Tag: inspiration

The Weekly Re-Motivator: The Anchor

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So, you’re a writer.

And you have this project.

It’s a project that you’ve had for months, or maybe even years. It’s a project you return to time and time again, when inspiration for other work deserts you or when a bolt from the blue strikes and you just have to, have to, go work on that project again. Maybe it’s your first project, maybe it’s your latest one, maybe it’s a project you started and forgot about and go back to every few months. When your mind goes blank, inevitably your thoughts turn to that one project, and even if you’re not actively working on it, your brain is always bent toward it.

This project is the anchor.

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Like a security blanket, you need this project. It comforts you in times of need, it fills you with nostalgia; even just opening the file (or turning the pages, or unrolling the parchment you scribed it onto, you insane purist) makes you smile. Like a true anchor, this project keeps you moored. Keeps you grounded. Keeps you from getting off course, keeps you true to yourself — or at least true to the self you were when you started the project. Without the anchor project, you wouldn’t be the writer that you are, you wouldn’t write the way you do.

The anchor project is a good thing.

But the anchor project can’t stay forever.

Like a security blanket, it works wonders for you for a while, but eventually, you start to outgrow it. People stare if you’re still dragging it around in public. It gets threadbare and worn-out, and not even functional for its original purpose beyond a point. Like a true anchor, well, it keeps you from drifting off during the storm, but it also keeps you from letting down the sails and exploring the ocean.

Comes a time when you have to cut the anchor loose, when you have to accept the fact that you’ve outgrown it and move on. When you have to drop the anchor and sail out into the wild blue. When you realize that the anchor is not the project that needs your time, your effort, your constant thought anymore.

Accidentally Inspired has been my anchor project since I was in college, which is to say, for about fifteen years. The idea was born in a scriptwriting class in 2002, I expanded it into a full-length play by 2004, when it actually saw production with my old high school. Then I mothballed it for almost a decade, though I always hung onto the idea of turning it into a novel, and there it nested in the depths of my brain, ripening on the vine.

Well, I’ve followed through on that seed of an idea, finally. I wrote the novel. I’ve revised and edited it through several iterations. I’m working on one last edit now.

And somewhere along the road in this last edit, I realized it’s time to cut this anchor loose.

I love this project. I always will. but the longer I keep reworking it, the more I’m neglecting other stories I want to tell, the more I give in to the fear of putting it out there and letting it walk on its own, like a wobbly-kneed colt.

I’ve got about one more month left in this phase of the work, and then it’s time to pull up roots and let this puppy go.

Bittersweet, to be sure, but the time is right. It’s time to move on.

Am I alone in this, or is there an anchor holding you back, too?

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Glimpses of Non-Suckitude

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I was beginning to get a little fatigued with this latest edit. Cleaning up the junk language, tightening up all the moments, trimming out the unnecessary. It felt like most of what I had written was crap; that it all needed serious work before it could be “ready”.

But I reached a few passages today that absolutely crackle with life and energy. Passages that had me laughing to myself while I sat in my darkened room reading jokes I myself had written, even though I already knew all the punchlines. Passages possessed of a sort of self-evident, unconcerned eloquent beauty, the like of which I would not attribute to myself. Passages that make me think maybe I’m not so bad at this writing thing after all.

This novel (and this blog for that matter) is keenly interested in the question of inspiration: where it comes from, how useful it is, what it can do for you when you have it. And by and large, I have come to believe that inspiration is just a bunch of baloney sandwiches. You either work or you don’t, but some days are better than others.

Still.

As I read my own work of the last year and a half, it’s encouraging — and kind of awesome — to see those flashes of inspiration peeking out through the cracks.

I like to liken (like to liken, tee hee) writing to a long, arduous slog through vine-darkened jungle, or to a hopeless trek in a desert. And it damn sure feels that way a lot of days. But every now and then, light penetrates the canopy and wakes up the critters on the jungle floor, and the rare flowers open their petals to the light. Here and there, water bubbles up to shape an oasis amid the scorching sands.

For now, though, it’s back into the caves.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: It Even Snows in Atlanta

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The world is not equitable. The playing field is not even.

Sure, most of us start with more or less the same genetic code, and people are generally people wherever you go, but there’s no telling who’s going to be naturally gifted at this thing or that thing. Some great writers languish, undiscovered, for their entire lifetimes, while the Stephanie Meyers and the E.L. Jameses of the world spread their cancerous tripe like a brush fire. Some of the best athletes the world will ever know have never set foot on a proper field or court.

All of which makes it pretty darn reasonable to throw in the towel. Getting discovered is a mug’s game. It’s who, not what, you know. Probably, you’re too old anyway to take up anything new. Old dogs and all. Right?

And that’s the problem with our culture. We think that we’ll never get to the top, so we give up on our dreams before we even take the first step. I’m never going to lose the thirty pounds I’d like to, so let me chomp down on this pile of cheeseburgers and watch reruns of House all day. This or that measure won’t solve every single problem with gun violence, so let’s not even bother disrupting the status quo.

We have such a distorted view of success that we’re afraid to reach even for the hem of its garment. We might not be perfect, so let’s not even try to be decent.

But that’s bullshit. Kids know it.

Give my kids a couple of crayons, and they will gladly launch into a whirlwind of artistic expression. They’ll branch out from doodling on paper to scrawling on the walls to decorating the family cats, then bring their work to you with a face-splitting smile saying “look what I did!” They take pride in their work, even though it’s crap, because they have no conception of what good work is. They have no idea — and are therefore not concerned — that there could possibly be somebody else out there doing anything better than what they are doing right here, right now, at this moment.

And that’s where this insecurity stems from, isn’t it? The constant comparison, the inescapable knowledge that while I’m sitting here tying myself in knots to bang out a few more words on my novel, Stephen King is somewhere in a mahogany study probably twenty pages deep into today’s copy. Every word better than mine, and by dint of that betterness, more valuable, and once we start talking about value, well. Steve’s words have value and mine don’t. It is as unlikely as a blizzard dumping two feet of snow in Atlanta that my words will ever be as valuable as Stephen King’s.

So why bother?

When we focus on the prizes that the things we could do bring — publication, wealth, an adoring audience … or a slimmer waistline, or a smaller number on the scale, or a promotion at work, or a new car in the driveway, or a medal or a trophy — we take our eyes off the road at our feet. Now, having a goal in mind is great. You have to dream big and aim high or you really won’t have a shot. But the prizes we’re aiming at — or the prizes we’re told we should aim at — aren’t the only prizes out there.

You can run for the serenity of it rather than to be the fastest. You can play pickup basketball for the distraction and the exercise and never have to worry about getting picked for a team. You can write for the sheer joy of it, or for the rush of playing god with the lives of the tiny beings you’ve created, or because it relaxes you, or simply because you have a story to tell.

I may never get published, or never reach the audience I hope to, or never make a dime off my writing. But I think I’d be okay with that. (I mean, it’d be a bummer, but I like to think I’d be okay with it.) I’m having a damned good time telling stories, even if it’s just to myself. Even if I’m never even a patch on Stephen King.

Then again, every now and then, it even snows in Atlanta…

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This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

I’m an Atheist

Pavowski6 Comments

In the spirit of my post yesterday — What Are We Waiting For? — it occurred to me that I’ve actually been sitting on something for quite a while, just waiting for the right time to say it. But as I pointed out in that post, there is no right time. Waiting around is worthless, it only means more of my time lost hiding something that deserves to be out in the open.

Let’s not bury the lede. I’m an atheist. That may not come as a shock to you if you’re a regular reader: I’ve never come out and said it, but I’m sure it’s bled out around the edges from time to time. But I’m an atheist, and I’m damned proud of it.

Atheist Symbol

This is a weird thing to sit down and type out, not because it’s something I feel guilty about in any way, but because I fear it might make things weird for me. I live in the southern United States, for one — better known as the Bible Belt. I teach at a school where many if not most of my colleagues are outspokenly religious. My family, while they don’t attend services anymore, brought me and my siblings up in the church. (And I don’t think that reading this will surprise them, but that speaks to the weirdness of all this — we’ve never had a conversation about it.) I’ve got sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and a veritable host of in-laws who believe. Add to that that in recent studies, atheists are the most feared and distrusted of all subgroups of people (even more than Muslims!), and it’s no great surprise that I feel a little bit uneasy on the topic.

Let’s be clear. I’m not here to proselytize. (Though the idea of a proselytizing atheist does give me a chuckle.) I’m not what some might call a militant atheist. I know and accept that the vast majority of people aren’t going to have their minds changed by anything I have to say. And if you do believe, I still welcome you as a reader.

I’m just here to say that in the past, there have been things I was afraid to say for fear of offending another’s point of view. There have been things I haven’t said for fear of making others uncomfortable. There have been things I’ve done strictly to assuage other people’s beliefs.

More and more, though, I realize that while I’m trying like mad to respect other people’s beliefs, I am marginalizing my own. While I’m working to make sure I don’t make others uncomfortable, I’m twisting myself up into knots, or worse, just sitting there like a lump, saying nothing.

No more.

Atheism is the next great coming out. And I am proud to list myself among its members.

I’m here to say that I won’t be hiding this particular aspect of who I am anymore. I’m not going to shove it down your throats, either, but it’s too much a part of me to keep it locked up in a closet. It informs my moral decisions, it informs my interactions with the world, and it damn sure informs my thinking and my writing.

So, yeah.

I’m an atheist.

I just wanted you to know.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: What Are We Waiting For?

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What are we waiting for?

Seriously, every one of us has something in their lives that they are putting off. (Apparently the previous sentence is now grammatically correct; thank you, singular-third-person-they.) Whether it’s fear or doubt or uncertainty or perceived lack of ability, we have numerous and convincing excuses for not doing this thing. Those excuses, with the rare exception, are bullshit.

(The above is an absolutely terrible music video for a pretty on-point song.)

Your new year’s resolutions are in all likelihood floating face down in the kiddie pool by now. Forget about that. What’s the thing you really want to do, but haven’t yet? The thing you’re waiting for the right time to do? The thing that, if you had a little more time in your day, you could fit it in? The thing that terrifies you and entices you at the same time?

Sam Harris is responsible for a relevant quote:

Don’t you know that there’s going to come a day when you’ll be sick, or someone close to you will die, and you will look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention, and you’ll think ‘What was I doing?’. You know this, and yet if you’re like most people, you’ll spend most of your time in life tacitly presuming you’ll live forever. Like, watching a bad movie for the fourth time, or bickering with your spouse. These things only make sense in light of eternity.

The fact — and we know it, of course, even if we pretend we don’t — is that we don’t get that much time. Yet we sit around, not doing the things that we won’t admit really matter to us.

So what are you waiting for?

(Stop waiting.)

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.