I’m in an odd sort of mood. I can’t recall how long it’s been since I’ve felt like this – pensive, thoughtful, with an edgy undercurrent. I used to feel this way a lot, or I think I did, back in my teens and early twenties. Most of those nights (occasionally days) were spent writing bad poetry or drawing strange pictures. Very rarely, I would try to put my thoughts down on paper – long, rambling monologues. I’ve long since lost those reveries, but their marks remain on my soul. Much of what I’ve become as a writer starts in those disjointed, random scribbles.

            Recently, my creative urge just stopped cold. The fire is not out, I can still feel it, but it’s banked back – I have no access to it. I finally stopped trying to fan it back up, realizing that my brain probably just needed a break. So, I’m catching up on my reading, refinishing furniture, and spending time with family and friends. All these things are helpful – they add fuel to the reservoir. But I feel the need to do something else as well – I need to walk.

            Whether it’s going out for a jaunt with the dogs and my wife, or taking a stroll on my own, I find walking to be relaxing, healthy and mentally energizing. Some of my best ideas and most creative impulses have come to me during a ramble. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I start out relaxed or tense, with an idea in mind or no mental activity worth the name. I’m quickly loose, warmed up and wandering in my thoughts as well as my shoes. If I walk out the door grumpy or angry, I’m usually fine after half a mile or so. But, if I’m not okay by the time I get back to my front door, I go around again. The quality of my thoughts also depends on the light.

            Daytime walks are fun, relaxing, full of little questions and observations. When the sun is high (and not too hot), it’s the best time for social walking – with pets, friends and loved ones. Conversations are free and easy, and range all over. We have a park a couple of miles away where we take the dogs for a romp. It’s big and green and open – lots of other dog owners walk their dogs there. There’s a small pond with ducks and geese. Watch your step.

            Nocturnal walks are very different. If taking the pooches, we have to be more vigilant – they’re both black and disappear quickly in the gloom. But I really prefer to walk alone at night, even if I don’t go very far. I rarely take a flashlight, because I live in the suburbs, and the streetlights are everywhere. This is the kind of walk I take if I want to unwind after a long day, or if my brain is all a-rattle with issues and questions. But there is another kind of nighttime walk.

            If I’m out away from the city, whether camping or just escaping the noise of a communal campfire, I sometimes take a walk in the dark, usually by myself. I take a flashlight, but I try not to use it. Man-made light ruins your dark adaption, so it’s hard to see the stars when you switch it off. I don’t see the Milky Way often enough. But it’s also hard to see the nighttime world around you, whether the light is on or off. This blue-grey world of dim shapes and deep shadows only appears when your eyes have adjusted to a world without artificial light. And it brings with it a whole host of wilder, deeper and darker thoughts.

            You come in contact with primal fears while walking in darkness. Whether in woodland or desert surroundings, your base impulses start to grasp at every sound, trying to make sense of what you hear. Then your sense of smell goes into high gear, trying to categorize the world around you. At a feeble, logical level, you ‘know’ there are no cougars or madmen in the area, and the snakes will all try to avoid you – but that is not what you feel. For the first ten minutes or so, your poor, over-civilized brain will scream at you to return to the others, to go back to the tent, to turn around, damn it! Then you step into a pool of moonlight.

            The moon, when close to full, is almost unbearably bright to look at. It blocks out the stars. Sometimes there is a ring around the moon. Again, the logical brain has an answer for these apparitions, but the primitive feeling of awe overwhelms it. You begin to understand why the Moon has always been seen as a goddess. The night terrors recede. The world is suddenly magical and strange again.

            The world seen in moonlight does not look like the same place in daylight. All the colors are different. Trees and rivers and grasslands are misty and slightly out of focus. The shadows are sharp and black. The mountains seem carved out of ice. You can hear the sound of running water, even if you can’t see the stream. Owls call each other from the surrounding trees. The world seems to be holding its breath and you catch yourself doing the same. Rather than thinking creative thoughts, or scary or even angry thoughts, you find yourself simply soaking up the night and the breeze, the moonlight and the stillness.

            Eventually, you return to the fire, you return to the tent or the camper. You return to other people and the civilized way. But you have changed. No great themes or ideas have come to you, but you are not the same. You can never return to a humdrum, slightly anesthetized, average everyday way of being. For a moment, you have touched the wild, and it has touched you. Welcome to the first step on the road to real Freedom. There is so much more to discover.

            Be well.

            bcd

            Lately I’ve caught the poetry bug again. Like most people, I used to write a lot of what could jokingly be called ‘free verse’ back in high school and college. My younger brother used to tell me the poor things sounded like ‘an old man sitting on top of a mountain, speaking dooms’. He wasn’t wrong – they were pretty awful. Later, I put out a whole rash of poems when I was dating the girl who would become my wife. Some of them were not awful. She still just smiles at me and says, ‘your heart was in the right place’. Damning by faint praise…

            I’ve turned out a very few poems since then. One or two of them even had some sadly stunted rhymes involved. Meter? Not so much. As with many other aspects of my creative journey, it was difficult to be artistic while I was insane – a matter of some 20 years or so. So, not a lot of progress in any area. As I have healed, my arts are coming back to me – poetry among them. But none of my arts have escaped my distraction and neglect unscathed. I find myself starting over – sometimes from zero – with every artistic pursuit. Can’t be helped.

            Poetry is just the latest to rise from somnolence. Prose writing – especially novels and short stories – was first, followed eventually by visual art. Now poetry and sculpture are waking up. My vocal music has limped along for years, and while I could do theatre even while insane, I haven’t been in front of the footlights for a decade. All of that is changing now. And it brings up a new question: When am I going to find time to do all this? I have related elsewhere in this blog how difficult it is to find time to write. But the ideas are rising in me, and they will not be denied.

            If I’m going to do this – if I’m actually going to write poetry – I feel the need to do it right, at long last. That means not just ‘free verse’ (i.e. – throwing words at a page and calling it poetry), but actually following the conventions and formats for the various types of poem. Now, rhyming doesn’t seem all that difficult on the face of it, but meter is something else again. I suppose most of that, plus word choice and imagery, can be hammered out in the editing process. But beyond that, each poetic form has its own conventions, and some are downright bizarre.

            Have you ever read a Sestina? It’s a strange, but mathematically precise form – which already has my little antennae a-twitching. Or, how about a villanelle? I’d never even heard of this form until recently, but apparently the poem Do not go gentle into that good night, by Dylan Thomas, is an example of a villanelle. The rhyme and meter schemes are torturous but produce a gorgeous result. And the sonnet form is just daunting. Any one of the three. I figure I may cut my teeth on a couple of haikus and a limerick or two before I attempt anything in that range.

            But, aside from the sheer challenge of the thing, why write poetry? Well, partly for what I think it can do for my prose. No less a light than Ray Bradbury insisted that prose authors should read poetry every day. He claimed that the beauty and the clarity of expression would leak over into your prose. Writing poetry should have an even stronger influence. It teaches you how to distill your imagery and clarify the mood in whatever you write. Prose writers tend to wander and sniff at rabbit holes too much. Poets don’t have that liberty, but in exchange, they become more incisive. Finally, it’s just a nice break from prose writing, while still keeping you at work.

            Okay, I took the leap and wrote a simple haiku –

Tall grass crickets drone

Warm sunlight caresses skin

Lazy summertime

            Alright, it’s not Basho. But it’s also not horrible, I think. I’m kinda stupidly proud of it. It hits the 5-7-5 scheme and is even somewhat indicative of a mood. I started with a childhood image and took it from there. If I end up writing a bunch of these, or of limericks, or really any kind of poetry – I’ll be sure to include them under their own heading on the site.

            It seems to me that the technical side of poetry, while challenging, is not the most difficult part. The real problem of poetry seems to be holding onto a mood or an image long enough to get it at least sketched out. In that sense, it really is a lot like a quick sketch in a drawing journal. I know that if I don’t get the image out on the paper fast enough, or if I get interrupted halfway through, I lose the thread. Things seemed much simpler when I was young.

            When I was a kid, it was easy to sit down and draw or paint or write for hours. Part of the reason I had so much free time was that I ignored my homework, usually. But I think a major reason for all the freedom was that I lived in a small town, with few distractions and not much TV worth watching. I didn’t play sports, so in order to keep boredom at arm’s length, I learned to invent things. I created something nearly every day. It was wonderful. I miss it.

            Now I feel I must find my way back to that pre-teen artist I used to be. It can be difficult for an adult to do more than just reminisce about the past. Instead, I need to find ways to drag the past into the present, but with upgrades. If I can manage to invest my days and nights with the same simple feelings, joy in nature and hunger to create that I had in my youth – you might see a lot more poetry come out of me. It’s worth a try.

            Be well.

            bcd

            Years ago, I was in a production of Kaufman and Hart’s, You Can’t Take It With You. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a lovely little play (first performed in 1936) which won the Pulitzer Prize. It was made into a movie in 1938 by Frank Capra. The movie starred Lionel Barrymore, Ann Miller and Jimmy Stewart. The production I was in back in 1980 was a lot of fun, and the show is a perennial crowd favorite. But it also carries a profound message: why should you waste your life working at a job you don’t like, if you could do something you love?

            Most of the world has been asking that same question for almost two centuries, and people are asking that question now, more than ever before. It’s a question I have asked, in one form or another, for most of my life. Until recently, I wasn’t even sure why I was asking it, and I certainly didn’t know there was an answer available. Now, I know a little more.

            Before about 1800 or so, most people around the world were born into poverty and ignorance and could expect to die that way. Religion and the Church still held sway among the lower classes. The Rationalist and Romantic periods were the first glimmerings of a new way of thinking, but they were still primarily only for the rich. The rise of the Industrial Revolution changed everything. It required the establishment of universal education, and eventually, universal suffrage.

            The intent was to create generations of good and tractable little worker bees. To some extent it worked, but it also saw the beginnings of a growing dissatisfaction with the social strata that were created. As people became more educated, more aware of the world around them, they started to see their jobs and their place in society as little more than cages. The political revolutions of the Eighteenth Century were replaced by social and class revolutions in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries.

            The Industrial Revolution is over, but we are still shackled with the systems it created. The late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries have seen a huge leveling of social norms and a broad democratization of the planet. There are still a few holdouts, of course. Equality of race, gender and political power scares the crap out of demagogues and dictators. Add the Pandemic in on top of that, and we are seeing that the old ways are well and truly broken. I say, good riddance.

            People everywhere are questioning everything. Good. Let the old world die, we’ve outgrown it. Nation-states, religious systems, class boundaries and economies are all tottering. It’s a chaotic mess, but I, for one, believe that something better will rise from the ashes. But it leaves people wondering – what do I do now? How should I live? The answer is relatively simple – but not remotely easy.

            You must do the kind of work that speaks to you, the kind of things you would enjoy doing. I don’t mean that everybody should go out and try to be actors or musicians or dancers. There is always going to be a place for that, a need for creatives. But creatives must now learn to be entrepreneurs, they must market themselves, because no one else will do it for them. And not everyone will want to do that kind of work. To echo Grandpa Vanderhof in the play, some people will still want to work in the factories or build houses or farm the land. Some will want to go down to Wall Street, or even fly the oceans – you can’t stop them. But you must never let someone else tell you what you should be, or what you should want. Slavery in all its forms must die. Democracy means that everyone has a voice, everyone has a place.

            In the end, what the play You Can’t Take It With You was trying to say is that just because you have money or fame or political power – that doesn’t make you a king. It doesn’t mean you’re important, or at least not more important than others. But it also begged the question – So what is important? How do we understand a world where everyone does whatever they want? How can society function under those terms? Pretty well, really.

            With very few exceptions, most people want to work. It makes us feel useful, like we’re doing our part. But I contend that what we work at should be our choice, not someone else’s idea. People do their best work when they’re fully invested in the task. It also helps to know what you expect to get from the work you do.

            If, like most people, all you really want to do is live out a quiet life, raise a couple of kids and retire peacefully – there’s any number of jobs that will pay you well and not stress you out too much. Suppose you feel that you want to make a difference in your community, then maybe working for a non-profit is your best path. If you feel that you should be rich and/or important, either become incredibly famous or go into politics. One absolute, however: if you want to be truly, disgustingly rich – you can’t work for anyone else.

            There’s a lot of ‘success gurus’ out in the wild, telling you to ‘find your passion’. Why? That seems high stress and very confusing. Maybe what you really need to do is just figure out what you’re good at, decide how much money you need to live on, and then find a way to earn the second thing, doing the first thing. Life really isn’t all that hard – we make it more difficult than it needs to be. Just go out into the world, have respect for others, don’t hurt anyone, and then do what really makes you happy. If it doesn’t make you happy, do something else. You can’t take it with you, after all.

            Be well.

            bcd

            If you’re anything like me, you’ve learned that sitting still and doing nothing is tantamount to a sin. Doing nothing means being lazy – procrastinating, right? Everyone is so busy – reading, journaling, working, working out, talking, running, taking classes – is it any wonder we’re all exhausted? It seems the older I get, the faster I move. I thought I was supposed to be slowing down.

            We are all pressured to do more. Want to make a million dollars? You better be out there grinding, baby. Do you want to look better, feel better? There are hundreds, maybe thousands of different Yoga routines, workout regimens and races to get into. Want to advance in your career, find the love of your life, harmonize your chakras? There’s an app for that! Do you want to be more creative? There are dozens of courses to take, videos to watch, podcasts to follow …

            Stop.

            You’re doing it wrong.

            You can’t really be creative, or even really efficient and useful, if you’re tearing around all the time trying to catch an imaginary brass ring. Multitasking only works in computers – they have multiple CPUs, each one of which can be working on a different program. You only have one. And while your brain is an incredibly complex and powerful machine, it needs to be operated in accordance with the system specifications. We need rest and relaxation on a regular basis in order to operate properly. And I don’t mean 4 hours of sleep. 8 – standard.

            Also, I don’t mean that sleep will make you creative, either. You need more than that. I hear some people say ‘Meditate’ – fine, if you’re into it. But that’s also not what I mean. Do this – turn off all the electronics, put the self-help books away, unplug the TV and veg out. You need to get bored. No drinking, no eating, no talking – just sit. Stare out the window if you have to. If it gets to be too much, go for a walk. Not ten minutes, mind you – 3 miles, minimum. Use paths you already know, if you can. Walking in circles is good. I’m talking total boredom.

            After a while, something weird will happen – your mind will switch gears, and you’ll start to have ideas. Crazy ideas. Huge designs. Tiny intuitions. You may even catch yourself talking to yourself. Don’t worry, you’re not crazy (necessarily). This is the same kind of thing the geeks were doing in high school all the time, remember? Wandering the halls, mumbling to themselves? Don’t dismiss it. Most of those geeks are rich, now. This is how they got their brilliant ideas. They embraced solitude and quiet.

            You see, the brain works in strange and wonderful ways. While some ideas and thoughts are born during interactions with other smart people, and a tiny number rise to the surface in board meetings, most ideas find the creative person in moments of quiet and boredom. Painters, musicians and physicists throughout history have taken long walks, usually alone, in order to clear their minds and find inspiration. Writers famously sit alone in their studios, staring at the walls until the words come. Quiet and solitude supercharges the creative centers of the brain.

            Non-electronic ‘alone time’ does other things for you as well. It makes you mentally tougher for one thing. If the only ideas and images in your head are handed to you through a screen, guess what? You’ve been brain-washed. Seriously, you need to sit still and be quiet or walk around in nature for a bit in order to have your own ideas. Otherwise, you’re just regurgitating someone else’s thoughts. And how do you know if they’re even correct? Of course, you don’t really know if your own ideas are any good either – do you? Now – here’s where journalling actually becomes useful.

            Once you start having thoughts of your own, don’t lose them – write them down! As fast as you have them, write them down. Don’t worry about grammar or syntax or pretty words or any of that crap they tried to shove into your brain in school. As you start to fill up your journal over the ensuing weeks and months, go back and look at what you wrote before. Honestly, it’s great for a laugh. Which also encourages honesty and humility in you. Any ideas which survive a second look need to be researched – maybe you were on to something. If you find truly good ideas in there – take them and do something with them. Now.

            Everything in our world started out as an idea in somebody’s head. Some ideas were immediately adopted, some died early, others took time to germinate. If you feel you have had a worthy idea – your own idea – that needs to go out into the world and live, you need to make that happen. Don’t put it off because you’re too busy. Who cares if someone else has already thought of it? And don’t dismiss it as too crazy.

            Airplanes and personal computers were once crazy ideas. Two bicycle mechanics from Dayton solved the first problem, a couple of college dropouts solved the second one. The difference between those guys and the hundreds, if not thousands, of other people looking for the same answers is very simple: they didn’t give up. Never forget: It’s only Crazy until it works – then it’s Genius. But you have to have the idea first.

            This kind of mental serendipity, a kind of thinking process with no ultimate goal, is the farthest thing from procrastination possible. It is a literal superpower, and it’s available to everyone. But you have to give it space and time to work correctly. And boredom. Just lay back in a sunlit, grassy field and think of nothing. That’s worth doing all by itself, isn’t it? Do yourself a favor and embrace the art of doing nothing at all.

            Be bored. Be well.

            bcd

            What is ceremony? Is it a culmination – a stage set with chairs, filled with nervous graduates listening to some ‘important’ person drone on about a nebulous future? Does it happen on a dais in a church or synagogue, trying to show us the way to God? Is it the annual tipsy revelry closing one year and moving into the next? A funeral service? Is it all of those? None of them? Why do we care?

            Ceremony goes to the heart of us. We need ceremony, need to have those commas, those periods in our lives. We have always had ceremonies. But all the old ceremonies are gone, forgotten, or turned into dirty jokes. The ceremonies we are given are meant to keep us prisoners, meant to keep us working at meaningless jobs and spending our paychecks to make a privileged few very rich. We know this at some level, but we still cling to these ceremonies – because ceremony is the words cut in stone, a sign of life, a sign that we were here. Whether we admit it or not, ceremonies are important.

            Some are tiny ceremonies, like opening a new can of coffee and stopping to inhale the odor of fresh ground nirvana. There are large ceremonies, like the breaking of a bottle of champagne over the bow of a newly launched battleship. There are secret ceremonies, public ceremonies, religious and civil and institutional ceremonies. But many, if not all, of these ceremonies have ceased to have any meaning for many people. Why is that?

            Our world and our lives are changing rapidly. People’s eyes are being opened to the realities of the quickly morphing world around them. Whether you like it or not, no matter how old you are, nothing you remember from your childhood will have any relevance in the next ten years or so. When you’re sitting in a rollercoaster, you have no choice where the car is going. Your choices boil down to opening your eyes wide to see what’s coming next or shutting your eyes tight. Don’t close your eyes.

            Technology is evolving as you watch. Systems of work, of education, of government are falling apart in front of us and being reborn as something new. The gentrification of the entire human race has begun. In order to be certain that we leave no person or group behind in this mad stumble into the future, we have to consciously create the systems, institutions and ceremonies that we want to have. Any framework constructed by random chance will be dangerous and possibly fatal to those who use it. If we start by creating ceremonies, I think (paradoxically) that we will also create the systems and institutions we need to go with them. So, what sort of ceremonies should we create?

            To begin, no ceremony which institutionalizes or celebrates hatred should survive. That means hatred of anyone or any group. Our world can no longer tolerate the concept of Us versus Them. It’s only Us. Our ceremonies must be inclusive, not exclusive.

            Ceremonies mark transitions in our lives. For instance, it has been too long since we had a ritual for crossing into manhood. As it turns out, we need one. There is good reason to believe that the lack of a ceremony or ritual ushering boys into manhood may be part of the broken narrative which results in gun violence and ‘toxic masculinity’. However, I think we’re well past the point where the young man should be sent out on his first tiger hunt. I also believe there should be a rite of womanhood, totally unconnected with any male ritual.

            Not sure what marriage ceremonies are going to look like in the coming years. I just know that they will continue to be popular. It would also be nice if they were more about the couple and less about the money spent.

            Religion is not going away anytime soon and shouldn’t. At its best, religion points us toward what we can become. But I think even religions should examine their ceremonies to be certain that they spread love, not hatred of others.

            With the educational system changing at every level, it seems likely that the cumbersome and largely silly graduation ceremony will simply vanish. I’m not sure that any ceremony will rise to replace it. I’m also pretty sure I hope nothing does.

            Secret societies should probably just go away as well. Not that it isn’t kinda cool to have a secret handshake, an exclusive clubhouse and a Wham-O decoder ring, but let’s not get ugly with it. Any group that has to have secret rituals as part of their membership drive is asking for trouble in the Age of the Internet.

            I won’t even get into my least favorite topic: politics. Though I will say that if we never have to watch another stupid and wasteful Democratic or Republican National Convention, I don’t think anyone will miss them.

            For the future, let’s not create ceremonies that celebrate institutions or governments or businesses. We need to leave the 18^th and 19^th centuries behind. Let’s create ceremonies that celebrate people – especially individuals. Because in celebrating individuals, their achievements and passages, we celebrate all of us. In that way, I think we can satisfy our ancient tribal urges for recognition, while also connecting to the world at large.

            We need ceremonies, they’re a part of our genetic heritage, in a way. But we need ceremonies that strengthen Us as Us. Ceremonies should remind us of what it is to be a human amongst other humans.

            Be well.

            bcd

            I was slouching my way through YouTube, looking at various rants and listicles, when I ran across a list of 18 things that ‘highly creative’ people do. Seemed interesting, so I watched it. Oh dear God – they hit me square between the eyes with every point. But more than that, it evoked an emotional response – I wanted to celebrate it and deny it at the same time. It seems my old enemy Impostor Syndrome isn’t done with me yet.

            Part of my issue – maybe the biggest part of it – is that it’s really hard for me to see my artistic endeavors as being worthy or worthwhile. I was raised with the understanding that art was not a career. “Oh, that’s nice dear, but it’s just a hobby, right? You’ll never make a living doing (theatre, writing, painting), so stay in school and study something Worthwhile.” I heard this from all quarters, every adult I knew. Possibly the most damaging thing was that my father, a very talented artist, never spoke up against it.

            And so, I studied math, physics and engineering. Because I also wanted to be an astronaut, that seemed the best course I could take towards the goal. I liked physics, I was okay in engineering – I had a natural gift for understanding machinery – but me and math were not friends. This was mostly due to the fact that math requires a lot of work and study, and I had no interest in doing either at the time. Finally, I was flunking Calculus, so I changed my major in college – first to Art, then Theatre. I figured Theatre would be an easy way for me to get a degree. Well, yes and no, as it turns out, but I got the degree, anyway.

            Since then, I’ve had a very technical career (with a two-year digression into Professional Acting), and even the drawings I did at that time were all in AutoCAD. Still, I kept wandering through art supply stores and gawking at the toys, occasionally buying a pen or a brush or a canvas, but never painting. I did the same with writing – coming up with all kinds of interesting story ideas, but only occasionally writing anything down. I never really finished anything. For the longest time I thought I was lazy, or not really interested in doing art. Actually, I hadn’t yet convinced myself that it was Okay to do Art. I didn’t give myself permission to take it seriously. I avoided the theatre for different reasons.

            Only now, late in my life, do I understand the ridiculous waste of time and talent I have suffered through. These thoughts used to make me scream in frustration and bewail my ‘lost opportunities’ – but that was just a dodge. You see, back during the years I used to wail about my poor, stunted art career, I was actually a Fake. I was lying to myself – mooning over creativity while I continued to insist on being a ‘useful’ technocrat. Which I did poorly, by the way. One of the many threads of delusion twisting through my psyche was that of my being a successful architect or engineer, or whatever. Since my heart wasn’t in it, I was pretty lackluster. I never got promoted and couldn’t understand why not. Foolishness.

            Compounded with that was the fact that I never devoted enough time to art or writing. The capabilities were there, I knew they were, but I was a Fake there, too. I was sure I would be able to just jump back in where I left off, whenever I wanted, at the same level of ability at which I’d stopped. It doesn’t work like that. You need to keep practicing art, just like you need to keep up any athletic training, just to stay even. I didn’t give my creative impulses any outlet, because I was sure that my technological abilities would set me up in comfort so that I could come back to the art someday. So, I concentrated on the scientific and technical – which I was really pretty good at but had no heart for – as a down payment on the future. Didn’t work that way.

            Final score: 0 – 0, with fakery being the only real player on the field. What an unbelievable waste of time and effort. Well, now I’m done with pretending and fakery – hopefully. My all too recent commitment to my writing and my arts should reignite my creative spark, or at least that’s the hope. So far it seems to be working. I’m not yet back to the point where my craft consumes every waking hour of the day, but then, it’s also not paying the bills yet. Once my writing picks up steam, I should be able to move into the next phase. About time, too.

            Don’t misunderstand me – I don’t see anything I learned in those years, or any rabbit hole I went down as wasted effort. Just the insistence that I had to be an engineer/architect/astronaut first and disregard the art as unimportant. I was good at the technical stuff, just not devoted to it. Because I wasn’t devoted to it, I made no progress – because I wasn’t willing to work hard at something my heart wasn’t in. That, and only that, is what I regret about those years. It took far too long for me to realize that I am a creative to my core, and that I needed to focus on the things I’m passionate about, even if it doesn’t make me rich.

            I intend to spend the rest of my life making up the ground I’ve lost. But to do that I must understand one thing to the deepest level of my soul. My arts, whether writing, painting, singing or theatre, are important and worthy and worthwhile. I am not wasting time by doing these things – they’re necessary and good. No more faking. I am on the right road at last.

            Be well.

            bcd

            I’ve been struggling with an issue for the last couple of years. I’ve been fighting against my seeming inability to buckle down to write. I’m not scared of writing or even at a loss for words – I’m just not doing it. Always in the past, I’ve chalked it up to some sort of bad mood or shitty memory from my youth, wrecking my creativity. But after some consideration, it seems my mood is dependent on my lack of progress, not the other way around. And I just can’t seem to dredge up a memory that comes close to fitting the mold. Then a couple of random thoughts smacked me – one from outside, one from inside.

            I heard a classical musician (on the radio) talking about her newfound hobby – painting. She loves it, because it reduces stress and gives her an extra creative outlet. As she put it (I paraphrase), ‘I insist on being professional and exacting in my music, but I can relax and play with the brush.’ Seems she’s pretty good at it, too. That started me thinking.

            I have always known that I dislike work. I cannot enumerate the number of jobs I’ve wrecked and/or lost because my lousy work attitude torpedoed my performance. Whenever anything I’m doing starts to feel like work, I drop it like a dead lizard. And go wash my hands. However, I’d always believed that writing ‘wasn’t really work’ and was therefore immune to that reaction. I guess not, because writing has apparently now become actual work.

            Why do I hate work? It’s difficult to say, but my guess would be that various twists and complications in my personality brought me to the conclusion that I was ‘above all that’. I’ve mentioned my delusions before. This was one of the big ones. From a very young age I felt that I was so smart and so talented, that everything should come easily to me. By extension, anything which didn’t come easily was stupid and unworthy. So, that meant that work – especially manual labor – was for ‘those other people’. As I said – delusional.

            It seems that what’s been happening with my writing is that I have been unconsciously seeing it as work, so my knee-jerk reaction to work kicks in, and I’ve been avoiding it. I’m not sure when the transition from ‘hobby’ to ‘work’ occurred, but I’m guessing at least two years ago. I note that this reaction does affect my blog output but not my journalling. It seems I don’t consider journalling to be work. Perhaps I don’t see journalling as work because it’s almost entirely private. Interestingly, I have also been avoiding freelance writing because it’s ‘work’. Get paid to write, equals work.

            As I mentioned before, this was an unconscious change in perspective, so therefore invisible to me. Because the motivation was invisible, I spent way too long chasing down dead-end streams of thought, compounded by my emotional reaction to the whole business of not getting my writing done. I’ve wasted a lot of ink (and computer bits) trying to find the answer. So, now I feel chagrined – because now I know the answer, and it wasn’t what I thought. As well as the fact that I’ve known how to deal with this problem for many years.

            Over the decades I have developed a method for going to work, doing work and even doing extra work – even work that was stupid and boring. This was necessary, not just to keep a job, but to stay married. My wife was understandably loath to go to her job for 50 or 60 hours every week while I sat on my ass and looked pretty. I developed what I can only call a Stoic attitude towards work just after starting at a particularly odious job in Southern California. Sadly, there it worked altogether too well. I was stuck in that job for almost ten years. But that same attitude has served me well ever since.

            Because of my delusions and the attitudes that went with them, I had no idea how to actually work. When things got difficult, I’d either quit or wait to get fired. This was a very immature stance for a man in his 30’s! I’m sure my parents tried to teach me how to work, but if they did, I have no memory of the process. My newfound Stoic attitude kept me engaged and learning, whether in a hired job or self-employed. Now I can see that this mindset can help me to write every day, no matter how I feel or whether or not I feel inspired. I just need to do my job.

            So, it seems the answer to the whole conundrum boils down to this: writing is now my job. I have finally seen and accepted that consciously. Art will remain a (serious) hobby, and act as a relief valve for me. However, I need to apply the same work ethic that I have for hired jobs to my work as a writer. I have to sit down at my computer or my paper pad and turn out at least a thousand words – every day. At the moment this is still a part-time job, and the pay sucks, but I must be attentive and diligent with my work. The pay will get better, and the hours will increase on their own. To reiterate: writing is my job. I need to treat it with the respect it deserves.

            If you have dealt with similar problems in your own writing journey, I hope this helps.

            Be well.

            bcd

            It occurs to me that in all the floundering and flopping around I’ve done, trying to explain my process, I haven’t really explained how I proceed from zero, to get to a finished draft. In other words, I haven’t described my actual process, only the background. Just to keep things honest, let’s start from bargain-basement nothin’.

            To start, I don’t generally write to commission – in other words, I only write what I think up. An idea can start from anything: a photo, a song lyric, something someone says in conversation, a random quote. And sometimes it can literally drop on me out of a clear blue sky. Ideas are cheap. Ideas are everywhere – I covered this before. Now, we get to work.

            If the idea sticks with me, it either goes into its own file, or into a general catch-all file I keep on my computer. For strong ideas, I can actually remember them (in my head, yes) for quite some time. I will revisit these ideas from time to time to see if anything new branches off and starts to grow. In most cases, I will get a few little off shoots, but they run out of steam quickly and I leave them in the file.

            Some ideas catch fire and start to write themselves in my head. Whole sections of description or pages of dialog will run rampant through my imagination, and I’ll have to write it down quickly. I will usually get several pages of written treatment down before I’m interrupted by work or dinner or just life in general. If I can get back to those fast enough, and I’m not working on anything else at the moment, I can go quite a way before hitting a snag. In the case of a short story, I may get the whole thing written (or a great deal of it, anyway) before any serious problems occur. Usually, I need to get back to a half-formed script within seven days or it starts to go septic.

            In the case of long form stuff, I have to be careful not to get too deep into it if I’m working on a different script. Working on two (or more) projects at once only works for me if only one of them is long form. Even then, it’s not easy to do. It’s not that I can’t keep two or more ideas in my head at once (I do that all the time), but when I have a half dozen characters and their motivations and the external action for each story all running at once in my head – I can start to trip over stuff. This is not conducive to good storytelling.

            Now the topic everyone loves to hate – stalling out in the middle of a story. As I’ve explained before, I don’t get ‘writers block’ in the conventional sense. I don’t feel that sense of standing on the edge of a yawning crevasse, I don’t slide into depression (at least for that reason), and I don’t go on a three-day drunk. I may wander around, confused for a few days, but I can usually find where I went wrong in the story and fix the issue. Yes, the story will sometimes sit in my head, refusing to be written until I get my bearings. It’s maddening and it makes me grouchy, but I know I can recover. The seven-day rule holds here, as well.

            I am a dedicated ‘pantser’, meaning I write by the seat of my pants, discovering where the story wants to go as I follow gleefully along behind it. When I get stuck, I will sometimes resort to a bit of plotting or even (horrors!) outlining. It does work – sometimes. Usually, it works long enough to get me going again, and then I forget about the outline. I will also, for long form, often start with a rough outline, from which I will usually depart. I guess that makes me a kind of ‘plantser’ (plotter/pantser). Hey, whatever works, right?

            Short stories take a minimum of a week to write, sometimes several weeks. A novel takes me months or years to finish. I’m trying to get faster with that, we’ll see what’s possible. I haven’t finished a play yet, so I have no idea how long that takes. Realize too, I’m just talking the first draft of anything. Next comes the edit.

            My first edit is usually a quick read-through, correcting spelling and grammar errors, maybe adding a word or two. If it feels tight enough, I have someone else read it. I use Words Matter Communications (https://wordsmattercommunications.com) – they’re impartial, quick and make great recommendations. I get my stuff back quickly and move on to the next edit – story sense.

            This is the tough edit for me. I have to read through my own work as if it were someone else’s and I have to fix it. This is tough to do if I don’t have enough distance on the script yet. In this edit, I’m looking for everything at once: broken connections in the narrative, clunky dialog, bits of information without background, poorly constructed scenes – the works. During this edit for Soul Surgery, I added almost 5000 words to the script. I rarely delete stuff unless it’s just not working. My writing is sparse enough that I have to add words to make things work, usually.

            So, what about the ideas that just sit in the files, never leaping to flame? I have to say, so far that’s been a very small percentage of the total number of stories. But if it comes right down to it, not every idea is going to live, just like not every plant, puppy or person bears fruit. It’s sad, but there’s not much I can do about it. I have too many ideas in my head now, and they all want to make it to print. I can only do my best.

            So, did I finally get enough information about my process down?

            Be well.

            bcd

            Nearly every writer is hit with the question: Where do you get your ideas from? Aargh! Sacrilege! Anathema! Seriously though, no writer wants to answer that question – mostly because they don’t really know the answer. Harlan Ellison supposedly told people he used to go to a little idea shop in Schenectady. Neil Gaiman says he plays little ‘what if’ games – ‘what if a werewolf bit a chair?’ Stephen King claims the ideas just ‘come to him out of the blue’. Hilarious, but really, now.

            The ancient Greeks and Romans thought that spiritual creatures known as Muses brought ideas and inspiration to artists and other creatives. Some people still believe that, or a variation of it. Modern scientists think that ideas happen at the intersections of areas of interest or experience within the creative. Orson Scott Card thinks that ideas are all around, but that most people miss them. Some credit the subconscious mind, others credit the environment. I’m not sure that a single explanation will suffice even for a singular artist.

            I never have an issue coming up with ideas. Part of this, I think, stems from the fact that I’ve been looking for ideas for so long that they just show up everywhere. Useful inventions show up in my mind through cross-pollination of the various sciences I study. Paintings get inspired by music, or during long walks. Sculptures begin their lives as raw emotion. And stories just seem to pop out of nothing, right in front of me. Even these blog posts tend to begin as random grumbles or jokes. It’s a startling and fun way to walk through life. But I think there’s also an unspoken question here: How can I learn to find ideas?

            First, let’s manage a few expectations. Not everyone is naturally creative – that’s an oversimplification. Anyone can learn to do crafts, anyone can learn to sketch, to cook, to decorate and build simple objects. These are good and useful skills to have. Most people can learn to give a speech, paint a room or a house, work in the garden, sing and dance well enough. All of these things are very good and should be encouraged in everyone. These skills make a life more full, more expressive. They do not make you into an artist in the truest sense of the word – they do not make you creative. Let’s use a different illustration.

            If you did fairly well with math in school, if you were good at arithmetic, got high marks in algebra and geometry (or just one of them, which is more often the case), or perhaps you took elementary calculus – fantastic! Mathematics is a useful skill to have. This does not make you a mathematician, and you would probably not have an issue with that assessment. Knowing how to treat a cut doesn’t make you a doctor, knowing how to solve an algebra problem doesn’t make you an engineer. We are all well aware of this. These jobs are hard, they take years of specialized training. Believe it or not, so do the arts.

            The arts in this country and throughout the developed world have fallen victim to an insidious bias created by the Industrial Revolution. Math, science, even sports training were seen as useful skills to develop in the population, in order to create a limitless supply of workers and managers for the ever-hungry mills, foundries and mines. The arts and artists were of no obvious use to the factory owners and were therefore discouraged. The populace picked up on and internalized this bias, believing that art was frivolous and pointless, that anyone could learn to do it, and only the most lazy and dissolute members of society would become artists. This is a bald-faced lie, and we need to stop believing it.

            Creativity, by one definition, is the ability to have and develop new ideas which have value. This requires not just a high degree of intelligence from the creative, and a high degree of skill, but also a highly sensitive nature – especially a sensitivity to connections, emotions and values. Most creatives start with a basic ability to find or invent new ideas, but then they find they have to search hard for further ideas, new roads, new visions to follow. This is not an easy job. On top of that, the creative will usually find that they are drawn to one or more modes of expression – painting, writing, dance, to name a few. These are skills that take years, sometimes decades to master. For every child prodigy writing symphonies in his teens, there are hundreds, even thousands more who don’t reach that level until their thirties or forties – if at all.

            Creativity is a very high risk/high reward career path. Most people cannot develop a highly creative nature, by simply wanting to. And even fewer develop the skills required to fully realize their potential. But if they do manage both feats, the chances for success and recognition are extremely small. Many people fantasize about being a best-selling author, without realizing how difficult and unlikely it is to become one. Getting a great idea for a story is barely step one.

            So, getting back to the topic, where do the good ideas come from? That remains largely a mystery, because the process is different for each creative, and very often different from moment to moment for the individual. The one common element I’ve seen is that each creative spends more time and energy looking for ideas than anyone else does. Like any good hunter, they look more, so they see more. That particular skill can be learned, so if you’re interested in coming up with more and better ideas, remember these two things: those who look harder for ideas find more of them. And also – most ideas are garbage. You not only need to be able to see new ideas, you need to figure out which ones are worth a damn.

            Good hunting. Be well.

            bcd

            I have another bone to pick: this time with the way much popular fiction is structured, written and sold to the public. Let’s start with fantasy.

            One of the things that makes LoTR more powerful than any other fantasy story of our times (including HP – sorry guys), is its focus on heroic action by a small group of deeply outnumbered people and the way they bond together in the face of adversity. HP does this to an extent, but it never gets over the tired trope of ‘the kids are better at this than the adults’ – that crap needs to stop. It puts a childish ‘adults are stupid’ spin on the story that cheapens the whole thing. Yes, adults are stupid. So are kids. And kids have the added disadvantage that they have no experience to fall back on in times of trouble.

            Harry always had to run to Dumbledore or some other adult whenever he really got in trouble. Even after the wizard died, Harry had to go running back to him. Aragorn had no one to fall back on except Gandalf, and he didn’t have the wizard available to him (alive or dead) for over half the story. Even Frodo could only lean on Samwise for support after the first third of the story. This is the difference between adults driving the story and kids (with ineffectual adults in the wings) driving it. Also, Tolkien was trying to create a myth about England – a very different focus than teenage angst.

            I find that I need to write the truth – even if that breaks popular tropes. For instance: while some kids can be smarter than the adults they deal with – most aren’t. The people in fantasy settings are just as smart (or stupid) as people in science fiction settings. Just because they don’t have science doesn’t mean they’re dumb. And, of course, the unpopular truth that evil people don’t think of themselves as evil. All kinds of truth.

            You see this kind of twisting of reality, the insistence on an author’s own prejudices dressed up as incontrovertible truth, in the very worst stories. You also see it, sadly, in some of the best stories as well. Personal religious beliefs dressed up as scientific fact, personal political beliefs lionized while the opposite side is demonized. But I think the worst instances occur when authors try to paint money or science or religion or technology as the bad guy. Not only does this make for a very weak story (a thing or concept can’t really be an antagonist), but it’s just plain false. Those things are tools – they can’t be good or evil on their own.

            Only people can be truly good or evil – mostly they’re a combination of the two. If you have a problem seeing people as an amalgam of nice and bad, I suggest you take a closer look at people. Because people are what we write about, not science or art or money or God – if you want to write about those things, there’s plenty of publishers willing to talk to you. But stories – stories about people caught up in the chaos of life – that’s what other people mostly want to read.

            People want to know about other people. They want to look at them, listen to them, talk to them, read about them. It’s the glue that holds groups, countries and civilizations together. We all want to know that others are just as goofy as we are. People want to know what makes other people tick – and what drives them to despair, violence and even murder. But I think that one need in people has been overlooked in our modern culture, or perhaps sidelined as maudlin or over-sentimental. We need to see people not only at their worst, but at their best. Audiences need to be shown that the same humans who can be petty, cowardly and greedy can also be loving, brilliant and generous. This is my aim, among others, in the things I write.

            Years ago, I decided that I wanted to write about uncommon people in common settings or common people in uncommon settings. At the time I felt that writing about common people in common settings, or its opposite, was too simple or even boring. I was not a big fan of comic book heroes back then. I have since altered my opinions. I will still pursue stories of the first two varieties, but I’m beginning to see the attraction of the common/common type, and even the uncommon/uncommon variety. I can see that much of what is labelled ‘mainstream’ fiction is often no better written than the wildly fantastical stuff, and therefore offers a challenge. And aren’t we all just a little tired of superheroes?

            It’s not just the truth of our characters we need to face, or the truth of the society we live in (or they do) – we also need to face the truth of our lives as writers. Anybody can do this job – anybody can be a writer. Some can do it well. It also seems that most of the difference between a ‘pretty good’ writer and a very good one is largely in how much work you put in. ‘Born’ writers, if they exist at all, seem to be as rare as ‘born’ athletes or ‘born’ artists. Sure, a person may start out with an innate love of books and writing, but I promise you that is no guarantee of literary success. Nearly everyone has to start with the basics, and then practice – practice – practice. There are no shortcuts, and you can’t wait for divine inspiration.

            This doesn’t mean, by the way, that I don’t believe in divine inspiration. See my blog Care and Feeding of a Muse if you want proof. We just can’t wait for inspiration in order to write. As Dan Poynter said, ”If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” And that, my friends, is the unvarnished truth.

            Be well.

            bcd