Games Prolific Writers Play By L Michael Hall

A number of years ago I was repeatedly surprised when I read reviews describing me as a “prolific” writer. It didn’t feel that way to me. Not on the inside. From the inside, I was more aware of all the things involved in reading, researching, documenting, honing a idea, formulating it, creating frames for it, writing drafts, revising, etc. I continued to feel surprised the first dozen or so times I read that description. Eventually, I suppose I just got used to seeing that adjective, although I didn’t really think of myself as prolific.

In our Summer Intensive training programs in Florida last year, numerous people kept asking when I would do a training on writing. I didn’t really figure I had anything to say. But when NLP and Neuro-Semantic Trainer, David Pautler, volunteered to host the first Prolific Writing Workshop in Hilton Head SC, I consented. The next month, at the Millennial Project, Robert Dilts who has to be the most prolific writer in NLP, introduced me as a prolific writer. About the same time I mentioned this someone who replied, “How many books over 20 do you have to publish before yo’re prolific?” I got the point.

When I returned from the training (Jan. 2001), which was surprisingly delightful, exciting, and transformative beyond my expectations, Terry Fieland said that would be something of interest to write about. So here goes.

The Writing Game

In the past four years, I’ve personally worked with or coached some 20 individuals who “had a book in them” and wanted to write. Half of these occurred during the basic Meta-States training, Accessing Personal Genius. That was the mastery or genius that they wanted to access, cultivate, develop, and commissioned, so that’s what we worked on. We focused on intentionality, skill and strategy, the focused/flow state, and other prerequisites of personal genius.

Almost to a person, everybody primarily had to eliminate the things that got in their way, some legitimate constraints of everyday life (time management, how to understand the writing process, its stages, skills) and some just mere excuses. Typically, this meant either designing the customized states and strategies necessary for the writing game or slaying and/or taming the dragons that got in the way. Sometimes it meant reframing or outframing concepts about writing: writing, revising, planning, sequencing, formatting, revising, editing, scheduling time, researching, documenting, indexing sources, etc.

The Writing Game itself is actually pretty simple and straightforward. You have to get an idea, a good idea—a solid, substantial, and valid idea. You have to work that idea over, seek to falsify it, research who else has written about it, what are some of the current and leading thoughts about it, begin free-writing about it, begin formulating how to say it, dialogue about it with other minds, teach or train it, outline it, create some frames for it, get it down on paper, revise it half a dozen times, proof-read it, etc.

The “Just Get It Down On Paper” Game

If you can talk, you can write. Unless, of course, you’ve built an internal dragon that says you have to “write it right” the first time. If you can’t get it down on paper, or if you write your ideas fully prepared to crumple it up and toss it away at any moment, then you can hardly even get started playing the writing game. Not good.

The game that prolific writers play always involves some form of Just get it down on Paper! If you have to record it on audio-tape and pay someone to transcribe it, do whatever you have to do to get it down. Prolific writers can turn off their internal editor at the first stage of writing, because they know full well that there is no great writing, there’s only great re-writing—to quote my marketing expert friend, Joe Vitale (1997).

If you want to get into a state where you just turn on the faucet and let it flow, attend or read about what’s called “creative writing.” The so-called “creative” writing courses are misnamed because they give the impression that some writing is not creative. Give me a break. Even technical writing is creative. And non-fiction— another misnomer. There’s as much fiction in non-fiction as in fiction; often times, more. Someone has to create the form, style, expressions. Of course, then there is “boring” writing. But that goes back to a writer not being personally moved by the subject and failing to write from a “hot idea” state.

The “Quality Thinking” Game
The main thing about the basic Writing Game is the Idea. Those who “write writing” play a sabotaging game that will ultimate undermine their skills at writing. When we “write writing” we develop a focus that aims to impress rather than express. Yet good writing is not about writing. If writing calls attention to itself, then the voice or tone inside of the writing comes across as forced, strained, even egotistic. Good writing is like good speaking and training. Training is not about the trainer, presenting is not about the presenter. “It’s not?” No. It’s about the participants, the hearers, the content, the message.

That’s why good writing comes from good thinking. In fact, the quality of writing flows directly from, and expresses, the quality of our thinking. Herein lies the problem with many people who truly “have a book within them,” as they think about their book, they become much more focused on how to say it than what they have to say. And that’s a mistake, a big mistake.

In our Prolific Writers Workshop, I targeted the center of good writing as good quality thinking, and top-notch thinking as a matter of living with an idea until it takes possession of you. Too many people get an idea, and rush off to write about it with the result that they write down half-baked ideas, ideas untested and untried in the crucible of other minds.

What does it mean to live with an idea? It means to focus on it intently and to really get to know it. It means to fall in love with that idea... to look at it from multiple perspectives, to turn it over and inside out, to explore the history of that idea, to delve into the minds and hearts of others who have danced with it. It means making trips to the local library and becoming acquainted with the field within which that idea grows and the great minds who have seeded that thought. It also means to hang out with that idea when it is still formless, when it is vague, when your mind is a void about how to formulate it. It means living with ambiguity, confusion, and uncertainty for awhile.

Like a guy falling in love with a wonderful woman, and focusing intently on who she is, what she is like, her best qualities, it also means living with that idea when its flaws and imperfections come into view. This is the Writing Game that makes for the best writing and, in the long run, for prolific writing. This has allowed me to become much more productive.

This is especially true in the long run. In recent years I’ve been writing 3 books a year, 2 or 3 training manuals, and 30 to 35 articles. More recently I’ve been noticing a pattern developing. It’s the quality and depth pattern: the longer, deeper, and more intensely I live with a subject—the more ideas emerge, the richer the ideas become, and the more insights come.

The “Now, Just How Shall I Say It?” Game

We say in NLP that if you only have one choice, you are living the exciting life of a robot. If you have two choices, you’re living on the horns of a dilemma. It’s only have you have at least three choices, that you truly have some options. The same applies to writers.

Once you have your hot idea, it’s best to come up with half a dozen ways to say it. For the writer, this means learning about a wide variety of literary devices and formatting styles. Even an article in Anchor Point could be formatted as a letter, journal entry, how to description, argumentation of a point of view, review of a book or training, hypnotic induction, short story, biography, poetry, interview, news release, etc.

We can also write from many perspectives, adopt many tones of voice, use multitudes of language patterns, and evoke hundreds of states. These multitudes of variables in writing provide us a medium for developing tremendous flexibility. And the combinatorial interface of these can make the experience of writing itself forever challenging and personally stretching.

Prolific Games that I Play

After our first training in Prolific Writing, we set up a special egroup for all of the participants of the training. A few days after returning, as one gentleman was writing to the group, he commented that he had adopted one of my supporting beliefs. I read more intensely. What was this supporting belief? He said it was the belief-driven strategy, “I look upon every available moment as an opportunity to write.”

While that certainly rang a bell with me, I had not been aware that I had communicated such. First I wanted to write it down and remember it! I certainly had not put that statement in the first edition of the training manual. Yet I recognized it as one of the games I play and have numerous stories that I tell which fleshes that out. And true enough, I seldom have to slap my forehead with my palm, “I could have had a moment of writing!” I typically keep a notebook with me just for queues at banks and grocery stores, riding in a car, etc.

When I’m home, I always begin my day with two or three hours of reading at a local coffee shop. I always keep a book simmering on my mind. And I typically read one book at a time. For me, it’s like having a conversation with the author. Over coffee we talk. I mostly listen, although I am always writing notes in the margins, asking questions, wondering, checking out references, visiting the library, arguing, indexing the author’s points and lines of reasoning, and making mental movies in my head.

I write mostly to learn, to discover, to understand, and to experience. If I can write it so that it conveys corresponding ideas and states in another, I figure I know the subject pretty well. The game I play is mostly the game of “Writing for Me.” That helps me to forget about trying to “write writing.” I write to more fully understand, to develop my own skills and competencies. Numerous things that are now books (i.e., The Spirit of NLP, Becoming a Ferocious Presenter, Meta-States), I first wrote only for my eyes, just as notes.

In this sense, I cannot not write. I find it so pleasurable that if it become illegal and a felony against the state, I’d go underground to write. To play with ideas, to find new ways to express a thrilling understanding, to explore what I don’t know, to find out what I do—these are the psychic and semantic pleasures of writing.

One writer of books on writing said that if something is worth living, it’s worth writing about. That’s a common theme in the field of writing. That idea leads to journal writing. Write about what you’re experiencing every day. Wake up and see, truly see the people, the events, the experiences, the words, the culture, the opportunities.

There’s another side of that. To write is to live. Writing wakes us up in a marvelous way. It forces us to notice, to see, to hear, to feel, to develop sensory awareness. Writing wakes us up to our ideas, our higher frames of mind, our neuro-semantic states. In fact, the quality of our lives affects the quality of our writing and vise versa. Writing gently invites us to become more authentic, more known to ourselves.

Whether you write your life experiences and thoughts down or not, the life you live— the life you “author” relates to the words you “author.” And authoring a life, a book, a poem, a story, etc. describes, in part, how we develop our own personal authority to speak and write of what we learn, experience, hope, desire, and know. We’ve lived with an idea and that idea has influenced our mind, emotions, and life. It has authored facets of who we are. No wonder we’re then able to write with more authority.

There is also the wonder of co-writing. When you engage in co-authoring an article, book, training manual, marketing piece, narrative, biography, etc. with someone, you enter into another dimension of writing. If you’ve set up the frames that allow you to effectively navigate the stages and processes, then you have a partner for your explorations— another mind to sharpen yours with. Co-writing also makes for becoming more prolific.

And Then There are the Perks

In addition to the internal perks that makes us richer in mind and speech, writing has numerous external perks. From creating products that can leave a legacy, pass on knowledge to the next generation (“time binding” to quote Korzybski), writing can increase your personal credibility, open doors of opportunities, make some money, and touch the lives of people you’ll never seen all over the globe.

References

Hall, L. Michael. (2000) Frame games: Persuasion elegance. Winning at the games of life. Clifton, CO. Neuro-Semantics Publications.

Hall, L. Michael. (2001). Prolific Writing Training Manual: Games Prolific Writers Play. Clifton, CO. Neuro-Semantics Publications.

Hickman, Dixie Elise; Jacobson, Sid. (1998). The power process: An NLP approach to writing. Carmarthen, Wales, UK: Anglo-American Book Co.

Vitale, Joe. (1997). Cyber writing: How to promote your product or service online. NY: AMACOM: American Management Association.