Lean and Believe
Your ability to tell your story is built on a collection of habits.
I feel a little like I’m trapped in a Hair Club for Men-type nightmare…which is supremely ironic given how many times a week I shave my head. But I digress. When I find a system that works, I feel compelled to adopt it for myself. I’ve been a Story Grid Certified Editor for years. I’m in a cult. I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid™. And, as if I weren’t already overcommitted this year, now I am also a student in the Writer Mentorship Program.
I met with my new mentor this week for the first time. Randy is a mean person. He’s been in the Story Grid cult at least as long as I have. He’s a retired Green Beret with no sympathy for my whiny civilian nonsense whatsoever. Which, I suppose, is why “they” paired us together because he’s perfect for me. Randy assigned me to write brand new Chase scene first, as is tradition. He expects it to be better than the one I already wrote. 😬
Why?
Why would anyone in my situation sign up for this kind of weekly torment? I kinda already posted about this earlier, but I’ll whine some more. I want to continue to advance my craft as a writer and a mentor. And I know the only way to do that is partner with another great mentor like Randy and put myself in the student position to get feedback on my writing as a student and my technique in giving feedback to students from one of the best mentors we have in the program.
Learn to Ride
Yes. Ride, not write. But they’re related, I promise!
Before I further wax eloquent, let me explain where the post title came from. When I was getting my first motorcycle license as an adult, I took the easy path (as whiny civilians do). At the time, this was (and as far as I know still is) through the Motorcycle Safety Foundation training course in the USA. I won’t bore you with my entire journey, but there was a lesson early in the weekend-long course about the physics of motorcycle riding. My instructor for the weekend (ironically) was a handlebar-mustachioed man named Sam.
The lesson Sam taught about braking, turning, leaning, and friction was foundational to the course. The simple mantra stuck with me: Lean and believe.
When you’re cornering on a motorcycle, it’s easy to panic and worry that you’re not going to make the corner because our human bodies have not evolved to handle the G forces and physics involved. We have to practice and train our intuition in order for riding to become muscle memory. If a rider doesn’t override their natural anxiety-induced reflex to brake, they’ll wind up laying the bike down (or worse, flipping it) because they overcorrected or undercorrected. The tires can either provide friction to grip the road while they’re turning or friction to brake. A panic braking maneuver during a turn is almost always a bad plan.
Therefore, the self-coaching mechanism Sam taught me to recite during every turn is to lean and believe that the gods of physics and the practice you’ve done to earn your license will slide you through the turn safely. Scraping the pegs is just a bonus.
I apply this same concept when I hire a mentor or a coach. I trust Randy the same way I trusted Sam. I will do whatever he tells me. I will lean and believe.
Habits Are Hard
The reason why this kind of self-coaching is necessary is because learning new skills is hard. And forming new habits is harder. In my experience, every new habit first has to become a learned skill before it can become a habit. I’m a big fan of Atomic Habits as a foundational set of techniques for building new habits. But as big a fan as I am of James Clear, I think there’s one crucial element that he glossed over.
Because we Homo narrans are first and foremost creatures of narrative, our habits are the unconscious stories we tell ourselves.
To change an old habit you need a new story.
Choose Your Habits Wisely
At some point, you woke up and realized that you wanted to change something about yourself or your life. I assume that, because you’re here, that’s related to storytelling. You probably didn’t think of storytelling skills as habits. But they are.
We Homo narrans fundamentally embody our intelligence in storytelling. This means that trying to academically or cognitively “tell a story” by doing math or engineering or science is very unlikely to succeed. By definition, language and storytelling are an infinite combinatorial matrix. Our ability to tell story is, at its heart, the application of a personalized intuitive salience filter to everything to produce a relevant, engaging story by choosing what Sam (the reader) has to pay attention to through the lens of the point of view of a character in the story.
This is why I’m really not worried that “ai” in the form of LLMs and other Transformer-type models will ever get there except by accident. The model isn’t embodied intelligence and has no concept of salience through which to filter literally everything.
This is also why improving your storytelling habits requires intentional practice with intentional feedback, one habit at a time. There are so many moving parts to story that you can’t keep track of them all at once. This means that to become better and more efficient, you need to embody the fundamentals so that you can focus on the bigger picture while you’re drafting. This cognitive limit is also why story creation is an iterative process for most of us. You can’t focus on “all the things” while you’re working on any given part of the story.
This is why I decided this week to put on the student hat to get feedback from a pro to improve my own storytelling habits. One at a time.
I Hate Hats
When I first took the Story Grid Certified Editor training course in 2020, the program involved driving to Nashville during the pandemic and locking myself in a room with Shawn Coyne, Tim Grahl, a couple other brave souls, and a camera crew. It was definitely an intense and memorable experience. One that I’m deeply grateful for. 🙏
During that week, Shawn suggested that we prospective editors buy an “editor hat” and put it on intentionally when we were engaged in doing “editor stuff.” Because I lean and believe, I did. I picked an Indiana Jones official oiled leather affair. It still sits on a bookshelf in my writing cave. It’s sexy, weathered, distressed, and adventurous looking. It’s also uncomfortable as fuck to wear.
It turns out that I’d rather be able to wear my Air Pod Max-es than to wear an airtight contraption that makes my naked head sweat. I keep it as a reminder that not every piece of advice works for everybody.
I did try it. A lot. But, ultimately, I had to find something else to differentiate my writing creation habits from my editorial habits.
Lights on. Lights off.
When I’m coaching students and clients, I recommend that they edit somewhere else different from where they write so that they can engage with the words in a different mode. I’ve learned that it’s often easier to change the things around you than it is to change yourself.
For many people, having a separate room or a separate office or going to a different coffee shop just to edit isn’t feasible. I’ve had students that didn’t even really have a different chair to sit it. Printing out your pages to edit them by hand with a red pen is triggering or feels wasteful to many. I’m always looking for other environmental design techniques that can “trick” your brain into viewing the words on the page differently so that you can edit with more clarity.
At the risk of sounding like Mr. Miyagi, I’m experimenting with changing the writing cave for myself simply by turning the lights on or off.
Lights off? I’m writing, creating, imagining what’s happening in my story with my sensory cortex and creating new things “inside the snow globe.”
Lights on? I’m editing and mentoring and coaching, working with the words in a more abstract, cerebral manner from “outside the snow globe.”
The jury’s still out (for me) as to whether turning the lights on or off will work better than wearing an uncomfortable hat or going and sitting by the pool to edit (for whiny civilians, it’s a looong walk across the house and sometimes Outside® is too hot or too cold).
But I have learned that trying to change more than one habit at a time is doomed.
Pick One Thing at a Time
The concept of only adjusting one thing at a time is something I’m sure we’ve all heard along the way. It’s foundational to the scientific method. It’s fundamental to engineering. And yet we all try to CHANGE EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE anyway. Because we’re lazy and in a hurry and…
Stop it. Don’t do that. Pick fewer battles. No, put the rest back. Pick just one thing at a time to work on.
I’ve had students (as recently as two weeks ago) get really, really frustrated that I didn’t “tell them all that” in the previous week’s feedback notes. The student did a good revision to get the 5Cs working and stacked in the right escalating order—and now it was time to work on enhancing the emotionality of each exchange. For the student, it seemed frustrating because it was something they thought “You could’ve told me all that last week!” Yup. They’re gonna be mad next week, too, when I give them one more new thing to work on in the next revision. 😈
This desire to “fix it all at once” is based on a fundamental delusion that you can learn and fix it all at once. Trying to learn the Reaction/Response cycle to deepen the emotionality of your exchanges at the same time that you’re trying to learn to keep the 5Cs in your head all while trying to improve the valancing of your language and…and…and…won’t work. You can’t. Sorry. I know better. It takes time and practice and iteration of one thing at a time.
Trying to fix more than one thing at a time feels more efficient, but it isn’t. Trying to build more than one writing habit at a time will actually delay your progress on all of them.
Don’t Lie to Yourself
I’ll stop rambling with this one admonition. If you lie to yourself about how often you do it or how well it’s working or whether it’s working at all, you’re not really making progress—you’re just making yourself feel better. When you’re practicing a new writing habit, be honest with yourself about what one thing you’re practicing.
The best way to do this is to pick somebody trustworthy to mentor you. Then do what your mentor tells your and…
Lean and believe.
A good reflection on craft and mentorship that reframes storytelling as a discipline of embodied habits