For as long as I can remember, I have been desperately concerned with my level of metacognitive skill. It was the reason I gave the first story I ever wrote for public consumption to my best friend to critique, I was seven and I remember vividly the relief that I had a chance to fix it before I read it to the prep class (the grade before grade 1, in Australia.) Metacognition is the ability to assess one’s own skill level and, of course, I didn’t know the word until my university philosophy of mind studies, but my greatest fear has always been not failure to achieve perfection but to have thought that what I had done was objectively good and then to discover that it wasn’t.

Whether a child, probably too young even to have metacognitive ability, should be worrying about such things is a valid question for another, more private, forum, but it has driven a life-long love of theory and research, if only to do as much as I can to make sure I don’t find myself in that situation. It’s what drives me to believe that editing and story analysis classes are more important for a writer than any “Express yourselves, dahlings!” creative writing classes. It’s also lead to a morbid curiosity about how on earth people have the confidence to, for example, audition for So You Think You Can Dance despite having no ability whatsoever. Aren’t they embarrassed? And how can they not know how bad they are?

The same questions come to mind when I read an terribly flawed piece of writing.* When I have been asked to give feedback (professionally or no) I have to try to work out why the writer hasn’t noticed these flaws so that I can work out the best way to approach giving my feedback in the hope that it will be taken as constructively as it is meant. I have found, again and again, that the level of confidence the writer has is an excellent gauge, invariably, those whose pieces need the most work are most shocked that any work is required and genuinely seem to have believed they had produced a masterpiece.

I have discussed this many times with Superman and he recently pointed me to a 1999 report which shed some interesting light on the subject and backs up the, now old-fashioned, belief that anyone who believes themselves to be the best at anything is unlikely to be even close to the best.

The Report: “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”**

In their 1999 report, Kruger and Dunning outlined four studies they had undertaken which were inspired by previous studies which showed a correlation between level of confidence and lack of ability. Kruger and Dunning devised experiments in which they asked people to take tests in the areas of logical reasoning, humor and English grammar, then asked them to estimate both: what their specific test score had been and; which percentile their test results fell into (i.e., where their test result would fall in comparison to others’.) The aim was to find the subjects’ actual skill level in an area, and then see if they were aware of what their skill level actually was.

Their findings were unambiguous: the less skill you have, the more grossly you overestimate your ability and, perhaps more instructively, it seems only those with above average skill underestimate their skill. Thus, if you want to make an assumption about a person’s skill from their attitude, the best thing to do is to watch out for humility, not confidence!

“But, but, but!” I hear all the management-book-steeped would-be-Donald-Trumps of the world shriek, “That’s loser talk. Confidence is the most important thing! If you don’t think you’re the best, who will?”

This is an attitude that, as far as I can tell, began to seep into the world in the 80’s, as advertising men, salesmen and generic ‘business’ men began to make enormous amounts of money, and people started looking to them as icons of success. Suddenly, everyone was reading management and wealth-building books written by these ‘guru’s, and this requirement for uber-self-confidence was being applied in interview rooms across all sorts of industries. Quiet confidence and humility became associated with ‘losers’ – who just didn’t want it enough, or were cursed with low self-esteem - a condition which was to be treated like a highly contagious disease.

I’m not denying the existence of, or problems associated with low self-esteem. It may surprise some people who have met me, because I usually speak with confidence, but I’ve been close to crippled by low self-esteem for much of my life. When I speak up, it is with confidence, but that’s because I only speak up if I have done copious research, practice and, especially if it involved public speaking, throwing up, in private.  I understand completely that a certain level of confidence is required just to step into any arena of experience, some more than others, but beyond the minimum level of confidence required for the particular task at hand confidence is, as the studies demonstrate, more of an indication of lack of skill than of competence.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that projection of confidence is essential in marketing, or sales, or any profession which requires one to convince others to willingly do what you want them to do. I also understand the philosophy that any interview is a sales pitch of yourself. It is not true, however, that every job is a sales job and anyone who conducts interviews for non-sales positions and makes their decisions based on who sold themselves most confidently really can’t complain when that applicant turns out not to have the skill they’d hoped (or has even lied on their resume!) Such interviewers are as responsible for the bad hire as they would be if they’d ordered a disappointing piece of exercise equipment skillfully advertised in the wee hours of the morning.

Of course, a study like this isn’t going to instantly change the prevailing culture but I thought it worth sharing with my small audience of, mostly, writers hoping to be published who are wrestling with their own levels of confidence, or perhaps should be

*Note: Any discussion of ability brings with it the jinx that there will be numerous grammatical and spelling errors in the very piece discussing it. I’d like to point out that metacognition is the issue here and I’m fully aware that this blog post won’t be perfect, unwilling as I am to spend more time than it takes to jot down the thoughts and get my creative juices flowing for my fiction writing!

** “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”, Justin Kruger and David Dunning Department of Psychology Cornell University, © 1999 by the American Psychological Association For personal use only--not for distribution December 1999 Vol. 77, No. 6, 1121-1134

Rather than write another how-to book, Mittelmark and Newman have produced a book in a format which will be familiar to TV Tropes readers, naming, describing and creating their own hand-crafted, hysterical examples of many of the mistakes that unpublished authors make in spec manuscripts (though I have certainly seen many of these in published books, too!)

Ask yourself, are you guilty of:

“The Overture: Wherein the prologue is a brief guide to the meaning of life”

“The Puffer Fish: Wherein the author flaunts his vocabulary”

“The Joan Rivers Pre-Novel Special: In which clothing is given too much prominence?”

“The Vacation Slideshow: In which the author substitutes location for story?”

“Gibberish for Art’s Sake: Wherein indecipherable lyricism baffles the reader”

““But, Captain…!”: Where characters tell each other things they both already know”

“Hamlet at the Deli: Wherein the character’s thoughts are transcribed to no purpose”

“Goodbye cruel reader! In which an inconvenient character is conveniently disposed of?”

“The Underpants Gnomes Where crucial steps are omitted?”

and does your novel end with

“Now with 20% More Homily! Where the author tells us what he’s just spent 300 pages telling us”

If you find yourself haunted by some of the examples (and if you are even slightly honest with yourself, you will) and if you find yourself trying to justify your particular use of them, then they are probably the things you most need to fix!

Laugh out loud, shriek out loud, funny, this book will teach you more than many similar books which take you away from your writing for far longer. Definitely a book every would-be novelist should read.

The plan was to do our best to treat Sydney as though it were Japan and continue to travel, playing tourist in our own land, and continue to blog about life as an ex-pat wife, hopefully hitting on the odd issue that could be helpful to someone. It seemed a good plan; we lived here for 18months before we moved to Japan and it was, indeed, like moving to a foreign country (I genuinely found Japan easier), so clearly there were difficulties worth addressing. Now that we're here, however, the cost of living prevents us from being able to travel as we did in Japan, so travel and photography will be limited to the, not unattractive, metropolitan area. What is more, in the few months we've been here, I've found solutions to the main problems we had living here last time and, while I will eventually write those posts, there really aren't that many ways to say "Have lots of money" and "Don't live in The Shire".  

Nevertheless, life is not lacking excitement, even if it is the kind of excitement which only that percentage of the population which identifies as 'writers' (and possibly musicians and other creatives) would define as such. Perhaps it's the lack of beautiful architecture luring me from my desk, and/or the removal of the constant, low-grade stress of living in a land in which you do not speak the language, but my narrative disorder has returned with a force I have not experienced for many years, perhaps even since high school. Characters are tramping through my head all night, scenes are playing like movies in my mind's eye, often from the moment I wake. When sitting down to write each weekday, my only creative angst derives from trying to unravel the big ball of scenes which seems to have replaced my brain. It's bliss!

All that is not to say that it's easy. No matter how quickly or slowly scenes come to mind, rarely do they come in order, and, despite the phrasing sometimes used to describe the process, nothing actually writes itself. What is different at the moment is that the scenes come so fast that it's all I can do to get them down, and there is simply no time for self-doubt. For years, I've understood intellectually the theory that you have to take off your editor's hat while writing your first draft. I've repeated the advice as mantras: "You can't edit what you haven't written"; "If it's worth doing well, it's worth doing badly till you learn", trying to convince myself not to second-guess as I go, but I've never before managed to achieve it. I'd like to think that I've reached some kind of personal and professional turning point, that this new state is the result of my continual practice and study of the craft, and that it will be, if not permanent, at least something I can call upon at will, but I daren't tempt the Gods by assuming such a thing.

And so, the answer to my original question becomes clear: the blog will return to its original subject - my Adventures in Wordcraft (I wonder if I still have any readers from when the blog was called that?) Whether this blissful state is permanent or not, I'll be doing everything I can to nurture it and, while I probably won't share my actual writing with you here, I will do my best to share anything that helps me to keep this state going. Off the top of my head, I can imagine posts might include: reviews of books on writing; alerts to a writer/agent/publisher whose blog or tweets I find inspiring; recommendations of tech that make reading or research easier; reviews of fountain pens and inks I use to slow down and create less frantically; or even a recipe for some comfort food to soothe a ragged, creative soul. 

To those of you who came to this blog because it was about Japan, I want to say thank you for reading these past eighteen months, I hope I was able to help your own Japanese experiences in some small way. I have a few posts on Japan left in me, but only a few. Many of you are also writers and I hope you'll stick around to see where this goes, but I won't be surprised or upset if I see my subscriptions and views dropping substantially - it's quite a ride, the whole ex-pat jBlogger thing, even from the sidelines where I've been hanging out!

Of course, the most important way to nurture the muse is to answer its call to write, so chances are there will be awfully long gaps between posts, but I imagine only family, friends and writers will be watching for Narrative Disorder to go bold on their feed readers, so I'm sure I'll be forgiven. 

From my desk to yours, happy writing!!

About a decade ago, I witnessed an Australian cognitive scientist declare with utter conviction that a person's capacity for happiness was genetically pre-determined and then refuse to be drawn into any discussion of environmental factors for the rest of the seminar. When asked if he was happy himself he responded "As happy as I am capable of being" and gave a smug, self-satisfied, lips-only smile - a happiness of sorts, I suppose. In contrast, Nancy Etcoff tells us that cognitive scientists have now discovered that, while they do their share, genes are only about 50% responsible for our level of happiness, the rest is a combination of chasing natural beauty, social activity and other such pleasure inducing experiences while avoiding misery inducing ones and the judicious satisfaction of desires (which may or may not be pleasure or misery inducing themselves).

Contrary to the idea Plato's Socrates gives us, that happiness exists only in as much as we experience the absence of its opposite, our emotional well-being is not a continuum from happy to sad but, rather, a balance of parallel emotional systems. Making ourselves less miserable does not automatically result in a move towards happiness, it acts solely to make us more able to enjoy whatever happiness we find without the chemical fog of depression. Similarly, pursuing what we feel an urgent desire to attain, whether it a material possession, or the love of a person, satisfies only our dopamine-based, "need" system, which is at the heart of addiction; we won't feel as bad as we do when we are yearning for that thing, but getting it will not necessarily raise the happiness level of the equation unless what is gained is something which also gives us pleasure, rather than merely the absence of yearning.

To be truly happy, if I have understood Etcoff correctly, one must address not only misery and it's avoidance but our, separate,  desire system and the pursuit of its satisfaction, while also indulging in experiences that give us pleasure (yet another system again). Like an audio engineer finding the perfect mix, we must adjust all three sliders to find the sweet spot, which is likely to be slightly different for everyone.

As a writer, this insight is exciting; I can see how this will be a tool for tweaking characters: which one of the sliders is the character more influenced by, which does he have the emotional skills to manipulate better?

Etcoff is a great presenter, too. Enjoy!

SHELDON

It must be an emergency; everyone at the university knows that I eat my breakfast at 8 and move my bowels at 8:20

LEONARD

Yes, how did we live before Twitter?

- from The Big Bang Theory, S.2, Ep.23,The Monopolar Expedition.

When even the boys of The Big Bang Theory, champions of all things techie and geeky, appear to use Twitter merely to broadcast the minutiae of daily life, it’s no wonder tweeting is generally considered a frivolous procrastination. When I began tweeting I did so with no idea of what it was except that it was another social networking site which my fellow Japan Bloggers were jumping aboard to promote their blogs. I figured it wouldn’t hurt for me to try it out and see if I could give them a hand here and there. Approximately one year and 2,246 tweets later, I’m completely hooked on Twitter as an information resource which I have tailored to my needs and interests.

How Twitter Works

Because there are no stupid questions: a basic run down.

1) People make observations, ask questions, answer questions and broadcast information in the form of  a tweet - a text message which can be no longer than 140 characters.

2) Those observations, questions and information are seen by anyone who is either mentioned in the tweet (by means of their twitter name with an @ symbol in front of it) or anyone who has chosen to ‘follow’ all of the tweets of the person writing.

3)Repeat 1 & 2 on ridiculously huge, entangled scale.

How Twitter Becomes Useful

When we first begin, invariably we all follow the tweets of friends and family who have told us their Twitter name (I’m Danisidhe btw, nice to tweet you. Sorry.) We send them a tweet telling them we are on and they then follow us. At this stage, it is understandable that people think that this is just another Facebook or mySpace but without snappy (?) layout or pictures and, if you never go beyond friends and family, that’s true and you can use it that way but you’re not using Twitter to its full, wonderful extent.

The real key to Twitter is to give in to the curious cat within and risk one of your nine lives. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Note that when you choose to follow someone, you follow all of their tweets. When someone that you are following sends a message or replies to someone that they are following, you will see that message BUT you won’t know what on earth they are replying to. If your friend’s message catches your interest, click on that other person’s name and you will be taken to their page where you will see their last several tweets (possibly including the tweet to which your friend was replying, depending on the time your friend took to respond.) If the tweets on your friend’s friend’s page are of interest to you, you can choose to follow them, too.

Unless they have locked their account for privacy, in which case you won’t see any of their tweets at all, you can follow someone without getting permission like you need to in Facebook etc. If they see that you are following them and they don’t wish you to, they can block you (just as you can block people) but since Twitter is really a public information stream (so no-one should be twittering something they can’t risk strangers seeing) there is no reason that they should need to do that unless you harass or spam them. Note that following them doesn’t mean that they are following you, nor does it create any kind of social contract requiring them to do so.

And that’s how the tailoring begins.

Through the judicious use of ‘spying’ on people with whom your ‘twitter friends’ are conversing and following those with similar interests, you will soon find your Twitter stream is filled with useful information that you could never have gathered on your own.

It is always worthwhile checking out who is following you because chances are they share your interests and therefore might be worth following but who follows you won’t really matter to you unless you are using twitter as a way to promote something. Promoter tweeters devote their whole twitter-being to writing targeted tweets to attract as many followers as possible but that is only one use of Twitter and one that requires careful execution lest you become so obviously one-eyed that you are boring and people, like me, stop following you.

How I use Twitter

Professional Development & Community

Most of the people I now follow and who follow me are writers, both budding and jobbing, print and screen, and there is quite a community. We share links to articles or posts from writers or publishing industry types on writing craft, tips on getting published, publishing trends, competitions… you get the picture. My RSS readers has blossomed since joining twitter as I add blogs recommended by my fellow writers or the blogs of those who’s tweets always intrigue. We support each other through the use of #tags like #writegoal – wherein we might tweet: “#writegoal today, 2000 words” then, at the end of the day we will tweet: “Woohoo #writegoal met plus 146 words!” and anyone who happens to be looking at the #writegoal search at the time of your report tweet will send you a ‘”woohoo, well done!” tweet. It might sound silly to some but when you’re sitting at a computer alone (as writers tend to be) just knowing you’ve made the public commitment and getting some positive feedback when you’re done can be great.

Here’s a tweet I received in my stream today from @BookEditorLM:

RT @BookBundlz "The Book Pick" Contest Deadline = 11/16 Enter yr novel, memoir; self-pub ok http://bit.ly/4nUd12 #Authors #Writers #Books”

In that tweet: @BookEditorLM re-tweeted (i.e., copied the original and sent it as her own tweet indicating it with RT) a tweet from @BookBundlz announcing a competition with a link to where you can enter. They also added #tags to the tweet so that any writers who regularly search twitter for any tweets containing those #tags will see it, too. In fact, I saw that tweet because I have a permanent search set up for any tweet containing “#writers” – not because I follow @BookEditorLM (though I do now!).

Now, I’m not actually interested in this particular competition but there are two things I might do with this tweet 1) I can click on @BookBundlz and see if they regularly tweet about competitions and thus might be worth following in case they mention one I am interested in and 2) I can re-tweet it myself so that any writers who follow me will be sure to see it (in case they don’t follow @BookBundlz , @BookEditorLM or any of the #tags.)

I follow #tags by using a desktop (i.e. not in a browser) application called Tweetdeck, which I highly recommend. I set up a search for, for example  #writegoal and Tweetdeck gives me a separate column for it and updates it automatically at whatever interval I tell it to (Twitter traffic permitting.)

Some of the #tags worth following if you are a writer #writers, #writechat (this one has a tweetchat which occurs at 4am Monday morning Japan time, for which I occasionally stay up and is always worth it,) #writegoal. There are heaps of others which I might duck into temporarily if I find out something is happening in it (usually by people adding one of the above #tags to a relevant tweet.) A currently busy one is #nanowrimo for all those participating this year!

Journal/Travel Diary

Those of you who subscribe to my feed will be vaguely familiar with this use because it is the reason you are hit with a “My Week in Tweets” post every Sunday night, Japan time. I’ve never been much of a journal-er because I’ve always felt there is a kind of wallowing, if not dishonesty, in trying to write down what you remember were your thoughts and/or feelings at the time something happened. With Twitter, you can record your observations as they occur (circumstances permitting, of course) and have a real record of what mattered to you enough to Tweet it at the time, rather than what you think is appropriate to record later.

Using a wordpress plugin by the wonderful Alex King called Twitter Tools, all the tweets from the week (that are not direct replies to other tweets) are published as a post on my blog, giving me a permanent record of my tweets. So, though I also have in mind keeping my friends and family in touch with my activities, it is often this that I am thinking of when I take a low quality photo with my phone and send it via email to Tweetphoto, with a comment in the subject line that becomes the tweet (GOD I LOVE Japanese phone internet lol.)

Using Twitter this way is a little different because it is not really about communicating with others and so isn’t something that Twitter is actually made to do, in fact, I don’t think it can be done without also having a blog with a plugin like Twittertools installed (there may be a way to have all your tweets emailed to you but I haven’t checked that out). Of course you also need a decent mobile internet solution, I don’t know how I’ll do it in Australia

Shameless Plug for Friend:

Speaking of travel, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my dear friend @ShaneSakata’s tweetchat using the #tag: #japantravel which occurs for an hour from Midday on Fridays, Tokyo time and is a wonderful resource for anyone planning a trip to or already travelling within Japan. You can find details and/or actually follow the tweetchat without an application like Tweetdeck here

/Plug ends

Keeping in Touch

Obviously I do use Twitter to keep in touch with friends in a similar way that one does on Facebook (which I only recently joined and I admit is mostly updated by clicking the ‘facebook’ button on the application I use to handle Twitter and posting to both services at once.)

Twitter does have a Direct Message function which enables you to send a tweet privately to one person (still 140 chars) and I admit to being more quickly contactable that way than by email these days. I check my email once a day (at best) while I check twitter many times a day (hence I have been known to request a virtual slap from my #writegoal friends if I tweet again within a certain time frame!) In fact a recent trip to Tokyo, to meet up with a friend for a two day feast of cookware and ceramics shops on Kappabashi, was planned entirely via Twitter and I even updated her on my travel status from the Shinkansen when I had web access on my phone but could not call or SMS her.

So, that’s why and how I use Twitter. How do you use it? And if you don’t, will you join ussss?

“it is the same as the printed newspaper in the UK. The News, Sport and Business sections, and the supplements are laid out just as in the actual paper, but are also complemented by a variety of digital tools.”

View from chopping board over my workspace and beyond!

In fact, this post was a little longer but I was writing it on the WordPress dashboard – which looks better than it did in 2.7 but seemingly still fails as a writing tool because when I pressed ‘publish’ it published it’s own autosave from fifteen minutes previous. I’ve written this in Live Writer which developed issues with images with WP 2.7 but frankly I’d rather have to manually insert an image than lose fifteen minutes of writing. Grrr wordpress – welcome back to technology, me

My little house is just the other side of the green bit in the middle!

*Photo credit: HUGE coincidence, my Warcraft friend Charmaine sent me some photos of her home town over a year ago now but didn’t tell me the name just that it was a tiny town I wouldn’t know. When I told her where I was going she said “That’s where I’m from! The photos i sent you were from there!” So thank you, Charmaine for the photo!

From Tony's post, I clicked on the link to the official Ghibli Museum site and was presented with Miyazaki Hayao's philosophy for building the museum. Most of it was positive and about what he wanted the museum to be and certainly each was a reason to visit. The last paragraph, though, was a list of what he did not want the museum to be like and it struck me that it was something that every film director should have framed on a wall, or tattooed somewhere on their person where they can read it daily - except replace the word "museum" with "film"!

"This is the kind of museum I don't want to make!
A pretentious museum
An arrogant museum
A museum that treats its contents as if they were more important than people
A museum that displays uninteresting works as if they were significant"

- Miyazaki Hayao "A few words from Executive Director Miyazai Hayao" on the Ghibli Museum website.

There are probably any number of words which could replace "museum" here to create an excellent philosophy to live by!