The Grasshopper #68: Look Inside
It’s all in there
“There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well.”
~ Ann Patchett, Tom Lake
“There’s the void, and then out of the void comes creativity in all these myriad forms. When you experience this, and it’s not a philosophy, you understand that this is a play, the Hindus call it the Lila, the play of the divine, or something like that. And it doesn’t mean you don’t have to take care of your part.”
~ Jack Kornfeld in a podcast with Tim Ferriss (transcript)
“And from that, then, which is what you’ve done, then you can enter, or you go to Japan or you going to say, all right, let’s play this game. Let’s do martial arts, let’s do business. But you do it with less fear and attachment and much more with the delight of the game.”
Another Kornfeld quote from that podcast. The guy is on a roll but he hits on exactly what we need to do to write well. Play the game, know it’s a game, have fun.
When I’m happy as a writer, and you should be there sometimes, it is one of the most enjoyable experiences I can imagine. I know that for many expressing yourself can be painful. But as you practice, that will change. You’ll evolve into the conduit, the hand that connects the inner you to the world.
That, honestly, is what all of this is about.
Lest we get too lala, let me tell you about my morning. Last night my friend and I were playing dominoes, with her patiently teaching me the rules and kicking my ass. All over drinks on an absolutely perfect summer night. So I was pleasantly foggy this morning.
I start my day by reading a lot of news and the latest Trump indictments came out. The fact that I can write ‘the latest’ is a damning testimony to how far our country has fallen. A large percentage of us support that guy. But this struck me:
He told Mike Pence, when he refused to decertify the election, “you’re too honest”.
This just hit me as the essence of this man, if we can call him that. So I wrote and published a brief diatribe. It was cathartic to be momentarily outraged before I even had my coffee. (The link bypasses the Medium paywall, btw).
The other half of The Grasshopper is The Witness Chronicles and this kind of thing is why. As writers we have an obligation to witness things and chronicle them. Not just politics, human nature, and other fundamental aspects of life. You can write fantasies or murder mysteries, but the best of these still contain reality and human nature.
Wonky stuff
As mentioned previously, Medium announced a new measurement system for calculating payments based on rewarding more in-depth pieces, and the degree of reader response, as measured by a combination of read time, claps, comments, and reader highlighting. The goal is to filter out the endless flow of stupid get rich articles and listicles. And AI crapola.
I started testing this earlier this week with a 2000 word piece about living with and adapting to climate change. So far, and it has only been a few days, it is performing well. At the rate it is going it will be worth around $70 per one thousand reads, about $25 more than my typical shorter pieces (500-1000 words). That’s a big jump.
It might seem that it would be equally worth it to write 2-3 shorter pieces but I enjoyed taking some time with this one and I strongly support Medium’s goal of cleaning up the trash content that litters the site. The new Boost guidelines also promise to penalize that stuff by not compensating pieces that only get skimmed or looked at briefly.
One thing I’ve learned from writing The Grasshopper is readers are not afraid of longer content, and this hopefully will prove the case with these new Medium algorithms. Anything that will improve the reader experience is very important to me as both a writer and reader.
I’m currently rereading Winston Churchill’s The Second World War, his monumental six volume history of the war from his perspective as one of the three leaders fighting Hitler’s Nazism. The others were Roosevelt and Stalin.
These are unusual works of history because he was a major player in that history and an accomplished writer. According to Wm. Manchester’s masterful biography of Churchill, he was the highest paid writer on the planet during the first half of the twentieth century.
The man was incredibly prolific as a writer, writing on every imaginable topic, including what can only be called self-help articles, for popular magazines like The Saturday Evening Post. Those magazines would take almost anything he wrote because he was very popular and his name on the cover would sell magazines.
But it is his history writing that survives him, including his multi-volume histories of the First World War and the life of his relative, the Duke of Marlborough. I find it encouraging and a bit strange that writing was his principal source of income and like a lot of us, he lived from check to check.
Popular writers were paid much more in those pre-tv days. Though he was the son of a Duke, he was the second son and as such, did not inherit the money or Blenheim Palace, their ancestral home. In Britain politicians live a precarious existence because their jobs can be lost at the whim of the people. So, writing essentially kept one of the greatest statesmen in history available to serve.
On another note, he was a very accomplished watercolorist and one of his paintings recently sold at auction for several million dollars. An amazing man.
As you can see, I’ve been in a bit of a contemplative mood this week. We thought we lost my mom last week but she rallied and is in a nursing home for rehab with the hope, but not the guarantee, that she will return to her home (she is 92, so no guarantees). But it’s great to see her doing better and talking up a storm.
About to disembark on a new writing project- I’ll keep you posted. And politics and climate keep providing me with endless things to opine about. Both are beyond surrealistic.
Did you write today?
Martin
1127 words
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So Happy Marianne is rehabbing!
Please teach me dominos over cocktails.
Interesting about Churchill. I knew he wrote a major work of history but not that he wrote anything else.