Work-Arounds

Zestful Blog Post #139

Big-ass storms sweep over Washington’s Olympic Peninsula a lot. They like to knock down trees. Back when Marcia and I were living in the deep woods there, we had to make shift without electricity many times, once for a whole winter week. (A woodstove and well-stocked shed solve many problems.) During one such outage, I hiked into our neighbors’ woods to watch a work crew, whose truck I’d heard rumble up the rough road we shared.

The guys’ problem was a large dead hemlock that had fallen across the power line, which stretched from the lower road straight up through a steep, thickly forested hillside. The tree hadn’t ripped the line down; it was hanging on it, fifty yards from the road. No way could the guys get their cherry-picker truck down there to lift the tree off; they’d have to wallow down the slope with their chainsaws. Having felled trees myself, I knew the perils of hanging timber, and wondered how the hell they were going to cut up that tree safely. It seemed impossible.

[A different large hemlock, but you get the idea. This one didn't pause, but just ripped down the electric and phone lines on its way to block our garage, along with a fragrant cedar.]

They solved the dangerous problem in less than a minute. They eased the truck next to the pole that supported the line as it crossed the road. One guy went up in the basket, reached up with a jaws-of-life-looking tool, and simply cut the line. It whanged, and the tree crashed to the ground. The other guy scampered down the slope and retrieved the line. They had the son of a bitch spliced and back on the pole in five more minutes. They rumbled down the road, flipped the circuit at the main pole, and left. I just stood there absorbing the brilliant work-around that for them was routine.

My New Year’s resolution is to figure out as many work-arounds as possible, in my own life and work, so as to save time and be brilliant. Gotta look beyond obvious solutions; I think the key will be to first BELIEVE that more than one solution might exist.

p.s. Thanks to my buddy Steve for prompting my thoughts on this. Here’s hoping for better weather up there soon.

And here’s hoping for a happy New Year for everyone.

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Giving & Telling?

Zestful Blog Post #138

Social media, including blogs, especially blogs, can be a challenge for those of us who were brought up not to boast. Is that a humblebrag right there? It is, it is! I’m sorry. Hopeless situation. Here’s my issue today: Charities and those who give or serve have the dilemma of telling about the giving vs. not telling. If you tell, it seems boastful, yet perhaps by telling one can prompt others to give. If you don’t tell, you’re safe from any boast accusations, yet by keeping it secret you relinquish the possibility of suggesting the idea to others.

What the hell. After I post this, I’m off to donate blood. I do this regularly; I got the email a few days ago notifying me that I’m eligible again; I decided to schedule my donation on Christmas Eve day. My reasons, actually, are selfish: The donation center is unlikely to be crowded, and I can eat large portions of Christmas fest food for a couple of days with the perfect excuse of having to build my life juices up again. Plus, OK, yes, it feels more special to do it today.

Donating blood, if your health permits, is such an easy way to give a gift no one can buy. That’s message #1 of 2 from me today.

[This is the most elaborate Christmas display on a private residence I’ve ever seen. It’s our neighbors’ house a few doors down, and it's only a partial view. I mean, that's a life-sized Angel Gabriel on top of the garage. The people are new, and I’ve got to catch them and tell them of the awesomeness of their work. Wish I'd had a tripod for crisp focus, but you get the idea.]

Message #2 is this. Thank you, my friends, for giving ME gifts throughout the year, gifts that can’t be bought: your attention and your esteem. Your sharing of your ideas. Thank you for being with me.

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Direct Experience

Zestful Blog Post #137

Here’s a blog post by new friend Alan Spector, who got inspired by one of my recent Writer’s Digest articles (on making a new commitment to your writing). He believes getting out of your comfort zone and going for something special is important for retirees too. Yeah! Here’s also a link to a historical novel he’s written and published.

What’s stepping out of your comfort zone really about? Two things: One, it’s about keeping your comfort zone comfortable. Think about easing into your nice soft sleeping bag after a hard day of mountain hiking. Ah, bliss. Now think about lying in your sleeping bag for days on end. Comfort evaporates. Muscles atrophy. Only by periodically leaving that comfort can you maintain that comfort. Paradox, yeah. Zen, yeah.

The other thing: leaving your comfort zone is the only way you can gain new direct experience. Who has a stake in this? I remember arguing with one of my grad school professors about sleeping out under the stars. The question was, do you need to experience something in order to fully appreciate it? She, who had never spent a night in the open, contended that you can read a book about being outdoors in the woods and have as much feeling for the natural world as if you’d actually experienced it firsthand. I, who had slept on mountainsides without shelter, contended the opposite. And you can only know the difference if you’ve gone out and done the experience, whatever it is, dammit. It’s great to love books, and books can bring the outer world alive, but only to a point.

It’s essential for the writers of books to go out and gain direct experience, so they can write about it convincingly—so the experience can inform their work. This is true even for writers of sci-fi and fantasy. I think I’d like to explain and dig deeper into that soon.

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Three Buds

Zestful Blog Post #136

The most recent two issues of Writer’s Digest magazine include articles by me. November/December contains “Make a New Commitment to Your Writing,” which has moved more readers to get in touch with me, either via email or social media, than any other piece I’ve written for the magazine in the ten years I’ve been doing it. The article is a bouquet of encouragement, drawn from my insights, woes, and successes. From the response, I realize that while writers can always use help with technique, they thirst as much or more for help with heart and guts. Here’s one of my favorite passages from the article:

Rekindle the spark by simply moving full-on into the unknown. Whatever you doubt you can do on the page, choose that thing. In our increasingly cautious world, “For the hell of it,” has too often been replaced by “Better not.” It’s up to artists—that is, you—to throw away caution and leap. You might attain remarkable new heights.

I want to keep helping writers this way.

[For the hell of it: trying to fit into a mockup of the Mercury capsule at NASA. Real dimensions. The Mercury 7 astronauts all were shorter than me. The thing is terrifyingly tiny. This is the best I could do for an illustration for this post.]

The January issue features a more workmanlike piece: “Power Tools,” which shows how to use arc and pace to fix just about any problem in fiction writing. And here’s an excerpt:

Often dialogue doesn’t work because the author was afraid to move too fast. But fiction, almost as much as stage drama, relies on dialogue for vigor and movement.

Arc and pace together, when injected into dialogue, can transform it from weak to strong. In fact, a small dialogue exchange can have a microarc all its own:

“No, because I don’t think you can keep a secret.”

“Oh, yes I can! Try me.”

I just turned in a chapter for a new Writer’s Digest book on dialogue, set to come out in 2016. My assignment was to write something on internal dialogue, or the inner voices of characters. It’s funny, I’ve always represented my characters’ thoughts intuitively, but researching and writing the chapter made me realize how complex the whole thing can get, when you try to nail down absolutes. For instance, is this passage in present tense or past?:

I should hold up that liquor store tonight, he thought.

Truly, you can argue that one both ways. And truly, it doesn’t matter! If you have a basic grasp of how it works, you can’t go far wrong. All you really need to attend to is consistency. For instance, if you use the above construction in a story, you should not later use something like this:

I’ve got it made now, he thinks.

Once you see it explained, you’ve got it.

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Shutting Up Most of the Time

Zestful Blog Post #135

My blog is about zestful writing and the things I learn about and love. When one is a blogger and something big just happened and is all over the news and social media, one sometimes wonders whether to comment. I think many bloggers, no matter what their specialty, figure if they don’t comment on whatever the big news is, readers will think they’re out of touch or don’t care. I’m in touch, I care, and I have opinions, but I choose not to comment.

The very best one can do is choose peace for one’s own heart at whatever the cost. And there is a cost to choosing peace. The price is relinquishing the grievance narrative, dropping the need to grasp and struggle, and embracing humility. Which also means not trying to fix other people. And it means shutting up most of the time.

Out of all that, simply that, comes real power.

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