I would expand the main idea. What you’ve written isn’t so much “How I cured my chronic back pain” as it is “How seeking a cure for my chronic back pain led to my catharsis”.

Your first paragraph should be like a summary of the whole article. This would be mine:

I. Chronic back pain

A. sought help through traditional medicine
B. sought help through non-traditional medicine
C. cured my back pain and found myself in the process.

The proceeding paragraphs would expand upon A, B and C.

Remember your main idea is what you want the reader to gain or conclude from reading the article. Knights don’t fight dragons for the hell of it. They fight dragons to win the princess. The story is how he gets the princess, but we know there is a princess out there somewhere in the beginning of the story.

I would work on the transition between non-traditional medicine and soft-touch chiropractors/writing.  I would include the soft-touch in with the non-traditional medicine. Make writing (and meditation maybe?) it’s own paragraph about how self-introspection has helped you solve this problem. You could include how your friends have opened doors you didn’t know existed as well.

Those are my suggestions. Hope I’m not being too authoritarian here. Take what you can use and leave the rest, as they say.

Namaste

I. Writing an outline helps organize your ideas, gives your piece a strong backbone and makes the writing process more efficient and less frustrating.

A. Every piece of writing is a series of ideas put together to convey a larger idea.

B. Whatever you are writing, you need to have substance before you have style.

C. By using an outline, you know where your piece is going and you can concentrate you efforts on good writing.

II. Every piece of writing is a series of ideas put together to convey a larger idea.

A. Words are nothing more than symbols for ideas.

B. Every idea has all other ideas in it.

C. Through an outline you can tap into the matrix of words to create a unique organization of thought.

III. Whatever you are writing, you need to have substance before you have style.

A. Many people focus on how they will write something rather than what they are writing.

B. Ultimately, you want to communicate your thoughts in the clearest, most concise way possible.

C. So start with getting down what you want to say and then shape and mold it into something brilliant.

IV. By using an outline, you know where your piece is going and you can concentrate you efforts on good writing.

A.  An outline is like a map to what you are writing. It can look a little repetitive, but consider that New York City and Los Angeles both look like dots on a map.

B. An outline just tells you where things are at, not where you necessarily have to go.

C.  But if you have to write something quick and it isn’t Hamlet, you can save a lot of time and headaches.

V.  Writing an outline helps organize your ideas, gives your piece a strong backbone and makes the writing process more efficient and less frustrating.

A. Every piece of writing is a series of ideas put together to convey a larger idea.

B. Whatever you are writing, you need to have substance before you have style.

C. By using an outline, you know where your piece is going and you can concentrate you efforts on good writing.

I was really happy with the way that our conversation today turned out. There was no major upheaval between us. That’s good considering we disagreed on some things. As you know, I’m a thinker. And there’s some things you said rolling around that I need to express.

The difference between a writer and a hack is that the writer speaks from the heart and the hack is just following a formula. Writing might be therapy, but it’s constructive therapy. And I’ve been to enough meetings to know that you can’t find this at the nooner. Most people share their war stories, bullshit and unsolicited advice. It’s not the same and you know it.

The main thing you said that keeps coming up is about how I ask the people closest to me for validation, for approval, but they don’t see it. You don’t see it. People who barely know me, like this lady here (read the comments), or my friends: they can see it, but my family and loved ones can’t. I’m not pointing the finger. I just think that is sad.

What my friends see is a huge amount of potential going to waste. What my past girlfriends saw was a lack of confidence in myself. It’s why they left. What you see is someone who thinks they have something that they really do not. That actually says more about you than me.

You said that if someone were to look at your life, they might say that you had it all but then you gave it all away. I think you traded comfort for authenticity. The longer you’ve been sober, the more I see the real you coming out. You can’t hide behind compromises and what passes for common sense. The real you won’t settle for less than the real you.

If you want a legitimate answer to why I feel this way, it’s because I don’t want to wait 35 years to figure that out. From what I understand, God gets a little pissed when you just bury your authentic self in the ground. It’s a feeling like “wake the **** up!” not “I’m a little irritable today.”

It might be all about me, but I want to show my kids that they can make something out of themselves. They can be exactly what they want to be. They don’t have to compromise. Tell me, what’s more important: that they have the latest toy under the Christmas tree or belief in themselves? They become what they see and not what you tell them anyway, right? If they see a broken man, what will they become?

Last thing: you said I was a good writer and not a great one. Believe it or not, I’m not offended. I strive to be competent, not comprehensive. Great writers generally starve. People study their works in a literature class after they’re dead. Good writers are real people. Stephen King is a good writer, but he’s not a great. James Joyce, he’s great, but how many people pick up Finnegan’s Wake for some light reading before bed?

You were right about a lot of things today. Maybe I need some angst to really get the juices flowing. What I was really asking today is that you invest in the potential you see. That doesn’t mean money. It means faith. Go back through this blog and my other one. Read it. Compare it to some of these other people out there blogging. Make a rational critique. Then help me make the most out of this talent. It’s what I do for my kids. It’s what I’m asking of you.

Love,

Ned

Your basic essay has three parts and five paragraphs:

1. Opening: Usually one paragraph
2. Body: Usually three paragraphs
3. Closing: Usually one paragraph

Start with the Body

Most people start with a rambling opening that rarely has anything to do with the body and a quick closing that sounds exactly like the opening. To prevent this problem, start with the body. The body consists of (generally) three ideas that support the main idea of the essay. So now you need to answer the questions “What is my main idea?” and “What three ideas support the main one?”

Determine the Main Idea

Your main idea should describe the purpose of your writing. There are three purposes: narrative, persuasive, and expository. The purpose is what you want your audience to gain from reading your essay.

Narrative: A narrative is a sequence of events of a personal, biographical or fictional nature. Ask yourself:  What is the last event in that sequence? I.e. John Wilkes Booth murdered Abraham Lincoln to avenge the South.

Persuasive: A persuasive essay takes a particular stance for or against something. Ask yourself: What is the stance you want people to take? I.e. Abortion is wrong because every unborn child is a potential Einstein.

Expository: An expository essay is a “how-to” piece and is similar to a narrative in some ways. Ask yourself: What is the final product of your process? I.e. Many people are missing the basics on how to write an essay, so I put together this article.

Determine your supporting ideas

In a narrative or expository essay, you can utilize a simple sequence of events: Beginning, Middle and the End. If you want to get creative, you could take a multi-viewpoint approach. Say you were writing a narrative about 9/11. You have one event, but each paragraph could address a different viewpoint (a fireman, a mother, a Wall Street broker). For expository essays, you can use a map approach. Instead of offering a linear process, you give a map or model and then describe the map (this is the elephant’s legs, body and trunk). The important point is that it’s clearly organized.

For a persuasive essay, I recommend a thesis/antithesis/synthesis approach. Most people just offer a “this vs. that” comparative essay, but the idea is to persuade the audience so you want to tip the scale a bit in your favor. Say you were writing an essay against abortion. The thesis is the pro-life stance (your stance), the antithesis is the pro-choice stance (the other stance), the synthesis would show how the pro-life stance is appropriate  (answering the pro-choice rationale).

Get some references

Now that you have a main idea and your supporting ideas, you need to get some references. I suggest one reference for each paragraph in the body of the essay. Most people don’t have difficulties finding references, they have difficulties knowing what to quote or utilize from those references. Here’s a simple way:

Narratives: For biographies, no one tells a person’s story the same way. Look for the differences between viewpoints of biographers. Emphasize those differences in your essay. For personal or fictional narratives, you could reference music, books, movies and historical events to make your essay dynamic.

Expository: The main reason to offer references in an expository essay is so that people can expand their understanding of a process. Use materials written by experts that are readily available and easy to understand. If you were writing about yoga for example, you might use Yoga for Everybody as opposed to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

Persuasive: For your stance, use information that everyone accepts as fact. Avoid anything radical or questionable in any way. Save that for your opponent’s stance. You want people to accept your opinion as simple common sense.

Your Opening and Closing

To get people’s attention you want to create what’s called an open loop. In your opening, you give something for the reader to think about: a question, a reflection, a scene, etc. You want to answer the question, re-visit the reflection or close the scene in your conclusion. For example, in this piece, I told you that you can write an essay in an hour. I gave you a reason to read this article.

In expository essays (like this one) a good opening is to offer a benefit. In a narrative, a good action sequence leading to a climax is a good opening. In persuasion, a reflection on a particular event that leads people to re-evaluate their opinion is a good opening. There are many other ways to open, these are just some suggestions.

Your closing should give the benefit in an expository, give a twist ending to the opening scene in the narrative and a return to a reflection with a call to action in a persuasive.

Writing, Revision and How to Put this all Together in an Hour

To write an essay in an hour, you need to have a good idea what you are writing about and I hope this article has helped you do that. In one hour you are going to spend:

20 minutes brainstorming and outlining

20 minutes writing

20 minutes revising

Brainstorming and Outlining

There are many ways to brainstorm about an idea. We’re going to keep it simple so that we can make this quick. There’s a reason why brainstorming and outlining are together… because they are the same thing in this process.

Writing

If you have an egg timer or something, set it for twenty minutes and just write according to the outline. Try not to edit too much during this part (that’s why you set the timer). Allow for all the bad English you want: misspellings, bad punctuation, fragments, run-on sentences, too many adverbs and adjectives, bad transition, etc.

Revising

It’s very important that you revise. Revision is eighty percent of writing. It is not nearly as painful or time-consuming as it may appear.

Your going to revise in three steps:

1. Global Changes: Look at the over-all essay. Is everything where it is supposed to be according to the outline? Do your transitions from one part to another make sense? Is there a transition from one part to another (opening to body to closing)?

2. Regional Changes: Read the piece out-loud. Do the paragraphs transition smoothly from one to the next? Do your sentences repeat the same statement over and over? Is there an easier (clearer) way you could write any given sentence? If there is, do it. Make your sentences short and to the point. Avoid any weird phrasing, lots of commas and multiple adjectives.

3. Local Changes: go over the spelling and punctuation. Sometimes spelling/grammar-check miss words and phrases. Tweek a sentence, use a different word here and there. This last revision can be very beneficial.

Take it to the next level

If you have any comments on this article, please feel free to add one below. If you need further help, I’d be happy to edit your essay. I will not re-write it for you. Send your essay to nedjlawrence@yahoo.com

- Blog for people. I think the main reason to keep a blog is to interact with other bloggers. The people who I’ve met and talked to through this blog have helped me keep it together through a very rough month. I’ve met people who I share interests, problems, solutions… etc.  

-  Let a blog define itself. People say you should decide what a blog is going to be about before you start. Whatever idea you have, it will probably change. So what? You can always edit or delete old posts or allow people to see the evolution to how you got here. When you start off with some hardcore plan, either you get overwhelmed trying to do everything at once or the subject matter is too narrow to keep up the content.

- Talk about your pet. People say you shouldn’t talk about personal stuff or your cat. The posts that got me a lot of readership have been the one’s based on my personal experience. Not to mention, there are a lot of people who own a parakeet as well. Talk about what you want to talk about.

- Comment, visit, respond. Part of blogging is paying attention to what others are doing with their blog. If someone comments on my blog, I will visit their site after I respond to what they said. I’ll look for posts that I have something say. I find it odd that some of these ‘problogger’ types don’t respond to their readership. I feel like I’m talking to voice mail.

- Post when you feel like it. Post 20 times in one day and then don’t post for a week. Post every day. Make your posts one paragraph or three pages. Post only on Tuesday at 3 a.m. I got in the habit of posting every morning for a while. It helped set up my day.

- Go for a walk. I don’t even follow this suggestion. I spend way too much time sitting here staring a screen for something interesting to happen. It’s hard to blog when you don’t have a life away from a computer.

I’m out of suggestions for now. I hope this helps someone out there feel a little more comfortable blogging. I’ll add some more tomorrow.

Namaste

- 

I started my own website the Church of Ned. Please stop by and pay me a visit.

Namaste

But we sure do give it a shot, don’t we?

Perfectionism causes more misery in this world than we likely realize. We’ve all had that boss at work who looks like he’s about to have a coronary because something wasn’t done right.

Or how about that ride home from the office? None of those people know how to drive as perfect as you.

Have you ever dated someone that told you everything you are doing wrong from the way you brush your teeth to the way you argue together? If you haven’t, I’m free this friday. 

Do you find yourself counting the number of mis-spellings, run-on sentences or just plain bad English you find on some of these blogs (guilty as charged)? How many times do you go to write something, you got this great idea, but you sit there staring at a blank screen? Are you waiting for the ghost of Hemingway to take over your body and type this masterpiece? (Where’s my ouija board?)

Here’s a list of suggestions I’ve compiled for someone else (not you, of course). Maybe you can mail it to your favorite perfectionist without a return address. God knows, he’d go ballistic if he found out who wrote it.

1. Remove “must”, “should” or “need to” from your internal monologue.

This is from the psychiatrist Albert Ellis, who created Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT).

When that guy cuts you off in traffic, you (unconsciously) tell yourself, “People shouldn’t drive like that around me.”

Just by (consciously) changing that sentence to, “I wish people didn’t drive like that, but sometimes they do,” can reduce the level of anger you feel.

“Must”, “should”, and “need to” are all signs of absolute thinking. We’re injecting irrational (unrealistic) rules in the workings of reality, which causes our emotions to take over.

If you get this one, the other suggestions become obvious. 

2. Stop trying to control other people or events.

Most of us have a model in our heads of how reality should work and an external world that doesn’t work that way. We try manipulating or directly ordering people to act like the utopia in our minds says they should.

Certain situations are ‘unacceptable’ to us and when they happen, “heads are going to roll.” There’s always someone to blame. Alcoholics are famous for this one.

It sucks being that kind of person. You are never happy because nothing ever lives up to your standards of happiness. The answer to this problem is to accept people and situations as they are and work on changing yourself. It’s amazing how happy you can be when people are being idiots and the sky is falling.

3. Stop trying to know everything and start experiencing.

Have you ever met someone who thinks they know everything? Some people call them teenagers… or doctors. They know how to solve your problem even though they have never actually had that experience. They tell you exactly what you need to do and God help you if you don’t do as they say. When I meet one of these people, I run… fast. I’m not going to lie to you. People like this are scary (like ‘Hitler’ scary).

At some point in my life, I realized that computers store data and human beings have experiences. I can tell you how I solved a problem, but I can’t tell you how to solve your problem. Some problems I haven’t had and some solutions won’t work for you. It’s your job to determine what works for you and what doesn’t.

4. Quit labelling people.

A person who commits a rape is not a rapist. A person who tells a lie is not a liar. A person who gets mad is not an aggressor. A person who feels sad is not depressed.

This is a subtle way of judging other people and ourselves. We tend to embody the label we have been given by society or the one we give ourselves. This label can put a dark tint on our perception. Consider a person who lost the spelling bee in second grade and calls himself a loser. How does that affect all of his other experiences in life?

Before you send me hate mail about the rapist comment, I’m not saying we should ignore people’s behavior. I’m saying that labelling people because of their behavior can perpetuate the very problem we’re trying to solve.

5. Allow yourself to be wrong.

This kind of goes along with knowing everything. I have the bad habit of thinking I’m always right. I’m better these days about which battles I’m willing to fight. I always ask myself, “Is this worth it?” or “What do I get for being right?” 

I’ve learned this through years of frustrating experience in relationships:  a woman is always right. My girlfriend is the worst driver I have ever met, but it doesn’t compare with her ettiquete as a passenger. So I let her take the long way to work and drive 15 miles under the speed limit. We have a very uncomfortable couch. 

There is no booby prize for being correct (is that a Freudian slip?). What you ‘win’ for being right is loneliness. If you are looking for a mantra, get yourself some prayer beads and repeat, “I’d rather be happy, than right.”

Here’s a bonus suggestion: Allow a mess.

This goes against another post I wrote about cleaning and that’s why I’m adding it here.

My girlfriend used to live with her brother while she was going through college. He kicked her out of the house because she left a toothbrush sitting in the livingroom one morning. It was the toothbrush that broke the camel’s back.

None of us want mold growing on our dishes or a CD collection that was arranged by a grenade. But the law of entropy in the universe  says that all things will fall apart. Why take your frustration with Mother Nature out on those you love? My girlfriend hasn’t talked to her brother since that time, which is sad.

And if you live with a dozen cats, ignore that last suggestion.

May you have an imperfect day.

(I’d rather be happy than right. I’d rather be happy than right. I’d rather be happy than right.)

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

But at some point, babbling incessantly about your life isn’t so therapeutic, especially when you want to write for people besides your counselor or your mom. People want solutions to their problems, but writing doesn’t seem to offer that. Or, if it does, we don’t know how to reveal those solutions.

What is interesting about writing is how similar it is to the actual working of our conscious mind. The mind is big (some say infinite) and there are plenty of places to wander, to hide, to run, to fly and to get lost. But as with writing, eventually you get tired of wandering all over the place and you want to go home. But where is that? This is where meditation comes in. Meditation is an exercise in finding home.

Most forms of meditation have you focus upon a particular object: it could be breathing, a mantra, a sacred image or this present moment. No matter what the object may be, at some point, your mind will wander off into other thoughts. Then you realize you have wandered off and come back to the point of focus. Most people who have just begun a meditation practice berate themselves for losing their center. If you are one of those people, know that the exercise of focusing upon an object, wandering away and then coming back to the center is meditation. You are teaching your mind how to find its way home. 

This is why meditation can be so beneficial to the writer who wants to evolve out of the primordial ooze of therapy. Whatever you may be writing, if it is for another human being’s reading enjoyment, there must be a center: an object of focus.  As with meditation, you are going to wander off from that object and eventually come back again. Readers are just like you and me. They have this huge mental landscape within them. They want to run around and play, but eventually they want to find home. This is why we read in the first place: whether it’s a how-to book or a bestselling novel. The objects, descriptions and journeys are different, but the basic exercise is the same.

Finding a focus to my writing gives me more confidence and direction in what I am saying. Writing on this blog or in forums has helped immensely because it gives me a reader (besides my mom). I have to consider where the center of my attention is, where I’m going to wander off, and how I’m going to get back… and if you even care about any of that. I still write rambling diatribes to no one, but I can’t think of anything more therapeutic than finding a purpose. 

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

 Namaste