16345--Rong Writing Made Right

Probably the worst writing advice I've ever received was also the weirdest.  Sadly, it came from another writer I met once.  I don't recall his name, my brain cells devoting themselves to processing and making attempts at rationalizing his strange words overwhelmed their normally firm grasp on names.  C'est la vie.

Years later, I'm not sure if his advice was sincere or if this writer I had a brief exchange with one afternoon had it in his heart to sabotage other writers.

It went like this, "Quality writing should be devoid of ego, so after you write something you need to set it aside.  Come back to it the next day and read it fresh.  Anything you like, you need to discard because that has an ego attachment."  I didn't feel like arguing with this guy, so I said, "I see," and let it go at that.  The philosopher in me really could understand the viewpoint.  By that point in Life, I'd been through a lot of martial arts training and spiritual philosophy stuff, so I was more than a little familiar with the concept of divesting oneself of the burdensome ego.

Still, it never sat right with me.  There were a lot of aspects of Life I could see making a case for leaving your ego to warm the bench and I could even see limiting its influence over my writing, but to throw out any thing I liked felt wrong.  How was that any way to assess your own work?  Assuming the work ever even found an audience, how would you ever even connect with them?  "Hi, everyone.  Thanks for buying my book.  Glad you like it, but I don't know why.  What's my favorite part?  I didn't like any of it."  He might as well have told me never to trust my eyes.  How about, "When you cook, taste the food.  Throw out anything that tastes good to you."

Advice like that I could only see resulting in bad cooking and bad writing.  Personally, I'm glad I chose to eat the many chocolate delights I've baked, the many meals I've cooked and to have written the works that I've crafted.  I put a lot of time, energy and attention into all of them because, y'know, practice practice practice.  That's how you get better at anything.  Whether it be culinary arts, martial arts, literary arts or whatever else you choose to dedicate yourself to, open yourself to what you love love love and practice practice practice.

A lot of us learn by doing.  Some only learn by doing wrong.  Either way, can mean a lot of crispy cookies and burned pancakes.  It could mean broken bones and things, depending on your particular passion.  One of the great things about writing is that the practice paving the road of improvement is rewriting which has no limit to the number of times it can be done.  If all goes well, the more you do it, the less you'll have to do it.

That just leaves the other question.  Weigh-in with your thoughts.  Was it sincerely weird advice or sabotage couched as counsel?

16313--Firing on all cylinders...

     What do you mean there are people who can recite the digits of pi out to thousands of decimal places?  Who has that kind of free time?  Worse, what about the roomful of people who sat around to observe?  They were so impressed by the feat that they felt compelled to watch?  Alright, I don't know their reasoning.

     What I'm thinking, though, is that if you're impressed by some feat of memory or calculation, innovation or creative thinking, you should strive to accomplish your own.  Those people who put on a show of remembering and reciting something they heard thirty years ago, while playing eight simultaneous chess games and solving calculus problems in their head aren't freaks.  They're simply focused and practiced at performing particular skills.

     Did you know that homo sapiens is the weakest mammal in the world?  I'm not saying you couldn't overpower your kid's gerbil.  What I mean is that we have the lowest muscle to mass ratio of the mammal world.  So how have we been able to push all the other critters around for so long?  The answer is the same as I tell my kid when he asks for a new computer.  "You've got that thing on top of your neck."

     Yeah, I'm talking to you.  You've read this far so don't try to deny it.  You have a brain and we both know it.  The biggest, baddest supercomputers still take up huge rooms and run on megawatts of power just to be able to perform at a fraction of the capacity of that thing on top of your neck.  With its 100 billion neurons and quadrillion synapses, your brain is estimated to have potential processing power equivalent to 100 petaflops (10¹⁵ floating point operations/second).  That’s a lot.  On top of that, it's portable, self-cooling and runs on about 20 watts of power.  Your body is its robot slave.

     Your brain is as big and bad as you want it to be.  With focus and application, you can do those things you always wanted to do.  If not, you're not using the equipment right.  Be creative.  Go write that book you've been putting off writing.  I'm not saying it won't be hard.  That's where the practice part comes in, because after you write you'll be rewriting.  That's OK, though.  Work is the price of excellence.  Don't get stressed chasing perfection.  That's the mirage in the distance.  Leave it out there for the next sucker.

     Instead of stringing together a bunch of numbers in repetition of an infinitely long bunch of digits that's already been figured out, you're going to use your personal organic supercomputer to arrange twenty-six letters into a unique pattern one million letters long that will be so amazing people will voluntarily read it again.  They might even go see the movie version.  No matter what Hollywood does to it, it has to be better than the movie version of pi.  What were those guys thinking?  Talk about not using the equipment right.

     Any questions?

Don't live wanting.  Don't die wondering.
Phoenix