gotta use words

Choosing to Be a Writer: Ulterior Motives and Good Intentions

Like many college students, I had a hard time focusing on just one subject to study – one major to define four years of my life and provide the foundation for my career. It was a lot of pressure from professors, from family, and mostly from inexplicable reactions that happened in an unfamiliar territory that felt like my stomach suffering from indigestion. The pressure grew into uncontrolled worry, paranoia, and insomnia before I decided to end it regardless of the consequences. After settling haphazardly on Spanish and international studies, I immediately switched to piano performance and allowed the incessant demand for hard work to swallow my thoughts and energy. Three years passed before I made my last and most difficult change, deciding to study English with a concentration in professional writing and rhetoric. Why?

On Writing for Life

It’s a question I often ask myself, and others who consider my behavior strange have demanded solid reasons for my apparent mismanagement of self and of others’ resources. To them, I point out that I did graduate in four years, magna cum laude. They no longer feel that I owe an explanation, but on solitary afternoons without music, I have to answer my own question. I do miss the piano and the ability to enjoy the company of other musicians who need no words to communicate. But the practical side of me that’s been unfairly paired with a strictly creative spirit is fulfilled by writing and left cold by music.

I began to approach the idea of becoming a writer when I realized that studying music would not equip me for life after college. It was a purely practical urge, one that I had ignored in order to focus on developing myself as a musician, and it had grown to a size that couldn’t be ignored. I knew that out of the slew of impractical skills and hobbies I had, writing was the most practical and had the most potential for getting me through life in the real world. What I didn’t expect from it was the opportunity to be creative.

Writing as Profession

I’m a professional writer. I use writing as a versatile tool to accomplish a variety of goals, such as successful communication, informing others, constructing marketing campaigns, publicizing, and even entertaining. I manipulate words to achieve specific effects – the ultimate practical use of writing. And although I’m not changing the world or solving its problems, my practical side is satisfied that I’m able to support myself while I plot my next move. Fortunately, that’s not where my decision to be a writer ends – I also allow myself to enjoy writing as a creative enterprise.

Writing as Creation

They say you should write every day if you want to become a serious writer. I do that as work, but it’s not what I would be writing if I had the choice – and I think that’s the important part of writing for personal development. After I’ve worked all day, writing for two different jobs, I have to find a way to rediscover writing as creation. At night, I leave the keyboard out of the equation, grab a notebook and a few pens, and leave my home office. It doesn’t matter if I just go sit in my car to write or if I go to a café, but physically leaving work for play is the only way I can access my creative writer. And without that opportunity to write as release, I wouldn’t be a writer.

The Nature of Writing

It’s an interesting entity. Writing can be every bit as artistic as painting, performing music, acting, or dancing, but it’s also a tool that can be used for efficient communication – a tool that’s indispensable in today’s corporate and social world. I like to think that I’ve chosen both practicality and creativity, and it’s a great feeling.

Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, where recently she’s been researching different online bsw degrees and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

You wouldn’t think that someone with Dante’s status and profile wouldn’t have a scout, his canary in a coal mine,would you?

Down past where Dante found it necessary to report on, I’d been places, seen things – and I didn’t get out.

I was Dante’s Scout. I was in the suburbs. I abandoned Hope.

That’s sort of how it’s felt sometimes these last five years.  I was a city guy used to all kinds of street life and eccentrics – surprises around every corner, the urban “museum without walls”.

Moving twenty miles out of the city Casbah, I found that parking was available – you just didn’t have to factor it in! What else? Well, that each colliding town had it’s own character and demographics, that you could get out to the country proper in minutes, and this giant new area code was as complicated and diverse as my favourite downtown ethnic market. There are people in the suburbs who are just as sophisticated as in the city. Maybe most interesting to me was the way different ethnic groups shared space. In the city, you go to Chinatown, Little Italy, Greek Town, Little India and immerse yourself in one culture at a time. In the suburbs, any given commercial area will have all these groups cheek by jowl in the same neighbourhood. Maybe the “melting pot” or “salad bowl” is more truly realized in the suburbs?

Which is a long way of saying that I grew to appreciate the ‘burbs. Now, I’m going back to the big smoke.

I want to talk about being out in this landscape while I’m still here because all the people I’ve met, roads I’ve driven, towns I’ve visited are not going to come into my city to pose. I have to do this on location, “in situ”.

A painter needs to be in front of his subject/object to do it justice. He or she keeps going back to the landscape, or the model keeps coming to the studio. And although a writer can pull from memory and write just about anywhere, I know I’ll forget. I’ll forget the feel of the place and the flavour. I’ll forget what the air smells like when I walk out of a coffee shop and that first sip outside heightens the fragrance of wood smoke and apples. That’s just one thing.
Some of these things I am missing already before I move. They are memories in the making,

The word “memory” comes from Mnemosyne the goddess of Memory and wife of Zeus. She is one of the three elder Muses. By Zeus she became the mother of the nine younger Muses.

▲ Mom and the Girls ▼

 

It is fascinating to me that Mnemosyne is the Goddess of Memory AND the inventor of words. What a combination.
Here is what a few other fellows had to say on the matter. 

Back to Dante:
from his “Inferno Canto XXXII:1-39 The Ninth Circle: The frozen River Cocytus”:

“If I had words, rough and hoarse enough, to fit the dismal chasm, on which all the other rocky cliffs weigh, and converge, I would squeeze out the juice of my imagination more completely: but since I have not, I bring myself, not without fear, to describe the place: to tell of the pit of the Universe is not a task to be taken up in play, nor in a language that has words like ‘mother’ and ‘father’. But may the Muses, those Ladies, who helped Amphion shut Thebes behind its walls, aid my speech, so that my words may not vary from the truth.”

I am only Dante’s scout. I can’t rival the above. Nonetheless, before I return “above ground”, I will attempt in a forthcoming post (or two) to write a little about my experience in a place I once thought of as hell. I’ll try to do this before it’s all a bunch of memories. Or I can dial up the Muses.

Today’s Listening:

1. Memory Pain by Percy Mayfield
2. If I’m Still Around Tomorrow – Roberta Flack and Sadao Watanabe
3. Circular Circulation by the GTO’s (Girls Together Outrageously)
4. Treasure Island – Bob James with Eric Gale

Memory hoarding?

 

The recent attention in the media to hoarders, has brought the subject, if not the clothes, out of the closet.

And when you see the pictures of these people’s houses, you can feel the tangibility of all that junk. You can be disgusted. You can feel pity. You may be prodded to do a little purging yourself.

But what about hoarding memories? Is it the same as having “baggage”?
It’s the same old problem with dealing with invisible things. Another example of how the eye is a tyrant.
I first came across this notion of the dominance of the visual while reading “The Lords and the New Creatures” when I was 14 and ordered the 1st Edition when I was 14 (I thump my chest).

      

How much of our consciousness is taken up by memories? How much of our belief systems, values, are informed by memories? And are these memories real, or selective? What goes on?

On a recent episode of CSI, the typical hoarder theme was used to show what hoarding looks like, what the psychology of a hoarder might be, and the mischief that hoarding can lead to. We were already used to a lot of this by way of the reality TV shows about hoarding. But what interested me was the use of “time capsule” hoarding in the CSI episode.
Unlike the usual garbage all over the place, possessions were carefully stored in plastic storage bins and stacked according to a time-line.

This seemed to go beyond “someday this will come in handy” or “I just can’t let go of these things I paid good money for”. This seemed to be someone writing their autobiography by stashing material things in a chronological “order”.
Memories in physical form were being organized into some kind of story. 

There’s no question that hoarding takes up space most of us would sooner have as … space. And, as far as I know, there is no way to digitize all the junk you can’t let go of – no way to go “paperless”.
Of course, we can be “virtual” hoarders. Check out “If I Were a Hoarder” for lots of good, clean, messy, fun.

But, as far as “time capsule hoarding” goes, couldn’t this be another way for people to write things down?

The dumpster as diary? Worse things have been written. I’m sure of it.

Today’s Listening:

1. Small Town Talk by Amos Garrett & Maria Muldaur
2. Every Day I Write The Book by Elvis Costello
3. Whispering Grass by Sandy Denny
4. Do It The Hard Way by Chet Baker

Over the last five years, I’ve been writing from odd places.
For instance, I got into the habit of driving at night.

I went for night drives for hours at a time just north of this suburban town I live in.

When the sun went down, I’d start to come alive and head out for a soothing ride along concession roads, occasionally spotting the welcoming amber lights of rural homes.

Like beacons,  they seemed to say: “We’re still up”.
Up to all sorts of things.
“See, we’re still awake in the country. When you least expected.”

Dozens of these lights in homes, at their most mysterious and attractive allure.

“Stop in. Take refuge”, they’d say.
“We know why you are driving and you can stop in – take some rest.”

Previously, these kinds of places I only acknowledged in the crooks and crannies of the city. Forgotten rooms in the closed-for-the-night museum city.

Out here in the suburbs, the country is just beyond the last big box store – maybe 15 minutes away.

Listening to an audiobook, listening to a radio show, ideas would inevitably pop into my head.
It could be the perfect marriage of Declan Hughes’s novels and the reading of them by Stanley Townsend.
It could be the few excellent radio shows remaining on CBC hosted by longtime airwave friends like Katie Malloch on Tonic, Holger Petersen on his Saturday Night Blues, or Laurie Brown on The Signal.

It could be those houses, odd store signs

in newly discovered towns, a late-night CP freight train plowing through an old-fashioned level-crossing. The latter often affording the opportunity of up to 25 minutes of uninterrupted writing to the sound of wheels on rails against the background of silence. The odd Doppler effect on the train whistle mimicking the moan of a blues harmonica.
Once, I even experienced the confluence of a train whistle with the most blue moment of a slow harmonica break by Charlie Musselwhite. The two sounds potentiated each other into something euphoric, accidental, miraculous and transporting.

The above are examples of external stimuli that sparked off inspiration inside me for stories. And they just had to be written down.

Naturally all this magic would happen at the worst possible times for scribbling down anything. I’d learned all the reliable places where I could quickly pull over and record my genius observations: shoulders of roads lit by a flashing stop sign, the lights in a church parking lot, or just the overhead light inside the car.

On a hot summer night last July, I had stopped my car on the side of truly remote side road. As I worked away in my notebook, there was a tap on the window. A policewoman had cruised up beside me and now was asking me… well, she had a hard time asking me anything. I wasn’t speeding or doing anything illegal. I was just an aberration, parked there at 2 in the morning apparently doing nothing.
“Is everything alright?”, I think she said.
“Yes, I’m just writing down an idea for a story I’m working on”, I think I said.
A pause.
“I believe you.”
A pause.
“Have a good night sir.”

I’m not doing this much anymore. I’m returning to the city after half a decade. I can’t hope to capture everything I’ve seen and thought during this time. This has been an amateur point-and-shoot version of nights and nights and nights in a car, in the dark. An indulgence in solitude and an attempt to get myself sane for a few minutes, maybe a couple of hours.
It’s absurd, hurtling along through a tunnel of trees and farmland in a monstrous piece of tin. However, it seemed I came to be accepted more and more by nature as the old car I drive succumbed to its fate. Nature was reclaiming it, even as I rolled along with my dashboard lights luring the spirits in, my car was being recycled, minisculely, bit by bit, heading back into the formless absolute. The trees are winning.

Today’s Listening:

1. End of the Day by Doug Paisley fr: “Constant Companion”
2. Pleasures of the Harbor by Phil Ochs fr: “Pleasures of the Harbor”
3. Maiden Voyage by Herbie Hancock fr: “Maiden Voyage”
4. Driving Away from Home by It’s Immaterial fr: “Life’s Hard and Then You Die”

 

Many years ago I worked in a Forensic Psychiatric Unit in a hospital. Our primary function was to assess the mental stability of people charged with criminal offenses. They were sent to us at some point during their voyage through the legal system by an officer of the court, a judge or a lawyer, to determine their fitness to stand trial or their dangerousness or their sanity. We saw every possible combination of mad and bad. For example some of them who had been charged with very violent crimes were sane as rain. Others, charged with public mischief, were utter lunatics and of course the place where these two groups intersected was where you really had to watch your back (side) especially if you were alone in a room with them.

Now there were lots of us doing this work but we were not all members of the same club. There were nurses, social workers, psychologists, psychiatric assistants, correctional officers, and psychiatrists. The latter group teetered dangerously at the top of this menacing totem pole in terms of their salaries and their power in the joint . This included their power over the clientele.
When we were not seeing patients or in meetings, we wrote and wrote and wrote. Every time any one of us saw somebody, we had to file a report somewhere. These were usually handwritten and sometimes they got typed and all went into the patient’s file. The final report, a supposed amalgamation of all the prior reports was the one that accompanied the accused back into the court system and it was almost always written by a psychiatrist who was often called into court to testify.

Perhaps the most dangerous men and women we assessed suffered from major mental illnesses such as paranoid schizophrenia and acted out their delusions particularly when they were not on medication. Most were- but not everyone and not always. If you were a nurse or psychiatric assistant or correctional officer you would be pulling eight hour shifts on the unit and there was a good chance you would be present during someone’s emotional escalation or altercation with another. There was a pretty good chance that they might take a swing at you or something more original. I remember one extremely paranoid young woman, charged with murder, who became very agitated and in the process of being physically restrained by six staff members bit a rather unpopular male head nurse in the left buttock. He did have a rather firm smallish rear end somewhat resembling two apples which was shown to great advantage by tight pants.

Those not on the front line: social workers psychiatrists, psychologists, had the luxury of brief intermittent contact. Even the most agitated character, could keep it together for half an hour . That being said it didn’t stop them from taking the occasional swing at one of us even though it was not in their best interests. In my mind clinical skill was inversely proportional to the number of times you were successfully assaulted. If you were good at your job you could usually tell when your guy or gal was getting hot under the collar either because they were tired of stupid questions or ink blots or because the ghost of jack the ripper has begun to nudge them in the ribs- time to cut the interview short- “We’ll have to continue this next Thursday!”

The other skill was not looking too weird. Paranoids are very fond of seeing evil portents. Year after year there was a psychiatrist that I will call Hamish who topped the list for most pummeled. He was not a bad fellow and although not the most sensitive he was knowledgeable of his field. He was also extremely eager to have murderers on his case load. Unfortunately his mode of dress and demeanor did not underscore his authority or power . He was careless with his glasses which were often broken so he taped them together and sometimes wore a folded up kleenex between his glasses and his ear. I never knew why. His pants rarely reached his ankles and unwittingly he wore the same prison issue running shoes with his polyester dress pants as those whose fates were in his hands. Perhaps his most unfortunate choice of adornment was ink. He wrote on his hands. He wrote phone numbers, names, addresses , grocery lists or other reminders. Once he wrote something on his body I’m sure he became oblivious to it till he needed the information.

Most people tend to be vigilant when they are being evaluated by someone who has power over them . If you happen to be incarcerated and suffer from a paranoid thought disorder this vigilance intensifies – greatly. My guess is that Hamish’s hands became a set of instructions possibly a call to arms. Perhaps the words Schwartz, Milk and Dry Cleaning became a code to some troubled mind that Hamish was a covert assassin and must be stopped before he could kill again. Perhaps the writing on his hands was unrelated to the violence visited upon him. Maybe patients were simply annoyed at the Kleenex over his ear. I’ll never know for sure.
But ever since I worked there, I never write on skin.

Sorry about the interregnum . I’ve been chicken-sitting the last few days and not posting in a dutiful manner.

I’ve also been sitting on 4 posts for the past week because I haven’t been able to find the right way to collate, or organize all the pieces. And when I have most of the pieces, I find myself in a place with no computer or, if with laptop, no internet connection. I’m not into the phone culture (yet), so I’m not going to do a blog post the way young Japanese kids are now writing and publishing and reading novels.

 

On the days that I have my laptop with me, about the only thing I’d need internet access for is to find an image or link, or for a bit of research. The content is pretty much done in longhand, from a day-timer, a Moleskine journal, a big spiral notebook, and the odd scrap of memo paper. I haven’t resorted to my hands or running shoes.

Usually, I can gather the longhand stuff together on a table or footstool, arm of a chair, or today, on a back deck, watching chickens. Then, I can start typing it into the app of my choice on my laptop.

These days I’m using David Michael’s great all-round note-taker and organizer The Journal  and MS Live Writer. Sometimes I realize the import of Philip Kerr‘s 2nd tip in his “20 practical tips on Creative Writing”: “Typing well is not important but good handwriting is important.”

While watching the chickens, I am reading Siri Hustvedt’s novel “What I Loved“. There is a nice line:
“My vanity simply wasn’t strong enough to endure deprivation.“
The main character is talking about trying to undo changes to his middle-aged body. (Although I think this can happen at any age, if your real physical body gets out of whack with the ideal you have of yourself.)
I’m also reading some non-fiction: a biography of Harold Innis 

and the somewhat rare “Self-Portrait” by Ross MacDonald.

Another thing I brought out to the country is a DVD with the first two episodes of the new re-make of Sherlock Holmes called “Sherlock”.

It’s from BBC Wales and will make fans of the Jeremy Brett version happy. At the very least, as a tribute. Imagine Jeremy with a smartphone and Dr. Watson just back from a tour in Afghanistan. Sharp, dark, comforting.

I’ll probably watch Sherlock when I’m sure the chickens have all gone home to their coop for the night. One of them is devious and she roosts in a top corner in the back. It took two trips out there, the last with a flashlight to find her. They all have to be locked in. The coyotes and possums have to be locked out. Then, day is done.

There is, I must say,  a chicken connection to my next planned post because the chickens blink in and out of existence. I’ll try to explain. When I got out here in the country, the chicken coop was open but I couldn’t see chickens anywhere. Now, these are the most sociable chickens in the world and normally they would run up to me from wherever they were. This day, an hour went by and no chickens. Chipmunks, hummingbirds, a blue jay, rabbits, vultures, yes. But where were the girls? I was worried about them. I sat on the back deck and read. Finally, looking up from the page, there they were! All five of them, in a cluster. 

They just seemed to “blink” in, like in those old video games where the bad guys would suddenly “blink” into the screen and get you.
I was relieved and went back to reading. A couple of minutes later, I looked up again and they were gone. And when the chickens blink out, a rabbit happens to blink in.

My next post which is going under the working title “Approaching Zero” talks about Calculus, of all things, and the gap between the blinks.  The main thing is: I have to make up something around these sudden appearances. I knew the chickens are always around even when I can’t see them, but where? I only see them when I see them.
I need to invent the unseen points.

Today’s Listening:

1. World Sick by Broken Social Scene fr: “Forgiveness Rock Record:
2. Origin of Species by Chris Smither fr: “Leave the Light On”
3. The Moment Slipped Away by Christine Lavin fr: “Beau Woes”

Listen.

You can’t do it. There is nothing to listen to on this page.

You haven’t just turned your radio on. You came to a visual space.

There will be listening soon, so hang on. Put up with me for a moment. I have some things to say about listening.  And conversation.

So much of what we say to each other is just reporting. We circulate our news. It passes for conversation.

It’s small talk that fills up time or serves as, how my old friend Tom put it, a social laxative. Often what we say to each other is really proclamation – a one-way bit of info that could be anything from a comment on the weather to a “great truth” delivered as sage advice. I’m not including great, brilliant, spontaneous outbursts like I heard last night. Last night, standing outside my favourite club, “The Moonshine Café”, some of us regulars were talking about the difficulties of getting work and getting paid for it. Out of the blue, one guy said “I just go wherever they’re serving the soup.”

You could tell from the look on his face, as he heard himself and the rest of us laugh, that it had just popped out – though there was certainly the reference to the Great Depression.

I’m talking more about the whole evenings, coffee sessions, and dinner parties where all the talk is “catching up”, a recitation of what’s already happened. Nothing new, nothing original. Sure, conversations can veer into current events or some issue that’s been in the news. Again, it’s second hand stuff.

Maybe this is a kind of re-cycling. We break down our life events into digestible bits and they go back into the word void. The Wordrogen cycle. (I think I will sell  “Wordrogen Cycle” on E-Bay). The Wordrogen Cycle could be nature’s way of cleaning up verbal by-products while you fill people in on your important life and get things off your chest at the same time.

Want to hear a real conversation?

Just go to this page: Home  Conversations with the Captain and you will hear some of the most genuine dialogue around today.

Professor Ron Glasberg and Master’s Candidate Marco Barile didn’t know their informal talk was going to be a hit on the University of Calgary’s website – they didn’t have any list of questions or focus groups. They just started talking, and listening. It’s also remarkable that these are audio downloads – no video – and visitors to the site are still hooked. Score one for audio.

The next link will give you some of the background from Ron and Marco. They really give the best description of how it got going. Here is their video: Conversations with the Captain

I could go on at some length about what is fascinating about this project but, for now, I’ll just mention one aspect that is really interesting to me. This is a project that happened in reverse. I would say that 99% of what you see and hear from any kind of media came from an agenda. Producers or media managers pick a topic, pick the speakers, pick the questions, pick the answers, pick what you get to hear and when and for how long. Honestly, that’s the way it happens most of the time, and that applies to the very best interviews you ever heard. 

In the case of “Conversations with the Captain”, the process was entirely turned around. It didn’t even start out as a project. How refreshing! How hard to edit! It was rather like mining ore from a vast quarry. If a quarry can be 30 plus hours long, that is.

There was someone else involved in this endeavour, definitely the most important person in bringing this series of conversations to the public. Maybe I can convince her to talk about it.

Today’s listening: (a bit of “kangaroo music”, sorry)

1. “Conversations with Myself” by Bill Evans (the whole album, live it up)
2.  Small Town Talk by Paul Butterfield Better Days Band fr: “It All Comes Back”
3. Are You Sleeping?  by Harry Nilsson fr: “The Point”

 

My first computer was the Mac Plus:

 

A little magic box.

It was, however, no replacement for the thing that resembled a bird bath in Jason and the Argonauts that Zeus and Hera used to spy on the humans with. What was that thing called? I’ll post a reward.

Earlier than me, by about five years, some of my writers, notably The Frantics, invested in Macs which, like early cell phones, were the size and weight of a car battery. They’d haul them down the street like briefcases.

Another writer kept on using an IBM Selectric even after buying 3 different Macs. At the urging of his fellows, he decided to “get with it” and bought his first Mac and it sat, unpacked, in his basement till it become obsolete. More urging, more Macs – all unpacked. He died young, still using an electric typewriter. Aside from his colossal talent, I will remember that his scripts always arrived in perfect shape. He would rewrite a whole page if there was a typo, (spell-checked from memory) then go to a professional photocopier for the requisite number of scripts. He also did not drive, so all this was done by streetcar, or cab if recording-time was imminent.

Some guys at work were into arcane machines like the Osborne, and the early Commodores and PCs. They would come into the local pub, bringing  foolscap pages full of code that just didn’t look like any fun. If I wanted a cryptic crossword, I would buy a paper.

The Mac was a lot friendlier but, even so, I couldn’t find anything on it.  Documents would disappear straight into computer limbo. I didn’t even know what a folder or directory was. I missed all my bits of paper. I started to sympathize with my grandfather who was slandered for having the messiest workbench in all the basements in town. “I can put my hand on anything”, he would say.

Even with the help of friends who were really fluent in computer ways, I either couldn’t retain their little training sessions or else I was simply inadequate. Not really inadequate; I was a published writer and writing was all I wanted a computer for. Back then.

Up till that time, the only organization of information I needed to worry about was making a list of music for radio shows I was doing. I’d browse the record library, grabbing a few discs that grabbed my ear. I’d begin to add more discs and audition them in a listening booth.

Inevitably, I would end up with more music than would fit into my allotted time-slot. So began the juggling of musical pieces and calculations to make it all fit the one-hour format. All I can say is: thank God I didn’t have to play Wagner!

In the listening booth, I would end up with a list that looked remarkably like this:

I would then type this up on my Olympia typewriter, using 5-part green carbonless paper. Bang bang bang. I only needed 3 copies, one each for the announcer, the technician, and me.

Sometimes, a yearning kicks in for the analogue days. I miss handling tape, cutting it with a real razor blade, rocking the reels back and forth on the editing machine,  sticking a final label on the tape, and a cue sheet inside the box, and carrying the whole thing down to master control. There was a physical rhythm that isn’t there today.

But even with all the wrangling between artistic programming and the clock, I was lucky.  Structure was imposed on me by the network schedule. As I’ve mentioned in the Tangents post, my incoming info ends up all over the place. Where I record it, and how I organize it, is a real hit and miss exercise. Somehow, things would always work out as long as I knew the 4 walls I was working within. Then I could go crazy, with confidence.

This post is called “an overture” not only because of the musical connotations, but because, in the overall picture, writers can face great challenges getting their thoughts into a structure. And no matter what form the original ideas manifest themselves – in notebooks, Post-It Notes, the backs of receipts, you name it – chances are that a computer is going to get involved. Even if you get someone else to do the word processing and send it off by e-mail to a publisher. I wanted to tell my own lead-up to how I got interested in organizing snippets of writing by way of an introduction to the topic of “soft tools”, especially “outliners” and the philosophies around outlining.

Don’t worry, there will be pictures.

Today’s listening:

1. Heat Wave by Ben Sidran fr: “On The Cool Side”
2. The Underwood Typewriter by Fionn Regan fr: “The End of History”
3.  Pull My Daisy by David Amram fr: “No More Walls”

Last night, I watched  Charlie Rose interviewing Tony Judt. It was Judt’s last interview before passing away on August 6 of ALS.

I had barely heard of Judt before, maybe only because he had won the George Orwell Prize in 2009, and anything referencing George Orwell gets my attention.  Shame on me because this man had written so much, so clearly.

There was so much in the Charlie Rose interview, that resonated with me. That he only felt himself when he was on his way to somewhere, that he loved to write while riding on trains all day. Seemingly aimless travel was the perfect writing environment for him.

He also talked about the progress of his illness and gradually losing physical abilities to the point where all he had left was words.

He reflected that: “I’m now very clear that living can be reduced to the business of communication”

In one of his last essays for the Guardian, He says:

“Translating being into thought, thought into words and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.”

I could have said right at the beginning of this post that here was a man who thought so much the way I do about words and communicating. And by writing down his words, and speaking his words, I feel a kindred spirit. Even if he is gone now and I never read him when he was alive. How many others are out there?

Today’s Listening:
1. Bumpin’ on Sunset – Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express fr: “Live Oblivion 1”
2. Passing Thru – Leonard Cohen fr: “Live Songs”
3. Wish I – Jem fr: “Finally Woken”

I was once in a horrid management training course in which all kinds of moronic theories were marched out for us poor radio producers to memorize. Some of the management flavour of the month dictums included the 5 “T’”s of dealing with problem subordinates (Talking, Training, Teaching, something beginning with T, and Termination), the Pareto Principle, and one that actually stuck with me.

This was a little list on a flip chart with the words Why, What, How. In the context of the course, these words represented the theory that people who know How have to work for people who know What, and people who know What work for people who know Why. Now, there is probably a branded name for this principle and I know it still gets spun six ways from Sunday as a new enlightening tool, and like all of these things, it’s a tad disgusting. But… the order is right. Even if you work alone.

Luckily for writers, and songwriters, and visual artists, the Why is usually taken care of. You “gotta use words”, or that melody has just broken it’s water, or the image that you alone see demands to be shared. As the John Mayer CD says: “Inside Wants Out”.

The What is also covered automatically. Your natural bent is towards a particular medium, as is the output: a book, a CD, a painting. I still cherish the memory of holding a finished 10” reel of tape in my hand, (7”, if truth be told).

Where this blog joins all the above is in the How.

When I imagined what the focus of this blog would be, I had a pretty good idea that it would be about How creative people do it. Not the techniques, or learned skills,  of their craft, but how they shoehorn their inspirations out into the external world. This is magic to me. My problem would be how to organize the content, the topics, etc., into something people could navigate easily.  I had my own How to deal with.

A lot of whirling thoughts went down into my notebook something like this:

This is kind of a poor man’s mind map. But, being out in the country with no electricity, it did fine.

Back at the ranch, I used a real mind mapping program and came up with this:

Beats your old to-do list doesn’t it? At least it’s a start.

Listening for today:
1. Pink-O Boogie – Ry Cooder fr: “I, Flathead”
2. There’s A Rugged Road – Judee Sill fr: “Heart Food”
3. James – Pat Metheny Group fr: “Offramp”