawn” Connery and Christian “Laettner” Slater if you can look past the sort of grainy kind of cameras they used in the Middle Ages. But really Eco spends the whole book writing about books, and then the postscript writing about writing. You’ll get this if you read the Postscript, which is actually published as it’s own volume in some cases.

If it’s good enough for Umberto Eco, it’s good enough for me. Happy writer’s Thursday.

Fusions in the Void, Part 8. Spirit and Body: A True Being

The ancient Greeks liked to separate the body and soul. It’s a nice idea: holiness is for the spirit, while the body is designed for pleasure.

But the dividends of a lifestyle geared for pleasing the body as a separate entity from the spirit are lackluster at best. That’s an interesting word, lackluster, meaning without a shine or polish. Life, for those who throw everything into bodily pleasure, ends up being dull. You can see it in addicts’ hair and eyes, their skin tone. Dullness. So, right, we all know what it is to be a little bit addicted at least. Maybe a video game had your attention to the detriment of your grades, or booze had a hold on you. I’ve been there too, and it’s not fun or easy to break out of.

When we become reactionaries at a fundamental level to this, we end up denying ourselves any pleasures at all. Various religious societies have encouraged people not to have sex, even when married, unless they are intentionally procreating. They have encouraged people never to drink a drop, or to not enjoy a sporting event, or whatever it may be. Perhaps you’ve been there too, a place where the pursuit of holiness has made you a complete puritan. I submit that the same thing happens. Our life takes on a lackluster quality, we eat beans because some people in the world are poor, we never dance because it might awaken something within our hearts, we eschew anything which might lead to lust or covetousness or what have you. And we grow dull.

In the Void, God’s Spirit hovered over the waters, making fusions of Godself, perfect spirit, with the mud, the earth, forming heavenly bodies in both the literal sense as well as the figurative (pick-up-line) sense. If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me? But there’s a reason we call bodies “heavenly” in this sense too. They reflect the goodness of the Truest Being.

I promoted fasting in my last blog on Fire and rain — purity. Today I promote also a step towards the sensual. Even in the depression and sadness of a void, or desert time in our lives, when we hurt spiritually and psychologically and hope and hunger for righteousness, we can get a lot out of a healthy, balanced enjoyment of physical pleasures. Jesus came out of the desert, where he’d been fasting, and performed his first miracle: he turned water into wine (how’s that for some fusion)! Even then, he said it wasn’t his time yet – he was still in many ways coming out of that desert experience, but he made time and gave energy to a party. So. Make love with your spouse. Find some good wine and cheese and share it with someone. Run until you break through the pain and find that “second wind” or runner’s high. Find a part of life that’s pleasing to your body and watch how it fuses with your spirit. It doesn’t mean the Void is over. I’m not suggesting wallowing in an addiction, and I certainly don’t think that doing these things will pull you “out of a funk” but sometimes we get so down in our spiritual quest that we forget to do something that just feels good. Let God fuse something within us; our bodies with our spirit, as we, too, become truer beings.

Previous sections of this series were published on these dates: #7 Fire and Rain on Oct 27, #6 Stone and Water on Oct 20, #5 Sword and Flesh on Oct 17, #4 Distance and Closeness on Oct 13, #3 Resting and Motion on Oct 10, #2 God and Darkness on Oct 6, #1 Fusions in the Void on Oct 3. See October archives on adamgfleming.com.

The Art of Motivational Listening

This book is like a tin of truffles. You don’t want to consume it without pausing to consider what you’re getting, but rather, you look for coconut or mint. It’s OK to pick a random piece and surprise yourself, it all depends on your mood. In The Art of Motivational Listening, Adam G. Fleming brings the creative voice of a novelist to the expanding body of literature on the topic of leadership coaching and listening in general. Recognizing that you don’t need another linear, how-to book on the topic, Adam instead offers a collection of essays with an invitation-to-ponder.  Brace yourself for flavor. Slow down and enjoy a turtle. Settle in beside a crackling fire and think about what it means to you to become a better listener, a better leader.
Pre-purchase your copy here and be one of the first to get an autographed copy!

Motivational Listening art front coverAdamFleming_casual

NaNoWriMo writers: When does your real day begin?

Happy First of November.

For those of you who want to start writing a novel today, we’ve got a great writer’s group which meets on November 19 via teleconference. But the first thing you need to do is figure out when you’re going to do this important thing you’ve decided to do. Maybe you’re writing a novel this month, and maybe you aren’t, but this ought to be helpful no matter what your top priority is.

Ask yourself: what’s your top priority right now? Working on a novel? Spending time with kids? Getting more sleep? Landing a new client?

Day begins at dawn. Or does it really?

Based on the premise that we ought to put the top priorities on our schedule for the first thing to do in the day may mean that we need to think outside the box about when our day begins. If my top priority is getting more sleep, then my day might begin at 9 PM. If my top priority is spending time with the kids, it’s 4 PM when they get home from school (and my week begins at 4 PM on Friday). If it’s finishing that novel, it begins at 7 AM with a two hour writing session before I do any other work, and my month begins with the weekend where I schedule a writer’s retreat.

Think outside about what time your day begins. Set that time for your most important activity of all, then, and only then, after you’ve done that, you can do whatever you can with the rest of your day. Everything else revolves around what’s most important to you. You may notice that this is when you have a surge of energy — when beginning that thing which is most important. Or, you may decide to begin your day at 8 AM with the thing you least like to do but is important for your success.

In the Jewish tradition Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday; in fact, every day begins at nightfall, not at dawn. There’s no reason you can’t set the beginning of your day for some other time than when you wake up (unless you’re practicing this aspect of Judaism, of course, then you have to follow your convictions). The point is that you really can begin to think of a different time than dawn as the beginning of your day.

Change your thinking about what time of day your day really begins, and you’ll have a new tool for time management. Do the most important stuff first, and everything else can fall into place. Then, set a goal and tell somebody about it!

Writer’s Group: I can do it on my own. Really?

Writing is a solitary existence. The best advice-givers, like Steven King in his book “On Writing” suggest that for a certain amount of time in the course of your manuscript you need to work alone, without allowing other people to see, read or influence what you’re doing.

That’s true, which is part of the reason our writer’s group doesn’t do critiquing. We don’t want to interrupt the flow.

On the other hand, you have to be highly motivated to keep plowing ahead. It’s so easy to just surf the net or go for a long walk rather than write. That’s why we get together for accountability. You set your goal for the month, and you’ve got to deliver.

My goal this past month was 15,000 words. My total was closer to 20,000. If I didn’t have a group I was committing to for that kind of production, it wouldn’t happen.

How many words are you writing this month? What’s your goal? Who’s holding you to it?

Fusions in the Void, Number 7. Fire and Rain: Purity

There are several ways to detoxify the physical body, and perhaps they serve either as a metaphor or even quite literally also for other ways of looking at the body, such as the spiritual, emotional or psychological body.

In the void experience, everything’s adrift. Laws such as gravity don’t even seem to work. I’m talking about those times in life when we feel like we’re in a spiritual vacuum.

The physical body gets rid of toxins via fasting and by sweat. Either way, for the body to reset it needs to stop ingesting so that it can focus on evacuation for a time. When fire and rain fuse, you get steam. Steaming out the toxins in a sweat lodge is a great way to experience fusion in the void. Spiritually, what do fire and rain mean as a metaphor? If you’re in a void, what do you bring together to create spiritual steam, to heat it up and eliminate toxins? Exercise, fasting, all these things are known to assist not only the physical body but also nourish the spiritual body as well.

Steam. In the water, toxins are trapped and evaporate through the skin. In the void God does provide fusion. It’s not a fusion to move forward, yet. It’s a fusion designed for a purification process. You can take a proactive engagement with this particular fusion. It requires little effort. In fact, in some ways it takes more effort to eat than to fast. (Cook, sit down for a meal, wash your dishes.) In some ways it takes more energy to be unfit, to not sweat, than it does to get out and walk for an hour, or to go to a sauna. (Certainly not at first).

I am not advocating a lifestyle where you never eat and also run ten miles a day. All things in balance. Fire and rain fuses in the void for purity.

You’re Evil! (Or something like that)

My 7 year old son told a friend of ours last Sunday “you’re evil.”

Nice way to be greeted at church, huh? she told me about it, laughing, so I asked him, hey, I heard you said Courtney is evil, what’s up with that?

“Oh,” he said, perhaps worried that he was in trouble, “I was just exaggerating.”

The nature of humanity has long been debated. The debate usually focuses on our nature. We are essentially good, or evil, or neither or both.

A more helpful framing of the discussion is that we are by nature filled with potential. We are set in motion. We make an impact. When we put our minds to it, we’re difficult to stop!

Most of the most evil people we deal with are those souls who go shoot up schools. It’s not unusual for us to say they were “pure evil” but I’d like to observe that often these evil people often come bursting out of a basement where they’ve been playing violent video games and living lives full of quiet desperation born of the thought that they’ll never live up to their potential. If potential is a finite thing, to be used for good or for evil or partly for both (and I’m not sure that it is, just trying the idea out here) if that is the case, they end up using a lifetime of potential in one fell swoop, stealing the potential from everyone else in the process.

The antidote must involve helping young men to recognize that they have potential before they hit the depths of despair. Our society’s mantra “go to school, get a job” is partly responsible. Nobody says “raise tomatoes and pick up trash” or “walk to the beach and paint the sunrise” or any other alternative mantra for those whom school does not come easily. The alternative “sit in basement, play video games, drink Yellow 5” is not building young people. We need to tell people “You’re good because you’re full of potential” rather than “you’re evil” and we need to do it without a hint of exaggeration.