the writing life: part 1 - coaxing the muse out of hiding
Okay, now that we’ve got the marriage stuff knocked out, it’s time to dive into the next series of posts on writing.
How long I’ve been “a writer” depends on who you ask. I would say since roughly five years old, when I grabbed a blue crayon and harrassed my mom for three days to spell 26 words for me so I could write my first alphabet book. Others would say not till this fall, when my official paid job title included the word “writer” (despite the fact that I’ve done copywriting in every job I’ve held since the age of 18 writing radio ads.)
Some people insist that you can’t just call yourself a writer. That it somehow denigrates the holy calling of writing to have guys who managed to register a blogger.com account calling themselves writers. As for myself, I tend to think that if you feel a pull to write, and enjoy the process of writing, you are probably a writer. Most people I know look forward to any writing they’re required to do about as much as they look forward to a root canal.
I blame the school system. [Our narrator now ducks the erasers being thrown at her by her many teacher friends!]
But seriously, the way writing is approached in the educational system is not really conducive to developing a great love of writing. Writing is essentially personal; it’s putting your thoughts, feelings and ideas into tangible, semi-permanent form. We innately take criticism of our writing personally. We naturally see it as a criticism of those thoughts, feelings, and ideas. While detailed criticism of grammar, handwriting, and spelling is an essential part of learning proper English, it can also create some negative emotional associations with writing that some people never overcome.
Some people master the mechanics of writing quickly, and I think these are the people with the best shot of developing a lifelong love of writing. It’s much the same as people who develop a lifelong love of reading because for whatever reason, they master the mechanics of it quickly enough to get tagged “good readers.” Is a “good reader” in the first grade predisposed by fate to eventually be able to enjoy the subtle nuances of great literature? No. And a kid who masters spelling and punctuation at age 7 is also not predisposed by fate to become the next Steinbeck.
But he might not fear writing like a kid who was slower to pick up those mechanics.
So a good first step in entering into the writing life, is to overcome any fear that you have about writing or yourself as a writer, and work on developing a love of writing.
So since this is a series on writing, there will be a writing assignment associated with each post. Today’s assignment is to write about your feelings, experiences, fears and hopes regarding writing. You can write down your opinion on what constitutes “a writer.” You can write about a particularly heinous writing experience (and possibly in writing about it, get past it). You can write about a particularly glorious writing experience (and possibly inspire yourself to do it more often).
First rule of writing: write!
true love
Before we dive into the next post about marriage, I would like to share with you a little true story of true love.
A friend of mine and I were talking and she mentioned that a girlfriend of hers was getting a divorce, and understandably, returning to her maiden name. I say “understandably” because her soon-to-be-ex’s last name was “Cockshead.” Obviously, this is not the “true love” portion of the story.
My friend’s girlfriend’s soon-to-be Mother-In-Law’s first name?
Ada.
That, my friends, is true love, when a woman can look a man in the eye without blinking and say “Yes, darling, I would be proud to become Ada Cockshead.”
random nonsequitor
Apropos of nothing: I’ve drank so much coffee in the last year, I think next week I’m going to start peeing pure arabica. Just felt like espressing that sentiment…
would you be mine, could you be mine, won’t you be?
We borrowed Pixar’s Cars this weekend from Dad and Sandra, being that we were one of the ten families in the country with kids who hadn’t already seen it. I had already read a few reviews that said it was basically an animated Doc Hollywood with cars instead of people, but since Doc Hollywood holds a special place in my heart, I was okay with that.
Chris and I refer to Doc Hollywood as “our honeymoon movie” because we got married on a Friday and were both due at work and school on Monday. We had rented a cabin at Patoka Lake for the weekend, but for some odd reason, all the restaurants up there were closed that weekend, it was rainy, and believe it or not, even the primary honeymoon activity gets boring after a certain number of times in two days.
So we left the lake early, went back to our first apartment in Corydon, but first we had a nice lunch at Frisch’s Big Boy and stopped off at the Twin Cinemas and caught a matinee showing of Doc Hollywood.
There is something in both Cars and Doc Hollywood that speaks to an ache and a longing in our contemporary consciousness. I don’t think it’s about rural life versus urban life, although it’s easy to mistake for that. I don’t think it’s even mostly about the pace of life these days and a growing nostalgia for a more Mayberry-like speed of life.
I think it’s about community and belonging.
I don’t have the necessary naivete to think that life was really, truly slower and easier in the “good old days.” For one thing, the lack of time-saving conveniences and the addition of a lot of work that we just don’t have to mess with in modern life makes me think that people were probably just as worn out then as they are now, if not moreso.
I do tend to believe that we have longings in us that are placed there for a reason. I think we’re all homesick for heaven, and that homesickness comes out in a lot of different forms, nostalgia for a way of life that may have never really existed being one of them. I think we all long for a place where we belong. To quote the theme to Cheers, we want to be where everybody knows your name.
I may be the only person who actually liked the remake of The Stepford Wives with Nicole Kidman and Matthew Broderick, but it speaks to this sense of alienation too, albeit in a very different way. The Stepford Wives is about the sense of loneliness that comes from trying to belong. Trying to belong is a very different thing from belonging. The difference between the two is the largest part of why I needed to leave our last church home.
Belonging is when you fit into a community, not in spite of your differences and uniqueness, but because of them. Â Both Doc Hollywood and Cars celebrated communities where every quirky, oddball member has their own valuable role and is an integral part of keeping the community functioning. The television show Northern Exposure was another example of this.
I grew up in a small, rural town seven miles from my current house, where my dad and youngest sister still live. I think my dad has a hard time understanding why I like living “in town.” He complains that you don’t have any privacy; that the houses are too close. My dad is a man who appreciates the ability to take a whiz off the back porch without fear of the neighbors seeing and complaining. Then again, Dad was the youngest of five kids in a really poor family where indoor plumbing was not a given growing up. I can respect his greater need for space and privacy.
Rural or urban, I like living where sidewalks and front porches are the rule, not the exception, and people use both regularly. When we first moved to Pal, Chris used to say this was the walking-est town he’d ever seen. People walked around town in the evenings, apparently just for the (arguably questionable) entertainment value. They stop and talk to each other. Yes, the dogs bark incessantly. Yes, people let them dump in their neighbors yards and ignore leash laws. Yes, people are nosy and gossipy. I don’t care.
Better that than living in suburban houses with a five-by-five stoop that’s probably four-by-four bigger than its use justifies. Better that than living an acre in distance and ten thousand miles in “none of my business” from your nearest neighbor.
I know that ultimately, it’s my own attitude and behavior that determines the metaphysical distance of my neighbors moreso than whether my house has a porch and a sidewalk. But I do think that some physical spaces, some neighborhoods, are more built for neighborliness than others.
In the last couple of months, I’ve discovered through Chris that my neighbors think I hate them. I don’t hate them. I’m just deaf as a post. Seriously; I have scar tissue in my ears from a childhood illness, so I often can’t tell when people are talking to me. At a distance and with background noise, all people sound like the adults in Peanuts cartoons to me. So apparently, my neighbors have been saying hello and baffled by the fact that I don’t acknowledge them.
I could fix that. I could make a batch of cookies and go up my street, handing them out and explaining “If you’ve every said ‘hi’ to me and I’ve ignored you, I’m sorry. My hearing sucks and I’m usually really distracted. If you ever need anything, just knock.” Part of my hesitance to do so is my introversion. But mostly, if I’m honest, it’s because I know people are … messy … by nature. Opening myself up to people opens myself up to their problems, their “stuff.” Which is scary.
I have lived much of my life very closed-off, in a vain attempt to protect myself from getting hurt. Limiting the number of people I cared about to as small a number as possible has done absolutely nothing to protect me from being hurt. On the contrary, all it’s done is make me more isolated and desperate when the painful things came.  So now, I’m trying to be different. I have no experience with being different, so I have to call on my imagination to try and figure it out. I have to use the imagery provided by movies and books and television to create an inner picture of the neighborhood I want to live in in the external world.
The process of moving into that “inner neighborhood” in my outer reality is not a matter of real estate, but a matter of becoming a good neighbor myself.
Gee, that sounds familiar. Where have I heard a story like that before?
little by little
Raise your hand if you’ve tried the Atkins Diet. Or any other extreme, “no cheating allowed” eating plans. How’d that work out for you?
Today, we’re going to talk about wheat and tares. Or wheat and weeds, if you prefer. If you’re not familiar with the parable, click the link and catch up.
The most common interpretation of this parable is that it deals with the saved and unsaved souls of men, and that the harvest mentioned is the judgment, similar to the parable of the good and bad fish. However, as this is one of the parables that isn’t explicitly explained in scripture, that leaves it open to multiple interpretations. One of the more interesting interpretations I’ve read or heard is that it relates to spiritual formation, or an older term that’s been a bit misused, discipleship. In short, that it refers to the process of becoming Christ-like, the “renewing of the mind” that is mentioned in Ephesians.
Here’s where I get to pull out a little Japanese philosophy, and tie it in to scripture. I love it when I get to do that. 
The Japanese have a management philosophy (which is really a way of life philosophy that gets misapplied as a “management tool” by the West) called “kaizen.” Kaizen is basically Japanese for incremental, continuous improvement.
Often, you have an area of your life that needs an overhaul. Instead of making small, incremental changes, you determine that you’re going to “do it right.” “Doing it right” means taking time, making preparations, setting the stage, and totally implementing a complete, fully-formed new way of doing things. Starting January 1st, how many people plan to start eating right? (And “eating right” means completely overhaul their nutritional way of life.)
In principle, starting with a “clean slate” on a whole new “total program” approach sounds appealing. We love new starts here in America. Where we trip up is maintenance, staying the course, and finishing strong. We suck at those. But we’re great at new beginnings. So we have a history, as a culture, of starting lots of new projects and when the going gets tough… starting a new, new project. This explains “New Year’s Resolutions” in a nutshell.
But there are a lot of problems with this approach. First, it fails to take into account the shifting, continuously moving nature of life itself. By insisting on completely defining both the problem and solution in detail first, a person can effectively postpone making any changes …pretty much forever. Second, it fails to take into account the complex nature of change and how even a small change can have difficult-to-predict outcomes that then need to be dealt with. By trying to implement massive, all-at-once, “programs” of change, a person is effectively tacking learning the new way, maintaining the new way (building new habits and breaking old ones), troubleshooting the new way (dealing with the inevitable “oops, didn’t think about that”s), and improving the new way simultaneously. In short, it’s a great way to set oneself up for failure.
Which takes us back to the wheat and the weeds. Let’s face it. As messed up as your life may be, it is at least marginally functioning. Instead of a farming analogy, lets deal with something a bit more contemporary. Let’s say you’ve got an old laptop computer. It’s slow. It’s buggy. It’s, generally speaking, a piece of garbage. So you decide that instead of dealing with the bugs and the upgrades, you’re just going to completely wipe the hard drive and install a whole new operating system.
The amount of dread that statement just provoked in you is probably directly proportional to how well you’ve managed “total overhauls” in other areas of your life. As buggy as the old system is, if you lose it, you don’t really know what all you’ll lose. Possibly some good and valuable stuff.
One way of looking at the wheat and the weeds is that the Good Seed is the New Life that is planted in you when you accept salvation. It’s just a seed (perhaps as small as a mustard seed), but it contains the blueprint of the fully-formed and mature “plant”–Christ. Given care and attention, time, maintenance, and effort (all those things we contemporary Americans are not great at, as it turns out) the plant will mature and grow.
What often happens, however, is that instead of focusing on nurturing those new seeds of a better way of life, we focus on “pulling up the weeds” of our bad behaviors. Instead of nurturing a growing relationship with our newly-reconciled Creator, we try to “tidy ourselves up” a bit. Instead of cultivating virtues, we expend massive amounts of energy trying to yank up our vices. And often pull up those tiny, newly-sprouted virtues along with them.
Lots of different “gurus” for different aspects of life have sprung up in the last several years promoting this kind of “little things add up” change. David Allen’s Getting Things Done applies it to work productivity. Martha Cilley applies it to housework with her FlyLady program. Dave Ramsey uses “Baby Steps” to apply it to a person’s finances. Jonny Bowden, iVillage’s Weight Loss Coach, advocates the same approach in the realm of diet and exercise.
So, my question for you to ponder is, what small seeds of change can you give some attention to this week?
deux ex machina
Going to be leaving the enneagram alone for a bit. It’s a useful tool, in that it can be a key that helps a person unlock the “box” of repeated, unconsciously motivated behavior patters they’re living in. But overusing it can become “decorating the box,” so to speak.
I ran across an intriguing statement in my readings this week. The writer is speaking about the teachings of Jesus. “This is a dangerous teaching. It could be abused. Anything that increases freedom is dangerous and can and will be abused.”
I think we try to “pad” the gospel in many ways, because it is dangerous information. Â Freedom creates risk. That’s a given.
I honestly think the source of most if not all legalism is a desire to pad the gospel, to make it “safer.” It comes from the same well-meaning instinct that caused the Jewish rabbis to create “hedge” laws. Hedge laws were laws that were created to keep people from getting too close to breaking the Mosaic law. The problem with that is, you never know when to stop. At some point, the hedge laws become tradition, making them important enough to require hedge laws of their own. By the time of Christ, the law had expanded in this way so far beyond the original 10 commandments that it was generally recognized that a person could not keep the law in its entirety. It was impossible.
When people are set up for failure, they become frustrated and give up even trying. Or they compare themselves to others, because that’s a standard where they have a shot at some kind of success. Legalism doesn’t work.
One of Chris’ favorite movies is Dangerous Minds, and not just because it features Michelle Pfieffer. In the movie, she tells a class that everyone else has written off that everyone will start out the year with an A. They don’t have to earn it. They just have to worry about not losing it.
This is grace. Grace begins from a point of success, where all the work has been done for you, instead of starting from not only a point of failure, but a point where even eventual success seems hopeless. Grace makes the task of doing well seem attainable. Grace keeps you trying. Grace allows you to compare where you are to where you were, and appreciate the process, instead of comparing where you are to where someone else is.  Grace presents better options than legalism.
I’ve just started studying video game development (because I clearly need yet another hobby or interest. Insert eye-roll here.) But part of good game development is offering the player appealing options. You keep the player moving forward by presenting the possibilities of choice and success.  A bad game is like a narrow maze; the “walls” bounding your choices are hard, clear, and obvious, with only one successful path possible. A good game camoflages, widens, or removes those walls altogether, presenting multiple paths and choices that will move you forward and allow you to succeed.
Of course, a game that’s too open-ended can be problematic, too. (Ask Chris why he’s never gotten into Morrowind.) If the game is too open-ended, you can wander around purposelessly forever. Without at least a few broad goals, it’s difficult to tell if you’re succeeding or even making any progress. The gameplay loses meaning without at least some touchpoints of progress. The best games present an appealing path (or multiple, parallel paths) that are clear enough to find with a little effort, but hidden enough to make finding them interesting and engaging. They present small rewards all along the path to keep you motivated and moving forward. They are challenging enough to be interesting but not so difficult that you give up completely.
Freedom creates risk. Freedom presents the opportunity to go off the map and crash the game completely. Freedom means some wrong turns and stupid moves are going to happen. Freedom means you could get stuck for a while without someone prodding you and a glaring neon sign saying “YOU MUST GO THIS WAY!”
Grace and providence are the implied good will of the Designer, who you can sense wants you to succeed and make your way through to the end. When you believe that the Designer created the game to beat you, you get angry, frustrated, and want to either give up or “show that @%^$& that he’s not going to beat you.” It’s a much different game when your image of the creator of it is that this is a person who is trying to challenge you rather than someone who is using his superior position to beat you. How angry do you get when you think a game has “cheated” you? Can you connect that anger to the feeling that God has set you up to fail in life?
What difference could it make if you believed He has guaranteed your success? That he wants you to progress, grow, get better, and that you’re going to win? What difference does it make to start with an A on your grade sheet, instead of the expected F? How much harder are you willing to fight to keep that A, or to keep it above a B or C, than you would have been willing to fight the F?
Something to chew on, anyway.
the enneagram and you: part 6 - epilogue, or the enneagram and me
Make of this what you will.
Last week, I kept having recurring dreams where there was something absolutely vital and critical that I must do, but no matter how hard I tried, it was impossible to accomplish it. No matter how hard I tried to maneuver around the obstacles, refactor and try again, I just couldn’t accomplish whatever the “something” was. I was blocked at every turn, as if some unseen force was one step ahead of me, thwarting me.
This week, I’ve had similar recurring dreams with the same theme. But this week, there is a resolution in the dreams. I end up finding out that it’s actually a good thing that I’ve been prevented from accomplishing my mission. In these dreams, I’m still being thwarted, but at the end there is some kind of revelation that I end up better off because I don’t accomplish my goal.
It is perhaps a more personal note than I would have planned on using for an ending to this series, but it works as a kind of epilogue. I’ve been processing this stuff as I write–apparently as I sleep, as well.
the enneagram and you: part 5 - signs, signs, everywhere are signs
We’re still not going to discuss the individual types, and at this point, I’m fairly sure we won’t in this series. If you really want to know more in-depth information about how all the nine strategies play out, there’s ample information out there that I don’t feel like repeating.
What we are moving on to is a little idea I like to call postmodern parables. Unlike in Biblical times, we don’t have itinerant rabbis wandering the streets, telling stories to shatter our worldview and open us up to reality. Unlike medieval times, we don’t have itinerant storytellers and bards wandering the roads, telling stories that shatter our worldview and open us up to reality. Today, we have filmmakers and novelists to fill that role.
In our last post, we briefly touched on the importance of imagination and the unconscious in enabling behavioral change. Symbolism, metaphor, and imagery are apparently not just the native tongue of our unconscious imaginations, they are also the makings of some darn fine cinema and literature.
How ironic is it to find that after five years of intensive study of self-help manuals, a person might have been better served by popping a bag of Cousin Willie’s popcorn and sitting down and watching The Matrix? Think I’m kidding?
Okay, think a moment about what we’ve been talking about.
Reality as you know it is a false construct.
The false reality keeps you trapped.
Introduction of a small, yet powerful “virus” into your mental system is capable of rewriting your mental hard drive from within, and propelling you out of your comfortable but dysfunctional existence and into a new reality.
The new reality is not glamorous; its main benefit is that it’s real and you’re free within it.
Sound familiar?
Gonna throw another one at you. There’s a television show about characters who are LOST. All of the people on a plane are stuck in negative repeating patterns. They land on an island, where their eyes are opened (many episodes begin with an extreme close up of an awakening eye) and they are able to shed their previous identities (some of which are assumed identities) and are now free to be someone entirely different.
“Everyone here gets a new start.”
I could name four or five more books, television shows, movies or other contemporary mass media that echo these same themes. Â Is it a conspiracy?
Maybe, maybe not.
Maybe, these are things that many of us instinctively know, deep down. Maybe all the modern-day mystics are in the media and publishing.
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