Anne Janzer

Sow Ideas Like Sunflowers

Our first crop of sunflowers was a gift from unseen forces—a bird, perhaps, or a squirrel? The seedlings poked their heads up in the two raised beds in our garden—in and amongst the poppies, alongside the cosmos plants we had raised from seeds and planted in the bed.

My husband Steve (the one who does the gardening), contemplated the upstarts.

“I’m going to let these grow and see what they are.”

He had an inkling they were something special—volunteers worth giving a chance. I suspected they were broad-leafed weeds, but agreed.

A few weeks later, he was certain. “They’re sunflowers.”

And then there were more.

Nature is a considerate landscaper. She sowed the seeds in sequence, so that while one flower bloomed, the next was climbing toward the sky. For weeks last summer, we enjoyed a rotating succession of blooms. As one lost its petals and developed seeds for the birds, the next unfurled and turned its face to the sun.

A jay contemplating how to get at the seeds

Some were short, others tall. Their flower heads ranged from a few inches in diameter to 10 inches or more.

Sunflowers amidst the cosmos in our planting bed

Last fall, Steve gathered the seeds from these volunteers, and this spring he planted them with care, choosing their locations, hoping for the vigorous success of their ancestors.

This time, the world waited to devour them.

Unseen insects feasted not only on the established leaves but also the brand new growth, stunting the plants’ upward progress. A subterranean creature yanked a just-sprouted seedling below for a tasty treat.

We’ve had to shelter them from birds and bugs as seedlings, and spray them with neem oil (a natural insecticide) as they grow to protect the fresh leaves. (By we, I mean Steve.)

Why were last year’s volunteers, left to their own devices, so fortunate?

Maybe we only saw the survivors. (It’s survivorship bias!) Nature believes in abundance. Plants generate thousands of seeds so that a few can take hold and propagate themselves.

How does this related to writing?

Ideas are like sunflowers.

You need to generate a lot of ideas to produce something wonderful.

Some ideas never land on fertile soil—you have a concept, but it never makes it beyond your head and into words. Others are crowded out by the exigencies of life. You may nip others in the bud pretty early—you try writing, but it doesn’t go anywhere.

And some ideas are like those stunted, late sunflowers, with small, late blossoms that barely rise above the surrounding plants. Your writing may be lovely, but no one ever sees or hears it.

(Much writing belongs in that category.)

Not every seed sprouts. Not every idea deserves publication. If you don’t write, you’ll never know.

But when an idea arrives, like a gift from nature, see where it takes you. You might be delighted.

Catching a Flood of Writing Ideas

Searching for Creative Inspiration

When Good Advice Is a Trojan Horse

We live our lives surrounded by a chorus of shoulds.

They accumulate gradually, as we try to improve. We read the best practices, success stories and guides. We listen to industry experts and accept friendly tips—and most of them come loaded with new things we should be doing.

For example, if you’re trying to be a writer, you’ll find plenty of advice about what other authors have done, how to write, how to publish, how to be successful.

If you want to be a writer, you should…

Here’s how I wrote my book or experienced success, you should do the same.

Alas, these promises are like Trojan horses. You dutifully drag them into the walls of your life and take them on. But wrapped inside each nugget of advice is a small army of assumptions, obligations, and practices that can quickly take over your life.

One action leads to another, to another. Pretty soon you are spending most of your time on tasks dictated by other people’s objectives or experiences rather than your own values. Your life fills with things that you don’t really want to be doing.

I have wandered down many false trails following sign-posts marked “Should.”

sign post, with "You should go this way"

It’s taken me several years in my author career to have the confidence to sort through and set aside well-meaning advice that doesn’t fit my objectives.

Enough.

Examine the gifts of advice carefully

Before you accept advice, take a careful look at what’s inside it. Is it based on unspoken assumptions, and if so, what are they? Does the advice-giver’s life match the one you want to lead?

If you simply follow best practices, you’ll look and sound like everyone else. If that’s not your goal, think twice.

Be clear on your goals and values—and boundaries. Don’t accept gifts of advice blindly—even from me! Examine recommendations, accept the ones that fit, and leave the rest safely outside the walls. They’ll be there later if you need them.

Clearing out the invading army

If you already feel derailed, examine how you’re spending your time and notice all of the tasks you think should be doing.

The word should is a red flag. Every time you find yourself saying or thinking it, dig deeper: Who says I should? Why?

Do you spend all of your time racing between social media accounts, because people say you should be there as an author? What if that leaves you no time to write?

You may be spending time on apparent obligations that have slipped into your life cushioned in sound advice. They may not match your objectives or values.

Show those unintentional obligations to the exit before they overrun your life.

Castle gate, with words "Defend your time and attention."

When you defend the borders of your life from unwelcome intruders, you’ll make room to experience the genuine gift of a purposeful life. You’ll hear other possibilities and ideas knocking at the door—things that were overwhelmed or drowned out by the chorus of shoulds.

Here’s my challenge—look through the things on your “to do” list that are weighing you down. Re-examine those tasks. Are they taking you where you want to go? Are they genuine obligations, or simply someone else’s standards? Do they get in the way of more meaningful work?

Find at least one, and show it the door.

Then get back to your writing.

Bring a Full Mind to the Empty Page

Open a blank white notebook, pen and cup of coffee on the desk

You sit down to write, but can’t come up with anything good enough to besmirch the pristine whiteness of the blank page.

Perhaps you know what you want to write about. Even so, your inner critic bashes everything you propose. For every keystroke you make, there’s a backspace.

Once this encounter with the empty page happens a few times, limiting thoughts barge in. You’ve got writer’s block. Maybe you’re not cut out to do this. You’ve got nothing to write, so why torture yourself?

This may have nothing to do with your being a writer, and everything to do with what’s in your “writing tank.”

It’s not the empty page we’re afraid of—it’s the empty mind.

Where the words come from

Before words appear on paper, the ideas form in your head. (Sometimes those ideas don’t clarify until you put them into the words. For me, writing is a physical manifestation of deep thought.)

When writing is fun and fulfilling, the words emerge from different areas of our minds as images, emotions, and memories. Ideas connect and combine and invite their friends to the party.

Creativity results from messy, unstructured thoughts colliding and connecting.

But it’s tough to get into the right frame of mind—one in which those thoughts rise to the surface, so you can capture them in the containers of the right words.

That’s why it’s often best to prime the pump before you face the blank page of a draft, whether you’re writing a blog post or a book chapter.

First, prime the pump

Back when people hand-pumped water out of wells, they had to put a small amount of water in the pump to get the suction going.

That’s what the phrase “priming the pump” comes from. To start the water flowing, add water.

It works well for writing. To get your writing flowing, add words and ideas. Starting working with the things you want to write about. Prime your pump before you begin a first draft of anything, before you face that blank page.

In the writing recipe outlined in The Writer’s Process, this activity falls into the research phase. This is inner research. You rummage around in the attic of your mind to get the words flowing.

Pump-priming activities

Everyone will find different ways to prime their pumps.

My favorite pump-priming activity is writing. (No surprise there.) I use “directed journaling” or freewriting—writing something just for myself to put ideas into words, and welcome fresh ideas altogether.

Most of the stuff in my freewriting file gets thrown away, and that’s fine. It’s served its purpose. Bits and pieces may end up in the final draft. But that’s a lucky accident, and not my intention when writing.

Your inner research might look different than mine. You could:

Write in a journal as preparation for a blog post
Write a blog as preparation for a book
Use dictation or voice recognition software to capture ideas you talk through and transcribe them into words.
Use mind mapping to brainstorm ideas onto paper
Discuss your topic with another person

The activities outlined above work best early in the writing process, when you’re sorting through and capturing your thoughts.

Once you have those ideas and want to refine them, you can turn to advanced pump-priming activities that also contribute to your overall platform. These might include:

Teaching: Create a webinar or host a session for your local library.
Speaking: Find opportunities to speak publicly on your topic.

These activities involve an audience that can offer valuable input as you refine and explore your ideas. These experiences may change how you think about and present your ideas. They almost always make the work better.

When you’ve primed the pump, the blank page isn’t frightening—it’s an invitation to bring the swirl of ideas into the world.

Prime the pump, then let the words flow.

You can start pump-priming any time, even well before you plan to buckle down and start drafting. If you’d like to write a big project like a book, you can start putting your thoughts on it into words right away. Today.

What will you do to prime the pump for your next writing project?

Jargon Kills (Other People’s Time)

Old-fashioned watch buried in sand at the beach

Are you inadvertently wasting other people’s time when you speak or write? Here’s a cautionary tale for anyone who works in a field that uses acronyms, abbreviations, and other jargon.

“We had an NPS of 80.”

That comment came from a marketer on a panel discussion in a video. She was referring to Net Promoter Score—a metric of how willing customers are to recommend a business to others.

A few people commented on that score, and then the conversation moved on. I thought nothing of it, alas.

But here’s the thing—not everyone on the panel came from the world of marketing. Probably not everyone in the audience, either. The average person on the street has no reason to know or care about Net Promoter Score.

One of the panelists was mystified, but didn’t want to interrupt to clarify. As she told me later, “When you’re in the thick of it, you don’t like to ask, because you don’t like to look like an idiot.”

(We’ve all experienced that uncomfortable feeling when we don’t know something that others do.)

This woman (my new friend and ally in the jargon battle) is clearly diligent, because she set out to learn what the term meant.

Alas, she mis-heard the “N” as an “M.” So she searched for MPS after the call and found nothing that made sense for the context. (Meters per second? Minnesota Public Schools?)

Next she asked friends and colleagues—no one knew what MPS referred to.

She reached out to me, because I was on the panel and she didn’t remember who had mentioned it. She asked, “If you know what it is, would you mind enlightening me, so I don’t feel left out of the loop next time I hear it?”

Let’s recap here. She felt confused when she heard (misheard) the term. She spent time searching online, then consulting her colleagues, then crafting a message to me asking about the term.

How much time did the abbreviation save us in conversation? In contrast, how much time did she spend chasing down its meaning? And how about the cost of her feeling like an outsider?

Jargon may save you time, but at what cost?

The False Time Savings of Jargon

The word jargon refers to terminology known mostly to insiders in an industry. We use it for many reasons, including demonstrating our expertise or insider status in a group.

But we also use it to save time when communicating with colleagues. It’s faster to use abbreviations or acronyms than to spell things out. Academics use specific terms to be exceedingly precise when communicating with others.

When we use those terms with others outside of that specific domain, jargon quickly becomes a huge time sink—not for you, but for the people reading or listening to you.

If you are writing something that will go out into the world, or recording an interview, you cannot be sure who will listen. Even in the confines of your own workplace, you can alienate someone who is new at the job.

You might save a couple seconds by saying NPS instead of Net Promoter Score, but waste countless minutes of your listeners’ or readers’ time. They won’t appreciate it.

Respect the reader’s time by clarifying or eliminating industry terminology.

The word "Respect" spelled with wooden tiles

Alas, we are all subject to using jargon unknowingly. I am sure that I have done the same, unwittingly making people feel left out or uncertain.

What can we do about it?

First, recognize when we use it.

It’s tough detecting the jargon in our own words—that’s the curse of knowledge in action.

When we’re speaking live, as this panelist was, it’s difficult to catch.

When writing, however, we have a golden opportunity to protect the reader. It’s called revision.

Here are a few things to consider:

Scan your work for acronyms, abbreviations, or other industry terms and either spell them out or define them the first time they appear.
Use spelling/grammar checking software. If it coughs on a term, then that phrase is probably not familiar to all of your readers.
Ask an editor or someone else to read your work and be ruthless about highlighting anything unfamiliar. (If you ask a colleague in the same line of work, they may not spot the jargon.)

Second, be an advocate for the listener when you hear someone else using a term that might be unfamiliar. (In the terminology of allyship, be a jargon upstander.)

When you hear someone else using jargon in a meeting or on a Zoom call, clarify it for anyone who may be left out.

You don’t have to call people out on using the term—you don’t want to embarrass the speaker, but to clarify for the listener. You can be subtle.

If it’s an acronym or abbreviation, spell it out. If it’s an industry term, use it in context. Consider doing both.

This story made me question—how many times have I made readers feel unwelcome or insecure by using terms thoughtlessly? How much of other people’s time have I wasted by not taking the time to revise or clarify?

I wish I registered the abbreviation on that call. If I had, I could have said something like, “Wow, that’s a really terrific Net Promoter Score. Did your company rely heavily on that metric to track customer loyalty?”

Hindsight is always better than foresight. Let’s all help each other.

Respect the reader’s time by taking a moment to clarify.

You Are What You Risk: A Review

Your friend says she won’t fly anywhere until 2022. Is that excessively cautious? Another friend is flying around the country before they’ve gotten vaccines. Does that make sense? When should you go visit that elderly relative across the country?

In the past year, we’ve all become armchair risk analysts contemplating the various risk levels of our lives. Vaccines, variants… the calculations change from week to week.

Have you noticed that faced with the same information, people make different choices? What’s going on?

Michele Wucker’s new book You Are What You Risk addresses those issues perfectly. It arrives at a perfect moment, just when we need it most.

A new vocabulary of risk

You Are What You Risk is a Deep dive into personal risk, and it gives us a better vocabulary to understand and talk about risk.

Wucker describes us as each having a risk fingerprint, which is influenced by personality, social context, and experiences. It’s a fascinating way to think about this, as we notice the diversity of human behavior in this time of uncertainty.

She also asks that we stop throwing around the risk averse label and instead consider terms like risk perception (are we aware of the risks?), and risk attitude (how do we feel about them?)

My favorite definition is risk savvy:

The ability to recognize and assess dangers and opportunities reasonably accurately while balancing emotion and reason, and taking smart precautions so as to avoid being either foolhardy or overcautious.
Michele Wucker, You Are What You Risk

The book dives into the various factors affecting our risk fingerprints, including the societies in which we live, the people we spend time with, our personalities, our sense of purpose, even whether we’re eating spicy food!

Not All Risks Are Bad

While we want to protect ourselves from negative risks, we also need to get comfortable taking chances for positive outcomes. The book offers advice on how to train ourselves to take risks in service of growth and a greater purpose.

In many situations, it’s riskier to stay in your comfort zone than to act on opportunities to stretch and adapt to changing situations.

How can we better manage our own risks? We start by understanding our current risk fingerprint, then working with ourselves and our environment. Even things as subtle as what music is playing in the background can affect our decision making.

We can also build up our positive risk-taking with practice, and by surrounding ourselves with accountability groups (or risk circles) to help us stretch.

Risk Empathy

Wucker also writes about risk empathy, which she defines as “the ability to relate to the ways others experience risks and adapt your own behavior to accommodate those needs.”

I predict that for the rest of 2021, we’ll yet again be divided. This time it’s not mask-wearing. Rather, we’ll have varying degrees of comfort and understanding of risks of the lingering COVID-19 pandemic. Some people will hop on planes or attend in-person chorus rehearsals quickly, while make different choices.

We’ll need to show each other, and ourselves, grace in the coming months. Let’s understand and acknowledge our different risk fingerprints, and demonstrate risk empathy as we work together to define our new normal.

This book is a great place to start. Kudos to Michele Wucker for working diligently through the pandemic to get it out into the world when we need it.

Searching for Creative Inspiration

Sighting a whale is always a thrill, even from a great distance.

The first thing you usually see is the whale’s exhalation—the spout. A white, misty column appears suddenly on the horizon, then slowly dissipates as you focus in on it.

Is it a whale? You watch and wait.

Somewhere, underneath the distant surface, a large, magnificent creature is breathing, surfacing, rolling.

Then another spout appears nearby. Yes! If you’re lucky or have binoculars on hand, you might detect the sun’s reflection off the back of the whale as it rolls, or perhaps the wave of a fluke as it dives.

It’s like a glimpse into a hidden world—a breach of the borders between water and air, sea and sky. It’s always miraculous. You feel lucky, blessed by the encounter.

But finding the whales out at sea is difficult. Even if you visit the coast at the right general time of year, they are hard to see from afar. There’s an element of luck—are the whales even present? The conditions matter, too. A fairly calm ocean makes it easier to see those characteristic spouts.

The more intently you search for them, the tougher they are to detect—and the more disappointed you may be if they don’t show up.

The Benefits of Open Attention

I’ve been lucky enough to see gray whales migrating off our coast in California in recent months from a nearby state park. Over time, I’ve honed my method for finding them by practicing a kind of open attention.

Here’s my method, in case you’re ever looking for whales:

First, I let go of the idea of seeing whales and direct an open, accepting gaze on the sea, absorbing it all. Other things attract my attention—pelicans filing by in a line, diving cormorants, a sea otter.

While I am peacefully enjoying this prospect, in the corner of my vision I see something that doesn’t belong—a vertical white line. A spout. It feels like a gift for patient acceptance.

It strikes me that writers often spend our time on a similar quest, looking for ideas lurking in the depths that come to the surface to surprise and delight us.

Maybe the lessons of whale watching apply.

Spotting Inspiration

When looking for creative inspiration, start by putting yourself in the right situation—in this case, a mental situation rather than a physical one.

Just as calm water helps the whale watcher, a calm mind helps the writer. You’ll never notice the brilliant ideas if you are busy ruminating on what you’ve got to do tomorrow morning or what someone else said about you.

Direct your gaze to the general area you would like to think about. You’ll never spot a whale while scanning the mountains. Bring your mind’s attention to the general subject area you’d like to explore.

Then welcome a state of open attention. Rather than seeking the ideas, enjoy the contemplation. If you’re out walking, enjoy the walk. If you are freewriting or journaling, relish the exploration.

When you spot that puff of an idea, then you can focus in. Explore. Spend more time exploring and see what else comes up.

The big, brilliant ideas don’t show up every day on demand. But if you look often enough, you’re bound to find them.

Related Posts

Where Do You Go for Inspiration?

Adopting a Writing Mindset

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