Do You Write Carmel or Caramel?

Six Bookish Songs to Spread Holiday Cheer

Merry LitMas!

Just kidding, we’re only on the sixth day of LitMas, so we haven’t finished giving you gifts of well-read knowledge yet. Today, we’re departing from booklists and reading tips for something you can tap your toes to. That’s right, we’ve created a playlist of tunes inspired by famous works of literature. And we have to admit, we love the creativity behind all of these bookish songs.

1 Christmas at Hogwarts by Harry and the Potters

We’re starting with a classic literary band, Harry and the Potters! Although it was hard to choose just one song from their Christmas-in-the-wizarding-world-themed album, this short but sweet number rose to the top. Fun fact: if their name wasn’t enough to suggest a literary connection, this powerhouse group once played at the New York Public Library! Absolutely magical.

2 Narnia by Steve Hackett

What’s more festive than The Chronicles of Narnia? This lovely ode to C. S. Lewis’s fantasy masterpiece is certain to set you in a bright and cheery mood, even if it describes eternal winter and lost children.

3 The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins by Leonard Nimoy

You read that right, Leonard Nimoy once recorded a two-minute-21-second ballad about the merits and trials of Bilbo Baggins. We don’t think we need to say much more here, since this is obviously an instant nerd classic.

4 Atticus by The Noisettes

Harper Lee’s passing this year was a tragedy for the literary world. Luckily, some great artists have commemorated her work, so remembering her can be as easy as listening to a track. This tribute from The Noisettes is light, sweet, and beautiful, just like the novel it references.

5 Gold by Imagine Dragons

Ok, we have to admit that this entry is slightly stretching the definition of literary. Imagine Dragons based this track loosely on the Midas myth, without referencing any one author or work. But hey, what’s the holiday season without a little fun?

6 Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush

Although the reference may be obvious, this song probably captures the emotions of its reference work better than any other on this list. Kate Bush has been listed as an influence for a number of current artists, and this hit shows what a powerhouse she is.

If you’d like to listen to more literary jams, we made a Spotify playlist with a few of our favorite bookish tunes. Did we forget any of your favorites?

Not-So-Sweet Game 5: Background Noise Nuisances vs. Should’ve Spoken IRL

In the battle for the worst call habits, we’ve had some solid contenders. Our followers overwhelmingly agreed that background noise and calling instead of chatting in person are two of the worst. Do you agree? Vote for the absolute worst below.

Background Noise Nuisances

We’ve all joined a call where the other participants sounded like they were either in an echo chamber, a wind tunnel, or the middle of Times Square. Nobody likes those calls, and nobody likes distracting background noise.

When You Should’ve Spoken IRL

Or, in an attempt to save time and energy on the team, you condense an update on a project to an email then zip it off to the stakeholders. A few hours later you’ve got an inbox full of questions and at least one very confused engineer. You’ve drastically underestimated the complexity of the update; you should have spoken in real life.

5 Retro Games that Made Us Better People

You’re having an average morning at the office, when suddenly word ripples out from the corner suite: the boss is going to visit a major potential client this afternoon, and she wants the latest version of the demo ready to show off. A wave of adrenaline sweeps the room—this is all hands on deck.

The copywriter and designers launch into vetting every scrap of text and making sure every element on the screen will be pixel-perfect. Their actions come naturally; there is no fumbling, no time to second-guess. Meanwhile the developers and project manager scramble furiously to make sure every last tweak is going to fit—if something in the code breaks now, there might not be enough time to push through a fix. An exhilarating (if unexpected) test of your team’s abilities is now underway.

A lesser version of yourself might hyperventilate in this situation, but you’re so immersed in the task at hand you hardly have time to reflect on this. If you came up for air now, you might even realize you’re thrilled—it’s as though you’ve been preparing for this kind of challenge your whole life.

In a way, maybe you have been. Do you think all those old games you grew up playing had anything to do with it?

Perhaps you have fond memories of looking over a parent’s shoulder while they played solitaire, instilling an early appreciation for sequencing and spotting patterns. Or maybe anytime you think about strategic ways to keep your project’s options open, it all comes back to those kitchen-table games of poker with your cousins.

Did you surmount your first failure to negotiate a grand bargain after a botched transaction involving Park Place and a get-out-of-jail-free card? Did you learn about admitting you need help from the time you had to wake up that one kid at the slumber party who knew how to wall-jump in Super Metroid?

Maybe you took down enough bosses in Zelda with just a single a heart remaining that you’ll forever know how to keep your cool in dicy situations. Or maybe all those late nights playing Contra at your friend’s house taught you the value of leaving a few power-ups for your teammate to grab.

Whatever your games of choice were back then, we think it all might’ve factored in over the years to help shape the collaborator you’ve since become. Here’s a look at some of the games that taught us a thing or two about teamwork in the days before gamers wore headsets.

1 Chrono Trigger

This Super Nintendo classic centers on a plucky band of six (or seven—we’ll get to that) friends who represent different epochs of human progress, all united around their modest shared goal of averting an apocalypse.

Besides their disparate strengths, the characters all showcase unique styles of communication: The cursed frog (birthname: Glenn) speaks at times like a character from Chaucer, while cavegirl Ayla’s diction is still more . . . primitive. Spikey-haired swordsman Crono hardly speaks at all throughout the game.

But despite their many dissimilarities, the team does its best work together, with three-character ensembles uniting to cast spells that combine their best traits—for instance blending Crono’s lightning magic with the fire of Lucca (the prodigious inventor) and water magic from Marle (the crossbow-toting princess).

Along the way, the time-traveling team has opportunities to help right each other’s wrongs—stopping a horrible accident from befalling Lucca’s mother, for instance, or helping Glenn lay to rest the ghost of a slain knight. In a true testament to the game’s collaborative spirit, you can even forgive and recruit Magus, the shadow wizard who earlier in the game had seemed the middle ages’ main fount of evil.

Chrono Trigger remains a beautiful gamerly encapsulation of the power of working with a team, however wonky or arcane your colleagues and their strengths may seem.

2 Starcraft

The ne plus ultra of real-time strategy, Starcraft is a game where no one unit can single-handedly win a match, but the most skilled players make certain that every humble drone they spawn or probe they assemble counts for something.

As with Chrono Trigger (albeit here on a galactic scale) the single-player campaigns in Starcraft often center on peculiar alliances of disparate forces: the scrappy human space explorers (Terrans, to use the game’s parlance) teaming with the noble but sometimes conceited Protoss aliens, for instance, to halt the advance of the prolific, bug-like Zerg.

Connecting online or via local-area networks (remember LAN parties?) also made for fun hours battling alongside friends. Such endeavors found you delegating some tasks (mine your own minerals and explore the map as you can) while intersecting on shared goals (let’s position some siege tanks and templars over the cliff above the opponent’s expansion). And in the true spirit of teamwork, a team with human medics could even heal an ally’s alien hydralisks!

For anyone whose job involves managing a complex and growing team in an uncertain and rapidly evolving environment, Starcraft might just feel familiar.

3 Rummikub

You might remember this tile-based classic from summer nights with your grandparents; it fits somewhere between gin rummy and Scrabble in the taxonomy of games.

As a pastime where you not only build numeric patterns of your own but also break apart and reassemble combinations played by others, your every incremental step toward victory in Rummikub might also provide the breakthrough someone else needs in order to win. In other words, to inch toward success, you can’t help but nudge others closer to winning, as well—how’s that for built-in collaboration?

As an occasional bonus, trying to combo your way to victory through a dramatic (if not convoluted) series of moves in a crowded late-game board occasionally just fizzles and goes awry. The solution? Other players have to help you puzzle the board back to its original state.

4 The Adventures of Lolo

The NES Lolo series proved unique in an era of games like Mario and Tetris that tend to reward sharp reflexes and hand-eye coordination.

Lolo’s gameplay revolves around recognizing patterns and devising the best sequence for the adorable blue protagonist (the third installment also features his pink counterpart, Lala) to navigate obstacles like rivers and mazes, as well as a slew of quirky enemies. As a result, quick thumbs proved a secondary asset in Lolo, next to patience and a willingness to experiment.

Consequently, a few people could easily sit around the screen, passing the controller and plotting different solutions to each level (as your humble blogger did with his mom and brother in the bygone era of brick-and-mortar video stores).

There are many doors into the thriving world of collaborative puzzle games (consider tabletop gems like Forbidden Island) but for a certain set of people whose work all hinges on planning things in the right order, the sound of a Lolo-esque treasure chest springing open will forever play in their minds as they close in on their final task each day.

5 Magic: The Gathering

As digital games grow ever more popular, paper Magic might just endure (the strategy trading-card game is nearly twenty-five years old now) partly because it can provide something of a respite for people whose careers involve looking at screens all day.

As a recruiter for a tech company in San Francisco, Kevin Ligutom weeds through massive stacks of resumes just to pluck out a small handful of winning candidates. Along the way, he sifts through a variety of metrics and has to know which numbers matter and which ones are just noise. In the end, he has to communicate these results to hiring managers, lawyers, and H.R.

While Kevin is often at the hub of a wheel with many spokes, one thing that helps is his longtime hobby: slinging cards in Legacy, Magic’s highly competitive equivalent of Formula One racing. Experienced Legacy players know hundreds of cards purely by memory, and are comfortable sifting through reams of data about everything from popular tournament-winning decks to lethal new uses for long-out-of-print cards.

In other words, Kevin says, his hobby is a lot like his job: “I need to be able to tell management how long it will take to fill a given role. Part of that is giving them both metrics and my analysis of those numbers based on my experience. Magic got me really comfortable with that kind of thinking.”

Whatever your assignment might be today, we hope you have fun—and maybe even make a game out of it.

8 Things We Can All Learn From Elizabeth Kolbert

If you’re looking for an inspiring female author from whose work you might glean a few writerly pointers, you needn’t search far. Whether you’re a hardcore fiction buff or always hungry for a fresh memoir, the world of words is suffering no shortage of brilliant women.

Recent fiction luminaires include Hanya Yanagihara—a longtime writer by trade but a relative newcomer to the realm of novels. Her latest was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and was a 2015 National Book Award finalist. Then there’s Karen Russell, the MacArthur “Genius” Grant winner whose debut novel was a 2012 Pulitzer finalist. And Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, another “Genius” Grant winner whose novels have garnered a string of awards, and whose speech “We should all be feminists” was sampled by Beyoncé.

The nonfiction side of writing also boasts an abundance of female heroes, like Emily Nussbaum, who won a 2016 Pulitzer for her prolific and thoughtful TV criticism, and her fellow New Yorker writer, Elizabeth Kolbert.

A journalist, author, and adventurer seasoned by more than three decades of writing experience, Kolbert is perhaps best known for her book The Sixth Extinction, which won a 2015 Pulitzer for nonfiction.

Kolbert’s writing is sharp, scientifically complex, politically fraught, and at times darkly funny. In short, she’s exactly the type of author worth studying for hints about the craft. Here are a few we’ve picked up:

1 Leave home. Talk to strangers.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s writing refuses to stay chained to a desk. Not content to muse from home about melting ice sheets, for instance, she journeys with scientists to the distant reaches of Greenland.

Indeed, Kolbert’s travels transport readers to far-flung places like the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon rainforest, and an utterly wild preserve in the Netherlands. Along the way, she propels us forward using scenes with working experts, providing not just their scientific perspectives but also glimpses into their, er, natural habitats.

It’s the kind of writing that shows not everything has been done or written before—and that truth can be stranger than fiction. Make a habit of venturing outside your head and out into the world, and your writing will be indelible.

2 Show—and also tell.

You’ve probably run across that writerly dictum “show, don’t tell” before, but sometimes the situation calls for both. When Kolbert sets out to explain ocean acidification, she pulls on a wetsuit and takes us scuba diving. Any time she wants to describe a complex scientific finding based on an esoteric lab technique, she goes to the lab and has an expert walk us through the process.

This approach lets Kolbert grapple with wonky concepts (like geologic epochs) while still relating a concrete story (a hike to a rocky outcropping with a group of geologists). When you opt to show and tell, you deliver a bevy of facts in a story that’s more memorable than any sterile treatise.

3 Be adaptable.

It’s good to devise plans, but it’s also good to shred them if they’re not working or if other opportunities arise. In an interview with The Open Notebook, Kolbert relates one small adaptation she had to discover in the field, in order to take notes while swimming:

The most challenging thing was reporting underwater. That is the hardest thing—when you see these amazing things underwater, but what can you do? You can’t take notes. When I was in Hawaii snorkeling, the scientists had these plastic slates with a special pencil to keep track of their experiments, that you can write on underwater. They loaned me one of those, so I took all my notes on my plastic tablet and transcribed it when I got back to shore.

In that same interview, Kolbert also speaks to the process of making adjustments based on her subjects’ schedules:

I try to go on reporting trips when things are happening, but deadlines are complicated and things that only happen once a year are hard to plan around. For the book, a couple of times I tagged along on an expedition. Sometimes people kindly staged expeditions for me, but I had to work around their schedules. Some things took a year to schedule properly. You have a lot more time when it’s your own book. Or maybe you don’t really—my book was way overdue.

Be flexible when you can. Kolbert’s willingness to shrug off her book’s initial timetable eventually paid off with a Pulitzer-caliber result.

4 Let yourself appear in the work, once in a while.

The question of how often you, as the writer, should insert yourself into a story that isn’t expressly about you is often debated.

Kolbert doesn’t readily personalize every story she publishes, but she does occasionally step in and describe her own experiences—like a night she spent at a sleep center with electrodes on her scalp and tubes in her nose for a story about the science of insomnia. In The Sixth Extinction, for a section about backpacking in mountainous Peru, she includes an aside about a shopping bag full of coca leaves presented to her by an ecologist:

The leaves were leathery and tasted like old books. Soon my lips grew numb, and my aches and pains began to fade. An hour or two later, I was back for more. (Many times since have I wished for that shopping bag.)

Kolbert has chosen the setting of this chapter for other reasons, but having brought us here, she doesn’t shy away from a flavorful detail. This is the key: finding a happy middle ground that’s neither self-indulgent nor invisible.

5 Don’t let anyone tell you you’re unqualified.

Your writing doesn’t have to be circumscribed by your credentials. Elizabeth Kolbert is many things, but she is not a scientist. All the same, she’s not dissuaded from researching and sharing insights on subjects from colonizing Mars to the future of automation.

Sometimes what’s important isn’t so much technical expertise as the ability to do your homework and to zoom out and recognize what will be important to your audience.

6 Persist.

Just because recognition doesn’t come overnight doesn’t mean it’s not coming.

Kolbert began her career as a newspaper reporter in the mid-1980s; she headed the New York Times’ Albany bureau from 1988 to 1991. By the time she became a New Yorker staff writer in 1999, she’d been grinding out stories for some fifteen years. Even then, she was still years of hard work away from the National Magazine Award she eventually won for her 2005 series The Climate of Man.

Be patient; keep showing up and putting in the work.

7 Keep your readers guessing.

A reader who can easily predict what you’re about to say may not remain a reader for long. One way Kolbert keeps us hooked is by interjecting an occasional wry observation or utterly startling turn of phrase, as with the ending of this thought:

If nearly half the occupations in the U.S. are ‘potentially automatable,’ and if this could play out within ‘a decade or two,’ then we are looking at economic disruption on an unparalleled scale. Picture the entire Industrial Revolution compressed into the life span of a beagle.

Weren’t expecting that, were you? One other pointer we glean from Kolbert—this technique is most effective when applied sparingly; you don’t want to wear it out.

8 Enjoy the work.

Kolbert’s writing could hardly be called whimsical, and often gravitates to matters of extinction and survival. The subjects can feel as grim as a cave full of diseased bats in winter. But that doesn’t mean the day-to-day work of finding words for it is miserable; Kolbert makes a point of traveling to fascinating places and seeking out compelling characters.

Though few writers have the luxury of working exclusively on projects they cherish every minute of, the job doesn’t have to be a pure slog. Find and nurture the aspect of writing that drives you, and the rest will be that much easier.

How to Consistently Write Better and Faster

In this article, here’s what you’ll discover:

• why distractions are more debilitating than you think (and what to do about them)
• a simple four-step formula to dramatically improve your writing
• how to crank out high-quality content in half the time by optimizing every step of the writing process from first draft to formatting

So let’s get started, shall we?

Why distractions are more debilitating than you think (and what to do about it)

Just how bad are distractions for your productivity?

A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology investigated this question—and its findings were shocking. A research team lead by Erik Altmann wanted to see whether short-term interruptions—lasting as little as 2.8 seconds—affected performance. Subjects completed tasks on a computer. While they worked, an interruption appeared on their screens and researchers logged how many errors subjects made when returning to the task.

Researchers found that interruptions averaging 2.8 seconds doubled the number of mistakes; interruptions averaging 4.4 seconds tripled it.

That’s incredible. Even a simple distraction lasting less than five seconds can triple the number of errors you make. So it pays to block distractions at every turn.

But how do you block distractions? While most productivity gurus will tell you to use tools like StayFocusd to block time-wasting sites, I’ll give you something even better.

The “magic word” scientifically proven to reduce distractions by 64 percent

In a study for the Journal of Consumer Research, Vanessa Patrick and Henrik Hagtvedt measured the power of self-talk and how it affected distractions and follow-through.

In the experiment, thirty women attended a seminar on long-term health goals. After the seminar, researchers asked the women to join a program that would help them change their eating habits by changing their self-talk.

The women were divided into three separate groups of ten:

• Group A was instructed to say something like “I can’t eat cupcakes because I’m on a diet” when facing temptation.
• Group B would say something like “I don’t eat cupcakes because I’m on a diet.”
• Group C adopted a “just say no” strategy.

The results?

Eight out of ten women in Group B (“I don’t”) stuck with the program for the full ten days.

Of the women in Group C (“No”), only three completed the program.

And of those in Group A (“I can’t”), only one person completed the program.

Let that sink in. By substituting a single word—don’t for can’t—people were eight times as likely to succeed.

(Note: If you’re into statistics, the p-value in the above experiment was less than 0.001, which means there is only a 1 in 1,000 likelihood the improvement was due to chance. I’ll take those odds any day.)

Bottom line: the next time you’re faced with temptation—whether it’s a distraction or otherwise—tell yourself “I don’t X” instead of “I can’t X.”

Here are a few examples to keep your writing on track:

• Once I start, I don’t stop writing until I’ve written 1,000 words.
• When I’m writing, I don’t browse the Internet, use my phone, stop for snacks, or play with my cat until I have written 2,000 words.
• I don’t eat breakfast until I’ve completed this blog post.

See how simple it is? Try it yourself and enjoy the results right away!

How to write better: a simple four-step formula to dramatically improve your writing

When I began as a copywriter, I copied some of the best sales letters out there. In fact, copywriting legend Gary Halbert recommended you not just copy these pages, but actually write them out by hand to ensure the good writing gets into your bones. (He actually used that phrase; no wonder they called him the Prince of Print.)

So without further ado, follow these four simple steps to dramatically improve your writing:

1 Find a brilliant piece of writing. Start with these. 2 Select 300 to 500 words from that piece, then type—don’t copy and paste!—that writing into a Google Doc. 3 Add comments throughout the piece; note what you like, what you don’t, and how you’d improve it. 4 Rewrite the piece in your own words. Use a completely different topic, but strive to maintain the original’s structure and pace.

Easy, right?

How to write faster (or, how I tripled my writing speed—and how you can, too)

There are four techniques I’ve used to triple my writing speed. Before I used these techniques I averaged about 500 words per hour; now, I average about 1,500 words per hour and occasionally top out at 2,000 words per hour.

Technique 1: Outline everything

An effective outline serves as your “talking points.” These talking points allow you to “talk” through your first draft, which should be done as quickly as possible. It also ensures you’ve thought through your writing and that everything is presented logically for your reader.

Technique 2: Become a dictator (in a good way)

Don’t underestimate the power of dictation. Once you learn to dictate effectively, you can easily double your writing speed.

To get started, use the Google Docs voice typing feature (free) or Dragon Speaking Naturally. (Note: I use Google Docs for everything.)

Don’t “think” about dictating. Instead, pretend you’re speaking to a friend. Sometimes it helps to look in a mirror while you’re talking. This makes you—and therefore, your writing—feel more conversational.

Speak quickly through your first draft. Do not try to edit. Your first draft will be ugly. That’s fine. Speed is important in your first draft; quality only matters in subsequent drafts. Just dump all your ideas onto the page and worry later about cleaning it up.

Technique 3: Track your words-per-hour

Use a spreadsheet to track how many words you write (or dictate) in a twenty-five-minute period. Your goal is to “write” at least 1,000 words per hour. (As I mentioned before, 2,000 is doable—and some people claim to write as fast as 5,000 words per hour!)

Technique 4: Format the fast (and smart) way

Formatting is important but time-consuming if you’re not careful. You can easily waste hours formatting your text, adding images, and including HTML as well as links to further resources.

The simplest way to speed up your formatting is to use Google Docs. Google Docs is online, free, and contains several useful tools.

For example, you can search for links directly within the doc (instead of searching via Google). This makes it very easy for you to add hyperlinks to further resources. It also keeps you away from Google’s search results—which can lead you down a dark road to distraction.

Another useful tool is Image Extractor. This free add-on makes it simple to copy and paste images into your post, then save them all at the very end for publication.

In conclusion, you can improve your writing in three ways:

• Write better
• Write faster
• Format better and faster

By improving these three elements, you create a virtuous cycle. What tips do you have for writing better and faster? Let me know in the comments below!

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Adam Costa—and his wife Darcie Connell—run KeepInspiring.me, a blog dedicated to inspiration and motivation, and 10xToday.com, where you can access free e-courses on how to become ten times better at life. Adam is also the author of 10x Life: A breakthrough system to improve focus, develop productive habits, and maximize willpower-in 5 minutes a day.

Simple Past Tense–Grammar Rules

The simple past is a verb tense that is used to talk about things that happened or existed before now. Imagine someone asks what your brother Wolfgang did while he was in town last weekend.

Wolfgang entered a hula hoop contest.

He won the silver medal.

The simple past tense shows that you are talking about something that has already happened. Unlike the past continuous tense, which is used to talk about past events that happened over a period of time, the simple past tense emphasizes that the action is finished.

Wolfgang admired the way the light glinted off his silver medal.

You can also use the simple past to talk about a past state of being, such as the way someone felt about something. This is often expressed with the simple past tense of the verb to be and an adjective, noun, or prepositional phrase.

Wolfgang was proud of his hula hoop victory.

The contest was the highlight of his week.

How to Formulate the Simple Past

For regular verbs, add -ed to the root form of the verb (or just -d if the root form already ends in an e):

Play→Played Type→Typed Listen→Listened Push→Pushed Love→Loved

For irregular verbs, things get more complicated. The simple past tense of some irregular verbs looks exactly like the root form:

Put→Put Cut→Cut Set→Set Cost→Cost Hit→Hit

For other irregular verbs, including the verb to be, the simple past forms are more erratic:

See→Saw Build→Built Go→Went Do→Did Rise→Rose Am/Is/Are→Was/Were

The good news is that verbs in the simple past tense (except for the verb to be) don’t need to agree in number with their subjects.

Wolfgang polished his medal. The other winners polished their medals too.

How to Make the Simple Past Negative

Fortunately, there is a formula for making simple past verbs negative, and it’s the same for both regular and irregular verbs (except for the verb to be). The formula is did not + [root form of verb]. You can also use the contraction didn’t instead of did not.

Wolfgang did not brag too much about his hula hoop skills. Wolfgang’s girlfriend didn’t see the contest.

For the verb to be, you don’t need the auxiliary did. When the subject of the sentence is singular, use was not or wasn’t. When the subject is plural, use were not or weren’t.

The third-place winner was not as happy as Wolfgang. The fourth-place winner wasn’t happy at all. The onlookers were not ready to leave after the contest ended. The contestants weren’t ready to leave either.

How to Ask a Question

The formula for asking a question in the simple past tense is did + [subject] + [root form of verb].

Did Wolfgang win the gold medal or the silver medal? Where did Wolfgang go to celebrate? Did the judges decide fairly, in your opinion?

When asking a question with the verb to be, you don’t need the auxiliary did. The formula is was/were + [subject].

Was Wolfgang in a good mood after the contest? Were people taking lots of pictures?

Common Regular Verbs in the Past Tense

Common Irregular Verbs in the Past Tense