Thomas Sullivan

I think it was the DragonBar that made me remember an early lesson in my writing career.  And that happened because the carp ‘n’ tuna syndrome that beset my wrists after too many 18-hour marathons at the keyboard eventually led me to try voice activation software.  Dragon NaturallySpeaking with its DragonBar is arguably the leader in that field.  I had tried using it in the late 90s to write a book for a celebrity, but the error rate just killed me when it came time to transcribe our interviews.  The celeb’s voice was crystal clear, while mine sounded like a cat coughing up hairballs underwater.  And guess what?  Dragon just wrote “their balls” for “hairballs,” so my enunciation is still perilous at best.  I think I learned speaking from Demosthenes, and no one ever told me to take the pebbles out of my mouth.  At any rate, the new version of Dragon is more mumble-friendly and so intuitive that you can talk in your sleep and come up with coherent confessions by morning.  The mumble-friendly is a gas, but I can do without the intuitive aspect, which is actually a bit of a pain because of the way I think and speak.  That’s because the intuition is based on normal patterns of sane people, and I’m not…um – well, let’s just say that if you think unorthodox thoughts or constantly use language in inventive ways, Dragon won’t be able to zero in on you. 

So, there is this DragonBar on my screen.  I mean doesn’t the name alone set off pinwheels and sparklers in your imagination?  DragonBar! – can’t you just picture a lizard lounge with fire-breathing serpents warming their rum toddies by blowing on ‘em?  And there’s this little yellow dialog box that plays Simon Says with your every breath and grunt (clear your throat and it’s liable to “spit out” the Gettysburg address).  The thing spangles with color cues in response to your voice — a kind of synesthesia — that make you feel that your words are refracting light like bits of broken glass in the bottom of a kaleidoscope.  And the mystical crossing between sound and visual representation is unpredictable.  You never know what zaniness will pop up next, because what’s inside the box is sometimes outside the box, if you get my meaning.  Hmmm.  Maybe I’m looking in a mirror.

But it’s also inspiring, intriguing, rich in possibilities, thought-provoking, and a catalyst for newness and change.  It unblocks me, unlocks me — lets me develop and distill those truths I need to find and express in order to be me.  I can’t do that by following rutted footprints and being the same as everyone else.  Every day (and every experience) is fresh and new if you can find the words and wisdom with which to capture it.  To put it conversely, DragonBar does not go with the herd.  It goes beyond what you would expect from passive people, places and things.  It travels to terra incognita (land of my birth!).  There be DragonBars!  It does so by unleashing little imperfections in what you feed it; and that’s what reminded me of the early lesson in my writing career.

Before I became stupid, I knew a great many things.  I had a phenomenal memory for facts and could explain any process.  Never mind that most of those explanations were wrong; when I looked at a wall it dissolved into molecules and quantum paradigms.  I have written elsewhere in this blog about converting my mind’s warehouse space for facts to storage space for patterns [http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2007/03/16/thomas-sullivan-%e2%80%9cmamas-don%e2%80%99t-let-your-babies-grow-up-to-be-writers%e2%80%a6%e2%80%9d/].  I did this because patterns are more valuable.  I can always look up facts, but patterns have to be recognized and understood.  At least, I think I did this conversion of my mind’s limited storage space.  But since that’s a fact, I may have forgotten it (I forget).  Before that, remembering facts was a kind of perfection.  And it showed in my writing. 

I wrote with an airless clarity that was logical and absolute.  I think a certain kind of beginner writer does this to a fault.  Usually they are male.  Usually they write about “things and events” or “ideas,” as opposed to incorporating “emotions.”  I’ve covered all three of those elements in a five-part series here on StorytellersUnplugged, which is central to my writing philosophy.  What the hell, here are the links: http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/04/16/thomas-sullivan-spiders-and-spuds/     

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/05/16/thomas-sullivan-horned-owls-other-horny-beasts/    

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/06/16/thomas-sullivan-name-the-baby/    

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/07/16/thomas-sullivan-marmaduke-er%e2%80%a6-goes-to-college-or-wet-naked-screaming/     

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/08/16/thomas-sullivan-time-to-jump-the-shark/ 

The change in my writing did not come from a sudden epiphany anymore than the change in what I stored in my brain was instantaneous.  It was (and still is) a gradual trade-out of inventory.  I learn much more about life and people by focusing on patterns than I ever learned from facts.  And patterns are seldom pure and exact.  They tend to be a kind of consensus of observation, and they cut to the heart of an issue, and they reveal private truth like…uh, nobody’s business.  They separate the façades we all wear from the underlying and meaningful realities that govern who we really are.

Anyway, writing with perfect knowledge of facts can get in the way of showing the patterns of life.  To know everything is to be unreal.  You can even intimidate readers, or make them uncomfortable, by bombarding them with too much in-depth certainty.  Most of all, you are very likely to be rejected by mature readers as phony if all your prose is cocksure factual and exact.  On the other hand, the messy contradictions that show the humanity of characters (and even of the third person POV of the author) are more consistent with inexactness.  It wasn’t until I learned to use qualifier words and relative modifiers that I felt my characters coming to life.  Beware of characters you think you know inside and out.  You may have dressed them in caricature.  Let them go where you cannot.  Let them lead you from page to page.  Are you never going to change, be wrong or contradictory?  If the answer is no, then why create fully formed manikins whose thoughts and utterances are exact?  Sure your characters can have their unchanging bedrock, but all the more reason to show the reader their vagueness and uncertainty in the little things they think and do on the surface.  Let your characters grow and surprise you.

And here’s the key: apply some of that same inexactness to the narrator, even if it’s third person omniscient.  Because even that unobtrusive narrator is a kind of implied character POV, capable of stepping away from every other character and observing, describing, philosophizing, analyzing and so on.  You have the reader by the hand, and they must trust you.  So think of yourself as needing to come across as the real and imperfect person you are and not God.  Of course, if you are God, that’s different.  But then, shouldn’t you be writing a Bible? You are trying to be omniscient, not omnipotent.  So give the blend of your fallible humanness and omniscience a name or an anagram that will stick with you.  Think 3CPO — if I may borrow from “Stars War.”  Third Character-Person Omniscient. 

What I’m suggesting is that giving reality some elbow room is a stage of development in good fiction writing.  Pin it down too tightly and it may lose color, reverting to black and white.  The more human you are as a writer, while still observing and analyzing but never judging, the more your readers will fit under your umbrella.  Sometimes it is better to be merely omnipresent rather than omniscient as a third-person narrator.  And if you are writing first-person narratives you can really be imperfect.  First-person POVs enjoy the suspense of not knowing.  Sort of gives a whole new meaning to imperfect tense.

I do recall sitting in a writer’s group one night where I had a sort of epiphany about this.  And I have a déjà vu feeling that this anecdote is also in the SU archives of my columns (if you find it, please let me know).  Three of the people present that night stand out like an equilateral tri — no, too perfect, make it an isosceles triangle… aargh! worse… okay, you know, one of those Leaning Tower of Pisa triangles. 

So, there they were, three people coming from different angles from acutely bent to obtuse.  The first angle was a former ballet dancer who emoted with everything.  Her movements were dramatic and choreographed, even when she helped herself to the honey roasted cashews.  She would rise up on one bent leg, the other extended toward the coffee table, and with a graceful bob dip one hand swan-like into the silver dish, then curtsy back down to the divan.  Her writing was infused with emotional color but no form, rather like a finger pressed to mute lips seen in a dream for which there is no explanation.  The second angle was all sly mind games — ideas — which he perpetrated on the hostess mostly, and on those among us he felt were easily shocked (definitely not moi).  His writing was about transvestites, and in reality he was outing himself, enjoying the delicious dawning horror in the faces of the inhibited ones in the group.  But the third angle is the one I am writing about today — facts (things & events).  He was a wonderfully researched, technically informed, fact-crammed writer who should have been in charge of all shop manuals from Taiwan.  He also had a squeeze bottle of Neosynephrin (spelling — where is my pharmacist?) that he kept squirting up his nostrils.  One of the hosts had a hearing aid whose ultrasonic mosquito note came clearly into range each time he turned it up.  So it remains a very vivid memory for me, filled with eccentric mannerisms like the madcap Marx Brothers in “A Night at the Opera.”  Of course, I was the straight arrow member of the group.

If there was a single moment when the fallacy of a perfect omniscient narrator sank in for me as a writer, that was it.  But I’d like to make a distinction here between the kind of stylistic imperfection I’ve described and perfection as motivation.  I worship perfection.  It has always been my Grail.  Without it as an ideal to pursue full speed my life would be dull and empty.  The difference is in learning that communication has no rules.  DragonBar reminds me of that.

“What?” you say.  “No rules!  Absurd.  Of course it has rules!”  Well… not really.  Just the one.  Communication must communicate.  That’s the definition.  Yes, I’m using a ton of rules (or trying to) to write this essay.  But that’s my choice.  Sometimes you have to strip away all the rules in order to appreciate how much freedom you have within the rules.  You won’t find your voice on DragonBar, but you might find the breath of freedom and imagination you need to go looking for it.

Finally, last month I gave some misinformation in my newsletter which, for many people, is linked to this column.  I mentioned that the gift of a nomination at The1000BestSpecialPeople.com  expires after a year, and so I thanked a number of individuals for tributes and for boosts as the year drew to a close.  Now Australian Grant Soosalu informs me that the site has gone free and thus the nomination will stay up there.  Thank you one and all, in particular for the tributes and boosts posted since last month. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.  My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds.  I’ll be happy to send it to you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net   Past newsletters are being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included!  

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

When it comes to writing, every day is April Fools’ Day.  The Muses — hobgoblins of the mind that they are — play their usual tricks 24/7/365.  Clear your desk, your computer screen and your brain for them and they will clear out of town.  Cut yourself off from pen and paper and they will immediately begin dictating the great American novel to you.  They have a sense of humor, a sense of irony, and no sense of obligation whatsoever.  Swim a mile from shore, sky dive, slide under your car and remove the oil drain plug, grab a handful of buttered popcorn, or swab down deck cleaner that must be rinsed off in 20 minutes, and inspiration that needs to be written down IMMEDIATELY will hit you like a Mack truck driven by a muse.  They do this to a-Muse themselves because they don’t have TVs or iPods and there is nothing funnier than a writer with an idea and no place to put it.  Sort of like diarrhea in the middle of a speech, or a frying pan that bursts into flames as you lift it off the stove.  It must be boring as hell to be a muse — being more than human but still a lesser god and always in charge of your own entertainment.  I’m betting more than a few of them go off the reservation.  Muses, leprechauns, and poltergeists are probably all related.  Theologically speaking, it’s tempting to speculate that the Big Kahuna created us just to keep the demigods and minor spirits in good…uh, spirits.  I mean, think about it.  Name a magical being below Prime Mover that you can depend on.  They’re all mischief-makers and unpredictable.  Holy Hijinks , I’m using voice recognition to type this, and when I dictated “Prime Mover,” Dragon NaturallySpeaking typed “Prime Blooper.”  And if that wasn’t enough fun for the muse, when I tried to use “Prime Blooper” in the title of this essay, it became “Prime Pooper.”  I rest my case.  Lady Luck smiles on a whim and Cupid can’t shoot straight.  If love is fickle, writing must be the greatest romance of all time. 

Anyway, to move along here and get to the point (can you see how I’m getting to the point?), people who live off their creativity evolve all kinds of strategies to max out the good timing and beat the bad.  Some of us have “systems.”  But systems usually trigger counter-systems, and the gods of irony love to be challenged.  So it’s a constant battle.  Still, seeing someone else’s pathetic struggle can sometimes unlock one’s own shackles, whether through the shock of recognition or just out of plain old pity (there might even be an untried stratagem for you in the following).  Therefore, for all you disenfranchised souls — or for anyone who has ever gone to the cupboard for inspiration and found it bare — I humbly offer:

ONE NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF AN AUTHOR

6:18 p.m. Wake up, you sleepyhead, rise and shine!  Hey, where’s the sun?

6:19 p.m. point at self in bathroom mirror.  “Don’t even try to hide.  Call yourself an author?  You are going straight to Geekspeak9 — that bells and whistles desktop for which you paid much wampum — and you are going to work relentlessly through the night until the Great American Novel sends the smoke signal for mercy through whatever orifices a computer has.  And put some pants over your posse, for booty’s sake, you look like an Ethiopian snowman.”

6:21 p.m. pull on sweatpants and Wal-Mart deluxe wrist guards for carp ‘n’ tuna syndrome, adjust 6-way ergonomic chair all six ways, plug-in USB sound card adapter, plug-in microphone, adjust Sennheiser ME3 headset, open Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice-recognition app, adjust cheap Costco reading glasses for computer screen over headset, don wool cap, mute phone, turn off Big Bang e-mail alert. 

6:26 p.m. open working novel file.  Read last page written.  Read again.  Read last paragraph.  Read six more times.  …stare out window at lone duck squatting on ice on lake.  Wonder if duck’s feet frozen in ice.  Too dark to tell.  Start to take off headset to go check.  Reach for binoculars instead.  Still can’t tell.  Crank open window.  Bark like dog.  Feathered squatter unmoved.  Shake head rapidly while making noise like Donald Duck pissed off.  Duck waddles slowly away in zigzag line.  Notice small child next door staring up at me wide-eyed.  No problem.  Someone will explain to her that it was God’s plan to make writers this way. … Duck emergency over.  Must quit stalling the Great American Novel.

6:32 p.m. notice status bar update alert.  Jump on it like it was the secret of life and happiness.  Trace tech info links explaining the option that Windows wants to install for new fonts in Farsi and Pig Latin.  Install.  Reboot computer.

6:43 p.m. read last page written, read again, read last paragraph, read six more times.  Stare.  Read last sentence.  Read 23 more times (might have been 24).  Need a starter word.  Write “The.”  Stare.  Delete “The.”  Stay with it, stay with it…

6:44 p.m. check e-mail.  All subject lines begin: “Fwd:Fwd:Re:Re:…”

6:44:06 p.m. ignore e-mail.  Return to novel.  Reread last sentence five more times.  Write “Sometimes.”  Delete “Sometimes” — too many syllables.  Do not give up.  Do not give –

6:45 p.m. check Drudge Report, follow all links in order to be fully informed in case any news tidbit turns out to be relevant to new novel.

6:59 p.m. return to novel.  Stare.  Consider new plot in which neighborhood awakens to find lake missing.  Small child with wide eyes is only witness to what happened and no one believes her.  100,000 ducks with their 200,000 webbed feet frozen in the ice lifted off at dawn with the entire lake still locked around their skinny orange ankles (shallow lake completely frozen down to lakebed).  Child is vindicated when jet airliner crashes into flying lake, or maybe it melts and drowns East Sweet Pea, Arizona, or maybe the ducks get testy when all the ones flying wing on the V cannot rotate into new leadership formations, or maybe my muse is making me quack up!

7:11 p.m. check e-mail again, reading everything this time, including contact lens re-order reminder and pathetic letter from 106-year-old Nigerian widow suffering from Dutch Elm disease looking for someone trustworthy to help her launder $45 million left by late husband, General Abubacar Jones XXXVII, who was tortured to death by a cabal of witch doctors in the employ of Shell oil.  Return to novel.  No witch doctors, no tortured general, no Dutch Elm disease, no $45 million.  Novel sucks. 

7:22 p.m. burn title page.  Smoke alarm goes off.  Beat out flames.  Sulk.

7:27 p.m. try to get things rolling by calling self from cell phone and leaving voicemail SOS for muse on home phone.

7:28 p.m. switch to home phone to hear voicemail SOS just phoned in.  Stare expectantly at novel on computer screen.  Muse must not have pager.  Print out new title page. 

7:29 p.m. check blogs, including StorytellersUnplugged and dozen others.  Reply, manage, delete, adjust privacy settings…

8:02 p.m. call muse on cell again.  Busy signal.  Busy signal?  Am sitting next to phone that is purportedly busy.  This proves that muses are magical and conspiratorial.

8:03 p.m. check more blogs, recalling a certain Thomas Sullivan fan site a few months back that had nothing on it.  Find again.  Nothing on it.  Laugh hysterically until wracked with sobs. 

8:05 p.m. decide I must immediately upload pictures that have sat in camera for two weeks.  But which import app to select in dialog box?  Major dilemma. 

8:12 p.m. pick Windows Media.  Upload pictures from camera.

8:15 p.m. decide to upload lone cell phone photo that has sat in phone for two weeks.  Major dilemma redux. 

8:19 p.m. choose Roxio.  Upload photo.

8:21 p.m. stare at novel on monitor some more.  Type in single word “industrious” on first page.  Discover house phone is not fully seated in cradle, explaining busy signal.

8:22 p.m. exhausted from writing.  Time for break.  Google: The Cranberries Dreams.  Google opens.  Hit link for Cranberries music video “Dreams” on YouTube.  Iridescent green frogs rain into green pool, followed by raining green pearls, followed by blue Ophelia-like face floating to surface.  Am incapable of hearing urgent beat of “Dreams” without magic and inspiration breathing into brain.  Song flows through veins like a drug, but nothing to do with novel.  Poignant stabs.  Screw novel.  Crank up volume.  Loop video.  Turn off lights. 

9:33 p.m. 71 minute magic carpet ride ends when computer announces new updates available.  Click off YouTube “Dreams.”  Go for nightly drive.

9:36 p.m. think about new novel while driving Interstate.  Look for remorseful muse hitchhiking on soft shoulder, but dead doe’s eyes flash directly into mine.  Protruding tongue definitely aimed at me.  

9:37 p.m. turn on FM.  First song is A Fine Frenzy’s “Almost Lover.”  Insert CD of Cranberries “Dreams” in car stereo.  Crank up.  Loop.  Romantic ideal comes ghosting in from outer reach of headlights.  Here it comes, here it comes on the soft shoulder, the face I will love forever.  …another dead doe with tongue hanging out.  Does species matter?   

9:37 p.m. to 1:51 a.m. 4 hour and 14 minute magic carpet ride.  Alien abduction?

2:01 a.m. drive to Elm Creek and enter back trail on skis kept in car.  Soar to different part of Universe.  Phantom blue, deep beyond measure, roaring with silence.  No pen, no paper…abandon computers all ye who enter here.  Out of crystal silence, crackling like million shooting stars bursting through black velvet ether, comes tardy and unapologetic muse, spouting soul-searing poetry like auctioneer put to music.  Great voluble stanzas of wisdom bound to beauty.  I channel thoughts and words as seeds of sleeping rainbows awaken.  Indelible stuff, wasted on mere mortal me, because what am I to do — write in snow with ski poles and take cell phone picture?  Cell phone!  ET phone home.  I call voicemail and repeat dictation from muse. 

3:46 a.m. arrive home smug and intoxicated.  Peel off soaked layers of polypropylene.  Drink Cytomax, O. J., cherry cider and ice water. 

3:57 a.m. don sweatpants, go to computer.  Pull on Wal-Mart deluxe wrist guards, adjust 6-waychair six ways, plug-in USB sound card adapter, plug-in microphone, adjust Sennheiser ME3 headset, open Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice-recognition app, adjust Costco cheap reading glasses over headset, skinny on wool cap. 

4:04 a.m. transcribe voicemail poetry.  Open novel.  Stare.  Except for priming pump, no connection between Elm Creek rapture and ms.  Wherefore art thou, muse? 

4:11 a.m. delete word “industrious” added before nightly drive.  Wool cap rubbing stubble of shaved head is picked up by Sennheiser microphone, which keeps writing “fish” – “fish fish fish…”  Must shave stubble.

4:12 a.m., while running hot bath, drink quart of microwaved Coffee Blast ice cream because haven’t eaten since 4 p.m. yesterday. 

4:19 a.m. esophagus numb from drinking Coffee Blast.  Get into hot bath.  Scald privates.  Shout “Baby!” like wrestler in FM heavy-metal commercial. 

4:24 a.m. pain from third-degree burns subsides.  Once again cut off from computer, pen, paper.  Hello, muse.  Writing ideas flood brain.  Call voicemail from cordless phone next to tub, leave deathless but incoherent prose.

5:31 a.m. water now room temp.   Lather up with Irish Spring on bod, leg shaving gel on head.  Shave head.  Bloody foam floats around tub like little volcanic glaciers.  Shower caddy mirror reveals cross between stigmata and piranha attack above neck.

5:39 a.m. write entire novel in six minutes with styptic pencil on skull.

And there you have it.  At this point I throw myself on the mercy of my readers.  I am open to suggestions (and I mightily fear I will get some).  No, I will not flay my scalp and submit it in formaldehyde to an editor, nor will I collaborate with a taxidermist.  Yes, I have considered collaborating on a novel with a 106-year-old widow in Nigeria.  Am currently checking to see if there is a vaccination against Dutch Elm disease.  In the meantime, may my life serve as a warning to others.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.  My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds.  I’ll be happy to send it to you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net   Past newsletters are being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included!  And David Niall Wilson, whose questions are like laser brain surgery, has done a new interview of me at this link: Interview-Sully   Does anyone ask better questions than DNW?  Squirm, squirm.  One last.  As many of you know from my column subbing in a few days ago (April 13^th), Frank Wydra is fighting the toughest battle of his life and doing it in the style for which he is so much loved.  The outpouring of response for Flamingo Frank and that column are appreciated more than you know.  Thanks for reading.

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

My mother liked to get things done and hated to impose on anyone. This may be why she never made it to the maternity ward and birthed me in the lobby of a hospital. It was the first of many surprise entrances through the wrong door at the wrong time of life that have dogged me ever since. Now you might think that bad timing would be fatal to a writer or to anyone reaching for high stakes against long odds, and you’d be right. Bad timing can interrupt the flow of routine events, cause missed opportunities, and create challenges that turn people inside out. It is synonymous with bad luck. But it also makes life interesting, and now and then – just every now and then – it flips over the wild card that trumps all other possibilities, wins the jackpot, and redefines the game.

Used to be I focused on the downsides of luck and timing, bitching with the best of the malcontents, and was very imaginative in seeing how a thing could fail or go wrong. Writers especially are great at foreseeing dooms, little and large. They are not good at solving them, however, until they learn how to write endings. My parents thought it was hysterical when they challenged 10-year-old Tommy to write down all the offenses his big sister perpetrated on him and he came up with two pages of Machiavellian psychology. Sadly, I got better at that before I got… uh, better.

Now I’m sad for the good people I see daily whose tender dreams are crippled by cynicism. Include all dreamers and unsung talents who think they are down on their luck. Include lots of entertainers, even A-list successes. The trouble is that negative expectations are another example of bad timing. The word expectations tells it all. This is a preemptive word, an anticipatory term that has the power to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So it is dangerous to use it to rehearse failure. Do not send your expectations into battle with a white flag or otherwise defenseless. Much safer to arm them with all the positive weaponry you can muster. Yes, I understand the psychology. Negative expectations temper disappointment and buffer shock, provide a vacation from stress, and shift blame if blame is important to you. Hope, on the other hand, is hard. It is a risk that taxes the emotions and creates vulnerability. It borrows against a future that may become insolvent, but… are you ready for this?

It is always timely.

It comes exactly when you need to optimize your potential future. It provides motivation, greases the skids, and is the only bus out of town for Disney World. And here is what most people miss:

If it fails to deliver, it can be rolled over to the next hope.

You never need to attend the funeral of a hope. When one expires, it doesn’t leave a mess unless you bleed over it and cry unduly or stomp up and down on the corpse of hope in a tantrum. What you can do is look at the lesser or greater options remaining, stick out your thumb, and hitch a ride on the next best hope. The new one may call for a completely different road and destination. So be it. Start thinking of the dawn’s new wardrobe. What will you wear tomorrow? There is a tomorrow. Always. The day after victory is tomorrow, the day after defeat is tomorrow, aftermath is tomorrow. It’s going to come whether you get pissy about it or not. So why waste a single moment? The only guarantee you’ll ever get is that the heart and soul of you proceed by moving from one hope to another, because…

If a hope does deliver, you will then hope for something else.

Still, if you’re a writer, you spend most of your time waiting at the wrong end of long odds, picking up the pieces of disappointments, or looking for escapes from the stress of putting your creative energy and tender hopes on the line yet again. You suspect that Lady Luck’s real name is Lucy. “Hey, Charlie Brown,” she shouts, “I promise this time I won’t jerk the football away just when you get your hopes up that you’re about to kick a winning field goal.” But she does. Usually. Bad timing can look like a conspiracy.

I guess it was March 17^th that put it in perspective for me. The date itself, I mean. Beware the Ides of March plus two. Starting decades ago, that first infamous March 17^th registered on me as the day I missed my event in the swimming nationals. And every March 17^th thereafter for a few years I noticed something else dire happened. I couldn’t believe it. Bad timing in the extreme. Snake-bit, I thought, a gambler’s mentality – and there was a time when, if you could call me anything, it could only have been a gambler. March 17^th became the annual culmination of the habitual bad timing that defined me. Maybe my dreams were too big, my compromises too small. I seemed forever to have almost succeeded while in reality achieving nothing, and March 17^th was invariably another defeat to wallow in.

And then one year – not on the dreaded date – I had a moment of miraculous timing that revised everything. I have written about it before in another context (http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2007/08/16/thomas-sullivan-24-hour-insects-dusty-dreams-eternal-islands/ ), so I’ll just say that cosmic lightning flashed at precisely the right moment to allow me to save my son from drowning in a chill, dark Canadian lake. The marvel of that timing offsets all the others, of course. He is alive today. The disasters of each and every March 17^th fade to meaningless if that was the compensation. The pendulum swings both ways. Revelation:

You can’t keep the books on destiny or fate.

It’s natural for personal survival to skew our judgments about ourselves, but thinking you’re a perpetual victim is a sure-fire way to become one. That’s just as mindless as being a giddy Pollyanna driven by guilt. The true perspective lies somewhere in between, and if you try to keep score, you’ll likely screw up the proportion or the scope of what happens to you. Sadly, I DO – sort of – still keep score, but I do so more out of wonder than trying to make a case for how deserving I am of anything. And you know, it’s utterly amazing how things can work out. Yeah, I’m still the exception to every rule and out of sync with the human condition, but maybe that’s what I’ve chosen to be. Because when you don’t follow the script, you get to write your own. The most important things in my life have been freak timings. Whether they were good or bad depends on what I did with them.

The March 17^th fateful date has migrated a little over the years. It’s more of a window now. Last year it happened on March 27^th and it was probably the happiest day of my life. Whatever comes, I no longer fear it. I’ll trade all the red stoplights, untimely electric outages, and unforecast rains for the next big swing of the pendulum my way. And the bad timing seems almost necessary to the adventures I live daily. It rescues me from routine, saves me from following the herd, and challenges me to invent bigger-than-life romantic perfection in place of what I used to think I missed.

Bad timing creates unique opportunities.

It also creates material. Like they say, nothing is wasted for a writer. You want I should give you an example? You think I should pay some dues? Okay, okay. A couple of hours ago I was eating a turkey club wrap at the ski chalet when some girl scouts sat down around the table in front of me. Guess that made me think of girl scout cookies because I got up and bought one of those $1.25 chocolate chip jobbies. Red alert – bad timing, bad timing! ‘Cause as soon as I got back to the table I noticed one of the mothers was passing out flyers. Yeah, those flyers. Each girl was receiving her sales sheet, and there I sat with the crumbling evidence of my fondness for the very product they were selling, wondering if I could wing it down my throat like a Frisbee. But it was too late. They descended on me like flies on an outhouse. Hey, if you’re on my Christmas list, you know what you’re getting. Try not to notice come December if they’re a little stale. Think of it as bad timing…for which there will be compensation.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website. My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds. I’ll be happy to send it to you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net Past newsletters are being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included! And finally, David Niall Wilson, whose questions are like laser brain surgery, has done a new interview of me at this link: Home [Note: if you don’t get to this link while I’m on the front page, click the word Shadeaux in the box and you’ll find me in the Interview archives for March 11, 2008.] Does anyone ask better questions than DNW? Squirm, squirm. Thanks for reading.

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

Stop me before I kill again.

I’m going to do it, yes, I am, I’m really going to do it. Going to write about another obscure topic so ephemeral that I don’t know if I can pull it off. You may have noticed that I shy away from the easy stuff – practical stuff with practical answers. Not that those things aren’t invaluable – they are – but all the sane and successful writers in this blog do an admirable job with those tangible aspects of writing. You need someone like me (big head, small brain) to even attempt romantic idealism beyond the five senses (January), keeping the faith (December), or Stage 3 Suffocation (November). And right now my brain is rolling around in my head like a bell clapper, so here I go, rushing in where angels fear to tread. To top it off, let me make this a Cannibal Essay. For those of you new to this column, those are essays that attempt to connect mundane living with inspired writing, some examples being: 09-16-06 http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/09/16/thomas-sullivan-ky-jelly-the-headless-squirrel/; 12-16-06 http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/12/16/thomas-sullivan-khaki-man-the-peanut-butter-players/; and 01-16-07 http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2007/01/16/thomas-sullivan-empty-boxes-i-have-worn/. The subject this time is as nebulous as dreams. In fact, it is dreams. Real, middle-of-the-night, full snooze dreams.

Are dreams produced by your life or is your life, at least in part, a product of your dreams? I thought I knew the answer to that when a young man (Mike Nielsen) recently asked me a question about writing and dreams. Dreams are the mind’s way of defragging the brain’s emotional computer, I thought. They do not project the future, unless you are Madam Swami charging 30 shekels a minute on the call-in Dream Channel or a Biblical king consulting his soothsayers. Nor are they part of the active creative process for a writer, Xanadu and opium stoners like Coleridge excepted. Or so I thought. And then that night I had a dream…

This one, right on the border of waking, lent itself to full analysis. It was ripe with elements of my life, past and present, but it also contained strong hints of things in process, pointers to the future, if you will, and even more than that: things presented in a way that I have trained myself to use as a writer. Hmmm. Going to need an example/sample here, right? Thought I could sashay past that without anyone noticing, lest it get too personal, but this is too general. Okay. I shall throw my virginal soul into the volcano. A little. Here is an air-brushed version of the dream:

The walls around me are mist, as they often are when I am about to go somewhere in a sleep fantasy. I have a vague sense that I need to get a ride to a swimming meet. The fact that in real life I sometimes hitchhiked to swim meets to compete blends easily into this anxiety. In this dream there are people offering me rides, but the drivers are either dead or impossible. One is a former teammate killed in a motorcycle accident, another a piano player friend from another part of my past, yet another my father who never saw me swim. All are gone from my life. The effort of bringing my father back conjures up a rental flat where we once lived in another state. I am standing in the upper story of an old house with wooden window casements now when a bird tries to carry something off the ledge in its talons. This, too, is evoked by realities, because the creature’s nails scrabbling outside the kitchen window stab me with guilt. A thoughtless adolescent who looks a lot like me once greased that ledge with Crisco and sprinkled peanuts on it to watch the squirrels skid and dance when they jumped from the nearest eave. I hang my head in shame but am happy to report that no animals were injured in the making of this dream or its sponsoring events from the past. Anyway, in the dream a female comes alongside me in the kitchen and I open the window. The bird tries to fly off and the woman grabs for whatever it is clutching in its talons, getting an edge of the thing. I help her pull it in against an immense force, an energy that suggests a memory resisting exposure. The object is fading in our grasp when suddenly the bird lets go and we pull the prize inside, slamming the window shut. It is a checkbook. The woman I’m with insists it is something else, but I can see my ex’s name on the top check where it is written in smudged ink. And then the bird is back on the ledge, fluttering its wings and looking very distraught.

And here is where the dream goes from sorting out old debris in the warehouse of my mind to the present and future tense. I know this because it borrows things I have been actively creating in the staging area of my brain and takes them further. It ceases using identifiable components of my emotional past and enters the arena of pure creativity. In a sense, I awaken within my sleep and begin thinking outside myself. Returning you now to the dream…

…we take the bird in but grip it tightly because it is a wily thief. But a thief of what? I remember asking myself that question in the dream. I am definitely thinking like a writer now. The woman and I carry the bird out of the house, along a sidewalk and a path and eventually along a railroad track. Somewhere in transit I become aware that I am carrying, not a bird, but a human being, a young girl who is trying to get back on an “orphan train.” Orphan trains were the brainchild of Rev. Charles Loring Brace as an answer to the problem of 34,000 homeless waifs on the streets of New York City in 1854. The trains ran for 75 years, carrying about 200,000 children from eastern cities into the heartland of America where they were adopted at little more than whistle-stops in a fashion reminiscent of auction blocks. I have used that theme before in my writing and am currently doing so again. But to finish the dream…

The avian girl is restored now, and the woman and I let her go. A train whistles in the distance with a terrible significance that has something to do with time but is as elusive as a wisp of color in a rolling marble. The young girl wanders sadly toward the mournful sound, stopping to look at something, a flower perhaps, as if to delay her return, reluctant, unsure. But the whistle is relentless and when it becomes an insistent scream blasting through the mist, she wanders a few more steps and fades into the past…

I awaken for real now with a sense of finality too pat to have punctuated a random dream. This was the writer me engaged in creation – a not un-dreamlike state where I become sort of cosmic, seeing with a third eye that takes in three dimensions as if they are portals to higher consciousness. The higher consciousness is rife with symbols and themes and underlying meanings that I control rather than having them control me. Do I dream like this all the time? I don’t know. It may be that the young man who posed the question about dreaming and writing stirred awareness of the process. In any event, it has reaffirmed my conviction that a lot of creativity takes place subconsciously, whether actually dreaming in sleep or seemingly occupied with other waking thoughts. Can you kick-start that process? I believe you can. I think it’s more or less natural but that we get distracted from it. In fact, I’ll go a step further and say that most of creativity takes place subconsciously. The conscious brain simply sifts through the associations that pop up from underlying currents that you can tap into. It looks for things that are relevant to what it is trying to create. It makes a decision on what to use, and you can call that creativity, but it’s the subconscious that is supplying all the possibilities. You may disagree with my semantics here, but the important consideration for the writer – if I’ve correctly described a process of creating – is how to connect or stimulate the two (conscious and subconscious) to work together. How do you start the associations flowing? I thought you’d never ask.

You ask yourself the right questions.

Asking the right questions of your life is like turning a compost pile to generate heat and transformation. Once you are vexed with a problem, the subconscious goes to work. It dredges up all kinds of associations in any number of ways having to do with both style and content. It could be “what ifs” or personal experiences or a range of possible verbal expressions or close matches of specific events, attributes and ideas in your memory. I try never to disengage from a ms without asking myself what the next problem to solve is. Maybe this is what Hemingway called leaving something in the well. And, oh yeah, the process I’m describing requires one other thing.

A vacuum.

If you really want to stimulate your inner resources, give them a vacuum to fill. Do it every day. Your brain will scream, thrash, beg you for distraction, but do not feed the monkey on your back. Give it a vacuum. It will go nuts looking for an escape, and eventually it will have to turn inward. It will do it while you are driving a car and the radio is off, or when you are walking up a flight of stairs, or when you are waiting for the waiter to bring your dinner, or even when you are dreaming.

Helps to avoid the numbing aspects of life around you. Meaningless conversations, spectatorship, creature comforts, negativity – all qualify as things that can anesthetize your imagination. Serene settings, still beauty, physical rhythms that leave your mind unfettered can work for you. Try it. Try it regularly. Live there for a while, alone, with nothing to distract you from yourself. You’ll never go back full-time to civilization, socialization, or any whatever-izations you were in that caused you to be divorced from yourself in the first place. Trust that there is a great person inside you with a great mind and a great soul. Get in touch with that person daily. If you’re trying to be creative, you really have to do that, unless you’re so good that you can create with half your brain tied behind your back.

I’ve tried to dissect the intangibles of the creative process in other essays about attitudes, habits and environment. I strongly believe that most people have multiple resources within them and that what emerges or gets suppressed is a matter of choice. It may be an unconscious choice, due to lifestyle, but that’s just another way of saying that the more you think about your life, the more control you gain over it. I am always impressed by how adaptable we all are. You can’t look at history or the great array of contrasting cultures and not see that. We are conditioned from the cradle by our surroundings, but at some point we each have the option of seizing control of that, of conditioning ourselves. A need for something – freedom, truth, security – is going to trump whatever was grafted onto you and drive you to a point of individuality where you can be your happiest and most satisfied. If you want to be a writer, the key thing isn’t mere literacy, it’s thinking outside the box you live in, grew up in, the one that says you are like everyone else in your place and times. That box. You are not like everyone else. Or rather you are like everyone else only to the extent to which you choose to be, consciously or unconsciously. I shaved this morning. I shoveled the driveway, put on clothes (well… I put on clothes BEFORE I shoveled the drive), kept my speed below Mach 1 and obeyed all traffic lights on the way to a store, and smiled politely at people (Minnesota nice). But there was a subtext going on in my mind of observation and expression that is uniquely me all the while. And I’ll pretty much fill the well that feeds it with things that inspire, challenge, fulfill and grow me all day long. Most importantly, I’ll find an atmosphere that supports this as much as possible where I can come fully alive. These are choices and now habits I’ve come by that keep my circuit board lit. Thinking is the most important thing I do. I mean really thinking. I am not passive. I am active. They say you burn more calories sleeping than watching TV. Maybe that’s not so much a put-down of the vegetable state as it is an endorsement of what happens when your mind takes center-stage as in dreaming.

Now that doesn’t guarantee I am worth anything or that I add up to anything more than a waste of skin, but it does let me be as creative as I can be. And it keeps me free. If nothing else, I am a stand-alone product. What a lucky coincidence, since I am in a stand-alone business. The classic meditator is the guru, the esthetic who goes to the mountain top, the Christ who wanders the wilderness for 40 days. That is essentially a creative state, a search to express inner truth to oneself. How fortunate writers are to have an occupation where they do that all their waking hours. Waking hours? Revise, edit! Not just waking hours but dreaming too. So make that 24/7. When you become so habituated to thinking creatively that it permeates even your dreams, you know you are through and through the creative person you chose to be.

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website. My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds. I’ll be happy to send it to you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net Older newsletters are now being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included!

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

My first word was “Boo!” and I’ve loved surprises ever since.  I want to discover things.  Refine that, I want to discover hidden things, things that have meaning.  I want there to be more than five senses can take in.  Five senses are standard issue.  Most critters with fin, skin, fur or feathers have them, often with a superior specialty.  Jack rabbits out-hear me.  Eagles out-see me.  I’m tied with the koala bear.  But word has it that heart, mind and soul are strong suits for the human clay, and these have a type of sensory perception that respond to a whole different set of stimuli.  They feed off meanings, connections, patterns and intangible things that are bigger than life.  And mine also flourish on surprises.   So I look for that which is behind the scenes, under the surface, or “manifestly” invisible.  My physical senses pick up the obvious stuff, the bows, ribbons and colorful exteriors that gift-wrap life, but my heart, mind and soul go for what’s inside the package.  If it’s people I’m looking at, the package contains their wants and their fears, and if I can see inside the package I’ll know everything important about them – their motives, their responses, their lines in the sand.  And if it’s nature I’m looking at, the package contains the voice of the universe, whispered by stars and whatever force is behind creation.  The voice carries grandeur, excitement, meaning and truth.  I want to hear the voice of God and think about it.

Does that make me a writer?  Maybe a species of writer.  A poet.  Check that.  I still have to transmit the poetry in order to be a writer, don’t I?  And I have to find the poetry in every reader in order to be read with appreciation.  So I’m writing this to every writer who has an ounce of poetry in them (you all do) and to every reader capable of recognizing that five senses are not enough equipment to take along for a potentially incredible ride through life.

Trouble is, the world seems bent on ignoring its poetry.  Cut me some slack, please.  I’m going to bundle the words poetry, romance, ideals, heroes and perfection together for no other reason than they all seem to be in short supply in this disbelieving age.  They all sound bigger than life to me, and bigger than life is what I want to distill.  I’m talking magic, things that sing with a rhythm that transcends routine.  Natural poetry, if you will.  Trust me, it’s out there.  Or rather it’s in there.  Inside your head, your feelings, your soul.  Eye of the beholder, eye of the believer, and all that.  But shhh…please don’t let that get around.  Especially you readers.  The poets union is going to be on my case, as it is, for revealing trade secrets.  Can’t have everyone creating their own poetry willy-nilly.  Writers rule!  So if you’re not a writer, plant yourself indoors and sink your roots into the Scothguard brocade of the sofa, while you wait for bigger-than-life to magically appear on Cable and mesmerize you.  But do not – I repeat DO NOT – take things into your own hands by pulling the plug on the TV and sticking your fingers into the world’s sockets, because then you won’t need us.  Can’t have you finding out you are the finest generator of interesting content ever made.  That’s how a writer gets a leg up.  They do primary research and report to you.  And if you’re a writer, or a writer in process, bathe your senses in whatever you experience, but then take it inside your mind and dwell on it like a guru on acid.  Do not multi-task.  Transcendental yourself.  That way you may learn how to think, how to see the world, which is impossible to do in dumbed down circumstances.  So tear up the script.  Write your own.  You are unique.  Then give yourself an Emmy (Emmy, Emmy…an enema is what you get when you visit the marketplace – whole other essay).

Writer or reader, most people suffer from a contagious disease called “passivity,” characterized by a lack of imagination.  It’s generally harmless, except for lost living time – sort of like sleeping on the job.  But if you’re a writer, it’s downright lethal.  Some people are born with an immunity, or a hyper-gene for imagination, but everyone has some natural resistance to passivity.  If you’ve lost yours, the best way to reacquire it is to concentrate without distraction until you can make walls collapse and to stay away from voluntarily boring people.  You can tell if people are voluntarily boring because they will say they are themselves bored or otherwise surrender initiative.  The second best way to get in touch with your imagination is to connect yourself with reservoirs of inspiration.  That can be a place, an activity, or a person.  In my case, my mentor was a tree.

I first met Evergreen as I was skiing around a turn.  It wasn’t just the front-row seat he had taken to hang out on the corner that drew my attention, but rather his infirmity.  He was missing his lowest overhanging boughs.  Moreover, they had obviously been lopped off.  I stopped.  “Ouch, I bet that hurt,” I said.  He said nothing, conveying the impression of wisdom; and the fact that the rest of him was throbbingly green and thriving suggested strength of character.  We talked.  Or rather he listened, which confirmed the impression of stately wisdom.  “Aren’t you bored just standing here?” I blathered.  But he answered naught.  Could be autistic, crossed my mind.  I decided to give him a test.  “When you see a cloud, do you just see…a cloud?”  Naught squared.  A genius!  Of course he saw more than a cloud.  How could he not?  Standing there, seeing every cloud of every sky of every day in his corner of the universe?  He was too wise to answer, that’s all.  How could you stare at the cosmos 24/7, non-stop naked infinity, as the moon and the sun trade numberless shifts, and life and death play out before you, leaving telltale tracks in the snow or trails in the grass as the seasons come and go, observing mating, hunting, the answering of territorial imperatives through droughts and times of plenty, storms and Halcyon days, witnessing miracles in the light of day and dark magic in the night, and not learn all there is to learn?  And you know, there has never been a time since, when I have passed that tree, that I have not felt an amazing thought or emotion.  So Evergreen has become my reservoir of inspiration.   I do not know if he is religious, but then he surely knows more of God than any religion trapped behind four walls within the petty politics and shifting moralities of civilization.  So I usually murmur a nondenominational, “May our prayers be granted, tree,” as I pass by.  And Evergreen rewards me by saying naught.

But I digress.  I was lamenting that the world seems bent on ignoring its poetry.  I can propound a dozen reasons for this, though at bottom I think it’s a throwback to a 19^th century conflict.  The Virgin and the Dynamo met head on during the Industrial Revolution, and the Virgin lost everything but her virginity.  It was an age when spiritual values collided with the razzmatazz of mechanized ways of doing things.  Up reared the factories, pulling an agrarian world into the future.  No, I’m not ranting about pollution or globalization.  But in an increasingly pre- packaged world where needs were met and delivered by third parties, people were beginning to lose their connections with the natural world, with self-reliance and their own inner resources.  Hard to be philosophical in a large and meaningful way when you are shrinking into a complex mega-society where everyone and everything is specialized.  The John Stuart Mill classical education went by the boards, and broadly learned generalists became an endangered species.  And that was just the beginning.  We saw a resurgence of humanism here and there in the 20^th century, but technology (and I love it) advanced as Toffler said it would in FUTURE SHOCK.  Too much information spread over too many fields to be assimilated and put into perspective.  So the push was toward becoming a cog in the great machine of humanity and knowing little of how the other cogs work.  Jay Leno’s JayWalks and Glenn Beck’s Moron Trivia reveal a frightening vacuum between the ears of those poised to inherit the Earth.  But you really only needed to listen to the media’s talking heads over the past 30 years since they anointed themselves in trios and quartets on raised daises to find the same appalling ignorance and lack of context.  And that increasingly activist media is the surrogate parent, educator and peer representative for us all.  So it’s very hard to be independent these days, very hard to rely on your own imagination and develop an informed and encompassing view of life.  Much easier to just have it fed you according to your time and place and circumstances.  And if you can’t get beneath the conditioning and indoctrination of our times, you are to a greater degree derivative.  BUT…if you are or want to become one of those rare people who still know where the primary sources are, and you can fight your way out of the sheltering cocoon that comes pretty much automatically with modern living, you just might become an original.  Seems to me a writer must do this, if they want something to say.  And finding the poetry in life is a good place to start, because it is almost synonymous with those words I cited earlier: romance, ideals, heroes and perfection – all casualties of a jaded, more cynical world that came with the savvy of a fast-transit, mass communication, pc-connected, hi-tech, dynamo-wins-over-virgin age.  But can you understand a jaded world without having a vision for a perfect one?  Don’t negative things imply the existence of positives?  There is no night without day, no pain without pleasure, no death without life.  I want to go where the light and warmth are.  I want to live and write where beauty and wisdom remind me of that, even if I show it by reversing it in a dark mirror.  Five senses are good for digesting fast food and taking in life’s re-runs.  Heart, mind and soul can make truth dance and awaken sleeping dreams.  Let me discover and relay the surprises.  And if the world won’t give me that, I’ll find the poetry within myself and plant it wherever I go.  Johnny Appleseed would understand.   

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.  My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds.  I’ll be happy to send it to you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net   Older newsletters are now being added to the website (www.thomassullivanauthor.com) but unfortunately we can only include new photos with the e-mailed version.  You can also get to my past columns right there with the newsletter on my web page under News & Articles, or if you want to go month by month to the 16^th in the SU archives, they are available that way as well.

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

Read more…

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

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

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

Keep the faith! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merry Christmas and a bold new year!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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