Hey folks — I’m doing this week’s content as a block, both because I’m trying something a little weird (see the Process section, below), and because they all build upon one another in a way I haven’t tried since breaking things into blocks.
COOL THING: The Core Values of Anson Dorrance
My recent focus as a reader has featured a lot of books about the physiology and culture behind excellence, written by a series of writer/academics whose work seems to cross-pollinate and revisit a few core examples. I’ll no doubt write about those more in future commentary sections, but this week I wanted to focus on a recurring presence in multiple books: the head coach of the University of North Carolina’s women’s soccer team, Anson Dorrance, and his philosophy of building around core values of grit and respect in order to achieve success.
I’m not a sports guy at all—my sport of choice is professional wrestling, which is both predetermined and highly narrative—but his track record strikes me as impressive. His teams have 800 odd wins over 70 losses across a 40-year career, including a 101-game winning streak. His teams have won 60% of the NCAA women’s soccer championships ever, and he’s coached over 65% of the women who have won Player of the Year.
There’re many reasons for this success, but one of the recurring things that comes up is the 12 core values Dorrance asks his team to memorize and embrace, establishing a common ground as a team around expectations and culture. There are multiple examples of this floating around the internet—accompanied with quotes from writers and thinkers players memorize along with the value list—but I’m going to post a truncated version here because, frankly, you can file off the serial numbers and they’re a good philosophy to bring to writing, being part of a fan community, or simply living your goddamned life.
Dorrance’s 12 Core Values
- Let’s begin with this, we don’t whine. This individual can handle any situation and never complain about anything on or off the field.
- The truly extraordinary do something every day. This individual has remarkable self-discipline, does the summer workout sheets from beginning to end without omission or substitution, and every day has a plan to do something to get better.
- We want these four years of college to be rich, valuable and deep. This is that focused individual that is here for the “right reason”– to get an education. She leads her life here with the proper balance and an orientation towards her intellectual growth, and makes good choices to best represent herself, her team, and her university.
- We work hard. This individual embodies the “indefatigable human spirit” and never stops pushing herself.
- We don’t freak out over ridiculous issues or live in fragile states of emotional catharsis or create crises where none should exist.
- We choose to be positive. Nothing can depress or upset this powerful and positive life force –no mood swings, not even negative circumstances can affect this “rock”.
- We treat everyone with respect.
- We care about each other as teammates and as human beings. We never say a negative thing about anyone, and embrace all humanity with no separation by academic class, social class, race, religious preference, etc.
- When we don’t play as much as we would like we are noble and still support the team and its mission. She always places the team before herself.
- 10. We play for each other, and through effort, care, and encouragement help everyone around us be a better player.
- We are well led. Our leader is less concerned by popularity, and more concerned with holding us to highest standards and driving teammates towards their potential.
- We want our lives (and not just in soccer) to be never ending ascensions, but for that to happen properly our fundamental attitude about life and our appreciation for it is critical. Be humble and gracious for everything we have, and bring contagious generosity to ever room.
This list intrigued me when I first heard about them—hence my knowledge of just how many iterations you can find when you Google “Anson Dorrance Core Values”—but what really pushed me to sit up and take note was Dorrance’s interview on The Cultured Cast podcast, where he talks about the way his use of these values has developed over his career.
Originally, he’d use the values list as a private form of player assessment: asking team members to rate themselves and their teammates on a four-point scale, with a 3 being “lives this value most of the time”, a 4 being “paragon of this value” and a 1 being… well, not living the value at all.
Dorrance and his coaching team kept these assessments private for a long time, a tool for benchmarking where their players were and guiding them during coaching sessions, but that habit changed after a frustrated Dorrance shared the teams assessment with a player who was underperforming on multiple levels. And while crossing that line resulte in a moment of terror, the response changed his approach to the tool. Consider the following, from the Cultured Cast transcript:
…she’s sitting across from me in cold silence, and I’m thinking oh, my gosh, I shouldn’t have shared this with her. And I said are you glad I shared this with you? And in a very low voice she said yes. And I said why? She said because Anson, I have to change. And all of a sudden I saw this transformation that was phenomenal.
And then what was really cool is in the spring of every player’s senior year we have our final banquet. Every senior gets to have a parting speech and basically almost like an advice to all the kids that are left in the program on, you know, what they should do to become extraordinary.
And she gave the most wonderful senior exit speech I’ve ever heard. And what she talked about was when I shared with her basically everyone in the room’s opinion of her and how she felt she had to change, and then basically she did. And it was just extraordinary.
So from then on we’ve shared with everyone where they are. And we’ve made all kinds of mistakes on this because originally we would actually share where they ranked among the 30 players in character, and that, you know, I didn’t think ended up being very positive. So now what we share is we share the top 4, we share their names and their ranks and everything, and then we share a one line statement not of where this girl ranks, but of where she is in the core values. And as far as I’m concerned, if her average is over a 3.0, in other words she lives these core values most of the time, we completely embrace her, because that’s what we want everyone to live…
I’ve done plenty of values exercises in the past—they’re often a go-to when I get massive anxiety, because one thing that sets me off is when I feel like I’ve drifted too far from “core mission Peter”—but never with the kind of rigor and detail that Dorrance and his teams bring to the table as an assessment tool.
Dorrance’s interview also brings some clarity to why values ranking has been a tool psychologist have worked on: “here’s the coolest thing about evaluating people with numbers. I can sit there and post the numbers, and now what happens to my relationship, it’s me and the players against the numbers.” Basically, if a player agrees on the philosophy of who you want to be represented by those values, the thrice-yearly one-on-one meetings between players and coach because a place of collaboration, rather than combat.
I’m going to be doing something with all of this on the writing front, although it’s still new and shiny enough that I’m figuring out how to apply it to various parts of my life. Especially since I don’t have a team who can offer counterpoints to my self-assessment (Right now, I suspect I’d barely hit two in a lot of values he lays out, even if I personally believe they’re important traits to have as a writer).
Until then, it’s a cool little insight into one important tool in the way a truly successful team achieves its culture of excellence. The whole interview with Dorrance is worth a read, and I’d encourage you to head over to Cultured Cast if you’d like to hear it.
PROCESS: PULP WEEK
Long-term readers have probably got some idea of my usual writing process at this point: 500 words a day, slow and steady, working in Scrivener because it’s autosave features kick Word’s ass six days of the week and come back to do it twice on Sunday. There are a few folks who have contacted me about finding their way back to writing using those scaled down expectations, especially when their life has been chaos.
This week I’m deliberately breaking those habits. I’ve scaled up my daily expectations dramatically to smash out a novella that’s been kicking my ass since my dad died back in 2019. My goal is 4,000 “clean” words on my novella draft, in need of minimal editing, all done and dusted by 1:00 PM, when my focus shifts to editing Brian Jar projects. No fiction writing on the weekends, because they’re now when I draft this newsletter and read, but advancing the draft by 20,000 words in a week (potentially carrying over to next week as well).
For someone who usually averages 2,500 words a week, it’s a crazy, deranged sprint. A sudden moment of working like its the pulp era, where speed was a valuable resource. Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner—once dubbed “King of the Pulps”—used to aim for 60,000 words of fiction per week; his inspiration, William Wallace Cook (who also wrote as John Milton Edwards, and an assortment of house names) would frequently do 30 to 40 novellas of 20,000 to 40,000 words per year in order to make ends meet back in the early 1900s.
Partially I’ve embraced speed to shake things up, because the context in which I stopped working on this book has made it hard to pick it up again. But also because I just need it done, and its been dragging so long that 500 words a day is giving me space to overthink and digress rather than progress. Two 20k weeks of solid hammering away may result in a terrible draft, but it’s something that will clear the decks and give me space to think of other projects.
I’ve also ditched scrivener for Microsoft word, largely because Scrivener would cough up an error message every time my computer went into sleep mode. For the first time in years, I work in a single document, writing chapters in a continuous thread instead of jumping around.
Intriguingly, this seems to change the way I write, because far more of the story needs to live in my head as a coherent whole. It’s a little easier to see the shape of the story and determine when the pace is off. Plus I’m more likely to skip back and polish older scenes when stuck, rather than skipping ahead and trying to lock down a scene deeper into the narrative.
It’s had a positive effect: what routinely kept turning into a 50,000 word monster in scrivener now seems likely to come in on target at 30,000 words. Scenes I kept putting in the middle of the story have now shifted towards the climax, and the number of subplots and secondary antagonists is down to a reasonable level for the book’s length.
How much of that comes down to the tools I’m using, versus increased familiarity with the novella and the story I wanted to tell? I’m not sure, but it’s something I’m thinking about. Neil Gaiman often noted the ways different tools changed the way he wrote, and the way the average length of short stories increased with the advent of the word processor (which makes additions and changes easy to accomplish, compared to a typewriter).
Personally, I believe it’s worth messing with your defaults from time to time, just to see how it changes the end result (and if you find something that works better for you).
COMMENTARY: REVISITING PULP WRITERS ON WRITING
I’ve been fortifying myself for the current pulp week by devouring books about the pulp era at a rate of knots. It started with a re-read of William Wallace Cook’s The Fiction Factory, a series of lessons, autobiographical notes, and productivity/income logs Cook maintained over a 22-year period of being a full-time writer.
From there, I moved on to Secrets of The Worlds Best-Selling Writer, a book drawn from the notebooks of Erle Stanley Gardner that lays out his writing philosophy and approach. I’ve written about this book in the past, and recommend it to any writer who wants to develop a diligent approach to craft.
I’m currently neck deep in The Red Hot Typewriter, The Life and Times of John D. McDonald, which is definitely more biography than writing book, but still an intriguing look at the man who created the character of Travis McGee (who, in turn, inspired the creation of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher). Most intriguing is the assertion it makes about the realities of making a living in the pulp era, which lots of spec fic folks romanticise as being “easier” for a writer who wants to break in and make a living.
For the most part, however, pulp stories were written by about three hundred writers in New York City. Most of them lived in Greenwich Village. Another thousand regular contributors were scattered around the country.
These writers produced two hundred million words of fiction every year, filling a plethora of pulp magazines in multiple different genres. The very best usually went on to have careers as novel writers after the magazines folded, bringing the lessons of the pulp days to the rest of their careers. The pace of the pulp era served as an apprenticeship, even if the work itself was disposable.
A few years back, on a podcast, I talked about the realities of full-time writing I’d noticed: writers with stable careers tend to have a backlist, and produce new work at a predictable, regular pace. Someone brought up Neil Gaiman as a counter-example, a writer who produced a novel every few years and sold in incredible numbers.
Except Neil Gaiman did exactly what I said, writing 75 issues of Sandman and several other comics before he transitioned into writing novels. He brought a huge fanbase along with him, and fans beget more fans.
Out of interest, I went and did some back-of-the-envelope maths on just how many single-issue comics Gaiman’s written over the course of his life. I figure there were about 100 before he ever sat down and wrote American Gods, and maybe 150 in total. That’s a lot of work appearing a regular basis, and a lot of storytelling within the rigid confines of the comic book, which have physical requirements around page-count and layout that shape the way stories are told and the deadlines around getting stuff out.
It’s a hell of an apprenticeship, in much the same way writers like Gardner and John McDonald served in their pulp magazine days, and I ponder how to replicate it if you’re not someone who writes comics.
What kind of writer would you be, for example, if you committed to doing 150 novellas using the stricter formats required of a writer like William Wallace Cook, who wrote nickel novels of 20,000 to 30,000 words with a strict requirement of 16 chapters lasting 5 to 6 typed pages apiece?
What happens if you compressed that apprenticeship into a space of 4 to 5 years, hammering away at the pace of the pulp writers of old who aimed to write a million words a year?
I often felt like each novella was an evolution and a learning curve, and I’ve only written 6 of the damned things (and only 5 are in print right now). The prospect of doing 150 is mildly terrifying, both in the terms of the work required, but also the potential impact they could have on everything done subsequently.
I danced aroudn this idea a year or two ago, before COVID and Brian Jar 2.0 rewrote the way I approached my day, and I think it’s got some merit. A seemingly incredible task to achieve amid a busy life—and probably one that I’d burn out on ten novellas in—but there’s an intriguing idea at the core of it that I’m pondering in more details.
And possibly something worth considering as I look back on Anson Dorrance’s values at the top of this week’s newsletter, because it seems a lot of the focus that underpins these pulp writers (and even, heck, a writer like Gaiman) comes down to the values they bring tot he job of sitting down and hammering out words.
If you’re interested in reading up on the pulp writers who have been inspring me this week, the books mentioned are:
- The Fiction Factory, William Wallace Cook
- Secrets Of The Worlds Best-Selling Writer: The Storytelling Techniques of Erle Stanley Gardner, Francis and Robert Fugate
- The Red Hot Typewriter: The Life and Times of John B. McDonald, Hugh Merill.
- Neil Gaiman talks about the impact of switching between handwriting and word processes in lots of places, but I’d recommend The Art of Neil Gaiman or the interview collection, Conversation With Neil Gaiman, as a starting point if you’d like to dig deeper.