Professor Conrad and Gracie Lake discuss how to write.  Writing is about making a connection–determining what your thinking has in common with your audience. It can be as simple as starting out with a common geographical area. “Yes, I’m from Chicago too,”  or “I love living in Southern California,” or “I worked up north in the cold country.” Anything works as long as it is a real connection.

We also cover how to write by getting out of your own way and writing what is already welling up inside you. There is nothing like the powerful magnetic pull of a story to get your point across. That means stepping out of yourself and delivering a solid story. In fact,s tory telling is one of the best ways to get a point across.

The interview also covers the important art of making course corrections. If you aren’t writing, then you don’t know how to improve, but if you are writing, whether as a beginner, intermediate, or as a professional, you know that every piece you write can be improved. Once you write, you can take a measure of where you are. Using that information, you can plot a new course and correct yourself to success.

Professor Conrad interview with Gracie Lake on making a connection and getting out of your own way by Professorconrad on Mixcloud

If you are wondering how to get your small business engaged in blogging and social media listen to this interview with Professor Conrad and Gracie Lake. Find out how to get the writing process going and get noticed online.

Peter Conrad and Gracie Lake interview on how to write a blog by Professorconrad on Mixcloud

I had a great response to my post yesterday in the class, so I thought I’d share what I wrote back to one of my students who was talking about her hard times in the past week.

Hi X,

It sounds like prayer is one of the things you do to change the equation in your function box. You know, we all are awash in a sea of our own thoughts. The good and the bad things that happen in our day get automatically processed in our function boxes. We react with more good or bad thoughts as output. The output thoughts control the link to what we do about the events.

Interestingly, some people believe that we cannot control the flow of our thoughts.

I posted this to my students today. I thought some of you might enjoy reading it.

Hi Class,

Since I began teaching many years ago, I have heard many possible versions of why students couldn’t get their work in on time. The most common is: “I’ve got a lot of stuff going on at home.” Another common version is: “I’ve got a lot of stuff going on at work.”

Of course there are the individual events related to health and money that jump up and get in the way of schooling. Sometimes these issues are fabricated as plausible excuses to get out of work, but far more often there is at least a seed of truth in the statements. I don’t discount them. In fact, I can understand how home life, work, health, and money can all impact the way we think, and therefore the way we perform.

If you see yourself in any of the above statements or possibilities I talk about, please don’t take it personally.

There it is: the blank page. Now what do you do? Sit back and stare at the page, wondering where the words will come from? Stare at the ceiling and think? Put on a serious look, with hand to chin, so you look like a writer? Pace around the room in a writerly fashion?

All these look like what a writer does . . .at least that’s what writers do in the movies. They muse and wrestle with writing demons for hours, days, and sometimes months or years. Finally, the dam breaks and they begin to flow their ideas on the page. It takes no effort, and they work until they collapse, producing the artistic triumph that only the agony of musing and wrestling can bring. Looking like a writer may feel like being a writer, but it ain’t necessarily so.

New writers all face the same issues (and so do some experienced writers). They doubt that they can write. They doubt that anyone would be interested in what they want to write. They doubt until they put down the pen or shut off the computer. They doubt until they quietly wither the writer within to nothing.

There is no need to doubt. You have a writer within you. You have ideas, interests, and knowledge to share. You have stories and poems tightly packed in the most powerful computer we know–your brain.

Here’s something you might not know. . . .

Are you confused? I’ve taught for over two decades, and I can be as confused as any of my students ever were.

Setting the stage for being confused:

Being confused means falling out of the comfortable line of thinking.

Life became a bit more complicated during tax season this year. We have been working with an accounting program that normally does a great job of keeping all of our income and expenses organized, but for some reason the program’s database got corrupted (I’m pretty sure I was the corrupting influence, but with computers, it’s always best to blame the machine–just to be safe). All blame aside, someone (me) had to transfer every transaction out of the database and go through it by hand. This meant reorganizing every bill and every receipt to make sure that dates, amounts, and categories all lined up.

I was confused.

Believe me, they didn’t line up. I was confused. For example, I had about twenty or so different business receipts all dated July 1, regardless of when they were actually paid or billed. The same thing happened in September. According to the data, we had eaten at a place called Dobson’s Restaurant over a dozen times, but we only went there once. The clincher was the bill for $78 for parking at Malaga Car Park, which happens to be in Spain. Um . . . Spain? Didn’t go there. Didn’t park there. Yeah, I was confused.