Backwards calligraphy as a method of concentration expansion and auto-hypnotism.

Think about what you want to write and plan out the amount of space you'll need. Only start out with a few words at first, building up to 7 to 9 and then push yourself to 11 or more to see just how many you can concentrate on at one time. Start at the spot on the righthand side of the page where the lettering would end were you to have written it left to right and begin writing your sentences backwards from right to left, one letter at a time. Be diligent and thorough in your manuscripts, respecting aesthetics as a virtue, making your lettering as attractive as possible.

If you want to avoid something like smoking, you can play a prerecorded tape in the background. Many people like to use positive affirmations either in the first or second person, but these do not work for me. This is how I would craft something if I wanted it to imprint itself upon my mind.

"Thomas fervently pushes one leg in front of the other as he powers on down the street. His boss has crossed the line this time, things cannot remain as they are. His fingers fumbling at every second, he reaches into his pocket feeling for the crumpled pack of cigarettes he has been secretly keeping in there. It is like drawing up an ancient memory from the deepest parts of his personal library as he pulls the pack out of the hidden pocket he had sewn into the lining of his jacket. Old and stale the cigarettes must be, but he lusts for them anyway as he pulls the lighter out from within the poorly torn open hole of the soft pack. The pack is bright red and larger than life, the cellophane slips between his fingers crackling softly as he extracts an old, slightly bent cigarette from within its passenger. The smell of dried tobacco hits his nose and a powerful longing shoots down the core of his being as he puts the filter to his lips. Spark after spark is exhausted, trying to get his flame to burst forth into reality, but the wind is too strong. Frustrated he realizes that his lighter must be out of fuel. Tossing it aside, he reaches into his pocket to pull out a box of matches. Horror strikes him as he slides open the drawer, realizing he has only one match left. Looking around, he spots a tree and edges against it, shielding himself with his jacket from the unrelenting wind as he seeks to insulate the tiny flame from the dangers that surround it. Quickly he drags the match along the striker on the side of the box as he protects the tiny flame with a flat curved hand and draws it up to his lips to receive the first inhalation. It is like bringing water to the lips after a long drought and the smell of the burning tobacco, slightly sweet against his nose relay to him the coming of his relief. As he drags on the cigarette and draws the smoke into his lungs, a powerful choking sensation burns its way into his chest. Reeling against the sensation he coughs repeatedly, tossing the cigarette to the ground. 'I can never smoke again,' he mutters, 'Never smoke again.'"

Anyway, that works on me. Start the story out singsong and go down to monotonous by the end. Leave a long pause at the end of the recording so if you loop it, it doesn't become too irritating to the mind. Play it really quietly in the background, maybe even playing music a bit louder nearer to you so it isn't the dominant noise in the room. Focus on your work, enjoy the music, but make sure the narrative is loud enough to where you could make out the words if you wanted to. The key is to get some part of you to relate and empathize with that character, to allow itself to become him for a minute. The pain of the character will drive that semi-conscious part of you away and the monotony and lack of interesting descriptors at the end will not give it any incitements to draw it back leaving only the unconscious parts of you to be listening for the commands, "never smoke again." This is pretty straightforward and simplistic, maybe just one step up from a positive affirmation in the grand realm of autohypnotism.

There are much more sophisticate approaches you can get into. As a primer, I would suggest the books, "The structure of magic." I'm personally not into the cult of NLP, but he does a good job bringing together many of the elements that I have found useful to me when building up my personal armory. Transactional analysis honestly was universes more useful to me than NLP was especially when you start to see yourself as a large cruise ship full of people. You are the captain, but sometimes you must sleep and someone else takes the wheel. Find out who these people are. Search every room. Unlock every closet. Find them all. Drag them all out into the light until you understand what each of them is about. Look at every subconscious and semi-conscious force within you as its own person with its own archetype and its own motivations and programs. Find ways to trigger them and to get them to perform their sequence of emotions. You'll be amazed at what you can figure out about yourself through experimentation. Pain, annoyance, boredom, sleepiness, amnesia, confusion, distraction, racing thoughts... these are all indicators that you are approaching a very powerful force which is doing everything in its power to prevent you from unlocking it. Do not fall for its siren song. Face it head on. Call it out into the light and confront it. If you can expose yourself to these discomforts on your own terms in an environment where you can shake it off and walk away whenever you want, you can begin to prepare yourself for the type of stamina that you will need to face the full discomforts of reality.

That is an awesome piece of writing, very discriptive and powerful. I wish I could write like that.

Leo DaVinci wrote backwards also, so You may be on to something...

a reply to: JHumm

My style of writing is a skill I developed and I'm still pretty awkward with it and too often repetitious, so I'm confident that almost anyone can learn to write if they want to. Creativity is best channeled when you give it specific guidelines withing which to impose itself into this world. When you leave it open to every possibility, it'll get lost in the realm of potentiality, never properly manifesting itself, but when you limit and guide its choices, it can often come up with something far more beautiful, complex and transcendent than anything you could have devised on your own.

When I first desired to write, I began reading critically, taking apart what people wrote, how they wrote it, diagramming their sentences and getting a good feel for the parts of speech. I discovered that I like a present active tense for narration above any of the other alternatives from a third person point of view. Narratives can be written in different styles. This is just the type I prefer. After that, I follow a few basic rules. I try not to repeat myself. If I want to approach the reader subliminally, I will use rhythmic language with similar sounds, near rhyming, but not quite, like crumple and fumbling. If you want someone to perceive something in a certain light, slip that word in more often than necessary without becoming overly repetitive. You perceived this writing as powerful. I use that word three times in the piece. Can you find any other word I used as often?

I use my own version of the snowflake method. I didn't realize that is what it was when I began using it, but I write from the top down, planning everything and filling in the details latter. When I fill in the details, that is when I'll let my self slip into a deeper trance like state, channeling the subconscious forces of my being and given them a voice in this reality. You don't realize how many of them want to impose themselves upon this world, but they've just never been given an opportunity before.

Coining new words is fun and opens up the mind. It challenges the reader to connect with you on a deeper level because they need to infer your meaning from more than the literal wording of the text. This forces them to draw upon the powers of their subconcious mind, which is really the audience that any serious artist should be targeting. Unfortunately, when you channel the deepest parts of yourself, you often discover, to your annoyance, that you've communicated vastly more than you intended. Often I've gone back over, picked apart what I've said and realized just how expressive the subconscious parts of myself can be. T

This is honestly why I think deep writers get way too much credit for the symbolism hidden in their works. My guess is that 99% of the time, a person creating something in a moment of Dionysian trance will not realize the full nature of the thing that they've created. In the creation process, the creation takes on a soul of its own and it grows to become something from its own ambitions.

Honestly, I think storytelling is the most powerful craft there is. It is literally the profession of gods. I haven't been published very frequently, honestly, because I don't think I'm objectively marketable. My technical writing has an almost 100% success rate at being published, whereas my fiction never goes much of anywhere. Ultimately, I don't think I'm all that creative. If you compare anything I've ever produced to something like the Pillars of the Earth, my work is a joke. I'll stick to science for now. I am able to make a living at that at least. ;p

Ken Follet is not my favorite author, but that work is my favorite modern novel. It is the apex of classical writing in my mind, reinvented for the current world. It is as if Homer himself was teleported to the present day and wrote a tale through the eyes of Ken Follet.

a reply to: Nechash

To anyone reading this. Do not use that above paragraph. It doesn't work to avoid cigarettes as I had odd cravings for them this afternoon. I always forget with me at least that negative phrases almost never work. When you blow up an image and make it vivid and desirable, you have to have a very powerful destructive event to prevent that image from becoming the dominant force. Apparently, this does not pull that off, despite my good intentions.

The only way for me to negate something is to deflate and erode the opinions I have of it gradually over time and to replace those good mental states with negative ones. This is not going to happen generally with a single event like this above, especially not when you have years of good memories built up.

I'm sorry, but the above was poorly crafted.