Episode 118 - The Martial Art of Writing with Alan Baxter
February 1, 2022
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Alan Baxter discusses THE MARTIAL ART OF WRITING. focusing on the lessons we as writers can take from the martial arts, of which Alan is a practitioner. He talks about the danger of reading about how to do something but not doing it, the fact that the journey to mastery will never end but that the only failure is quitting, that the only competition is against ourselves, and the only goal to be a better writer than you were the day before. You all know of my love of the nautical metaphor, so I was especially happy when Alan talked about the importance of having a mindset that a rising tide lifts all boats and that as writers, we might be in different boats, but we're all in the same storm, so we need to look out for each other.
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Alan Baxter is a British-Australian multi-award-winning author of horror, supernatural thrillers, and dark fantasy, with more than twenty books including novels, novellas, and short story collections. He’s also a whisky-soaked swear monkey and dog lover. He creates dark, weird stories among dairy paddocks on the beautiful south coast of New South Wales, Australia, where he lives with his wife, son, hound, and other creatures.
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"It doesn't matter how successful you might be, there's always someone who's more successful. But there's no reason you shouldn't all just treat each other equally. You're all on the same journey. We might be in different boats, but we're all in the same storm. Just look after each other and be kind to each other." —Alan Baxter
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Alan Baxter. Hey Alan, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Alan: I'm well, how are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing very well, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Alan Baxter is a British-Australian multi-award-winning author of horror, supernatural thrillers and dark fantasy, with more than 20 books, including novels, novellas, and short story collections. He's also a whiskey-soaked swear monkey and dog lover. He creates dark, weird stories among dairy paddocks on the beautiful south coast of New South Wales, Australia, where he lives with his wife, son, hound and other creatures.
[00:00:35] And Alan is also a practitioner of the martial arts, and that's what we're going to be talking about today. We're going to be talking about the martial art of writing.
[00:00:43] Matty: And so, Alan, I thought a good way to start this out would be to talk about what initially interested you in martial arts, and how it was similar to or different from what originally interested you about writing?
[00:00:57] Alan: Well, the martial arts is just, it's one of those things. It feels like it's just something I've always done, because I've done that since I was a little kid. It originally started when I was in school, I was about 10 years old, and as is often the case with school, there are bullies around and people can be a bit of a pain. My dad, when he was a lot younger, had done judo. And he said, there's nothing more satisfying than throwing a bully on his ass to make him leave you alone, kind of thing. So he said, maybe you should do some judo classes and you'd feel a bit better. When it comes to it, a lot of the time with bullies, they only understand one language, so there is some value in that idea. So I started doing judo when I was little, and I really enjoyed it. It was good. So I fell into it and really enjoyed that.
[00:01:38] But then the judo teacher moved away, and said, don't worry, same time, same place, a new teacher will be here, but it turned out that teacher was a karate teacher. And I did a year or so of that particular style of karate and it didn't really suit me, it didn't really fit. And that's what made me start looking around for what it was that I really wanted. And at the time I was mad for a TV show called MONKEY. I assume you guys got that, the Japanese series that was made of the Chinese epic with Monkey and Pixie and Sandy and all that. And I was like, I want to do what Monkey does, what's that? And I discovered that was Kung Fu, and so then that led me to go and find Kung Fu schools, and that's what I've been doing ever since.
[00:02:13] Matty: I'm wondering if there's an analogy about the, you basically got into the martial arts and originally to defend yourself against bullies. Is there a writing analogy there or was your entree to writing somewhat different?
[00:02:27] Alan: Yeah, I'd always been a storyteller. I always made stuff up, always liked to tell stories, and even before I got into martial arts, I discovered the joy of writing stories. And I suppose that in some ways that's an escape as well, and that's an outlet and that helps to deal with certain aspects of life, you know. It helps you to process things, reading and writing both. And so I guess, if you want an analogy, I guess I got into writing to get the bullies out of my brain that wouldn't leave me alone. I needed to tell the stories, right? So I guess maybe that's the process, yeah. Because once they're in there and these stories are going and you know, if they feel like they have to be told, you've got to find an outlet for them in one way or another. And for me, that was writing.
[00:03:08] Matty: It's interesting that martial arts is considered an art, as is writing. So were there general philosophies that you took to your practice of martial arts that you then saw playing out later? It sounds like your writing career, even back with your childhood, began after you had started martial arts. So were you able to carry forward some of those lessons, if I understand that correctly?
[00:03:33] Alan: I guess I started writing stories before I started martial arts, but then I started writing more seriously with an idea of actual professional writing much later. And definitely, I make a point of reminding people of this all the time when I'm teaching, that it is a martial art, there is a lot of science to it. There's a lot of anatomy and mechanics and whatever else that's involved. But it is also an art. The martial arts are a form of self-expression and there are certain things that will change from person to person. That's why I encourage my students to go and train with other teachers within our school, because other teachers have a different accent, if you know what I mean, in the way that they teach and the way they interpret things, because that's their art. And so that helps students discover their own, when they see this sort of slight variety in teachers and stuff.
[00:04:18] And so, by the time I started writing seriously, I had certainly developed this idea of what's required to succeed in martial arts. Try a lot, fail a lot, build your way up, the discipline of just getting in and getting it done. Unless you do it, you're never going to get any good and all that sort of stuff. So the parallels are legion. Yeah, they are both arts and they have a lot in common.
[00:04:40] Matty: How about the idea of training with other teachers? Do you see that playing out if you're advising people about their writing craft?
[00:04:48] Alan: Yeah, absolutely. If you only ever read one author, you're going to have a fairly flat style of your own probably. We read numerous books and authors and hopefully genres and everything else. We learn from movies as much as from books, there's graphic novels and other stuff. We might do writing courses where we'll learn from different instructors and stuff like that or be with different writing groups online.
[00:05:11] So a lot of the time, when it comes to developing an art, you consume the stuff that feeds back into your art from a variety of places. So within the Kung Fu school, people are fine to train with one teacher for a long time, because there's a lot to be learned, but once they get to a point, especially if they're getting to that point where they're getting towards becoming an instructor themselves, it's really beneficial for them to go and train with other teachers and they know all this stuff already, but then they go and do that stuff with someone else and see a slightly different flavor in someone else, and that helps them to develop their own understanding and then their own interpretation of the art that way.
[00:05:47] Matty: I think it's interesting to distinguish what you'd be looking for as a new writer or new martial arts practitioner, as opposed to more experienced one, because I don't know that this played out this way for me for the writing craft, but definitely did for the publishing voyage, because early on, I was just trying to read everything and trying to act on all the advice. And of course, some of it was contradictory, some of it I didn't fully understand, and so it was really beneficial for me to find a couple of trusted advisors and just follow them, until I got to the point where I felt like I had mastered that and then I could start reaching out. But I think the same is true for the writing craft. Early on, if you read a whole bunch of craft books, sometimes it's hard to sort through it. Is there an analogy there with what you're saying about later on, it's more important to go to different instructors to learn martial arts?
[00:06:35] Alan: Yeah, maybe. The other side of that as well, is that in the martial arts, your instructor will learn about you as a student as well. So it's good to say, you know what, you should go and train with so-and-so or you should go and train with so-and-so, because you can recognize what they might bring out in that student.
[00:06:49] So I suppose there's a similarity in a way, like you said, if you just try to consume everything, there's this great danger of reading all about how to do something, but not doing it.
[00:06:58] And it's well, at the end of the day, regardless of anything else, you just got to get on and do it. It's the same with writing, it's the same with the martial arts. You have to just put in the hours, you have to practice. So better to take a few small bits, practice and start getting good, and then you can recognize areas where you need to improve, areas where you've got weaknesses or strengths and stuff like that. And the better you get at something, if you sort of self-interrogate all the time, the better you get at something, the more aware you are of where you need to improve and then what you might need to seek out.
[00:07:28] I think that as you mentioned yourself, there's a danger that if you just sort of read every craft book you can find right from the outset, you'll just be overwhelmed with stuff, but you've still never done the exercises. You've never put in the basics of just trying to write stuff and see how it goes.
[00:07:41] Better to start small, and we do, especially with writing. Presumably, I know it's not actually the case for everyone which mystifies me, but generally speaking, the case for writers is that you come to a writer as a very voracious reader. So initially, even from a young age, you've probably been reading loads. So in many ways, you've been studying craft all along subconsciously, because the stories you enjoy are the ones that are well-crafted and the ones that appeal to you. And so when you start to write, you probably emulate that a little bit, even subconsciously, and as you develop your own voice, you learn how to step aside from the influence and then have more of your own voice and style going on. And I think that's similar with the martial arts as well. First of all, you copy, and then when you remember and practice on your own, you start to interpret. So, it's similar, I think.
[00:08:29] Matty: I think one nice lesson from martial arts is that I don't think anyone ever decides they're going to learn a particular practice of martial arts and then just waits for competency to strike. It's clear that's something that's been to take many years of practice.
[00:08:43] Alan: Well, it's interesting I mean, that you do get those people.
[00:08:46] Matty: Oh yeah.
[00:08:47] Alan: They come along to the class, and they go, well this is great because I want to be like Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. I want to be able to do this stuff, so I'm going to go to a class and you're going to teach me how to do that. And so well, yes, I can explain to you what's involved in doing that, but just coming to a few classes, it doesn't mean you're then going to be able to do that. You come to a few classes, you start to learn and 10,000 hours later, you start getting competent, because you have to put in the work. The best thing you can do is have a good teacher who's going to guide you well, so that you put your efforts into good places, you don't waste your efforts. But, yeah, you've got to do the work and a lot of the time people, and I used to be a personal trainer, I don't do that really much anymore as well. But it would be the same with that, people will come along and go, right, you're a personal trainer, you're going to get me fit.
[00:09:31] It's like, well, I'm going to show you how to get fit, but you're the one who has put in the work and it's going to take hours and weeks and months. There's no secrets, there's nothing I can say that go, right, this is how you do it, boom, suddenly you're a martial artist or suddenly you're a writer. You've still got to put in those hours.
[00:09:46] And that's the single lesson, even as you get more experienced, you need to continuously remind yourself of. This is a journey that never ends. You never get to a point, okay, I can do that now. It doesn't matter how good you are, you can always get better. It's one of the things I love about martial arts and writing and any art. However good you get, you can always get better. But you're not going to be any good for a long time, because you've got to be bad and get good in the first place.
[00:10:10] And then hopefully you continually get better. But you've got to fail. You've got to be rubbish. We're all rubbish when we start, but the determination to push on and develop, that's important.
[00:10:20] Matty: Another comparison that I thought was interesting is, we've been talking about martial arts being an art, writing being an art. But you had mentioned the fact that there's this whole sort of scientific component of understanding the physics of movement of bodies and things like that. Do you see an analogy there between balancing, I don't know if it's the science of writing, but maybe the guidelines for writing, that would be equivalent to the sort of scientific side of martial arts and how a writer should be approaching that?
[00:10:51] Alan: Yeah, probably. There are rules of grammar, there are rules of language, that you have to understand, in the same way that there are rules of movements. Bodies will only move in certain ways, and we can train our bodies to go beyond those basic movements. And that's a lot of what the martial arts does. A lot of martial arts training is basically training your whole body to move as a single unit. So just because I'm punching with my fist, that's just the end result. The fact that my fist is the thing that connects is the end result of an entire chain of events that works with the body. You understand the foot work and the stance and the movement and everything else to develop a good punch.
[00:11:26] So the mechanics and the sort of kinesiology of physical movement, I was going to say is unchangeable. That's not entirely true. You can change it to some degree, but there are certain boundaries within it in the same way that with writing, there are boundaries of language and grammar. You can't just randomly throw words at the page and say, well, that's experimental because it's just senseless. But the better you get at it and the more you understand it, the more you can manipulate that to develop and draw up your own style and to make something interesting. And that's, I suppose, within writing, that's where we start having this seemingly sort of effortless prose that just conveys ideas beautifully, which is what we're aiming for.
[00:12:03] And like that with the martial arts, once you understand good technique and you relax and you practice and you do it again and again, and you forge your body to be able to do the things you ask of it, then you can make seemingly very difficult or athletic or unusual movements seem effortless. Yeah, again, it comes back to the practice. The master that makes these things look effortless is because they're really fit, they're really strong, they've put in thousands of hours of practice, really developing good technique. To make something look easy is really hard.
[00:12:33] Matty: When you look at your own writing career and you think back to how you are approaching your early stories and how you approach your stories now, are you seeing that play out, that you have a better handle on the mechanics, so you can venture into more creative approaches to your writing?
[00:12:49] Alan: Yeah, it's interesting actually, I was saying to someone the other day, the book I released at the start of this year was THE GULP, which is sort of five interconnected stories. That horror story is set in a fictional Australian harbor town. And I've just finished writing the next set of five, which will be out next year, which kind of creates a whole set of 10 with this overarching theme, and each story is individual, and they all interact and all that sort of stuff.
[00:13:11] And I was talking to someone about this last week or the week before and saying how it's really interesting that this is an idea I had for a long time, but it's only now that I could do that. I feel like I've done a really good job of it, but I couldn't have done that 10 years ago. I couldn't have written, even though the sort of concept was there, and the idea was there, I couldn't have pulled that off 10 years ago. I wasn't good enough to develop the characters and the interacting storylines and to weave it all together.
[00:13:40] And I think a lot of that comes down to those early stories, where you're still almost trying too hard because you're trying to find what it is that you're doing. You're trying to find good language and you're trying to find cool ideas. And I'm still very proud of my early books and my early stories, but I think there is some degree of that in there where you're searching for your voice, and you're almost trying too hard. And as you get better, the more you do it, the more you relax, the more your own voice and your style comes through. And then the more you're able to really draw, because a lot of the ideas, what you're doing is trying to realize the subconscious. Within the martial arts, one of the things, my students get sick of hearing me say it, but one of the things I say probably more than anything else is, relax, relax, relax, which is contradictory in itself because it's really hard work.
[00:14:26] So you've got to be fit, you've got to be strong, you've really got to use your body properly. And when people are trying to do that in the first case, they tend to be stiff and slow and a bit "grrr" in trying to think of all the things. Whereas as they get stronger and their bodies become stronger and more flexible through that practice, they're more capable of doing those things, and then they need to learn to hold the energy and the power and the body in the right places, but otherwise relax, because the best expression comes through when you're relaxed.
[00:14:58] And that's the same with writing, I think. The more you get used to it, the less you're trying hard to make a story or to make interesting language, the more you relax, the more you express that subconscious of that real heart of what it is that you're trying to say, the more that can come through. So yeah, there's a definite parallel in getting good enough to relax and let out what it is that you're really trying to express.
[00:15:24] Matty: I think it's a very difficult decision or a consideration in writing, to think about being that relaxed creator.
[00:15:33] Alan: Yeah.
[00:15:33] Matty: And still adhering to let's say, the tropes or conventions or the guidelines that make sense for your book, your genre, the story you want to tell, and both not resting on your laurels in terms of your craft and doing what you can do well, but not overstepping.
[00:15:51] Alan: I think it comes down to those basics. When you're training in the martial arts, no matter how advanced you get, you frequently drill through the basics and the techniques that you learn and the forms that you learned. You're constantly going back and training those. It's, I know that form inside out, I've done it for X years, I could do it backwards and standing on my head or whatever, but you still do it because the benefit of the actual act of doing that is the reason that form or that technique is there, it's because it develops a certain thing. And if you stop doing it, then that development starts to wane. So even the more advanced stuff that you learn, the more that feeds back into the basics and the better you can do the basics, and then the better you can do the basics, the more that feeds up and makes you more capable of doing the advanced stuff. And this is the nature of yin yang in the practice.
[00:16:37] And I think it comes through the same way in writing as well. Once you've understood those basics and you've got an understanding of your voice and grammar and story structure, once that starts to come quite naturally, you relax more, and better story can come out because you're not thinking so hard about those basics. But equally, you still have to practice those. You still have to adhere to those and understand that they're part of the process. And then that will feed up and make the other stuff better.
[00:17:04] So, yeah, I think it's always important. I'll do it quite often, every once in a while, I sort of step back from the story and look at the story beats and look at the shape of things, and you know, am I still sticking to the general rules here and making something good or have I just wandered off into some strange and almost experimental? Which doesn't usually happen, I'm used to story structure now, I guess, so that's where it comes from. But the better you get at it, the more relaxed you get about doing those basics, the more the advanced stuff comes through. When you still have to think hard about adhering to the basics, it's harder than to do the other stuff. I think that's how the development grows.
[00:17:39] Matty: I assume that when you're getting ready for a martial arts session, you do warmups. Do you do warmups for writing before you start doing your real writing?
[00:17:48] Alan: I don't, actually. It's interesting, I write quite a few books with David Wood, and I know that when he's doing his solo stuff, he'll quite often basically just do a word sprint to get, and he's right, I've got 20 minutes, 300 words, bang. And it doesn't matter, just, just to get him in that zone of writing. And I know a few people that do some variation of that. I don't, which is interesting. You're absolutely right, you don't drop into busting your ass training hard until you've stretched a bit, warmed up a bit, got the blood moving. I don't tend to have that equivalent with writing. If I'm in a project, I tend to just sort of wherever I left off, I sit back down and drop back into it again.
[00:18:24] But you'll probably find that, I've never really paid attention to it about this, but I'd probably find that as I start a writing session, it's probably a bit slow and I take my time, and then as you get warmed up, then it starts to motor. I have a little alarm thing that I set because, especially being involved with martial arts and physical training so much, I'm really aware of how unhealthy sitting for long periods is. Then I have this, and it's one of the biggest issues for writers, is that we sit in places like this for hours and we're hunched over, picking away and whatever. So I have this little thing that beeps every 30 minutes when I'm in a writing session, because I know I zone in, and it beeps every 30 minutes to then, when it beeps, I'll just stand up and stretch and squat and move and then sit down again, to make sure that I'm reminded to do that. Otherwise, I can sit there, and three hours will go past, and I realize I've been in the chair and haven't moved or my feet are going numb. So I try to take proper breaks, but I have this little 30-minute timer that beeps.
[00:19:23] Matty: I think that's a great idea. And I was, as I was looking through your book, THE MARTIAL ART OF WRITING, I saw that. And I was like, you know what, if I don't take any other tips from this, I've got to start doing that. because I'm just terrible about that.
[00:19:35] Alan: For writers, it's one of the best tips and it is literally, you know I'll just push the chair back and I'll stand up and I'll sort of squat, and I'll twist, and I'll stretch. I might drop and do 10 pushups and a sit up and then get back in the chair. Takes 15, 20 seconds.
[00:19:47] Matty: Right.
[00:19:48] Alan: But all of a sudden, your body's moved and your blood's running. Oh, and then you go again. And I try to take bigger breaks then when I can, quite often, if I get to a natural, I'll go make a cup of tea or something, and then I'll walk around, I'll go out and I'll throw the dog's toy in the back garden while I drink a cup of tea before I come and sit down again and get a longer break.
[00:20:06] But yeah, because this position, where we just sit like this, especially when we type, because everything's forward. There's even, I always try to do this and my chair's set so that I can type this way because I have this terrible habit of sticking my head forward, and the more you get into the story, the more you go into the screen and ugh, I have to sit up and get my neck, it's terrible. Yeah, the writing is so unhealthy in terms of physicality.
[00:20:30] Matty: Yeah. One of the upsides or downsides, I don't know which, of video conferences is that I never truly appreciated how awful my posture is until I saw myself on video. And I was like, oh my God. If only I had noticed that three decades ago.
[00:20:47] Alan: Yeah. I've discovered. It's interesting actually, that I got an injury years and years and years ago, I got an injury in my hip. And it means that sitting in a sort of a dining chair, just that sitting straight up position is okay for about 5 or 10 minutes, and then my hip just starts, and so I have to open up my hip. I can't sit, if I have to sit at like a dinner table or something for any length of time, I just get so uncomfortable. Flights are a nightmare because I'm 6'2" as well, there's not a lot of room in a plane and it plays havoc with my hip.
[00:21:16] But it's also made me really aware of when I'm sitting up or when I'm leaning forward, where it gets worse or when I'm leaning back and let my hip open. And so it's made me really aware of that, especially the last few years, as you get a bit older and injuries sort of shine through a little bit stronger. And so I've become really aware of that. And for a while my posture of sort of sitting forward, especially putting the neck forward was just terrible. And I've trained myself to be aware of it and to keep straight up and down in the neck and to allow my hip that movement and stuff.
[00:21:49] So, yeah, you have to train yourself to be aware of it because it's very easy to just not notice and not do anything about it. But once you do, any new habit, 30 days to develop a new habit principle at work, you have some sort of reminder. Once it becomes a habit, it's sort of impossible not to stay aware of it, and you very quickly become aware of when your posture is going bad. And I'll do that when I'm really into something and thinking, and I'm writing, and I'll feel myself going. I get about halfway there and I just naturally push up, because I've become so aware of it. But you have to train that, you have to train yourself to recognize it.
[00:22:24] Matty: Yeah, absolutely. You had mentioned before about the concept of holding energy as part of your martial arts practice. Is there an analogy in writing about holding energy?
[00:23:09] Alan: Good question. Within the traditional martial arts, there are different energies that you focus, sinking energy, stopping energy, all these different things that you focus to develop certain types of sorts of movement and power and whatever else. And when you first start learning, you just learn the mechanics, because there's enough to think about as a beginner, you've got to understand the mechanics, the movements, the techniques. Once they start to become natural, then you start trying to draw out the understanding of those energies in the student.
[00:23:35] And that comes to correct breathing and hand and foot moving together and working with the breath and everything else, and then sort of developing what they call the 'Geng', these different energies that we use. So that is the really long process in terms of martial arts. And it's something a bit more advanced to get to that.
[00:23:52] I'm not sure there's necessarily a particular analogy when it comes to writing. I think the other thing is that those energies come out more naturally when you are relaxed. But like we were talking about before, if you're stiff and concentrating, it's very difficult for anything to get through there. But when you are relaxed, the movement comes well, and the energies can come through better. I think that's probably true of the writing as well. We said before, when you relax with those basics and you relax in terms of structure and let your voice come through, then you'll probably find this sort of natural cadence of story moves as well.
[00:24:22] If you're writing action, you get that vibe, if you're writing sort of tension, you'll get that vibe. If you try too hard, it comes off as sort of superficial and doesn't really work. When you relax into it and let the story naturally follow its ups and downs, then that happens. So I think it probably feeds back the same way as that. It's an interesting question, I've never considered the energies in correlation to writing.
[00:24:44] Matty: I can imagine a whole offering for your fellow writers about how, I think you had mentioned, falling energy or ...
[00:24:52] Alan: The sinking energy, stopping energy, spiral energy. Yeah, there's all sorts of different, all the different kind of 'geng,' tucking, cupping, all these different things that we use when we're talking about how we're moving our body and fighting and stuff. I'll have to think about that and see if I can draw some analogy.
[00:25:06] Matty: It feels like there would be a good analogy to the movement of a book. It would be so much a mindset thing, but at this point, you want the sinking energy, at this point you want the pushing back energy.
[00:25:18] Alan: Yeah, I think could be something in there.
[00:25:21] Matty: In some cases, the analogy seemed pretty clear to me, even though I know nothing about martial arts, but the one that I think is tricky is the idea of competition. So, if you're involved in martial arts, you're almost by definition, in a sense, competing. Feel free to correct me on any of this, competing with the person that you're engaging in the martial arts with, or there may be actual literal competitions. Is there an aspect of that that translates into your writing work?
[00:25:48] Alan: There is, but it's important to recognize that competition is only ever against yourself. In terms of development in the martial arts, all you ever need to try to do is be better than you yesterday. If you want to actually enter competition, if you want to enter tournament and either do like forms competition, where you get judged on your execution of a form, or you want to aim to actually fight in competitions, be it sort of points sparring right up to full contact, either ring octagon or open mat, that's always an option. But it's a secondary path. The actual path of martial arts is just all about your own journey.
[00:26:28] One of the reasons it's very appealing to a lot of people, especially a lot of kids, is a lot of kids I don't like the idea of team sports and competition and stuff like that, because they feel too self-conscious about that. And they get drawn to the martial arts because they know that they're only ever in competition with themselves. It doesn't matter how good anybody else in the class is, all they're doing is trying to get better. So if each time they come to class, they're a little bit better than they were last time, then that's great. As the old adage says, fear not moving slowly, fear only standing still. All you've got to do is just incrementally try to sort of improve, and even the tiniest things, a little bit here, a little bit there, these little improvements that go on.
[00:27:05] So the martial arts is not inherently about competition, beyond competing with yourself, and then trying to make yourself better. And I think that's absolutely true of writing as well. I think it's really dangerous to ever consider other writers in any way competition. I'm very much sort of of the mindset, the rising tide lifts all boats principle. Anyone who's succeeding, it's great for all of us, because if that person's succeeding, it means other people can succeed too.
[00:27:34] Of course, we are always looking on anybody else's success with a tinge of envy, if it's what we want, if somebody wins one particular prize or has one particular bestseller or whatever else. Of course we want that for ourselves, but that's where we're in competition with ourselves because we see that, or hopefully, I think a healthy mindset is to see that as something that we want to raise ourselves. It's not like we want to take it away from someone else because it should be ours, but it's something that we want to also see in ourselves.
[00:28:04] And so for me, the only competition in writing is trying to constantly get better. I want fundamentally more than anything else, I want a bigger readership. The one thing I'm always working towards is trying to draw in more readers. If more people are enjoying my stories, that's fantastic. That's the only real measure of success for me. That comes along with more sales and a better income, fantastic, because you know, I've got a family to feed, so that's good. If awards and stuff come along the way as well, then fantastic, that's awesome feedback.
[00:28:33] But if you don't win awards or you don't get on someone's Years' Best list or whatever, it doesn't make your work and your stories any less value. They still have their own intrinsic value if they're what you produced because that's what you were trying to do. And if you're always doing your best to improve on what you put out before, if every story you're writing or every book you're writing, you're doing your best to make that the best book you've written, then I think that's the only real competition you ever need to face.
[00:29:02] And in the same way with the martial arts, every time you train, you're just trying to get a little bit better, even at one tiny thing. And that's the competition you face. If you want to push that further, if you want to enter your book into a contest and see if you win, that's a different type of competition. If you want to enter a fight tournament and see if you win about, that's a different type of competition. But they're not necessary to the art itself.
[00:29:27] Matty: That whole idea of competitiveness makes me think of a comment you'd made early on in our conversation about, when you start out on anything, you're not going to be good at it. The same is true between martial arts and writing. So I'm wondering what martial arts has taught you about dealing with failure, within the martial arts, but also in your writing craft?
[00:29:48] Alan: Yeah, I think it teaches you that you have to fail to get good. But it also, and I very much believe this, that I think failure is a bad word. The only failure is quitting. Because if you're not any good or you haven't passed a grading yet, or you haven't sold a book yet, or whatever else, that's not failing, that's just not yet succeeding. So you only fail if you quit. And even then, that's not necessarily failing if that's what you decided, you know what, this isn't working for me, I'm going to do something else, then that's not a failure either.
[00:30:18] But by the same token, you do have to really learn to not succeed in order to succeed. One of the first phrases I learned in Cantonese too, when I was training with my teacher was a phrase that basically translates to, I understand, I just can't do it. Because the teacher would be like, ah, what's wrong? You've got to do this, you've got to do this! I'd been in this for a while at this point, seeing that he was expecting a lot more of me, and it's can you give me a few minutes, because I understand what you're asking, I can't do it. Let me practice, let me do it and he'd walk away and then come back a bit later on, OK, I'm getting it, I'm getting it. Because you have to just do it over and over.
[00:30:52] And I think that's true in writing as well, is that you know what you want to do, but you can't do it yet. But you have to do it to the best of your ability in order to exercise that process in order to then be able to do it more. You can't spend 10 years studying and sit down and write a bestseller, but you can spend 10 years writing, and after 10 years a book you turn out will be way better than the stuff you started with, because you were not successful at what you were trying to achieve early on, but it gave you that practice and it gave you that sort of understanding of yourself and your voice and your process and whatever.
[00:31:28] That was like I was saying about those stories from THE GULP. I couldn't have written those stories 10 years ago because I just didn't have the chops to do it. But all the stuff that I've written along the way developed the skills in terms of structure and character and language and anything else that made me able to write. Hopefully, that's true for all of us, that the stories that we write, each subsequent story that we write is one that we couldn't have written before, but we can right now. And every time, hopefully, we try to improve. Every time we try to get a bit better, it's that thing, every book we write should hopefully be the best book we've ever written.
[00:32:01] Sometimes you don't pull it off, sometimes you get to the end of a book, and you go, that's pretty good, it's not quite what I thought it was going to be. You have to accept that about art sometimes. But I think if you're always striving for that at least, that's the ideal. And you have to fail, you have to not get it right in order to figure out how to do it right next time.
[00:32:19] Matty: I think that's one of the most difficult decisions, especially an indy author has to make, where they're looking at something, knowing that if they write this same topic, same book in a year or two years, it's going to be better then because they'll know more. But is it something that they want to share with the world, even knowing that they're not as good today as they're going to be tomorrow?
[00:32:41] Alan: You remember the old adage, art is never finished, it's just abandoned. And you have to do that. There are people out there who've been writing the same book for 10 years because they're too scared to let it out. But it also ends up, you have that potential where if you get several different colors of paint and you keep mixing them together, they make amazing patterns for a while and eventually they just become brown. And so, you kind of risk that in writing, is that if you just constantly get over and over and over something, eventually, it's just going to come out brown. You're going to lose the essence or the magic of what it was.
[00:33:13] So you might have a story a few years ago that it's like, if I wrote that now it would be so much better. But a few years ago, when you wrote it, it was as good as you could write it, and at that point, that magic is what happened. So if you're going to do this gig, you have to work on a piece until it's the best you can make it then, and not worry about the fact that maybe you could make it better in a few years, because in a few years, you're going to be writing something else so well. But you put it out.
[00:33:40] That's where having a sort of trusted group of readers around you and stuff, and you can read and critique for each other is really useful. Because hopefully, those sorts of people will be honest with you and say, this isn't ready for the world yet, but you know, what about this? What about this? Or they can say, I really enjoyed this, this is great, and give you that confidence to go, I'm going to give it a step and see what happens. You've always got to look forward. If you're looking back then you're always going to have inertia I think, which is a dangerous thing.
[00:34:06] Being a writer is a weird dualistic mindset because we're constantly thinking, oh God, I'm not good enough, this is no good, this could be better, I can make a better job of this. And at the same time we're going, here's my book, it's fantastic, everybody should read it, I deserve a million readers. So it's like this weird double mindset that you have to maintain all the time. The first one is what keeps you getting better, and the second one is what hopefully keeps you in the game because you do get a few readers.
[00:34:32] Matty: I think it's important to have two very explicitly different hats. There's your writing hat, and then there's your publisher hat or your editor hat or whatever. You can't really mix them. You have to decide, this hour, I'm going to be this, this hour I'm going to be something different, in order to deal with that duality.
[00:34:49] Alan: Yeah, at some point you just have to go, right, that's as good as it can be right now. It's good enough, readers have enjoyed it, I can't make it any better right now. Boom, let it go, have a rest, start another thing. Yeah.
[00:35:00] Matty: So I had one other question to ask. We've talked a little bit about what martial arts taught you about dealing with failure, and why failure is probably not the best term to use there, but I'm wondering, has it taught you anything about dealing with success?
[00:35:14] Alan: Well, you know what, one of the most important things in martial arts is humility. There's a principle in traditional Chinese arts, it's the idea of martial virtue. And it's about living a good life and it sort of translates to the way you practice the martial arts right through to the way you practice life, the way you live.
[00:35:35] One of the principle basic tenets in it is to be kind and to be humble, because especially as you get to a point, if you've been doing something for decades and you're recognized as a master in that art and whatever else, it's very easy for people who are super keen to learn and to become good, it's very easy for those sorts of people to look up to you. And this is why so often in the world, you have these people who exploit that, and you have this kind of guru worship principle, and that can develop right through into bad cults and stuff even. Because once you know something very well, and you've been doing it a long time and you're recognized as an authority in it, it's very easy to abuse that position.
[00:36:15] But within martial arts, it's very important, you've got to remember, there's always someone better than you. It doesn't matter how long you've been doing it, how good you might be, what certificates and colored belts you might have, or what people call you, around the corner could be someone who could just kick your ass. It could happen at any time. You might just have an off day against someone who's normally no good, and they just get the better of you. So it's always really important to retain that humility and to make sure that people, on the one hand respect the time and the effort that you've put in, but on the other hand, doesn't make you better than anyone else.
[00:36:48] And I don't know that that really applies in my writing life quite the same way. I've been doing martial arts a lot longer, I suppose. But I think to some degree it does apply, and you see it sometimes, you see some writers start to develop and become successful and they sort of pull up the ladder behind them. And I've had the exact experience where I would be at a convention and someone would be chatting to me, and very quickly you see them realize there's nothing they can get from you and just, oh, and just turn their attention to someone else. Or someone that used to talk to you a few years ago just ignores you now, because they feel like they've got this sort of stuck-up attitude, now I'm doing better than you now, I don't need to talk to you.
[00:37:28] That really bugs me, and I think it's really important to always treat everyone on an equal level. And that's something that I sort of correlate with the martial arts as well. My own teacher is a very humble person. You know, never puts himself above other people. I try to be the same with my students.
[00:37:44] And I think it's the same in the writing world as well. It doesn't matter how successful you might be, there's always someone who's more successful. There's always someone who's going to beat you on sales numbers or beat you to that award or whatever else. But there's no reason you shouldn't all just treat each other equally. You're all on the same journey. We might be in different boats, but we're all in the same storm. Just look after each other and be kind to each other. There's that level of, you say, be humble, remember humility. Don't try to use people above you and don't forget people below you. If someone helped you up, help someone else up behind, and keep that level sort of thing happening. And I think that's really important.
[00:38:20] And yeah, in the school you don't treat people differently because they're new or haven't proved their chops yet. They still deserve the respect of showing up. I think that's true for the writing world as well.
[00:38:32] Matty: Great. Well, Alan, thank you so much, this has been so interesting. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all your work online.
[00:38:40] Alan: Sure. Well, thanks, yes, it has been interesting. There's been some interesting questions coming up there. You've been digging deep. You can find me online, AlanBaxter.com.au is my website. That's the easiest place to go, because that's the central hub. You can see about all my books and all my different social media and stuff. As far as the social media is concerned, I'm most active on Twitter, again, just @alanbaxter on Twitter, you can find me there. Those are the two easiest places to track me down.
[00:39:05] Matty: Right, thank you so much, Alan.
[00:39:07] Alan: No worries. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:06] Alan: I'm well, how are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing very well, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Alan Baxter is a British-Australian multi-award-winning author of horror, supernatural thrillers and dark fantasy, with more than 20 books, including novels, novellas, and short story collections. He's also a whiskey-soaked swear monkey and dog lover. He creates dark, weird stories among dairy paddocks on the beautiful south coast of New South Wales, Australia, where he lives with his wife, son, hound and other creatures.
[00:00:35] And Alan is also a practitioner of the martial arts, and that's what we're going to be talking about today. We're going to be talking about the martial art of writing.
[00:00:43] Matty: And so, Alan, I thought a good way to start this out would be to talk about what initially interested you in martial arts, and how it was similar to or different from what originally interested you about writing?
[00:00:57] Alan: Well, the martial arts is just, it's one of those things. It feels like it's just something I've always done, because I've done that since I was a little kid. It originally started when I was in school, I was about 10 years old, and as is often the case with school, there are bullies around and people can be a bit of a pain. My dad, when he was a lot younger, had done judo. And he said, there's nothing more satisfying than throwing a bully on his ass to make him leave you alone, kind of thing. So he said, maybe you should do some judo classes and you'd feel a bit better. When it comes to it, a lot of the time with bullies, they only understand one language, so there is some value in that idea. So I started doing judo when I was little, and I really enjoyed it. It was good. So I fell into it and really enjoyed that.
[00:01:38] But then the judo teacher moved away, and said, don't worry, same time, same place, a new teacher will be here, but it turned out that teacher was a karate teacher. And I did a year or so of that particular style of karate and it didn't really suit me, it didn't really fit. And that's what made me start looking around for what it was that I really wanted. And at the time I was mad for a TV show called MONKEY. I assume you guys got that, the Japanese series that was made of the Chinese epic with Monkey and Pixie and Sandy and all that. And I was like, I want to do what Monkey does, what's that? And I discovered that was Kung Fu, and so then that led me to go and find Kung Fu schools, and that's what I've been doing ever since.
[00:02:13] Matty: I'm wondering if there's an analogy about the, you basically got into the martial arts and originally to defend yourself against bullies. Is there a writing analogy there or was your entree to writing somewhat different?
[00:02:27] Alan: Yeah, I'd always been a storyteller. I always made stuff up, always liked to tell stories, and even before I got into martial arts, I discovered the joy of writing stories. And I suppose that in some ways that's an escape as well, and that's an outlet and that helps to deal with certain aspects of life, you know. It helps you to process things, reading and writing both. And so I guess, if you want an analogy, I guess I got into writing to get the bullies out of my brain that wouldn't leave me alone. I needed to tell the stories, right? So I guess maybe that's the process, yeah. Because once they're in there and these stories are going and you know, if they feel like they have to be told, you've got to find an outlet for them in one way or another. And for me, that was writing.
[00:03:08] Matty: It's interesting that martial arts is considered an art, as is writing. So were there general philosophies that you took to your practice of martial arts that you then saw playing out later? It sounds like your writing career, even back with your childhood, began after you had started martial arts. So were you able to carry forward some of those lessons, if I understand that correctly?
[00:03:33] Alan: I guess I started writing stories before I started martial arts, but then I started writing more seriously with an idea of actual professional writing much later. And definitely, I make a point of reminding people of this all the time when I'm teaching, that it is a martial art, there is a lot of science to it. There's a lot of anatomy and mechanics and whatever else that's involved. But it is also an art. The martial arts are a form of self-expression and there are certain things that will change from person to person. That's why I encourage my students to go and train with other teachers within our school, because other teachers have a different accent, if you know what I mean, in the way that they teach and the way they interpret things, because that's their art. And so that helps students discover their own, when they see this sort of slight variety in teachers and stuff.
[00:04:18] And so, by the time I started writing seriously, I had certainly developed this idea of what's required to succeed in martial arts. Try a lot, fail a lot, build your way up, the discipline of just getting in and getting it done. Unless you do it, you're never going to get any good and all that sort of stuff. So the parallels are legion. Yeah, they are both arts and they have a lot in common.
[00:04:40] Matty: How about the idea of training with other teachers? Do you see that playing out if you're advising people about their writing craft?
[00:04:48] Alan: Yeah, absolutely. If you only ever read one author, you're going to have a fairly flat style of your own probably. We read numerous books and authors and hopefully genres and everything else. We learn from movies as much as from books, there's graphic novels and other stuff. We might do writing courses where we'll learn from different instructors and stuff like that or be with different writing groups online.
[00:05:11] So a lot of the time, when it comes to developing an art, you consume the stuff that feeds back into your art from a variety of places. So within the Kung Fu school, people are fine to train with one teacher for a long time, because there's a lot to be learned, but once they get to a point, especially if they're getting to that point where they're getting towards becoming an instructor themselves, it's really beneficial for them to go and train with other teachers and they know all this stuff already, but then they go and do that stuff with someone else and see a slightly different flavor in someone else, and that helps them to develop their own understanding and then their own interpretation of the art that way.
[00:05:47] Matty: I think it's interesting to distinguish what you'd be looking for as a new writer or new martial arts practitioner, as opposed to more experienced one, because I don't know that this played out this way for me for the writing craft, but definitely did for the publishing voyage, because early on, I was just trying to read everything and trying to act on all the advice. And of course, some of it was contradictory, some of it I didn't fully understand, and so it was really beneficial for me to find a couple of trusted advisors and just follow them, until I got to the point where I felt like I had mastered that and then I could start reaching out. But I think the same is true for the writing craft. Early on, if you read a whole bunch of craft books, sometimes it's hard to sort through it. Is there an analogy there with what you're saying about later on, it's more important to go to different instructors to learn martial arts?
[00:06:35] Alan: Yeah, maybe. The other side of that as well, is that in the martial arts, your instructor will learn about you as a student as well. So it's good to say, you know what, you should go and train with so-and-so or you should go and train with so-and-so, because you can recognize what they might bring out in that student.
[00:06:49] So I suppose there's a similarity in a way, like you said, if you just try to consume everything, there's this great danger of reading all about how to do something, but not doing it.
[00:06:58] And it's well, at the end of the day, regardless of anything else, you just got to get on and do it. It's the same with writing, it's the same with the martial arts. You have to just put in the hours, you have to practice. So better to take a few small bits, practice and start getting good, and then you can recognize areas where you need to improve, areas where you've got weaknesses or strengths and stuff like that. And the better you get at something, if you sort of self-interrogate all the time, the better you get at something, the more aware you are of where you need to improve and then what you might need to seek out.
[00:07:28] I think that as you mentioned yourself, there's a danger that if you just sort of read every craft book you can find right from the outset, you'll just be overwhelmed with stuff, but you've still never done the exercises. You've never put in the basics of just trying to write stuff and see how it goes.
[00:07:41] Better to start small, and we do, especially with writing. Presumably, I know it's not actually the case for everyone which mystifies me, but generally speaking, the case for writers is that you come to a writer as a very voracious reader. So initially, even from a young age, you've probably been reading loads. So in many ways, you've been studying craft all along subconsciously, because the stories you enjoy are the ones that are well-crafted and the ones that appeal to you. And so when you start to write, you probably emulate that a little bit, even subconsciously, and as you develop your own voice, you learn how to step aside from the influence and then have more of your own voice and style going on. And I think that's similar with the martial arts as well. First of all, you copy, and then when you remember and practice on your own, you start to interpret. So, it's similar, I think.
[00:08:29] Matty: I think one nice lesson from martial arts is that I don't think anyone ever decides they're going to learn a particular practice of martial arts and then just waits for competency to strike. It's clear that's something that's been to take many years of practice.
[00:08:43] Alan: Well, it's interesting I mean, that you do get those people.
[00:08:46] Matty: Oh yeah.
[00:08:47] Alan: They come along to the class, and they go, well this is great because I want to be like Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. I want to be able to do this stuff, so I'm going to go to a class and you're going to teach me how to do that. And so well, yes, I can explain to you what's involved in doing that, but just coming to a few classes, it doesn't mean you're then going to be able to do that. You come to a few classes, you start to learn and 10,000 hours later, you start getting competent, because you have to put in the work. The best thing you can do is have a good teacher who's going to guide you well, so that you put your efforts into good places, you don't waste your efforts. But, yeah, you've got to do the work and a lot of the time people, and I used to be a personal trainer, I don't do that really much anymore as well. But it would be the same with that, people will come along and go, right, you're a personal trainer, you're going to get me fit.
[00:09:31] It's like, well, I'm going to show you how to get fit, but you're the one who has put in the work and it's going to take hours and weeks and months. There's no secrets, there's nothing I can say that go, right, this is how you do it, boom, suddenly you're a martial artist or suddenly you're a writer. You've still got to put in those hours.
[00:09:46] And that's the single lesson, even as you get more experienced, you need to continuously remind yourself of. This is a journey that never ends. You never get to a point, okay, I can do that now. It doesn't matter how good you are, you can always get better. It's one of the things I love about martial arts and writing and any art. However good you get, you can always get better. But you're not going to be any good for a long time, because you've got to be bad and get good in the first place.
[00:10:10] And then hopefully you continually get better. But you've got to fail. You've got to be rubbish. We're all rubbish when we start, but the determination to push on and develop, that's important.
[00:10:20] Matty: Another comparison that I thought was interesting is, we've been talking about martial arts being an art, writing being an art. But you had mentioned the fact that there's this whole sort of scientific component of understanding the physics of movement of bodies and things like that. Do you see an analogy there between balancing, I don't know if it's the science of writing, but maybe the guidelines for writing, that would be equivalent to the sort of scientific side of martial arts and how a writer should be approaching that?
[00:10:51] Alan: Yeah, probably. There are rules of grammar, there are rules of language, that you have to understand, in the same way that there are rules of movements. Bodies will only move in certain ways, and we can train our bodies to go beyond those basic movements. And that's a lot of what the martial arts does. A lot of martial arts training is basically training your whole body to move as a single unit. So just because I'm punching with my fist, that's just the end result. The fact that my fist is the thing that connects is the end result of an entire chain of events that works with the body. You understand the foot work and the stance and the movement and everything else to develop a good punch.
[00:11:26] So the mechanics and the sort of kinesiology of physical movement, I was going to say is unchangeable. That's not entirely true. You can change it to some degree, but there are certain boundaries within it in the same way that with writing, there are boundaries of language and grammar. You can't just randomly throw words at the page and say, well, that's experimental because it's just senseless. But the better you get at it and the more you understand it, the more you can manipulate that to develop and draw up your own style and to make something interesting. And that's, I suppose, within writing, that's where we start having this seemingly sort of effortless prose that just conveys ideas beautifully, which is what we're aiming for.
[00:12:03] And like that with the martial arts, once you understand good technique and you relax and you practice and you do it again and again, and you forge your body to be able to do the things you ask of it, then you can make seemingly very difficult or athletic or unusual movements seem effortless. Yeah, again, it comes back to the practice. The master that makes these things look effortless is because they're really fit, they're really strong, they've put in thousands of hours of practice, really developing good technique. To make something look easy is really hard.
[00:12:33] Matty: When you look at your own writing career and you think back to how you are approaching your early stories and how you approach your stories now, are you seeing that play out, that you have a better handle on the mechanics, so you can venture into more creative approaches to your writing?
[00:12:49] Alan: Yeah, it's interesting actually, I was saying to someone the other day, the book I released at the start of this year was THE GULP, which is sort of five interconnected stories. That horror story is set in a fictional Australian harbor town. And I've just finished writing the next set of five, which will be out next year, which kind of creates a whole set of 10 with this overarching theme, and each story is individual, and they all interact and all that sort of stuff.
[00:13:11] And I was talking to someone about this last week or the week before and saying how it's really interesting that this is an idea I had for a long time, but it's only now that I could do that. I feel like I've done a really good job of it, but I couldn't have done that 10 years ago. I couldn't have written, even though the sort of concept was there, and the idea was there, I couldn't have pulled that off 10 years ago. I wasn't good enough to develop the characters and the interacting storylines and to weave it all together.
[00:13:40] And I think a lot of that comes down to those early stories, where you're still almost trying too hard because you're trying to find what it is that you're doing. You're trying to find good language and you're trying to find cool ideas. And I'm still very proud of my early books and my early stories, but I think there is some degree of that in there where you're searching for your voice, and you're almost trying too hard. And as you get better, the more you do it, the more you relax, the more your own voice and your style comes through. And then the more you're able to really draw, because a lot of the ideas, what you're doing is trying to realize the subconscious. Within the martial arts, one of the things, my students get sick of hearing me say it, but one of the things I say probably more than anything else is, relax, relax, relax, which is contradictory in itself because it's really hard work.
[00:14:26] So you've got to be fit, you've got to be strong, you've really got to use your body properly. And when people are trying to do that in the first case, they tend to be stiff and slow and a bit "grrr" in trying to think of all the things. Whereas as they get stronger and their bodies become stronger and more flexible through that practice, they're more capable of doing those things, and then they need to learn to hold the energy and the power and the body in the right places, but otherwise relax, because the best expression comes through when you're relaxed.
[00:14:58] And that's the same with writing, I think. The more you get used to it, the less you're trying hard to make a story or to make interesting language, the more you relax, the more you express that subconscious of that real heart of what it is that you're trying to say, the more that can come through. So yeah, there's a definite parallel in getting good enough to relax and let out what it is that you're really trying to express.
[00:15:24] Matty: I think it's a very difficult decision or a consideration in writing, to think about being that relaxed creator.
[00:15:33] Alan: Yeah.
[00:15:33] Matty: And still adhering to let's say, the tropes or conventions or the guidelines that make sense for your book, your genre, the story you want to tell, and both not resting on your laurels in terms of your craft and doing what you can do well, but not overstepping.
[00:15:51] Alan: I think it comes down to those basics. When you're training in the martial arts, no matter how advanced you get, you frequently drill through the basics and the techniques that you learn and the forms that you learned. You're constantly going back and training those. It's, I know that form inside out, I've done it for X years, I could do it backwards and standing on my head or whatever, but you still do it because the benefit of the actual act of doing that is the reason that form or that technique is there, it's because it develops a certain thing. And if you stop doing it, then that development starts to wane. So even the more advanced stuff that you learn, the more that feeds back into the basics and the better you can do the basics, and then the better you can do the basics, the more that feeds up and makes you more capable of doing the advanced stuff. And this is the nature of yin yang in the practice.
[00:16:37] And I think it comes through the same way in writing as well. Once you've understood those basics and you've got an understanding of your voice and grammar and story structure, once that starts to come quite naturally, you relax more, and better story can come out because you're not thinking so hard about those basics. But equally, you still have to practice those. You still have to adhere to those and understand that they're part of the process. And then that will feed up and make the other stuff better.
[00:17:04] So, yeah, I think it's always important. I'll do it quite often, every once in a while, I sort of step back from the story and look at the story beats and look at the shape of things, and you know, am I still sticking to the general rules here and making something good or have I just wandered off into some strange and almost experimental? Which doesn't usually happen, I'm used to story structure now, I guess, so that's where it comes from. But the better you get at it, the more relaxed you get about doing those basics, the more the advanced stuff comes through. When you still have to think hard about adhering to the basics, it's harder than to do the other stuff. I think that's how the development grows.
[00:17:39] Matty: I assume that when you're getting ready for a martial arts session, you do warmups. Do you do warmups for writing before you start doing your real writing?
[00:17:48] Alan: I don't, actually. It's interesting, I write quite a few books with David Wood, and I know that when he's doing his solo stuff, he'll quite often basically just do a word sprint to get, and he's right, I've got 20 minutes, 300 words, bang. And it doesn't matter, just, just to get him in that zone of writing. And I know a few people that do some variation of that. I don't, which is interesting. You're absolutely right, you don't drop into busting your ass training hard until you've stretched a bit, warmed up a bit, got the blood moving. I don't tend to have that equivalent with writing. If I'm in a project, I tend to just sort of wherever I left off, I sit back down and drop back into it again.
[00:18:24] But you'll probably find that, I've never really paid attention to it about this, but I'd probably find that as I start a writing session, it's probably a bit slow and I take my time, and then as you get warmed up, then it starts to motor. I have a little alarm thing that I set because, especially being involved with martial arts and physical training so much, I'm really aware of how unhealthy sitting for long periods is. Then I have this, and it's one of the biggest issues for writers, is that we sit in places like this for hours and we're hunched over, picking away and whatever. So I have this little thing that beeps every 30 minutes when I'm in a writing session, because I know I zone in, and it beeps every 30 minutes to then, when it beeps, I'll just stand up and stretch and squat and move and then sit down again, to make sure that I'm reminded to do that. Otherwise, I can sit there, and three hours will go past, and I realize I've been in the chair and haven't moved or my feet are going numb. So I try to take proper breaks, but I have this little 30-minute timer that beeps.
[00:19:23] Matty: I think that's a great idea. And I was, as I was looking through your book, THE MARTIAL ART OF WRITING, I saw that. And I was like, you know what, if I don't take any other tips from this, I've got to start doing that. because I'm just terrible about that.
[00:19:35] Alan: For writers, it's one of the best tips and it is literally, you know I'll just push the chair back and I'll stand up and I'll sort of squat, and I'll twist, and I'll stretch. I might drop and do 10 pushups and a sit up and then get back in the chair. Takes 15, 20 seconds.
[00:19:47] Matty: Right.
[00:19:48] Alan: But all of a sudden, your body's moved and your blood's running. Oh, and then you go again. And I try to take bigger breaks then when I can, quite often, if I get to a natural, I'll go make a cup of tea or something, and then I'll walk around, I'll go out and I'll throw the dog's toy in the back garden while I drink a cup of tea before I come and sit down again and get a longer break.
[00:20:06] But yeah, because this position, where we just sit like this, especially when we type, because everything's forward. There's even, I always try to do this and my chair's set so that I can type this way because I have this terrible habit of sticking my head forward, and the more you get into the story, the more you go into the screen and ugh, I have to sit up and get my neck, it's terrible. Yeah, the writing is so unhealthy in terms of physicality.
[00:20:30] Matty: Yeah. One of the upsides or downsides, I don't know which, of video conferences is that I never truly appreciated how awful my posture is until I saw myself on video. And I was like, oh my God. If only I had noticed that three decades ago.
[00:20:47] Alan: Yeah. I've discovered. It's interesting actually, that I got an injury years and years and years ago, I got an injury in my hip. And it means that sitting in a sort of a dining chair, just that sitting straight up position is okay for about 5 or 10 minutes, and then my hip just starts, and so I have to open up my hip. I can't sit, if I have to sit at like a dinner table or something for any length of time, I just get so uncomfortable. Flights are a nightmare because I'm 6'2" as well, there's not a lot of room in a plane and it plays havoc with my hip.
[00:21:16] But it's also made me really aware of when I'm sitting up or when I'm leaning forward, where it gets worse or when I'm leaning back and let my hip open. And so it's made me really aware of that, especially the last few years, as you get a bit older and injuries sort of shine through a little bit stronger. And so I've become really aware of that. And for a while my posture of sort of sitting forward, especially putting the neck forward was just terrible. And I've trained myself to be aware of it and to keep straight up and down in the neck and to allow my hip that movement and stuff.
[00:21:49] So, yeah, you have to train yourself to be aware of it because it's very easy to just not notice and not do anything about it. But once you do, any new habit, 30 days to develop a new habit principle at work, you have some sort of reminder. Once it becomes a habit, it's sort of impossible not to stay aware of it, and you very quickly become aware of when your posture is going bad. And I'll do that when I'm really into something and thinking, and I'm writing, and I'll feel myself going. I get about halfway there and I just naturally push up, because I've become so aware of it. But you have to train that, you have to train yourself to recognize it.
[00:22:24] Matty: Yeah, absolutely. You had mentioned before about the concept of holding energy as part of your martial arts practice. Is there an analogy in writing about holding energy?
[00:23:09] Alan: Good question. Within the traditional martial arts, there are different energies that you focus, sinking energy, stopping energy, all these different things that you focus to develop certain types of sorts of movement and power and whatever else. And when you first start learning, you just learn the mechanics, because there's enough to think about as a beginner, you've got to understand the mechanics, the movements, the techniques. Once they start to become natural, then you start trying to draw out the understanding of those energies in the student.
[00:23:35] And that comes to correct breathing and hand and foot moving together and working with the breath and everything else, and then sort of developing what they call the 'Geng', these different energies that we use. So that is the really long process in terms of martial arts. And it's something a bit more advanced to get to that.
[00:23:52] I'm not sure there's necessarily a particular analogy when it comes to writing. I think the other thing is that those energies come out more naturally when you are relaxed. But like we were talking about before, if you're stiff and concentrating, it's very difficult for anything to get through there. But when you are relaxed, the movement comes well, and the energies can come through better. I think that's probably true of the writing as well. We said before, when you relax with those basics and you relax in terms of structure and let your voice come through, then you'll probably find this sort of natural cadence of story moves as well.
[00:24:22] If you're writing action, you get that vibe, if you're writing sort of tension, you'll get that vibe. If you try too hard, it comes off as sort of superficial and doesn't really work. When you relax into it and let the story naturally follow its ups and downs, then that happens. So I think it probably feeds back the same way as that. It's an interesting question, I've never considered the energies in correlation to writing.
[00:24:44] Matty: I can imagine a whole offering for your fellow writers about how, I think you had mentioned, falling energy or ...
[00:24:52] Alan: The sinking energy, stopping energy, spiral energy. Yeah, there's all sorts of different, all the different kind of 'geng,' tucking, cupping, all these different things that we use when we're talking about how we're moving our body and fighting and stuff. I'll have to think about that and see if I can draw some analogy.
[00:25:06] Matty: It feels like there would be a good analogy to the movement of a book. It would be so much a mindset thing, but at this point, you want the sinking energy, at this point you want the pushing back energy.
[00:25:18] Alan: Yeah, I think could be something in there.
[00:25:21] Matty: In some cases, the analogy seemed pretty clear to me, even though I know nothing about martial arts, but the one that I think is tricky is the idea of competition. So, if you're involved in martial arts, you're almost by definition, in a sense, competing. Feel free to correct me on any of this, competing with the person that you're engaging in the martial arts with, or there may be actual literal competitions. Is there an aspect of that that translates into your writing work?
[00:25:48] Alan: There is, but it's important to recognize that competition is only ever against yourself. In terms of development in the martial arts, all you ever need to try to do is be better than you yesterday. If you want to actually enter competition, if you want to enter tournament and either do like forms competition, where you get judged on your execution of a form, or you want to aim to actually fight in competitions, be it sort of points sparring right up to full contact, either ring octagon or open mat, that's always an option. But it's a secondary path. The actual path of martial arts is just all about your own journey.
[00:26:28] One of the reasons it's very appealing to a lot of people, especially a lot of kids, is a lot of kids I don't like the idea of team sports and competition and stuff like that, because they feel too self-conscious about that. And they get drawn to the martial arts because they know that they're only ever in competition with themselves. It doesn't matter how good anybody else in the class is, all they're doing is trying to get better. So if each time they come to class, they're a little bit better than they were last time, then that's great. As the old adage says, fear not moving slowly, fear only standing still. All you've got to do is just incrementally try to sort of improve, and even the tiniest things, a little bit here, a little bit there, these little improvements that go on.
[00:27:05] So the martial arts is not inherently about competition, beyond competing with yourself, and then trying to make yourself better. And I think that's absolutely true of writing as well. I think it's really dangerous to ever consider other writers in any way competition. I'm very much sort of of the mindset, the rising tide lifts all boats principle. Anyone who's succeeding, it's great for all of us, because if that person's succeeding, it means other people can succeed too.
[00:27:34] Of course, we are always looking on anybody else's success with a tinge of envy, if it's what we want, if somebody wins one particular prize or has one particular bestseller or whatever else. Of course we want that for ourselves, but that's where we're in competition with ourselves because we see that, or hopefully, I think a healthy mindset is to see that as something that we want to raise ourselves. It's not like we want to take it away from someone else because it should be ours, but it's something that we want to also see in ourselves.
[00:28:04] And so for me, the only competition in writing is trying to constantly get better. I want fundamentally more than anything else, I want a bigger readership. The one thing I'm always working towards is trying to draw in more readers. If more people are enjoying my stories, that's fantastic. That's the only real measure of success for me. That comes along with more sales and a better income, fantastic, because you know, I've got a family to feed, so that's good. If awards and stuff come along the way as well, then fantastic, that's awesome feedback.
[00:28:33] But if you don't win awards or you don't get on someone's Years' Best list or whatever, it doesn't make your work and your stories any less value. They still have their own intrinsic value if they're what you produced because that's what you were trying to do. And if you're always doing your best to improve on what you put out before, if every story you're writing or every book you're writing, you're doing your best to make that the best book you've written, then I think that's the only real competition you ever need to face.
[00:29:02] And in the same way with the martial arts, every time you train, you're just trying to get a little bit better, even at one tiny thing. And that's the competition you face. If you want to push that further, if you want to enter your book into a contest and see if you win, that's a different type of competition. If you want to enter a fight tournament and see if you win about, that's a different type of competition. But they're not necessary to the art itself.
[00:29:27] Matty: That whole idea of competitiveness makes me think of a comment you'd made early on in our conversation about, when you start out on anything, you're not going to be good at it. The same is true between martial arts and writing. So I'm wondering what martial arts has taught you about dealing with failure, within the martial arts, but also in your writing craft?
[00:29:48] Alan: Yeah, I think it teaches you that you have to fail to get good. But it also, and I very much believe this, that I think failure is a bad word. The only failure is quitting. Because if you're not any good or you haven't passed a grading yet, or you haven't sold a book yet, or whatever else, that's not failing, that's just not yet succeeding. So you only fail if you quit. And even then, that's not necessarily failing if that's what you decided, you know what, this isn't working for me, I'm going to do something else, then that's not a failure either.
[00:30:18] But by the same token, you do have to really learn to not succeed in order to succeed. One of the first phrases I learned in Cantonese too, when I was training with my teacher was a phrase that basically translates to, I understand, I just can't do it. Because the teacher would be like, ah, what's wrong? You've got to do this, you've got to do this! I'd been in this for a while at this point, seeing that he was expecting a lot more of me, and it's can you give me a few minutes, because I understand what you're asking, I can't do it. Let me practice, let me do it and he'd walk away and then come back a bit later on, OK, I'm getting it, I'm getting it. Because you have to just do it over and over.
[00:30:52] And I think that's true in writing as well, is that you know what you want to do, but you can't do it yet. But you have to do it to the best of your ability in order to exercise that process in order to then be able to do it more. You can't spend 10 years studying and sit down and write a bestseller, but you can spend 10 years writing, and after 10 years a book you turn out will be way better than the stuff you started with, because you were not successful at what you were trying to achieve early on, but it gave you that practice and it gave you that sort of understanding of yourself and your voice and your process and whatever.
[00:31:28] That was like I was saying about those stories from THE GULP. I couldn't have written those stories 10 years ago because I just didn't have the chops to do it. But all the stuff that I've written along the way developed the skills in terms of structure and character and language and anything else that made me able to write. Hopefully, that's true for all of us, that the stories that we write, each subsequent story that we write is one that we couldn't have written before, but we can right now. And every time, hopefully, we try to improve. Every time we try to get a bit better, it's that thing, every book we write should hopefully be the best book we've ever written.
[00:32:01] Sometimes you don't pull it off, sometimes you get to the end of a book, and you go, that's pretty good, it's not quite what I thought it was going to be. You have to accept that about art sometimes. But I think if you're always striving for that at least, that's the ideal. And you have to fail, you have to not get it right in order to figure out how to do it right next time.
[00:32:19] Matty: I think that's one of the most difficult decisions, especially an indy author has to make, where they're looking at something, knowing that if they write this same topic, same book in a year or two years, it's going to be better then because they'll know more. But is it something that they want to share with the world, even knowing that they're not as good today as they're going to be tomorrow?
[00:32:41] Alan: You remember the old adage, art is never finished, it's just abandoned. And you have to do that. There are people out there who've been writing the same book for 10 years because they're too scared to let it out. But it also ends up, you have that potential where if you get several different colors of paint and you keep mixing them together, they make amazing patterns for a while and eventually they just become brown. And so, you kind of risk that in writing, is that if you just constantly get over and over and over something, eventually, it's just going to come out brown. You're going to lose the essence or the magic of what it was.
[00:33:13] So you might have a story a few years ago that it's like, if I wrote that now it would be so much better. But a few years ago, when you wrote it, it was as good as you could write it, and at that point, that magic is what happened. So if you're going to do this gig, you have to work on a piece until it's the best you can make it then, and not worry about the fact that maybe you could make it better in a few years, because in a few years, you're going to be writing something else so well. But you put it out.
[00:33:40] That's where having a sort of trusted group of readers around you and stuff, and you can read and critique for each other is really useful. Because hopefully, those sorts of people will be honest with you and say, this isn't ready for the world yet, but you know, what about this? What about this? Or they can say, I really enjoyed this, this is great, and give you that confidence to go, I'm going to give it a step and see what happens. You've always got to look forward. If you're looking back then you're always going to have inertia I think, which is a dangerous thing.
[00:34:06] Being a writer is a weird dualistic mindset because we're constantly thinking, oh God, I'm not good enough, this is no good, this could be better, I can make a better job of this. And at the same time we're going, here's my book, it's fantastic, everybody should read it, I deserve a million readers. So it's like this weird double mindset that you have to maintain all the time. The first one is what keeps you getting better, and the second one is what hopefully keeps you in the game because you do get a few readers.
[00:34:32] Matty: I think it's important to have two very explicitly different hats. There's your writing hat, and then there's your publisher hat or your editor hat or whatever. You can't really mix them. You have to decide, this hour, I'm going to be this, this hour I'm going to be something different, in order to deal with that duality.
[00:34:49] Alan: Yeah, at some point you just have to go, right, that's as good as it can be right now. It's good enough, readers have enjoyed it, I can't make it any better right now. Boom, let it go, have a rest, start another thing. Yeah.
[00:35:00] Matty: So I had one other question to ask. We've talked a little bit about what martial arts taught you about dealing with failure, and why failure is probably not the best term to use there, but I'm wondering, has it taught you anything about dealing with success?
[00:35:14] Alan: Well, you know what, one of the most important things in martial arts is humility. There's a principle in traditional Chinese arts, it's the idea of martial virtue. And it's about living a good life and it sort of translates to the way you practice the martial arts right through to the way you practice life, the way you live.
[00:35:35] One of the principle basic tenets in it is to be kind and to be humble, because especially as you get to a point, if you've been doing something for decades and you're recognized as a master in that art and whatever else, it's very easy for people who are super keen to learn and to become good, it's very easy for those sorts of people to look up to you. And this is why so often in the world, you have these people who exploit that, and you have this kind of guru worship principle, and that can develop right through into bad cults and stuff even. Because once you know something very well, and you've been doing it a long time and you're recognized as an authority in it, it's very easy to abuse that position.
[00:36:15] But within martial arts, it's very important, you've got to remember, there's always someone better than you. It doesn't matter how long you've been doing it, how good you might be, what certificates and colored belts you might have, or what people call you, around the corner could be someone who could just kick your ass. It could happen at any time. You might just have an off day against someone who's normally no good, and they just get the better of you. So it's always really important to retain that humility and to make sure that people, on the one hand respect the time and the effort that you've put in, but on the other hand, doesn't make you better than anyone else.
[00:36:48] And I don't know that that really applies in my writing life quite the same way. I've been doing martial arts a lot longer, I suppose. But I think to some degree it does apply, and you see it sometimes, you see some writers start to develop and become successful and they sort of pull up the ladder behind them. And I've had the exact experience where I would be at a convention and someone would be chatting to me, and very quickly you see them realize there's nothing they can get from you and just, oh, and just turn their attention to someone else. Or someone that used to talk to you a few years ago just ignores you now, because they feel like they've got this sort of stuck-up attitude, now I'm doing better than you now, I don't need to talk to you.
[00:37:28] That really bugs me, and I think it's really important to always treat everyone on an equal level. And that's something that I sort of correlate with the martial arts as well. My own teacher is a very humble person. You know, never puts himself above other people. I try to be the same with my students.
[00:37:44] And I think it's the same in the writing world as well. It doesn't matter how successful you might be, there's always someone who's more successful. There's always someone who's going to beat you on sales numbers or beat you to that award or whatever else. But there's no reason you shouldn't all just treat each other equally. You're all on the same journey. We might be in different boats, but we're all in the same storm. Just look after each other and be kind to each other. There's that level of, you say, be humble, remember humility. Don't try to use people above you and don't forget people below you. If someone helped you up, help someone else up behind, and keep that level sort of thing happening. And I think that's really important.
[00:38:20] And yeah, in the school you don't treat people differently because they're new or haven't proved their chops yet. They still deserve the respect of showing up. I think that's true for the writing world as well.
[00:38:32] Matty: Great. Well, Alan, thank you so much, this has been so interesting. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all your work online.
[00:38:40] Alan: Sure. Well, thanks, yes, it has been interesting. There's been some interesting questions coming up there. You've been digging deep. You can find me online, AlanBaxter.com.au is my website. That's the easiest place to go, because that's the central hub. You can see about all my books and all my different social media and stuff. As far as the social media is concerned, I'm most active on Twitter, again, just @alanbaxter on Twitter, you can find me there. Those are the two easiest places to track me down.
[00:39:05] Matty: Right, thank you so much, Alan.
[00:39:07] Alan: No worries. Thanks for having me.
Links
www.alanbaxter.com.au
Find me Twitter - @AlanBaxter
My Amazon Author Page
My Kung Fu Academy
The Creative Penn Podcast "Short Stories As The Basis To An Award-Winning Author Career With Alan Baxter"
Find me Twitter - @AlanBaxter
My Amazon Author Page
My Kung Fu Academy
The Creative Penn Podcast "Short Stories As The Basis To An Award-Winning Author Career With Alan Baxter"
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