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