Thomas Sullivan

I don’t know if I can do this.  I want to, but I don’t know if I can.  I want to tell you about characters, about heroes & villains and the necessity of empathizing with them, but I think it’s a lot like telling you to go through psychoanalysis. 

That’s because you have to be bigger than your characters.  You have to contain them.  All of them.  The ones of the opposite sex, the sinners and saints, the cowards and fools, the twisted and the pure, the children, the obese octogenarian of another culture or another race, the thieves, the liars, the cheats, the Einstein, the Forrest Gump, the suicidal, the politically opposite of what you believe, the warrior and the pacifist.  Fight or flight must be in you in every possible equation.  Fear and desire in all proportions.  You must be in a wheelchair and you must train with Olympians.  So, if you want to be a writer — or even a complete, empathic, insightful, creative human being — you need some serious psychoanalysis.

Whatever makes you snuggle comfortably into your demographic works against this, of course.  Whether you are Joe Sixpack camped in front of the TV or the bored woman who was promised it all when she hauled her advanced degree to the altar, you won’t outrun your own borders without a mental overhaul.  It’s relatively easy to sympathize/empathize with yourself.  Even if you are filled with self-hate, confusion or depression, you can probably recall specific things and events that changed you from positive to negative and therefore you remember a time when whatever you were seemed justified and worthy.  But as an exercise, think of your worst enemy or someone you hate and try to empathize with them.  That’s the acid test if you’re going to assume the God power of creating people, or even the insight to understand the human blueprints for every person.  Creativity doesn’t fit a mold or follow a stereotype.

But how do you achieve such broad-mindedness without sometimes compromising or even contradicting your beliefs and values?  And doesn’t the inherent contradiction in trying to represent everyone’s POV convincingly where they differ from your own threaten who you are?  Ya, you betcha it does.  Small writers — small people — who reach mindlessly in that direction are almost doomed.  They are at risk of losing their souls, of becoming intellectual and emotional whores, or of simply drowning in more life than they can sort out.  But I’m not making a pitch for you to become some giddy, singsong, bleeding heart, all-inclusive, ex-patriot hippie who is so open-minded that their brains are lying in the road behind them.  What I’m saying is that you can let go of your demographic without abandoning it.  You can reach across the aisle into truth about the human condition in all its stripes; you can walk the walk, share the passion, talk the talk.  All you need do is drop prior expectations, judgments (and maybe even a few biases) as you meet/create characters with unique histories and independent motives.  And at the end of the day you can still flee back to familiar things you have chosen to define yourself. 

Of course, that’s where the psychoanalysis comes in.  Because you may not want to go back.  Not completely.  You may change, learn, grow, if you open up in this way.  It’s really quite emancipating — and sometimes even a relief — to go outside the appearances of your life.  And it’s exhilarating to work in the same industry as God, Nicholas Sparks and Dr. Frankenstein.  You never know what you’ll come up with, plus — oh, boy, here’s the door prize — know that above all you will learn to live more honestly within yourself.  The genuine, authentic, uncompromised, absolutely core Version 1.0 of YOU may re-emerge and trump the accumulated Version 99 with all its patches, fixes and updates.  But I hasten to repeat that it doesn’t have to shine a new light over your entire outward life.  It may be enough if it just shines a new light in your head, heart and soul during those times when they are up on deck.  True, you will then be schizophrenic.  Sort of.  But hey, you aren’t all that real when you’re living mostly appearances, if you want to know the truth.  Now at least you can be honest about it half the time.  And for all you know, that might be the best half of your life.

S’pose I should finish off here with a little show ‘n’ tell by way of example.  I’ve never been in therapy, but I’ve been in way deep self-analysis all my life.  Can’t tell you exactly why.  Maybe I was the class clown who got attention by being different; maybe I couldn’t win anything so I took my bat and ball and went home, refusing to play the game; or maybe I really was just different.  Doesn’t matter.  When you don’t belong anywhere, in a sense you belong everywhere.  I had circumstantial help.  A certain rootlessness anchored me to the broader universe — I had lived in a dozen countries by the time I was six, and maybe the different languages were part of the reason I seemed to be tuned to shadows and echoes rather than taking everything at face value.  But whether or not you have circumstances conducive to force you to look over walls, you DO get to choose where to put your borders.  Probably at critical or even life-defining moments.  As Jake Sully (no relation) says in Avatar, “Sometimes your whole life comes down to one insane move.”

The movie Avatar says quite perfectly some of the things I’m trying to say here.  It’s one of those films in which you can find what you want, and its premise is an ancient Hollywood cliché, but the real magic is in its fantasy culture (the Na’vi) and how the characters relate.  The Na’vi are driven by tradition, but their individualism trumps mere appearances of tradition.  Though the chief’s daughter is socially ordained to marry the heir apparent to the chief, the reality of her love for Jake Sully wins unhesitatingly.  They simply mate after vowing their mutual love in a natural setting one afternoon and that bonds them for life.  When a clash of cultures annihilates their home, the Na’vi begin again without looking back.  There is a kind of freedom implicit in their openness to all of nature.  And because they are open to all of it, it is open to them, from messaging through tree roots to riding dragons.  They embrace reality without losing their souls.  They will survive any change because their minds and their spirits are not narrowed into a subset, a demographic.  They live by the truth within themselves, as we all secretly yearn to do.

That’s the kind of childlike honesty that flows through the veins of creativity.  Purest reality and yet, because of its searching honesty, it becomes the hyper-reality of romantic idealism, of perfect empathy.  It is not a short-term perception that fits mere circumstances.  It is an unfettered perception that links beyond one’s circumstances and thus opens the door to understanding and creating truly believable characters.  Any and all characters.

When your writing drags on, try riding dragons.

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s just something fun you can peep at without having to interact.  Samples of recent Tweets: Valentine’s Day: I shall visit a place where a woman once married me in her heart, mind & soul, and loved me with her body.  And…  I keep seeing what I think is the same deer in the same place. The buck stops here…   And…  Just driving around all night, dodging recalled Toyotas. Missed Toyotas but witnessed a disaster while listening to Howie Day’s “Collide.”  Here’s the link: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters w/photos are archived at the author’s website below under News & Articles (http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/News.htm ) and usually go up within 1 day of being sent out.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Who you were at your best moment is always who you can be again.  Kind of like summiting a mountain, it becomes a benchmark.  You’ve proven you can reach that far, be that person, do that thing – a minimum standard of excellence that cannot be taken away from you.  That applies pretty much to everything from labor to love, laughter to loss, but especially – I firmly believe – to moments of creativity.

Creativity, after all, is pointedly about excellence, isn’t it?  You reach for perfection, and if your fingers get burned, you gather your courage and reach again.  Artists as a community may be deeply flawed and anything but perfect, but in a world of frauds and disappointments that’s what makes our quests/dreams/passions so necessary.  In the infant innocence of our souls we cannot give up the romantic notion of achieving something godlike.  Is there an addiction or a high as pure as perfection?  I can’t speak for normal people, but for the lost and the damned who think that the sky is too low a limit, it is only in pursuit of excellence that all our senses and sensibilities come fully alive and we breathe rarefied air once again.  Just to be in the game, to make a little progress toward unblemished goals, quickens the blood and restores an urgency that is too easily lost in routine lives.  That said, it is exhausting to soar at that level, and so the real problem – once you find the courage to try – becomes to find the inspiration to act…

Which is what I wrote about last month  —   http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2009/12/16/thomas-sullivan-sea-lions-in-coffins-getting-lost-writing-without-words/ .  A number of e-mails came in from people who related to the little trick of getting lost in order to find themselves or doing eccentric things to shake the dust of monotony from their souls, so here I go, diving recklessly deeper into the subject.

Most of the feedback came from people who don’t regularly seek CPR from their muses, but I got the sense that whether it was just to escape, say, writer’s block, or something more systemic like stopping suffocation in a routine life, a necessary part of the solution was to gain perspective.  To me gaining perspective is almost the same as defining the problem, which most suffocatees have already done (they can’t breathe!…duh).  The necessary adjunct to gaining perspective, however, seems to be to do something very instinctive, like…walk, run, fly, but get out of Dodge.  In other words, do not let inertia chain you to your prison.

BACKFIELD IN MOTION.  Amazing how many writers regularly use the same strategy in order to re-fill the well.  DNW drives or walks past houses, WAS is drawn like a moth to the cathode tube glow of a night-time Chicago, RB bikes around Los Angeles… Brian Hodge defines the need to break out of routine as hardwired.  My own personal matrix is at least 3-D, so I have mixed motives, but I can’t remember when I did not make daily transits, usually into nature, and for the past three years inevitably a nightly drive.  Last month I suggested getting lost as a way of finding one’s self.  The goal of that was to eliminate the tedium of daily life — those limitations that make us forget our potential.  It’s very hard to see the painting, after all, when you’re standing on the canvas.  So you move outside the frame to a place with no context in your life.  Streets are good – and best at night – because they are margins.  You want to be totally offstage, pure audience.

Okay, let’s assume you achieve this true detachment which is fundamental to escaping whatever is smothering your creative side.  Like the physician who wants to heal, you must “first do no harm,” and remaining in your routine was harming you.  So you’ve stopped the hemorrhaging by taking sanctuary elsewhere, and now you’re ready for a transfusion.  Where do you find a donor for that?  The suffocation was of your mind and spirit, after all.  Where do the stem cells for imagination come from?  How do you kickstart inspiration?  

When was the last time you didn’t have to kickstart inspiration?  Pregnant pause.  Ever see a bored baby? 

THE GANG OF 5…or empowering your five senses.  This is another trick that works for me.  It worked for all of us when we were babies totally indulged in sensory information.  Everything was new and we were keen to examine it all with the full battery of our senses.  But we grew up and started to skip the savoring of the senses — been there, done that — and went straight to the abstractions, and so every time the phone rang with a new message from Taste or Touch or See, we didn’t always answer attentively.  Why should we, if we already knew what it tasted, felt or looked like and had turned it into an abstraction?  But we missed some new info that way, and maybe got disconnected from the inspiration — the total sense of being alive — that only The Gang of 5 can supply.  So going back to your senses and putting your brain on high alert for all incoming calls is good stimulation, even if all it does is repave old roads.  

Chances are, though, that your senses will give you better conversations if you give them some variety to chew on.  And that brings me to the third element of this column, another thing that works for me on a daily basis…

WHO’S THE STIFF?  Yeah, that thing you’re carrying around, the cadaver hanging from your brain, the corpse embalming your heart.  That stiff.  You.  The body.  Maybe you trace your pedigree back to Adam and Eve a few thousand years ago, or maybe you add millions more on the Charles Darwin freeway by believing in evolution, which gives you one helluva lot of basic training no matter how you slice it.  Sure, sure, we live in an intellectual age now, but whether we got here from standing naked talking to snakes and eating apples in the Garden of Eden or through eons of adaptation, most of what came between then and now was a pretty physical world.  You think because modernity has arrived, and the can opener has been invented, you can just ignore all that physical potential?  That’s a lot of dead weight to carry around.  A real drag on those sensory outposts I mentioned a paragraph back, know what I mean?  You sure you want to become a vestigial vagrant — hauling that carcass along through your emotional/psychological/intellectual state of being like it wasn’t a blue elephant standing in the room with you?  What if there’s more of a connection between your mind and your bod than you think?  Ever hear of, “Anima Sana in Corpore Sano”?  Okay, the only Latin I speak has the word “pig” in front of it — but just about everyone from Plato to John Locke is credited with saying, “Sound mind, sound body,” and even if I’m not that smart, I recognize a truism when I see it…feel it.

So do you.

And that’s my third trick this column.  Physicality.  Big part of my life.  True, I’ve been a nut job about it since romper room days, and ego & competition played large for most my life, but it was never JUST ego & competition and now being physical is purely about escape.  Escaping the tyranny of my mind, ditching smallness and paranoia, and about waking up my imagination each day.  It doesn’t have to be rabid physicality.  It can even be dynamic physical surroundings, if it wakes up your body.  This column is pushing my limit for length, so I’ll have to come back to the subject another time.  Right now I have a hunch that taking my Adam & Eve sleeping bag out into the brilliant winter woods for the afternoon will be a hoot.  Seriously.  Think contrast: robust nature vs. down sleeping bag.  Think crystal air and white light.  Imagine yourself all snug and warm while drinking in the pure distillation of winter in bracing sips.  Could be I’ll find my day’s supply of perspective, sensory stimulation, and physicality all in one shot.  You never know what you’ll find when you search for perfection.  And never knowing is part of the magic of inspiration. 

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s just something fun you can peep at without having to interact.  2 samples of recent Tweets:  Someone clue me, is the point of Vietnamese music to sing totally off key or did I just get a really bad trio twanging “Seoul” music?  And…  If I was a bat, I’d want to live in Al Gore’s humongous nostrils.  Here’s the link: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters w/photos are archived at the author’s website below under News & Articles and usually go up within 1 day of being sent out.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  Happy 2K10! 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com    

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Pssst…me again.  Thought I’d check in on you.  See what kind of problems you got today.  No problems?  That’s a problem.  You’re an adventurer, a thinker, a romantic, a thrillseeker — something in a Walter Mitty fantasy that needs an adrenaline feed.  You need a problem.  Well…to be precise, you need a problem and a solution all in one shot.  If you’re a writer, you especially need something going on in the — whatchamacallit — inspiration department.

I never run out of inspiration.  Okay…okay, sometimes I run out of inspiration.  Okay, a lot of times I run out of inspiration.  Whenever I’m suffocating, actually.  Apathy suffocates me.  And I tend to get blue around the gills in a room full of oxygen if it’s being breathed by dull people in formal situations.  My least favorite vegetables are cooked carrots, rutabaga and dull people.  People who don’t respond and mistake prattle for conversation are duller than mosquitoes droning a Gregorian chant.  People who veg out like sea lions in coffins make me catatonic.  That’s when my eyes glaze over and my internal rockets launch for the far side of the universe. 

True, I am easily motivated.  But I am just as easily unmotivated.  People I can’t light up unmotivate me.  If you want to call that a lack of inspiration, okay, but really I just go underground.  Inside my head the burners are still blazing as I entertain myself.  I call that: WRITING WITHOUT WORDS.  Sometimes I just crack me up — such a funny guy, ha, ha, sob, sob.  You’d think someone would want to push my best stuff out there in front of people, cultivate an audience.  Oh, the world owes me a living!  But it doesn’t.  It do not.  Uh-uh.  Nope.  So, eventually I have to forgive the world for not loving me, make peace with it, and approach it on its own terms.  Eat your veggies, Sully.

Okay, now comes the part where I throw you some of my favorite tricks for inspiration.  I might as well tell you right now that they sound silly.  But that’s the whole idea.  If they don’t sound frigging ridiculous, they won’t shake anything up, and you need to be shaken up when you are uninspired.  That is what they do for severely depressed patients, you know — shake them up.  For instance, they might wake them in the middle of the night.  That puts the depressed person in a different world.  It’s a change from their expectations, their routine, and the overwhelming hopelessness that has them locked down.  It might seem pointless, but regarding everything as pointless is exactly the rationale we use to procrastinate until we become so inert that doing anything, however unorthodox, is a better option.  We need to stop smoking the brakes.  We need to grind some gears and DO something. 

Example, Sully.  Right.  Example: Go somewhere you have no reason to be.  (Yo, I’ve done this, you betcha – hell, I do it every day without trying.)  Try walking three miles to a corner totally unrelated to your neighborhood or anywhere you normally go.  Then think how disconnected you are at that moment. 

Feel the rain.

Feel the snow.

Feel the sun.

Feel the wind.

Take whatever is there.  Shape it.  Now invent the future you want.  The present is ever sashaying into the past before you can pin it down.  And the past is dead.  Life goes in one direction.  If you missed the life you should have led, at least live the life you have left.  Make it what you want.  There are always flashes of light in the broken glass of your dreams.

As you gaze at the traffic light – red, green, red, green — ask yourself, What if I never go back? 

So now you reinvent yourself right there.  Don’t skimp on the dimensions.  Roles have hammered your shape into what it was before you walked here, but now at this new intersection you can be whatever you want to be.  You can’t be born again, but you can grow, edit, morph.  Once you drop the embalming expectations and the fear-and-guilt driven inhibitions, you may surprise yourself with what emerges from your repressed soul.  The unfettered passion, the unhampered reach, the uncompromised dreams — like seeds trying to grow in the dark. 

This is the beginning of magic.  In you.  Still.  And if it’s still there, you have to ask yourself how/why you let it slip away in the first place.  How did you get to this time and place in your life?  Where were you born?  What or who were your companions for the first 20 years of life?  Are your dreams still alive?  What is crushing you?  What is floating your boat?  Are you who you thought you would be?  Watch the traffic going by and realize you are a stranger.  You have no history, no failures, no disappointments.  Just a stranger standing on a corner.  The intersection of Nowhere and One Way.  You can wait out the red light, or you can follow the green.  Go in any direction you want.  Be anyone you want.  At least for a while.

Now, for whatever reason, you may be saying that you can’t go somewhere you have no reason to be.  Your shackles are a 24/7 job or a family or physical limitations or you’re sitting in a jail cell in DeHoCo (Detroit House of Corrections).  Well…yeah, it’s cool if you can take a trip to Nova Scotia or drive 300 miles on a whim some night, but even if you have to sit backwards in a bath tub (warning: sitting backward on a toilet is not recommended) or go stand in a closet, you can put yourself in a position that makes you see the world differently for a while and stops the clock and causes you to THINK new stuff.  

Vitality is stimulated — or smothered — by context.  But the thing is you get to pick the context, and if you fail to take advantage of that, then what’s left except to fold your hand and take what you get? 

More on this in future columns.  Right now I’ve got to get lost so that magic can find me.  Got to go visit a beaver dam deep in a local woods.  Really.  It’s the wrong time, the wrong season and the wrong place (see photo at start of column) – what could be more lost than that?

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s fun and won’t intrude on your computer.  2 samples of recent Tweets:  I’ve been practicing stupidity all day. Then I realized something very profound. I don’t need to practice…  And…  Considering the number of vitamin pills that have rolled under the ‘fridge, I have the healthiest spiders in the Universe.  Here’s the link: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net.  Past newsletters are archived at the author’s website below under News & Articles.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/  

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Love that George Jones song.  If you have an ounce of passion in you for anything, a single unblemished ideal, or if you feel a poignant stab in the heart for any kind of perfection, then you understand what’s behind that song.  

Writers get it.  Real writers.  Lovers of the Muse.  When you want something so badly that it makes your teeth ache and you swallow sand and you know that whatever the obstacles, it’s just right for you – not for someone else maybe, but absolutely for you — and life just won’t move forward unless you are in pursuit of that holy grail, well…that’s when you come alive.  And only then.  Passion sweats blood. 

Only sometimes you bleed out.  Bleed white.  Your veins constrict, your heart turns into a dried husk, and your mind goes cold.  That’s when you THINK you stop loving the Muse.  Because passion that intense is draining, and rejection takes its toll.  Your commitment may be true, but even a faithful dog backs off when it’s kicked in the teeth enough times.  So your fingers slip off the keys; you quit caring.  Hope becomes a dull ache, and you walk around in a novocaine stupor.  You listen to loud music, you laugh at things that aren’t funny, you get hyper interested in feng shui or the kids next baseball game.  The people around you who have patiently endured your impossible dream seem almost relieved.  You are back.  You are acting the way they act.  Life is suddenly clear and simple and balanced. 

And predictable.                    

But then you get a glimpse of color flitting past the window one day or hear a whisper in the leaves alongside an autumn path, and it’s like remembering where you placed your car keys.  You vividly recall where you were going!  It hits you full passion with a touch of dismay.  Because you realize that you are wasting your life, wasting precious time.  Like the white rabbit, you are so late!  You can’t believe you let yourself become a zombie, that you lost faith with what you started out to be.  The stars and the galaxies are still there; you just quit reaching for them. 

But giving up on your dream is like letting the best part of you commit suicide.  Because that’s where the real you lives.  Your dream is where you are honest with yourself.  If it dies, what’s left except to live a lie?  And, yes, you can live a lie where appearances demand it, but you can’t do it 24/7.  You need somewhere, sometime to live your dream, to know that it could really happen, to feel that you are worthy of it.  Living a lie might meet the world’s expectations for you on the surface — it might even be noble, depending on your situation — but by definition it cannot be honest. 

So you re-visit your dream.  Secretly at first.  Maybe life interferes with that a little bit.  But you find a way, even if at the start it’s only in your mind, your heart.  You imagine, plan, fantasize.  And then you dare to reach out on a computer screen or a piece of paper.  And the words come back.  Because that’s who you are.  Words and thoughts.  That’s all anyone is, only with some people — writers – communication is infinitely more acute.  You need words both coming and going.  Like breaths.  Inhale, exhale.  Words are oxygen.  You are a willing slave to the Muse.  Forever in love. 

But you only recognize that when you think you’ve stopped loving your dream.  Because your passion is so great that it just exhausts your spirit and you have to take a timeout to let the ground springs refill the reservoir.  To let the hurt of rejection subside.  And you’ll probably repeat the whole thing again.  Until you succeed.  Or don’t succeed.  It really doesn’t matter which, as far as what you have to do.  Life is not a dress rehearsal.  One take…action!  Or else you go sit with the audience.

“He stopped loving her today… they hung a wreath upon his door.” 

Yeah.  That’s the only way to murder a Muse, if you’re for real.  The only way to kill a true writer.  And it says everything I’ve ever tried to say about the journey itself being the destination.

Thanks for reading along with these columns.  I get a lot of e-mail from people who gave up on their dreams but think their dreams gave up on them.  And speaking of e-mail, I’ve heard from a number of Glenn & Deacon Frey fans that my link to the September column is broken on some of the newsletter mirror sites.  I think that column is being confused with earlier mentions of Glenn and Deacon from 14 months or so ago.  Here’s the correct link to the most recent column:   http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2009/09/16/thomas-sullivan-are-you-ready-for-fame-fortune-%e2%80%94-crosslake-redux-with-glenn-deacon-frey/   

Oh, and another thing.  If it says Comments closed at the end of this column, IGNORE that.  Wordpress has a glitch or two and that’s one of them.  Your comments are MOST welcome, and the way to leave them is just to click the title of this column, which will take you to a new page of the column so fast you may not realize it changed.  At the bottom of that column is the posting box for your comments.  If you got here from my newsletter link, you may already see that.

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s fun and won’t intrude on your computer.  2 examples of recent Tweets:  Nothing is easier to take for granted or quickly forgotten than constant magic…until you suddenly realize it isn’t there.   And…  Why is everyone telling me I should write a romance novel? Am I wearing chick-socks or something?  Hey, I can explain. That was Halloween.  Here’s the link:  http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters are archived at the author’s website below under News & Articles.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

I remember overhearing my mother tell someone how as a boy I used to set up jigsaw puzzles in different rooms.  And it’s funny, but as an adult I never thought about myself doing this until she said that.  The thing that made it bizarre if not downright dysfunctional in a personality sense was that the loose pieces and the placed pieces of each puzzle were never in the same room.  The unplaced pieces of, say, a western scene around a cowboy campfire would be in a room where the picture from a Disney film like “Fantasia” was partly put together.  There might be four puzzles in-process like that.  With laughter in her voice my mother told this person that you always knew I was onto something when I suddenly went into one room, picked up a piece and carried it into another room.

Whatever possessed me — and I use the word possessed apprehensively — to begin doing this, the thing that strikes me now is the fact that finding answers that fit wasn’t something I did just standing over a problem.  It was something that occurred mostly over time and from a distance.  So, obviously the problem(s) were carried around in my head, and obviously the search for answers was ongoing, and perhaps less obviously whatever else I was doing at any given moment might trigger an inspiration or a revelation.  And now (at last he’s getting to the point, folks) I realize it’s the same thing with creating books and short stories.  They get solved (written) over time and from a distance.

Tell me, please, do you solve problems this way?  It seems evident that everyone does to some extent.  But to what extent?  How deliberately?  Is it a trainable resource in human creativity or just another blind alley in my idiosyncratic nature? 

I guess I’ve tried before to pin it down as a worthwhile and useful strategy for writers, i.e., that you should always define the next problem before you walk away from a creative session, because then solutions may occur to you in the interim.  In fact they almost certainly will be suggested by whatever you experience as you go about doing other things.  The suggestions will come to you as associations and metaphors.  Or maybe the terms connections and similarities work better for you.  That flow of suggestion is a big part of who you are, writer or not – creative person or not.

Well…at least the associations part is.  All people put life’s puzzles together over time by seeing the associations.  And they do it walking from room to room in their lives, noticing things that might fit insights and answers to whatever questions are nagging them.  Unless the TV is on.  (That’s only a metaphor for distraction, ‘cause in reality even the TV can suggest associations.)  What I mean is that the TV sort of appeals to the passive/lazy part of all of us.  It’s a stand-in for imagination and active thought.  If that’s your default activity whenever you chill out, pick a good channel, because that may constitute the quality of your life.  I know it’s scary to turn the TV off.  Suddenly we are in a room again and the walls rush toward us and the silence feels thick and terminal.  If we are with someone, what do we talk about?  God help us if we give our brains center stage and the spotlight fades to black!  There is always that danger.  But then, if that’s who you are – if you think that the last words to the national anthem are “…start your engines” – you can always turn the TV back on and pop a beer.  On the other hand, you might turn out to have those whatchamacallit’s…inner resources.  You might turn out to have them in spades – deep thought, wit, wisdom, imagination.  Dial the TV and other passive distractions down, and you dial the nagging problems up along with your motivation to solve them.  Do something that draws energy out of yourself, or interact with whatever or whoever inspires you, and you’ll feel your circuits come to life. 

Okay.  Sorry for the rant.  I’m just bitter about all the years I’ve wasted in the company of uninspiring things, narrowness and blocked communication.  My choice, mea culpa.  But then, I do have one helluva lot of rooms in my life.  It’s a burning regret and kind of an irony that I never found someone to share them with, and yet I think everyone has some rooms like that – maybe the innermost rooms.  I’m good at sharing innermost rooms, but I suck at crowded rooms where you have to live appearances rather than truths.  Appearances just smother me, and in general I have to believe they are antithetical to a creative life.

Anyway, I was saying that all people put life’s puzzles together with associations.  But not all people put together those metaphors to express them that I mentioned.  Writers do that.  People with poetry inside them do that.  Metaphors too are apt to dawn slowly on a person who carries the need to communicate with flair and imagination from room to room. 

It strikes me that metaphors are also more inspiration-sensitive than simple communication.  Expressing oneself in language that jangles and pulses with imagery is a whole other universe.  It can convey multiple levels of information and connect the dots between insights.  It can do this in a style that is itself colorful and entertaining, as opposed to the mundane communication of literal facts.  But this requires a willingness to go with the flow and sometimes a suspension of disbelief.  When you try to express yourself with flair to someone who clings narrowly to literal communication, you can quickly be snuffed out.  You feel you are talking to a blank wall, unable to engage them with insight, depth and emotional coloring.  Metaphorical and image-laden language is more challenging to use, but when it works, there’s nothing like it.  You want to connect with it always, to live life in the Technicolor it provides in a black-and-white world.

I’d like to believe it can be acquired.  And you can make it real.  Imagine a bed of roses.  Have you ever actually seen a bed of roses?  Why don’t you make one, like the picture at the start of this article?  Presto…done!  The metaphor is no longer just a metaphor but a fact.  You are living your imagination; you have given an ideal permanence. 

The truth is probably that some people just think metaphorically, while most do not but recognize and respond to what they perceive as witty or poetic or wise.  The problem for the inventor of metaphors — the writer, in this case — is to not overreach.  Hence, coming up with optimal expression is just like any other problem — any other jigsaw puzzle — that can benefit from being carried from room to room while life suggests possibilities and puts things into perspective.  I’m not saying that every word you write/utter should reverberate through marble halls.  On the contrary, clarity is the first mandate of communication.  But clarity is not confined to simplicity.  Unrelenting simplicity can be both boring and shallow.  Finding the right balance between artful expression that carries meaning and the straightforward conveyance of facts is just the sort of problem-solving I’m writing about.  If you’ve never spent a few days carrying around the dilemma of what to say or write, you’ve missed out on the rich array of possibilities that might have nudged you over that period of time.

Try it.

Imagine you are going to propose to someone by renting a billboard on a highway they drive.  You’ve got the first and the last parts of the message, i.e., “You make me feel like_______________________!  Marry me…”  Now carry that blank around with you.  Force yourself to think about it everywhere you go.  Turn off the radio in the car, take a walk by yourself, stare out the window and THINK until monkeys come out of your nose.  Do not settle for the first candidate to fill in the blank, even if ultimately you come back to that one as the best choice.  Let frustration and annoyance have their way for a few seconds each time you draw a blank on the blank.  Sooner than later you’ll have something that works, something satisfying, something worthy of…

Who You Are.

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s fun and unintrusive.  2 examples of my recent Tweets:  Chicago out 4 Olympics. So tell the gangbangers to stop training for the drive-by target shooting event.  And…  “Freedom ain’t worth nothin’ but it’s free.”  Is that why I always do way more than I commit to?  Here’s the link:  http://twitter.com/thomassullivan .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net.  Past newsletters/photos are archived under News & Articles at the author’s website below by my illustrious California webmaster, Cap’n Ed Picard.  Also, if you tried to find my old columns and the links no longer worked, it’s because StorytellersUnplugged recently moved to a new hosting location with David Niall Wilson now keeping it dynamic and up to date.  But my webmaster, working tirelessly, has just finished posting new links to those columns as well.  You’ll find them all on my author’s website next to the newsletters.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/  

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

                                            21  COMMENTS follow

Picture this.  It’s a 70° Saturday, and your kids are away at Death Valley survival camp, your spouse is shopping at Mall of America with a new credit card, the teen across the street who drives the Panzer with the heavy metal band locked in the trunk is in bed with the flu, phone service is out, and the neighbors’ dog has stopped barking for the first time since squirrels were invented.  You are sitting in front of your computer, fingers poised above the keyboard, staring at a blank New Document in Word.  Eager images crowd into your thoughts like actors waiting to audition at a cattle call — a Spanish galleon weighs anchor on the edge of your imagination, two lovers with eager moist lips lean across a red rose, gunfire slashes through dense jungle around a Mayan pyramid, a lone cowboy urges his horse up a dry gulch on a mountain, from the Oort region of the solar system a meteor is bumped into Earth trajectory, a broken-hearted woman with tear-stained cheeks climbs to the rail of a bridge…  Your fingers attack the keys with very little guidance from your brain and what you get is:

At last they stood on the quarterdeck, remembering how they had escaped their Mayan captors — he, a lone cowboy from the mountains of his native Spain where the rain falls mainly on the plain, and she, an English Lady so recently suicidal (had she really tried to leap off that bridge into the Thames) over her last lost love — and now, anticipating their first kiss within the heady scent of roses that somehow mysteriously perfumed the breeze, they were blissfully unaware that a meteor half the size of East Sweet Pea, Arizona, was hurtling toward them.

So goes the perfect writing circumstances of an optimal afternoon.  Those porcelain acoustics you hear in the distance are your muse retching in the toilet.

But maybe the problem is that creativity really doesn’t take place in front of the computer or hovering over a blank sheet of paper.  It takes place in all your collective experiences, your associations, your memories, and everything you know about life BEFORE you sit down in front of the computer.  The specific act of writing is pretty much a sorting out process applied to what you bring to that point.  And so, in your frustration with eliminating distractions, you may have overlooked the need to stimulate or inspire that fundamental collective of thoughts and insights that brought you to the game.

Wordsmithing is the shaping of content into expression.  The content has to be there, has to be drawn from the well, refined into gold, distilled from swamp water; and maybe you sat down in the perfect absence of distraction and expected it to be on the screen — that dead piece of glass covered with electrically excitable dots known as pixels.  If you spend a lot of your time doing that every day, you get farther and farther from the source material.  Moreover, you get saturated with your own uninterrupted words and dead-ended in the ruts of circular thoughts.  Good writing needs priming.  Properly primed it can almost flow by itself. 

And you prime by going back to the well.  It took me a long time to learn that.  I thought that the only things that stood between me and success as a writer were the demands of gainful employment and the distractions of a home life.  Curse the world that thought it didn’t owe me a living!  Where was the booklined study where the author sat ensconced in golden silence meticulously crafting deathless prose with a goose quill on parchment?  Hungry mouths at home dictated that quitting my job as a teacher was out of the question.  I became habituated to parked cars, bathrooms and restaurants in order to practice my craft, as if it were a dark perversion in the otherwise pedestrian flow of life.  And then I learned to separate — to see the natural separation, actually — between creativity and the physical act of writing.

You can create anytime, anywhere.  In fact, anytime/anywhere is the precise coordinate of time and space where your source material resides.  Why separate those sources — those rich and tangible associations from everything you know — from the act of creation?  All you need do is think while you are out and about engaged in the act of living.  The things you must think on are the questions that need to be answered about wherever you are in the creation of a book or story.  Need a new idea for a book?  A character?  A plot twist?  A scene?  Know what the question is, and as you go about your life with insightful eyes, seeing and appreciating the world around you with all the insight you can muster, I guarantee you that answers to those questions will come.  They will come as possibilities, suggestions to yourself that you can refine into workable directions for what comes next.  But you can — nay, must — ask those questions before you quit a writing session, if you want the answers to be there when you return.  Hemingway called it “leaving something in the well.”  I think that’s what he meant.  I’ll ask him next time we talk.

Despite my making light of them, the physical circumstances of writing are a factor, of course.  I’m just trying to point out that much of distraction is self-inflicted and that you can parse out a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to creativity.  It isn’t like someone shoots off a starting gun when you sit down in front of the computer.  “Ready…set…think!”  By putting my brain in gear and my muse to work, I learned to write very fast when I actually sat down.  Typically I would drive 12 miles to the school where I taught, take the steps two at a time to the library loft on the third floor, and there in the five minutes or so before first bell, knock out a couple of handwritten pages of a novel.  It happened on demand because I was ready by the time I got there.  The major work was prepped sometime after asking the right questions at the end of the previous writing session.  Knowing what I had to answer kept me engaged in the intervening time as I simply passed through life with my eyes open.  Eyes open — very important.  Won’t work for sedentary spectators.  You have to make yourself into the kind of person who thinks, notices, analyzes.  It’s sort of like being a quick-start computer that is never completely off, and when the right signal jars your circuits, you come consciously to life with a linkage or an answer.  And you never know when that will happen, because you don’t know when the right associations or inspirations will appear.  My first novel was sketched out on a scrap of paper I borrowed from a stranger working in her backyard when I was out running.  Even today I routinely leave plot notes on my voicemail.

The many ways writers acclimate themselves to a day’s work are legendary.  Nabokov wrote at a lectern, recording each sentence on a 3 x 5 card he kept in a shoebox.  Janet Berliner tells me that Harlan Ellison similarly composes at a typewriter on a podium.  Loren Estleman uses one of many antique typewriters from his collection, repairing one with parts from another.  I know a former 9-5er who simply must shower, shave, dress formally and drive to an office he has rented before he can write.  Come to think of it, a hypnotherapist once loaned me his penthouse office overlooking a quiet city to write in the middle of my nights.  John Stchurr used to spend a couple of hours setting up (usually in a library carrel) before he could work and even then he found himself easily distracted.  Other writers have an amazing ability to concentrate, perhaps born of necessity.  David Niall Wilson, the author king of multitasking, can focus on tweets, screenplays, novels, short stories, e-mail, blogs, and take the nanowrimo challenge all by turns while watching movies or TV or listening to audio sources and fielding a full family of chilluns.  Proust, by contrast, worked in a cork-lined room.  Nikolai Gogol is said to have reached a contemplative state by killing lizards with a silver-headed cane in his garden.  And was it Bach who solved the routine aspects of composing by putting his 20 – or 24?  (the number varies, and some of his children did not survive infancy) — offspring to work copying manuscripts?

I’ve tried them all.  Well…not the lizards (though somewhere there is a picture of me on a writing retreat in the Bahamas with a lizard on my shoulder).  Other places I’ve tried writing include a canoe, bathtub (which is the same thing only with the water inside), taxi, golf course, attic, moving around the house, outdoor deer watch in the dead of winter, Golden Meadow, Mall of America, small island in a pond, woods at night, alternating with playing T-sax in same woods, numerous backstages in numerous theaters, skate skiing while dictating into a cell phone recorder, ditto snowshoeing — and a zillion other venues, the point being that a muse is portable and can benefit by a change of setting.  I am writing this now using Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice activation software.  Sometimes it helps to make oneself comfortable, sometimes uncomfortable.  Curiously, I love to write in a crowd if I know that I won’t be interrupted.  In fact, I used to write in the local Wal-Mart pharmacy where my tight-lipped pharmacist would charge my battery between laptop sessions.  Some of these columns were written at a Humana display and a Subway shop in that same Wal-Mart’s.  And the photo that heads up today’s column is of the author hisself working diligently in a gazebo overlooking Lake Minnetonka at a place called Noerenberg Gardens, which is a frequent workstation for me.

I’ll focus more specifically in another column on ways to stimulate that fundamental collective of thoughts and insights mentioned earlier.  In the meantime, may I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  Here’s the link:  http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  .  It’s fun and unintrusive.  Example of my recent Tweets: “To my heirs: there’s a fortune in carwash coupons lost around the house.  Sorry, I’m taking the car with me.” And at the end of several Tweet exchanges with a friend: “4 me, romance and imagination r paramount. Irony gave me a glimpse… now have to live on knowing ‘it could’ve been.’”  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters, which includes photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net . Past newsletters are archived at the website below.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, a new short story, “Case White,” is out in the latest issue of Cemetery Dance http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/_cd060  , and the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website.  Live large and write on….

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Thomas Sullivan

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Comments

Pingback by Fiction Writing with Storytellersunplugged | Thomas Sullivan: THE … | contentwriters on August 15, 2009 @ 10:36 pm

[...] Continue reading here: Fiction Writing with Storytellersunplugged | Thomas Sullivan: THE … [...]

Comment by David Niall Wilson on August 16, 2009 @ 8:02 am

You captured that very well, my friend, and while I strive to avoid ALL of those distractions at once, we do what we have to to get the words down…

I want to hear the story of how the cowboy happened to be there to rescue the lady from the Thames prior to their capture, but maybe (probably?) that’s just me.

Write on!

Comment by Jeani on August 16, 2009 @ 8:08 am

I don’t think I have the stomach for killing lizards, but a silver-headed cane would look good standing in the corner by our front door.

Comment by Serg on August 16, 2009 @ 9:03 am

Very interesting article. Thanks You!!!

Comment by Robert Jones on August 16, 2009 @ 9:50 am

The constituents in your colorful description of what should have been a perfect day for writing were delightfully diverse and imaginative. I was particularly amused by your mention of the across-the-street Panzer driver confined to bed with the flu. That described my years-ago Detroit neighborhood. The neighbor in question had no band in his trunk but did have recordings of bands with which he enriched the lives of his neighbors by keeping his volume control at its highest setting and keeping his trunk wide open while he and his friends bounced a basketball continuously all afternoon and late into the night.

Your advice on noting ideas on the spot is especially valid. They don’t call short-term memory by that name for no reason. I’m often left frustrated by how unexpectedly quickly my short-term memory runs its squeegee down my mental blackboard.

Descriptions of how writers position themselves for writing is always interesting. An enlarged version of yours would make an interesting and amusing article. A college English teacher once described a famous writer’s REQUIRED preparation as involving having an apple and a pen positioned just so on his desk. That smacks of conforming to a childhood image.

Your e-mailed picture of a low Sun’s reflection and the aura-like circle of hazy colors is a beauty that provides as much mood as image.

Thank you.

Amalgam

Comment by Firewolf on August 16, 2009 @ 1:12 pm

Hi,
thanks for your words! I’ll follow you on twitter once I’m home from work.

Julie
(long time lurker)

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 16, 2009 @ 7:15 pm

Ah, Davie, you could work out that little logistical probably without a hitch. You never miss a thing. Well, maybe one thing…I used your initials backwards on Twitter yesterday to create an anagram…

Sully

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 16, 2009 @ 7:18 pm

I’m with you, Jeani. That author (Gogol) was a study in isolation. His schoolmates wouldn’t even touch books he had handled. Hmmm. Sounds like a normal author to me.

Sully

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 16, 2009 @ 7:19 pm

Your welcome, Serg, and thanks for taking the trouble to comment…

Sully

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 16, 2009 @ 7:25 pm

Back atcha, Amalgam. I’m up here in the Boundary Waters using Ely’s Grand Lodge computer to answer these. Had a fantastic day and night. Canoeing in tsunamis with storms raging around, island hoping, and having stimulating conversations in the lea of one cove or another. Then swimming in a storm and a superb dinner…

Glad you liked the photo. Anyone reading this who would like to receive my free newsletter with the photos Robert Jones is talking about can email me to get on the list at mn333mn@earthlink.net.

Sully

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 16, 2009 @ 7:30 pm

Thanks very much, Julie. Just visited your blog, and I’ll look forward to keeping track of you there…

Sully

Comment by Alan Russell on August 16, 2009 @ 8:11 pm

Wonderful column, Sully.

I knew I was missing something. I need more swamp water to distill.

Alan

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 17, 2009 @ 7:36 am

Hey, Al, I’ll look for some swamp water today up here in the Boundary Waters. Though this pristine stuff looks more like the distilled variety. Wish u wuz here. What a setup. Class by night, adventure by day. Ah, the loons are calling and I must answer (snicker)…

Sully

Comment by Janet on August 17, 2009 @ 3:27 pm

Right now (as opposed to write now) it’s 106 degrees indoors because the power has gone elsewhere. Makes me nervous, given that I’m oxygen and other equipment dependent. My shaking hands don’t do much for me either. Ordered #4 version of “Speak and it shall appear.” We’ll see. Meanwhile, as always, it is a joy to read your words.

I like writing in a New York Deli, at Grand Central Station, and plugged into a Palm tree.

Much love, Janet

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 17, 2009 @ 5:37 pm

Well, I don’t know about plugged into a palm tree, Janet, but today in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters I could have used that pea green boat you sail in Granada. My Tasmanian buddy and I jammed a canoe into some boulders in the middle of a huge wind-tossed lake and road out storm winds on an island about twenty feet across. What a hoot! Am jumping from computer to computer whenever we make land, trying to keep up with newsletter/column feedback. Adventure, hoy!

106 degrees sounds like time to fill the bathtub with ice water or gin and tonic, Janet. Think of it as another sterling saga in your most interesting life. I do believe your autobio could be presented alphabetically in 30 volumes, a la encyclopedically. Take care and write on…

Sully

Comment by Larry on August 19, 2009 @ 3:33 pm

Yes nothing but natures music. Truly inspirational.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 19, 2009 @ 3:55 pm

From a man who knows about music that is much appreciated. Thanks…

Sully

Comment by copywriting seo on August 21, 2009 @ 10:22 pm

I am yet to find my inspiration for writing. Like everybody else, I put too much pressure on myself to write the good stuff. Sometimes, distractions can also be an inspiration.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 22, 2009 @ 6:44 am

Distractions as inspiration — well put. Like they say, there are no negatives for writers. Everything is material. A trained artist’s mind takes everything — including so-called distractions — and mines them for associations, patterns, insights, metaphors and portable minutia that apply to whatever they are working on or might work on. Thanks for the…inspiration, CS.

Sully

Comment by Lectern Guy on September 7, 2009 @ 11:01 am

I love this blog, and I can’t wait to read more from you! I’ll definitely be following you on twitter too!!

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on September 7, 2009 @ 1:15 pm

Thanks, Lectern Guy. I kind of surf through the Tweets of my followers informally, but Twitter seems to be the way to go these days. Cheers and best…

Sully

                                                                               10  COMMENTS follow

Planning is the death of spontaneity.  Goodbye magic.  Then again, spontaneity is how you end up going the wrong way on a one-way street.  When it comes to writing books, I like a lot of both — planning and spontaneity.

Getting the balance right is an acquired skill.  Most people get mired in one extreme or another.  It’s their whatchamacallit…nature.  If you are one of them, congratulations.  You are normal.  But if you court creativity and like to express it in words, you need a minimal map of where you are going and a maximal amount of daring in order to get there via the scenic route.  Zero in on a destination, but get there by your own roads.  As long as you know which horizon you’re headed for, you might even blow through a few useless traffic signs. 

So which traffic signs do you keep in order to sustain a minimum plan?  I like to think of effective expression as having a succinct beginning, middle and end, no matter how simple or complex.  “Hello, how are you, goodbye” will work as an entry level example of the simple.  You engage attention, deliver the goods, and disengage.  It’s the same on the heavy end of size and comprehensiveness, just more elaborate.  You have to establish a purpose for the reader’s attention in the beginning (a conflict, a problem to be solved, a set of characters to travel with, a POV), and then you run an obstacle course (the middle) with those elements on the way to a resolution that neatly disengages (the end).  But when you think about it, you really only need the beginning and the end, because you can play the middle where it lies, stretching or compressing it like the bellows of an accordion.  The beginning has to incorporate and foresee your needs and purpose, however, and the ending must satisfy both those needs and purpose.  So those are the two traffic signs that have to be planned.  To plan more is to limit the possibilities — which is sometimes desirable, sometimes not.  You define yourself and the quality of your work by how open you are on the journey.  That’s the savoring part.  To be sure, you must pick the right beginning in order to make it work and not have to begin again.  But once you have the correct anchor point, imagination and freedom will max out the potential.

As an object lesson in too much spontaneity, I’m reminded of a Sax Rohmer anecdote.  This noted author was traveling by ship from London to New York, I believe, and completing the next installment of a novel serialization for a magazine en route.  He had created a perfect crime scenario as a premise in the first installment and now found he could not figure a way out of it.  He had written himself into a box.  In a panic, he turned to a clever friend who pointed out that if he simply went back to his premise and established that a character had lied about a key fact in the beginning, he was home free.  In effect, he was starting over with a new anchor for his plan.  The original premise was flawed, an illusion.  The clever friend’s name?  Harry Houdini.

I believe most people err in the other direction, but it isn’t because they over-plan.  If they do not plan out well, neither do they exercise their freedom and imagination.  Instead, they follow the clichés of life.  They move with the herd, doing what others have done and sticking to the map.  It isn’t a big dramatic thing, it’s the little things they do and don’t do — how they look at the possibilities, how they interpret them, how energetic they are with their insight and imagination — that lock them into predictable outcomes.  They simply cannot think far enough outside the box… or off the map.

And here’s where spontaneity either makes its entrance or misses the cue.  For the writer, the world should be full of cues.  The writer is not a passive spectator, a sedentary Kool-Aid drinker.  The writer looks at what he/she saw yesterday and finds newness, because they themselves are new; they have grown in 24 hours, added to their database and therefore their insight.  They have learned to see deeper and make more associations.  I’m not kidding about the 24 hours, because even if there were no significant growth in that brief period of time, there is rotation of associations in your mind every day — an infinite variety of ways to engage things if you train your mind and attitudes to be open.

Australian Grant Soosalu researches this stuff and spurred me to think about what motivates life enhancement when he interviewed me recently (http://enhancingmylife.blogspot.com/2009/06/life-enhancing-with-author-thomas.html  ).  For sure a person’s basic nature plays into it, but a lot of the things that work against a spontaneous mind are conditioned, it seems to me.  As a society we are utterly bent on things that stupefy us, mesmerize us, or otherwise discourage original thinking.  I am an expert on personal failure, but I count it my one great consolation that Technicolor mice run rampant in my mind.  I would have made a lousy NASCAR alcoholic or a lemming or a sedentary anything.  Put me on a treadmill and I’ll flip it sideways.  Not a convenient way to live, but for me a rewarding one, always interesting and full of inspirations.

Stories happen to me all day long.  Friends say I make them happen by what I do.  Maybe there’s some truth to that, but mostly I just see them.  Hang out with me, and I’ll see the stories in your life too.  Technical truth is usually a lie.  People build their lives out of appearances rather than realities.  They almost always have secret inner lives, and yet they feel they are being honest with the world as long as they don’t live them outwardly.  That has always struck me as ludicrous and precisely backward.  Why should appearances rule?  Yet they do.  Less so for me.  I like that.  True, I conform to many situations because I try not to offend or hurt anyone, but I also seek to live true to myself as many hours of the day as I can.  Where and when do you live honestly?  Ideally you find a soulmate with whom you can share that inner being, but failing that (as most people do) you choose either to be alone or you live a secret life beneath appearances.  Inner honesty is crucial for me as a person, as a writer.  I must have that.  Every day.  It frees me up to a whole lot of things, including making impossibilities into realities.

It might surprise you (or not) to know that stories almost always evolve from spontaneity for me rather than a plan.  The plan is a coherent coming together of a pattern from those unexpected and inspiring events.  Sort of like an unplanned pregnancy.  Here’s one that’s perking in embryo right now:

Early this spring, when the Indian grass was 6 feet high in a place I call the Golden Meadow, I paid a visit to exquisite memories.  We’re talking story quality memories and beyond already, so inspiration’s pilot light was already on.  Somehow in the wandering breezes of that interlude I leaned over a cup-sized hole in the earth and my cell phone dropped dead center into it.  Astonishing.  Couldn’t have done it on a bet.  Not so amusing, though, when I reached in only to find my hand choked off before it touched the slim phone.  A little scrabbling and clawing did nothing in the hard ground, and I withdrew my fingers.  The hole was too big to have been made by a snake, two small for a fox, but I imagined carnivorous incisors poised for a lucky lunch of “finger” snacks at my expense.

There were half a dozen holes in close proximity, and so I refined the picture to a burrow of gophers or other meadow munchers celebrating their lucky find while looking up the phone numbers of all their cousins in China.  I glanced around for a branch to break into chopsticks, thinking I could leverage the phone out, but I probably had an equal chance of wedging it deeper, so with a nod to karma for its neat practical joke on me I went back to the car for a spade.  Did I mention that there were half a dozen of these holes?  I thought about that before I went to the car — thought about marking the right one — but I didn’t, of course, and when I got back, confident I’d know which black hole was eating up my cell phone minutes…I didn’t.

Oh, you just have to laugh.  You laugh and laugh and laugh.  And then you swear.

I didn’t want to decimate a clan of rodents by any name, or explain why I was digging up six holes to the DNR, so that’s when I got the inspiration to chug back to the park nature center and call my son, the boy, the lad, Sean a.k.a. Shane hisself.  I would have him call my cell, say, 10 minutes after I hung up, by which time I would be back in position to sort out the hole with the ringtone coming out of it.  One problem.  Odds of getting the busy lad on the fly like that are less than picking the right hole from a choice of six.  And the odds won.  But the kind lady overhearing all this from behind the desk offered to make the call, and that’s how a grown man crawling on all fours around six holes in a golden field eventually reached down and plucked a singing cell phone from the earth.  Just another quirky episode in my eccentric life.  But it would not have happened if I didn’t live in the center of an intricate maze of meaningful cues and romantic associations.

How are all these spontaneous little acts and circumstances going to merge into a plan?  Well…I don’t know.  Yet.  But I know they will.  They already have in my life, because it is — after all — the Golden Meadow, and there I was searching in the darkness of the bleeding earth for what I could no longer see, and there were the ringtones playing “It’s only words, and words are all I have to take your heart away…” (Boyzone or Bee Gees, take your pick) and somehow, somewhere this will merge with the mirrors and echoes of my (he)art.

Spontaneous events are like pieces of stained glass, and when you collect enough of them you have a window on a new scene.

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  )?  It’s fun and unintrusive.  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for my free newsletter, which includes photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net . Past newsletters are archived at the website below.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, my new short story, “Case White,” is out in the latest issue of Cemetery Dance http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/_cd060  , and the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website.  May summer’s horizons be yours.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  

 

Thomas Sullivan

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Comments

Comment by Robert Jones on July 17, 2009 @ 12:55 pm

You need never be concerned about anyone ever mistaking you for a spectative, sedentary Kool-Aid drinker. Significant growth and especially a rotation of associations (Technicolor mice running track is a great image) are attributives that define your very being. Your latest unplug is an example. In it, you demonstrate a smooth rotation from planning and spontaneity, through initial and terminal hooks, to the ludicrousness of building lives out of external appearances rather than internal realities. (Why indeed should appearances rule?)

Your next angular displacement quickly brings readers to another illustrative tour of nature as you invite us along while you anticipate the possibility of carnivorous incisors waiting in a classic, Athenian Underworld to receive sacrificial fingers. (I shared that feeling when I used to imagine what might be salivating in dark, underwater caves in reefs as whatever it was watched me swim past.)

In regard to what starts one’s writing engine, when I was regularly writing newspaper columns, they were often an offspring of an overall, basic theme; but they were sometimes developed from an idea for only a beginning or an ending. The central, bellows portion usually seemed to expand almost effortlessly.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on July 17, 2009 @ 2:26 pm

“…the ludicrousness of building lives out of external appearances rather than internal realities.” Amen, Amalgam. Almost everyone knows the truth within their hearts, but living that — even with one person — is the hardest thing in the world. And yet that’s where the greatest reward is. How can one achieve/acquire anything worth having without at least trying to live truth as a foundation? This is why humans just have to be the #1 sitcom/drama for the god/gods/committee that created us and gave us free will. Courage vs. fear/guilt. I don’t think I’ve passed many tests in this life, but I hope I’m passing that one. Was it Jack London said he’d rather be ashes than dust? Yeah. Ashes testify to having lived. Dust never did. Thanks for placing me on that side of risk-taking. Can’t say I’ve reached many successful outcomes by it, but it’s never about the destination, is it? Not many of us will reach a destination, and those who do are often disappointed. It’s about the journey. And if that’s just a romantic ideal, so be it. Living the ideal has made reality magical…

– Sully

Comment by Robert Jones on July 17, 2009 @ 6:17 pm

As with your previous essays, this reader has come away entertained, with more wisdom and with thoughts to carry away and ponder. For what more could one wish?

Thank you, mon ami.

In view of your history with squirrels, kindly be careful of jaywalking with a feisty one. Just yesterday, I had one chomping away at a crack in the corner of my upper deck railing. I had to chase him away repeatedly. A few minutes ago, I had to chase away a large woodpecker that was excavating the same crack. He was replaced almost immediately by a blue jay. I don’t know what’s in that crack, but it must be something tasty in animal terms.

Amalgam

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on July 17, 2009 @ 7:11 pm

Revenge of the animals! Just this week repaired a porch post that a woodpecker made into a penthouse, and last night a cat and a fox got into it in the backyard. Chipmunk ran over my foot while I was playing T-sax in the garage, and a dog fell asleep on me while I was watching a movie at my adoptive family’s house last night. Seems like everything with fur or feathers is getting bolder. New world order? Maybe you’d better finish that dog book you’re working on in order to curry favor…

Sully

Comment by Wayne Allen Sallee on July 19, 2009 @ 10:19 pm

Sully, I overthink things when I’m writing a narrative and get to deep into the character’s mindset. Sometimes the story seems to write itself, the spontaneity is like when every single thing you do during a single day is simply right and effortless. At a certain point, the story carries you. I never outline. I have a title, a first line, and a last line.

Nice comments, Robert. Wow. London Rohmer, Houdini. You name droppers. Wait a minute. Rohmer and Houdini were on a boat that had left…London. Hmnnn. The circle tightens.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on July 19, 2009 @ 10:39 pm

First line…last line. To my mind, you probably have two-thirds of the story right there, Wayne. Doubt that those two sentences would satisfy you unless they contained at least the seeds of a set-up and a resolution. An outline by any name…

You just look at things and see the frames around them, from what I’ve seen. Even your descriptions of Chicago stuff and everyday events carry larger than life messages. Which is why you are a natural writer, say I.

As for Houdini on the high seas, didn’t happen. As I recall, the magazine that was serializing Rohmer was Collier’s, and Sax arrived in New York in a panic because he had not been able to craft a way out of his perfect crime while crossing aboard ship, as he had intended. I think at the heart of it was a sealed room with no clues. Houdini was in New York, and it was his suggestion that if one of the characters lied, the premise could be undone enough to offer a solution. It was an 11th hour salvation for Rohmer, who seized upon it in time for the deadline. Or something like that. Loren Estleman is the one who told me about it, and he later gave me a collector’s copy of a bio of SR one Christmas that I think also had he story. Not sure about that last, though. Cheers.

Sully

Comment by Alan Russell on July 21, 2009 @ 5:14 pm

Let’s face it: Sully was jealous of Alice going down a rabbit hole, prompting him to have his cell phone do a swan dive.

Now how will he make hay out of this story? Maybe his cell phone will take a picture while in the depths . . . The result might be as frightening as that Sully Scarecrow.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on July 21, 2009 @ 6:41 pm

Ooh! Like that plot angle. How about we use the Alice shrink-pill in chapter 2? What if everyone has a scarecrow and comes face to face with it down the hole? And what do the scarecrows scare and why?

Going to dust off my scarecrow story “To Walk the Earth” and redux it… Thanks, west-coast guru.

Sully

Comment by Sam Trend on July 24, 2009 @ 7:17 pm

Hmm, usually when I try to write story, that evolves on its own, I sooner or later come to a dead-end. I really prefer to plan all out before actual work.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on July 24, 2009 @ 7:31 pm

Nothing wrong with going with what works for you. If it was a formula, the act of creativity could be memorized. That said, for me the way to avoid a dead end is to have that initial problem/conflict that begins a story resolved in one’s mind (the ending). Planning to that extent ensures a solution or resolution. And the narrative roads between conflict (beginning) and resolution (ending) can then circle and roam endlessly. Invention is wide open in that part. Dead ends thereafter probably only happen in subplots or character entanglements that are not thought through. Bottom line, if planning it all out doesn’t make your story sounds leaden and mechanical, I say go with it. But if you can only plan out the essential parts, you may find more freedom and inventiveness as you work out the narrative. Thanks, Sam…
Sully

                                               6  COMMENTS follow

Shhh.  Don’t want to disturb the Spirit layers.  Okay, let’s hold hands in a circle across the miles.  Now dim the lights or just close your baby blues.  See the floating trumpet?  Make that a floating T-sax (after all this is a séance to get in touch with Sully’s ghost), and let’s hope he doesn’t actually play the damn thing — rock ‘n roll RIP!  Brace yourselves…  He’s baaa-ack!

Seriously, good folks, I am not a zombie.  Go ahead, one pinch.  OUCH!  See?  And I really was grateful and touched by all the expressions of concern as I went through some physical trauma and the sawbones fired up the buzzsaw a time or two.  But now I have escaped stitches, gauze, tape, ace bandages, plaster cast, surgical wear, meds, a deflatible rubber boot that allowed me to work out in the pool, and a pitching wedge that did for a cane.  My gloriously naked body is better than new (it could only be better) and my odometer is rolled back to — oh, say – 19 or 20…decades.

So now I must apologize profusely if you are one of the many people I kinda blew off with glibness when you were so gracious as to ask after my status.  The thing of it is I hate to be a whiner and I’m a pretty stereotypical male in that when I’m injured I just want to be alone.  Maybe it’s an evolutionary echo, like a fear that if you expose your vulnerabilities, the sabertooth tiger will get you while you are lying injured under a bush.  But it was rude and immature of me.  So now in a shameless bid for your sympathy AFTER THE FACT, and hopefully to get an amusing column out of it, I’m whining and coming clean with all the answers and details.  Call it another of my Cannibal Essays, geared as an object lesson in converting mundane life into stylized prose.  There are no bad experiences for a writer, as they say, just material. 

So there I was last January skiing in the dark and pissing off my muse who thought I was altogether too far removed from suffering for my art.  This explains the vindictive irony that I simply wiped out on a nothing sweep of snow, falling softly and I thought in a controlled way but somehow tearing my rotator nearly clean off.  Don’t you love it when the surgeon calls in his colleagues to look at the MRI all excited about the extent of the injury?  Yes, I lied to my friends a little when it happened — lied to myself — actually tried to ski a couple of times sans poles before the sawbones cut.

It is probably not an exaggeration to call me an orthopod junkie.  In order to simplify life, I regularly visit the offices of a coven of terrific trauma surgeons who collectively account for my various injured limbs.  It is only a slight exaggeration to mention that, due to some overlap, I am able to send broken body parts in separately and on occasion keep simultaneous appointments.  When I come to the reception desk the nurses immediately begin laughing, and if I announce my intention to see a veterinarian or a gynecologist, I am pitied but scarcely doubted.  Thus, I have a reputation among the “sturgeons” for not taking treatment seriously. “It would be you…” said the state’s leading carpal tunnel doc when just before he retired I became the first patient whose wrist surgeries he had to repeat.  But see, this is good, because he said I heal so fast that the nerves didn’t have time to abate.  In the postmortem after the rotator cuff repair, that surgeon said the same thing, that my range of motion was better after three days than he had expected in two weeks.  True, one of them also told his nurse, “Don’t bother telling him what to do, he’ll just do what he wants anyway,” but let it be known, I was a very good patient this time. 

The sawbones made sure of that by scaring me to death with his enthusiastic account of how he had to chase my rotator somewhere south of my derrière and haul it into place with a special technique that sounded like a tractor pull and crucify it with twice the number of pins, stitches, and surgery time as usual.  Oh, I was awed and contrite after that.  Didn’t protest when he strapped my arm to my chest or insisted I stay in the hospital overnight or wanted to give me fentanyl for pain (the drug that is 80 times more powerful than morphine and that the Russians used to kill terrorists in that opera house a few years back).  Hate the stuff on account of I think it shuts down my bladder and I never met a catheter I liked.  They always warn you to stay with someone the first 24 hours, but if I feel like I’m in trouble I usually drive over to Wal-Mart and hang out in the pharmacy near the meds.  Not this time.  When my boy-child drove me home I even asked him to stay a while.  Went by the book.  Straight arrow.  I r a good patient – yessir…mm-hmm.

And things went swimmingly at first — learning how to change a light bulb by letting it drop into a clothes basket and shaving my head with one hand and pouring water from a jug spigot into a glass sitting in an open drawer below, etc. Admittedly boredom drove me to press my luck a little, e.g. snowshoeing or dragging a canoe into the lake while the ice was breaking up (a spring thaw event not to be missed!) and poling one-arm along the zigzag lightning channels.  But no harm done. 

What’s really dangerous is following the doctor’s orders, and being too cautious, and rehab, and sleeping!  Sleeping — totally dangerous!  You can crawl into a knot and strangle while sleeping.  Last year my bicep ruptured in the middle of the night!  It was strained while bailing out a boat with a 5-gallon bucket, but I was just lying in bed and suddenly it felt like warm wax dripping down my arm as it peeled off.  That was the right bicep, and after the injury to the left rotator cuff, the doc mentioned that I ruptured that bicep too.  I asked him if he reattached it, and he said “nah, you’ll probably never notice the difference,” so now I’ve got matching ruptured biceps. 

It got more complicated at rehab.  Lisa, who is gifted with the touch, manipulates my arm for half an hour once a week.  I was not trying to be macho, but since I didn’t think stretching could cause any damage, I kept telling her to ignore my reflexes as she torqued my arm, and she did, and that was how my elbow suddenly swelled up like a grapefruit.  One of the standby sawbones aspirated it and compressed it, but when the Ace bandage came off, it just ballooned up again.  X-rays showed zero arthritis, so it had to be a ruptured bursa sac.  When the doc drew off fluid this time, he got nothing but a cup full of black blood, and thus I was sentenced to 10 days in an elbow cast.

Are you getting the picture here?  The Incredible Mummified Man.  I slept in micro bursts swaddled in bloody rags and felt like I was in a Japanese game show where every time I figured out how to wash an armpit, they slapped another cast or ridiculous Velcro wrap on me.  Plus, after making fantastic progress in rehab — months ahead of schedule — I now had to stop all exercises.  Except that I did a lot of hiking.  A LOT.

So why did I opt for toe surgery– don’t ask.  Yet another sawbones saber-dancing around a surgical gurney.  BTW, I recommend not joking with the nurses as you are about to be anesthetized on the slab.  It was, to say the least, impolitic to quote CrackBarbie: “The last nurse I had was four chest hairs short of being a dude!”  (har, har).  Too late the realization dawned on me that the nurse behind the surgical table was, in fact, a dude.  Lights out before I could apologize, and I woke up fearing I would hear people in white discussing my sex change operation (har, har).  But they stuck to the script and so far no funny urges. 

Now welded into a surgical boot with a pin stuck through the end of my toe to hold it together and using a pitching wedge for a cane, I barely missed not sleeping for the next 30 days, and it dootaleebop didn’t cha-cha-cha affect my sanity at all!  Headline: MAN HANGS HIMSELF WITH ACE BANDAGE WHILE LYING IN BED.  Shades of David Carradine in a Bangkok closet.  Absolutely normal, I suppose, for a wretched writer wearing an elbow cast, shoulder sling, 33 miles of Ace bandage, a surgical slipper and bloody stuffing coming out of all seven orifices. 

Did I mention the bath?  I am so clever.  Figured out how to sit in the freaking tub with a surgical boot braced on the wall and an elbow cast looped over the soap dish while shaving my head with one hand.  You probably think my skull looks like hamburger, but nay, the problem was that I never got through a single bath without dipping the cast in the soup.  When the itching kept me awake, I tried holding the cast arm over a burner on the stove to dry it out, and that’s how I set an Ace bandage on fire.

This drove me to try the blue rubber deflatable boot.  With DryPro not only were showers possible, but as the cast was removed and wrappings rotted off, working out in the pool became socially acceptable.  And if a defective squeeze bulb had not messed up the deflating of the rubber boot, I probably would not have hung up like an obscene blue buoy when the thing bobbed out of the water on flip turns.

Out of pity, the surgeon said I could walk all I wanted.  “Like all day?” I asked.  “I don’t think you’ll feel like doing that, but as much as you want,” he repeated.  This led to a reprise of the Bataan death march, during which the bleeding toe became infected.  Thank God for my Maple Grove WalMart pharmacy.  Just two parking lots and a corner of a lake away, I can walk there…or take the elevator.  Like Alice’s Restaurant, you can find anything you want over-the-counter, and it has saved my soul more than once. 

Antibiotics were not enough, so the sawbones pulled the pin on me after 20 days instead of 30.  You’d think that a pin holding a toe together would match its length, but I was shocked to see 4 inches of it come out as if my foot were shish kebab.  “I did some nasty things to your toe,” said the surgeon, “it was basically hanging in three pieces.”  Which is why, I suppose, he only used one stitch that ran through the toe like a clothesline.  More information than I needed to know.  

So there you have it, the unexpurgated skinny.  There is more — the Achilles tendinitis, and how I sprained a knee trying to sleep with my foot hanging off the bed, and falling asleep in the middle of an MRI (clunk, clank — zzzzz) — but in the end laughter is the best medicine, and I’m taking the last dose of that now.  What’s the old saying?  “He who laughs laugh, laughs laughs laughs laughs.”  Yeah.  Whatever.

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/thomassullivan )?  It’s fun and unintrusive.  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for my free newsletter, which includes photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net. Past newsletters are archived at the website below.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, my new short story, “Case White,” is out in the latest issue of Cemetery Dance http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/_cd060 , and the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website.  Have a terrific launch into summer.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/  

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan 

Thomas Sullivan

Comments

Comment by hypnotherapy on June 16, 2009 @ 4:03 am

Hey wonderful….
does he really mean it

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on June 16, 2009 @ 4:20 am

Is this, by any chance, the hypnotherapist who hypnotized a woman and convinced her that I had stolen her naval? Think State Fair, Michigan, 1980s. I was signing books when this redhead started crawling over me, looking for her belly button…

– Sully

Comment by Robert Jones on June 16, 2009 @ 10:54 am

Your continuing, compounding catastrophes and writing style made for extremely humorous reading – surely much funnier for us to read about than for you to experience. Ow! I couldn’t get very far into your account without hearing Flamingo Frank chuckling. I’m certain I heard a genuine guffaw when I came to your description of attempting to dry your arm cast by holding it over a stove burner and setting an Ace bandage on fire. Overall, it could hold its own in humor when compared even to Jacques Tati’s sequence of catastrophes in his famous film, MR. HULOT’S HOLIDAY.

Seriously, you have my sympathy for all the discomfort and inconvenience you experienced. Also seriously, I hope you take mindful heed of the likely “press on regardless” causes and effects related to your painful experiences before you end up being partially eaten by another squirrel.

Amalgam

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on June 16, 2009 @ 11:14 am

Mercy, you used the dreaded “S” word for brown furry rodent (a.k.a. tree rat). Ever since I wrote that column KY JELLY & THE HEADLESS SQUIRREL in September of ‘06, I have been under surveillance. They are watching me from the yard below, even as I type this. Yea verily, Flamingo Frank would have one of his gentlemanly smiles at my stupidity. I shall be very, very careful, amigo…

And thanks for the comments. Glad the farcical tone came through.

– Sully

Comment by Wayne Allen Sallee on June 18, 2009 @ 8:19 pm

Hey, Sully. Man, I thought I was Frankenstein. I think you (more than me) are Bruce Willis in UNBREAKABLE. You seem to heal as fast as I do, and people kept telling me I was more like Sam Jackson in the film. So, yeah. Bruce Willis=Thomas Sullivan.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on June 18, 2009 @ 8:27 pm

Gives a whole new spin to the phrase “being cast,” doesn’t it? Glad you also heal quickly, my friend. If I take on this new persona of Bruce Willis, do I have to give up being Christopher Walken?

– Sully

                                                   17  COMMENTS follow

This one’s for the birds.  Seriously.  They’ve been flopping, flitting, flying and

flapping around in my life for years, but sometimes I can’t see the forest for the trees, or in this case the feathers — white and otherwise.  As the old saying goes, there is no one blinder than he who won’t see.  Check.

So this column is about themes, and one particular theme, and how writers have to be super keen to the subtle vibes in their lives – ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.  Oh, I r keen.

I guess the bird theme in my life started with parakeets, like the one whose last flight ended in our swinging kitchen door when I was 12.  Extreme — one might even say mindless — loyalty is one of my virtues/vices, and I mourned that loss for decades (guess I still do, since I can’t seem to throw away its pathetic memorial kept in a drawer).  A recent Twitter line I posted, “Are parakeets supposed to be black?…maybe I should move the cage away from the stove,” shall go unexplained.

More recently, it was ducks.  When I moved to the shore of a lake in Minnesota, a momma duck decided to nest in a barrel planter on my upper deck.  10 eggs later, I found myself nestsitting because she turned out to be the AmyWinehouse of waterfowl, partying off God knows where all night while predators moved in on her minus-29-day-old young.  I won’t get into paternity suits for unwed fowl, but I wiled away the hours by writing it all up in an article (A BARREL OF DUCKS) and sent it off to the Minneapolis Star-Trib.  When the article proved popular, they asked for more, and so when poly-birthday arrived and the crazy hatchlings followed shameless Wild Mama over an 11-foot drop from my deck (instead of taking the stairs like I showed them), I wrote it all up again as DUCKS REDUX for the Star-Trib.  Was not surprised when I saw Wild Mama swimming around a week later with only two chicks in her wake.  No “wake” for the rest, so to speak.  Sad ending, but what can you say, except AFLAC?

I’ve missed other avian clues to this major theme in my life.  There are the Eagles, founded by one of my closest friends Glenn Frey.  And white feathers, a major symbol well documented in my columns and newsletters over the past year and more [and for those who have asked, the white feather still endures by the tree in the Golden Meadow as of May 9].  Not to mention, Woody Woodpecker drilled the top of my porch post last week, then got stuck inside at the bottom.  To be brutally honest, I might not have been so charitable as to help him out, but I figured he would have made his own doorway anyway.  And, of course, I wrote in my newsletter last June about the amazing swallow at Elm Creek, so opposite Wild Mama, who trusted me when I tried to save her eggs: http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/newsletters/06162008.htm  

Then there are the love doves.  They seemed to show up in tandem with the white feathers.  Which is odd, because I believe the white feathers began with a rubber chicken named Charlene — Charlene the Chocolate Chewing Chicken, to be exact, who was especially fond of a confection known as Nipples of Venus and was last seen joyriding on the running board of a Ford Explorer.  Anyway, one morning shortly after the love doves showed up, I was eating oatmeal out of a sauce pan in the kitchen when a sudden compulsion to go to the dining room came over me.  I almost never enter the dining room, but I was drawn to the curtained window, and just as I reached out to pull back the sheers, there was a deafening impact on the glass.  I snatched the curtain away and met my own reflection . . . and then below on the lower deck I saw a male dove, twitching on its side.  I rushed down to the lower level, but it was too late and it died of a broken neck in my hands.  Or maybe it was a broken heart, because of course it had seen its reflection in the glass too and, thinking it was a rival, dove into it. 

A year has passed since then.  Four seasons with no love doves and no white feathers, except for the lone one I planted in the Golden Meadow.  And then I stepped out my front door one recent dawn and came nose to beak with a lone love dove sitting on a nest in the arbor vita next to my porch.  We are sharing the spring and soft conversations (she listens, I coo) while her two chicks grow big enough to make it on their own.  (Yes, that’s her in the photo at the beginning of this column.)  I don’t know what to make of this.

And now there’s the chicken-swan.  For this one you have to go to the Apron Hall of Fame.  A terrific new writing talent in Missouri talked me into sending an incriminating photo and also posted my recipe for Shrimp Sully Red.  Carole Lanham’s web site is funny and clever — well worth a look.  Had to borrow an apron from Teri Norby (mother of Norby Nation, the family that has adopted me and whose photos are in some of my past newsletters), but here are the links to the apron shot: http://horrorhomemaker.com/theapronhalloffame.htm & the recipe: http://horrorhomemaker.com/fromthekitchen.htm

Ask my long-time friends and they’ll probably tell you that squirrels are my avatar, not birds.  Well, yeah…lots of squirrel stories, alluded to in past posts by Flamingo Frank among others.  I’m really good with squirrel stories, squirrels are good, ask me about squirrels, got squirrels down swell and Aretha Franklin and psychedelic mushrooms all with squirrels, yeah, yeah, doo-dah – save for another column.

How good are you at picking up the themes and patterns in your life?  Sometimes the most obvious ones are the hardest to see.  I like to think that for a good writer anything that happens twice is a pattern.  It may or may not say anything conclusive to you, but there are associations worth exploring anytime something is repeated.  Finding meaning in things is how I put the universe together and why I need creativity.  Without that final step of thinking I am just a spectator, passive instead of passionate.  That’s like getting all your meals through an IV.  You just exist and you don’t savor the flavor.  Bon appétit!

You can follow me on Twitter now (http://twitter.com/thomassullivan ).  It’s fun and unintrusive.  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for my free newsletter, which includes photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net. Past newsletters are archived at the website below, photos included.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website.  

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

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

 

Thomas Sullivan

 

Comments

Comment by Vicki on May 15, 2009 @ 11:46 pm

Poor ducklings. If the surviving two make it through to duckhood, it’ll be no thanks to Wild Mama.

I’d never really thought about themes in life before. It is only now you mention it that I recognise the recurring motif in my life.

Frogs.

The first gift my husband gave me when we were dating was a small wooden frog, which I still have. A photo of a frog in a child’s cupped hands was the inspiration behind my first income-earning short story. I now live on a road with frog in its name. In the last six months, frogs have been regular visitors to my kitchen window.

Yes, definitely frogs.

Thank you for a most interesting and thought-provoking post, Sully.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on May 16, 2009 @ 7:18 am

Glad to hear frogs are in vogue in the land down under (greenbacks in the outback?). They are completely fascinating. In fact, if you’ll permit a slight sachay to include a near cousin, one of my favorite literary characters is the obsessive/compulsive Mr. Toad in “Wind in the Willows.” And there is a “Frog Crossing” flagstone next to my porch and other frog stuff around the house. Good to hear from you, Vicki, and thanks for giving my humble thoughts a global “theme.”

– Sully

Comment by Janet Berliner on May 16, 2009 @ 11:31 am

Nothing short of a death certificate could make me miss one of your essays.
Bob has a client in Australia. She, too, is Vicki, or could they be one and the same?

Could it be that Cem Dance would publish all of CASE WHITE?

Here’s to drunken tree frogs. Yes. There’s a story in that.

J.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on May 16, 2009 @ 12:13 pm

The link attached to Vicki’s name will take you to author page Vicki Tyley. Is that Bob’s client? I wonder if frogs croak with an Aussie verve down under.

Have not explored CASE WHITE, the novel, with Cemetery Dance. It’s a thought.

And thank you as always for your appreciation, Janet. Drunken tree frogs have captured my imagination for the rest of the day. Fermented berries?

– Sully

Comment by Janet Berliner on May 16, 2009 @ 4:23 pm

Yep. Same Vicki.

Tree frog: An oft-intoxicated friend in Carmel Valley talked to tree frogs. She left bits of alcohol for them on a large leaf. Perhaps the liquid dried up; perhaps not…

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on May 16, 2009 @ 6:41 pm

Beats champaigne out of a glass slipper!

Sully

Comment by Robert Jones on May 17, 2009 @ 4:27 pm

You are quite right about the most obvious themes and patterns often being the hardest to see. Since it is so easy to dismiss the obvious while consciously searching for something unique, it might be far more frequent than often the hardest to see. And your comment about there being “no one blinder than he who won’t see” is as true as that other old saying about the most costly thing that one can own being a closed mind.

Thank you for revealing yet another facet of The Sullivan by way of a tour of the personal effects of THE Sullivan by way of your relationships with birds past and present. You related it all in a visual style that embraced both sadness and humor in a just so balance. As usual, you included a lesson in the importance of focusing upon observing, writing and living and whatever one might find lurking in between.

Great stuff, mon ami.

Amalgam

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on May 17, 2009 @ 5:23 pm

You know, ever since I quoted that line about, “no one blinder than me you won’t see,” I haven’t been able to get a song that used it out of my head. Maybe if I could remember the title… It was the flip side of a hit by Bobby Bland. Aaargh! Anyway, thank you most kindly for your sentiments, Amalgam.

Sully

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on May 17, 2009 @ 11:11 pm

Well, of course, I typoed the song line in the previous post. It’s “No one blinder than he who won’t see.” Blame it on voice activation software. Thanks to anonymous in South Africa who emailed the answer, I now have the name of the song: “Share Your Love with Me,” the flip side of “After It’s too Late.”

Sully

Comment by Wayne Allen Sallee on May 24, 2009 @ 10:05 pm

Sorry, Sully. I was going to vote for your title as being most erotic of the month, but John beat you out.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on May 25, 2009 @ 6:02 am

I knew I should have added “Do-dah” at the end, but to tell you the truth, John got my vote too. You can’t beat naked blondes (oops — sex and violence — no pun intended).

Sully

Pingback by Fiction Writing with Storytellersunplugged Thomas Sullivan | My Site on May 31, 2009 @ 8:59 pm

[...] Fiction Writing with Storytellersunplugged Thomas Sullivan Posted by root 20 minutes ago (http://www.storytellersunplugged.com) And there is a frog crossing flagstone next to my porch and other frog stuff around the house comment by thomas sullivan on may 16 2009 12 13 pm Discuss  |  Bury |  News | Fiction Writing with Storytellersunplugged Thomas Sullivan [...]

Comment by Jeanie Ransom on June 7, 2009 @ 9:37 pm

Your way with words never ceases to amaze me. I especially loved your description of you and the lone love dove “sharing the spring and soft conversations.” With two big lakes in our subdivision, ducks and geese abound — if someone could figure out what makes goose poop harden like cement, I’m sure it could be used to solve some world problem. One day, I noticed several cars stopped to watch a mallard duck who was quite visibly upset. His mate had been hit and killed by a car, and the duck would not leave her side. He seemed to either be in in shock or in denial that his loved one was gone from this world, and the depth of his anguish left a lasting impression on my own soul. And then, there are squirrels. I don’t know why I like them, especially since several of them set up house in our attic last summer, but after reading your blog entry, I’m thinking “squirrel theme” for one of my children’s books.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on June 7, 2009 @ 10:27 pm

Squirrels are sitting ducks for children’s books. And I almost feel irreverent for the glib word play, because the mallard in denial strums something poignant for sure. I’m not big on anthropomorphizing, but animal emotions are way played down by stodgy behavioralists, seems to me. Even the existence of emotions isn’t recognized by some. Maybe you should work that duck story into an article somewhere. Thanks for weighing in, Jeanie…

– Sully

Comment by Vicki on June 14, 2009 @ 1:14 am

Ahh, yes, who could forget the inimitable Mr Toad.

Hello, Sully. Apologies for the belated reply. I’m not long home from a month in the South Australian outback. No telephone, no Internet, no computer. And no frogs. Or at least none that I came across.

Where I live is dry, though not arid as Australia’s interior. The frogs at home tend to be nocturnal, emerging in the cool of night to feed. Insects attracted by the kitchen light make for easy pickings. Fast food for amphibians: http://www.vickityley.com/frogs/

– Vicki

P.S. Hi to Janet

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on June 15, 2009 @ 11:38 pm

Australian novelist Vicki Tyley posted a second comment here along with this link, but it has been lost to cyberspace. Apparently it followed up on the first post and referenced the three photos of frogs seen here: http://www.vickityley.com/frogs/

We’ll at least see if this hyperlink stays up…

And, Vicki, if you’re reading this right after it’s posted, know that my outgoing email is jammed and I’ll reply to yours as soon as my server clears. Thanks for the link in the meantime.

Sully

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on June 16, 2009 @ 8:13 am

And there it is. Vicki’s comment mysteriously back (and just before my denying that it’s there). Sigh…

Sully

I think choosing a career or a genre is a little like making love. Well…a lot like making love. You have a certain skill set, and we can call that your power of attraction — your good looks. Good looks (as women always know) grant the power of choice, and so you use your skill set to attract a specific readership. It is a superficial beginning, but you build on it, so that over time you engender a certain loyalty (faithfulness). And in the happily-ever-after — if you’ve chosen the right readership — it morphs into a true butterfly. Like beauty, the initial attraction itself stays in the eyes of the beholder, because it is locked in memory and association. But the sustaining thing is not just that specific beauty or attractiveness, it is the fact that you used it to make the choice you did. You belong to those readers.

That seems to be an increasingly trendy part of our culture: the social pressure to belong to something apart from the substance or lack of it in a relationship. You see it in, for instance, music. Bands like Modest Mouse or The Shins become initially popular among a group of independent fans (“Indies”), but when they cross over into mainstream success they are almost reviled by their original followers for having “left.” So, for better or worse, genre may act more like a benevolent hostage-taker than a fair exchange of loyalty for value at one point in a writer’s life. Or to keep within the metaphor of this column, a jealous lover.

And there’s the rub. Because if you haven’t chosen the right readership — one that fits the full range of who you are — you may be stuck. This is probably the most secret (shhh!) complaint I hear from other writers. They feel like they are suffocating in a confining genre. Often they want to develop more character-driven narratives that would be considered indulgent in the action/tone of category fiction. Sometimes they balk at popular themes and new trends. Sometimes the desire to change simply reflects their own growth and outreach into the real world as they get older. In this sense, either they have outgrown their marriages — their readers — or else the genres have changed or revealed limitations in a way that leaves them stagnating.

It is no one’s fault, and there is no right or wrong. Just the unassailable fact of change or awakening. But now there are complications of time invested, marketability, image and loyalty. Assets may be involved. And yet, the choice for a writer who feels they can no longer grow in a category of fiction is often to die in the traces or to risk rejection all over again in a new direction. In order to keep my focus here, I’m just going to shorthand the philosophical side of it. To my mind, there is no real choice. Not being true to yourself is being untrue to everything else. It disrespects the marriage. The consequences of that may take a long time to become apparent, but eventually who you pretend to be and what you do will ring false and hollow all the way around. If you’re going to try and fool the world full-time, why bother to write at all?

So, if the goal is to be who you are soul deep, then life is too precious and short to procrastinate. In that situation, you put your quality time and passion where it maxes out your potential. Of course, you still want the chrome-plated, bling-encrusted, plastic banana testimonials you may have garnered along the old way, and it’s nice if they come, but if they don’t, you have to be wise enough and real enough to walk the walk wherein the true reward is in the doing…the living. Or in the words of teen rock idol Ricky Nelson in another millennium (after he tried to break out at a Madison Square Garden concert):

“When I got to the Garden party, they all knew my name
But no one recognized me, I didn’t look the same…

If you gotta play at garden parties, I wish you a lotta luck
But if memories were all I sang, I’d rather drive a truck.”

As I said, the number of writers I know who secretly yearn for air beyond what they breathe in their seemingly successful careers is quite arresting. It is almost a cliché (especially for writers who succeed early), like lamenting, “… it’s too bad that youth has to be wasted on the young.” Blessed are those who find a good fit early and never need to change, say I. Loyal cadres of fans should never be disdained. But for those writers who try to segue out of genre, the result is often disappointment from their fans and the perception that they have “lost it.” And the fans are correct, as far as it goes. The writers have lost the genre. I don’t think there is any mending that; any need to, really. It’s apples and oranges. The problem comes when the writer tries to have it both ways by writing hybrids. They usually end up with an “orpple.” The fans aren’t fooled, the writer isn’t satisfied.

Trying to make the genre fit the writer never works. The genre is what it is — what it’s supposed to be. So, if the writer doesn’t want a clean break, then they need a partition within their work. Sometimes that can be done openly, but more often (much, much more often than you might think), it is done with a separate identity. That’s what pseudonyms are for. It really doesn’t matter whether the world knows or not. What matters is whether the writer can handle the dual identity. Does “to thine own self be true” mean 24/7? Or does it mean that you can be true enough to yourself to be fulfilled but still maintain a presence in what you did before? I’ve seen it work out either way, though more often the writer makes an undiluted commitment in their new direction. Those existing assets I mentioned before will still be there, like children. And in the long run, they will reflect a part of the total and true writer, rather than something they tried to micromanage forever. Living your own history is a good way to miss the present and render the future stillborn. But then, if you had a really, really, really good yesterday, maybe living in its memory is the way to go. Sort of like being permanently on drugs, though. Can you make love to the past? That just seems like a colossal waste to me, because it is a fear — fear of losing, fear of never being loved again — that locks writers (and people) into unfulfilling careers. We all have to choose whether courage trumps fear and honesty trumps appearances in our lives. Either you choose life’s grand adventure, risks inclusive, or you bury the active, growing part of yourself now. As Jack London put it:

“I would rather be ashes than dust!

I would rather that my spark should burn out

In a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom

Of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

The function of man is to live, not to exist…”

Yeah. Use it or lose it. Using it fulfills your purpose and makes life worth living. Anything less is an affront to whatever created you. If you bury your assets in the earth, you are burying yourself — as the parable of the talents teaches. And whether it is God or Shakespeare that gets the last word: “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man…”

Photos in my free monthly newsletter for April include updates on the white feather in last month’s column that many of you have asked about. You can follow me on Twitter now (http://twitter.com/thomassullivan ). I’ll also be happy to put you on my mailing list if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net . Past newsletters are archived at the website below, photos included.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website. 

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