My two favorites:

8.      Trust your instincts. Don’t allow yourself to get discouraged. Albert Einstein was expelled from school because his attitude had a negative effect on serious students; he failed his university entrance exam and had to attend a trade school for one year before finally being admitted; and was the only one in his graduating class who did not get a teaching position because no professor would recommend him. One professor said Einstein was “the laziest dog” the university ever had. Beethoven’s parents were told he was too stupid to be a music composer. Charles Darwin’s colleagues called him a fool and what he was doing “fool’s experiments” when he worked on his theory of biological evolution. Walt Disney was fired from his first job on a newspaper because “he lacked imagination.” Thomas Edison had only two years of formal schooling, was totally deaf in one ear and was hard of hearing in the other, was fired from his first job as a newsboy and later fired from his job as a telegrapher; and still he became the most famous inventor in the history of the U.S.

10.   You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are. Interpret your own experiences. All experiences are neutral. They have no meaning. You give them meaning by the way you choose to interpret them. If you are a priest, you see evidence of God everywhere. If you are an atheist, you see the absence of God everywhere. IBM observed that no one in the world had a personal computer. IBM interpreted this to mean there was no market. College dropouts, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, looked at the same absence of personal computers and saw a massive opportunity. Once Thomas Edison was approached by an assistant while working on the filament for the light bulb. The assistant asked Edison why he didn’t give up. “After all,” he said, “you have failed 5000 times.” Edison looked at him and told him that he didn’t understand what the assistant meant by failure, because, Edison said, “I have discovered 5000 things that don’t work.” You construct your own reality by how you choose to interpret your experiences.

Read the other 10 things you weren’t taught in school about creative thinking.

P.S. Happy New Year!

Finishing anything at all is a total win

There are three key steps to finishing any project:

1. Make it a distinct task, separate from your initial creative impulse
2. Define what “finished” means before you start, so you know when you’re done
3. Adjust your expectations down to realistic levels

The dirty secret that keeps people from finishing things: They don’t want to. Finishing things is no fun. That’s why you have to treat finishing as a separate activity, distinct from your initial creative impulse.

Finishing has nothing to do with starting. It’s like doing your taxes, or taking out the trash. When you get to the end of a project, the most useful thing you can do is reframe it as a brand-new thing, with a brand-new set of expectations and assumptions attached to it.

The least popular of my classes is the last session of Intro to Writing Fairy Tales. Everyone has heard the same stories at least once/week for five straight weeks. They’ve listened to endless iterations, struggled with intractable characters or plot points that never quite resolved to satisfaction, watched with frustration as the delicate soufflés of their literary ambition slowly deflate (every once in a while a story turns out better than anyone expected, but that’s rare). And they hate it. The only reason they stay is because I trick them into signing up for a public reading while their enthusiasm is still high, and we use the last class to polish the stories for the performance. There is so much sighing and grumbling in the last Intro to Writing Fairy Tales class. (“Finished” for them means “ready to read to a room full of strangers.”)

But you know what? The ones who hang in there, who honestly consider feedback on their second and third revisions, then go home to revise those hateful, lumpy passages again and again? When the time comes for the reading, they stand up in front of the microphone, read their fairy tales to a fresh group of listeners, and their stories shine like diamonds. Their stories are not only better than the stories of their less persistent classmates, they’re overall better than they realized!

By the end of the night they forget how much they hated their stories, and they’re practically drunk on praise, satisfaction, and the pleasure of showing up and doing their best. It’s amazing.

It’s easy to lose perspective when you’re working on the sixteenth version of something. You think it sucks, your [classmates, friends, family, pets, etc.] are starting to act like they’ll die if they hear/see it again. You can’t remember why you’re working so hard on something you’re probably not getting paid for.

By the time you’re finishing something, you’re usually sick to death of it, yourself, and everything associated with it—and you’re nose to nose with your limitations, which is often unpleasant. (This is why it helps to have low expectations. Don’t try to write a masterpiece. Just write a story with a beginning, middle, and end that you’re not ashamed to read to some strangers in a bar.)

But if you can make it to the finish line, you’ll be rewarded with a sense of satisfaction that’s bigger than the castle in the sky that got you started in the first place. Starting is about sparkles and fairy dust, tangerine-colored splashes of creative juice running down your chin, worlds of possibility opening before you—each more perfect than the last. Finishing is about sandpaper and touch-up paint, obsessive attention to detail and, finally, compromise—reconciling your real-life abilities with your ambitions. It’s also about having a real thing to show off. It sets you apart. Lots of people start. Finishing things makes you kind of a rock star. That’s worth a little discomfort, isn’t it?

Attention Seattle NaNoWriMo authors: the University Book Store Press wants to publish your book this year!

Find out the rules and etc. for the NaNoWriMo Contest.

Submission deadline is December 2. You have nothing to lose, and publication to gain!

When it comes to creative expression, one of your worst enemies can be your inner editor, that judge-y, mean-spirited, hyper-critical jerk who starts harshing on you as soon as you sit down to create. You know the one. It’s a toxic blend of lofty expectations and distorted perceptions, and left unchecked it can perpetuate creative infanticide on all your baby ideas.

That’s why NaNoWriMo is such a great event. If you don’t know about it, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write 1,000 words a day, every day, for 30 days. At the end, you’ll have a 30,000-word novel! How amazing is that? And there’s a tremendous community around your effort. Libraries invite you in to write. Independent bookstores do, too. You can meet other sweaty scribblers just like yourself in forums and support groups all over the world.

And, as if that’s not enough, amazing writers will write you pep talks! People like Jonathan Lethem and Audrey Niffenegger have already signed up to tell you how great you are for doing this, and how much everyone appreciates the fact that you’re showing up and putting in the effort.

You can even roam through the pep talk archives when you’re feeling frustrated and in need of inspiration. People like Lynda Barry (LYNDA BARRY!) and Lemony Snicket (one of my favorite bits about writing, ever, for all time) and Neil Gaiman and Dave Eggers and Peter Fucking Carey – all these people, these talented, accomplished people, will be cheering you on.

So what are you waiting for? Inspiration? Bah. The right time? Double bah! For the swelling to go down? BAH! The swelling may never go down. You may never have the right idea. And you will certainly never have the time. So why not just start?

As my sainted father always says, “There ain’t nothing to it but to do it.”

It starts in eight hours. Ready, set, WRITE!

There are lots of hard things about writing, but one of the hardest is editing your own work. Editing brain is an entirely different animal from writing brain, and flaws that seem obvious in someone else’s work often go unnoticed in our own. So what’s a poor writer to do?

Fortunately for us, Carol Saller, senior manuscript editor at the University of Chicago press and an editor at the Chicago Manual of Style, has compiled a list of errors she sees in manuscripts over and over again. For instance:

* Throat-clearing. When writer Richard Peck finishes a novel, he claims, he throws out the first chapter without reading it and writes it anew. He reasons that when we begin a work, we’re rarely certain of where it will end. Revisiting the beginning after the end has emerged makes sense. This time it will be easier to eliminate all the bush-beating.

* Personal tics. Most writers have a few pet words or phrases: decidedly, or by no means, or incredibly, or most important. Ditto for favorite sentence constructions: “Not only X but Y” is always popular. Once you identify your own foibles, they become more difficult to ignore.

* Repetition. Word-processing encourages this to the same degree that old-fashioned typewriting discouraged it: why say something once when you can say it three times? A common keyboard error is to copy and paste when you mean to cut and paste, so that whole passages are accidentally repeated verbatim.

Read the whole list.

And hook yourself up with an incredible blog about language and writing, while you’re at it.