Tag: stream of consciousness

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Humans Being

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I’ve just finished reading Christopher McDougall’s latest offering, Natural Born Heroes. (Review forthcoming.) The central tenet is: you can’t always tell a hero just by looking at him. The strongest fighter? The girl who can outrun everybody in the field? The guy who can traverse a forbidding mountain range in the dead of night on nothing to eat but weeds and acorns? They don’t look like much. They become who they are and capable of what they can do out of necessity, innovation, or sheer bloody-mindedness.

You can’t build resolve like that. You can’t engineer ingenuity. You don’t unlock the secrets of human potential on a whim or by mistake. These things only happen when we eschew the trappings of the modern world, when we cut through the nonsense of our capitalist culture, when we tap into what makes us who we are, what we evolved to do.

Which is, to survive.

Girl, At Night, Running, Cloud, Silhouette, Freedom

But it’s more than that, more than just being. We are human beings, but it isn’t being that makes us human; it’s our doings.

Each of us has within ourselves vast, untapped reservoirs of potential and energy. Everybody knows (or at least suspects) that they could do this or that unbelievable thing. (I could write the next great novel. I could run a marathon. I could quit my job and go herd goats. I could go and ask that girl/guy out.) But most of us don’t do those things. We allow them to remain unbelievable and go on just surviving. Which is easy! But it doesn’t put our names in the history books.

So let me stop myself before I get carried away on a tidal wave of my own ego. I’m not saying my name is going into the history books thanks to anything you might read around here. But there’s a slew of sayings on this particular subject:

You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.

You can’t hit a home run without swinging the bat.

You can’t hit a target that isn’t there.

Darts, Dart Board, Bull'S Eye, Game, Playing, Target

And with that in mind, this is me taking this opportunity to remind myself that this blarg, this past two years of writing novels and letting the voices in my head take the reins and spill over onto the page, of exploring the vast uncharted recesses of my storyteller brain, is me trying to tap into my inner hero.

Did I actually say that? Yeah, sure. Storytellers are heroes of a sort. We connect through stories. We live expansive alternate lives through stories. We learn to appreciate others through stories. And at their core, stories tell us about who we are.

We can be heroes.

We just have to take that chance on ourselves.

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.

Lucky Bastard, or A Glitch in the Matrix

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No re-motivator this week, because holy carp am I tapped out. Long week at school. Long week at the novel-writing game. Wife is hella sick. No time to muse on creativity and motivation and inspiration and the darkly wonderful things that happen in the writer’s lizard brain.

But, dude. You guys. GUYS.

I am thirty-something years old, and I have never in my life found a four-leaf clover. And there were times that I looked. I can distinctly remember a younger, high-school aged or maybe even collegiate version of myself spending entire minutes in weedy fields searching for one.

Never happened.

Then, today, this:20160326_185018.jpg

That’s totally my hand; you can tell by the horrible cuticles. I was gobsmacked. We hopped out of the car after a long day visiting with family, and I happened to glance down at my feet, and there it was.

But wait. WAIT.

Not even an hour later, I’d been to the grocery store and come back, and I was reflecting on how strange it was that I should find a four-leaf cloverin my own front yard. I glanced at my feet as I stepped over a totally different patch of clover. And I glanced again.

NO WAY.

20160326_193643.jpg

But yes way. A second four-leaf clover.

You guys.

Either I’m really, really lucky, or my front yard is a glitch in the matrix.

*skitters off to wait for Morpheus to unplug me*

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: Damn These Eggs!

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Is there a better metaphor for a writer’s head than a basket full of eggs?

Basket, Egg, Quail Eggs, Natural Product, Small Eggs

You have all these ideas rattling around up there. Poorly formed, fragile little things, each one the seed of something incredible and amazing; each one the proto-soup that can — through a process indistinguishable from literal magic — turn into either a living, breathing, existing thing or your overcooked, barely-edible breakfast.

Consider.

The chicken squirts the egg into the world, full of goop and the building blocks of a fuzzy little baby chick, something it in no way resembles. This is your story at first conception: a seedling, a possibility, an otherwise inert lump of fats and possibilities.

Then it goes into incubation: the mother cares for the egg, shields it from harm and from the elements, warms it with the heat of her own body. So, too, must you protect your fledgling idea. A stiff breeze can scatter it like ash, a judgmental word from a friend can shatter it to pieces (that would never work!), and even your own self-doubt can cause the hapless critter to wither and die (I just don’t have the time, I don’t know how it would work, It’s too big/stupid/much-like-this-other-thing/cliche). It needs nurturing. It needs shelter. It needs to live in the secret heart of the writer for a while before it comes to light.

But one day, the incubation is over, the alchemy of life has worked its magic on the bundle of plasma and protein, and the egg begins to jolt. To judder. The chick within stretches and grows and pushes outward against the walls of its prison — walls it has outgrown — and goes casting for daylight. And it succeeds! First the beak comes thrusting through, then the whole head, and soon it’s nothing but wings and feet and feathers, and hey holy carp, the little monster is walking on its own. That moment comes with the story too: one day it can hardly abide the sunlight and your own doubts about it, the next it’s got legs of its own and it’s not only walking without support, it’s running in its race to be told, and it’s all you can do to keep up with it. Sure, it still stumbles, and sure, its wings aren’t fully-formed enough to fly, its feathers not developed enough to insulate it. But it’s alive, and there’s no stopping it.

Chicks, Babies, Black, Beige, Animal, Domestic, Chicken

With time, it grows; it learns to walk without stumbling, it learns how and where to find food, it even learns to fly (awkwardly) a little bit at a time. This, too, is your story: the longer you work with it, the more you get a feel for what works, the more it feels like the story is doing much of its own heavy lifting. It tells you when things aren’t right. It can solve problems for itself if you let it.

And eventually, that little baby chick gets to the point where she can have eggs of her own, and the whole process begins anew. And just like that, your own story will spawn ideas of its own; ideas related not just to the squawking, squalling storyworld it lives in, but worlds unto themselves, ideas to be incubated and saved for another time, another place.

But what if your idea isn’t meant to be a chicken? Well, some ideas aren’t cut out for it. And those ideas are food. Crack them open, extract the useful bits, stir them into a bowl with some other stories, cook off what results, and see if any of it is edible. Because an egg — or an idea — that goes unhatched and uncooked will pretty soon start to stink up the joint.

Egg, Eggshell, Broken, Yolk, Shell, Yellow, Egg Beater

And now, just because I enjoyed it last week, a list of egg-related writing metaphors.

If you want to make an omelet, you’ve got to break some eggs. Applies for characters in the story — sometimes you’ve just got to kill one or erase him completely — as well as ideas you thought were awesome at the beginning and that have turned into dog vomit along the way. Let ’em go.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Commit too fully to one idea — or even to one aspect of an idea — and you will inevitably be disappointed, because it doesn’t always work, and it definitely doesn’t always work out the way you expect.

Walking on eggshells. Sometimes you proceed with reckless abandon, sometimes you have to slow down and measure every step. Nothing wrong with this every now and then, as long as you don’t write the whole story like that.

 

And finally, my favorite egg-related moment in literature. From A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry:

Ruth: How do you want your eggs?

Walter: Any way but scrambled.

Ruth: (Scrambles eggs.)

And later in that scene:

Walter: Man say to his woman: I got me a dream. Woman say: eat your eggs. Man say: I got to take hold of this here world, baby! Woman say: eat your eggs and go to work. Man say: I got to change my life, I’m choking to death, baby! And his woman say: your eggs is getting cold.

A lovely snapshot of the dreamer against the pragmatist.

How else is an idea like an egg? Let me know in the comments!

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: The Writer’s Diet

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Pizza, Lunch, Meal, Food, Baked, Italian, Sliced

I remember a time when I was in college, when money was tight, that I literally ate nothing but pizza for about four or five days. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. I was working at a Papa John’s doing delivery at the time, and there was always extra pizza left over at the end of the night which we’d take home. It was a college student’s dream (free food, say no more), and it almost ruined me for pizza.

Let’s clarify: I love pizza. Maybe it’s the simplicity, maybe it’s the grease, maybe it’s the geometric perfection of a perfectly-crafted pie. Time was when I could eat an entire pie by myself, but (probably for the better) those days are long past.

So to have nothing but pizza for almost a week is one of those things that maybe sounds like a good idea before you actually try it, like a juice cleanse, or a trip to the beach with your two sub-preschool-aged kids. The beginning is fine, maybe even fun. But before long the monotony sets in, then the actual physical discomfort, and before very much time passes at all, you realize what a terrible decision you’ve actually made, but there’s no way out.

By the end of the week, I felt ill, with terrible whanging headaches. I didn’t feel like getting out of the house at all; I had to force myself out of bed for class and work. My friends said I looked terrible. I believed it. I had put on three or four pounds gorging myself on pizza just because it was there and it was free. Needless to say, when my paycheck came in, I rushed to the grocery store to pick up a more equitable spread of staples for the college student (Ramen noodles, cereal, peanut butter and jelly … you know, the healthy basics).

Short of the actual physical difficulties you can cause yourself eating basically nothing but bread and cheese for days on end, the boredom and monotony are even worse. We humans may be creatures of habit, but as has been said before, variety is the spice of life. Until they start selling Soylent Green, our physiology dictates that we need a varied diet. You can’t get everything you need from just one source.

So what’s all that got to do with writing?

Pretty much everything, actually.

The monochromatic writer is as boring (and possibly as hazardous to your health) as an all-pizza diet. The writer owes it to himself to consume a varied diet of literature, as well as to serve up a spread that satisfies a bunch of different tastes. Both in the form (novels, short stories, plays, poetry, or even blogs) and in the substance (the genres, the types of characters, the tone and timbre of the stories).

To focus only on novels is to neglect the elegant brevity of the short story. To write only poetry robs one of the nuance of a finely crafted dialogue.

And if you only read in your genre, you’re sealing up the door of your own echo chamber. It’s much more interesting than reading horror over and over again to read science fiction, explore mysteries, go galloping through YA or coming-of-age stories, and weave into your own writing the little gravelly bits that stick to your brain from those other stories.

Or, you know, you could just eat pizza all the time.

Just don’t come running to me with your blockage issues.

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: Short of Time

Pavowski4 Comments

I’m tired.

This is the part of the year where everything seems to converge and my time and energy run low, the gas tank puttering on fumes, the next gas station a couple of impossible miles ahead. Soccer is getting into full swing, which means I’m losing out on a couple entire evenings every week, and several hours on the average weeknight. School tends to pick up during this time as well, as we start to look forward toward the end of the year: conferences, scheduling for next year, graduation, all of which says nothing about the old refrain of grades, grades, grades. It’s colder out, which makes it harder to get out for my runs, which makes me more likely to miss them, which has its own sapping effect. And, of course, the days are shorter, so there is literally less daylight in which to get done the things that need doing.

Again: I’m tired.

The inclination is to just let a few things slide. Miss a run here and there. Let a day’s worth of writing get away from me. Shell out for some fast food instead of cooking a proper meal.

But momentum matters, and it cuts both ways.

I’ve worked really hard to establish a momentum which has me writing every day, exercising almost every day, waking up early, doing a decent job balancing work with family. And I know that that momentum will survive a skipped workout, a slipped writing session, a meal of junk food. But just like the slow orbit of the moon is slowly disrupting the earth’s rotation, little things add up over time. Skipping a workout on Monday makes it easy to skip the one on Tuesday as well. Leaving out the writing time on Thursday makes me realize just how nice it would be to have that extra time on Friday, too.

Hourglass, Duration, Temporal Distance, Egg Timer

It’s why we have the recognizable, lamentable stereotype of the person who retires and develops Alzheimer’s or dementia in just a few short years. The routine goes away, there’s not nearly so much to occupy their time, and suddenly, they’re no longer able to accomplish a fraction of what they once could.

Writer types know how hard it is to protect their writing time, especially when the routine is disrupted. It only gets worse when nature itself is conspiring against you by literally removing minutes and hours from the day. The truth is, I know it won’t be that big a deal if I let the project breathe for a few days while I catch up on some other work, and it certainly won’t hurt me to catch up on a little sleep instead of rising at 5 to go for a run. But I think it becomes even more important to be true to our goals when it’s hard to follow through on them.

It’s like a placekicker who never misses a goal in practice but shanks his kicks during the game. Well and good to deliver when it’s easy, but it doesn’t help much if you can’t get the work done when it matters. Which is not to say that the work matters more at this time of year than at any other — unless you’re lucky enough to have a deadline looming — but I just come back to knowing that the momentum matters. My momentum will survive a day or two of slippage, but an entire week? A month?

No chance.

Winter has its hooks in. I’m tired. We’re all tired.

But there is still work to do.

As a great American once said, we do these things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

So I guess I’ll find a way to lace up for my run later this afternoon, even though I missed it this morning. And I’ll find a way to carve out a few more minutes for my writing, too.

Luckily, the kids are out of town for the night. Maybe this is why god invented grandparents.

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.