Showing posts with label Coaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coaching. Show all posts
Story Merchant E-Book Deal - Sell Your Story to Hollywood $.99
Through the expanding influence of the Internet and the corporatization of both publishing and entertainment, the process of getting your book to the big screen has gotten more complicated, more eccentric, and more exciting.
WHAT IS A STORY?
Writing, though driven by intuition and passion, is first and foremost a craft that demands discipline.
Collaborate with Ken Atchity for one-on-one coaching.
Don’t put a deadline on your dreams!
Persistence is showing up for your writing—even when no one’s reading yet.
With one-on-one coaching, you’ll get the support, structure, and belief to keep going until your voice breaks through.
WRITE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE!
What kind of impact do you want to make on an audience with your writing?
Let's go ahead and answer that question.
Let's go ahead and answer that question.
Write with Purpose!
Kenneth Atchity's Writer's Lifeline: Turning Writers into Bestsellers, and Bestsellers into Blockbusters for 25 years!
One-on-one professional assistance and interaction goes a very long way toward making your writing and publishing dreams a reality.
Sometimes writers, when they begin their careers, think that if they write, they can write about anything, but the truth is they need to write from their heart about things that matter to everyone, and if they do that, you can hardly go wrong. Because stories are really not about words or word choice or anything like that. They’re about conveying the power of a character facing a dilemma that you have no idea how he or she will resolve, and when you do that, you’ve got everyone’s attention.
Sometimes writers, when they begin their careers, think that if they write, they can write about anything, but the truth is they need to write from their heart about things that matter to everyone, and if they do that, you can hardly go wrong. Because stories are really not about words or word choice or anything like that. They’re about conveying the power of a character facing a dilemma that you have no idea how he or she will resolve, and when you do that, you’ve got everyone’s attention.
Visit: https://thewriterslifeline.com or
Contact Ken: atchity@storymerchant.com
Why Aren’t You Writing?
Kenneth Atchity's Writer's Lifeline: Turning Writers into Bestsellers, and Bestsellers into Blockbusters for 25 years!
One-on-one professional assistance and interaction goes a very long way toward making your writing and publishing dreams a reality.
FILM COURAGE: Sell Your Story To Hollywood: Writer's Guide To Show Business - Dr. Ken Atchity [FULL INTERVIEW]
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| Available on Amazon |
The #1 Writer's Pocket Guide to the Business of Show Business by Kenneth Atchity.
Through the expanding influence of the Internet and the corporatization of both publishing and entertainment, the process of getting your book to the big screen has gotten more complicated, more eccentric, and more exciting.
This little book aims to help you figure out how to get your story told on big screens or small.
Work 1 on 1 with Story Merchant CEO, Hollywood producer, and author Dr. Ken Atchity.
Sign up Today at Writers Lifeline
Story Merchant E-Book Deal Ken Atchity's Sell Your Story to Hollywood $.99!
|
| Available on Amazon |
Through the expanding influence of the Internet and the corporatization of both publishing and entertainment, the process of getting your book to the big screen has gotten more complicated, more eccentric, and more exciting.
This little book aims to help you figure out how to get your story told on big screens or small.
Maren R, ReviewerFull of information but still easy to read! If you want to start screen writing -even if it snot the rather lofty goal of becoming a Hollywood writer- this book will tell you how you could actually manage it!
Cristie U, Reviewer
This is a helpful and honest guide as to how to get your book made into a movie or tv show. It seems like it would be easier now because of the internet, but the author points out how difficult it still is and how to ensure your book gets into the right hands.
Terri D, Reviewer
Sell Your Story to Hollywood is a quick guide to getting your story into the hands of those who make things happen in Hollywood. The author Kenneth Atchity speaks from experience with decades working in Hollywood to get stories from the page to the screen. Although every guide about breaking into Hollywood should be viewed through the lens of how small the odds really are, this book starts out a bit discouraging for those who are truly interested in learning what they can do to move from a novel to a produced screenplay. The first step in getting this done, according to this book? Have an international bestseller. Okay. Not everyone can do that. Step 2: get reviewed by the NYT or other prestigious publication. Um... if a writer had that, they probably wouldn't need this book. While some of these initial steps are not quite what you would consider actionable advice for getting your screenplay produced, the book does move toward more actionable steps that you can take, though the guide does assume that you have a great story to tell with either an impeccably written novel or screenplay. As a writer with scripts but no connections to the industry, the parts of this book that I found most helpful were actual Appendix B and Appendix C. Writers at any stage can probably find something useful to take away from this guide to use in pursuing their own Hollywood career.
Reviewer 428382
Informative and well written, this is a guide that ever writer should read. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot.
pamula f, Reviewer
Hollywood buys stories all of the time. Sometimes they buy a story that started out as a small article in a hometown newspaper. This book will show you how to get your writing out there for the world to see.
Steven M, Reviewer
I’ve recently completed a screen writing course and was delighted to have been approved for this ARC. The author clearly knows his stuff and offers an insight into the world of scriptwriting for movies. A perfect introduction to a world that some of us can only dream of.
Librarian 121315
Have you ever watched a movie and thought to yourself that you can come up with a better story? Or have you ever been inspired by a movie to tell a story of you own? For either of those cases, this is one of the books that you must read. I said one of the books because there are other books that can also stir you in the right direction; nevertheless, this book will certainly give you a good start. I loved that the author offers real life examples of movies that we have heard or watched before making the book’s contents more relatable to the readers. This is a great introduction to the business of movie making and readers should feel more comfortable with this subject after studying this book.
I’ve recently completed a screen writing course and was delighted to have been approved for this ARC. The author clearly knows his stuff and offers an insight into the world of scriptwriting for movies. A perfect introduction to a world that some of us can only dream of.
Librarian 121315
Have you ever watched a movie and thought to yourself that you can come up with a better story? Or have you ever been inspired by a movie to tell a story of you own? For either of those cases, this is one of the books that you must read. I said one of the books because there are other books that can also stir you in the right direction; nevertheless, this book will certainly give you a good start. I loved that the author offers real life examples of movies that we have heard or watched before making the book’s contents more relatable to the readers. This is a great introduction to the business of movie making and readers should feel more comfortable with this subject after studying this book.
Stealing Time for Your Dream in 2025 -- Part 5: How to Make "the clock of life" YOUR clock
The stopwatch
Mercury’s contemporary magic wand for taking command of your time is the stopwatch. Here’s how you use this magical wand:
You know the clock on the wall will keep ticking away
relentlessly until the day has gone by. You even know how it keeps ticking at night--why
else would you awaken at 5:59 on your digital bedside clock when you’ve set the
alarm to go off at 6:00? You know the telephone seems wired to that damned
clock, life’s interruptions seem wired to it, the myriad distractions that
flesh is heir to seem wired to it--and you recognize that, as a result, you
yourself and your dreams have been wired to the Accountant’s clock for way too
long. Your world has been defined by that relentless, uncreative clock. You are
desperate to realize your Goal Time.
Today you stop the world. You buy a stopwatch. I suggest buying the simplest one you can find, one that allows you to stop the seconds and restart them, without the other countless modes that will drive you crazy unless you’re training race horses. Hang the stopwatch above your computer, your telephone, your work table--above whatever altar serves the god of your dream. Promise yourself that, no matter what happens on that wall clock, you will work on your dream at least one hour before you go to bed tonight.
Or two hours. Try one first, then expand slowly and
naturally in the direction of that Goal Time. Keep it as simple as you can and
still make it work for you. Using the stopwatch allows me the illusion of
freedom you value highly, but also ensures the constant sense of disciplined
progress toward the success you’ve mapped out for yourself.
Nothing is more satisfyingly inevitable than the achievements that time creates from small, stolen increments. One hour a day is thirty hours a month. Thirty hours a month will inevitably produce results, especially if you’ve programmed the three parts of your mind effectively to make the best possible use of that one hour. Imagine how quickly planning his quest will move forward, having assigned five hours a week to the operation.
If the one-hour-per-day approach doesn't work for your
unpredictable schedule, or makes you feel too disciplined, make it a weekly
approach. One of my workshop students was having trouble keeping to his contract
that he’d put in two writing hours per day. After several give and takes, we
came down to the real reason he was having problems: He was leaving his day job
in order to be free, and the daily discipline we’d been discussing made him
feel enslaved again. I asked him if he’d be comfortable committing to a weekly
number of hours, to bringing in his stopwatch to the next session with ten
hours on it.
"Absolutely. The whole idea is to find a way of tricking your mind into allowing you to live by your own clock."
He came in the next week with 10:06 on his stopwatch, and the weeks after with 10:04, 9:56, 10:10. He’d found a way of using the magic wand to give him that necessary illusion of freedom and control combined with the satisfaction of real progress in committing hours to his career transit.
Don’t forget that only you can call "time out!"
Anon: It's not over until the fat lady sings.
Atchity: It's not over, but you can call time out.
I used to wish I could call time out to give myself time to regroup and figure out the meaning of life. I used to fantasize about building in an extra, dateless, hour-less day each week to give us time off: no appointments, no phone calls, no deadlines. But that is daydreaming, undisciplined Visionary thinking; and we are trapped in an Accountant’s world.
You can get time out on a regular basis by stealing it. Now that you’ve embraced your career transit and are living the entrepreneurial life, don’t forget to give yourself the benefits that your day job employer was forced to give you. Sometimes we are so excited about doing the things we love on a daily basis that we forget to give ourselves a break from them. “I don't need a vacation. My life is a vacation!”
Everyone needs vacations. Most people need them because work is exhausting. The entrepreneur needs them because vacations bring perspective and creative insights that are unavailable under the daily pressures of the career transit. "To do great work," Samuel Butler wrote, a person "must be very idle as well as very industrious." The entrepreneur, as both employer and employed, must schedule his vacations, with alternate dates in mind in case "something comes up" that forces a change. You are accomplishing just as much if not more when you "go away for the whistle" and allow your mind to play.
Vacations for the dreamer are excursions into Visionary
time. "Getaway time," like the aboriginal "dreamtime," puts
your Mind’s Eye in direct touch with the Visionary’s view of what you've been
doing on a daily basis, and what you could be doing more creatively. Traveling
away from "Base 1" is always good for the dreamer because it causes a
"cross-pollinating" effect among your objectives, goals, and
projects. Traveling anywhere away from a project is a kind of vacation, and
nearly always a creative advantage; but traveling should be distinguished from
true vacations. Going to New York on business, or going home to see your family
for a week, are vacations that can bring fresh perspective. But in both cases
there are too many things "to do" for the most constructive form of
abandonment to occur. A true vacation is being on the island of Maui, where,
after a couple of days of readjustment to "heavenly Hana," your
"to-do" list consists of two items, and you somehow never quite get
around either to doing them or to caring that you didn't. You notice suddenly
that the days seem long, immense; that time has become, as Jorge Luis Borges
puts it, "like a plaza." Smaller getaways can produce the same
effect: mountain hiking; wandering through the museum; deep-sea fishing for a
day; just "hanging out" at Grand Central Station or at the Plaza Oak
Bar watching the world go by. During a true vacation Mercury can bring you an
Olympian perspective, where the patterns of your life and activities become
apparent among the tangle of busyness.
It is precisely at such times that "chaos theory" applies itself to the creative process. Chaos theory posits the all-important impact of tiny random events on the long-range prediction of physical cycles. Weather patterns could be predicted accurately were it not for "the butterfly effect": Somewhere a Monarch butterfly fluttering from flower to flower (an incident too small to measure) minutely disrupts the passage of the breeze, and a thousand miles away a middle-sized storm turns into a tornado. Chaos theory is the despair of Accountants, who spend their lives trying to predict regularity as though chaos didn’t exist. But to the Visionary, chaos is the staff of Mercury. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, his most Visionary work, wrote: "One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star."
The dreamer arranges his true vacations to put him in direct touch with chaos, following winding roads to heavenly dream places inaccessible to ordinary travelers.
Tips on time and work management
Rate everything that crosses your desk 1, 2, or 3. Then make
an agenda for the 1s immediately, and immediately delegate the 2s to someone
else. Put the 3s in a drawer designated the "3-drawer," setting aside
a few hours once a month to go through it and see what’s still important enough
to deal with. You’ll discover that most of the contents of the 3-drawer are
even less important than they were. Napoleon supposedly had all his mail dumped
before the bags were opened, on the premise that the important news would have
reached him already and anything he neglected that should not have been
neglected would make itself known. I’m sure that Josephine quickly found an
alternative method of communicating with her Emperor.
Postpone procrastination! Anthony Robbins says, "The
best way to deal with procrastination is to postpone it." Procrastinate
with everything except your dream. To make that happen you need to--
As much as possible, solve each problem as it occurs.
Postponing the solution automatically increases the total amount of time needed
for it. Opening a letter, then stacking it somewhere, is counterproductive. If
you know from the envelope that the letter isn’t important, toss it in the
nearest wastebasket and don’t even take it into your den.
Selective pruning
Mencius: Men must be decided on what they will not do, and then they are able to act with vigor in what they ought to do.
Well-meaning Friend: You're such an enthusiast.
Atchity: Why does that sound like an accusation?
Enthusiasts must protect themselves from their enthusiasms. To accomplish this, I suggest the following.
Hold a monthly "drop" meeting with yourself. The
object of the meeting is to select activities that can be dropped for a month,
with a promise to reevaluate their importance at your next meeting. Tabling or
discarding the weaker dreams, thereby constantly improves the quality of the
dreams you work on. As you become experienced in the creative life, you’ll
recognize that one of its strangest characteristics is the necessity of killing
the little monsters--that once were bright dreams--nipping at your heels. The
smaller dreams must now be pruned away so that the bigger ones can thrive. Of
course it’s even better to kill them off in the concept stage; as Albert Camus
said: "It's better to resist at the beginning, than at the end."
Don’t feel bad about the discards. Celebrate them. More than
sacrifices or disappointments, they are symptoms of your disciplined progress.
Just because you can do something, after all, no longer means that you must or
should do it. That was the old you, dominated by the Accountant, before your
Mind’s Eye opened to engage you in an entrepreneurial career transit.
When evaluating new projects, keep in mind the sign that
psychologist Carl Jung had framed above his desk:
Yes No Maybe
"Maybe" is crossed out as well as “No” to remind us that it’s the "Maybes" that devour our time and dream energies. If the answer to an incoming idea or request isn't definitively "Yes," it’s definitively "No." Never Maybe. Maybe kills countless ambitions and splendid plans. "We are what we pretend to be," says Kurt Vonnegut's narrator in Mother Night, "so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
You may also find it useful to go through the following checklist:
Is this a good idea (or opportunity)? Yes or No.
Is this idea directly connected with my dream? Yes or No. If
the answer is No, pass it along to someone else "with no strings
attached.”
Does this idea fit into my present agenda? If not, is it
such a good idea that I should revise my agenda to accommodate it?
Is the world ready for this idea?
Am I ready to spend years making it real?
It’s extremely important to consider both internal and external "timing" when it comes to evaluating new ideas and opportunities. Many of us waste time on good ideas whose time has either come and gone, or won’t be coming for too long a time to make its present implementation productive. Of course, thanks to the predictably unpredictable impact of chaos on our lives, we can never be certain about timing. But we can be certain about our gut reaction to the checklist.
So long as you live, be radiant, and do not grieve at all. Life's span is short and time exacts the final reckoning.
--Cepitaph of Seikilos for his wife (100 B.C.)
This series was updated from How to Escape Lifetime Security and Pursue Your Impossible Dream: A Guide to Transforming Your Career (Helios Press)
Stealing Time for Your Dream in 2025 - Part 4: Where Does the Time Go?
Where does the time go?
The nonproductive dreamer: "I don’t know where the time goes.
Once your Mind’s Eye takes over: "It doesn’t go anywhere; time’s in your face all the time! It’s knowing what to do with it that counts."
For me, keeping track of time started at Rockhurst High School in Kansas City, where the Jesuits taught us to schedule our activities in precise Accountant segments. A page from the daily list I kept for four years looked like a space-launch checklist. Every single ten-minute period all day was chockfull of activities, starting from the moment of awakening to the last minutes of making the next day’s list.
At the end of each daily agenda, which was written in pencil, was "tomorrow's to do list": At 10:50 P.M. I allowed myself eight minutes to work on the next day’s agenda. All day I’d been jotting down notes in pencil to remind me of things that had to be scheduled for the next day. During the eight minutes at the end of the day, I created the agenda for next day. All but one of the individual items on the daily agenda are items of "micro management" (defined as what to do on the Accountant's clock when—or “objectives”). The eight minutes at 10:50 P.M. are "macro-management" --considerably less than 1% of the time available to me.
Though it served me well as a foundation for future productivity, it’s immediately obvious that an adult living in our new millennium, in a life filled with interruptions and immediate demands, can’t live sanely for long with this excessively disciplined approach. But accurate description precedes effective prescription.
For accurate consciousness of time-usage to arise, you must take control one way or another. As years passed, I learned I had to move on from the severe but satisfying monastic time-management methods of my Jesuit agendas. I experimented with macro management techniques --what I call "the Gordian knot style of time management": Cut through the busyness by doing the important matters first, and letting everything else take care of itself.
The most familiar macro tool is the to-do list. It’s excellent for getting specific small objectives accomplished, but ultimately you’ll want to move on because using the to-do list to control your life ends up wasting too much time. Yes, you get the important little things done. But you can’t write, “become an internationally recognized architect” on your to-do list. The to-do list doesn’t motivate or inspire you because it doesn’t deal with goals and dreams, only with objectives. That’s why even the shortest to-do list often gets neglected, ignored, postponed, constantly "carried over" from one day to the next. There’s a rebellion going on inside you. Accomplishing the list may satisfy your Accountant, but your Visionary is longing for more and feeling cheated.
I’ve developed two forms that can help you inventory your actual expenditure of time so that you can take charge of this most precious asset and attach it firmly to your dream plan.
The Time Inventory Daily Work Sheet should be filled out at the end of each day, estimating the number of hours you spend on the various activities in your life. The example that follows belongs to an imaginary dreamer who wants to move from his day job as a bank teller to selling the nonfiction book he’s writing.
When you’re filling out your own work sheet, don’t forget housework, church and/or volunteer activities, phone time, etc. If the categories here don’t sound right to you, alter them to suit your own life and activities. Don’t add up the totals beneath or to the right until the week is over. But at the end of the week, add them up. Our bank teller came up with 201 hours. Ninety percent of my career management students and clients end up with weekly audits far under or considerably over 168.
What’s magical about the number 168? The accountant is right about this one: 168 is exactly how many hours are in the week for all of us--whether you’re the Pope, a figure skater, the President of the United States, a stock broker, a major league baseball player, a bank teller, or a hairdresser.
The discrepancy between your count and 168 arises from your unawareness of the interaction among the three voices within your mind, the Accountant, the Visionary, and the Mind’s Eye. In his first week of keeping track, notice that our future published writer has recorded activities to fill 201 hours in the week. Where did the extra thirty-three hours come from? Now that he's admitted the discrepancy and recognized its magnitude, he's ready to get serious. Obviously he's more careful using the work sheet the second week, making sure he keeps closer tabs on where the time is going.
Once you’ve used these work sheets for two weeks, you have an accurate enough idea of where your time is going to make use of the Actual Time Inventory Analysis Work Sheet. Fill out the Activity and Hours per Week columns using the results of your second Time Inventory Daily Work Sheet.
Next we want to find out, on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being highest), how much each activity serves your goals. This is its Visionary Quotient. And we’re not going to fool with "Sleeping" because the right amount of sleep is essential on all fronts.
There’s nothing magical about filling out the Visionary Quotient column. Follow your gut reaction.
The Accountant's Quotient column rates the activity’s importance to your physical, financial, and psychological welfare. Taking writing classes, as far as our banker’s onboard Accountant’s gut reaction is concerned, has minimal present value. Your paycheck from the bank is keeping the potatoes on the table. Obviously, on the other hand, this teller's Visionary hates his day job. But notice that neither his Visionary nor his Accountant is thrilled with the twelve hours weekly this man spends on errands. Although some might rightly regard "socializing" as a valuable activity, our example obviously doesn’t. His Visionary hates it as much as he hates his day job, and his Accountant rates it only a 2. If he’s going to do anything about his socializing, he should think about socializing with different people (exchanging the coffee shop in his neighborhood for the one where the social interaction might lead to useful networking.
The third column, presided over by your Mind’s Eye, combines the two quotients. This man’s bank job is a pain in the neck to his Visionary, but it does pay the bills--an activity the Accountant values to the utmost. It receives a 0 in the Visionary Quotient column, a 5 in the Accountant Quotient column. But your Mind’s Eye acknowledges that any activity with a combined quotient of 5 or above will not be dropped or seriously reduced in time investment, thereby keeping both serpents happy.
The blank Actual Time Inventory Analysis Work Sheet below is for your reassessment. Fill in the categories to suit your own life.
As it recognizes the unique power of both his Accountant’s and his Visionary’s perception of time, our teller’s Mind’s Eye knows that the yin of Accountant time and the yang of Visionary time are both valid, simultaneous, and equally important in their places and for their purposes. Telling them both that they're correct, and that they can take turns, his Mind’s Eye negotiates with the Accountant to allow a conservative, cautious amount of time during which the "success dreams" of the Visionary can be explored. Without the Mind’s Eye’s intervention, he was constantly conflicted over his use of time. With his Mind’s Eye’s help and negotiation, he begins to steal time for success, using his Goal Time Work Sheet to carve hours from the twenty-four hour clock and to mine, methodically, the breakthrough energy of the Visionary.
Activities that rate less than a 5 in the M.E. column are
subject to first-round negotiation. Let’s say you hate doing yard work, and
give it a 0 Visionary Quotient and a 1 Accountant Quotient. Obviously, we’re
going to find a way to get that particular activity out of your life. In our
teller’s inventory, "Driving Errands" falls into this category. So he
figures out a way of no longer doing errands. Instead of spending twelve hours
a week on errands, he decides to do four hours of overtime at the bank to pay
for someone to do the shuttle service for him. Or he moves closer to his day
job. These revised decisions, which become "goals," are recorded in
the Goal Time Work Sheet. Notice that by reducing "Driving/Errands"
to two hours, and making a few other adjustments, he’s been able to increase
Sales Calls from thirteen to twenty-four hours per week--which will inevitably
advance his dream more quickly. At the same time, he’s managed to increase the
percentage of time devoted to the pursuit of his dream from 16% (combining
"Sales Calls," "Writing Classes," and "Reading")
to 26% because he’s increased the time available to make those sales calls, but
he’s also changed his way of socializing so that it serves the dream as well.
Time to schedule time
No time you spend is more important than the time you spend scheduling your time; and that needn’t be more than a tiny fraction of the time available to you. But scheduling your time is doomed to ineffectiveness unless you begin from the reality baseline of knowing what you’ve been doing with your time, and confronting your own lack of awareness about where your time has been going.
The blank Goal Time Work Sheet helps your Mind’s Eye complete and memorialize its contract with Accountant and Visionary.
Once your knowledge of your time usage has allowed you to make new goals and objectives regarding the use of time, how in this busy, busy, busy world do you enforce the objectives for yourself? How can you schedule a life that is one, long, endless shrieking, demanding interruption? After all, you can only turn off the phone for so long without losing your illusion of control, and all contact with reality.
Next: How to make the clock of life YOUR clock.
Stealing Time for Your Dream in 2025 - Part 2: What is Time?
What is time?
Unlike oxygen, an element which is objectively, scientifically definable, and more or less beyond our control, time is relative to perception and subject to choice. “Time,” Melville wrote, “began with man.” The Type C (creative) Personality learns to redefine time subjectively, in order to become successful by his own standards. Objective time, dictated by Greenwich Mean Time with an occasional correction for NASA, leads only to the conformity of repetition. Subjective time alone allows us to distinguish ourselves and to achieve our dreams of success.
Logos vs. Mythos
According to the classical Greeks, the two primary ways of perceiving the world were known to them as logos (for the Accountant’s logic) and mythos (for your onboard Visionary’s simultaneity). The Visionary’s belief in eternity in every moment is what makes the dreamer’s life change from barely bearable to ever enthusiastic. “To himself,” Samuel Butler wrote, “everyone is immortal. He may know he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.” The Visionary’s eternity is the experience of mythic time that occurs when you “lose yourself” in the pursuit of your dream. Its Brer Rabbit’s “briar patch” speech: “Throw me anywhere, but please don’t throw me in the briar patch!” The briar patch, of course, is Rabbit’s favorite place, his home.
Sometimes you’ll meet an old schoolmate after years and have the experience that “it seems just like yesterday” that you were having this exact same argument, or laughing for the same reason known only to the two of you. A moment passes, as the Accountant wrests control from the Visionary: “But, on the other hand, it seems every bit like the twenty years it’s actually been.” Has it been twenty years, or was it just yesterday? Faulkner said: “There is no such thing as was; if was existed there would be no grief or sorrow.” To the Visionary, time exists always in the present.
Accountant’s time
To the Accountant, who’s kept track of the years--and also the months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds--precisely, it’s been exactly twenty years, and he can prove it by reciting all the things that have happened to both of you in the interim. The Accountant clocks time with digital precision, obsessive checks with the Internet’s time services. The Accountant’s time is what keeps society sane, if you call today’s society sane.
But when the Accountant’s insistence dominates, you are denied making your dreams come true. The Accountant, nervous about anything intangible or “unseen,” doesn’t believe in dreams; or, at best, assumes the worst about them: “They¹re only dreams.” Human beings can’t fly.
Visionary time
To the Visionary, whose relationship with that same friend is/was intense, it’s just yesterday. The Visionary clocks time only by reference to intensity. Lovers live from embrace to embrace, the time that’s passed between them not counting. Have you ever felt like life would pass you by when you’re stuck in an endless left-turn lane during rush hour? How long does a second last if you’re perched at the parachute door of a plane at 15,000 feet about to make your first jump? How long is forty seconds during a 6.6 earthquake? Or at the edge of a cliff, about to rappel for the first time? A friend of mine described an encounter with a problem customer, “I spent an eternity with her for an hour and a half yesterday.”
The Visionary brings you mythic time when you engage in your dream with all your heart, mind, and soul; when you are occupied in doing something that "takes you out of time," or "takes you out of yourself." You're literally ecstatic--which, from its Greek origins, means "standing outside" yourself. "I don't know where the time went," is what you say when you've just passed fourteen hours creating the whole magical kingdom of Timbuktu on your drawing board--and your spouse, sent by the worried Accountant to tell you you've missed an important dinner party, is banging on the door because you've taken the phone off the hook.
Like Alice's White Rabbit, the Accountant would always have you believe that you’re late for a very important date. And the Accountant doesn’t like it one bit when your Mind’s Eye stops to question how important that date may be; or, whether you made the date in the first place or whether it was made for you. Dreamers insist on making their own dates because their Mind’s Eyes (the Mind’s Eye being that part of your mind that’s aware of the conflict between the onboard Accountant and the onboard Visionary) have learned how to insure that mythic time gets preference over logical time.
You’ve had this experience: You’ve told yourself you’re just going to steal "two hours" to work on your dream. You go into the briar patch. One hour and fifty-five minutes have gone by, during which you've been lost--fully engrossed in your quest, without a thought for the outside world that operates on the Greenwich clock. The hours have passed "like a minute" (the Visionary’s way of talking makes the Accountant crazy). Then, you look up at the clock to discover that only five minutes remain of your bargained for two hours. How did you know to look up at the five-minute mark? Because your Accountant never sleeps, even when he’s been taken off duty. If you decide to remain in the mythic time of your dream work beyond the five minutes remaining--that is, beyond the exactly two hours you set aside--the Visionary has won this particular encounter. The Accountant has lost. If you decide to quit "on time," you may think the Accountant has won, and the Visionary lost.
What’s wrong with this win-lose scenario is that it’s exhausting, and impossible to maintain in the long run. Most people, faced with this constant natural strife between the two aspects of their minds, have allowed the Accountant to take over entirely as the only peaceful alternative. They’ve chosen the Accountant’s conservative, safe way of behaving because the daily battle is too costly in energy and emotion. If the Visionary "wins" the five-minute battle, for example, and you continue working on your new invention for another four hours instead of the two you’d set aside, guess how hard it’s going to be for the Accountant to agree to the next two hours you want to steal. The Accountant will use every instrument in the arsenal of procrastination to postpone the trip to your dreamer’s workshop.
How to avoid losing time
Francesco Petrarch: It is appointed for us to lose the present in the expectation of the future.
Petrarch, the first "Renaissance man" and precursor of Eckhart Tolle, was aware that we spend a large majority of our time "somewhere else" than in the present moment. Planning for the future, worrying about the past--so much so that by the time you reach middle age the two horses, Past and Future, are engaged in a life-and-death race along your internal timeline. Competing for your vitality, stealing your present. The time you spend on past responsibilities, past regrets, past relationships, eats into the time available for growth and progress toward your future goals.
If we don't recognize "what’s going on here," as Accountant time and Visionary time battle in our perceptions, we can get very confused. When we get confused, the Accountant can take control of our lives. For most people, the Accountant has been in full control. Consequently, they are frustrated, bored, caught in a rut. With the help of Mercury’s powerful wand--whose two snakes represent the taming of past and future around the strength of present awareness--the entrepreneur’s now-open Mind’s Eye can transform the bloody battlefield into the altar of your hopes and dreams. Awakening his Mind’s Eye, Jack London said:
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
This anti-Accountant declaration is made by your Mind’s Eye--which knows that only by marrying the Accountant’s logic with the Visionary’s myth will the present be captured for effective dream work, in lieu of the Visionary wasting the present in daydreaming, or the Accountant in obsessing about the past and the future. When your Mind’s Eye takes charge of these constant time wars, productivity combines with peace of mind. The photographer Ansel Adams said, "I’m amazed at how many people have emotional difficulties. I have none. If you keep busy, you have no time for them."
Next: Work-management doesn’t work
Stealing Time for Your Dream in 2025 – Part 3: Work-management doesn’t work
Work-management doesn't work
Time and work (action) are, in one essential regard, opposites. Here are the laws of time-work physics:
1) Time is finite. We only live so long and, while we’re alive, we’re allotted only 24 hours in every day.
2) Work—or action--is infinite. Work, whether good or bad, always generates more work, expanding to fill the time available.
Given these physical laws, it should be obvious that action is unmanageable; that only time can be managed. Yet people regularly sabotage themselves by trying to manage action. "First I’ll catch up with my day job, then I’ll take time for my dream," or, "First, I’ll get my family in good shape, then I’ll find time for dreams."
Don’t get me wrong. Action is what we’re trying to find time for. Writers write. Craftsmen make tables or boats or flower arrangements. Actors and models go for auditions and interviews. Salespeople make sales calls--the more calls they make, the more sales. Dreamers take treks to exotic places. Shakespeare's observation, that "action is eloquence," is not only creatively productive; it’s the best way to stay sane. Even one phone call a day in the service of your dreams, means, if you take two days off each week, 200 calls per year. That’s definitely progress toward the mountaintop. Success comes inevitably on the heels of constant action, as the ancient Greek poet Hesiod pointed out in his almanac: "If you put a little upon a little, soon it will become a lot."
My mentor Tom Bergin (Sterling Professor of Romance Languages and Master of Timothy Dwight College at Yale) was the author of fifty-nine books by the time he retired and eighty-three by the time he died. Yet he described himself as a "plodder." He just kept plodding away, in the vein of Hesiod. Tom and I exchanged hundreds of letters from the time I left Yale to the time he died. He taught me the relentless equation between consistent, minor actions and ultimate productivity. One day, by way of complaining about having no time to do any serious work because of all the trivial errands and duties he had to attend to, he sent me a quotation from Emerson: "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind."
Against the accelerating incoming bombardment of the things of contemporary life, action happens only when we steal time to make it happen. Yet schedules, to-do lists, self-revising agendas are constantly being tested and found insufficient. They work for a while, then become ineffective. Without recognizing this reality, through the Mind’s Eye’s awareness, each time this happens it may send us into a tailspin that moves us further from success. Life delights in creeping in to sabotage our dreams if only to make sure we’re serious about them. One of my clients, after six months of working together to change her habits to become more productive, told me I was the "Ulysses S. Grant of time management." She told me that Grant wired Lincoln: "I plan to hammer it out on this line if it takes all summer"--and that his telegram was read along the way before it was handed to the beleaguered President. The jealous snoops told Lincoln, "You know, we have reports that General Grant drinks a considerable amount of whiskey." "Is that right?" Lincoln replied. "Find out what brand he drinks and send a case of it to each of my Generals."
The human nature of time
Archimedes: Give me a lever and I can move the world.
Atchity: Time is the Dreamer’s lever.
All you need to make your dreams come true is time. Using time as your most faithful collaborator begins with understanding its interactive characteristics and protean shapes. You’ll begin noticing that time behaves differently under different circumstances. When you’re concentrating, your awareness of time seems to disappear because you’ve taken yourself out of the Accountant’s time and are dealing with the Visionary whose experience is timeless. When you're away from your quest, you become very conscious of time because your Visionary is clamoring in his cage to be released from the constraints of logical time.
"You've got my full attention": compartments of time, time and energy, rotation, kinds of time, and linkage
Time-effectiveness is a direct function of attention span. When you’re concentrating, giving the activity you’re involved with your full attention, you produce excellent results. When your attention span wavers and fades, the results diminish. Until you recognize that attention span dictates effectiveness, you’re likely to waste a great deal of time.
The key to avoiding this situation is assessing how long your attention span is for each activity you engage in--and then doing your best to engage in that activity in appropriate compartments (allotments of time that you’ve found to be most productive). Since my particular career is multivalent, I pursue what I call a "rotation method” of moving among activities that support my producing, managing, writing, brand-launching, speaking, and managing my next quest. I love all these activities, but not when I do them exclusively--each one having its own high ratio of crazy-making aspects that diminishes automatically when that activity is juxtaposed with the others.
Except during a crisis in one of the four areas, at which point all other activities stand aside until the crisis is resolved, I find it stimulating to spend an hour working on production-related matters, then spending the next hour on calls that manage various client projects in development. I’ve also learned that it’s a waste of time to try to control things that only time can accomplish--such as making a phone call, then waiting next to the phone for a response to it; or staring at the toaster waiting for the toast to pop up. The only time you have anything approaching direct control of anything is when the ball is in your court. During that moment I focus on getting the ball out of my court into someone else’s court so that I’ve done what I need to do to make the game continue. Success is all about what you do while you’re waiting.
Rotating from one activity to another ensures that the
outreach begun in Activity A will be "taking its time" while you’re
engaged in Activities B, C, and D. When the phone rings from the A call, you
interrupt D to deal with it--and it’s generally a pleasant interruption,
knowing that one facet of your career is vying with another for your attention.
An hour is probably an average attention span compartment for work. But the length of the particular compartments (remember that "compartments" are allotments of time given to a particular work activity) changes from time to time as your attention span for that activity evolves. During the original drafting of this book, for example, I spent two hours a day writing, whereas before I began the draft my attention span allowed me to spend only an hour or less a day thinking about the book and gathering my notes for it.
There’s no magical formula for determining attention span; it changes as you and your circumstances change. Yet once determined, attention span is the mastering rod between the serpents, the compartment of time where past and future meet in a present that feeds from the first and nourishes the latter.
Obviously attention span is related to your energy level at different times of day, and with regard to different activities. Activities that drain you should not be scheduled one after the other, but should alternate with activities that create energy for you.
Energy and attention span will also be different depending on whether you’re at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a particular objective. Your attention span is most in danger of sabotaging you in the middle, where it’s easy to confuse your fatigue from the hard work of plodding forward with some sort of psychological upset caused by the process you’re engaged in. Usually that situation can be resolved by shortening the allotments of time you’re devoting to the present objective; or changing the activities around which you’re scheduling this objective’s compartments.
When a particular compartment is nearing its end, use the
last few minutes of it (when the Accountant comes back online to remind you
that the time is "almost up") to jot down what you’re going to do the
next time you revisit this compartment. This automatically puts your Visionary
and Accountant into a percolation mode in which they bat things back and forth
"in the back of your mind" while you¹re busy working in the next activity’s
compartment.
Next: Where does the time go?
Stealing Time for Your Dream in 2025!
Jack Smith: “God created time so that everything wouldn't happen at once.”
Atchity: Then how come everything keeps happening at once?
Dreamers know that if you follow your dream, by definition, you can't fail. Success lies in the pursuit. If you have a dream, you have the responsibility to yourself and to the source of dreams to make it come true.
But that means finding time to do what you have to do--the very opposite of "marking time." Our minds experience life on a timeline of their own invention, a continuum that stretches from our first moment of consciousness to our last. "The end of the world," said Bernard Malamud, “will occur when I die. After that, it's everyone for himself.”
And finding time for dreams in our accelerated world where we hear of "flextime," "time-elasticity," “the sweet spot in time," “virtual time,” “time shifting,” and "time slowing down” is more confusing than ever before. A little over a century ago, if you missed a stagecoach you thought nothing of waiting a day or two for the next one to come along. Today you feel frustrated if you miss one section of a revolving door! So many of today's "time-saving devices" prove to be frauds---requiring more time to select, install, maintain, and update than it used to take without them. It's hard to believe that a few short years ago we had not yet become addicted to email, voicemail, FAX machines, microwaves, VCRs, earphones, IPods, I Phones, blackberries. All these inventions, as helpful as they can be to your onboard Accountant’s output level, suck up our time in ways that, unless they are examined and acknowledged, become quite destructive to the realization of the dream. More and more demands are being made on our time. Faith Popcorn (The Popcorn Report) puts it this way:
We're pleading to the big time clock in the sky: "Give me fewer choices, far fewer choices. Make my life easier. Help me make the most of my most valued commodity--the very minutes of my life.”
Things have gotten so bad that we can¹t really manage time any more. We’re now forced to steal it, invoking the assistance of Mercury, messenger, salesman, trickster, and thief of the gods. Like any professional thief, Mercury insists on knowing as much as possible about the object of his theft and its natural habitat and characteristics before he goes into action. This series combines observations about the nature of time and work with practical suggestions about employing Mercury’s caduceus--that magic wand with the snakes entwined around it--to steal the time you need.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Bokonon: “Busy, busy, busy.”
Ecclesiastes: “Consider the ants. Yes, you are busy. What are you busy about?”
Our Puritanical upbringing has led the Accountant to want us to keep busy. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” One day I was consulting with an attorney who, by everyone’s standards but his own, is quite successful. We were talking about forming a new marketing company. “Why do you want to do this?” I asked him.
“Because I want to get rich.” He added: “I have to stop selling my time.”
I nodded. “That’s interesting.” I was thinking of the reversible equation I’d written about in A Writer’s Time: “Time is money, money is time.”
“What brought you to this conclusion?” I asked him.
He told me that a self-made, wealthy, genius friend of his kept coming to
Finally, on one visit, the friend had to sit in the attorney’s law office for an hour waiting for him to complete some phone calls. He observed what was happening in the office.
On their way to lunch, his friend said: “You know that question I’ve been asking you all these years?”
“Yeah, of course I remember it--it drives me crazy. If I’m so smart, why aren’t I rich?”
“I know the answer now.”
“Tell
“You’re too busy to be rich.”
Doing the wrong things, no matter how fast, or how well, you do them, or how many of them you do, will not advance your dream. One of my partners put it this way: “Don’t confuse efforts with results.”
Those who break out of busy work and into the success they’ve dreamed of have learned to redefine time. If you recognize that time is merely a concept, a social or intellectual construct, you can make the clock of life your clock; then determine what you do with it. More than the quantity of activities or completed projects I’ve experienced in my various career transits, what I value most is the quality of time I’ve managed to steal from all those committees and examination-grading sessions. When someone asked me years ago to make a list of “things I do that I don’t enjoy” I was happy to realize that it was difficult to think of anything other than my two or three hours per week of desk work that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy. Then I found a way of enjoying desk work, too! By hook or crook, you need to steal the right kind of time for your dreams.
[first in a 5-part series] next: “What is time?”
Kevin Flanagan of District Magazine talks to Ken About the Art of Storytelling!
Kevin Flanagan talks to Hollywood producer and author Kenneth John Atchity, about the importance of story and why the Irish are good at telling them.
Kevin met Ken Atchity at the international writer’s symposium held in Dublin. There he was able to get the producer’s views on the magic of story from the man who is known internationally as a “Story Merchant.”
I love Hollywood.
In 2003 I spent a month in Los Angeles attempting to sell my script to a Hollywood agent. It was memorable queuing at the local Kinko’s store where they had a photocopying machine that only copied film scripts and the queue was long! People are friendly, once they heard I was from Ireland our individual projects were discussed and phone numbers were swapped. As they say, you have to be friendly in Tinseltown because you never know who you will need on the way up (and down).
The other thing I loved was sitting in my favourite coffee shop Urth Caffé on Melrose Avenue watching drop-dead gorgeous waitresses serve us coffee. They all looked, to my naive eye, like film stars. My cynical Irish friend burst my bubble. He had been working in Hollywood for years and said, between sips of his soya latte, ‘beautiful people are two-a-penny here!’.
As I continued to sit with my mouth wide-open my friend nudged me. A famed Hollywood producer had arrived outside the patio in an open-topped Bentley. Heads swivelled as he took a table, surrounded by a group of acolytes dancing attendance. Certainly the waitress perked up.
Everyone in Hollywood, I soon discovered, was climbing the greasy pole. Actresses, writers, directors, but at the top, wielding the real power, was the fabled Hollywood producer who can make (and break) anyone. You could smell their power and sense their arrogance.
My impression of Hollywood producers had not changed over the years till I meet Ken Atchity in Dublin this June past. Atchity has produced over 30 Hollywood movies and is known in the book world as the ‘Story Merchant’ because he also sells stories to publishers–and publishes them through Story Merchant Books. Soft spoken, educated, he is not at all like the usual hustler I saw on a daily basis in Hollywood. Ken Atchity is above all a reflective man who has built his life around the concept of “story.” He has been an academic, a writer, before he became a movie producer. He loves “story” and wants to share that love.
He certainly did that in Dublin when he spoke this summer to a group of writers, and what he said has stayed with me and helped inform my own work. According to Atchity, whatever the genre – movie, TV series, book or computer game – its core chances of success all come down to story. But story is not confined to the creative arts.
“Look at Brexit,” Atchity says as we sip a drink after his lecture in the bar of the famed Gresham Hotel, “the day after the referendum a lot of British people wanted to have another vote as they were led to believe Brexit was a story about the immigration crisis. But it was also about 200 other things as well: the value of pound and the stock market. But the story was moulded around immigration and national identity and people bought into it.”
Ken lowers his glass and smiles, “Lying is an old Catholic word for what we all do all day – another form of storytelling. If your wife walks down the steps after a long night out and asks “how am I looking?” do you tell the truth or a story to get by and not stir up a row?” He takes another sip. “Everybody is telling a story!”
Storytelling goes back to the dawn of man, Atchity insists, and Homer was the greatest storyteller of them all, probably as product of the oral tradition of storytelling having to be committed to memory. It becomes deeply ingrained.
“Stories are there to warn us what happens when people bring disaster on themselves and their people. To this day story still acts as an exhortation and a warning as what happens when someone brings destruction on all around him. Great stories are changing the world by changing the perception of people.”
Atchity believes storytelling impacts profoundly on both young and old.
“You hear parents saying disparaging remarks about groups of people – say Poles or black people – and you wake up one day as an adult and you believe fully in them.”
But despite this pessimistic view Atchity thinks things in the world are actually improving.
“Fewer people are dying in wars. People are giving up smoking. Communication is helping us. As the saying goes, living well is the best revenge and we are slowly learning to leave things behind. Optimism is the more logical of two options. I love the story of the optimist who was pushed off Empire State Building and half way down says, “Well, so far, so good!”’
Atchity has always believed in the power of “story” and I ask him why that is.
“I think it all goes back to my childhood growing up on front porches in my Cajun Louisiana (maternal) family. My uncles and cousins were storytellers – some accomplished, some not so good. I loved the feeling of community that happened when they began swapping stories and jokes. And though I studied analysis and logic in Jesuit classrooms my heart was with the storytellers. As an Italian friend of mine said one day, trying to explain his new wife’s erratic behavior, “Let me tell you a story instead–isn’t life, after all, just a story?” It’s the power of stories that change the world more than anything else.”
Among a vast oeuvre Atchity has produced his share of horror movies, including Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes. But horror is a genre in decline. Does Atchity have his views on why this is?
“Aristotle’s theory was about how audience needs catharsis. They see horror on stage, walk out of the theatre and give a sigh of relief that the “horror” does not affect their lives. But in today’s world all that has changed. Daily we hear and see horrific things – decapitations and mass murder at every turn. Horror is no longer escapism. Audiences now need to escape their daily dose of real live horror by going to the movie house. There they can watch heroes in blockbusters win and the bad guys lose.”
Despite the decline Atchity still continues to produce movies in the horror genre, “At the moment we are working on a very low budget horror spoof – Friday 31st – and that maybe is the way to go.” // We discuss our best loved horror movies. One of Atchity’s favorites was filmed on the campus he was attending at Georgetown University in Washington.
“Scenes from The Exorcist were shot at my alma mater. I remember reading the book in the early 70’s and being scared to death. Having been raised a Roman Catholic I believed it was all real! From a pure horror point of view it’s my favorite.”
The Exorcist was released in 1973 but not shown in Ireland till 1998. How things have changed! Now, according to Atchity, “horror movies are relegated to low-budget productions with an occasional excursion into brilliance. The market isn’t as robust as the general market is. It’s a selective audience, that doesn’t appear to be growing—because of the advent of alternate media such as online games, web series. Cheap ones are made because the loyal horror audience will see it and is enough by itself to make them profitable even if they don’t cross over to the larger audience.”
We move on to discussing another core shift in storytelling – the move from movies to TV mega stories, Game of Thrones being the prime example. Are these TV series successful because they allow “story” to be told in greater depth?
“A series or miniseries allows the storyteller to develop the characters more fully than the restricted time allowed for a film. The best writers and directors today are in television as well as film.”
Ken has enjoyed walking in the footsteps of Leopold Bloom while in Dublin, and I ask him for any words of wisdom for modern Irish writers.
“Tell a story with universal impact – something we all care about – and make sure it has three well-defined acts and each act is powerfully dramatic. It’s also important to make sure the main character is someone we can all relate to, even if he’s not likeable. Do all that and get someone in Hollywood to give you feedback on it.”
Irish writers get on the case – you know the right person in Hollywood to send it to!
Read more at District Magazine
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