What I’ve Learned So Far

It’s “entire” at least for now, anyway.

[drumroll]

1. Write all the time. You pick the value that suits you for “all the time.” If you want to write every day, then be sure to write every day. If you like the idea of writing every day, but find that you can’t get yourself to write every day . . . it’s time to get a new idea. Writers, by definition, write. It’s not a state of mind: it’s a description of a sick obsession steady behavior.

2. Pick the right things to write. If you’re not a poet, don’t try to publish poetry. If you have no ear for dialogue, don’t write scripts. If you’re a great explainer but not a great inventor, you might be more successful with nonfiction than with fiction. If you have a great imagination but can’t stand to do research, vice versa. And so on.

3. Be easy to work with. Two reasons: (i) so that when you’re working with an editor — as you surely will, along the road to publication — that editor won’t reach the verdict that you are an ass who creates more trouble than the writing is worth; and (ii) so that you’ll be valued in your day job, which you are going to need, probably for a long time, to support your writing addiction avocation.

4. Eliminate distractions. Checking baseball scores isn’t writing. Turning on the t.v. “just to see what’s on” isn’t writing. Tweeting isn’t writing. (You’re typing, yes, but it doesn’t count, unless your idea of the Great American Work of Literature fits into 140 characters.) Blogging, for that matter, probably isn’t writing, if you have it in mind to become a practitioner of serious fiction or beloved fantasy/satire or top-shelf journalism. When you’re writing, write — instead of doing whatever else.

5. Finish (and publish) steadily. That piece of writing you’ve been working on? It’s nothing until it’s something. It’s doesn’t have to win a prize to qualify as something. It doesn’t even have to be published to count as something. But it has to be done. As for publication? If you want other people to think of you seriously as a writer, you must publish. This doesn’t mean you weren’t really, truly a writer before — only that you didn’t have the evidence to convince a disinterested party before. That’s just the way it goes. The point remains the same: finish your work and get it out there. This is for your benefit, by the way, not your doubters’: you need to know that you can start a thing, work it through, and finish it. It’s as much a spiritual practice as anything else.

Here endeth the lesson. Catch me again someday when I give my Paris Review interview.

Admittedly, that may be a while.

~

Writing a book
requires many a look.
Writing a grook
requires only a hook.

~

(More on grooks — the verbal form pioneered by Piet Hein — here.)

May flowers are in full bloom.
How about your 2008 resolutions?

Every January brings with it endless magazine stories, blog posts, etc. about New Year’s resolutions: how to make them, how to keep them, how to get organized, how to improve your financial picture, how to lose weight this year — and we mean it this time! When the calendar flips over, it gives all of us a natural opportunity to take stock and to imagine what we’d like our lives to be like by this time next year.

And how long did that last for you this year? February? That’s usually how long I can keep myself on course.

Thing is, the best resolutions I ever made weren’t resolutions — they were just things I started doing, not on January 1 but on a random Wednesday, because that was the day I finally got off my ass and went to the gym. (Or whatever.) This happens, I think, because my New Year’s resolutions, like most people’s, are full of self-delusion. We think there’s something special about January 1 — or about Lent, the Monday after the Superbowl, or our birthday — that will enable us to break the habits of many years. And then we act all confused when it’s May and we haven’t improved our French like we said we would. We haven’t lost those 15 pounds — or even a couple of them. We haven’t fixed our 401(k) withholding like we said we would.

So my resolution — not for today, not for 2008, but for my own sanity all the time — is . . . to be honest with myself. It’s embodied right there in the subtitle of this blog: “Brutal honestly, kindly delivered.” You better believe that was always aimed primarily at myself.

Mind you, I fall off the wagon all the time. I’m bringing this up because I’m in the process of falling off the wagon, not just today, but, literally, all the time. There’s always something about which I’m in the process of deceiving myself. (At least, I think that’s true, and not another self-deception.) Probably it’s embedded in the human condition, but in any case it affects me pretty consistently in every hour of every day.

I can remember a long, detailed list of resolutions from my youth — I would have been maybe 13 when I wrote it — that included a sincere commitment to learning to juggle. To show my seriousness, I taped this up on my bedroom wall, next to the door where anyone can read it. Do I need to tell you that two decades along, I remain among the ranks of non-jugglers? I wrote it down because it’s something I wished for myself, but I was never honest with myself about what learning to juggle well would entail — namely, working through the frustrations of dropping things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over until you finally start to get the hang of it.

These sorts of failures have, over time, steered me away from making New Year’s resolutions. I’d rather find my resolve where and when I find it, strengthen it over time, and free myself from the false notion that the turn of the calendar will ease the process of a real turn in my behavior.

The fact is, changing your behavior is hard, for a variety of well-understood psychological — and even neurological — reasons. Even when we don’t like what we do (eating too much, smoking, being ignorant of French, whatever), we’re more comfortable when we continue to do what we’ve done before. And whether you make changes in your behaviors bit by bit (my beloved “baby steps all the way” approach) or all at once (the often-quite-effective cold-turkey approach), you usually do so despite the discomfort, not because the discomfort magically evaporates.

What I’ve also determined is that I’d rather focus on meta-habits rather than particular habits. In part this may be because I tend to reject structures in my schedule or behavior: I’m good enough at seeing many sides of an argument (read: rationalizing) that I can see the benefit in rising early to do your work, or in staying up late; working on projects from the nitty-gritty details on up, or focusing on the grand vision and working your way down from there; in focusing on one area at a time, or in improving across the board. And so on.

But if you can manage it, being honest with yourself addresses all these confusions. What is it that you want? If you answer honestly, that answer becomes a great tool in your hands. Is what you’re doing likely to get you what you want? Again, an honest answer can be powerful and liberating. What should you do today to pursue what you want? The more honest you can be answering that question, the more likely you are to turn today’s schedule into a real plank on the bridge from your past to your chosen destination.

All of this will also help you to see where you’ve been unreasonable with yourself. Maybe you resolved to put a home-cooked meal on the table every night of the week. Well, is that realistic? Would three home-cooked meals a week be better than what you were doing before? Could you do three a week, give yourself a break, and use the energy you free up from feeling guilty about it to do something else good with your life? Maybe you don’t need to learn French well enough to read Proust; maybe it’s enough if you can find your way around Paris.

Whatever the case, make your decisions honestly — not because you’re choosing the easiest way because it’s the easiest way, but because you’re being truthful about where you are, and about WHO you are.

Not in the abstract. Not in the future tense. Not in some alternate reality in which 2008 is your personal Year of Transcencent Awesomeness. But here, now, in the world you live in.

~

(Photo by Secret Tenerife.)

Talkin’ bout some overhang, people.

The number of 1,200- and 3,000- and 5,500-word unfinished — and potentially unfinishable — drafts of things I have lying around? It’s LARGE, people. It’s depressingly LARGE.

I sigh. I move on.

Okay, please resume your normal activities, secure in the knowledge that you are burdened with a smaller amount of leftover scribbles than I am.

~

(Photo by Will Ellis.)

The great investor Warren Buffett loves to play bridge. Since he’s an avid fan of the game — and, no doubt, since he’s Warren Buffett — he’s gotten to play with some of the luminaries of the bridge world. He has talked about how the very best bridge players virtually never make a mistake: they may lose a hand because of the cards they are dealt, but they don’t lose by making bad plays trick by trick.

With hopes of setting aside all partisan differences, I would note that the United States has undergone a period of intensely ideology-driven foreign policy during this decade. As it happens, the ideology in question has been (more or less) neo-conservative, and it has centered on Iraq and the “War on Terror.” In earlier generations, ideologically driven foreign policy has sometimes come from the Democrats rather than the Republicans (for example in the cases of Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter), and it has centered on other themes and other areas of the world.

There’s no need for a long essay belaboring this point, but what the United States needs in foreign policy, probably for a good twenty years to come, is a notable lack of ideology. Sure, we’ll always stump for democracy and free markets in general, and well we should. We ought to speak up likewise in favor of human rights. But we can’t afford — not even us, not even with our great resources — to fight ideological wars abroad, or cultural wars at home, if we are to retain our influence on the world, or if we are to regain the international standing that we have lost in recent years.

Saber-rattling won’t get us where we need to go. Wilfully simplistic misreadings of the world’s politics, ditto. In some cases, we may have to hold our noses as we make the smart play.

But for a couple of decades at least, we need a bipartisan commitment to making the smart play — like a master bridge player, like Warren Buffett choosing his investments — rather than the play that makes us feel vindicated in the moment, or that scratches an ideological itch.

~

The conclusion to Pope John XXIII’s daily decalogue is powerful:

10. Only for today, I will have no fears. In particular, I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful and to believe in goodness. Indeed, for 12 hours I can certainly do what might cause me consternation were I to believe I had to do it all my life.

“Fear,” Frank Herbert wrote, “is the mind-killer.” Modern neuroscience backs this up, showing us the many ways that fear evokes responses in us that, while they might help us to survive an attack by a pack of wolves, don’t help us much as we react to the challenges of morning traffic or the traumas of the daily news.

When taken out of true fight-or-flight contexts, fear is pointless, and even poisonous. Fear can make our food lose its savor, spoil our relationships, keep us from enjoying what is beautiful, make us despair of ever finding goodness in the common humanity of those around us.

It need not be so.

We will have our days when we feel that we are trapped under the earth, when we despair of ever seeing the sunshine again. But if we will note our fears, hold them at arm’s length, and consider our responses to them, we will come to see how much of our despair is created within us, not by the world around us.

This is easier for me to say because I live in the wealthy part of the world. There are no guerrillas roaming through the streets here. Yet many of us in the rich world provoke ourselves as though we lived in war zones. Better, by far, is to appreciate what we have, take the bad with the good, and, keeping fear at bay, come to appreciate the good that counterbalances — or outweighs — the bad in our lives.

In doing so, we may even find our way free to help our fellow toilers, both near and far, to be freed from their fears as well.

~

Previously in this series:

• “Without wishing to solve the problems of my life all at once.”
• “I will not claim to improve or to discipline anyone except myself.”
• “I will be happy in the certainty that I was created to be happy.”
• “I will adapt to circumstances.”
• “Good reading is necessary to the life of the soul.”
• “I will do one good deed …”
• “I will do at least one thing I do not like doing.”
• “I will be on guard against two evils: hastiness and indecision.”
• “The good Providence of God cares for me.”

~

(Image via Wikipedia.)

One of my motivations for writing this blog — for writing at all, really — is the hope that I’ll be able to say something wise that can help someone else, or even just myself, to navigate through life.

But here’s a thing that to keep in mind, probably especially if you’re as verbal as I am: we assume that wisdom will come in the form of words, but often it comes in other forms.

Lately I’ve been taking a lot of long walks. There is wisdom in these long walks, but it seldom takes the form of words. Sure, sometimes the writer-brain in me works overtime on these walks, and I find the perfect way to say something, or the solution to some logical problem that I can then put into words. It’s for these reasons that I carry index cards and a pen with me when I head out the door.

More often, though, the wisdom comes through in the walk itself. It comes in the wordless wisdom of moving your body through space, of touching nature directly, without the mediation of our endless verbiage. No words I could tell you about my walks would take the place of one walk that you take in your own “Hundred-Acre Wood”. It’s wisdom that comes only in the doing.

The next time you’re faced with a conundrum that makes you want to say “I don’t know what to say,” consider the possibility that the wisdom you’re looking for won’t come in the form of words at all. Experienced consolers of the bereaved know this: often a hug and a cry is worth much more than any amount of words. But opportunities for wordless wisdom abound — when we look for them.

Where do you find wisdom without words?

~

(Picture by oskay.)

An idea for your consideration: During the 19th century, the commanding issue of financial politics in the United States was the interrelation of the money supply with a national bank. Andrew Jackson, for one, hated the idea of a national bank.

It’s hard for us to understand today how seriously this issue was taken, how deeply it divided American politicians, and how long it lasted. Party platforms were built around this, and whole sessions of Congress debated it at length and with great bitterness.

The issue lasted for three-quarters of a century, such that seventy years after Jackson rose to the White House, William Jennings Bryan could campaign on the still-controversial issue of a bimetallic currency.

And then came the creation of the Federal Reserve. At which point the issue dried up altogether. Poof.

Not everything works that way. The other great question of the 19th century in U.S. politics — slavery — was even larger, and it was only solved via the bloodiest conflict this hemisphere has ever seen. So I don’t want to suggest that every political issue has such a straightforward solution.

But it’s worth considering: what’s the piece of policy that would erase Issue X, Issue Y, or Issue Z as a bone of contention within U.S. politics? Or within international affairs?

Please, ladle your thoughts upon me in the comment thread.

~

(Images of Jackson and Bryan via Wikipedia.)

A while back I made some notes for myself under the heading of “Junk, Detritus, Scree.” These notes, I think, were supposed to turn into an article for Writer’s Digest or the Chronicle of Higher Education or some such, talking about how, if we’re not careful, we can pile up a bunch of disconnected ideas that never get us anywhere. At some point, we’re surrounded by so much crud that we can’t even function, and the very weight of the notes bogs us down.

But “we” and “us,” of course, I mean “I” and “me.” But you, being clever, had guessed that.

As I type this, I have at my left hand a banker’s box stuffed to bursting with old scribbles, ranging from my teenage and undergraduate years until last month. In folders on my computer’s desktop I have, by actual count, 115 files with draftwork or writing ideas in them. Some of these files are dedicated to single topics, some contain dozens of ideas within them. All of this is not to mention the drafts saved within the blogging interfaces of either this blog or my professional blog. This should give you some idea of what I’m up against.

I have friends who save every single draft of every single thing they’ve ever written. They want to, or they feel they need to, and I can’t judge this wisdom of this for them, because I don’t live inside their heads. But me? I know it’s unwise for me to have so much draftwork, because it does bog me down with its weight. Far better, for me, is to work through the material, discard the stuff (the cruft, the fluff — I sense a sonnet on detritus coming on) that I can’t use or can’t turn into something good, and focus anew on the best material.

It’s no shame to have a lot of mediocre ideas. Indeed, you must generate many mediocre ideas if you’re going to get the really good ones, as great thinkers like Linus Pauling have observed. But, as Pauling also said, you have to develop your faculties for telling the good ideas from the bad. And, if you’re as scatter-brained as I am, you have to actively, gleefully, even belligerently throw away the detritus so that you don’t get lost in it.

Which is what I’m doing here. Those notes on “Junk, Detritus, Scree”? They’re gone now. And this little post lives in their place.

Chalk up one more tiny victory in my war against overhang.

~

(Image by Andrew Bossi via Wikipedia.)

Beloved readers: in an effort to remove the overhang of old projects in my life, I’m whittling down my lifetime pile of scribbles from a few linear feet to . . . well, to nothing but published work and published-work-still-in-draft, I hope. This means working through, oh, the odd few hundred partially written drafts for articles, stories, poems, essays, op-eds, novels, histories, polemics — you name it.

Some of it absolutely deserves to see the bottom of the recycling bin without further ado, and I’m giving myself the gift of throwing all of that away without ceremony. Some of it, however, seems to have some merit, but might not deserve the time to develop into a full-blown piece for submission to a respectable outlet. Some of this material may even be full of merit — but not on my watch, since I simply lack the time or the inclination to develop it.

So what, Tim?

Well, so what is that I’m going to be posting a lot of these ideas here, so that someone might be able to see them. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even rework some of these ideas myself later. Maybe some worthier writer than I will take them, run with them, make them their own. I hope so.

In any event, expect rapid-fire posting on myriad topics. Some of it will be rah-rah. Some of it will be political. Some of it may be a direct rehash of a post I wrote here two years ago but have forgotten. But since all of it will be newly (re)drafted, it will at least be a distinct rewording of what I’ve written before. (And we all love rewording, eh?)

If any of it’s useful to you, please do run with it — just remember me somewhere in your acknowledgements. Or, you know, tell me how wonderful (or how horribly mistaken) I am in the comment threads to come.