Tag Archives for Writing Exercises

The 3 A.M. Epiphany – Exercise 2

Hospital Hallway

You walk into the doctor’s office and there is a heavy smell of antiseptic and death. There is no one at the front desk so you stand in front of it like a confused tree. Five minutes tick by and no one returns to the desk. Other patrons sit with straight backs, spines so erect it makes you uncomfortable. You are wearing a T-shirt, faded jeans, and a pair of muddy sneakers. Looking at the other patrons, you see everyone else is wearing their Sunday’s best. Ties and brooches, diamond earrings, shiny black shoes that make hard clacking sounds on the floors of important buildings. You look down at your shoes to see your left one is untied, so you lean over and retie it.

Sitting down without signing in will make your visit a useless one. You will never get seen. There is no sign-in clipboard on the counter. The other patrons are eyeing you with careless pity. You do not make eye contact with them. You listen for footsteps. Perhaps someone is about to open the door and call out one of these citizen’s names. You have waited eight minutes. You are now this room’s center of gravity; its focal point. If someone throws this room across the universe in a wide arc, your path will remain a smooth curve on an unseen graph. You decide to sit down at the chair closest to the front desk. Someone will come in and you will see them and jump up and take your rightful place at the head of a two person line. Or the person will come back from their bathroom break and sign you in.

You stare forward at nothing, making yourself invisible. No one can detect you in your invisible chair, surrounded by an invisible cloak. You focus on nothing and you are nothing. You are unaccounted for with no name on a paper that is not on the counter.

A lady in a white coat emerges from a small doorway behind the counter and you jump up like a rabbit during hunting season. You will soon exist. You will soon be a part of a process with a name, a time, an insurance card, and a phone number. These are all properties of you, and since they exist, you must therefore also exist.

The lady opens your mouth to say something, but another lady comes through the main door and opens your mouth instead.

“I am ready,” you hear yourself say.

“Wonderful,” you feel yourself thinking, and the words emerge from the lady’s mouth.

You intend to smile and her lips part to show pearly white teeth.

She leads you down a long, polished concrete hallway. The walls are white. The lights are bright. Nothing to hide here. When you turn and enter the room, there is an elderly lady lying on her back. The cold, silver puddle of steel lies underneath her. There are instruments lying in front of you. A scapel, tongs, pliers, garden shears, lighter fluid, a translucent bag of leeches, and a small kitten actively trying to escape its cage. The woman has already been opened from belly-button to sternum, a crimson meat flower ready for pollenation. You step forward and as you reach for the lock on the kitten’s cage a small, rustic farmer-looking gentleman rushes into the room, boots leaving clumps of red clay all over the floor.

He says, “Sorry, sorry . . . this young citizen is here to have her gall bladder removed.”

The woman in white says, “Oh . . .” and then turns to you and says, “come with me.”

You turn to look at the room one last time on your way out. Everyone is smiling. Their smiles are wide, like a youth minister’s. The kitten hisses at you. The woman on the table breaths through a tube. You make your way down the hall again. The smooth floor becomes textured. The walls are made of cotton. The nurse stops and suddenly turns to face you.

“I need you to cough,” she states. You can tell by the manner in which she says this that she has said it millions of times. You try to repsond, but cannot. “I need you to cough,” she states again. The walls begin to dissapate; the cotton turning a soft, slow black, like survivalist tinder. And then without warning the floor is gone and you are falling at 9.8 meters per second.

“Sweetie, I need you to cough,” the nurse says. You emit a dainty wisp of air on your third attempt. The room spins and time is no more. You open your eyes again and the nurse asks if you would like more blankets. Yes, you would. How you convey this, you are not certain. You are not fully self-aware, but this person is standing in front of you. You are not invisible. She can see you.

Before time is fluid again, you think for some reason of Juliet, your cat. Have they fed her? You must do what the nurse and doctors say and heal quickly so you can get back to your garden. So you can dig your wrinkled fingers in the dark, wet potting soil and give life to your flowers and herbs.

The 3 A.M. Epiphany – Exercise 1

Lava Storm

There are flames everywhere. I’m sitting in the window seat of the bookstore, sipping my coffee.

Exactly three people are on fire. Two are dead. It’s St. Patrick’s Day. Only six of the people outside are wearing green. One of the dead is clad in all green, but his foot-tall, striped hat was blown off with the wind from the initial impact. His beer mug, however, is still clenched firmly in hand. One wonders if these priorities will carry over to the afterlife?

The people around me are choosing three different methods of panic. Nine of them run screaming to the back of the store, looking for a way out. Four older German ladies run screaming to the bathroom, a solid structure in the middle of the store. That would help in a tornado, but not for this. Who wants to die in a public bathroom? Apparently old German ladies. There are two stalls in the men’s bathroom, but I have no idea how many are in the ladies. I thought about a quick glance once, just to see, but the thought of getting caught was too much. Two people, a loud-speaking, maudlin hipster couple, are behind the coffee counter huddling with the baristas. The woman who has received her double chocolate-chip frappacino has kept hold of it as she dashes behind the safety of the expresso machine. You can have my overpriced caffeine and diuretics, these citizens are saying, when you pry it from our cold dead fingers.

The two people who are on fire are being put out by four men who have come from the bar across the street. They are dragging the limp bodies back through the door of the bar. The stuff that was burning them is like Greek Fire. Their clothes and skin, the men were able to put out, but the amoebic lava that had crawled its way into the flesh, that was still burning them from the inside out.

There are two mopeds, six bicycles, and one motorcycle outside. There are 36 flowers in the median, evenly spaced in a checkered pattern. They are all fake.

The second impact sets everything in the street on fire. The vehicles, the dead people, the plants, and even the asphalt in the road. The sidewalks are not on fire, the curb being the straightline separator. Everything between the two curbs is melting into the river of liquid Sun that was the road. The heat doesn’t penetrate the imaginary line either; a wayward burger wrapper sits a few inches from the volcanic pathway and doesn’t so much as turn black.

The book I’m reading costs twenty eight dollars. It has 320 pages. Why does a piece of cardboard in front of and behind the content of a book raise the price by thirteen dollars? The tax is ten percent here, but a membership card cuts ten percent off of the price.

There are two other people sitting at the window, watching and counting. One is a small boy and the other is a female college student. We will sit here for another thirty two minutes, until the fifth impact. That’s when the culling begins. But we count first. How many of them are left is important. To few and we’ll end up having to take care of this planet ourselves. To many and there’s always insurrection.

There are 346 other planets to resource, but when we’re done, we get to pick any of those for the Longevity. It is 2:31 pm in this time zone. There are twenty-four time zones.

All hail Lord Pox.

How To Write Your Own Perfect Sentence

Peter Pan First Sentence Diagrammed

 

After reading Stanley Fish’s book How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, I decided to do something that I’m usually too lazy to do; actually practice some of the exercises in the book. But first, the book.

There is what seems like an implausible expectation in the title. You might be thinking, okay, I can see how someone could write a book about how to read a book. There’s a lot of concepts, styles, theories, messages, meanings, etc., that one could spend ages deconstructing and studying how to consume each work. But to try and pull the stage curtain back on a single sentence? But Stanley manages to do so, and I can definitely say that, although the central dogma is the same for understanding anything on a higher level, I learned some new and helpful things. And that central dogma is reflection.

All of us have, at some point, stayed up late studying or reading for pleasure and arrived at the point where we’ve read the same sentence four or five times and never gleamed any meaning from it whatsoever. The words are nothing more than that, words. And at some point, we’ve all listened to a professor wax poetic for what seemed like hours about hidden meanings in obscure books, as we sat drooling from the corner of our mouths and wryly imagining that the author was still alive so they could burst into the room and scream at the pontificator of pomp that they never created a work where a tree was the metaphor for how a father treats his son. There is surely a safe and happy place between these two pointless points, one devoid of meaning and one bloated with pregnant apples just out of reach, where one can reflect on a book, paragraph, sentence, or even a word itself (in context), and not feel empty or pretentious. A reasonable amount of contemplation where we can achieve more than visceral pleasure without looking at every glass of water in the book as an element of baptism or birth.

Stanley Fish introduces us to the formula – Sentence craft equals sentence comprehension equals sentence appreciation. If you write sentences, and then strive to understand them on a slightly higher level, you will appreciate them more.

The key is understanding the skeleton within each sentence. Once you understand this inner structure and can separate the framing from the interior decorating, you can then imitate great sentences by substituting your own fleshy content in place of the author’s. His first example is the beginning of Lewis Caroll’s Jabberwocky . This is the perfect separation of sentence structure and content:

Twas bryllyg, and ye slythy toves

Did gyre and gymble in ye wabe:

All mimsy were ye borogoves;

And ye mome raths outgrabe.

 

You can understand the layout of the sentence enough to substitute your own words and have it make perfect sense.

Twas dusky, and ye slimy toads

did swim and paddle in the pond.

 

You get the idea. And you can do this with any sentence once you spend the time to break it down and really understand it. He makes it a careful point not to get too caught up in the whole parts of speech naming or pointing out every single literary term. The main point is how the different parts of the sentence relate to each other; the philosophy of the sentence. Stanley points out a few main types of sentences. Subordinate is a rigid approach that sets up expectations and then follows through. Additive is a more stream of consciousness approach, where you might move from past to present and back to the past, or even jump around subjects without warning. Satire is a style that promises one direction and then moves in another. You can pick a style that suites you, but the subordinate is the easiest to imitate.

I like this because it’s an algorithmic approach to literary creation that seems, to a lot of people, a great mystery. It’s a method by which, with nothing more than reflection and a few awkward starts, you can create sentences similar to your favorite authors. It’s not impossible.

I handed my wife a Virginia Woolf book called The Voyage Out, and she picked out this sentence:

Angry glances struck upon their backs.

Angry glances. Angry is specific, emotionally. It lies between peeved and hateful. Not fighting mad yet, but on the way. Glances is plural, which tells us right away that there are many people who are mad, not just one. And it’s a glance, not a stare, which would be confrontational. Instead, these people aren’t about to let whoever they’re glancing at know their emotional state. Struck. These glances are being delivered with physicality. Looks that leave whelps. Upon their backs. It’s more than one person absorbing ill will from this crowd. That’s a decent amount of information gleaned from a short sentence, and all we had to do was slow down and take a minute to really get at the essence of the sentence.

Then, you define the parts of the sentence, and substitute your ideas and words. My definition for this sentence is – something nonphysical, preceded by a description, acting physically on something else. Here is my wife’s first and very literal attempt because she really didn’t understand what we were doing (She was bored the minute I told her the name of the book).

Frustrated stares physically affected their heads.

And a funnier one:

Pissed off passersby provided them with pitiful attempts at provocative looks.

And my attempt:

Useless hopes bounced off her horn-rimmed glasses.

No awards imminent here. But you get the gist. It’s the practice that counts.

Here is another sentence taken from Victoria Laurie’s book Ghouls Gone Wild:

I’ve always believed in ghosts.

It’s a first sentence, and a good one. It’s short and hits you quick and strong, like a jab in a boxing match. There is no hesitation. I’ve. It’s in first person, so by definition, it’s personal. This is not something one screams to the people in a food court. It’s something you might tell a good friend or a small, close group of people you trust. The reader is already in a one-on-one with you. They are perhaps being let in on a secret. Always. Not sometimes. There is no room for doubt. Always believed in. This is something that has always been, and isn’t it harder to question things that have always been? This isn’t a statement you have time to negotiate with. In ghosts. So you know what’s coming. This isn’t a book about trolls, goblins, or sorcery. Ghosts are real, and you’re going to be seeing and believing in them pretty soon, if you don’t already. Ghosts. Plural. This isn’t one angry relative hanging around the kitchen table during dinners. They are many and everywhere.

The definition here, or structure, is a personal pronoun contraction followed by an adverb that connotes a definite history followed by what you’ve always done.

We’ve always swam barefoot in creeks.

I’ve never parallel parked a car in my life.

And so on. I surprised myself when I realized that a lot of kids today, myself included, already experience this type of algorithm every day without realizing it on the Internet. We’ve all seen a meme (Rhymes with seem). In its simplest form, it’s an idea that spreads. Here are two examples, the second one is mine:

 

Politically incorrect Sister

 

 

Republicans 1

 

 

You can see that it’s a skeleton concept, or structure, that you can fill in with your own content, or idea.

So my point is this – If a bunch of satirical Internet junkies in their pajamas can make us laugh everyday by using the same concept and changing the text, you can do the same thing with any sentence you love and create a perfect sentence of your own.

 

 

Read This And Win $1,000

Sorry, Charlie cover

There’s a particular type of sinking feeling you get when your Kickstarter project is 2/3 complete and underfunded. You don’t want to give up. Can’t, really. But you can see the water spilling over the bow as the women and children fill the lifeboats. It’s looking like I’m going to be on the not so wonderful side of that fully-funded statistic. Here is a snapshot of my sadness.

Kickstarter progress

See that plateau? That’s a horrible plateau. If it was a pool of water, you would not want to drink from its stagnant waters. If it was a ship headed to the New World, there would be a mutiny, the captain looking over the edge of his last diving board. If it was a rabbit, it would be a shaved rabbit, with the mange and a Scotty-Don’t haircut, no front teeth, spray-painted yellow and orange by vandals, curled up under a sopping wet newspaper inside a garbage can, slowly gnawing off one of its own front legs. You get the picture.

In one of my last posts, I laid out a few things I had done wrong concerning the project. But it’s too late to fix most of them. So I am going to go post crazy and stoop to the lowest form of selfish, spamtastic, advertising. A slutty form of SEO and guerilla-anti-reverse-subliminal-prodding. I’m not sure what else to do really. I’ve thought of publicity stunts. Like a bomb scare on The Bachelor. No good. I’ve thought of using phrases like California Earthquake gives rise to giant spiders. Don’t panic, I would never stoop that low. I want to shoot this to you straight, like Brandon Knight, and not irritate you like a sprained ankle. Nor would I capitalize on Prom fashion or Mother’s day this year. That would be petty. I just want to do something that cool like Justin Timberlake SNL Saturday Night Live. I want to be like Oz The Great and Powerful and do something beautiful like Danielle Fishel. Nor will I even mention North Korean nuclear threats imminent for fear of giving people a hangover 3 about the whole thing.

And I surely won’t filibuster you like Rand Paul or Google Trend you to death with statistics.

I’ll just say that you should go to Kickstarter immediately and pledge at least $20 to the Sorry, Charlie project. And that’s all I’ll say. Here is the link.

Sorry, Charlie on Kickstarter

 

 

The Pope. The Pope. The Pope. The Pope. The Pope. The Pope. The Pope.

Happy Family

Meet_AIKO_from_Davao_City_(2088973620)

 

Carlee and Gavin had been fighting for ten straight minutes.  Where to eat, who had to sit in what seat in the back, who was taking a shower first when we got home, who called who a butthole – you name it and they were fighting about it.  My wife Melissa had not taken her medicine today, left it back at the house this morning, and it was showing.  The definition of malcontent.  She was staring out the side window, her mind in some other place far from here.

 

I told them to please hush for the fifteenth time and then threatened to ground them both when Carlee hit Gavin and he called her the B word.  Melissa was ignoring the whole thing, me included when I nudged her on the leg to get her to help.  When she finally did swing around, it was to ask what they were fighting about.  She hadn’t even been listening and now they both launched into simultaneous tirades concerning the last fifteen minutes of arguments.

 

I was getting a headache and my back was tensing up.  I asked Melissa for four Ibuprofen and she was too busy ignoring the kids’ heated and unruly answers to pay attention to me.

 

“Jesus Dad, I’m freakin’ starvin’,” Carlee whined.

 

“Yeah, food would be nice right about now,” Gavin agreed.  Then went back to texting.

 

But they had both agreed and that was like the planets aligning during an eclipse.  That’s when I saw the Chinese restaurant down the street behind Kellerton Mills.  As far as I could remember, that old place had been abandoned since I was a kid.  It had been an ice cream shop, the kind that would slop a big gob of ice cream right in your Coca-Cola.  I made a U-turn and headed back.  It held a nostalgic attraction.

 

Nobody was paying attention as we drove up, but when Melissa looked up and saw the brightly colored green and yellow neon sign, she looked around like she was lost, crinkled her brow, and said, “Yea.  Chinese.”

 

The name of the place was New China.  We got out and noticed a green VW was the only other car in the small parking lot.  It had flowers painted on the side.  It made me smile until Gavin slugged his sister in the arm, a little harder than necessary, and claimed, “Punch bug, can’t punch back!”  Carlee chased him through the doors, cussing him every step of the way.  Melissa rolled her eyes and jerked the door open like she was a hostage.

 

“I want the pot-stickers and the lobster seafood stuff,” Gavin demanded.

 

“If he gets that, then I want the cream cheese thingys and the shrimp platter,” Carlee grumbled.

 

“I’m not eating here,” my wife said, finding another window to stare through while we were here.

 

I noticed that the Chinese lady at the counter had been watching us all very close ever since we entered.  She didn’t seem annoyed, just mildly curious with a poker face of sorts.

 

“Um, hi,” I offered with a smile.  She smiled back.  The first smile I had received back that day if I remember correctly.  “I’ll have the Lobster, number 8 there, and some wantons  and… um, the shrimp platter, number 4 that is, and um… let’s see… how about some Kung Pao chicken, and then a Dr. Pepper, sweet tea, and a Coke with no ice.  Thanks.”

 

She smiled back but did not make a move to record my order.  There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, perhaps only on my side, and then she looked over at my table.  Carlee kicking Gavin underneath the table and Gavin threatening her with bodily harm.  Melissa was parking lot catatonic.

 

“Happy family,” said the Chinese lady with a slight smile.

 

“Oh, uh, well,” I fumbled.  Was she making fun?  “We have our days, you know.”  I tried to smile.

 

“No.  You try Happy Family.”  She pointed above her head without looking up.  “Number 11.  You lucky number today.”

 

“Oh, gosh no.  Trying to the keep the kids, you know, happy,” I said.  I was gesticulating now and for some reason felt like I was apologizing, why I don’t know.

 

“You like Happy Family,” she stated plainly.

 

I was tired.  “Really… just the original order’s good, I think.”

 

“You like Happy Family.  If you don’t like Happy Family, you no charge.”

 

I just didn’t feel like arguing any more and this lady wasn’t understanding at all.  I could have walked out and told her never mind, but that would have led to even more ruckus in the car.

 

I shook my head in resignation.  “You know what?  Sounds fine.  Let’s try it.”

 

“Good man make wise choice,” she said.  Then she broke into a smile wider than I’ve ever seen.  Her teeth were perfect and white and her eyes seemed, now that I was closer to the counter, dilated like she had been to the eye doctor.  I had a very strange sensation on the back of my neck, like I had just walked through a spider web backwards.  I reached for my wallet and it wasn’t in my front pocket.

 

“Sorry.  I left my wallet in the car.  Be right back.”

 

I went to the car to retrieve my wallet, noticing on my way out a small women coming out of the bathroom.  She smiled at me as she walked to the counter to get her food.  My second smile of the day.  Upon reentering the restaurant, I noticed that there were other people in there I hadn’t seen before.  My table was empty.  As I handed the Chinese lady my credit card, I turned to watch two Oriental children quietly doing their homework at a nearby table.  My crew must be in the bathrooms, I thought.

 

There was a very attractive Asian lady picking up some napkins from the front.  Must be their mother.  As she turned to me, I noticed just how amazingly gorgeous she was.

 

“Duck sauce, babe,” she asked?  She smiled.  Smile number three.  And a little mischievously I might add.

 

“Come again?” I said.

 

The Chinese lady at the counter caught my attention and said, “Sign here please.”

 

I was still looking at the beautiful Asian woman who had obviously misspoke when I grabbed the pen.

 

“Oww!”  I meant to holler, but felt like I was at the bottom of a dream well.  My ‘Oww’ came out softly and without conviction.  I looked down at the receipt.  It was such an odd looking receipt, this receipt that the blood from my finger was oozing down on.  How clumsy of the lady to hand me such a sharp pen.  I signed my name with quite the flourish.  It was unlike me to do so, but it felt good just the same.  I was feeling giddy.

 

“Duck sauce is good, honey,” I told my smiling wife.  I grabbed our meal from the nice lady and my children, Yang and Wei, started helping each other get their books together.  I smiled back at the most gracious Chinese lady as a cook pushed through the swinging doors that revealed the kitchen.  As I glanced into the kitchen, it for some reason reminded me of a glorious painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

 

As my Happy Family and I left New China, I smiled at the VW lady who for some reason did not look to be enjoying her Pu Pu Platter.

 

Don’t forget to check out my project on

Sorry, Charlie on Kickstarter

 

Writing: seeing, but not observing

Eagle Owl

 

pic credit

In Oliver Sack’s book The Mind’s Eye, the author talks about how his mind played tricks on him after an eye operation. He experienced a blind spot in one eye that was amoebic in shape. But if he stared at some things for about 10 seconds with both eyes, the missing field of vision would magically fill in. The mind did its best to recreate brick patterns and clouds in the sky. I think a lot of us have our own self-imposed scotoma. And this deficiency in our visual awareness, especially as writers, is something that can leave us with stagnant descriptions, ambiguous environments, and only faint outlines of our characters’ surroundings in our writing.

 

What made me think of this was an article in Writer’s Digest by Tony Eprile that I read today. The author was discussing how we “see but don’t observe.” We become so familiar with our day to day surroundings that we don’t pay attention to them. He gives an example of how most accidents happen within a mile of our homes, presumably due to the fact that our minds are turned off to our surroundings because we see them every day. They become too familiar. Ever drove the same route to somewhere over and over again, for an extended period of time, and then passed by a building or tree and thought, “Hey! Has that always been there?” We all have.

 

Tony talked about how we can defamiliarize our environment. We can try and see everything around us as if it was the first time we’d ever laid eyes on it.

 

I asked myself if I was too familiar with my environment. Then I asked myself if this visual deficiency was getting carried over into my writing. My answer was yes to both.

 

So as I sat in a little coffee shop in Birmingham, I began to look around me. And then I started writing. I slowly panned the room and described things that I had never noticed. Here’s what I wrote:

 

The table I’m sitting at has aluminum legs and a wrap of the same around the rim. The surface is a 70’s laminate. It’s a two piece, and at some point in time, I’m sure it had a slide in section. The chairs match. There is a small lamp on the table and an orange ceramic vase next to it, from which sprouts a collage of plastic flowers. Across from me, a speaker plays Air Supply’s “Love out of Nothing at all.” It is surrounded by art. Art it everywhere. The walls a white-wash of ocher swirls. The floor, plain tiles spilling into zigzagging brick. There are tables. Couches. The coffee stirrers are not disposable. There are a collection of spoons in two separate cups. One marked clean, one marked dirty. Two metal buckets hold small bags of chips that go with homemade sandwiches. Do you see the teapot? Do you notice that the small tree in front of your is a magnolia? How is that club with the goat cheese? Did you stop chewing long enough to taste it? To taste the fatty-sweet smear of goat cheese. To chase it with the burning CO2 and hyper-sugar rush of an ice-cold Coke. There is a smidgen of tape clinging to the wall above the table. Its job is done. Its purpose fulfilled. And yet it hangs in this café, day after day, oblivious to its surroundings.

 

There were little things that I had missed. And I bet if I went again next week and sat in a different location, I would see even more. I completely forgot about the ceiling, for instance. I think it was all painted black, but I’m probably wrong. And although I could see through the big windows to the street outside, very alive with pedestrians and traffic, I left that out too. But as I wrapped up my lunch and left, I remembered a description I had given in my current novel of a similar coffee house. Comparatively, the one in my novel was naked. A winter tree stripped bare of its leaves. But now that I performed that exercise, I can steal some of what I wrote to infuse my current novel scene with a little more authenticity.

 

So take a look around you. Go ahead, even if you’re sitting in your own home. And open your eyes to the alien world surrounding you. And start writing.

 

 

Be Selfish

You selfish bastard. 

Do you not want to spend time with your loved ones?

Do you want to leave the house in disarray, dishes unwashed, clothes not ready for tomorrow, nothing cooked for dinner?  Is it too much to drive the kids to their friend’s house or park, so they can get out in the daylight?  Don’t they deserve a little free time too?

You selfish bastard.  Sure, go write your stupid story and don’t take anybody else’s life into account.  Enjoy your stingy time.

This is the disembodied voice I hear sometimes when I decide to go write.  I write at the local Starbucks.  I would write at home, but there are people who need questions immediately answered while I am in mid-sentence.  Questions like: Do I have any clean underwear, I’m getting in the shower?  Can I ride the bus home tomorrow with K. and then get them to take me home after we go to church, mom said to ask you, no she’s on the phone right now, she has to know right now, hold on K., so can I or not, they’ll take me home?  Have you seen the receipt for that – oh, sorry, I forgot you were writing, I was just looking for that receipt from when we bought that fan, I’ll let you write, did you talk to S.?  HEY!  HEY!  Can you get me a towel, I forgot to get one, no I think they’re in the dryer, or should be anyway? etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc…

These auditory hallucinations are the scourge of writers everywhere.  The voice is legion.  It will tell you whatever you want to hear.  It will tell you to take the easy way out, which is to not write at all.  So how do you get rid of these pesky nags?  You can’t.  Sorry, no magical panacea here.  You have to be selfish.  Think Ebenezer Scrooge without the change of heart.  You don’t have to stand up for yourself, you have to stand up to yourself.

Part of the reason that you have to be so cold-hearted is that the better part of that guilt ridden, accusatory voice is you.  Not the little angel that sits on your left shoulder, Animal House style, telling you to do the right thing.  It’s the one on the other shoulder, the one that whispers themes like justification, procrastination, guilt, and fear into your hapless ears.  Maybe Animal House isn’t the right analogy.  I always rooted for the Devil.

The point is that part of the voice may be right, you may be selfish, but you don’t have to carry the excessive emotional baggage that comes with that realization.  If all you want to do is write, then write.  Writing is a solitary adventure.  So you have to make time for yourself.  Selfish is good.  Stop what you are doing and say it with me – Sel – fish is Gooooooood!

If you listen to the whispering prat, you’re going to sit at home and do nothing anyway.  Then later, curse yourself for not writing.  I know this because Tyler knows this.

So the next time your loved one walks into your room while you’re packing the laptop and mumbles something about spending quality time with you, cut them off in mid-sentence, scream at them for not understanding your creative side, and then, only after they express their confusion in tears, do you scream at them, “I’M GOING TO WRITE SOME FUCKING POETRY AND I’LL BE HOME WHEN I DAMN WELL PLEASE!”

Just remember, you’re really screaming at yourself, at that voice, and not them.  And if they don’t understand what happened, you can always explain this later.

“I was yelling at the voices in my head, who are legion, and want me to find people’s underwear.”

They’ll understand.

How to get yourself writing: Lie to Yourself

“I want to write, but I just can’t bring myself to do it every day.”

 

We’ve all said it.  You could, of course, substitute any number of good-for-you activities in place of the write.  This is because writers are all procrastinating and lazy.  Come on, admit it.  It’s the first step to recovery.  So how do you trick yourself into doing something worthwhile?  You lie to yourself.

 

I can’t remember where I read it, but there was a trick for getting your kids to clean their rooms.  Actually, I don’t think that’s what the story was about, but I adapted the methodology to suit my purposes.  What you do is ask your kids to clean their rooms for five minutes.  Not the whole room, you see, because their rooms are in such a horrible state of chaos and disrepair that to clean it in its entirety would take them the whole day.  I know this to be true because they tell me so.  My kids would never lie.  But to only clean for five minutes?  No big deal.  They feel like they’re getting away with something.  Five minutes is nothing.  A couple of songs on their iPods maybe (They don’t listen to Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd).

 

But what they don’t realize is how much you can get done in five minutes.  That’s five minutes of actually moving with some purpose, which they are more likely to do because they only have to do it for five minutes.  This is in lieu of the usual misanthropic throes and woes they verbally radiate, like a bad case of verbal diarrhea, as they clean with all the vigor of a sloth on Zoloft.  There is a light at the end of the five minute tunnel; it’s a short tunnel.

 

And herein lies the problem with writing.  The tunnel can be a very long and lonely tunnel.  We know this.  We sometimes, even though we love writing and the finished product, secretly and unconsciously abhor the thought of writing on a deeper level.  Because it’s like cleaning your room.  The room is your story and it could take forever to finish it.  But you can use the five minute trick on yourself.

 

Here is the lie you say to yourself when you can’t bring yourself to write –  I will write for five minutes.

 

You can write anything.  On a project.  Short story.  Novel.  Poetry.  The state of affairs in Bhutan.  Make your own crossword puzzle.  No rules.  Just 300 seconds of pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.  And like your kids, if the five minutes are up and you don’t feel like continuing, don’t force yourself, or them, to do any more.  Stop and move on.  But wait a minute.  Where was the lie?

 

The lie is that most of the time you won’t write for five minutes.  Your kids won’t clean for five minutes.  Because once the juices get flowing, creative or otherwise, it’s hard to stop them.  They might clean for 10 or 20 minutes.  You might write for another five minutes or another five hours.  And even if you don’t, you’ve accomplished one very important thing.  You’ve written for the day.  And the next.  And the next.  And before you know it, you’ve created a habit.  And since we are creatures of habit, writing every day will become easier and easier.

 

Don’t worry.  It’s a tiny lie.  And you’re only lying to yourself.  And maybe your kids.  It’s also a better alternative to my other method for reaching goals.

 

Lowering your standards.  Use only in case of emergencies.

 

Happy writing.