If you want to enjoy reading, don’t have a reading goal.
If you want to read more books by female authors or explore a new genre or something like that, go for it. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Once you say “I want to read X number of books this year,” whatever that number is, you’ve turned what should be an enjoyable, enriching experience into work.
Just read what you like and read often—that’s all.
Robin Rendle preaching the truth:
Here’s one way to improve the thing you’re writing: cut the intro.
Writing about the symbiosis between trees and mushrooms? Don’t start talking about how humanity has depended on trees since the blah blah blah. Just jump right in! Talking about new features in your app? Don’t start with the fluffy stuff about how excited you are to announce yada yada ya – just tell me what improved.
Boom! The text is lighter, faster, less wasteful.
I get why folks feel the need to add a fluffy intro though. There’s real pressure to make a big deal out of whatever it is and turn everything we write into a thundering manifesto because we have to set up all this context and history, right? Well – no! We absolutely do not and often when we do our writing will mostly suffer for it.
Couldn’t agree more. And no disclaimers!
Literally: find a favorite (not dead) author’s website and use their contact form to send them a message with specifics about why you like them.
I’ve done this several times. The nice thing is they’re usually very accessible and responsive, maybe because they tend not to get the same kind of public praise as actors, musicians, and other more glamorous artists.
Of course this does depend on the author’s level of fame. My favorites tend to be nonfiction writers with an approachable-enough profile to still be accessible by civilians, so if your favorite author is a Cormac McCarthy type then you’re SOL.
You can do this over social media, but a mere “Love your work!” doesn’t have the same effect as a more detailed note, which both proves you’re actually a fan and gives them the fuel to keep going and making more stuff you enjoy.
Anyway, try it sometime.
Just getting this on the record: concert encores are dumb and bad.
They’re a terrible collective fiction that need to die.
Audiences should stop cheering for them and artists should stop planning for them.
Just play all the songs you want to play, then end the show and get gone.
From Mari Andrew’s 100 Things I Know:
I know how easy it is to get disoriented. When you don’t want to get lost on your way back, look backwards frequently. Everything looks completely different from the opposite view.
From the Okee Dokee Brothers’ “Possum’s Point of View”:
Hangin’ upside down I learned
The thing I always knew
Nothin’s as it seems once you’ve had
A different point of view
I noticed three writers posted about similar things around the same time, so I thought I ought to pay attention…
In the end, the reason actually doing things matters so much isn’t because it’s the right way to raise a successful adult, complete a novel, or achieve some other beneficial future goal. It’s because you’ll be using a bit of your actual time on the planet to live how you want to live.
It turns out, not doing their art was costing them time, was draining it away, little by little, like a slow but steady leak. They had assumed, wrongly, that there wasn’t enough time in the day to do their art, because they assumed (because we’re conditioned to assume) that every thing we do costs time. But that math doesn’t take energy into account, doesn’t grok that doing things that energize you gives you time back. By doing their art, a whole lot of time suddenly returned. Their art didn’t need more time; their time needed their art.
The way I show up for myself, the way I discover who I really am, is to make an appointment every day to show up to the page. If I show up to the page, I show up to myself.
Something I think about a lot are these lyrics from the Ben Folds song “Bastard”:
You get smaller as the world gets big
The more you know you know you don’t know shit
“The whiz man” will never fit you like “the whiz kid” did
So why you gotta act like you know when you don’t know?
It’s okay if you don’t know everything
This is such a simple concept that applies to a variety of situations, whether it’s politicians spouting off nonsense or insecure people projecting false confidence to mask a deeper fear.
It’s OK if you don’t know everything. In fact, it’s better when you don’t. Say “I don’t know, I need to learn” instead.
The best parenting advice I’ve ever gotten was from my own parent. Per my mom:
When all else fails, lower your expectations.
Runner-up is from my other parent. Per my dad:
Kids spell love T-I-M-E.
Generally I take a liberal stance towards unsolicited advice. You never know when you’ll get something worthwhile, and you can always just ignore the bad stuff.
We’ll see if that stance changes once people start chiming in about particular parenting choices. So far I haven’t had a problem.
In the meantime, Lifehacker’s Offspring parenting blog asked people for The Best Parenting Advice You’ve Ever Received. As I’m just 3 months into this parenting thing my capacity for advice giving is quite limited, but I appreciated hearing from more seasoned parents with maxims like:
More here.
Awhile back a patron donated a grey Smith Corona Corsair Deluxe typewriter to my library. She didn’t know why it wasn’t working but didn’t want to spend the time and effort to figure it out.
Little did she know she brought it to one of the few libraries in the area where someone actually cared and could do something about it.
But without a space of its own (or its cover/case), it sat atop a cabinet gathering dust until recently, when we thought we might use it in conjunction with National Poetry Month.
A quick inspection revealed the ribbon wasn’t advancing and the keys would get jammed on the way to the paper. I fixed the jamming easily enough, but needed to do some take-home surgery to properly diagnose the ribbon issue.
Once I got a closer look, I noticed one of the left ribbon spool pawls was out of alignment. This meant the ribbon wouldn’t advance with typing to provide constantly fresh ink. I gently bent it back into place and tried to tighten its binding screw so it would grab the teeth of the ratchet wheel as it should.
(I could be wrong on the names of these parts, but these educated guesses wouldn’t be possible without Richard Polt’s The Typewriter Revolution, the AMES OAMI Mechanical Training Manual for Standard Typewriter Repair at the Typewriter Database, and the War Department’s 1944 Typewriter Maintenance repair manual. Many happy typings to them!)
Typewriter screws can be pretty stubborn sometimes, especially if they haven’t moved in decades. This particular screw was quite intransigent, so in an effort to compel it into motion I leaned into the screwdriver to give it some extra oomph.
Big mistake.
As soon as I did that, the little L-shaped metal arm the pawls were screwed into (not sure of its technical name) bent downward about 45 degrees.
To paraphrase Monty Python, there was much cursing.
I was so close! Once I’d finished that screw the problem would have been solved and I could go on with my life. Alas, not only did this mistake mean I had to figure out how to bend a small 50-year-old metal arm back into place without breaking it, but I also had to remove the Corsair’s plastic body casing to do so. Which I was really trying to avoid.
Once the paroxysm of profanity passed, I quickly realized I had two options. I could give up and consign a mediocre typewriter to live the rest of its days as an Instagram prop. Or I could persevere until I fixed it.
Ultimately I chose a third way: I indulged in self-pity and gnashing of teeth for a few moments, then took Door #2.
I did successfully remove the shell, which exposed the whole ribbon spool mechanism from the side. Even then I struggled to get enough leverage within the cramped quarters of a typewriter’s innards to bend the arm back up. But I just kept at it and kept at it. Once I decided to endure, I had no other choice.
Eventually I found a tool with the right shape to lever the arm back into place no worse for wear. Back on the planned path after this sudden detour, I restored the remaining parts and screws, wedged the shell back into place, and nodded in satisfaction.
Previous typewriter repairs I’ve done produced similar do-or-die moments. Each time I chose to keep on (except one, a Consul Who Must Not Be Named), the repairs ended successfully. No amount of whining, swearing, procrastinating, or doomsaying made that possible. Only stubborn persistence.
The moral of the story: in typewriter repair as in cinematic prison, get busy living or get busy dying.
Today at the library, I read Matthew “The Oatmeal” Inman’s The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances, an extended version of his original web comic about ultra-running. It’s of a piece with his usual ardent and absurdist takes on varying topics. In the book he illustrates a few tips for becoming a runner, which I have decided to paraphrase into three core principles for life:
1. Shut up and run.
2. Running sucks.
3. Suck in the present.
(The first one is a direct quote from the book, but the latter two are my own condensations, which also happen to create a delightful anadiplosis.)
I am not much of a runner—though I’m certainly inspired to be after reading this book—but I quickly saw the wide-ranging value of these aphorisms. Replace “running” with any activity, but especially an arduous or creative one, and the phrases still work. For me, it’s writing.
The first step is the hardest, but everything hinges on it. Ignoring the compelling excuses our inner demons conjure is key to achieving even a modicum of success. Just doing the thing, whatever it is, is the beginning and end of it. It’s the permission-to-play value, the minimum qualification for entry.
If we accomplish the first step, then the second one gets real on the quick. The initial burst of enthusiasm fades and we’re left with the undeniable notion that we’ve made a mistake in starting at all, that our muscles ache and that life would be easier if we stopped. But this, damn those pesky demons, is a lie. On the contrary: “Life is difficult,” writes M. Scott Peck in The Road Less Traveled. “This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”
Running/writing/painting/cobbling/[insert activity here] sucks. It’s beautiful, and we love it, but it sucks to do. It definitely doesn’t suck to have done something, but getting to that point means getting through the suck.
Which brings us to the third great Oatmeal Truth™: be present in the suck. Whatever we’re doing we’re doing it for a reason, and that probably is because we want to, or even need to. It might feel terrible or wonderful, as the book’s title asserts, or somewhere in-between. Either way, it’s something important to us. To honor that, then, we need to give it our attention. We need to live with it as it lives in us, even when it sucks. Even if we just want to get it over with to make the pain or frustration stop.
I think I’ll put these up on my wall.