Category Archives: originality

On the blank page

Posted on by

Many people fear writing as if it were some arcane art in which only especially initiated adepts were allowed to work. Still others doubt that they have any talent at all, and they don’t want to make a fool of themselves, or that they don’t really have anything to say. They see the blank page as a challenge, not as an opportunity. The blank page stands before all of humanity as a monument to immobility. The difference between writers and non-writers is simple: writers don’t think about the shame of failure or that others will think their words boring or superficial. I have read things that I consider boring and superficial, but I have seldom come across anything that should never have been written at all. Some people will stare at the blank page and feel defeated before they even start because they fear failure, yet they have given themselves over to failure without even having tried. Writing is just words, one right after another, forming sentences, ideas, arguments, but if you never try to write, the blank page is a barrier, a wall you will never climb or pull down. Some people cannot even get past the first word, much less the first sentence. When I have thought my work trite or vacuous, there have been times when I have thrown things away, but for the most part, if I just keep writing, letting the words march across the paper by themselves, I can always go back and edit, throw away the crap, polish the good stuff. The blank page is filled with so much opportunity, so many possibilities, so much creative energy that you must yearn to fill it with discourse, poems, essays, conversations, descriptions, arguments, explanations. Bad writing is always a possibility, but if you never write at all, you are wearing cement shoes and won’t go much of anywhere. I see the blank page as a page already filled with ideas, metaphors, similes and a host of other poetic tropes which are all willing to clarify an to confuse perhaps both at the same time. Words are dark, no question, but we are all playing with the dictionary, so why not split open the dictionary and let the words run wild? The blank page stands up to the creative energy of the literary arts. All the best writers that have ever lived have always lamented the fact that there is nothing new to write about, so if we accept that premiss as a given, then we can stop worrying about whether Seneca or Ovid or Horace wrote about it two thousand years ago. I know I was born late, but there is nothing I, as a writer, can do about that. I accept the blank page as my traveling companion, and I am willing to work hard to fill up that page, sometimes with greater or lesser success. Thinking about the blank page just makes me want to write all that much more, and it also makes me care less about whether anyone likes what I write or not. I have no control over how anyone reads my writing–whether it moves them to cry, or moves them to snicker. I can’t even be sure if they understand what I write, but then again, do I understand what I am writing either? Or if I read this little ramble in two or three years, will I still think the same? Or will that ever matter? Once this is written, it is its piece of art over which I have no control, and that is really what the blank page is really all about, whether we have any control over our work, our ideas, or our lives. The answer is “no”, but then again, this page is no longer blank.

On the blank page

Posted on by

Many people fear writing as if it were some arcane art in which only especially initiated adepts were allowed to work. Still others doubt that they have any talent at all, and they don’t want to make a fool of themselves, or that they don’t really have anything to say. They see the blank page as a challenge, not as an opportunity. The blank page stands before all of humanity as a monument to immobility. The difference between writers and non-writers is simple: writers don’t think about the shame of failure or that others will think their words boring or superficial. I have read things that I consider boring and superficial, but I have seldom come across anything that should never have been written at all. Some people will stare at the blank page and feel defeated before they even start because they fear failure, yet they have given themselves over to failure without even having tried. Writing is just words, one right after another, forming sentences, ideas, arguments, but if you never try to write, the blank page is a barrier, a wall you will never climb or pull down. Some people cannot even get past the first word, much less the first sentence. When I have thought my work trite or vacuous, there have been times when I have thrown things away, but for the most part, if I just keep writing, letting the words march across the paper by themselves, I can always go back and edit, throw away the crap, polish the good stuff. The blank page is filled with so much opportunity, so many possibilities, so much creative energy that you must yearn to fill it with discourse, poems, essays, conversations, descriptions, arguments, explanations. Bad writing is always a possibility, but if you never write at all, you are wearing cement shoes and won’t go much of anywhere. I see the blank page as a page already filled with ideas, metaphors, similes and a host of other poetic tropes which are all willing to clarify an to confuse perhaps both at the same time. Words are dark, no question, but we are all playing with the dictionary, so why not split open the dictionary and let the words run wild? The blank page stands up to the creative energy of the literary arts. All the best writers that have ever lived have always lamented the fact that there is nothing new to write about, so if we accept that premiss as a given, then we can stop worrying about whether Seneca or Ovid or Horace wrote about it two thousand years ago. I know I was born late, but there is nothing I, as a writer, can do about that. I accept the blank page as my traveling companion, and I am willing to work hard to fill up that page, sometimes with greater or lesser success. Thinking about the blank page just makes me want to write all that much more, and it also makes me care less about whether anyone likes what I write or not. I have no control over how anyone reads my writing–whether it moves them to cry, or moves them to snicker. I can’t even be sure if they understand what I write, but then again, do I understand what I am writing either? Or if I read this little ramble in two or three years, will I still think the same? Or will that ever matter? Once this is written, it is its piece of art over which I have no control, and that is really what the blank page is really all about, whether we have any control over our work, our ideas, or our lives. The answer is “no”, but then again, this page is no longer blank.

On inspiration

Posted on by

I don’t believe in inspiration, and my muse just scoffs at the idea. “Just bleed,” she said. She is a sucker for Hemingway, I should have known. She just went out on the back porch to smoke a cigarette. Lucky for her imaginary entities can’t get lung cancer. Inspiration is just another word. Whenever I write, there is a nudge in my gut about something, but that something often has little or nothing to do with what I might be writing about on any given night. I am dead sure that I am not the world’s best writer, but I know I am a thousand times more prolific that 99.9%of the rest of the world. Why should I care about who might be better than me–there is always someone with better style, more profound ideas, great poetry, or a more intricate philosophy or world view. Yet, most of those people are waiting for inspiration that will never come. Waiting for inspiration is a lot like waiting for Godot. You can wait, but the wait will be eternal,melancholy, lonely. Writing is more like mowing the lawn than most would think.Writing is a deliberate self-conscious act in which the writer must put aside his own image while creating something new. Whether a writer fails or succeeds cannot be the criteria for writing anything. Writers will never be able to predict their success or their fall into oblivion. Inspiration is a mirage, an excuse, a straw man that really doesn’t exist in any shape or form. All of our ideas–good, bad, or ugly–float up out of sub-consciousness, rumble around our brain pan before exiting onto a screen, or in more folkloric fashion, onto apiece of paper. Regardless of what one writes about, the muse is working overtime to pile up the nouns and verbs, images and tropes, motifs, metaphors and similes. All writing is essentially always a series of metaphors that pileup like drunken sailors while trying to climb Mount Everest in jockey shorts. Writing is hard, but not because of a lack of inspiration. Writing is hard because writers are afraid that someone might not like their choice of adverbs.My muse says that the best way to write is to turn off the internal editor–that OCD editor that sits behind your eyes and criticizes every word,every period, every strangely alliterated phase–and just let the words flow. Set them free. Yet just doing it once is not enough. You are only a writer if you continue to write on a regular basis. From time to time, you might come up with a sentence that really sings, that reflects your interest in life’s bigger questions,, its most profound questions. Nevertheless, the object of writing has never been to resolve anything. The object of writing is to discuss the problem and recognize that some questions, life’s big questions, don’t have answers, only discussions. In the end, a writer who waits for inspiration is not a writer at all. Only those who write find inspiration because they are not looking for it. As the words pile up, the creative process begins to reach critical mass, thoughts pop like lightening, creating new words, new thoughts, new ideas. Images dance through the discourse, rhetoric blossoms, and before you know it, you have a new piece of literary art, which may delight, teach, amuse, provoke, inspire, or question. It all depends on the writer dismissing their self-doubts and forging ahead, or as my muse says,”just bleed.”

On inspiration

Posted on by

I don’t believe in inspiration, and my muse just scoffs at the idea. “Just bleed,” she said. She is a sucker for Hemingway, I should have known. She just went out on the back porch to smoke a cigarette. Lucky for her imaginary entities can’t get lung cancer. Inspiration is just another word. Whenever I write, there is a nudge in my gut about something, but that something often has little or nothing to do with what I might be writing about on any given night. I am dead sure that I am not the world’s best writer, but I know I am a thousand times more prolific that 99.9%of the rest of the world. Why should I care about who might be better than me–there is always someone with better style, more profound ideas, great poetry, or a more intricate philosophy or world view. Yet, most of those people are waiting for inspiration that will never come. Waiting for inspiration is a lot like waiting for Godot. You can wait, but the wait will be eternal,melancholy, lonely. Writing is more like mowing the lawn than most would think.Writing is a deliberate self-conscious act in which the writer must put aside his own image while creating something new. Whether a writer fails or succeeds cannot be the criteria for writing anything. Writers will never be able to predict their success or their fall into oblivion. Inspiration is a mirage, an excuse, a straw man that really doesn’t exist in any shape or form. All of our ideas–good, bad, or ugly–float up out of sub-consciousness, rumble around our brain pan before exiting onto a screen, or in more folkloric fashion, onto apiece of paper. Regardless of what one writes about, the muse is working overtime to pile up the nouns and verbs, images and tropes, motifs, metaphors and similes. All writing is essentially always a series of metaphors that pileup like drunken sailors while trying to climb Mount Everest in jockey shorts. Writing is hard, but not because of a lack of inspiration. Writing is hard because writers are afraid that someone might not like their choice of adverbs.My muse says that the best way to write is to turn off the internal editor–that OCD editor that sits behind your eyes and criticizes every word,every period, every strangely alliterated phase–and just let the words flow. Set them free. Yet just doing it once is not enough. You are only a writer if you continue to write on a regular basis. From time to time, you might come up with a sentence that really sings, that reflects your interest in life’s bigger questions,, its most profound questions. Nevertheless, the object of writing has never been to resolve anything. The object of writing is to discuss the problem and recognize that some questions, life’s big questions, don’t have answers, only discussions. In the end, a writer who waits for inspiration is not a writer at all. Only those who write find inspiration because they are not looking for it. As the words pile up, the creative process begins to reach critical mass, thoughts pop like lightening, creating new words, new thoughts, new ideas. Images dance through the discourse, rhetoric blossoms, and before you know it, you have a new piece of literary art, which may delight, teach, amuse, provoke, inspire, or question. It all depends on the writer dismissing their self-doubts and forging ahead, or as my muse says,”just bleed.”

On writer’s block

Posted on by

Obviously I don’t have writer’s block. Yet, there are many things I will never write about because either I don’t care or it’s none of your business. Writer’s block is really about shutting down the creative process and convincing yourself that you have nothing to say, which, given what I know about the human race, is blatantly false. Those who complain about writer’s block are just looking for an excuse to not write, and if you don’t want to write, you really don’t need an excuse, do you? Writing is about both creativity and a lack of shame. If I care what people think about what I write, then I would never get two words on a page, ever. Writers who write do so because they cannot imagine their world in any other way–ink, pens, keyboards, monitors, notebooks, scraps of paper, moments lost to the world while hammering out a haiku. Writing for some of us is just as vital as the blood that runs through our veins. If we couldn’t write, we wouldn’t be able to understand either our lives or our passions. We read, we write, we breathe, we live, and when we have trouble or troubles or concerns or worries, we write to try to figure it out. Writing is not a perfect catharsis for what ails a person, but it does help. When we feel the knock of eternity at our door–someone dies, a love moves on, the world changes–we write in order to listen to our own heart beat, to know that we are still alive, still vital, still worthy, still marching to our own drummer. The world is alive with the smell of fresh ink flowing onto a virgin white blank piece of paper, creating a new way of loving or hating or perceiving or longing or eating or losing or playing or enjoying the whole world. There are times when you hit a perfect phrase–just two or three words that sing, that shine in the darkness, that illuminate a dark area where the monsters come from. And when you do find those two or three words that sparkle in the fog of the mundane existence of an everyday routine, you create magic, and life is really worth living all over again–you understand why you put up with crap, why you try to do better everyday, why you risk failure, why you don’t fear criticism. You write to find your way out of the labyrinth, to understand loss, to contemplate beauty–physical or mystical or ephemeral, to know the unknowable, to experience the inexpressible. Writing is life and life, writing. The blocked writer has given up to frustration and failure, given in to the idea that they have nothing to say or worse, that it has all already been said and that there is no possibility of writing anything new. Poor devil. It has all been said before, but that is not precisely the point–it can always be said again. Humans have very short memories, and writers depend on that so that each generation might rewrite everything again. I know that a writer about six thousand years ago complained that all the good topics had already been written about and that there was nothing new under the sun. He was both right and wrong: there is nothing new under the sun, but that is totally irrelevant because each generation must write their own discourse–political, social, religious, historical, poetical, fictional, polemical. So I write. The muse comes in the door, drinking bourbon and smoking a cigarette with a funny smile on her face. It looks like I’m going to be busy for quite awhile and that my writer’s block will have to wait for another day–tonight I am busy writing, again.

On writer’s block

Posted on by

Obviously I don’t have writer’s block. Yet, there are many things I will never write about because either I don’t care or it’s none of your business. Writer’s block is really about shutting down the creative process and convincing yourself that you have nothing to say, which, given what I know about the human race, is blatantly false. Those who complain about writer’s block are just looking for an excuse to not write, and if you don’t want to write, you really don’t need an excuse, do you? Writing is about both creativity and a lack of shame. If I care what people think about what I write, then I would never get two words on a page, ever. Writers who write do so because they cannot imagine their world in any other way–ink, pens, keyboards, monitors, notebooks, scraps of paper, moments lost to the world while hammering out a haiku. Writing for some of us is just as vital as the blood that runs through our veins. If we couldn’t write, we wouldn’t be able to understand either our lives or our passions. We read, we write, we breathe, we live, and when we have trouble or troubles or concerns or worries, we write to try to figure it out. Writing is not a perfect catharsis for what ails a person, but it does help. When we feel the knock of eternity at our door–someone dies, a love moves on, the world changes–we write in order to listen to our own heart beat, to know that we are still alive, still vital, still worthy, still marching to our own drummer. The world is alive with the smell of fresh ink flowing onto a virgin white blank piece of paper, creating a new way of loving or hating or perceiving or longing or eating or losing or playing or enjoying the whole world. There are times when you hit a perfect phrase–just two or three words that sing, that shine in the darkness, that illuminate a dark area where the monsters come from. And when you do find those two or three words that sparkle in the fog of the mundane existence of an everyday routine, you create magic, and life is really worth living all over again–you understand why you put up with crap, why you try to do better everyday, why you risk failure, why you don’t fear criticism. You write to find your way out of the labyrinth, to understand loss, to contemplate beauty–physical or mystical or ephemeral, to know the unknowable, to experience the inexpressible. Writing is life and life, writing. The blocked writer has given up to frustration and failure, given in to the idea that they have nothing to say or worse, that it has all already been said and that there is no possibility of writing anything new. Poor devil. It has all been said before, but that is not precisely the point–it can always be said again. Humans have very short memories, and writers depend on that so that each generation might rewrite everything again. I know that a writer about six thousand years ago complained that all the good topics had already been written about and that there was nothing new under the sun. He was both right and wrong: there is nothing new under the sun, but that is totally irrelevant because each generation must write their own discourse–political, social, religious, historical, poetical, fictional, polemical. So I write. The muse comes in the door, drinking bourbon and smoking a cigarette with a funny smile on her face. It looks like I’m going to be busy for quite awhile and that my writer’s block will have to wait for another day–tonight I am busy writing, again.

On frosters

Posted on by

There is a new fad in the world, and it has nothing to do with decorating cupcakes and everything to do with going out in the snow and acting as if it were not the least bit cold. I’ve done it. It’s nothing new–I was in college, living in a dorm and prone to all sorts of anti-social and strange behavior. After a particularly horrible cold snap where the temperature did not go above zero for almost five days, a few of us donned shorts and t-shirts to go play Frisbee in the snow when the temperature rocketed all the way up into the mid-twenties. We were a little stir crazy to be outside and breath a little fresh air that wouldn’t kill us. We brought out lawn chairs and the grill and made hamburgers–the still air temperature went all the way up to thirty-five that day. We were sweating. That was in January of 1981 in southern Minnesota, now, flash forward thirty years and there are all sorts of photos floating around on the internet machine of people so similar things, but now they have a name: frosters. The idea is to take off most of your clothes and go out in the ice and snow so you can take a picture for the Facebook which your relatives vacationing in Hawaii will see. I can see why this is fun, and I totally understand the insanity. You wouldn’t really get the same effect if you put on a parka and boots and stood out in the heat–it’s not the same. No one cares about how much heat you can tolerate, although I do admire people who can do it. Frosters are just trying to ignore winter the best they can. It’s a mental thing: pretend that the ice and snow don’t matter at all, so that sitting in your lawn chair on the beach at Lake Nakomis in January with a beverage in your hand is your way of expressing your denial. Denial is very important when you are freezing off your cojones trying to get a stubborn car started on cold winter morning. Frosting as an activity is probably an outward sign of mental health even when the short, cold days of winter are getting you down. So putting on your swim suit, sunglasses, flip flops, and sunscreen and going outside in January is a great way of thumbing your nose at Old Man Winter. I don’t dislike Old Man Winter, but sometimes he is a challenge to the spirit. By pretending that he doesn’t matter or that he can’t ever really win, one can ignore winter and get on with life. Most frosters, I am assuming, also do a lot of winter sports such as biking, running, grilling, rock-climbing, and pond hockey. I get snowmobilers, skiers, ice fishermen, skaters and the like are really taking their winters seriously, enjoy the cold, and dream of endlessly falling flakes of snow that will close the schools tomorrow. Frosters would take advantage of a snow day to grill steaks, drink a cold frosty one, work on their tans, and shoot the photo for next year’s Christmas card with the entire family in swimwear and hip deep in a snow drift. A true froster will never admit they are cold. Probably the worst thing a person could do during a long, hard winter is to wallow in their misery, stay inside, and complain to the rest of the world about cold it is outside. Of course it’s cold outside! It’s January in the Midwest, but walk faster, admire the next guy’s stocking hat even if that’s all he’s got on! Without a sense of humor, the entire human race is in serious danger of taking itself too seriously, of believing its own press clippings, of sitting down to weep. The true froster laughs in the face of winter because that is all the human froster can do–any other analysis of the situation is to grim to even contemplate. Or decorate cupcakes.

On originality

Posted on by

Just thinking about originality makes me laugh, but not because originality is impossible, but because all who claim originality are usually all the same. Tattoos, piercings, black clothing, urban hipsters, retired hippies, Wall Street clones, soccer moms, cat people, dog people, bloggers, politicians, no one is original, even those who claim no originality whatsoever. We are often more similar than we want to admit, yet we fight the rush of the water as we strive to fit in. Yet we also strive to be our own person, to be creative, to leave our individual mark on the world. There are a few tame, quiet souls out there that given their inherent shyness would just as soon pass unnoticed by the whole world, and originality is anathema to their very nature. They are gray people of the world who fear everything. Originality is the exact opposite of fear. Though no one is original, thinking that one is original has to do with blindness and fearlessness mixed together with large doses of ego and bravado, failure and falling down. Originality ensures failure because the illusion of originality is also tied to the insight of recognizing one’s intellectual and inspirational parents and being born too late to be original in anything. Teenagers always think that they are the first to insight rebellion and reject their parents’ values, times, practices, paradigms, ideas, expectations, morals, religion, and politics, and teenagers have been doing this for several millennium. The irony of the teenager lies in their blindness and energy as they express their alienation and angst. Perhaps they should ask their parents how they dealt with exactly the same feelings? Each generation wants to liberate itself from the previous one, seeing it as spent, worn out, empty and vacuous, superficial, spurious, unoriginal and meaningless. By its very nature, originality holds within it all the generations that have claimed it and been doomed to repeat all the failures of the past. A few artists, maybe a few philosophers, a couple of poets, on a rare bad night, a theologian or two, have brushed up against originality, have seen and described something new, rejected it, tossed it aside as impossible, and continued on their collective way. We have mistaken failure for originality, only to find that failure is perhaps the last bastion of originality, and failure is only the most common of human actions. The earliest poets of the ancient middle east lamented in languages that have long since been forgotten and designated for studies in graduate courses that there is nothing original under the sun, that one may write about love, or hate, or war, or loss, or nostalgia, or sunsets, or roses, but you will always be repeating the words and ideas and forms that have come before you, that have informed you, that has given your creativity wings, so you are always the product of someone else’s originality, which never existed in the first place. You are always a child, of your past, of your present, of your future, so get over it, forget your past and be as original as your mind lets you be.

On originality

Posted on by

Just thinking about originality makes me laugh, but not because originality is impossible, but because all who claim originality are usually all the same. Tattoos, piercings, black clothing, urban hipsters, retired hippies, Wall Street clones, soccer moms, cat people, dog people, bloggers, politicians, no one is original, even those who claim no originality whatsoever. We are often more similar than we want to admit, yet we fight the rush of the water as we strive to fit in. Yet we also strive to be our own person, to be creative, to leave our individual mark on the world. There are a few tame, quiet souls out there that given their inherent shyness would just as soon pass unnoticed by the whole world, and originality is anathema to their very nature. They are gray people of the world who fear everything. Originality is the exact opposite of fear. Though no one is original, thinking that one is original has to do with blindness and fearlessness mixed together with large doses of ego and bravado, failure and falling down. Originality ensures failure because the illusion of originality is also tied to the insight of recognizing one’s intellectual and inspirational parents and being born too late to be original in anything. Teenagers always think that they are the first to insight rebellion and reject their parents’ values, times, practices, paradigms, ideas, expectations, morals, religion, and politics, and teenagers have been doing this for several millennium. The irony of the teenager lies in their blindness and energy as they express their alienation and angst. Perhaps they should ask their parents how they dealt with exactly the same feelings? Each generation wants to liberate itself from the previous one, seeing it as spent, worn out, empty and vacuous, superficial, spurious, unoriginal and meaningless. By its very nature, originality holds within it all the generations that have claimed it and been doomed to repeat all the failures of the past. A few artists, maybe a few philosophers, a couple of poets, on a rare bad night, a theologian or two, have brushed up against originality, have seen and described something new, rejected it, tossed it aside as impossible, and continued on their collective way. We have mistaken failure for originality, only to find that failure is perhaps the last bastion of originality, and failure is only the most common of human actions. The earliest poets of the ancient middle east lamented in languages that have long since been forgotten and designated for studies in graduate courses that there is nothing original under the sun, that one may write about love, or hate, or war, or loss, or nostalgia, or sunsets, or roses, but you will always be repeating the words and ideas and forms that have come before you, that have informed you, that has given your creativity wings, so you are always the product of someone else’s originality, which never existed in the first place. You are always a child, of your past, of your present, of your future, so get over it, forget your past and be as original as your mind lets you be.