Pep Talks for Writers Page 12
Not all of us have the good fortune of time or money to jump on a plane and seek adventures, though. When I was younger, I had many grand expeditions on my list—climb Mr. Everest, go on a safari, sail around Cape Horn. I recently realized, however, that I’ll be lucky to do even one of those things. I still want to have new experiences, though, to add layers to myself, so I decided to redefine travel to make it fit into my daily life—to distance myself through mental miles if not literal miles. I tried to think of low-cost things I could do nearby that wouldn’t have a huge time commitment, but would provide a new experience and be memorable. My goal was to create new memories, experiences I’d never forget.
I made a simple and relatively unambitious list of three new experiences I could have without traveling in the next year. Each experience on my list needed to hold at least a small challenge, a risk, if not an element of fear. Now I do this every year, as if they’re New Year’s Resolutions.
Here are the three I did this year:
1. Experience a floatation tank: I’d wanted to experience a floatation tank since seeing William Hurt’s imaginary voyage to his primal beginnings in Altered States. Being in an entirely enclosed space, floating in water dense with salt, was like drifting through a starless sky. It was a solitude unlike any other, each breath, each thought magnified by being in the paradoxically vast enclosure of a box.
2. Take salsa lessons: I put salsa lessons on my list because I used to dance a lot in my teens and twenties, but I somehow stopped when I got older, and I’d become self-conscious and awkward when I danced in front of others. To move in new ways to new rhythms was a completely different experience of my body.
3. Walk the length of San Pablo Avenue, a street that stretches for miles through the heart of Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond. I walked the length of San Pablo Avenue because I felt that there was no better way to know Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond than to traipse along the thoroughfare that connected them all. I walked block by block and took photos to help me notice things. I walked past homeless shelters, wig shops, barbeque joints, bars, and abandoned storefronts. I talked to people lingering on street corners, noticed the graffiti on the sides of buildings, and wrote down stray observations in my journal.
Maybe next year I’ll go hang gliding, sing karaoke, or take a Japanese flower arranging class. It doesn’t matter what I do as long as I put on my adventure backpack, collect inspiration, and log new ideas as I dream about going on a safari sometime in the future.
You can do the same in your community, whether you go to a nearby town you’ve never gone to and eat a piece of pie in a diner or get a tattoo on your ankle. What disrupts the familiar triggers new ways of seeing things. Even a small rejiggering of your normal routine can reap major rewards for your creative life. These experiences might not play out directly in your novel, but it’s important to tend to the dreamy spring of your creativity, to make sure its source doesn’t run dry.
TRY THIS
DO NEW THINGS
Reflect on the last adventure you had, large or small. Think of three new experiences you can make happen that are easy enough to do nearby and put them on your calendar.
38
THE MAGICAL SPRITES OF CREATIVITY: DISTRACTIONS
Distractions often get a bad rap. Synonyms for distraction in the dictionary include confusion, tumult, disorder, frenzy, raving, and derangement. The word was actually once a synonym for insanity. None of these words are exactly desirable states, unless you’re producing a frenzied tumult of words about a raving, deranged character.
There’s never been an age in history so full of distracting snares, thickets, and labyrinths—we essentially live in a cognitive plague of nonstop distraction, a state of continual partial attention, with the beeps of texts calling us as we hop from one social media platform to the next, the chatter of memes and animated gifs floating in and out of our consciousness, grabbing attention for a moment, then flitting away into the pixilated forgetfulness of our wired consciousness. Because of the media shuffle at our fingertips, you can always find a distraction if you’re looking for one, and, oh, do writers love going on a hunt for distractions. For me, sometimes all it takes is the slightest pain point in a story, a moment that requires the most rudimentary writing exertion, and I’ll breeze over to Facebook for a “quick peek” or do a Google search that will magically get me through the muddiness of a narrative muddle (except that it never has).
That said, I’m here to tell you that distractions—sometimes, just sometimes, and in proper moderation—can be good for your creativity. What? Yes, I know that almost every chapter of this book is essentially about building bulldozers of resolve to finish a creative project, but the nuances of art are often spawned through distractions, serendipitous interruptions, momentary flights of fancy. Open-mindedness and creativity go together, so artists tend to be unable to keep the spotlight of their attention from drifting off to the far corners of the stage. Psychologists say that creative people often have “leaky attention,” meaning that when we are concentrating on one thing, other supposedly irrelevant information can still seep into our consciousness. The end result is that we can’t help but consider the unexpected and integrate ideas that are outside of our normal focus of attention. When you’re at the idea generation stage of work, then your leaky mind is your strength. That’s how new creations are born.
Distractions can enrich your creativity because they naturally create juxtapositions and counterpoints to your thoughts. Distractions are like butterflies fluttering from flower to flower and cross-pollinating ideas. That’s one reason many writers like to work in cafes. Sometimes just looking up from your writing and watching the people around you for a moment, or eavesdropping on a random conversation, will spark a connection. Or, a distraction may provide the break you need to disengage from a fixation on an ineffective solution.
Distractions are like butterflies fluttering from flower to flower and cross-pollinating ideas.
Charles Dickens wrote his books with company in the living room. Saul Bellow fielded phone calls from editors, friends, and students while he wrote. The artist Chuck Close likes to have the TV or radio playing in the background when he creates. Somehow the background chatter provides a pleasant trickling of something beyond his art, enough random noise to feed into his unconscious and make him less anxious.
It’s interesting to think that a 100-percent focus might be too much—an overload for some of us. But that’s the thing—we each have to find the proper level of distraction for our creativity. Some of us are more sensitive to outside noises and sights than others. Marcel Proust wore ear-stoppers and lined his bedroom with cork because he was unable to filter out irrelevant noise.
There are good distractions and bad distractions, as well. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between the two. Bad distractions are like little pieces of candy that you grab without thinking and nibble on to allay a slightly difficult moment. Bad distractions are trifling entertainments, bon bons of thought, that take you away from the more arduous task at hand and provide no nourishment. We decide where to focus our attention every minute of our life, always trading off present rewards against future rewards, present pain against future pain. Sometimes it’s easy to be seduced by the empty calories that our modern world specializes in providing.
It’s difficult to constantly search for the signal amid the noise. While you don’t want to invite in a deluge of sensation and drown in possibility, seize those moments when your distractibility can lead you to new creative places. I like to think through a new story while making a collage with soothing music on in the background. Or, I like to collect images for certain characters or settings. I’ve even made special playlists as I ponder who my protagonist is. Call it leaky filter optimization.
But then recognize when you need to be deliberate about shutting off distractions. Put your phone on airplane mode or close your browser if need be. Because there’s a reason that distraction was a syno
nym for insanity—you don’t want to fall into the trap of being overly distracted, of letting your distractions guide you too far astray from the work at hand. There’s a reason why full absorption holds its own special bliss.
TRY THIS
CALIBRATE YOUR DISTRACTIBILITY INDEX
Which distractions inspire you and which dampen your creativity? Is your creativity sparked or smothered when you work in a place where there’s a natural bustle and flow of people and sounds? Do you work better with music or the radio on in the background?
39
TRUSTING IN THE ABSURD
We’re not going to make meaning here.
This is a pep talk of the absurd, the ludicrous, the incongruous, and the preposterous.
Sometimes you just have to bang on the trash cans with spoons, wear plaid knickers with a polka-dot turban, and toss a gewgaw on a thingamajigger and create a doohickey. You have to tap the wah-wah pedal of your brain, drive the interstate of your novel without a windshield, and relish in the zigzag joy and jubilant excess of it all. You have to trust in the usefulness of supposedly useless curiosity.
Don’t think of words as having any correspondence with reality.
Words are objects, equivalent to a mouse trap or an elastic band or a Jew’s harp.
The semiotics of bafflement shall be your guide, just as light bends into a black hole, just as a compass twitches on a carousel.
Turn yourself into a laboratory for the irrational. Alchemy started with the “rational” belief that lead could be made into gold. And why not?
It’s time to be silly and contradictory and irascible. It’s time to embrace rascality and treat it like a religion (at least until the wash is done). Just because you don’t have a purpose doesn’t mean you won’t find meaning.
Fill your hat with orange juice, put a frog in it, and sip it with a straw by the pool.
Let lightning bugs shine on the crop rotation of your mind and plant rows of confetti.
Spelunk your way to the top of Mount Everest.
It’s time to search out bananas to slip on, shake up the snow globe of your dreams, and make a cat’s meow the ringtone for your phone. Throw out the designer cheese and free the labrats because all the toilets in your neighborhood just flushed at once and your rubber doggie squeak toy is a demonic force.
Purposelessness is not meaninglessness because purposelessness is an adventure, and an adventure requires the proper camping gear (so, yes, balloons and kazoos).
So much of life is a training ground for knowing what you’re doing. We need to get better at not knowing what we’re doing. Monkey around. Monkey upside down. Monkey to and fro.
Listen to the beatings of your lopsided heart and look into your nocturnal eyes. Last night’s dream is attached to your forehead with a piece of duct tape. When you press a doorbell, it rings you. When you open your mouth to speak, you tweet like a bird.
Do the fish swim in the river, or does the river swim in the fish?
The court stenographer is distilling everything into haiku.
The court jester is now in charge of trash collection.
Your accountant won’t do your taxes until you paint your face, per recent federal regulations.
Can you surprise yourself with a single sentence?
This is your challenge. To write with a mercurial, erratic sensibility. To have a squirt gun fight in a desert. To row your boat with a banjo. The tectonics of your mind have been transformed into a bouncy house. The police department has abandoned their duties to jump on a trapeze.
Has there ever been a novel that takes place in shag carpeting? If not, it deserves to be written.
Your brain is a hand grenade going off in a honeycomb as you wait for the rain of sweetness to drop down on a humdrum day.
Can you surprise yourself with a single sentence?
Chase the fleeting. Cry into the silence. Dive in to the pitch and thrall of it all. Doo-wop the wingding of the clamor of your imbroglio.
A ghost is making macaroni and cheese in the kitchen. Richard Nixon is mowing the lawn. Please whisper because you don’t want to ruin the squirrels’ tea party.
TRY THIS
GET SURREAL
Write down words—not sentences, just words. Write them as quickly and spontaneously as you can because you want to make wild associative leaps, to think in a surreal way. Combine disjointed parings: blue cow, dancing tree, constipated stone, muscular poodle. Do this for 15 minutes. Are your notions of language enlivened? Did such odd word matching spark any new thoughts?
40
MOVE DIFFERENTLY TO THINK DIFFERENTLY
When you move your legs, you move your mind.
I know this, and yet I all too often disregard it. When I’m stuck in a story, my instinct is to rev up the power drill of my mind and bore into the hardwood of my story—to trust in the powers of my discipline (and in yet another pot of masochistically charged coffee) and burrow in, no matter how stultifying and painful it is.
An admirable trait? I suppose, and such diligence is certainly necessary during any creative project, but I often forget a key lesson of creativity: movement stimulates our brains. Any kind of movement is good (Igor Stravinsky stood on his head when he was blocked), but I find that walking gives you back yourself in a way that other activities don’t. Walking, because of the slow repetition of your steps, because your mind naturally synchronizes to your ambulatory rhythm, brings on a meandering drift of time, a meditative state that can be almost like a dream. You don’t have to devote too much of your brain’s attention to the act of walking, so your thoughts become free to wander (and wonder). When you’re immersed in the widening space of the world, your thoughts naturally expand into that space. Something happens in the transition from work to a more relaxed state of mind. The conscious and unconscious comingle, and breakthroughs become more likely.
Walking can be a welcome distraction from your work, but it also might very well turn into a condition for your work. William Wordsworth famously tramped through England’s Lake District, walking as many as 150,000 miles according to some estimates. He walked into the depths of his thoughts to compose poems. His poems are full of hikes up mountains and over dales, through forests, and along public roads. “The act of walking is indivisible from the act of making poetry,” he said. “One begets the other.”
Writing and walking are similar in that when we embark on a path, our brain must survey the surrounding environment and essentially create a mental map—a narrative that guides our footsteps through the terrain of the world and our minds. “Language is like a road; it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other,” wrote Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust: A History of Walking.
I first discovered how walking spawned imaginative possibilities when I discovered Baudelaire’s notion of the flâneur, which means stroller or saunterer. A flâneur is a connoisseur of the streets. A flâneur walks into the crowd of the city as a bird flies through the air, according to Baudelaire, and becomes “a botanist of the sidewalk,” a “passionate spectator” who resides in the ebb and flow of the movement of the city.
I couldn’t resist practicing the art of flânerie. I love walking through city streets, detached, solitary, yet a part of things. I love the feeling of becoming porous as the borders and strictures of my self dissolve with my steps. I move through landscapes as an observer, attuned to my aesthetic maunderings, yet losing myself. Each step creates a flow that allows a new wisp of a thought to drift out of its hiding place.
I don’t make my creative trek into a workout, or push to new levels of physical endurance as I might in a gym. I like to think of my walk as a percolating perambulation where the rhythm of my steps merges with the rhythm of my breath.
I find it’s best if I walk aimlessly, without a destination, without even a notion of when I’ll return. If I walk far enough, I get more and more distant fro
m the pressing concerns of life, geographically and mentally. My story, which might be a compressed knot in my mind, has a chance to loosen and expand as I traipse through the rustling murmurs of all that’s around me, whether I walk on a busy city street or in verdant nature. When I stroll, the pace of my strides naturally follows the cadence of my moods.
“Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow,” wrote Thoreau. And indeed, research shows that walking makes new connections between brain cells, staves off the withering of brain tissue, and increases the region of the brain crucial for memory (just in case you don’t believe me). When we walk, blood flows more vigorously throughout our brain.
Take a walk before sitting down to write to rouse your thoughts. Walk your way through a creative obstacle. Let a day’s writing keep flowing with your strides after you’ve completed a good writing session. Your words and your steps are like siblings.
TRY THIS
WALK INTO YOUR STORY
Walk. Get up right now and walk for 30 minutes. Notice how your strides influence the nature of your thoughts. Consider making it a creative ritual. Walk for 15 to 30 minutes before, during, or after writing. Take a long, rambling walk on the weekend and make it an adventure.
41
SPECIALIZE (BUT NOT TOO MUCH)
A few years ago, while plodding through a revision of my novel (revisions require the writer’s equivalent of heavy-duty hiking boots), I got bored by my writing. It was too literal, too realistic, too earnest, and too flat. I needed a way to jar my narrative sensibility. I needed the rousing energy of punk rock, Jackson Pollock’s paint splatters, Merce Cunningham’s asynchronous dance moves, something.