The Grasshopper #6: Flow
Note: normally I schedule this to go out automatically at 12:02 am on Wednesdays. But last night the second (actually the fifth but I may have lost count) mass shooting of the week was front of mind and I was thinking about guns and politicians, particularly Republican politicians.
I don’t write about politics here. But that is my principal focus on Medium.com where I publish every day. I’m working on a newsletter called The Witness Chronicles to get that writing out beyond the paywall. My goal here is to talk about creativity, an act that should be based on love, not hatred or anger.
Last night it was hard to go to that place, but creative expression is part of what keeps us human. So, we need to keep the flow positive even in the face of terrible things, M
This morning I wrote a piece that felt pretty incoherent as I wrote it. But I took a break and went back to it and it makes sense to me. Sometimes you have to go with the flow.
After five issues and my series of posts on writing, I’m starting to see a pattern emerge in The Grasshopper. It’s the notion that writing is not really a conscious act, in fact you have to let the conscious act go if you are going to reach deeper.
“As a writer he was a “taker-outer,” not a “keeper-inner,” Legendary baseball writer and New Yorker fiction editor, Roger Angell on his writing and editing style (noted in David Remnick’s piece on Angell after his death recently at 101).
Don’t Get Clever, We Can See It
If you get caught, you break the flow
The ‘we’ in my title are the readers. Remember us? We’re why you’re doing this thing, writing or creating something that conveys meaning.
The single most important thing as a writer, or any artist for that matter, is to get a reader to stop thinking and go with it, and that is tricky.
I love a beautifully constructed sentence, one that winds around like a vine in pursuit of the sun and rain.
But I write for digital consumption, a phrase it occasionally pains me to write and a truth it pains me to acknowledge.
Readers consume things differently these days and the medium they are using to consume changes those habits.
Short sentences. Punchy phrases designed to shift gears.
Spaces to put umph into the next thought.
We are trained by movies and TV to consume in scenes. Each scene serves one purpose and only one purpose. After it fulfills its purpose it must push the reader to the next scene.
Back in the sixties, art house films often had long scenes of dialog interspersed with existential dread.
If you were an intellectual kid or an academic, you mistook this stuff for something cool.
That stuff doesn’t hold up these days. It was great for its time, innovative even, but it was leftover from theatrical writing.
Theatrical writing is writing designed for a sustained live performance and captive audience. Did you ever have to read the script of a play? Unless you are an actor, they just don’t transfer as prose.
Things change. We, as readers, change. But something important remains.
You have to keep the reader out in the current, where the action is. Does this mean you have to write action and non-stop thrills? Not at all, but it does mean that if you let a reader drift off into calmer waters, something else might grab their attention.
This doesn’t always mean snappy, bam, bam, bam writing.
I spent the two years of Covid working my way through War and Peace, all 1215 pages of it. Towards the end a main character, Prince Andrei, is grievously wounded in a climactic battle and is being nursed by a young girl who is in love with him.
At some point the story goes into his head and we follow his drifting thoughts as he starts to die. The writing is incredibly strange and moving, unlike anything else I have read. You’re not actually sure what is going on, but as it progresses you start to realize that Tolstoy is taking on the hardest of tasks, following a soul into territory none of us know. The Prince dies and we are there with him, in his perspective.
This passage haunts me as a writer and a reader. I don’t know exactly how Tolstoy went there. Hemingway took this on in For Whom the Bell Tolls, somewhat less successfully, but he knew his Russian literature and I think he saw a challenge.
After I read Prince Andrei’s death scene, I went back to read the scene where he is wounded. It is in an artillery battle and since this is eighteen-twelve he does not get killed by an explosion. He actually gets hit by a cannonball.
Grievously injured indeed.
In these two scenes, both near the end of the book, as Tolstoy is working towards the end of a true epic, the reader (me) was riveted. One with a detail of the horror of battle, the other almost metaphysical in its imagining of the unimaginable.
The writer in me will be studying those scenes for the rest of my life.
One never suspends disbelief. There are no extraneous words or unnecessary asides. You never leave the flow because those things do not interrupt it.
They exist on a mundane conscious level. Great writing comes from a different place and takes us back there.
Good, now we have a real goal as writers. M
Writer’s Block and Friendships, Colliding Neural Pathways
You have to follow illogical connections
It’s a Saturday morning, spring, warm and muggy, thunderstorms headed our way later. You can feel it. The light looks different and the air feels different. We haven’t had a day like this since last fall.
Because it is Saturday, I’ve been roaming around in my reading, skipping most of the politics and war stuff and just seeing what comes up. Two topics struck me. Roxanne Gay, a literary agent and writer whose newsletter The Audacity popped up in my feed, wrote a piece about a famous bakery in Paris. Somehow halfway through she switched gears and was talking about writer’s block.
That kind of thing fit my state of mind perfectly this morning. Then I read a piece on Medium about a retiree who has been unable to make new friends.
Somehow the notion of a well known writer who struggles, in her mind, with writer’s block, and the story of a person who is really trying to connect with others seemed related. Both involve an inability to shift perspectives.
The writer thinks her writing should be something specific.
The retiree, who is doing social stuff, needs to relearn the baby steps of friendship.
Both need to do something to develop some new neural pathways. I’ve been in both places.
Writer’s block is interesting because once you get past it, it seems laughable that you let it get to you. I don’t have a secret, except to say, you have to start with something and then free associate a bit.
Being blocked is letting an internal critic get the upper hand. My way of dealing with it is to ignore that critic and just play a bit. Don’t be good. Don’t read your stuff right after you write. If you get stuck, write a nonsensical sentence, then try incorporating it into what you are trying to say.
Don’t fight it.
Loneliness is a different matter. This writer posted a picture of herself in her piece and she is very large. The fact that she posted a picture, but never mentioned her size made the shrink in me think she believes this is why she can’t connect.
She may be uncomfortable in her own skin and others can sense that. But she wrote about her friendship issue in a very public place and made no excuses.
Both of these issues are about frustration. “Why can’t I say what I want and why can’t people see past my body?” Both issues are about finding yourself out of the flow of life. The challenge is that you have to get right in, all at once, like diving into a cold lake in spring. Gradually doesn’t cut it.
But it can be hard to jump in when you’re afraid of being burned again or finding yourself up against the same old thing.
I’m older, but I learned something about meeting people a long time ago. It requires an effort, an effort uncomfortable for many. You need a small degree of persistence if you sense a connection. Bridges are not built in a day and you are building a bridge.
The main building block you need is listening and asking and then shutting up to hear the response. It’s hard, especially if you are unsure of yourself.
Long ago I wrote a book about sales. When I was learning to sell, a sales manager I respect a lot told me this: when you name a price, the first one to respond will give something up. You have to hold back and not complicate the issue with justifications, etc.
You wait for them to respond because their response will reveal any hesitation. It may even reveal the actual issue, known in sales as the ‘objection’, that is holding them back. If you know your stuff, you should anticipate virtually every objection and have a response, even if the response is ‘maybe this is not the right fit’.
When we meet someone interesting, we tend to start selling. That is almost always the exact wrong thing to do. The person who starts listing their accomplishments shortly after you meet them is selling. They are giving you a verbal resume.
I don’t know about you, but I have read a lot of resumes and they are almost always complete bullshit.
But once in a while you get one that tells me something about the person, mainly by what they don’t say.
I’m rambling, but the advice I’d give the lonely person is to ask a somewhat personal question and then wait. It can be as simple as asking them how they handle a situation.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“Have you ever….”
You won’t be good at this right away, but practice helps. But 90% of the time the other will tell you something personal you can relate to. That’s a start.
Writer’s block is about second guessing yourself before you have even written a word. Fortunately there is a solution. Just write badly until it starts to flow, then follow that flow wherever it goes. Don’t steer, don’t fight, just ride the current.
Same deal with meeting people. If the conversation drifts, maybe it’s not meant to be. And remember, don’t take it personally.
That is my golden rule.