Tag: motivation

LightningStruck

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Often, I rail against the mortal writing sin of “waiting for inspiration.” The fact is, you can’t count on inspiration. The muses are busy little bees, and if they only turn their divinely inspiring faces your way even every few months, well, you should consider yourself lucky. But you don’t get things done by sitting around, waiting for that to happen. Novels are not written with a muse perched over your shoulder, hmming and ahhing as you get to the good bits, putting whiskey into your hand just when you need it, and yanking you out of your stuffy crapsack apartment every now and then for the fresh air you so desperately need to keep the creative juices flowing. The muses have better things to do, and you should have better things to do than to sit around waiting for them.

Still, though, on some days the car just won’t start. Some days, you’re in between projects, and your routine is shattered, and you’re unsure what to do, and even the thought of opening up that blank document and screwing it up with your words is enough to send you into an existential spiral of doubt and dread and you go binge-watch Orphan Black instead. Some days, it’s hard to believe that you ever thought of yourself as a writer at all. Who does that, anyway? Who has the time or the creativity to turn out stories day after day, to think up new characters and conflicts, to flesh out entire worlds? It can’t be done. The authors who’ve done it are either fake people — computer-simulated AI programs that analyze market trends and tailor the storylines to what people really want to read. Or maybe they’re just independently wealthy people who don’t have to hold down jobs or families or any other inconveniences of living in modern society. That must be it.

These are the days that break a lot of folks down. They’re the days that broke me down in the past. “I just don’t feel like writing today, so I’ll start the new project tomorrow.” “I’m not sure what to do with this scene; I’ll just ponder on it until I figure it out.” “The story’s kind of up a tree. Maybe I just need to let it be for a while.” The problem is, momentum matters. “Tomorrow” turns into the next day, then a week, and so on until the novel you are writing turns into the novel you were writing, once upon a time. “Until I figure it out” becomes “until I feel like it,” which becomes the trash fire of “maybe I’ll get back to it one day.” “Letting it be for a while” likewise becomes “dust on the shelf.” You’re writing, you’re writing, you’re writing, and then poof, you lose the spark, and all of a sudden, you’re not writing anymore. You’re waiting.

For what? For the magic to happen?

Keep waiting. There is no magic in this world outside of the magic we create, so if you want inspiration, you have to seize it where it comes and drive it in front of you like a herd of goats when it doesn’t.

It shames me to admit (though I must) that I’ve been waiting for a while. Sitting back, letting my tomorrows turn into one days, letting my until I figure it outs turn into until I feel like its. I’ve had excuses. Good excuses, even! It was the end of the year; I was focused on wrapping up at school. I had just finished the AI edit, I needed some time to decompress before the next project. I wasn’t even certain what the next project wanted to be; how could I just start working on something with no guidance, no map?

Well, valid excuses turn into crap ones the longer you stretch them out, and I’ve stretched mine for about a month. And I wish I could say that I have seized gumption by the scruffy nethers and started shaping my creative expression like a sculptor with a particularly pliable bit of clay. That I hoisted myself by the bootstraps and threw myself back into the habit and started crotchpunching the sharks out of my way.

But the sad fact is, it took a visit from the muse to kickstart me into motion again.

Lightning, Thunderstorm, Storm, Weather, Clouds, Nature

Somewhere between trolling the internet, not thinking about writing too much, and mowing the lawn, lightning struck, and all of a sudden my brain is like a pack of jackals scrabbling against the inside of my skull. All of a sudden, the story demands to be written.

I’m not saying I wouldn’t have gotten started up again, but there’s no telling how long it might have taken. That scares me. More than a little bit. It’s humbling, this thought that for all I preach about the virtues of sticktoitiveness, of writing through every day even when the writing sucks, I got mired in the morass myself.

But you know what?

I’m writing again. And you know that thing they say about gift horses.

Jump on and ride them till they throw you.

On Graduation and The Accomplishment of Things

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All around the country, high school students are graduating. Throwing off the shackles of childhood and becoming adults. Getting ready to take the next big steps in their lives.

As much as the graduation ceremony is a pain for teachers (we get to haul the chairs out, stay late after school, put on silly outfits, and smile at everybody we see), it’s kind of awesome, too. Far be it from me to attach symbolism where there is none, but there’s something about seeing the students dressed up in their caps and gowns and tassels and stoles that somehow washes away a year (or more!) of silly behavior in a classroom and makes you think they’re going to be all right.

Still, they’re not done yet. Like a cake being checked by an overzealous baker, they need to cook a little longer. And as anybody over the age of thirty can tell you (with no hint of doom and gloom at all, naturally), it only gets harder from here. Whether it’s college or the armed forces or an early entry into the school of Real Life, it will quickly become apparent that high school was a milk run.

So, a double-edged bit of advice for anybody on the cusp of a great thing: Don’t be afraid to brake, but don’t break.

First, don’t be afraid to break. The sharknado happens fast in this world, and as Ferris Bueller said, “if you don’t slow down and look at it once in a while, you might miss it.” It’s true: the time seems to constrict around times of great import. The last few weeks of the semester fly by. You just can’t stop writing (or reading!) when you get to the end of the novel. And deadlines never approach so fast as when they’re right on top of you. Before you know it, the next thing will be here, and while it’s easy to shift your focus from what you’ve just finished and go straight into worrying about the next thing, don’t forget that there’s life happening everywhere all the time, spilling out of the cracks and gaps in your schedule, oozing out around the corners of all the things you have to do to get ready. Pump the brakes. Slow down for a minute. Enjoy and appreciate the world around the outside of everything that has to be done.

Animal, Lioness, Lazy, Rest, Predator, Cat

If you don’t take time to slow down like this every once in a while, you’ll burn out and lose the drive to do even the things that matter to you. But that brings us to the second part: you can’t break for too long. This country is built on towns that sprung up when people headed out west broke down and never got started again. And don’t tell me your goal was to make it to Kansas. (Sorry, Kansas natives. Your state is even boringer than a blank sheet of paper; at least you can write or draw on a sheet of paper, or fold it into a totally sweet airplane. All you can do in Kansas is drive through it for hours, never sure if you’re actually making any progress.) Your momentum in life matters, and if you don’t get moving again soon, inertia will swallow you like a black hole and you’ll find yourself sucked into the gravity  of the same old path of least resistance. Pull over for the pit stop and look around, but know when it’s time to get moving again.

In short, enjoy the summer after your graduation — or a week or two of rest after finishing that big project — or whatever it is that you need to recharge your batteries before you move on to the Next Big Thing.

Road, Straight Road, Route, America, Usa, Freedom

But then, get moving toward the Next Big Thing, before it drives on down the road without you.

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.

The Menagerie of Bad Ideas

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The mind is like a zoo.

A panoply of animals separated by a profusion of cages. Noisy kids running here and there. Somebody’s vomit there, just right there, next to a trashcan. (How they managed to get so close and miss the trashcan will forever baffle.) A series of footpaths connecting the lot. Maybe a little train to let you take it all in while you kick back and relax.

Our brains compartmentalize just like a zoo. Can’t have the dark thoughts of your latest antagonist kicking around your head while you’re pushing your little ones on the swings. Can’t have lions sharing the cage with the cockatiels. (Is that how you spell cockatiel?) Rather, you keep it all separate. Go visit the dark part of your brain when you need the antagonist. Stick to the flamingo exhibits when you’re with the kids. And so on.

Confined, Monkey, Cage, Animal, Prison, Captivity

But zoos aren’t perfect. Neither are caretakers or cages. Look at the octopus that just recently escaped to the ocean, or at any number of stories of people falling into wild animal enclosures and being mauled (or rescued!) by the inhabitants. Every once in a while, the externally-imposed order breaks down, and things get messy.

And in a zoo, that’s maybe not such a good thing. But in the mind, that’s a necessity.

If you’re like me, you’ve got maybe a dozen different story ideas swirling around in your head at any given time. And those ideas are in their cages, sure, but you can’t help noticing them as your consciousness strolls by. They rattle the bars. They chew on the locks. And occasionally, they break out. Cross-pollinate. Pollute each other.

And for the writer, that’s a very good thing.

The sci-fi idea that you had might just be awesome with a bit of that romantic comedy thrown in. The alternate-history period piece could crackle to life with a dash of the thriller you thought of last week over a plate of meatballs.

Or maybe those ideas will breed and collapse from genetic deformity.

That’s okay, too. Ideas are as numerous as grains of sand, if we’re only open to seeing them.

We can’t keep our ideas in their cages.

We’ve got to let them out once in a while.

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.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Childish Energy

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Child, Cool, Dress, Fun, Hero, Red, Feeling, Kid, Boy

Tap, tap, tap.

It’s six AM on a Saturday, and my 4-year old is tapping on my forehead.

“Daddy, it’s Friday o’clock. It’s time to wake up.”

I grumble and open one eye at him. “Friday isn’t a number, Sprout. Time has to be a number.”

He thinks about this and says, “Dad, it’s Saturday o’clock.” Which is closer to correct.

I pull the sheet over my head. He climbs up on the bed and jumps on me. Why? Because he’s awake, the sun is coming up, and he’s ready to start his day of watching cartoons, eating fruit, drinking chocolate milk, running around in the yard, tormenting his little sister, chasing the cats, coloring on the walls, and all the other things he has to do. His schedule is a giant blank slate, but he runs from one thing to the next like he’s trying to stretch out time by moving close to the speed of light.

Seriously. He runs everywhere. To the kitchen. To the bathroom. Up the stairs to his room. To the car. After the dog. In circles around the coffee table. Everywhere. And, to shamelessly reminisce upon my post from a couple weeks ago, he does nothing halfway. With every task, every diversion, he throws himself into it like … well, like a 4-year-old hurling himself into a bouncy house.

He’s that kid that adults see and think, I wish I had that kind of energy. Imagine what we could get done! But the fact is, we do have that kind of energy, we’ve just forgotten how to channel it. We work at jobs that wear us out physically or mentally or emotionally or all of the above. We come home from those jobs tired, wanting nothing more than to collapse on the couch and watch The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or whatever Netflix show is binge-worthy this week. And it’s all we can do to haul ourselves into bed a few hours later to steal a few hours of blessed sleep before it’s time to do it all again. We don’t have energy because our momentum sucks.

We watch TV because it’s that time of day. We heave ourselves out of bed after hitting the snooze button three times because we can’t put it off any longer.

Meanwhile, my son has seemingly endless reserves of energy because he’s always moving. He doesn’t rest because he just got done coloring or because he just wants to sit down for a minute after a hard day. He rests because he has to. He’ll run fifteen laps around the playground, then come to me and say, “daddy, I’m tired, I need to take a break.” And he does. For about two minutes. Then he’s up and running for the slides again. In fact, I can hardly ever capture a decent picture of him because he is always in motion.

20141013_082555
He doesn’t even touch the *ground*.

 

He has an urgency to everything he does that I wish I could recreate. He does everything in his life like he knows it won’t last forever.

And we can too, if we let ourselves.

Momentum matters.

We come home and watch TV for hours because our momentum sucks. We drag ass and sleep in and laze around on the weekend because we feel like we need the rest to muster ourselves for another week at work. But that’s only true if we view the movement, the activity, the doing of things as an obstacle in our day.

But these things are not the obstacles in our day. They are the stuff of the day itself. They are the stuff of life. Your job. Playing with the kids. Going to the store. Cleaning the house. This is life. And if it wears us out, well, okay, maybe that’s what happens. But energy is transformative. The more you spend, the more you seem to have.

It’s why I feel like I can get more done on a day when I run than on a day when I don’t. It’s why I feel like I need to write for an hour after I push through grading a whole stack of papers. The days I feel like I can’t get anything done are the days where I just never got started and can’t break out of the funk of the negative momentum.

So, back to my son tapping on my forehead.

Six AM on a Saturday. I’d rather be sleeping. But I’m coming downstairs. Making him breakfast. Taking time out to write a little bit while he chases the cats around.

And now, I think I’m going to go chase him around the yard a little bit.

You know, fill up the tank a little.

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.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Never Ask a Word Guy to Math Something

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The prompt for the week is “no.” Not “no” as in, “no, don’t eat that piece of chalk” or “no, don’t dump milk all over your baby sister,” but “no.” as in short for number.

Which is a dangerous topic for me, because I’m like that guy who does a few oil changes on his own car and then decides he’s capable of fine-tuning the engine, or the one who successfully builds an IKEA side table and then tries to build his own back porch complete with gazebo. I know a little bit about numbers, and I’m kind of fascinated, but I haven’t taken any math classes since high school.

Mathematics, Formula, Physics, School, Mathematical

Nevertheless, you can count anything, right? And numbers matter, don’t they? There’s the old bit about needing ten thousand hours of experience to get “good” at something that I heard somewhere. If that’s true, how long should I expect to have to plug away at this writing thing?

MATH TIME.

I aim for an hour of writing a day. That’s theoretically 365 hours a year, which means it’s likely to take … ugh … something like 28 years to log 10,000 hours that way. But I only do my capital-W project-related writing on weekdays. So make it more like 37 years.

Sharknado.

But surely, I can count writing on the blarg toward those hours, too, yeah? Well, I’m not as regular there (needs me some blogging fiber, which is a joke that only somebody over thirty could appreciate), but maybe I can claim about two-three hours per week. Which reclaims the years I had to add to make up for the weekend. So we’re back at 28 years.

But wait, do those 10,000 hours have to be dedicated to becoming better at the thing, or can they just be hours spent doing the thing?

If it’s just the doing and not the actively trying to improve that matters, then I logged a heck of a lot of hours writing assignments in college and high school. Has to be enough to get that 28 years down to 26.

And then I wrote a cough-splutter fantasy novella in high school (180 pages in number-two pencil on college-ruled paper, now that was dedication), not to mention a bunch of crappy stories. (These are all lost to the mists of time now, which may in fact be evidence of a benevolent God.) Let’s be generous and give me another two years. 24.

Oh, and there were the plays I wrote a few years back. Hard to quantify that time because I worked when the mood struck me, but surely it’s good for another couple if not trio of years. I’m liking the optimistic feel here, so call it 21 years.

Which is maybe not so bad.

But wait again! With a mental task such as writing, surely time spent planning and plotting and pondering my stories counts. I think it’s safe, then, to double my time over the past two years and bump the timer down to 19 years.

And if time plotting and pondering counts, then surely time reading writing advice counts — that’s learning after all. But at that rate, if reading counts, it’s impossible to argue that reading stories that have inspired me to write wouldn’t count.

And then the floodgates open. Reading has got to be good for at least 5,000 hours of my life, and that’s a conservative estimate, to be sure. And that means I’m just a thousand hours or so short of Mastering Writing Forever.

Geometry, Mathematics, Cube, Hexahedron, Body

Which is nonsense, of course.

Measuring these things is a mug’s game. It’s like asking how many birds are in flight right this moment in the world. Surely it’s a question with an answer. A correct answer, even — one that could theoretically be measured. But it’s a nonsense question just the same, because the means for measuring such a thing simply don’t exist. And you can no more measure the actual productive time you’ve spent in an endeavor than you can measure all the people in the world whose eyes are closed. The information is there, but we can’t know it.

And that means we can’t live in fear or doubt or frustration at the information. There’s no finish line. There’s no ticker-tape parade when you reach 10,000 hours of practice, or 5,000, or 1,000, or five. All we can do is keep plugging away, keep practicing, keep doing.

Math may be an intrinsic part of everything, but these things we do are much, much bigger than math.

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.