208 Words

I read an article the other day about how the most lucrative song ever written is “Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffett. Quoting from the Bloomberg Businessweek, “To think that all of this poured forth from a goofy, three-chord song—a mere 208 words, roughly half the length of this article—written about being lazy and getting drunk.”

This “most lucrative” title doesn’t stem from the royalties of the song or Buffett’s concerts alone. Margaritaville Enterprises franchises tourist entertainment complexes, sells beachwear, furniture, alcohol, blenders, and more.
While an interesting article, the fact that it all started from 208 words fascinates me. Somehow, the way he put those words together with the melody hooked people and started a financial empire. Was it luck? Or the ability to make listeners feel a certain way. In this case, carefree, relaxed, happy! How many of you can sing a few lines? I can.

BTW, the song’s popular ranking isn’t even in the top 10 richest songs. The two highest-ranking pop songs are You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling, by the Righteous Brothers, and Yesterday, by the Beatles. (No. 1 was Happy Birthday to You.) However, as a branding and a lifestyle having most total impact, Margaritaville wins with a couple hundred million dollars.

Another thing adding to this culture happened when Buffett dubbed his diehard fans Parrotheads in 1989. Parrotheads travel to Buffett’s concerts and party, party, party. These fans support the Margaritaville culture. It’s worth noting the Grateful Dead had Deadheads in the ‘70’s and young Justin Bieber has Beliebers, which was started around 2008 by his YouTube fans.

When we write, we spend agonizing days looking for the right words to communicate our work to the readers. It’s not the number of words, it’s how they are on the page and what they convey.

Sometimes, we think we’ll never get it right. Ah, but when we do…it’s worth it.

208 Words

 

Living

I’m continuing the discussion from Mary’s blog about finding your own writing path. I follow Nathan Bransford’s blog and, coincidentally, he posted In Order to Write, Writers have to Live, on the same day. The original post was a guest blog on NaNoWriMo, but it serves as a message for all writers all the time.

Nathan’s point is that writers tend to be solitary, shutting out the world and everything else to write. How many of you beat yourselves up when you give up a writing session because you feel like going shopping? Or even sleep in when you’d planned on rising early to get in two hours of writing?

You have to get out and experience the world, observe people and your surroundings. Absorb every bit of information that comes your way, whether it’s watching two octogenarians hold hands while walking down the sidewalk, or seeing a Canadian goose perched on top of the Sonic Drive-In sign while a fellow goose is on the ground squawking at it. You write what you live. Your writing will be better if you live life to the fullest with your friends and family. Stop and smell the variety of flowers!

Do you find yourself playing the guilt trip if you aren’t writing regularly? Or if you put it off to do something else?

As Nathan puts it, “Writing can wait. Living comes first.”

 

Habit

In February, I attended a work conference keynote presentation by Charles Duhigg who wrote “The Power of Habit.” His explanation of the genesis of a habit was fascinating. The book is divided into habits of individuals, habits of successful corporations, and habits of societies.

While habits of individuals are most interesting to me, I have to recount one story Mr. Duhigg shared.

While working as a newspaper reporter in Baghdad in the early 2000’s, Duhigg heard about an army major in the small town of Kufa who needed to mitigate or stop citizen riots which resulted in violence. The major analyzed hours of videotapes of the riots and found a pattern. The people would start to gather, be there for several hours, get something to eat from the cart vendors, mill around. Then, someone would throw something and everything escalated from there.

The major asked the town mayor (yes, the book called the town leader a mayor) to keep the food vendors out of the plaza area. A few weeks later, a crowd gathered near the Great Mosque of Kufa. They chanted angry slogans, the Iraqi police got nervous, and asked U.S. troops to stand by. Around dusk, people got hungry, but there were no vendors. Spectators left to go home and eat. The chanters lost their audience and by 8pm, everyone was gone.  The major also launched other experiments in Kufa to influence residents’ habits. There hadn’t been a riot since he’d arrived.  Quote from the major: “Understanding habits is the most important thing I’ve learned in the army.”

Amazing!

40%-50% of your day is habit, from taking a shower and brushing your teeth to taking the same route to work every day. According to brain scan studies, the more ingrained your habit, the less the brain works. It quiets because it doesn’t take energy to perform a habit that’s been learned. Brain scans show that when learning something new, activity increases in the brain to form neural pathways.

I’ve tried to break my bad habits.  I drank too many Diet Cokes each day and I now limit myself to two per week, with a mini-goal to make it no more than once per week. Success. I have broken that habit and maintained my new habit. But, some habits, no matter how hard I try to break them, remain. I ended up thinking I’d had the habit so long, it wasn’t going away.

Duhigg gave me hope. Hope that I could break a bad habit and forge a good habit. He believes that once you learn how habits work, you can more easily control them.

To establish a habit:

1) You first receive a cue.  I’ll start with feeding a pet from an owner’s standpoint. At a certain time every evening, you get a cue from your pet. It stands/sits in front of you, and stares. Maybe, it goes to the area of the food bowl and then paces back to stare some more. It might vocalize. You feed it.

2) The next step is routine. You do this every time the pet gives you the cue.

3) The final step is reward. This is very important to ingraining a habit. In this example, you might be glad it stops whining or meowing (which it has discovered drives you nuts, so it will vocalize until you cave!), you might smile because a dog jumps up and down, and wiggles its entire body with joy because you’re feeding it. These are rewards. Even as the pet has established a habit, so has the owner, each having a set of cue, routine, and reward.

Cue. Routine. Reward.

Duhigg says now you can change a component to break the habit.  The first step is to recognize the cue. Let’s say that when you go grocery shopping on Sunday mornings, you pass by a drive-in that serves a delicious mocha caramel latte. One day, you hadn’t eaten breakfast and it was a little chilly, so you stopped and got one. It tasted heavenly and you rationalized that it could replace breakfast and save time. And…it tasted heavenly. The cue was hunger, it became routine, and the reward was satiating and delicious. To change the cue, eat breakfast. Change the routine and take another route to the grocery store.  Or, do your shopping Saturday afternoon one week, Sunday afternoon another time.

Lest this seem too easy, it’s not.

The bad news is a habit never really disappears because the brain encodes it into its structure. If you put the cue back in place, the habit will reemerge. A habit cannot be eradicated. It can be replaced. That’s why dieting is so hard. If you put the cues back, you go back to the same patterns you had before you retrained yourself to eat better or exercise regularly. The brain doesn’t know the difference between a bad habit and a good habit. It just waits for cues and rewards.

The book has more to say about cravings and the importance of belief. To be successful, you have to believe it’s possible. Like getting published! BTW, our reward for attending the keynote was a free copy of his book!

Whether I want to break a bad habit or make a good one, I can do it by breaking up the components and altering them. Change or create cues, stop or establish a routine, determine my reward.

 

Love

Happy Valentine’s Day!

No pseudo-scholarly piece today. You can look up the origins of this day and find it rooted in pagan times, Christian times, and/or a combination of both. Have fun with that.

I am setting aside the commercialism of it. I want to celebrate those who love. I asked a few women I know this question, “What does your husband do that you find romantic.” I told them it could be an every day thing. It didn’t have to celebrate February 14^th.

R: First she said her husband cleaned out the cat litter box when it was her turn because she had to go to work. Then, she laughed and said they’d been married too long! A few days later she e-mailed. He bought me a day at a spa (massage, body scrub, facial, lunch, hair and make-up), the whole 9 yards. I was picked up by a white limo. After the spa day, he picked me up and we spent the night at the Anniversary Inn.

H: My husband always makes sure my car is filled with gas, even if he works late. He’s gone out at 4am before. I find that romantic.

L: He does a lot of little things every day…like rubbing my back and feet in the evenings and massaging my neck while I’m waiting for my ride in the morning. He gives me 2-3 cards on special occasions. He always wants to dress up and take me out to a nice, quiet restaurant for my birthday and our anniversary. Sometimes, he lights several candles in the bedroom when he knows he’ll be getting lucky that night. Probably, the most romantic thing he ever did was when he proposed—nice dinner, then we drove up to the Depot, walked out in the garden with the Capitol in the background, he got down on one knee, brought out the ring, and proposed.

J: I remember a few years back my family was going through a rough time and I was down in the pits! I felt broken inside and spent a good deal of time crying every night. Valentine’s Day came around and I was excited to finally smile (hoping my husband would do something). The day had started and there was no mention of Valentine’s Day from my husband. I figured if he wasn’t going to say something, then neither was I. The afternoon had come and gone and still no mention of Valentine’s. Not even a phone call to see how my day was. I remember calling my mother in tears because I thought he had forgotten. However, when I got home, the house smelled of bleach, the washing machine and dryer were running, and as I approached the kitchen/living room, there were no toys on the floor or dishes in the sink. In the kitchen was a huge bouquet of flowers, a box of my favorite chocolate, a card from my husband, and a homemade card from the kids. I was so overwhelmed that I cried all evening! I was more excited about a clean house rather than the gifts, but I also felt ashamed that the entire day I thought he had forgot about me and in turn I never said Happy Valentine’s day to him. In the end, it was a good day and worth the wait!

So now, lovely readers, tell me about what your husband/loved one does for you that you find romantic.

 

Accept…Change

I received a book for Christmas called “The Truth about Style” by Stacy London. I watch What Not to Wear (she is one of the style consultants) and thought it would be a fun pictorial on style. I didn’t expect the “aha” moment it gave me.

In this article, Stacy recounts visiting some friends’ house and remarking on how well their children behaved. The parents’ simple philosophy enables the young ones to first accept what life has given you and then work out how you move on. In the case of the book, the moral was accept the body you have today, not in a week, not when you’ve lost 10 pounds, and then make it look the best it can in the proper clothing. I encourage you to click on the link and read the short article because Stacy has a more eloquent tagline (three paragraphs down) that I didn’t want to poach, even though I gave her credit. Stacy believes it is even a good life philosophy.

Applied to writing, if you know you have problems writing a synopsis, accept it (without saying I’ll never get it right), and then start changing that reality if you aren’t satisfied. Take a class, practice, practice, practice. Don’t ignore it, fix it. If you don’t accept it as the first step, how will you improve your writing?

I recognize that I need to strengthen my setting descriptions, whether it is outside or inside. If I attend writing classes of any kind, I look for presentations in that category.

What are some of the components of writing you find yourself working on to improve? No fair saying EVERYTHING!