How To Be Happy

 

Gasp! The year is almost over and then we’re on to a new one. Maybe this time we can get things done, achieve our goals and succeed in the areas we failed in the past…

    Yeah, all that.

Seriously? Now, I don’t wanna burst your balloon but life is not always about achievement. It’s also about feeling content with ourselves, doing good and, gosh darn it, being happy.

Honestly, this compulsive need to complete goals and see tasks through to the end is surely what causes most of the stress in our lives.  

Sometimes I think we should simply reject our quest for instant
gratification and hyper stimulation. But what can we do to be calm and in control, positive, and, most of all, consistently creative?

Personally, first thing I do when I need to be happy is to write my 500 words for the day. More is good but 500 is fine. Just enough to make me feel useful and fulfilled.

Here are some other ways to keep up your happiness quotient:

Go for a walk in nature. This is a big one for me. Connecting with the natural world never fails to make me feel better. There’s something wonderful about the simple rhythm of walking and breathing in fresh air, thinking light thoughts, and just enjoying being outside. Especially if you’re surrounded by greenery - a state that is proven to have an efficacious effect on your body and mind.

Apparently nature is beneficial and calming because our inherited memory associates lush natural abundance with comfort, safety, and stability.

Studies show that people who live in a natural environment are generally less stressed and have more creative energy.

If you’re stuck in town, find a park or an empty seat away from traffic. Maybe in a cemetery or church grounds. Find peaceful places in your local area, they’re good for you.

Find water, running or otherwise. Watching and listening to water is restful, refreshing and acts like gentle music to our souls.

Find anywhere peaceful to calm your mind, to smooth away your frayed nerves. If you can’t find anywhere around you, try to create a special place in your home. In your  garden, or in a safe room perhaps, even just a spot on the end of the bed. Making this space - and ensuring it’s perfect for you - is often just as happiness inducing as using it.

To me, any creative endeavor is calming and likely to bring joy.

Sing, paint, write, sculpt, knit, always create.

I know many people regard sport and other vigorous activity as calming and energizing. Sometimes it can be. It’s not my cup of tea but do that if it works for you.  

Try little things too. Make an unselfish gesture, like helping someone or complimenting them and expecting nothing in return.

If you’re depressed or struggling to feel good, make a short list of positives. Start with just one item to feel good about then move up to five or ten. I guess the trick is to feel grateful. Even just one positive is enough to be going along with.

Try meditating. Close your eyes, relax and count down from ten to one, calm your mind, slow your breathing. Learn to associate stillness with happiness, carelessness with freedom.

I learned this little trick from a book once: If you want to induce instant joy, tap the center of your chest lightly. Yes, that’s right. Gently tap your breastbone about a dozen times. For some weird reason this will make you smile. If you don’t believe me, just try it.

Obviously, reading a book should make you feel better because it’s a way of switching your brain off from destructive self-talk. For a while you can allow another author’s voice to become your own.

Try going out and deliberately leaving your phone behind. The dopamine rush you get from social media is fun, sure, but it’s also addictive and ultimately unsettling, causing you to experience restlessness and irritation. For short periods try going without the internet.  See time away as fasting from the overabundance of inputs. I mean really, nobody actually needs all that petty stimulation, like you’re some kind of baby that wants constant distraction.

Find stillness. Breathe. Slow your heart.

Daydream a better future. Think aimless thoughts. Have no agenda. Relax. Take it easy. Don’t get so involved in other people’s meaningless drama.    

And don’t define yourself by your work. We are all so much more than what we do. I blame the Industrial Revolution. Around the eighteenth century we began to equate repetitive activity with worth. Usually some one else’s wealth at that. But to define ourselves by some fat cat corporation’s agenda is just wrong.

Yes, you should be busy and productive but for yourself. Making someone else rich and successful is not a great recipe for personal mental health. Because you’re wasting your time, giving away your soul for a few shillings in your pocket. Experience tells us that money doesn't really buy anything but more stress. Like the way giving children more toys makes them anxious, and eventually impossible to handle.

We need to give in to nothing. Encourage our brains, through stillness, to understand that nothing is the most important thing. Only when we need nothing and realize that nothing will help us, can we begin to appreciate the joy and majesty of life.

All very Zen, right?

Keep Writing!

Rob Parnell’s Writing Academy

Software for Writers: the AI Invasion

Last week we looked at software created to help authors find and enhance their talent. This week we’re examining AI software that seems designed to either hinder skill, replace talent, or turn writing into some kind of blood sport for people who would rather not get involved in the dirty business of actually putting pen to paper.

Since the beginning of time blocked writers have been looking for a way to make their craft easier and by the look of the numerous new products hitting the market, many software companies are applying themselves to the potentially lucrative business of replacing artists with machines.

To my mind Jasper was the first autonomous machine author. The software was called Jeeves originally, but they got into a fight with Marvel about using a name Disney had claimed as its own because Iron Man had used the name for his computer butler. Clearly Disney had never come across PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster - where the idea of calling a butler ‘Jeeves’ originated in the first place.

Jasper is very clever, suitably expensive, and often feels like a smart-arse friend. Probably better for articles and non fiction content, many young entrepreneurs swear by it.

AI-Writer is recommended for generating content from as little input as one word and boasts a sub-topic finder tool.

WordAI is good for repurposing and paraphrasing text, Apparently good for tensing, grammar, and ‘AI content spinning’ whatever that is.

These AI programs sell well but probably not specifically to those we might traditionally regard as ‘writers’. My guess is that there are now many ‘word nerds’ out there who know all there is about writing without actually doing any.  

I watched a video recently from a young guy explaining how he used AI software for all of his web content, how he worked with his copy writing clients, and generally how he spent all day manipulating words, sales pages, books, and articles, without actually doing any writing at all. Fascinating and bizarre. The new normal.

Honestly there are so many AI writing providers out there at the moment, it’s hard to keep up. They have silly names like Hypotenuse and Stunwriter and Copysmith. Most are concerned with writing marketing copy and SEO and keyword stuffed articles for online content. Soul destroying drivel mostly.

I guess online people need this stuff and there’s no doubt AI makes it easier if you like your writing to be ‘done for you’ and aren’t too fussy about the person-less quality you end up with. Not great for writing books either because Amazon and other online publishers now use machines that can tell whether you wrote your books with AI. They can also reject your book if they suspect you used too much AI to write it.

Some AI programs have a terrible habit of plagiarizing sections from other books. It’s happened to me. I’ve seen entire paragraphs of mine appear in other books with authors claiming it’s all their own work.

Hmm…

Scribbr is an AI detector, using AI, ironically, to detect itself. Problem is it analyzes only short bursts of text.  And in English only. Ai-detector and contentscale do the same.

There are also websites that will check your writing for ‘AI-ness’ so that they can change some of your words and sentences around to fool writing software detectors. Some sites also offer to do that for you automatically, as in: change the text, to undo the AI, making it less detectable to AI detectors!

I should mention that all of the above AI programs are expensive. Monthly and annual subscription based mostly, usually with limits on your word usage. Expect to pay $50 to $250 a month for basic writing AI.

All very complicated, programming heavy and seriously, if you spend all that time trying to make AI writing work for you, at the end of the day, you might as well have spent all day writing properly - you know, like making stuff up off the top of your head. Writing stuff that’s real and engaging. Having said that, I’m sure there are many people working in content mills - and people who want to sell content writing - who think AI is a godsend.

A product called Vellum is a book formatting option. I use Amazon, and Draft2Digital for that. For making the text of hardbacks Vellum is probably useful but it’s an expensive one-off option that may not work so well as technology changes. As it often has in the last couple of decades. For example, Amazon and D2D now offer a variety of text formats for free.

ProWritingAid. I bought this for a year but only used it once. I’m sure the programmers mean well and many people do like it but the ‘help’ was so thorough, it made me hate my own writing. Always trying to perfect everything until the text was so bland as to be unreadable. After a while I thought, Why should I write the way a machine tells me is correct when my bestselling books are the ones where I make all my own decisions about grammar, readability, and sense?

You probably already know I recommend Sudowrite for fiction writing. Lots of bells and whistles and always trying hard to be useful. And honestly it is very good at what it’s trying to do.

Replacing authors might be its ultimate goal but my feeling is that AI will always need a guiding human hand. Certain publishers may regard AI as ingenious and entirely better than a real author, but when I said guiding human hand I wasn’t including publishers - or movie producers for that matter.

While professional editors are often referred to with great affection by the authors who rely on them to make them look good, publishers (and movie producers) are often seen as the scourge of their industries. Funny because it’s these same parasites that give themselves the most awards at ceremonies where the writers are not invited!

Looks like in the future we may have award ceremonies for computer nerds who invent the best AI writing robots. I wonder who will be writing the thank you speeches for them.

Keep Writing!

Rob Parnell’s Writing Academy

Writing With Software. An Overview

Now we’re getting close to Christmas, if you want treat yourself and make next year go with a definite bang, you should consider buying Scrivener from Literature and Latte. If you haven’t done so already. 

Honestly, I get no money for giving Scrivener a plug. I just happen to believe it will make your life and your writing better. I’ve been using this awesome writing software for over a decade and have no complaints about its looks, its functionality, reliability, and its importance to the writing community.

And no, it doesn’t do anything spectacular. It’s little more than an organization tool. Use it for writing novels, ebooks, movies, articles, poems, shopping lists, pretty much anything.

Now, if you want something that edits, corrects, make suggestions, and annoys the crap out of you by trying to be everything to everyone, then you should probably try other programs.

What you don’t want to imagine is that any one software will make writing easier. Writing will always be hard for true writers because the mental head-space required to write isn’t available as a download.

Even AI requires your focus and an ability to analyze text and make decisions based on what the AI creates. That process is not always rewarding because the AI generated text may be so awful you will quickly become dispirited and go back to not using software at all!.

Scrivener doesn’t try to distract you with natty tricks, though it does format for all and sundry, has links to useful tools, and even has a handy name generator.

Writing is a craft you need to master. Only you can do that through trial and error. And, as with anything worthwhile, the more you practice, the better you get.

Using AI is a bit like painting by numbers. If you’ve ever done that, you will know that the resulting canvas is often fake looking and not quite satisfying to the eye. Certainly nothing like a proper oil painting that has been lovingly crafted with skill, technique, and talent. AI might be clever but it’s never going to write like YOU, as much as you might tell it to and force it to speak in a way that you’re happy with.

My personal issue with AI is that it tends to write everything it can think of, relaying what it apparently 'sees' other writers do. But to me it’s what real writers often LEAVE OUT that defines their uniqueness and their vision.

Amateurs tend to put in as much as possible but professionals do not. They either have a better sense of balance, pace, or stylistic skill, or they have efficient editors who have the courage to delete swathes of material readers will probably find dull.

This is what you have to do for yourself. Decide what’s not worth focusing on, either because it’s obvious or because it interferes with the pacing.

I find that you need distance from your own work to really see what you’ve written but - failing that - you need to read your work as though it’s been written by someone else.

There are other writing software programs.

Dabble is similar to Scrivener. The difference being you can also set goals and track your progress, something I use Excel for if I need to. But with Dabble, I don’t like the fact that all the writing is being saved on a cloud. This is common nowadays but I prefer knowing that I have my own versions of my stories on my own hard drives - which I then (ironically) save to my Dropbox (cloud) anyway because then I can access my work from any computer.

In Dabble there’s a special function where you can speak your story and have the program write it down. It will also read it back to you. Both functions I don’t need and strike me as gimmicky, therefore distracting.

When I write I like to immerse myself in the process. That’s how I stay focused. If I have to do other things like choose AI text or fiddle with self-correcting grammar, even just looking for alternate words in an online thesaurus, all these things break the writing spell.

Some say you can benefit from using Google Docs, though probably only Google. Unless you want to write collaboratively, I don’t see the point of spreading your writing across clouds. It seems like no one wants to trust their own systems anymore. We want everything we do: our music, our writing, our pictures, our videos, to be owned and kept by other agencies and only available when the electricity is on.

Trouble is, we become more reliant on technology every day.

It’s the very simplicity of Scrivener that I like. I use it in dark mode to help my eyes. On good days, I forget where I am and lose myself in the moment. F11 will take you into “composition mode” (where only your current text is visible) but to be honest I like knowing where I am in the book, so I always have the chapter headings down the left hand side. Plus I have the Notes, Word Count, and the Synopsis boxes open too so that I can remember little things I need to include: plot points, descriptions, and also I have little pictures of things like cars, locations, and guns etc., all in front of me on the home screen.

Scrivener is great for plotting too. Moving chapters around using the cork board function, all good. Plus, I often use separate pages (files) to record character descriptions, names, places, and plot details in locations outside of the main manuscript.

There you have it, a big Xmas thumbs up for Scrivener. Next week we look at some of the more “intelligent” AI software programs available for writers.

Keep Writing!

Rob Parnell's Writing Academy

Writing in Tomorrow's World

 

While I was growing up in the UK, we had this TV show called Tomorrow’s World. I loved it. The theme music was a hip, airy tune designed to signify progress. The presenters had wry, earnest smiles that implied they knew something we didn’t. The half-hour program was full of inspiring articles about how great the world was going to be. The show celebrated just how advanced, how smart, sophisticated, and especially how accountable the people of the future would become.

    Pure joy to watch when you’re a wide-eyed child.

    Like many kids, I also loved reruns of Star Trek, mainly because of the vision of the future it presented. What inspired me in particular was a universe in which cash-money was no longer necessary; where friendship and shared responsibility were more important than power, war, violence, and conflict.

    Apparently Star Trek creator, Gene Roddenberry, had many arguments with writers over the issue of conflict. In his future, most human conflict had been resolved and for the sake of plotting new stories set in the twenty-third century, his writers should assume that much conflict was unnecessary, redundant if you will. Which of course annoyed the crap out of the writers because, as we know, all good fiction is basically conflict driven.

    That’s the reason why the crew of the Enterprise is multi-racial. Back in the early 1960s this was a radical, even potentially self-defeating aspect of the show that curiously, never bothered anyone.  

    Talking of the future, we were told there was to be a Reset, either happening now or soon. Is it still happening? Has it happened without us noticing? Or does “reset” simply refer to an ongoing new process or philosophy?

    It’s funny. Way back in time, the most prevalent symbols of the future were robots and flying cars. As if these wonders were the pinnacle of our imagination, representing the promise of the golden days to come.
Well, if you’ve ever watched The Fifth Element you’ll remember what a bad idea flying cars are and robots, well, they’re here but we’re yet to be convinced…

    Elon Musk recently said the hardest part of making robots is getting them to stand up.  Imagine that. Not the thinking, understanding, or decision making but simply standing. That’s what we have to look forward to. Killer robots that keep falling over.

    I notice we keep talking about all the intellectual stuff that robots can do because of AI but nobody seems to be focusing on the potential real winners: in health management, construction, space and sea exploration, police and security, from warfare to janitorial duties, gardening, transport, logistics, generally saving our lives and freeing humans from toil, indignity, and pain.

    Bill Gates, before he grew into the archetypal James Bond villain, said that computers would come into their own when they became invisible. Not much chance of that happening soon. In fact we seem to revel in the appearance and universality of technology.

    So what does The Reset mean?

    Will anything actually change at all?

    If you are a writer, you will want to use your talent to examine issues, your own and others, and try to make conclusions based on analysis and wisdom. I know many of us write for simple entertainment but do you ever feel a sense of revelation? Sometimes just looking at things critically can reveal the true nature of the world. We need writers to revisit established truths. We have a responsibility to seek knowledge and wisdom. To see the world the way it is.  

    Writers are the changers, the leaders who show the way. That is our duty.    

    Some say not. Are we merely observers who can do nothing to help? 

    I would argue that simply by observing we are doing our duty. Observing means collating, weighing, measuring, not merely existing and accepting. We need to question, to remain unconvinced by arguments that do not sit well with us. We should be encouraged to disagree without consequence.

    I know it’s sometimes hard but we should try to see the positive in this new era of technology and globalization. We should be able to report on the changes we see and to rebel against them if necessary. The Reset needs to be about telling the truth, seeing reality and fighting for rationality and progress based on what is right and necessary for human welfare. Accountability for all, not only for the rich and powerful but for everyone. We need to hold each other to a higher standard because for the first time in history, we can and should.

    I remember once watching an episode of Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock with my kids where one of the characters couldn’t do as he was told. Assigning him work just made him angry, resentful, and eventually made him run away. In a cave where he was hiding, hating himself for not fitting in, some wise old dude told him to think of his predicament as a test. Some of us are just not meant to be drones, he said, some of us were meant to think and dream and create, to be someone who tries to change the world.

    Artists, writers, thinkers, inventors, often become the pioneers, the thought leaders, the ones we admire most and look to for purpose and meaning.

    That’s what The Reset should be for: to elevate wisdom, clarity, and creativity!

    Now that’s a Tomorrow’s World I can look forward to and be a part of.

Keep Writing!

Rob Parnell’s Writing Academy