Tag: Writing

How About a Graduation Speech that Doesn’t Suck?

Pavowski5 Comments

One of my students came to me for help writing a speech today.  She’s in the running to be one of the speakers at graduation and wanted my help in ironing out some of the details.

She’d written … not a bad speech, but a boring one.  It bespoke the regular regurgitated platitudes of high school: these are the first days of the rest of our life, the things which seem so important now are really very small in the scheme of things, limitless potential, blah blah blah.  Nothing wrong with it, but nothing particularly right, either.  I asked her what her goal was in this speech:  why did she want to give it, rather than let one of her classmates give it?  Why did she feel it was a speech worth giving?

She responded by saying that she wanted to write something people would enjoy.  HMM WHERE HAVE I HEARD THAT, OH WAIT, THAT’S MY GOAL.  She said that she wanted to write something that her classmates could relate to. YEP THAT’S ME TOO.  It didn’t occur to me at the time but in retrospect, by which I mean a few minutes after she left the classroom, it struck me that her fears are the same as my own.  She wanted to write a speech with broad-based appeal, and it was falling flat.  She wanted to be inclusive to everybody, and ended up sounding placating and boring.  She wanted a speech that would be memorable, but had written something utterly forgettable.

Where had she gone wrong?  I dutifully examined the speech with her, taking it line by line and thinking of ways to strengthen this sentence, simplify that idea, and all that stuff.  But the underlying problem, the one that I couldn’t point to and say, “here’s where you screwed up,” was the absence of heart.  She was so focused on getting her audience to connect with the speech that she had forgotten to write something she could connect with.  As a result, and not surprisingly in the least, her words were bland, disjointed, and uninteresting.

What to do?  When words give you trouble, you bust out the WordHammer. Go for the jugular.  Write what’s real and immediate and bloody and visceral.  Throw judgment out the window, kick doubt right in its asgard, and write some TRUTH.

The theme of the speech is time?  I shared with her a paradox which baffles me every day.  The days are so long, but the years are so short.  Every day it feels like there are so many hours to fill.  There’s time to go for a run.  There’s time to go to work.  There’s time to do a bit of writing.  Cook dinner.  Play with my kid.  Relax with my wife.  Watch some TV.  Read a few chapters.  Do some laundry.  So much time.  And yet, it feels like my high school’s 10-year reunion (such as it was) was just a few short weeks ago.  (Spoiler alert, it was five years ago.)  For that matter, it feels like I was in high school just a few years ago.  (Spoiler alert, it was MORE THAN five years ago.)  My son is two, running circles around me in the yard and counting to ten and happily calling out the color of every object in the house, but it feels like just last month he was a newborn, red-faced and squalling and unable to even roll over on his back without help.  I told her those things and reminded her that the days are long but the years are short, then I asked her why she suddenly seemed enraptured.

“I just hadn’t considered your life before.”

It’s indicative of the human condition, I think, that we turn inward.  That we focus on the immediate, that we focus on ourselves.  But it’s that very tendency that limits us as storytellers.  It’s a bizarre paradox.  To tell the best story to the widest audience, we have to make it accessible and real.  But to make it accessible and real, we have to forget about appealing to the audience and share the gooey, tasty bits of ourselves that we never think to tell about.  Try too hard to appeal and the story sounds forced, awkward, and hollow; tell a personal and nuanced tale and suddenly readers you don’t even know can relate.

You know that old adage about the student becoming the teacher?  The other half of the equation is that the teacher sometimes becomes the student.

Things I learned:

1.  Know what you want to say.  My student was so preoccupied with giving a good speech that she hadn’t bothered to determine whether she was delivering a message worth sharing.  The message matters.  In a lot of ways, it’s all that matters.

2.  Focus on the story before you focus on the audience.  The story has to come first.  After you know the story, then you can fine-tune the words and the metaphors and the way you tell it to your specific audience.  But if the story sucks, no amount of turd-polishing or clever wordplay will make it not suck.

So she left feeling better about her speech (I think) and I got back to work on my story with perhaps a bit more clarity and confidence.  Twelve hundred words today, and I think they tell a pretty good story.

By the way, I’m not sure if it’s a bastardization of a better known aphorism or what, but I first heard “the days are so long, but the years are so short” a few years back from my dad, and it proves more and more true every long day and short year.  Thanks, dad, for helping me to see something I hadn’t before.  (ALSO, SEE, I DO LISTEN.)

Zen and the Art of Shut Up and Write

PavowskiLeave a comment

Gawd, it’s been a rough week for my writing. Hard to find the time, hard to find the motivation, hard to even read what I’ve written.

The Howler Monkey of Doubt was exceptionally loud in my ears this morning, and I think he must have eaten a ton of garlic bread last night, because his breath was AWFUL, and he was not in the least apologetic about it. At any rate, during my tuning-up phase this morning, I went back and re-read the last few pages, as is my wont, and realized that there is a problem. It’s not going anywhere.
Read More »

Falling Pianos and Frozen Bananas (and other things to avoid during your week)

PavowskiLeave a comment

(I’m just kidding.  The title of this post is a lie.  If I were any sort of an authority on Things to Avoid or How to Avoid Them, I wouldn’t have impaled my foot on a porch in January.)

It’s only right that I should make a post about routines and how good they are and how much they contribute to the flow of all of my creative juices (especially the tasty ones) at the outset of a week which has effectively shattered my routine into itty-bitty pieces, stomped on the pieces, dug the pieces out of its grubby shoes, and fed them through a wood chipper.  The resultant dust could be used, I’m told, to craft a glitter-bomb which might then be fired at the idiot who put my lunch in the freezer the other day at work, ruining my fruit and by extension my afternoon writing session.  Wait, that idiot was me.  DONDRAPER YOU, PAST ME.

/Sidenote:  I’ve heard of frozen bananas being a delightful treat.  Where did I hear this, and what lamebrain banana salesperson perpetrated this myth?  The banana I pulled from the freezer went from a dong-shaped brick to a soggy, mushy turdlet in about three minutes flat.  It was in no way appetizing, let alone delightful.  /Sidenote over.

Read More »

Running is Magic

Pavowski3 Comments

Running is nothing if not a constant dialogue with yourself about the things you never thought you’d do.

I never thought I’d take up running.

Then I never thought I’d enjoy running.

I never thought I’d run in a race.  (Pay money to run?  Run with other people?  Do I look like a fool?)

Then I never thought I’d run multiple races in a year.

I never thought I’d run more than three or four miles at a stretch.

Then I never thought I’d run more than six.  Or eight.  Or ten.  Or thirteen.

Oh, that’s half of a marathon.  I never thought I’d run a half marathon.

I never thought I could appreciate any activity completed outdoors in the summer in the deep south.

Or in the winter for that matter.

I never thought I’d look forward to getting up while most of the world is asleep to “exercise”.

I never thought I’d ever be grumpy about not going for a run.

I never thought I’d ever have anything to say about running that was worth writing down.  (Okay, that’s probably still debatable.)

I could go on, but that’s probably enough for the moment.  Anyway, I say all that to say this.  Running is magic.

I don’t say that lightly.  Writing is magical.  My son is magical.  My wife is magical.  (No, seriously.  She once cast a spell on me and it WORKED.  She also convinced me that getting married was a good idea, so clearly she has magical powers of persuasion.)  But that’s about where the magic ends in my life.  Just for the record, I set the bar pretty high when it comes to declaring things magical.  A decent magician can pull a rabbit out of a hat or tell you what card he forced you to pick.  Real magic is when a piece of lead turns into a piece of gold right before your unblinking eyes.  Real magic is when something that WASN’T suddenly IS.  Real magic is when the work and the time you put into something gets magnified and transmogrified and turned into rainbows and kittens and sunshine and all the good things.

Writing?  Magical.  I feel smarter every day that I write, and given the esteem that I hold my intelligence in (again, I will reference my wife), that’s a pretty big deal.  But in addition to getting my story down in literal, tangible words that another human could read, consider, and then (hopefully) enjoy, it’s filling me with a sense of purpose and accomplishment and a sort of general sense of being a little bit awesome.  My son?  Magical.  I put in a fun weekend in Florida and a few sleepless nights and I’m rewarded with a TINY FARGOING HUMAN that’s basically me on a thirty-year delay.  Incredible.  My wife?  Magical.  I know of no other person on earth who would put up with and call me on the stupid things that I do and still allow me to have happy fun times with her.  (She might kill me tonight for writing that.  That would be less magical.)

Running, to return to the point, requires a bit more explanation.  I’ve sunk a metric sharknadoload of time (not to be confused with the imperial sharknadoload) into running, and what have I got to show?  I lost some weight.  I “feel” healthier.  The endorphins that follow an individual run are nice.  But that seems like a balanced equation; there’s no magic there.

No, the magic of running is not like the magic of a rainbow suddenly appearing.  It’s more like the magic of a sculpture emerging from a raw hunk of marble under the practiced hands of Michaelangelo.  (He made sculptures, right?  I don’t know Art.)  You work at it, and you work at it, and you chip away day after day after day, knowing that there’s something good under those layers of stone and sweat and tears and exhaustion, and then one day it just appears.  Like Batman out of the dark.  He was there all along, saving your asgard, looking out for you, protecting your city and your whole way of life, but he only just now revealed himself to you because you only just now stopped to look.

Running gives you patience.  Not right away.  When you first dip your toes in the shallow end of the pool, you barely have the patience to slog it out for twenty minutes.  But you can’t embark on a thirteen mile run, or a twenty-six mile run, or a fifty mile run without the patience not to get bored, not to get distracted, not to quit halfway through because you just can’t stand the tedium for another minute.  Running teaches you to accept the tedium of the long miles and, eventually, to appreciate it.

Running gives you resilience.  It hurts.  It’s exhausting.  Especially at first.  But the more you do it, the less it hurts, the less it exhausts you, and finally you realize that running wasn’t the problem, the old you was the problem.  The more you learn to get up off the mat when running knocks you down (and running WILL knock you down), the easier it gets to keep standing up for another helping.

Running gives you confidence.  You start small.  If I can run for a minute, maybe I can run for two.  If I can run for two, maybe I can run for three.  If I can run for a half-mile, maaaaybe I can run an entire mile.  And then you get there.  Sooner than you think.  And what was once impossible becomes routine, and you start getting crazy with confidence.  If I can run fivemiles, maybe I can run ten.  If I can run a half-marathon, maybe I can write a fargoing book.

Sidenote: it’s foolish and stupid that half-marathons are called half-marathons.  You have a 5k, then a 10k, and those sound awesome.  Then there’s a half-marathon, which sounds like, “well, that’s nice I suppose, but why not a whole marathon?”  To which runners who have just accomplished their first run at that distance might, rightly so, kick you in the sack.  And yeah, I know, some people call them Pikermis, and that’s nice and all, but nobody knows how to pronounce Pikermi and it sounds a little ridiculous besides.  Call it a Salvador or something, or surely there is some other Greek city with a nice name we could appropriate.

Finally, Running gives you a sense of community.  I don’t know if I could name a social situation I’ve been in where the collective vibe was more uplifting than at any race I’ve attended.  Runners support one another, because we’re not running against one another, we’re running with one another.  And if you’ve never raced, then at the very least you know the deep-seated connection you have with every other runner you pass on the road.  Whether you wave or not, whether they wave or not, you see each other, and you know that they know, and they know that you know, and both of you are going through it together.  Through what?  Through it all.

Why am I still writing this?  I’m going for a run.  (Okay, fine, I’m going for a run in the morning.  I just… god.  Why you gotta ruin it?)

(EDIT:  My wife would like for me to point out that there is in fact nothing magical about blisters.)

The Importance of Routine

Gallery PavowskiLeave a comment

I am quickly learning the importance of routine to — I want to say any creative endeavor, but I will err on the side of not being an overgeneralizing jerkstore and say — this particular project of mine. No matter what I do, it seems I have had and certainly will have good days and […]