Fall in Love with Ideas
As a writer, (as well as an actor), I need to fall in love with ideas. Not just whole, realized ideas, mind you. But fragments, snippets, questions, warped perceptions of previous ideas. Just about all of them.
It’s true that any creative idea could spark something that becomes a full fledged project, and that’s great. Yet I advocate falling in love with ideas even if they do not lead to a project.
Fall in love with the two lines of dialogue that come in to your head that you can’t find a place for in your work.
Fall in love with the concept that came to you for a novel, even if upon further consideration the concept probably can’t ever sustain a novel.
Fall in love with the characters that don’t find stories to live in. Write about them. Yes, go ahead and tell someone about them instead of showing. I won’t report you to the Creative Writing Police.
Fall in love with “what if?” considerations. Even absurd ones. Embrace them for at least as long as it takes you to provide one answer to the question. Or even if you don’t. “What if there had been a severe storm in Hawaii on December 7, 1941?” I don’t know what if anything that would change. But I have often wondered about the idea.
Fall in love with the questions that don’t have an answer. As corollary to that, fall in love with not having or not trying to find the answer.
But you can also fall in love with the answers if you find them, even if you can’t use them. Even if they are simple and silly.
Fall in love with how you would have written that scene in the novel or movie you like. Even if you don’t write it. And if you do write it, don’t publish it, of course, unless it’s in the public domain, but still fall in love with it.
Fall in love with ideas that you dislike. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but it is possible, and it doesn’t involve changing your mind about the idea. Think on that one for a while; you’ll get it.
Fall in love with the story you never finished, or never started, or will never come back to. Fall in love with it because it is yours. Your every minuscule unfinished idea is still yours, after all.
There are many, many other ideas with which a writer should fall in love. But to sum up this advice, remember this;
Fall in love with the idea of ideas. If you allow yourself to do this, one day you’ll create something in full of which you can be quite proud, and may just get the attention of your audience. Then they can fall in love with some of your ideas too.
Repost: My 9/11 Story
On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I wrote a detailed account, for the first time, of my own experience of that day. Since then, I have reposted that account on the anniversary, and allowed it to stand as my definitive response to those events. I try not to begrudge anybody of their personal methods of handling the event, but I admit I have always wondered about the wisdom and effectiveness of reliving, minute by minute, the terrorist attacks of those days. A few channels on TV replay their coverage from 9/11 moment to moment each year on this day-coverage I don’t tend to watch. If I need to find the images, I can do so easily online whenever I want to.
I don’t often want to.
“Never forget,” to me is an unfair pronouncement. No conscious person with all of their mental capacities in tact on that day is going to forget it. I sometimes feel that “never forget” has another meaning, “Remember what happened in the way I am choosing to remember it…as potently as possible all day, every year.”
I have chosen not to do it that way. My account is part of the “record” now, and I have used it to answer the inevitable “where we you?” Despite the tragic nature of the subject matter, I consider it one of my better pieces of writing. You can read it here.
“Writer’s Weight”
You know what you want to write today. The idea is there, you may even have an outline. You’re not under a particularly tight deadline with this one. In some ways you’ve been looking forward to this. You are not feeling at all lazy. In fact you’re rearing to go.
Then you sit down to begin…and you just can’t do it. You can’t bring yourself to begin writing. Despite your desire to get some words down, at this moment beginning the writing process becomes daunting. Maybe you sit there until it passes, if it does, or you get up and do everything else on your list for today, hoping that by the time you come back to writing, this feeling, this veil, this inertia against writing will be gone.
Often, however, it isn’t. If you want to finish your word quota for the day, you have to rev yourself up for an extended period of time, or through sheer force of will break through this shackle and just write.
It isn’t writers block, because you have the idea and the words in your head. It isn’t procrastination because you keep trying to do it. Yet you can’t bring yourself to write. I sometime call this writer’s weight.
No, this is not in reference to a diet or being too sedentary at your desk all day. (Though you do need to remember to get up and exercise.) I mean the weight of what you are doing as a writer. At times like those I have described, the artistic responsibility and/or power of putting your thoughts and feelings into words and sentences, as much as you long to do so, suddenly weighs you down, like a backpack filled with 20 pounds of bricks.
Could you, if you had to, walk about a mile with 20 pounds strapped to your back? Yes, in most cases, most of us could probably do it. Is there anybody alive would be chomping at the bit to begin such a chore? Would anyone fail to resist starting such a trek, at least for a while? Maybe a few people, but not most, and not me.
Where does it come from, this “writer’s weight?” I’ve thought about that a great deal in the last few weeks, as I seem to have suffered from the condition more during that time than normal. The nature of this “weight” is in all likelihood different for each person that might experience it. Could be fear, or confusion. Perfectionism probably has a lot to do with it for some. Guilt, even, for being a writer. It happens, believe me, as little sense as it may make. For myself, this “weight” has probably had parts of each of these concepts.
More than these, however, I think is the unknown. The XYZ factor of it all. The undefinable that seems to show up now and then, sometimes for short period and sometimes for the long haul, that makes the already difficult task of writing even more of a challenge. It’s like the professional high diver who every once in a while gets up on the platform, and simply can’t bring themselves to make the dive they have made a thousand times. It happens.
I try not to get too down on myself about writer’s weight. I’ll deal with it by either doing some other things for a while, or, if worse comes to worse, just sitting back from the computer for a bit, and doing some controlled breathing. I’ll try to envision myself typing at the keyboard at some point in the near future. Like a sprinter preparing for the dash, I’ll try to get lose, and summon my reserves of strength. An even better analogy is probably someone trying to push a stuck car out of the mud. They back up, get into position to brace for impact, take a deep breath and then force themselves toward the cars and shove like hell.
More often than not, that does the trick, and once I’ve written a paragraph, the inertia shifts, and I can get some work done.
I try not to acknowledge writers block as a concept. When I’m ready I can always write about something, even writer’s block itself. Writer’s weight, though is quite real to me and in some ways worse. When you can’t go, you can’t go.
Yet you do go, at some point. It’s easy to get over it when a deadline is approaching, and quite a bit harder when there is no deadline, but you get past it somehow. You have to. You’re a writer.
Have you ever experience this “writer’s weight” I’m talking about? Tell me about it.
A Writer’s Labor Day
Writing is a labor.
It won’t usually break your back or make you perspire. There is generally no threat to your life or limb when you write, nor is there much need to lift 50 pounds at a time when you do it.
In most cases you don’t get dirty, have to travel long distances or get accredited or certified in order to write.
Yet make no mistake; writing is labor. Let nobody tell you otherwise.
Whether it be fiction or non-fiction, it is not always easy to delve into your own mind for hours at a time, day in and day out. Yes, there is fantasizing and brainstorming within the writing process for most people, but any true writer knows that to get anywhere, one cannot remain forever in those stages. One must actually commit words to paper or screen. One must wrestle with concepts, stories, settings, instructions, pleas and so on and confine them to a (usually) limited amount of words. Those words must be strung together in a fashion that is not only coherent from a grammatical standpoint but effective for the audience for which they are written. So the audience must also be taken into account. (Even if one writes first to please ones self, an audience eventually exists for most things we write.)
Even once all of that is done, we need to correct it. Make it smaller, make it faster or better or prettier, or less pretty, or break it into bullet points, or consolidate into a sentence. We need to capitalize on our “voice” but not isolate ourselves from potential readers. And when all of that is done, some of us have to begin the process of researching other people that we think are most likely to roll the dice with our work. We have to convince someone else that what we have created or intend to create is going to in some way serve them as much as it serves us.
And we have to do so, in many cases, on a deadline. Even when we do not have an official deadline, we must always be moving forward with what we are writing. And few of us are ever writing just one single thing at a time, so multiply everything I just said by however many things are being worked on for any given writer on any given day.
Then we do it again the next day, or at the very best, two days later. But usually the next day. And the next and the next. At least if we want to have anything to show for our identity as a writer.
And after all of that, most of the time nobody reads our stuff anyway.
Writers don’t always merely stroll about in their imagination, taking in the view. They mine it, and sort it out, and translate it (often imperfectly) for other people. That takes energy and dedication, and sometimes we writers don’t have either. It can be an exhausting process to summon them up when they elude us. It can drain us and make us feel flat to the world for a while, just like many other jobs and callings.
In short, as I said, writing is labor. I may not die from it, but it is work for me, even when I enjoy it. (And I do.) Remember that today when you read something.
An Open Letter to a Thoughtful Man
For the purposes of this open letter, the subject will be adressed as Mr. Kimble. -Ty
Dear Mr. Kimble,
I have one memory of you, but it is one of the most important memories of anything that I have in life.
You were a coworker of my father’s when he died. A short time later, maybe a week, you came to our house, with gifts for my sister and myself. I remember the pained look on your face when you got out of your car. I remember knowing why you may be feeling like that, even though I didn’t know who you were at the time. Just about everyone who came to see us in those days had a similar look on their faces.
Not that many people did come, and that is why all these decades later the memory of you coming with those gifts is so significant to me. Other coworkers of my father, friends of the family, even extended members of the family itself all sort of receded into the background in the weeks and months after my father died. I can’t say nobody else helped us at all, but those were lonely, empty times in that big house with only three people for a while. Empty of visitors, empty of supporters, empty of the slightest indication that most people appreciated the gravity of what happened. Empty of individuals that had known us for years and years.
Yet not empty of you and your gesture. I don’t know how long you knew my father, but I know that plenty of people had known him longer and better than you did. As I said, most of those people were nowhere to be found, scattered to the four winds in wake of his death. You came to the epicenter of grief. You made that choice, and it was an honorable one.
As was the choice to bring my sister and I gifts. I don’t remember what you brought my sister. I clearly remember that you brought me a Care Bear. Champ Bear to be exact. As a child I appreciated the toy, and part of me recognized that it was especially nice given the circumstances. I now of course understand how profound the consideration was on your part to offer it to me at my home.
I very much wish I still had the bear. Teens being what they are, making room for new stuff I at one point gave it away to Goodwill. Even then I appreciated the gesture looking back, but I regret not being sentimental enough about it to hold on to it physically. It was one of my big mistakes in such matters.
Yet I hold on to the memory and cherish the gesture now. It was heartfelt, rare, and impactful on my life even to this day, as so often the simplest gestures are.
So I thank you, Mr. Kimble, for the gift and the thought you showed in giving it to me. You hold, and will always hold a place of honor in my mind.
sincerely, Ty Unglebower
–This post is part of the Open Letter Continuum.
Ty Unglebower 