Thomas Sullivan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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