Lessons Along the Road

Don’t base your protagonist on yourself.  This may be obvious as shit to you, but it was revelatory to me – and a painful, humbling lesson.  I was completing the characters in my outlining process, as previously described in Snowflake Outline Method Review, and digging in with my main character, Sophia, who was me; all my experiences, my history, my reactions to the story setting.  I was cocky; I knew I had found a way to best all the work this step was supposed to entail.  How hard could it be?  It was me after all.  As the questions became more intimate, calling for more detail and depth, I very quickly spluttered to a baffling, abrupt halt.  What the hell?  What was the problem?  I could not figure out why in the world I couldn’t answer these questions, and when I attempted to, they were sparse, and exceedingly boring.  I looked at what I had written and I hated my main character.  I hated her.  She was insipid, slightly melodramatic, and did I mention boring?

That was an interesting moment.

I was trying to force reality into a very fantastical tale; trying to make it fit all together, somehow holding on to the notion I had to diligently report the truth, the actual events that occurred.  I was trying to replicate those actual events

and just narrate them.  When I let go of that, it was a tremendously freeing and cathartic moment.  I got to make up whatever I wanted.  I could take those characters and make them say and do whatever I wanted them to.  I didn’t have to stay constrained by whatever the actual events were.  Again – maybe obvious in retrospect, but it was a momentous turning moment for me.

I began writing this story years ago while stuck in an insane, stressful job in the biggest bureaucracy I have ever experienced.  Seriously surreal.  Forging friendships and making fun of the truly absurd was the only way to survive, and

frankly a lot of fun.  I began writing down bizarre scenes, actual events, bizarre illogical situations, fantastic proclamations from some idiot in management.  My stashes of scenes and snippets grew and kept growing with a seemingly unending supply of raw material, until abruptly they presented themselves to me as the perfect elements for a screenplay.   

Fairly recently I decided to convert what I had into a novel instead, my true roots.  Something that is mine, all mine.  It keeps growing, expanding, adjusting.  It is no longer a ‘slice of life,’ albeit a surreal life, story.  It has morphed into something that really excites me, something completely different.  The same basic setting but on surreal steroids.  It in no way reflects reality, what really happened there at all.  That turned out to simply be the launch pad.

And my protagonist no longer, in any way, resembles me.  I discovered, the hard way, I am much better as the conductor – not the player.  As far as analyzing what I found when I looked into the viscera of that character – I

decided some things shouldn’t be perused too closely, or deeply.  I have quietly just let it go.  Maybe without being forced into such analysis, that character may learn to grow after all and do something that will one day take my breath away.

Upside Down Writing

One of the most mind-blowing creativity exercises I ever experienced was taught to me in a drawing class.  The teacher, employing the wonderful book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, instructed us to “simply” draw what we literally saw, not the symbols of what we saw.  The use of symbols to represent complex objects is a survival mechanism of the brain, the left hemisphere primarily.  It has to take those shortcuts in order to keep us moving one foot before the next in an overwhelmingly sensational world.  For example, what your brain has stored as a depiction of the object “tree” is just the basic primary components; a trunk, branches, leaves.  Those become what a “tree” is.  So when we see that object before us and are told to draw it, it’s the symbols of the thing that get called up and copied – we don’t draw what is actually there at all.

It’s fascinating really; developmental science abounds with these examples of how we learn, how we store massive amounts of information in our brains.  To a child, all little four-legged furry creatures are “doggy”; all females for a time are filed away as “mommy.”  We learn to expand and refine later, but it’s how we

are hard-wired to learn and to store.  The downside of that of course is that the world becomes so much smaller, everything reduced to a label and a symbol of the thing itself, which is in reality infinitely unique in the universe. 

The symbol-busting exercise to push through all that hard-wiring was to take a picture of an object, let’s say that tree, and turn it upside down.   You’re faced with a mass of unrecognizable lines, shapes, colors, and shadows, and that’s what you draw;

what you really see, what is actually there.  Draw the dark spaces, the light, the lines, all the shading, all of what’s in between, the negative space.  It ‘feels’ so different – a palpable sensation – almost drug-like.  It’s ‘that side’ of the brain,

front and center for a change in the driver’s seat; a wonderful state.  It short-circuits the brain from taking the automatic shortcut to the symbolic representation of “tree”, as it is no longer recognizable to the brain as a tree.

It is life-changing, honestly.  You are compelled to really see, to perceive what’s actually there.  When you’re done and turn it back over, your brain lobes collide in a wonderful confusion of recognition – you just drew a tree, an actual tree, without even “knowing” it.  You can physically feel the surprised outrage, the sheer confusion moving around up there, the left brain protesting ‘what the hell just happened?!’ as the right sidles up and says softly, “I got it, trust me.  See?  It turned out alright.”  If you can allow that amazing process to unfold, miracles happen.  It’s working the process instead of the goal.   Well, writing must be the same.  I wrote previously about the joy of outlining, putting everything in beatific OCD order.  But of course you have to have something first in order to be able to sort it.  Often when I set out to write, the end goal, the purpose of the piece, becomes the focus.  I write a template, put myself on assignment, and all those rigid essay writing rules from grammar school surge forth.  It must be blocked out in labeled parts, vetted and

approved, the pre-ordained format dictating everything.  That’s stifling, a representation of writing; the symbol of the thing, not the heart and process itself.  All the books I’ve read label the process part differently; right brain, free writing, morning pages, ad infinitum.  I call it the Flow.  It’s movement, it’s being in it – the eye of the storm with access to all the energy surrounding.  Things come together so easily when there.  It’s a magical place to be, a miraculous state to achieve. 
 
It’s turning writing upside down.

And we must turn writing on its head and write what we “see” in there, instead of a representation of the thing.  Follow the flow, chase down sparks and see what they ignite, don’t have a goal, ramble, take side paths, explore, play, meander, blatantly ignore ‘the rules’, gently hold the left aside, tell it ‘I got this for a while.  I’ll need you later, not now, go take a break’.  And just flow.  When it’s spent, turn it back over right side up, dust it off in editing, and be amazed at what has emerged.  You will find ‘you’ in there – your true voice that can’t ever be duplicated, your unique ‘wordprint’ in the universe.  It wants to come out, but can’t when only allowed out on a leash.  It has to run free or it will never actualize. 

Upside Down Writing Exercise:
Find a neutral quiet place like a closet, and turn off all your senses except hearing in any way possible.  Plug your nose, put a blindfold over your eyes, don’t reach out to touch, just listen – put any setting context out of your mind,

let the creative brain fully emerge.  Allow that you could be anywhere – on alien soil, inside a vacuum, an air hanger, the moon, a railway station – anywhere at all.  You’ve just come out of a time machine and all your senses are rendered useless except hearing, which is all there is in this world.  You can’t see, smell, touch, or taste anything at all and you don’t know where you’ve landed.  All of a sudden you hear a noise, and all of your being leans into that noise – the entirety of the universe in that moment is that

sound.  Locate it, latch on to it and devote yourself to it.  Really listen without any of the interference of the other senses imposing their filtration, or your brain providing its infamous shortcut labeling; there is no context to prejudice your interpretation of what it should be.  It’s just you and a sound, pure, unadulterated.  Now – what do you hear?  Don’t search for symbols, pre-existing constructs, of what a noise like that might be.  That’s futile – none of those symbols, like bird, wind, cat, construction noise, exist in this world.  Just allow the noise to be.  Describe it.  You can do this exercise with all the senses.  Block the others, and using just one at a time describe what that sense is experiencing without context, information or interference.

This is what happens when your ‘imagination runs away with you’ – in the middle of the night you’re alone, you hear a strange noise that wrenches you from your sleep, from your other world of dreams, that in-between hypnogogic state.  The noise, without any solid context, becomes enormous, terrifying.  You either huddle under the covers petrified the rest of that long night, hyper alert for any sound, the brain in manic overtime desperately trying to sort and identify.  Or, maybe in trepidation you expose one bare foot from under the covers, the other reluctantly following.  Holding your breath, using all your senses

to help restore familiarity, touching the walls of the hallway, the chairs, your brave feet lead you to the source of the unknown.  Finally, there’s the light switch and in the blinding life-altering blaze, all context is restored, the pieces physically, audibly, gratefully, scurry to restore reality, and The Answer is triumphantly borne aloft, paraded through every sense that’s been on full red alert – “It’s the damn cat.”  It’s the damn cat who, using her own special super-senses, had leapt on to the kitchen counter to have a late night nuzzle with the pervasively dripping sink faucet, obliviously contemptuous of the dishes she knocked about.  She looks at you with rapidly diminishing

pupils in the blinding light; offended, condescending.  “Really, again?  You still can’t tell it’s me after all these years?  You can’t just smell me?  Pathetic human.”  In your flood of relief – I mean what would you have really done

anyway had it turned out to be … something else? - you don’t remind the damn cat of the innumerable times she’s torn through the house to dive under the bed in utter panic and terror every single time the doorbell rings. 

Why do we have to find out so desperately, to the extent we would even be able to push through that sheer state of raw primitive terror?  Because not knowing is infinitely worse.  Our minds ‘run away’ on us, keep going with the infinitely horrific things that noise could be until it’s absolutely unbearable.  We push through the terror

because the unknown will continue to grow and mutate if unchecked.  We ‘let our imaginations get the best of us’ is how we put it.  Well – that is precisely what we’re aiming for as writers, isn’t it?  This exercise is a way to harness that wild ride of unfettered imagining – without the stark terror, or having to deal with patronizing cats.  Enjoy!

The Day Job Revisited: Endurance and Epiphany

I’m still in my ‘Day Job’ and must be for at least another year.  It continues to test the far reaches of my endurance with the plethora of oh-so-very-important life or death situations.  It never stops trying to lure me back into the belly of
the beast where I know the light of what I call my Flow, my true path, inevitably extinguishes, where I forget it ever even existed, and until I am once again consumed in its wretched bowels. 

I bought a compass that I’ve mounted in my office to provide me a constant reminder of where I want to go, and that I must relentlessly monitor that course to see when I’m veering off the path.  My hope and intent is that even if I do swerve and get in deep, that talisman will pull me out of the mire and guide me back to my real life, my Flow.  I am holding on.  But that’s not to say I haven’t been seriously slimed and compromised, necessitating those continual course corrections.  But that’s good, right?  The best we can do in such a situation?  Hold tight to our lifelines and not get consumed in the belly acid of the beast.

There are imperative duties to be accomplished in an important day job – don’t get me wrong.  Why, just this week I was provided invaluable insight and direction regarding utilization of a New Form that will surely save innumerable lives and fix the entirety of a billion dollar broken bureaucracy.  This form was after all devised by the impervious, all-knowing, all-powerful Oz, uh, I mean headquarters office.  So I was indeed honored to be the auspicious recipient of this amazing wisdom.  The product is to be revered
for its sheer brilliance, venerated for how untainted it is by the dreary shackles of actual history or experience.  To devise such an astounding product that has only been recycled surely no less than a thousand times, is a remarkable, unprecedented feat.  They are here to help and I am indeed the fortunate one to be able to reap the benefits. 

The construction of the form itself was quite impressively achieved in a mere 12.5 minutes.  Even more amazing, this was all somehow miraculously devised from an actual apparent child prodigy, all on his very own, by his own big self!  He intuitively understood the necessity of disregarding any unnecessary process that might impede the launch of his brilliant new product.

Things like, oh I don’t know – research, consultation, basic knowledge of what the hell he’s even talking about and what the product is designed for, or any related processes and policies already in existence.  Wisely dismissing these bothersome steps catapulted this endeavor straight to the implementation roll-out in the field.  That, after all, is what really matters – that the field follow this new direction like all the others before it, without question.  See?  It doesn’t even matter ‘what’ the policy is with that focus!  Just amazing. 

They were even able to streamline the implementation stage as well.  It only entailed a 4.5 hour introductory meeting, in addition to the day-long webinar presentation and training offsite.  The education was invaluable, the process 

inspired.  We learned how to completely duplicate a preexisting process and product and successfully re-package it.  We were taught, by example, how to purge cumbersome and unnecessary restraints and achieve that pure state of blissful ignorance of pesky precedent.  We were wisely disciplined to not even acknowledge, much less mention, the existence of original policy addressing the very same issues this new revered protocol was replacing.

And with the resources devoted to this project; the time and funds allocated for the extensive training, travel costs, the man-hours lost by hundreds of staff pulled away from their work to participate in the training – well, it surely only ended up costing the company mere hundreds of thousands of dollars, and only put production back measly months.  A bargain, bargain I tell you for what was achieved.

The participants in the training, my fellow co-workers, were equally inspiring.  They fervently embraced the New Form, this genius product, and even more impressively, all managed to 
become subjects in cutting-edge research into the phenomenon of collective abrupt onset mass amnesia.  They will surely be written up in the annals of science for all prosperity.  It was a wondrous sight to behold.  But we mustn’t stray from our accolades of the boy prodigy presenter who amazingly also possessed the generosity, physical capacity and willingness to fit each and every one of those eager staff in his audience right up his ready and graciously hospitable bum.

How could I possibly ever leave such an organization that embraces such meaning and purpose and creates that which really matters in this world?  What could I possibly do to top the achievement of this New Form that will inevitably change the course of our very destinies?  Maybe, just maybe, the day job isn’t all that bad after all.  

 I can see it now so clearly.  I’ve been approaching this all wrong.  It’s me.  I’m the one who needs adjustment.  I believe a full frontal lobotomy would take care of any conflict absolutely.  Then I too can finally fit in; can have an actual tear come to my eye in gratitude for the wisdom I am bestowed on a daily basis.

Are lobotomies reversible?  Say, in about a year?  Not a bad survival strategy really …

Editing for Life

Write without reserve, edit rigorously.  This is the process innumerable “how to” books and writing workshops espouse – a logical, necessary and valid process.  But it somehow still feels wrong, illicit.  I feel trepidation, that I’m doing something appalling, when I try write with the censor unplugged.  
The process can induce PTSD flashbacks of that horrid English teacher with her red pen eerily glowing in the dank classroom as she graded our essays in front of us, while we squirmed with every stab of her pen, captive in our seats.  No wonder ‘writer’s block’ is a phenomenon. 

We’re really not taught the complete process of writing, at least I wasn’t, and that set up this hard-wired precept that somehow I’m supposed to be able to put together a perfectly formatted and edited piece the first go-round.  I was only taught the rules, and graded / critiqued on just the final draft.  There were no instructions of how to get from the rules to the final piece, or even acknowledgement that that process was important.  So it left this gaping hole that guilt and insecurity are only too happy to rush in to fill.  We have to unlearn so many things from childhood.  Growing up really is just healing.  Understanding what happened, relearning, getting over it, acceptance, and learning how to really do it right.  We have to purge damaging constructs and start from scratch, seeking out what we only intuitively sense and find like-minded individuals to collude with us that we’re on the right track. 

To “edit” means to:  ‘prepare a text for publication by correcting errors and ensuring clarity and accuracy; to remove material from something … because it is lengthy or offensive’.  It is to:  ‘prepare for public, correct, tidy up, check over, revise, amend, change, alter, rework, rewrite, rearrange, rehash, improve, oversee, run, manage, be in charge of’.

Replace “edit” with “life” … we’re not really given the handbook to the process of life either, are we?  You have to actually write something first in order to edit it; you have to engage life and make mistakes in order to learn how to live.  But we live in a society that only reinforces, or even acknowledges, the final piece – the outcome.  We’re only taught the rules, and given the expectation that we should achieve x, y or z in life.  Sound familiar?  Straight from the rules to the result with no allowance for trying, experimenting, failing and refining.  But how the hell do you get there?  How do you learn how to navigate all the infinite processes involved in that transition?  We’re taught to focus on only one component that should be just a piece of the process.  

There’s an emphasis on results that belies everything it takes to get there.  We worry about life being accomplished and perfect, instead of jumping in and making a million mistakes to be able to ‘edit’ those and find that perfect combination that fits just right for us. 

The best we usually can get is snippets of advice – from family if we’re lucky, from friends, co-workers, roommates, relationships, specialized workshops – from therapy if we can take that plunge and afford it.  We’re pretty much left to figure out this complicated thing by ourselves, so we tend to make decisions in a panic just to have something – we have to know what it is we want to be and do pretty much out of the womb after all.  In my romanticized conceptualization of ‘days of yore’, young people went abroad out of school, to see the world first, then come back and engage in life choices, to actually see what there is to choose from first.  Hitchhiking across Europe, road trips – something, anything, to learn how to live before deciding what to do to live.  Now it seems the ‘process’ is all about getting to the goal, with no experimenting, no trying it on, about getting a perfect product the first time out instead of the essential trial and error that make that decision an informed one.  These unrealistic expectations may literally be driving young unprepared minds mad and relegating mid-life epiphanies to a stereotype joke instead of acknowledging what they really are – consciousness kicking in at last.

For my mid-life crisis, I’m finally figuring out what “writing” actually is – and by its example, life.  Experimentation and completely uncensored cavorting is what it’s all about.  My hard-wiring still flares up though with that nagging voice in my head, admonishing me that the ‘process’ is frivolous; I should only be following the rules and somehow coming out beautifully rendered, perfectly formatted and flawless.  This is the thing that writer’s block is made of and must be overcome, hit head on with the truth time and again.  I remind myself that I can only get “to” by going “through” and that can’t happen without the necessary process of just writing freely without restraint and with that voice securely gagged.  

Digging into great depths where the good stuff lurks, coaxing it out onto the page in the early morning dawn, is writing, that exciting journey of exploration 

into unknown territory.  No guide,no rules, just pure unadulterated immersion, grabbing everything in sight, stuffing it into the rucksack, stealing it back to camp to pour over that night, a joyous search into the cache to see what treasures were scavenged, deciding which are worth keeping, which aren’t. 

Piecing them together, rearranging the pieces, adding, deleting, polishing, is only the final stage – it is not the whole process, it is not “writing” all by itself.  When the words do come together, appear to magically fit, it’s really a culmination of so much work  - a whole journey full of trials, falls and despair; and utter ecstasy of hard-won accomplishment.