Thomas Sullivan

Have you ever noticed that the outcomes to life’s most successful quests can’t really be foreseen in detail?  If it’s an initiative that your heart is truly into, then whatever concept you have of success ahead of time, the outcome ends up exceeding it.  “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”  But starting out all you can see are the complexities and the problems up front.  The solutions build stroke by stroke like a painting taking on shape and color.  In the process, you are excited and inspired by your own imagination, and the things you come up with are richer and more satisfying than your beginning vision.  This only seems to work with challenges that engage our most perfect dreams, however.  Perhaps that’s because dreams trigger our highest desires and all our capacities are motivated to act.  Compromises need not apply. 

Writing a novel is like that.  If you begin with, “I can’t come up with anything better…” you probably won’t.  But if your first take excites you with an initial recognition that this could be an ultimate in your life, your Best Best, then it comes straight from a committee meeting of your heart, mind and soul chaired by your imagination.  You get to play the Creator.  No need to scale back, dumb down, or rein in.  It’s a very, very critical moment in your life, because you’re going to be married to this endeavor for a long time. 

So you start out with a bare-bones dream, and immediately the problems and obstacles begin to make themselves felt.  Maybe the unwritten part is full of unknowns, your hero is still expanding, and the words won’t come fast enough for the little time you get for your passion, a.k.a. don’t quit your day job.  You try to think over the hurdles, but you go from euphoria to despair as things get more complex and freighted with patches and fixes.  Just when you think you’ve got the resolutions all figured out, some new challenge bedevils you, and yesterday’s solutions seem inadequate today.  If you could just find enough time to work out the problems, you could do it, but stolen moments are never enough, and it’s difficult and frustrating to make it work from pieces.  The catch-22 is that you’ve got to be a full-time player in the game before you get the luxury of having full-time.  You never really get a handle on it until you are in bed with the whole deal. 

Keep the faith! 

Because if you persevere on blind instinct and cross the bridge to a complete ms (however rough), a full vision in your hot little hands, then you have all the elements under your control.  That in itself is a wonderful feeling.  Now you are working with an uninterrupted whole, a total relationship between you and your tale, and everything you do is informed by knowing the consequences ahead of time.  At that point, if you’ve made the right choice of an ultimate endeavor to begin with, it just keeps getting better and better.  Some of it is routine – smoothing, dovetailing, refining, et cetera – but most of it is pure quantum leaps as you see new possibilities and strengthen the connective tissue.  Ingenious twists appear, ironies and larger statements connect, enhancements and refinements evolve, meaning invests itself in every action, scenes tighten, relationships fulfill their natural destinies.  Imagination, imagination, imagination!  I call it layering.  You’ve already secured your story and reached your basic goal.  The book has met minimum standards for success.  So now you are into the transcendent part that you can’t appreciate ahead of time.  This is where you unlock your full potential.  This is how your fantasies become bigger than life.  It’s still a nuts and bolts process, but it comes together on such a scale that it transcends the pieces: the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.  Those unknowns that troubled you in the early going are nailed down and can be adjusted without upsetting the basic plot.  That hero who kept expanding is now all potential rather than all problems.  And the time you didn’t have for your quest is no longer a pressure.  In short, there are just so many possibilities to work with that the choices for development are good, better and best.   These are signature moments for who you are as a writer, a person.  It’s exciting and uncharted, the very peak of what you struggle for in your personal identity and ideals.  Throw away formulas – you make your own rules – because there is no experience that will prepare you for what is unique.  The standards you have for perfection will guide you.  Look inside yourself at what’s imprinted on your radar.  You will recognize what fits because it resonates your instincts, and there is nothing more heady than that rush of creative discovery.  But those rare moments in your journey when you have it all together won’t announce themselves conveniently.  Good things are measured by birth pains.  If they didn’t require sacrifice, they wouldn’t be worth doing.  What was that stat writer Rick Steinberg cited a few columns ago – of 1.8 million novels started in the U.S. in one year, only about 181,000 were even finished.  Most people just gave up. 

That single-mindedness is, for me, the best part of anything creative.  It engages my capacities to the max and draws out all my best.  I feel like a committee.  There is no way that a single version of me could produce what I am absorbed in.  It takes who I am Monday through Sunday, 24/7/365 to pull it off.  This is what I meant by the first sentence of this column: “Have you ever noticed that the outcomes to life’s most successful quests can’t really be foreseen in detail?”  The cumulative resources you bring to a pursuit over time add up to much more than you can anticipate at any given moment.  Another colleague, Brian Hodge, posted a terrific quote last summer by mountaineer and author of The Evidence of Things Not Seen, W. H. Murray:

“Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: That the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the discussion, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.  I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:

            ‘Whatever you can do or dream, you can begin it. 

Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!’”

Murray mentions providence, and I haven’t focused on that here, but yes, if you choose something that fully responds to your nature to begin with, then you will energize all kinds of unforeseen plusses with your own enthusiasm.  Whether that’s simply the compatibility that your instincts recognize, or some totally outside force, it unfailingly compounds the richness and range of whatever you do.  Call it the X factor.  It’s the intangible something that separates the uncommon from the common, that bit of elusive magic at the pinnacle of every perfection.  Yet it’s amazing how close at hand that is and how accessible if you just have the right attitudes and surround yourself with a positive atmosphere.  The opposite is true too.  Negatives are dead ends and dead ends are negatives.  Shun them.  I’ve seen whole groups of writers who reinforce the very things that block them as individuals.  Avoid people who limit you from being yourself.  It’s easy to despair, easier still to poison your perceptions rather than to keep faith with their highest potential and beyond.  But just as you can condition yourself to doubt or even hate something, you can condition yourself to believe in and love something else.  That is essentially the difference between winning and losing.  Between fulfillment and stagnancy.  Between perfection and mediocrity.  Will power over a period of time.  You do have control over your choices and choice over your environment, so move your HQ to Oz.  That’s what you can make happen.  A writer or any idealist has to do that and to persevere in order to actualize their dreams.

Life is short, and I’m not a big fan of anything that impedes it, so I guess when you break it down that’s a vote for quality over quantity.  But then, that’s what creative people are all about, isn’t it?  The pursuit of perfection, excellence, that which exercises the passions and makes life worthwhile.  That said, there is nothing wrong with going after more routine projects or prospects – journeyman writing pays the bills and moves life along.  But here’s the caveat: can you do that without watering down your standards and eventually your ability to achieve quality?  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to an ad copy writer complain about becoming a cliché or been interviewed by a reporter who later confided that they were trying to write the great American novel on the side and felt like they were being turned into a hack by their day job.  They may try to write their good stuff at ungodly hours in the dawn or after sunset when they are exhausted, or take six months off and go live in a cheap motel in Florida while they write The Book, but it never seems to work out.  Because in the long run the worst thing about living a compromise to your dreams isn’t the time crunch, it’s the soul-deadening aspect of prostituting your resources on something less than your passion.  That becomes a smothering habit that robs the best parts of you.  There is nothing more suffocating than to feel your brain turning to oatmeal and to realize that your one dance upon the stage has no musical accompaniment.  You can’t put your life on hold and be true to anything.  Tomorrow never comes.  And I’ve made that mistake big-time.  The amount of time and effort I’ve wasted is criminal and at the same time a monstrous joke on me.  No more, though.  In one way maybe it’s been a blessing.  Because it put me out of sync with a generation of people.  That and the fact that active longevity seems to run in my genes has sort of given me a second chance.  It’s like ground-hog day and I’m doing everything twice.  I guess I’m a monument to failure in a lot of ways, but that’s solely due to my own limitations.  Making sure my life is as much as it can be is Priority One this time around.  I’ve never given up on my ideals – writing being one of them – and if that keeps me from living a “normal” life, it also rescues me from it.  When you’re true to yourself things work out, and when you’re not, they don’t.  And believe this above all: either way, it will show.  No amount of subtlety will hide it.  You can’t micro-manage that or fake it.   The people who read you or know you will see it and feel it in the long run.  It’s all you have to give.  Your work.  Your true self.  If you’re a good person, be yourself, and trust that your world will benefit from it in ways you haven’t figured out yet. 

This vision of excellence has one exception.  It does not work for wrapping Christmas presents.  God only knows what mine look like when they arrive, but they aren’t too swift going out the door.  I start out trimming the paper, and the first edge looks like I used a hack saw – little shark fins sticking out.  No problem, I tell myself, this will tuck underneath the straight edge.  But by the time I’ve finished the other edge, the first one is looking pretty good as the visual lead.  The folds I make then turn the whole thing into ransom note quality.  And the tape…ah, the tape.  I never have to wash my hands afterward, because all the oils and smudges have transferred from my fingers onto the gifts via the tape.  Fortunately everything ends up in a ball, so who’s to notice?  And so it goes.  If I die and go to Hell, I’ll have to wrap Christmas presents.  I’ve been to Hell and so I know they have a department for that.  The only redeeming thing about the whole wrapping biz comes in January when thoughtful recipients who have found my severed opposable thumbs send them back.  Did I mention scissors?  Please, please, somebody take the scissors away from me! Ho, ho, ho.  (No, Don Imus didn’t tell me to say that.)

I sort of have a vision of a successfully wrapped present, but I have no faith whatever in getting there.  Faith is key to what I described in trusting the outcomes of life’s most important quests.  And did I not say you have to engage your most perfect dreams?  My dream is to wake up and find the presents already wrapped by some zealot origami champion from Japan.  What’s yours?

Creative lives don’t lend themselves to predictability.  If you don’t like surprises and the leap of inspiration that comes with discovery, then perhaps painting by the numbers is your best bet.  Whatever you think of yourself, chances are you’ve underestimated your dream scheme. Leaps of faith are very contrary to my nature, but I’ve learned that the big quests don’t come with warranties.  And yet you can eliminate most risk.  You simply have to have the fearlessness to weather the unknowns and trust that the solutions will be there when you have access to all the possibilities and the whole vision in front of you.  Writing a book is like life unfolding.  The finished product cannot be inferred from the pieces.  But when it comes together with all you have in you, it takes on a richness that can’t be imagined, even beyond your dreams. 

And here’s something else you can’t imagine – a hysterical link from me to you for Season’s Greetings.  Thanks to Mark “Dr. Foto” Manrique, I’ve been elfed.  If the link doesn’t open when you click it, right click and choose Open Hyperlink: http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1230300475

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.  My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds.  I’ll be happy to send it to you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net   Older newsletters are now being added to the website, but unfortunately we can only include new photos with the e-mailed version.  And finally I apologize that the links on the website to my past columns on StorytellersUnplugged lead only to the main page again.  I check them every month, but RSS feeds or updates at SU seem to undo them and it takes a while to reset them all.  You can still get to my past columns from the main page at SU by going to the archives month by month (the 16^th), but my webmaster Ed Picard and I will try to get them all direct linked by title from my web page again.

Merry Christmas and a bold new year!

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

There are people who can’t help but be different, and people who choose to be different, and people who live in fear of being different. If you’re a writer, that third category is a killer. In fact, it’s a killer for just about anything that isn’t sedentary, unimaginative or uninspiring.

I’m writing about ways of thinking, of course, and let me just call that fear category S3S for Stage 3 Suffocation. Excitement and discovery don’t happen much by recipe, formula, or in the middle of the pack. So, I’m always surprised when I see people who aspire to creativity but think they can acquire it like a diploma for staying in school long enough, or maybe by following a yellow brick road with a Wizard of Oz on the other end. I say this having taught for a lot of years – and maybe I’m teaching now in writing this – but I want to focus on things that are more a matter of choice than specific learning from someone else. Formal education is society’s way of passing on its legacy of mostly quantitative knowledge and order. It can foster cultural experiences and provide an opportunity for creative development. It can do a lot of things. But it can’t make you creative. It passes along sameness, not differences.

Being different (a.k.a. original) isn’t a learned lesson, or an imitation of individualism, it begins with a mindset, a way of looking at things, and – if you’re in that third category of living in fear of being different (S3S) – a little bit of risk-taking. Let me to break that down and elaborate:

The mindset doesn’t have to be attitude in the belligerent sense, but it does have to challenge the status quo. Whether to confirm, refute, or simply shape ideas and values, if you don’t question, you are by default a follower. Accepting everything traditional is an S3S symptom. It’s the way to go if you have a weak heart or just want a preview of eternity in a cemetery. Cemeteries are safe. No one gets hurt in a cemetery. If you do challenge the status quo, it means among other things that you probably aren’t ground temperature. You have looked at life around you, and when it said, “Live and think this way because that’s the way it is,” you said, “Wait a minute, why does it have to be that way?” You played “what if” with the possibilities. You are capable of original thought. It doesn’t mean you are cast as a crusader or an activist. It doesn’t mean you have to throw away the good things in your life, or question everything habitually. This is a quiet rebellion. It happens, for the most part, internally.

Now, maybe you come by that naturally. You were that impertinent little brat who asked insufferable questions all the time you were growing up, or maybe you just knew that whatever you were told to do, odds were that doing the opposite was going to be more interesting, more fun, and more educational. Even if you were an obedient – nay, servile – over-achiever, you knew that there were cracks in the perfect white walls that insulated you and that just maybe there were some truths on the other side. Maybe you rebelled loudly. Maybe you rebelled sneakily. Maybe you didn’t rebel at all, but now there is an outraged part of you that feels corralled when you want to gallop, because the sacred insulating walls turned out to be a prison. The point is that you acquired or naturally have this mindset which challenges the stagnancy of tradition for its own sake. You know what fits you, whether you actually went for it or not. You have the potential to be an original, a one-of-kind. Whatever your skills for expression – writing, painting, music, or just radiating the joy of living in a way that communicates happiness and satisfaction – the foundation for creativity in all you do is laid.

But there is another step in the process of maxing out your potential. Because the questioning mindset I’ve described merely clears the board for you of reflex social conditioning that blocks objective thinking. And now that you’ve gotten rid of some of the myths, you can reprogram yourself with the truth as you find it, free of social stress and political correctness. You are becoming an original thinker. I’m not saying that there isn’t value in growing up indoctrinated by fear and pressure. I’m just saying that the generalities that shepherd us through stages of growth often don’t hold up, and at some point in your adult life you need to examine every idea to see what remains true for you and lets you be fulfilled.

Hard to do. We come of age wearing a straitjacket of other people’s expectations. Jiminy Cricket sits on our shoulder and chirps guilt. What we do to escape those expectations defines us and whether we have the mindset to do something as crazy as write books, or think independently, or dare to be happy pursuing the nature within us. You can argue with yourself that if the people you disappoint along the way really love you, they’ll accept who you are eventually. And they will. Getting to that point, however, is beyond what most people have the drive to do. Which is why unique thinkers are unique. But the rewards for becoming your own person are unlimited and cumulative. It is a confirming process, and depending on the degree of your accomplishments and influence, you may find yourself a role model and source of inspiration rather than the pariah you may have imagined. The funny thing is, when you stop trying to curry favor with the world, the world will probably look over your shoulder at what you are doing and respect you for being independent and original.

So, okay, you question everything and now you’re a gadfly and a rebel, doing what everyone else wishes they had the moxie to do. Is that all there is – protesting, dissenting, playing devil’s advocate? Actually, that should be the least of it. Like a key turning a lock, you’ve simply removed a barrier. You still have to open the door and experience the freedom. The real benefit comes when you step outside and take an enhanced look around you. Because over time the mindset gives you an automatic perception outside the box – a way of looking at the world. It is, quite simply, insight. You don’t see only what people do, but what they want to do, could do, and don’t do. You don’t just hear what they say, but what they really mean, and the significance of what they don’t say. You learn the value of opposites and contrast. You see the why behind the what. The world of façades, false assumptions, radiant deceits and base hypocrisies, becomes clearer, and a world of hidden motives and raw truth emerges. And in the open-minded process of understanding others, you may come to understand yourself. Because the way is open then for your own humanity to develop in response. If learning about life’s façades makes you angry and self righteous, ready to do battle with windmills, you may gain sympathy and compassion. Or if you are ruled by knee-jerk guilt and obligation, you may discover that being tougher on others is a long-term kindness that respects their unused strengths. Moral truth is a whole other bias. But at the heart of it is this always-developing insight into the world as it really is. You literally train yourself to be a truth-seeker until it is a habit. This is the writer’s underlayment for mirroring life and the heart of skill with characterization, dialogue, motivation, and interactions.

Of course, everyone gains some degree of this kind of insight, but what I’m trying to describe is rather more profound than the normal range. You will know when you are thinking outside the box because you’ll catch yourself taking for granted that another observer is seeing and hearing the same subtext that you are, when in fact they are filtering everything through that dread of being different, trying to match what they observe with the sameness with which they have been indoctrinated. You may have to remind yourself that, for better or worse, you can never fit into that nice safe and secure S3S category again. Society doesn’t script you anymore. You are different.

Okay. I’ve described mindset and a way of looking at life. Two aspects of being different. Naturally occurring or a matter of choice. Either way, I also suggested that they carry a little bit of risk-taking. Very little, it turns out. If emotional intensity, stimulation and learning are missing from your life, you probably don’t need the insulation that sameness brings. You have outgrown the myth of security that comes from being in that cemetery where everyone is ground temperature. No, the risk-taking I’m talking about has mostly to do with handling freedom. Full-time writers, for instance, get rapped for being lazy. It’s tempting to let go of discipline when you get rid of the social pressure to be like everyone else. You risk not coming into a warm building on a winter’s morn where you follow the clock like others around you, socially sanctioned, normal, average. On the other hand, you could look at obesity, credit card debt, and the sedentary lifestyle that are pretty much the norm of modern living, and ask, “What discipline?” Lots of risk in being normal. Discipline is pick and choose. Nothing is stopping you from getting up in the morning and dressing to the nines just to sit down by yourself at a keyboard. You are free! The pressure is different just as you are different, and the risk is that you have to pull the motivation out of yourself because less of it is going to come from the world around you.

I’ll take that risk! It’s wonderful. Helps if you surround yourself with inspiration and avoid dead-end people. S3S is highly contagious. Nothing will kill you faster than friends and relationships who don’t “get that” about you. The world of sterile acceptance – in which most of us exist as spectators rather than participants – wants us to be homogenized. We are audience rather than actors. We tend to live through symbolic activities and to chase emblems rather than substance. Our gods dress in chrome and neon. It is easy to put your inner resources aside and let the world come at you passively. Multi-media will live for you, tell you what to think, what to feel. Much tougher to live by your mind and soul, examining everything for new wisdom, new insights. And if you actually find someone to share a like mind and soul with you, don’t expect heaven to be an upgrade.

As much as I’ve scurried through the underbrush of life, tragically I’ve wasted too much time standing in a line to nowhere, trying to be like everyone else. When you’ve done that long enough, you realize – with deep regret – that you could have made things happen earlier. You were in control all the time. Instead of waiting for fate to send you a message and give you a push, you could have just opened the door and said, “This is how it’s gonna be.” Defining your uniqueness is a way of seizing control of yourself and your destiny. That’s essential to any thinking person. And if you’re a writer, it beats a diploma in English Lit any day.

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out the free sample chapter from my latest novel, THE WATER WOLF on my website. And if you’d like to receive my free monthly newsletter which comes out the same day as this column, ask to be added to the list at: mn333mn@earthlink.net Older newsletters will now be archived on the website, but unfortunately we can only include new photos with the e-mailed version.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/