What's In An Albatross?

A few disclaimers about this post: First, this is not an anatomy lesson, and no harm has or will come to any birds whatsoever in the making of this piece. Secondly, this is not intended to be used in any way that would harm an albatross or any other of our fine avian friends. Lastly, just go with the whole albatross discussion, and see what it's actually about.

Sometimes, when a fellow writer feels bogged down in their writing and can't get themselves into a good space to be creative, I offer them the albatross challenge. In short, start writing about an albatross. Start describing it through the senses, but really don't be afraid to investigate and go deep into its particular smell or the feeling of its coarse, thick feathers. (Describing how it tastes is up to your imagination - please do not eat an albatross just to help your descriptive process). 

Now, this might seem like a simple task, but the challenge is to take it further. What does the voice of the albatross sound like? Not its call across the waters, but if it could talk, what would it sound like? Would it have a British accent? Would it use a lot of slang? What would it think about how people sounded with their smaller throats and beaks? Start challenging yourself to think of it as a unique entity, and how that might stand apart from what we typically think about these birds. Since there's no right or wrong to this exercise, you have the right to play around with it. Have fun with the exercise. Give your albatross a name - it should probably be Steve but that's your call. Then get to know Steve.

At this point, your mind should be travelling away from what we think about the typical albatross, which in fairness, is probably not very well known anyway. At this point, you can write down the secret world of these birds, their culture and habits, the immense efforts they take to make sure nobody ever finds out how they can speak English (and probably many other languages), and the heavy burden they carry in concealing everything about their special ways. God forbid if any human accidentally stumbled upon the secret kingdom of the albatross homeland. Would the birds rise up? Finally let the truth be told? Come out and demand a place amongst civilized society?

As you can tell, this exercise has very little to do with the fine albatross. This is merely a deep dive into committing yourself to writing about whatever circulates through your brain, and exploring it without the confines of annoying things like reality. Whenever we are hung up with our writing, it's usually because we have hit some kind of perceived boundary and do not have a good way to get through it. Usually the boundary is nothing more than some annoying obstacle that has no power over us, but we focus on it rather than the project of writing. So when these obstacles appear, your only responsibility is to find a way to break yourself from known concepts and explore the unknown spaces. And a good way to do that is with an albatross.

BTW - I chose an albatross for this example because it was alphabetically the first one I could think of. Your bird may vary.    

Screwing Up vs. Failing Up

Writing is a parade of mistakes and rewrites, and even that doesn't cover all the things that can go wrong. A three-hundred-page manuscript can fall apart with just a few bad pages at the end. Many well-intended essays can go completely sideways with a few poorly-placed words. And yes, even when all the words are the right ones, sometimes a piece can completely miss its target. This is a terrible fate for a piece of writing, but it's not a judgment of our work as much as it is an opportunity for us to do better.

Some of the more famous screw-ups have been very well-intentioned and purposeful, but they just ended up going in the wrong direction because the weight of the words were taken the wrong way. There was a very famous book written at the turn of the last century (yes, over 100 years ago) that was a scathing indictment of all the failings of capitalism while also backing the virtues of socialism. Surprisingly, this book is still standard reading in many schools, and was responsible for a lot of legislation getting passed that would change our way of living forever. Can you name it?

Well, chances are, you can't name the book by the way I described it - a pro-socialism book - but that's what the author intended it to be. It showed through a narrative tale about how a family was destroyed by an industry that exploited both its workers and customers, and our main character eventually supports a socialist cause that sympathizes with his cause. However, its writing about commercial exploitation was quite vivid and disturbingly drawn out, while the political side was actually quite boring. See the problem? The boring part was supposed to be the big hit of the book, but it didn't get the readers' attention. What drew all the views was the graphic descriptions of the meat-processing industry in the early 1900s. Yes, the book I refer to is The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. It inspired the famous Meat Safety Act of 1906, and did very little to rally the socialist cause. As Sinclair said later on, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." Oops.

Sinclair's folly, however, should not be a sign that he screwed up. As a staunch socialists, his motives were obvious, but his writing persuaded a different demographic to take action. The laws that followed did put controls on wildly out-of-control exploitation by businesses in the industry, but it was a far cry from what he hoped. In this regard he didn't screw up - he failed up. He didn't achieve his goal but he still wrote something that changed the world a little bit.

When we write, we need to give ourselves the liberty to fail up - to miss our target but still produce something impressive and thought-provoking. Not everyone who reads your work - be it a book like The Jungle or an essay or poem - is going to walk away with the same impression. Hopefully, you will get your message to the intended audience, but even if you miss, you still reach people. As long as you write with conviction, your words will be persuasive. Just give yourself a gut-check now and then to make sure the words you write match the statement you want to make. Be honest and observant of how you convey your message, and you won't screw up.       

And A Time to Scribble...

Maybe some people are picking this up as a trend, so I will just go with it. I have been talking about a lot of things in my past few posts that diverge from an actual writing process. They've been more like advice on how the written world is different than the real world, and how handwriting some things can affect the creative centers of the brain. So, in keeping with the spirit of things, here's another thing for you as a writer to try, just to see what it does for your process: scribbling.

Now, scribbling has many definitions, including but not limited to just wildly marking up a page with ink or with whatever you choose to write with. When a writer scribbles, it should be very similar but with words. What kind of words? Any words - anything remotely like words. Just applying ink to page, and letting the flow happen. It sounds weird, but I will explain its purpose.

First, it helps to know the rules, which are: no rules. If you get out a legal pad and just start jotting down things that pop into your head, you do not need to start at the top of the page. You do not need to obey the margins, write things left to right, top to bottom, or even in order. the blue-ruled lines across the page are irrelevant and should be ignored. Write words large, small, in cursive or print, whatever comes to mind. The magic of this is that it pushes you to see what is possible outside of all the grammatical, stylistic rules you've taught yourself. Instead of driving within the lines, you are free-wheeling across the Nevada Salt Plains, no boundaries, no restrictions, finding out what you want to do. It's actually exciting once you open yourself up to possibilities.

What should be the final outcome of this? Well, nothing amazing, and likely nothing worth keeping - that's fine. The idea is try to do this freestyle form of writing/play for ten minutes, or fifteen if you are enjoying it. Nobody has to see it, no other eyes but yours ever need explore what you write. It's strictly open season on words for words' sake and nothing else. But after that ten-to-fifteen minute period, end the session with one sentence, written at the bottom of the page, describing in whatever way you wish the experience of free-wheeling across the page and writing things without restriction. This sentence will be the takeaway from all this - the moment that you can look back upon and realize how after you broke all the rules, scribbled random nonsense all over the page or pages, and just poured things onto the page, everything afterward was fine. You created nonsense, broke the rules, and nothing bad happened. You escaped your boundaries, did something weird, wild, and new, and it all worked out. It's a feeling that's hard to describe until you try it and feel the results.

So often we do confine our creativity because something can't/shouldn't/won't be possible in our mind. This is usually because we create our own little boundaries that, if reinforced too much, trap in our creative urges. We lose the urge to explore because practicality overwhelms us. So, now and then we offer ourselves the chance to live free from the rules, throw around our words, and let the creativity flex its muscles. This is what being a creative is all about, and sometimes, it takes a little practice.

Incidentally, this is entirely different from free-verse poetry, although not at much as one might think. However, that's an article for another time.   

And So It Is Written...

Maybe it's a quick tell about my age, but I can read and write in cursive. I have been able to read cursive since I was about four, thanks to my mother diligently teaching me to understand her very elegant handwriting, and at about eight I could write it, although with far less elegance. I eventually developed my own style of semi-legible handwriting, and so started my practice of writing my homework, my journal entries, my everything. Then, one fateful day, my father picked up a used Smith-Corona typewriter to inspire me to do more homework, and that changed everything. Out with the script, in with the 12-point Courier Elite (that's the font old typewriters use). From there, I evolved to keyboards, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now, why did I give everyone this useless history lesson on how I learned cursive? Well, as it turns out, in my various readings I have noticed more and more discussion about the benefits of... not cursive, but writing things by hand instead of typing them. Now, what kind of heresy is this, you might ask. Are these studies done by Luddites? Is it all research funded by Big Pencil and its many industries? How can there be benefits? Computers are far faster, they have built-in spellcheckers and grammar-proofing, they know the margins and even typeset the letters. It does not go unnoticed, btw, that I am in fact creating this post on a computer. So what's the benefit?

Tell me this - have you ever had an idea for writing that just can't wait to pour right out of you? When you start writing, you just can't type fast enough because the creativity is just overpowering? If so, good for you. The pro-handwriting argument, however, suggests that unless we are just overflowing with words, it serves us better to exist within our writing, appreciating and savoring the process of creating as much as the creativity itself. Typing is a blur of activity, often working in fits and starts. Writing something by hand, however, takes an entirely different route through the brain, and that's worth exploring.

When we type, we hit a variety of keys and the corresponding letters appear as designated. At least in word processing, no matter how hard or soft I press the key, the letter is basically the same. Each key feels the same, each letter just a square on the keyboard. The process works, but it uses a part of our operational brain that reproduces activities such as pulling a lever to get a treat. The lever isn't the treat itself, it's a cause-effect process. When we write, however, different parts of the brain kick in because there is a direct connection between our pen or pencil and whatever we are writing on. If we write fast, slow, with anger, intensely, whatever, it shows in our handwriting. Activating different brain functions brings different results, and some of them actually feed into our creativity.

Lastly, and this may sound like a weird thing to boast about, but writing by hand - either cursive or print - slows down our mind and we focus more on the words than the paragraphs. The experience becomes more intimate, our thoughts more concentrated on the details rather than the broad brush of filling the page. And as we create things through this deliberate process, we think about what we are doing and we have the opportunity to consider whether it should be a little better. Our mind is still very fertile and creative, but it is now paying attention to the little things, and those make up the real grit and substance of most works.

Try writing a descriptive paragraph by hand, just to feel the experience. Describe some motionless, unimportant thing in the house - a refrigerator, a couch, a cat - and write seven sentences about it by hand (I apologize in advance for the hand cramps). Feel yourself in that moment, creating something on a simple sheet of paper with a basic pen, and see how it feels to engage in this process in a different way. You don't have to change, you don't have to delete Microsoft Word, just give a try and see how it feels. Try it a few times and you will realize it can be an excellent tool for writing first drafts, or sketching out things when you just need to formulate ideas. Then go ahead and type away if you wish. Just enjoy the process for what it offers.

And don't let my cat see that thing about being unimportant. 

Reading is a Different World

I performed a quiet little experiment during one writing workshop (that none of the participants were ever aware of as far as I know). I set my phone to record the meeting - just the voices - then let it get transcribed, word-for-word, to a document. Now - keeping in mind that I was there and speaking as well - when I read the discussions in written form, they were barely decipherable. I mean, I knew the content and context, but reading it off the page was absolutely brutal. Why? Well, they were talking, not writing, but their spoken voice was on the page.

You might be asking yourself whether it really makes that much of a difference between something someone said and writing something that was said. The difference is amazing, though probably not all that surprising. The difference, surprisingly, has very little to do with what they say as much as how they say it. More to the point, it has to do with the fact that "natural" speaking might sound fine but it reads very unnaturally. 

Think of it this way. I am a fan of the Law & Order franchise and its billion spin-offs. Every week, I get to see a nice legal procedural, watch the prosecution and defense have their back and forth, and usually a dramatic twist is thrown in as well. It's entertaining television. However, if you have ever seen a real trial, or compromised and seen a real crime documentary, you realize nothing is really that clean-cut. The legal counsels is full of average people, as are the defendant, the prosecution witnesses, the judge, the jury - every single person is just... a person. They do not have polished appearances, well-scripted dialogue, or magnetic presences. Basically, they are just like you and me - real people - and not the well-lit, properly made-up people on television.

Now, I am not downplaying real people or saying that television performances are better than reality television or documentaries - they just have their place. In my little workshop experiment, I noted how about one-half of everyone's sentences were run-ons, fragmented, used bad grammar, and/or were stuffed with "uh," "well," and "like" (including my own sentences). I understood every one of these lines as spoken at the time because they were filled with facial gestures, tonal inflections, and so on that filled in the cracks and made it a complete experience. In the written world, we lose that advantage and have to depend on clean dialogue so people don't get lost by reading all the "...well, um, it's like, y'know..." and trying to parse out the meaning.

This doesn't mean we can't give speeches a little variability - throw in some "ain't" or "y'all" to mix it up a little - but we should recognize that the written conversation should not sound similar to how we really speak. In a perfect piece of writing, a conversation should sound like how we think we heard everything afterward, with our brain editing out the stuttering, stammering, excessive words, and so on. Let it be clean in that regard, and save "real dialogue" for the documentaries.

And yes, it's okay to use the passive voice within dialogue. Just keep it inside the quotes.   

Rough Drafts and Tough Drafts

Writing can be many things for creatives, and is often more than one thing at any given time. Writing, for me, can be an exercise, a challenge, a puzzle to be solved, and often provides some form of catharsis. If I accomplish more than one of these feats during a writing session, I feel like I've won the game of writing. However, to win, I also need to know what my goal is - sometimes it's a victory just to put words on a page, other times it's all about finishing a particular piece. My current project has a goal in mind - finishing a first draft. However, this rough draft isn't the win, because it's also a tough draft.

Allow me to explain. Today, September 5th, is my mother's birthday. She was born 87 years ago today. However, this is the first birthday since her death, so instead of it being a time to celebrate with some cake and stuff, it's a much more somber day, and I don't like somber. Therefore, my goal was to try to seek some form of catharsis by writing about her and our complex relationship in one form or another as a way of remembering her. This is a case where one can claim victory merely by creating something. However, writing about my mother after her passing is not easy - therefore, this becomes a tough draft to write.

The tough drafts are far more difficult to create than just a rough draft, because the real challenge is digging deep enough within yourself to find that something worth pouring out your heart for. For first-time writers, sometimes it's a win just to write a simple confession of some thing never before spoken, or acknowledge something that is difficult to say out loud. "Growing up in a broken home really sucked," would make for a great reveal for first-time writers, especially if they had never admitted such a thing in the first place. However, future projects would require deeper revelations, more intense feelings, and an increasing reluctance to face up to the difficult truths (the drafts aren't called "tough" for now reason). 

The first tough draft I wrote about my mother's passing was simply saying that she died. Not "passed away" or "drew her last breath" but died, D-I-E-D. Using such a cold, absolute term was difficult to commit to words, and even more so to read to myself afterward, but it forced me to confront, head-on, a truth I did not want to face. The simple phrase, "My mother died last week" became my own tough draft, and that was all that needed to be said. It was, in that regard, a final draft as well.

Now, the one last thing about writing the tough draft - it's yours to do with as you wish. Nobody has to edit it, read it, see it, or even know it exists. Its purpose is merely the challenge of you writing it, then seeing this cold-hearted truth for what it is. Anything after that is up to you, because once you create the tough draft, you've already won.

Happy birthday, Mom!