There are two ways to improve self-reflection. One is meta-reflection. The other is structured reflection.

Meta-reflection's interesting.

Once you reflect, ask yourself, "What does the nature of my reflection say about me?" Try to interpret your reflections like you would interpret another author's book. What is the subtext? Why am I thinking this way now?

I often find that my reflections are not quality introspections. True introspection requires that you put yourself at a distance from yourself. Step away and see who you from a third person.

I used to do an exercise where I'd try to imagine myself as a fly on the wall, looking at myself, and pondering what I think about how I am doing.

Structured reflection.

Usually when I reflect, I just spit out whatever's on my mind. An alternative approach is to ask certain questions or cover certain bases. How happy was I this week? Is my reflection honest? What does my heart say? What does my mind say? Is there anything I'm missing? Refresh this page (Creative Whack Pack) and that should generate other good questions.

Another good source for reflection ideas is to peruse Aesop's Fables.

I was recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: first, one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This must be accompanied, second, by a haughty contempt for all the forms of work that one has established one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the nuttiness to believe that other people can be made to care about your opinions and views and be charmed by the way you state them. Incompetence, contempt, lunacy—once you have these in place, you are set to go. (read the rest by Joseph Epstein)

daah, this has become me, and I admit, it is kind of sick. (1) It's not that I've developed an incompetence, but rather a strong lack of motivation for profitable work. (2) I do not condem these other types of work so I'm okay. (3) This is where I make the largest error in judgment: I have this wild belief that my material is extremely profound.

I understand now the great decay chain of thought-communication-teaching. What you think you know is one thing. Then what you are able to communicate is like ten percent of that. And then what other's will understand is another 10%. So only 1% of what's inside can really get inside other ppl's heads. Even many great writers lament how poorly understood their works are, and some of them get depressed.

So maybe I will still suffer partly from (3); I still believe my thinking to be profound and laden with value to others. However, I've learnt the hard truth about writing that so much more of suceeding as a writer is in producing charismatic works. This is then just a function of one's social talents via the pen and not necessarily the beauty of one's intellect.

found via MeFi

Man, everytime I upgrade my blog-strategy or the type of content I post, I find that there already exists a community of people doing the same thing.

For example, I'm trying to do this thing where I draft articles first, stew on them for a little while, and then I post them. But, now that I start to pay attention to this, I find that there's a world of essayists constantly pumping out analysis on all sorts of topics.

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I'm trying to be a better writer. I have this book, Writing Worth Reading that they gave to us in our freshman writing class at Stanford.

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If you write fiction, can you please stop using a litany of physical features or fashion to kick off a characterization. I'm talking about beginning with something like this: "He was in his forties, tall, no fat on him, dressed in a pair of stained Dockers and a navy-blue sweatshirt cut off raggedly at the elbows." I tend to skip over this stuff. Even though it tells me stuff, sure, it's just so, blah. It's not that it's just superficial--I recognize that addressing something superficially is an aesthetic. But, well, what can I say, it's just uninteresting and uncreative. I'm like that guy in Adaptation. "Don't use voice-overs in your fucking script."

(Reference from "When I Woke Up This Morning, Everything I Had Was Gone" by T. Coraghessan Boyle in yesterday's New Yorker)