Tag: Writing

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.

How’s It Going?

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pretty good

I started out writing a post about how the boy in this picture is all of my students right now.

Then I realized that the boy in this picture is actually me right now.

Then I took one last think on it and it struck me: the boy in this picture is all of us, all of the time.

We’re all making this sharknado up as we go along. Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing. We hope we’re doing the right things, and we certainly like to think that we’re doing pretty good in that regard. But running like a river of slime just below that shiny, smiling surface, is a bubbling, broiling river of doubt and despair, and you never know when it’s going to flood its banks and cough up a clutch of dead raccoons on your perfectly manicured lawn.

Best we can hope for is that our brave facade holds up, and that no hapless interviewers bother to follow up when we tell them things are going “pretty good.”

I could watch that little boy’s face collapse for hours.

Dreams are Useless

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Many times I’ve read the nugget of writing advice: “keep a notepad by your bed, so you can jot down the ideas that come to you in your dreams!” Which is the sort of nebulous, tree-hugging crap that sounds good at first. We don’t know where inspiration comes from, and we don’t know where dreams come from, so obviously they must come from the same place, right??

I’ve tried it. My results are less than stellar. Less than atmospheric, really. The trajectory of my success with this method is more like a Greyhound ride to Denton: disappointing, a little smelly, and at the end of the day, you’re in fargoing Denton.

But my best ideas come from my dreams! I hear you cry. If I hadn’t kept that little notebook next to my bed, I wouldn’t have ever remembered the idea that became the seed for my 7-part fantasy saga based on my life, The Rainbow Riders of Regulon 7. (btw, you can’t have that title; I made it up as a joke but I’M KEEPING IT.)

Sure. Maybe. But dreams are boring as hell to anybody who isn’t you and who isn’t bound by genetics or marriage vows to listen to you. And dreams aren’t compelled to make sense or be coherent at all.

Here, I’ll show you. (Feel free to skip this next paragraph, because it’s absolute garbage.)

I dreamed early this morning of a sort of Titanic-esque love story. Two people from different worlds collide on this boat that’s going away forever. Romance. Goofy frippery. Elaborate costumes. But the dude is found out as a fraud by a snooty guy who goads him into a fistfight and gets him thrown off the boat. Dude is losing his mind with love and the thought that he’ll never see his girl again. He tries desperately to get back on board, and ends up swimming out into a shipping lane in hopes of getting scooped back up. He does — by the Coast Guard, and his persecutor takes great pleasure in locking him up for international crimes or something. But our dude manages to win over the persecutor’s grandmother with the power of his love, and she convinces her grandson to stage an elaborate shenanigan (shenanigans can be singular, can’t they?) to stop the boat and allow the dude back on board, where he is tearfully reunited with his love.

Terrible. And that’s a salvageable dream, with a beginning, middle, and end, kind of. Never mind how the guy got out into open ocean to swim into a shipping lane, although that’s arguably the best part — maybe he could get mauled by the propellers of a cargo freighter hauling prosthetic limbs. As dreams go, this is a masterpiece of continuity.

It’s awful, but it’s vivid, and because it’s vivid, and because that little turdlet of writing wisdom is still kicking around in my brain, I wrote it down. So, now, I can ignore it as I flip past it when I go plumbing the depths of my drivel looking for inspiration for my next work.

But here’s the real problem with waiting for inspiration from your dreams (though it’s more of a skeptical hangup than a problem). If it’s kicking around in your dreams, that means it’s already banging around in your subconscious, which means on some level it’s something you’re already thinking about. The dream just brought it to front-of-mind for a fleeting moment while you were unconscious.

With that in mind, it’s hard to say that just because I dreamed something, it’s automatically worth writing down. Like most of the thoughts that pass through my head, anything I dream is actually probably not worth writing down or remembering at all.

Dreams shouldn’t get preferential treatment over any other old crusty idea that drops into your brain. If anything, they deserve more skeptical treatment by dint of being disjointed incoherent heaps of hot garbage. Dreams, just like any other idea I have, go through a rigorous screening process. Just like I don’t pick up the phone for phone numbers I don’t recognize, I don’t write down an idea as worth keeping just because it popped in there.

Most ideas are crap; dreams, doubly so. But you’ll know the good ones when you see them: The good ones will stick around, call back, or even show up on your doorstep to make sure you pay attention to them. The good ones will stick in memory whether you write them down or not.

 

Time to Jump off the Cliff

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Nothing to see here, but the last edit (until, you know, somebody who’s trying to help me get the book published comes back and tells me to do it again) on Accidentally Inspired is finished.

One last pass (to be completed in an afternoon or so) to clean up the formatting and save it in about a half dozen places, and then it’s time to go about the business of submitting it.

Deep breath.

Time to jump off the cliff.