The Grasshopper #55: Routines
And when to break them
Writing that number up there, 55, kind of freaked me out this morning. I still think of The Grasshopper as a new thing, my experiment in something, intentionally not well defined. But 55 issues is no longer a new thing, it’s a part of my routine as a writer.
The only way you write something substantial like a novel or 55 issues of a weekly newsletter is to develop a routine. Actually in my case it’s well over 100 issues because I’m on a schedule of Wednesdays and Sundays and have been almost since the beginning just over a year ago.
But I’ve learned something about what a routine actually does. It signals that it is time to write a certain kind of thing, much different from my daily topical writing. Right now, it’s Monday morning and I know I need a Grasshopper to send out Wednesday at 12:02 am. So I open a Google Doc, jot down a theme, and then see what happens.
Right now the world outside is calm but a few minutes ago a guy with Tourette’s walked by my building screaming threats and obscenities at the top of his lungs at absolutely nobody. I don’t hear him very often, maybe once a month, but he is a part, a bit alarming part, of the neighborhood. A very nice, even posh, neighborhood I should say.
I used a man walking and speaking to himself as a harbinger of death in my last novel, but he was a quiet man, wearing a Homburg hat and an old suit and saying “there’s a warm wind in the west” over and over as he walked by my character.
It unsettled her and it unsettled me, even though I made him up and had no idea what he heralded with his cryptic message. And in the next scene, the bus she was riding on had a freak accident and the driver was killed, only a few feet from my character.
This turned out, as death often does, to be a plot point signaling to her that it was time to deal with something she had been putting off for a long time.
I had no idea I was going to kill off that driver, or why, or how, until I wrote the scene.
It took a routine to do that extremely unroutine thing, to write a death and a turning point and to describe it in a very non-dramatic voice, the way I thought it might look in real life. The routine is the framework for letting something go inside, that logical voice that is not the voice I use when writing.
So something mundane like a writing routine unleashes the ability to go somewhere unexpected. It’s very Zen in its contradictory thing, the idea that you transform something mundane, like doing dishes, by the way you attend to it.
You might think this kind of thing only applies to so-called creative writing like fiction, rather than the more mundane writing like a rant about a politician, but it applies there too. I’ve talked about finding your voice in your writing and I think this is an example of how you do that, by letting go.
By the way, when I sat down to write this I had no idea where it was going, but somehow it found a logic of its own. Bob’s your uncle.
Bob’s your uncle
I have absolutely no idea what that expression means and I can’t fathom its origin. If anyone knows, please enlighten me in a comment. But as a writer, I find something delightful in the phrase and I have no idea why. Maybe it is because it has a beat to it. Or maybe I just need another coffee.
Cliches
Cliches are a writer’s bane yet we all fall back on them at times. But for me, the comment that writing is cliched is a true insult. The idea that one’s writing is derivative or unoriginal would be a slap in the face.
The thing about writing online like this is the readers have the ability to respond directly, one on one, with the writer. If you’re a Substack subscriber you have access to their new Notes feature which is a Twittery clone where dialog on just about anything can take place. But, like Twitter, I find most of what people post is really just random thoughts, often not interesting in the least.
Threaded dialog like that can be very hard to follow and I like to be able to follow a through line in writing that stacks ideas on each other to build a story or support an opinion. With good writing that line can take the odd turn without losing the reader, as described in the anecdote about the man in a Homburg mentioned earlier.
I took pleasure in writing that little scene, not knowing that the man was serving as a kind of oracle foreshadowing something dark and life changing. When you can take pleasure in your work, you’re entering a flow state, a place where time pauses for a moment.
When I wrote the bus crash, I was seeing the scene become a slow motion wreck as my character watched it unfold in real time, but real time in which every moment had significance. She sees details, like a film that has been slowed and then returns to the pace of real time. But when the driver dies she is jolted into the present and forced to take action.
I don’t know whether it is because the spring days are getting longer or maybe I'm feeling my age, but I’ve been very conscious of the role of time in writing. You have to manage its passing so the reader stays with you from scene to scene.
I wrote two pieces yesterday for Medium, one on censorship and education and one on how AI has already made it almost impossible to be certain the information we consume is real. I’m predicting they won’t do that well because they felt a little forced, but sometimes you just have to get in there, pick up a shovel and start digging. That’s not always fun but that is sometimes how you get to the gist of something.
But if you’re not getting anywhere it is probably time to take a walk.
A few days ago I got a comment on The Witness Chronicles from a reader who was canceling their subscription because I write about Republican and Democratic elections. They suggested it was a low form of writing and I should move onto something else.
I’ve made it clear here that writing on those topics is what I do for my day job. Everyone is entitled to their opinions but lecturing me on the general topics I write about struck me as odd.
Maybe I just have a thin skin this week!
Did you write today?
Martin ‘thin skin’ Edic
1167 words
I believe it is the British equivalent of the American expression "... and there you have it!", or the non-verbal gesture of brushing one's hands upon completion of something.
In 1887, British Prime Minister Robert Gascoyne-Cecil appointed his nephew Arthur James Balfour as Minister for Ireland. The phrase 'Bob's your uncle' was coined when Arthur referred to the Prime Minister as 'Uncle Bob'. Apparently, it's very simple to become a minister when Bob's your uncle! This expression is more common in British English than in American English. An American equivalent would be and there you go.