January 2024

And I don’t mean through binoculars.

Like a lot of self-employed people, I work primarily from home. I became self-employed in 1998, so that’s a long time working on my own. Like a lot of writers, I’m quite a self-contained person. I’m used to living in my head and I enjoy my own company. And although a lot of people might think I’m an extrovert, I’m really quite introverted and I recharge my batteries during quiet, alone time.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t give me much opportunity to observe people doing people-y things, and that reduces the amount of externally-generated inspiration for new characters that I get. Sure, I have a wealth of experience of people – I mean, I haven’t spent the last 26 years living in a cave on a remote mountainside – so I can certainly conjure characters from my own imagination, but drawing from real life adds detail to the pictures my mind can draw.

Towards the end of last year, I started taking improv lessons with the aim of loosening up the slightly rusty nuts and bolts in my brain. It’s been a huge amount of fun and I am definitely beginning to feel more creative and more at ease with my instincts. But it’s also given me an opportunity to watch how other people do improv and how they approach creating a scene. And that has been unexpectedly fascinating!

We all have our quirks, our default ways of thinking. I know that in improv I always go for a conversational approach, whereas others default to disagreement, surrealism, or strange accents. I struggle to mime, because I’m really self-conscious about it, whereas others take to it like a duck to water (you can imagine the mime of that yourself). Some people let their improv partners lead, others have a clear idea of what they think the scene should become and work hard to make sure that they achieve that vision.

All of these quirks act as useful jumping off points for character development. Note that I’m not basing new characters on individual people, but when I see multiple people taking a similar approach, I ask myself, “If this were your first experience of a character’s attitude, how else might you expect them to behave?” It’s a process of taking a particular action or moment and then extrapolating it out.

When I think back to other groups I’ve been a part of, such as the ballroom dance lessons my husband and I took back in Sheboygan, WI, I didn’t get quite the same opportunity to watch how other participants responded to those around them. As you might expect, we all gathered in the hall, changed into our dance shoes, then did what we were told. There was very little opportunity to get to know people, and certainly no opportunity to watch how they might behave in multiple different scenarios over the course of one evening.

I know a lot of folk talk about people-watching in cafes, but I’m not convinced that you get much in the way of depth there, not unless you have extremely sharp ears and the tables are close together. To learn more about people’s characters, you need to be able to engage and actively observe over a period of weeks or months. And that active observation is important – if you’re always focused on throwing pots or drawing or singing, then you’re not free to watch and absorb.

Improv is great for giving you that time because, at least in our group, about half the lesson is sitting and watching other people perform. I suspect that any activity that includes a percentage of unfocused time, such walking clubs, book clubs or local theatre groups, will provide you with a chance to step back and start to build your own mental chap book of behaviours, idiosyncrasies and foibles that you can work into your characters.

So maybe, if you want to up your character game this year, your first step should be to find yourself a club to join or lessons to take?

Next Grist webinar – Plan Continuation Bias

The next Grist webinar will take place on Thursday 8 February at 19:00 GMT, and we’ll be taking a look at Plan Continuation Bias and how you can use that, and other cognitive biases, to help your characters make a jolly old mess of whatever it is they are trying to do. Stay tuned for the Zoom link, which will be sent out to paid Substack subscribers next week!

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Sometimes we should resolve not to add more to our lives, but to make space by taking things away.

I am not a fan of New Year’s resolutions. I used to make them, but I rarely kept them. The New Year, falling as it does in the middle of winter, season of damp grey days and not enough sunlight, is not a good time for me to be trying to do something new. It can be a struggle just to get through the day in one piece without adding the extra weight of a resolution to my shoulders.

So I was rather pleased to see a couple of articles doing the rounds this year that question the validity of two aspects to New Year’s resolutions that I find most difficult to deal with: Adding more to our plate and perfectionism.

Tim Harford in the Financial Times tackles the premise that our resolutions usually add new activities to our lives when we should really take a moment to asses what our lives are already full of and search for something we can take away. He discusses “subtraction neglect”, where we will generally try to solve a problem by adding something rather than removing it. We’ll try to improve a recipe by adding ingredients or fix a wonky Lego bridge by adding a block rather than taking anything away.

But the devil is always in the details and Harford has found it hard to know what to take away from his life:

as I pondered my weekly commitments and the list of things I was hoping to achieve over the next three months, I struggled. What could I subtract? I wanted to do all of it.

Even asking Leidy Klotz, author of Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, for advice didn’t help.

Klotz suggested an experiment, which he calls a “reverse pilot”. Unlike a regular pilot, in which you temporarily try something new, a reverse pilot calls for temporary subtraction. Just stop doing something for a bit, wrote Klotz, and see what happens. “Sometimes there is no way to know for sure what the outcome will be from removing something.”

Fair enough. Although I still couldn’t work out what to subtract from my life. Exercise less? Nope. See less of the children? They might want that, but it hardly felt like a noble plan. Less culture, less music, see friends less often?

Harford jokingly concludes that perhaps he should just work less, which I actually do think is a good answer. We have a lot of evidence that four day weeks – that is, proper four day weeks not pretend ones where you have to cram a full week’s work into less time – are highly beneficial, increasing productivity, reducing burnout and improving wellbeing. So actually, reducing work is a legitimate answer, even though Harford can’t quite bring himself to admit that.

But something else to consider reducing is perfectionism.

I will admit, I am a bit of a perfectionist. I want to put my very best work out into the world, whether that’s a newsletter or a book or Ada Lovelace Day Live. I will sweat the details. But actually, maybe, some of those details don’t matter?

Not every task is created equal and there are some areas where things do not have to be perfect, they just have to be good enough. Indeed, most things can just be good enough. That’s Sophie McBain’s argument in The Guardian and, as a recovering perfectionist, it’s one that I need to take to heart.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz suggests that there are two responses when faced with endless choice:

“Satisficers” are happy to pick a good enough option and are unlikely to spend their free time reading hundreds of product reviews, but “maximisers” feel compelled to make the best possible choice. This means the more choices they are offered, the worse off they are: an expansion of possibilities makes decision-making harder and regret the more likely outcome.

McBain points out that we talk about so much of our lives in maximiser terms, and perhaps we should rein that in and allow ourselves to be content with good enough.

How much energy do we waste on trying to close that gap between good enough and perfect? How much additional time does that take? What if we just admitted to ourselves, as Oliver Burkeman says, “we’ve already failed, totally and irredeemably.” Wouldn’t that give us so much more freedom to be good enough and to do other things with the time and energy we waste on trying to be perfect?

Burkeman goes on to say:

Behind our more strenuous attempts at personal change, there’s almost always the desire for a feeling of control. We want to lever ourselves into a position of dominance over our lives, so that we might finally feel secure and in charge, and no longer so vulnerable to events. But whichever way you look at it, this kind of control is an illusion.

New Year’s resolutions are the epitome of this. Every year, we try to assert more control over our lives so that we can feel better about them. Instead, we should let that go, accept that much of what we want to achieve is actually outside of our control, and look at finding ways to enjoy the process instead.

This is especially true of creative work where we are so often hostages to fortune. We could write the best book in the world, but if the time isn’t right then it won’t be published. Equally, if we’re lucky enough to hit the zeitgeist, then a book that’s just good enough can do real numbers. Neither outcome is within our control.

So this year, before we try to come up with some New Year’s resolutions, before we start outlining all our goals, perhaps we should have a think about what we could do less of instead. How can we practice being a satisficer? Where can we let go of our perfectionism? How do we identify which activities aren’t helping us and do less of them, in favour of doing thing that help us achieve what’s important to us and make us happier?

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