→ November 8, 2021
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Bird by Bird.

When I asked readers for suggestions for books about writing, the second-most cited book, after Stephen King’s On Writing, was Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. It’s a wonderful, slim book of short but very potent essays on just about everything related to writing, with an emphasis on fiction (and, at that, I’d say the short form), but much of it is also applicable to other forms of writing or merely the act of writing itself. It inspired me, and I say that as someone who is infrequently inspired at this point, even when it comes to writing about things I enjoy.

The book is filled with advice, and I don’t want to reproduce much of it here, because you should go read the book itself, and also because the advice just sounds much better in Lamott’s voice, with her wry humor and copious examples. She draws extensively on her experience teaching writing classes as well as writing for herself, allowing her to speak about things like writer’s block, creating credible characters, publishing, not publishing, and more in both her own voice and those of her students. I found nearly all of this advice to either ring true to my own experiences – especially that on writer’s block, something I haven’t truly experienced, because I can always just write something else and get things moving again – or to answer questions I’ve always had, such as how to do things like create those credible characters or write dialogue that sounds true, both to how people talk (which isn’t as easy as it sounds) and to the characters speaking it.

There’s plenty in here on getting started, which is something I often hear from aspiring writers is a huge part of the problem – they want to write, but can’t figure out how to begin. (With the first word, of course.) Lamott has sage advice on reasons to write, and reasons not to do so – not if you think it’s a quick route to wealth, or financial freedom, or popularity; if you doubt her, she has plenty of failure stories from her own career, from books rejected by publishers to dealing with self-doubt and the voices in her head that love to tell her she’s not any good at writing. (She is, though. Very.) It’s always helpful to know that other writers, especially those who have had more success than I have or have had longer careers, deal with the same kind of doubts and impostor syndrome that I do, and to be reminded that writing is its own end. Writing should give you joy, to use the popular bromide of the day. If it doesn’t, don’t do it. If it does, then how much you make from it – if you make anything at all, if you even publish – doesn’t matter. 

Lamott is an irreverent writer who is perhaps best known for some of her writing on faith, including the best-selling Traveling Mercies, and while her beliefs do show up in the pages here, I thought it was always in service of her larger points, without proselytizing or excluding; on the contrary, she goes out of her way to include people of all faiths and no faiths in the book. I can’t say I was concerned – I try to read as diverse a set of authors as possible – but I include this for anyone who might have felt disinclined to read for Bird by Bird for this reason.

The title of Bird by Bird comes from a wonderful anecdote within an early essay that, in short, is the writing equivalent of taking it one day at a time. One of the biggest obstacles I have always faced as a writer, regardless of my subject, has been the discouragement I feel when I think about the whole project – its size, yes, but my ability to complete it, and make it good, and in a timely fashion, and not to be distracted by that thing I’ve been meaning to bake or that game I’ve wanted to play. So much of Bird by Bird comprises gentle reminders that you can do this, and it’s okay to fail, or think you’re going to fail. Just keep going, bird by bird.

—

I also read another of your recommendations, Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing. It’s a twee book with advice written to look like verse, in a voice that would make me think violent thoughts about any teacher who lectured in it. There’s some useful advice buried within it, but I encountered at least as much advice that I would say I violate every time I start to write, and while it’s written by a journalist largely for journalists, I’m not sure how much of the counsel here I’d truly endorse. I did enjoy the last 50 pages, with examples of bad writing from students he’s taught over the years, which ranges from the execrable to the unintentionally hilarious. It’s more than a matter of laughing at bad writing, but many of the examples illuminate problems with the language itself, ways in which English, or a lack of command of it, can lead us astray. There’s value in that. Perhaps he should have made three-fourths of the book out of that, and limited his advice to the remainder – without the pompous formatting.

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→ December 8, 2020
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Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.

Over the summer, I linked to an interesting longread in The Guardian, an excerpt from a new book by James Nestor called Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. The excerpt and the title both promised an evidence-based approach to the rather fundamental act of respiration, one that comes up in areas from pulmonary and cardiovascular health to allergies to meditation and mindfulness. It was a huge disappointment: Breath is a lot of woo and anecdote, with a little bit of science hidden in the endnotes. It imparts very little useful information on how to improve your breathing, or address any problems with it.

Nestor starts Breath explaining an experiment he and a fellow “pulmonaut” underwent, where they agreed to block their nasal passages so they’d be forced to breath through their mouths for about three weeks , so they could see how much their health would deteriorate in the meantime. From there, he points out that humans are the only species with our wide range of dental problems, a product of evolution and our changing diet, and speculates that this has led to a constricted airway (which creates the conditions for sleep apnea) and says most of us are just breathing the wrong way.

One major way in which we do it wrong is breathing through our mouths, which bypasses the nose’s air-filtering, humidifying, and warming mechanisms, which came about via evolution and allow us to take less particulate matter into our lungs, while getting warmer, less dry air. Nasal breathing helps filter out some airborne pathogens, while the mouth has no such filtration. There’s even some evidence that breathing through the nose while exercising can improve performance, because “breathing through the nose releases nitric oxide, which is necessary to increase carbon dioxide (CO2) in the blood, which, in turn, is what releases oxygen.”

There’s at least some scientific evidence to back up the claims he presents in those parts of the book, and there’s copious evidence that sleep apnea is associated with serious health problems over the long term. As the book progresses, however, he veers farther and farther into pseudoscientific territory, discussing the Hindu concept of prana (the life force coursing through all living things in Hinduism) as if it were a scientific fact, which it’s not. He mentions how he breathes through his right nostril to improve his digestion, a belief from yoga that appears to have zero scientific evidence to support it. He also appears to advocate some extreme breathing hacks, such as the Buddhist method known as g Tum-mo meditation, that have little to no controlled research showing their efficacy or safety. There are even some internal contradictions here around hypoventilation and its effects, especially since there’s at least some literature showing a connection between hypoventilation and obesity.

I have some very mild breathing issues, mostly connected to sleeping, and thought I might get some useful tips from Breath to help with that, but all I really got out of the book was the advice to breathe more slowly, and remind myself to breathe through my nose when exercising. The former is something you’d get from any resource on mindful meditation, all of which start out with awareness-of-breath exercises. The latter is something I tried on Monday during a run … without success. It turns out that when it’s 40 degrees outside, breathing through your nose is not all that effective in delivering warm, moist air to your lungs, which is counterproductive when you’re trying to run at peak capacity. Apparently this is something you can build up to doing through practice, which I will continue to try to do over the next few weeks, but this isn’t advice for the larger audience.

There’s probably a decent book to write on this topic, but Breath isn’t it. With too much reliance on anecdote and the eventual devolution into woo, it’s not the kind of evidence-based argument I’d want to see for anything related to health or wellness.

Next up: I’ve got a few other books to review, but at the moment I’m reading Jude the Obscure.

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→ August 17, 2018
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Deep Work.

I am very prone to distractions, especially when it comes to sitting down at the computer to get work done. The obvious one is social media – I need to be on Twitter and Facebook for work purposes, but I spend far more time on those sites, especially the former, than I could justify rationally – which soaks up far too much of both my time and attention each day. But there are far more distractions around me, even though I don’t work in an office. Email is a constant intrusion, coupled with the feeling that you have to respond to certain emails immediately. Texts are the same, with an even greater sense of urgency. But there are also more mundane aspects of quotidian life at home that interfere with my ability to work – seemingly innocuous things like stopping to make coffee or to grab the mail, or to do a little cleaning, or to go get the mail, or to start prepping dinner. I’m aware on some level that all of these things make me less productive than I could be, but it takes a conscious effort to surmount them.

Cal Newport has some advice for me and anyone else who suffers from the noises & distractions from anything good in his new book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, a quick read that offers some hard advice that sounds easy to follow but in practice is hard to implement. He argues that deep work is an entirely different mode of thinking, the kind that we tend to disdain today because it doesn’t ‘look’ productive, but in fact is far more conducive to the kinds of productivity that matter: you’ll get more done, and what you do will be better. Newport even emphasizes that this is the kind of work that’s going to matter more in our modern, knowledge-driven economy, where merely being good at repetitive but shallow tasks isn’t enough to give you a sustainable career.

Deep Work has two sections, and you could easily just skip the first and read the second if you’re more focused on advice and a checklist for becoming a deep worker than in his arguments why deep work matters (although I’d still recommend reading the whole thing). That first part explains why you should realign your working habits around deep work: that it’s valuable in the marketplace, that few people can do it well, and that the cognitive processes around it produce work that is meaningful for the person doing it. Your brain functions differently in ‘deep work’ modes, and the more time you spend practicing it, the better you’ll get, producing more work and higher quality work as a result. He delves into the idea of ‘deliberate practice,’ popularized by Malcolm Gladwell and then roundly mocked by critics, going back to the professor, K. Anders Ericsson, who coined the phrase based on research into how we learn difficult material and what separates experts in certain fields from others working in those areas.

Newport also talks distractions, explaining why they’re a real problem in part one and recommending avoiding them in part two. Open offices come in for particular criticism, because they create more noises and more opportunities for co-workers to interrupt any attempts at deep work, all under the guise of creating “more opportunities for collaboration” (which, he later points out, may not even be accurate). The increased desire across industries to measure employee productivity – what Newport calls “the metric black hole” – also contributes to the fight against deep work, driving employees to do what will improve their metrics, not what will be more productive. And there are huge social obstacles to deep work, because most of us naturally want to be responsive, collegial, and, worst of all, available for colleagues when they appear to need our attention.

Part two of Deep Work is the checklist, four global rules, each with various corollaries, for becoming a deep worker: practice working deeply, embrace boredom, quit social media, and schedule your day to sequester and minimize shallow work. Newport is really prescribing an entirely new way to approach your job, one that will probably feel highly restrictive and type A to most people. But even in less than two weeks of dabbling in some of his recommendations, I can vouch for everything I’ve tried. There’s no question he’s right about social media; I used to keep Twitter and my public Facebook page open in browser tabs all day, so I could keep an eye on relevant news and respond to reader questions, but I’ve stopped doing that entirely. I’m writing this post with my browser closed entirely, and have reserved any questions or links I’ll need to finish this review until I’ve completed the body text and am almost ready to post it. I’ve started cordoning off email time, realizing that virtually nothing in my email related to work is actually urgent unless it’s an editor’s question about something I’ve filed – and by that point, my period of deep work has paused because I’ve finished a column or post and moved on to the next task. I’ve long encouraged readers to post baseball questions in my chats, where I can address the entire audience at once, rather than via private messages like email or Facebook, where my answer goes to just one person. (I also wouldn’t have time to answer all the baseball questions I get through email or other services, but if you message me with questions about mental health, I will answer.) Somehow I managed to write a book without very good work habits, judging by the standards Newport lays out in Deep Work, but if I do get the chance to write another one, I’ll feel much better armed to do it now that I’ve read his advice.

Next up: Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel Pachinko.

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→ September 6, 2016
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The Antidote.

We are inundated with messages and products that promise to tell us how to be happy. A quick amazon search for “how to be happy” yields books with titles like The 18 Rules of Happiness: How to Be Happy, How We Choose to Be Happy: The 9 Choices of Extremely Happy People–Their Secrets, Their Stories, and Be Happy! – How to Stop Negative Thinking, Start Focusing on the Positive, and Create Your Happiness Mindset. You can spend even more money to attend seminars like “How Positive Psychology Changes Our Lives,” “Happiness and its Causes,” and “The Happiness Habit.” All of this, as you might imagine, is just so much bullshit, and I fail to see how someone else taking my money for it is going to make me any happier.

In fact, as Oliver Burkeman argues in The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, much of this material is actually deleterious to our efforts to be happier. The feeling that we should be happy just makes us less so, and attempts to be happier by pushing out negative thoughts creates anxiety and, as you probably know, does nothing to keep those negative thoughts at bay. Burkeman approaches the happiness paradox – how those of us in developed countries, especially those of the west, seem to be so much less happy today even though our most basic existential needs are largely met – from a novel angle, instead looking at ways to find happiness through understanding and even embracing the things that tend to make us unhappy.

Burkeman begins the book at a rah-rah positive-thinking seminar held by Dr. Robert Schuller, at the time the leader of a megachurch in Texas, who would end up filing for bankruptcy a few months after Burkeman attended the rally. (Schuller died of cancer in 2015.) Schuller’s words – and those of President George W. Bush, who spoke briefly at the rally as well – appear to have been a lot of empty if not outright counterproductive advice, like banishing the word “impossible” from your vocabulary. Fortunately, this book isn’t just about knocking over mountebanks like Schuller; Burkeman instead explores seven avenues of finding happiness that not only seem to work (or at least to help) but also run counter to the “think positive” mentality that poisons everyone’s attempts to get happier.

Burkeman begins with the stoics, the ones from ancient Greece and the folks still practicing and teaching stoicism today, and moves along to Buddhism, to the secular aspects of Eckhart Tolle’s writings, and even to the Mexican tradition of celebrating death. He visits a museum of commercial product failures in Michigan and explains how our refusal to reconsider our failures leads us to make the same mistakes – as many businesses do, conceiving the same products repeatedly despite past evidence that they’re bad ideas.

Several of those philosophies revolve around the fact that trying to avoid negative or unwanted thoughts makes them harder to get rid of (demonstrated in the white bear experiment). Thinking about the worst-case scenario – when it’s extremely unlikely to occur, that is – can in fact reduce your anxiety about bad things that are likely to occur, because you’ll better understand that they too shall pass. If you’ve practiced mindfulness, or traditional meditation, you know that you are not supposed to suppress negative thoughts when they occur because it doesn’t work; you are supposed to observe them “without judging” and let them float on by. If you’re obsessed with things going wrong, simply saying – or having someone tell you – that they won’t go wrong isn’t helpful. You have to acknowledge those possibilities and put them in the proper context before you can get around them, and then, perhaps, you can be happier.

Along the way, Burkeman demolishes a lot of happiness and productivity myths. Setting goals does not, in fact, make you more likely to achieve them, but it does make you less happy when you fall short. The management scholar Chris Kayes coined the term “fatal magnetism” when analyzing the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, where many climbers who should have known better continued toward the summit in conditions that all but guaranteed they’d die on the way down. Kayes argues that these climbers were so hellbent on achieving their goals that they couldn’t think rationally about failing to do so, an extreme example of how goal-setting can distort our thinking. Burkeman also discusses “security theater,” Bruce Schneier’s term for how we enact visible efforts to stop terrorist attacks – think metal detectors at baseball stadiums – that don’t make us any safer but do impose significant costs on us in time and money. So while The Antidote is ostensibly about happiness, it covers a lot of other areas of life where we go wrong, including obstacles to productivity, inability to properly assess danger (of the physical or financial kinds), and our susceptibility to the placebo effect.

I learned quite a bit from Burkeman’s book, much of which will directly change how I go about my daily life and my work. I am fortunate in that, by nature, I’m a happy, optimistic person; my anxiety disorder is not about dwelling on what might go wrong, but more about reacting badly when things do go wrong, as well as the ongoing static in my brain that didn’t abate until I started a low dose of medication. But like most people, happy or not, I have sources of stress – myriad work responsibilities, like that whole writing-a-book thing right now, and the challenge of balancing work, family, personal interests, and being a homeowner, to pick a few examples – and The Antidote explains how to change your mindset around these questions. Burkeman also gets repeated counsel from the people he interviews or sources he consults about living more in the present; we worry too much about the future and we probably dwell too much on the past, which is why we don’t appreciate what we have now enough to enjoy it. There is no single key to happiness, nor are there 18 steps to take you there, but I think The Antidote can at least help you realign your thinking so you have a chance to be happier.

Next up: I’ve been reading faster than I can write reviews, but I expect to finish Connie Willis’ Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel The Doomsday Book today.

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