Category Archives: Writing

Good Things

One day, a month or so ago, when I was reading through my feeds, there happened to be a bunch of posts with a similar idea behind them:

This confluence of posts inspired me to re-start the Friday FUM. Here’s today’s.

I love making lists (my favorite apps are probably the list-making ones). So satisfying. The idea of making lists not to cross things off, but to be mindful of the good things from your day? Brilliant. But I think the reason it so resonated with me is because mentally I’d already been doing this.

In writing, we speak of missing the forest for the trees, i.e. getting so caught up in the details of a sentence or paragraph that we forget the overall story. But in life, I think sometimes we miss the trees for the forest. That is, whatever big thing’s going on in your life has a tendency to overwhelm everything else. So if whatever’s going on is bad, the impulse is to think everything in your life is bad. Which it isn’t. It doesn’t matter how overwhelming the big picture, there are always little things for which to be appreciative. True, the good things may be very little things compared the Big Bad Thing. But they are still good things. Even if they are little. A hot shower after a run. That first cup of coffee in the morning. Waking up to a sunny day.

Whenever someone remains positive despite tragic circumstances, people marvel. To a healthy person, the cheerful dying person is an enigma. But after the past while, I think I understand. Feeling sorry for yourself feels like crap. No one wants to be cast in the role of victim.

I have a long-standing policy of refusing to worry about things I have no control over. You know how people are always griping about gas prices or taxes or other things that the average person has no power to change? And then they wonder why they feel angry and frustrated and put-upon all the time? I can’t see the point. Agonizing about such things isn’t going to change them. Venting might make you feel marginally better briefly, but in the end, it just makes you feel worse.

Choosing to appreciate little good things in the face of a Big Bad Thing is empowering precisely because you’re making a choice. You’re taking control, saying, “Ok, I have no control over X. I do, however, have control over a, b, and c. So instead of spending my time being angry about X, which won’t change anything anyway, I’m going to spend it appreciating a, organizing b, and doing c.”  And on a micro-level, that feels good (even if the big picture is bad). So you keep doing it, because when it comes down to it, everyone wants to feel good (especially when they’re feeling bad).

From the outside, it might seem ridiculous to think that someone could be simultaneously grieving and yet still taking pleasure in life. But you only get one. It’s your choice what to do with it. Even when it doesn’t turn out like you expected.

We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand. If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you.  —Randy Pausch

Some things worth watching/reading:

The slow death of logical thought

In recent years I’ve tutored students at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism whose writing is disorganized almost beyond human help, but they seldom mention “writing” as what they came to the school to learn. … They return from a reporting assignment with a million notes and a million quotes and no idea what the story is about.

The reason, I assume–and I don’t expect a Nobel Prize for this deduction–is that people now get their information mainly from random images on a screen and from random messages in their ears, and it no longer occurs to them that writing is linear and sequential; sentence B must follow sentence A. Every year student writing is a little more disheveled; I’m witnessing the slow death of logical thought. So is every English teacher in America.

—William Zinsser

Not writing

Not writing is important: it’s restorative. Taking a break from the work is also a part the work. Nobody really talks about that part of being a writer, and I know why they don’t. It’s scary. When I’m writing, I feel plugged in and energized and in sync. But when I’m not writing, I feel out of it. I have the very real fear that I’ll never be able to write anything ever again.  When you look at the stiff, dark branches of trees in the winter, isn’t it hard to imagine those same trees all lush and full of leaves?

But winter happens. Then spring comes.

—Sarah Selecky
in guest post at Pickle Me This

A deep-seated fear

It’s painful to write. It’s painful to take a clear look at your finances, at your health, at your relationships. At least it’s painful when you have no confidence that you can actually improve in those areas. I would not speak for anyone else, but most of my distractions … are traceable to a deep-seated fear that I may not ultimately prevail.

—Ta-Nehisi Coates

Only slightly less morally repugnant than serial killers

In movies, writers are only slightly less morally repugnant than serial killers (unless the writer is a serial killer). According to Hollywood, writers are either parasites (Deconstructing Harry, Barton Fink, Capote, Misery); perverts (The Squid and the Whale, Adaptation, Wonder Boys, American Splendor); addicts (Permanent Midnight, Barfly, Leaving Las Vegas, Sideways), or sociopaths (La Piscine, Deathtrap, The Shining). They have monstrous egos and tiny, wizened hearts. Their moral compasses are permanently cracked; their personal relationships are cynically contrived to produce “experience,” which they feed to the insatiable maw of their craft. They are creatively constipated. They practice poor personal hygiene. They are not lovely to look at. It almost goes without saying that they are almost always male.

—Jennie Yabroff

One side of the story

[N]o matter how confessional a writer might seem, you are only seeing what they want you to see. You know what they want you to know. There are few things more controlled, to my mind, than a personal blog. It’s easy to believe you know everything about a person when you follow their blog or their writing online but you don’t. … Were holding up a mirror to ourselves but are controlling the angle.
…
You also only get to see one side of the story when you read a personal blog. … You see one side of the story, my side … You see the side of the story I choose to show you[.]

—Roxane Gay

The point of the place

A few years ago I used that passage in my memoir-writing class to suggest how to write about a place. Mere facts, I said, aren’t sufficient (“our house was on Spruce Street,” “the neighbors had a dog named Spot”). The task is to find the point of the place—its identifying idea. It may be waiting for you to find it. Or you may have to impose on the place some larger idea of your own.

—William Zinsser

Something that might endanger

[W]e’re bringing up generations of writers who think of [reviewing] as something that other people do, far away, or something that might endanger their fellowship, their recommendation, their job application, their grant application, their ability to get blurbs or to receive the coveted invitations to this or that conference, residency, or institute. This makes me uncomfortable, and it also makes me kind of lonely. I still think the writers are the smartest, most interesting, funniest, weirdest people in any given room. I miss hearing their voices.

—Stacey D’Erasmo

This book has an owl in it

[Reviews that] don’t bother to provide the reader with an accurate description of the books’ formal or verbal properties [are untrustworthy]. To say that something is “boring” is not a statement about a book, although the speaker may think that it is; it’s a statement about the reader’s poverty of equipment. … The marks of a trustworthy review, therefore, have a kind of doubleness: the reviewer manages to assert somehow that the book under discussion is of some importance for one reason or another; and second, a good review provides a formal description of the book’s properties, so that you could reconstruct it from the reviewer’s sketch of it. This description is not the same as a plot summary, although a plot summary may figure into it. What a formal description does is to show what a book is about in relation to the form in which the subject matter has been shaped or located. In order to write such a review, let’s say of a novel, you have to have a basic idea of how novels are constructed; you have to have the technical knowledge that allows you to stand back from the book and to say how a book is put together. By these criteria, quite a few book reviews are worthless. They are made up of what I call Owl Criticism. With Owl Criticism, you have statements like, “This book has an owl in it, and I don’t like owls.”

—Charles Baxter