Happy December!

Happy November!

Happy October!

Happy September!

Happy August!

Happy July!

Happy June!

Happy May!

Happy April!

Tip

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In the end it’s up to you -- remember that today comes once, and then it’s gone.  If you want to goof off and watch television instead of trying to make something, then go ahead; but if you’re just tired, keep going, if you’re discouraged, keep going, if you think you’re only making junk, make more junk, don’t let whatever pinprick of light you’ve got fade out because you don’t feel like it right now.  You don’t have to decide what’s important to you, it will automatically be important to you whatever you do.  You just have to do nothing, or do something.

Turn

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It's easy to feel discouraged, it's easy to feel that "just not today please" feeling, it's easy to indulge in trusting some future self to clean up one's own mess.

Maybe in the long haul being creative really just means doing what you do, when you don't feel like doing it, when you'd rather be doing anything else, seeing the dull and spiritless parts through until you strike something new again and can get back into the sunshine.

Rotation

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I enjoyed doing NaNoWriMo a few years back on this blog because every day I had to publish material, and it didn't seem like there was anyone to judge, and I had only a vague idea of where anything was going.

That's probably not the only reasons why; I'm sure that having a break from needing a variety of new material each and every day, or at least every week, was a relief, to say nothing of the personal matters changing in my life at the time -- but it would be good to try and see if I could turn this whole "wake the blog back up" project in a direction that had some of that fire.

Purchase

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It's encouraging to reflect that most often my good ideas come when I'm reading or listening to non-fiction material on a subject I find deeply interesting.

I grew up with the movie descendants of Star Wars and Jaws and Indiana Jones and other big-ticket blockbusters, so there are probably far more story ideas in my head that start with the words "What If" than ideas that don't.

Part of the trouble I think with research beyond a certain point is that you start to only pay attention to details that support your story the way you've already decided to yourself that it should play out.

Or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, is the problem of endlessly changing the very bones of the structure of your story because of unending research that cuts the ground out from beneath you.

Errant

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Too lazy as it turns out, to do even that much research before having to write more to move forward. 

I think we may be nearing the end of the amount of words I can churn out about Research without first doing any, and in contemplating this I'm puzzled by another aspect of keeping a blog alive.

What is the purpose?

We've already established that the purpose of the blog is for me to continue to develop my writing voice, and that doing so six hundred words or so at a time, at some undetermined point in the future when I'm writing every day again, is the best way to do that without either burning out or getting bored.

We've also established that one can't simply write about nothing if they're as undisciplined and on the kind of budget I'm on (time-wise?); sooner or later the speculation and rambling wears out.

So I can do research on things and then write about them -- but doesn't there have to be some larger goal than this, some bigger story I have to tell?

There are projects I've been working on for more than ten years that may never see the light of day if I don't get working on them in earnest and soon.

I understand my own impulse to keep that stuff close to the chest, and not wanting to publish anything before it's ready -- but is there any way to try and frame some of these smaller tasks around a bigger payoff later on?

Happy March!

More like this

Oscillation

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Well it’s an idea anyway, that there are things that I want to know all about but don’t want to have to spend the time actually doing work in order to understand.

In fact I even cheat when it comes to the classics; I have a vague understanding of books like the Odyssey and Don Quixote, even Crime and Punishment, but I hesitate to say that I’ve actually read them: I’ve listened to their audiobooks many times, but I’m still not convinced that it’s the same thing.

At any rate, there are dozens of things that are as uninteresting to me as the NFL draft that I could start looking into.

I think part of the trouble is I really do have to dig deeper if I’m going to get anywhere towards finding something that I find to be personally interesting on any kind of significant level.

What does that even mean -- I mean when you just read the wikipedia article about something, you’re basically getting the information filtered through a consensus or committee, varying in members and volume from article to article, that has had to agree at some point to what the most important, easy-to-explain, and easy to cite pieces of information about the subject are.

I’ve mentioned two things before that come back to me now on this line of thinking.

First is the idea that I could do research on how to do research itself -- sort of a crash course, try and pick up a few guides, read through the key sections, build up some conflicting viewpoints and explore my own road between them.

That’s not a terrible idea, but it’s one that I might not have as much time to devote to as I’d like -- remember that another part of the problem of avoiding burnout and abandoned blog syndrome is to not go overboard with overambitious projects and then drown in them.

The second is the idea that pretty much the only means I have at my disposal presently in terms of a formally conducted research project is the good old three-by-five notecard essay from middle school (I learned other writing programs in college, but I’m not sure any of them stuck).

I mentioned the whole 3x5 thing earlier with more or less a tone of dismissal and scorn, and I still feel largely the same way EXCEPT that I’ve realized one thing that’s changed since I was in middle school: I now actually think I understand what a thesis statement really is, and how to write a paper around one.

At least I know that I can pick out the vague notion of a topic, and write two or three thousand words around it until I sort of lazily and sort of brilliantly (well at least we can be sure it’s lazily) thread my essay through a guess at an answer to whatever question I’ve been trying to figure out.

So maybe what I need are a list of questions that I need answered, and I can go out and find the answers to them in simple straightforward research projects one and a time, and come back here to write the answer in six hundred words or less.

Again, not a terrible idea; I just have no idea where to start, with what questions or how to pick them or where I’ll find the time to do the research to get the information to form the thesis to answer the question to frame the rest of the writing around.

I could always just practice and see if I get better, without necessarily taking up too much extra time in doing so.

I’d like to end this particular session on a decisive note after all this dithering and stalling for time, so what is the next step of this plan, if it is a plan?

I could always try and read the wikipedia article on research and see where that gets me, it might just be not not lazy enough?

Alternative

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Did I learn enough about the NFL draft to write six hundred words about it, or find enough interest?

Well I could probably write six hundred words about a piece of gravel if I really had to, they just might not be the best six hundred words or the most engaging ever to write.

I don’t mean to say that I’m especially inventive, more that I’m especially wordy and long-winded, and can go on spinning out words for a while before my hands on the keyboard catch up to the fact that I’m quite out of things to say.

Anyway, I learned some valuable things from this first step I think: first and foremost, doing research on a topic that doesn’t interest you feels absolutely pointless, even when you have the stated goal of learning whatever you can.

I picked the NFL draft because it’s a topic that I had a reasonable amount of familiarity with it, but almost no practical information about, and most significantly, had no reason to acquire any information about, now or in the future.

It is not a useful topic for me to acquire information about, or at least that’s how it felt going in.

How does it feel now that I did admittedly the bare minimum of research possible on the subject and am moving on?

About the same, actually -- I found some facts that I could interpret as being interesting, but I honestly think I might be getting confused between being interested in the facts and being interested in my own interpretation of them.

In other words, interested in hearing my own fingers type and not much else.

I still believe that there’s use in trying to learn about a subject you wouldn’t normally be inclined to go out and learn about on your own -- otherwise, if people just stuck to learning more and more about the same things, there would be nothing much new to speak of in the world, creatively or otherwise, just stagnation everywhere.

Mark Twain once said that a classic is a book that people praise without reading.  In a speech he said famously of Paradise Lost (or Paradiſe Loſt for those playing along at home in the 16^th century) that it fulfills a certain criteria for a classic:

“I don't believe any of you have ever read PARADISE LOST, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic -- something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."  

- "The Disappearance of Literature" speech, 20 November 1900 

Note: Professor Winchester was Caleb Thomas Winchester (1847-1920), librarian of Connecticut Wesleyan University from 1869 - 1885 and Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature there from 1873 - 1920.

borrowed with thanks from twainquotes.com 

I’m not sure if I heard that entire quote once before or only heard it paraphrased, but the key passage, that everybody wants the experience gained by, or at least the credit for, reading something that has a reputation for being a great work of literature, but the strong preference would be to get it without having to actually take the time and effort to go through with actually reading the thing.  (See? Wordy.)  (I first typed that accidentally as “Wee? Sordy.” and giggled like the child I am.)

I was thinking about that quote after writing the post that went up yesterday, and thinking about how I may have been too broad when I set out to classify topics of possible research into the two categories of “things that interest me” and “things that do not.”

I also still believe that if I research and write about only those things that do strongly interest me, I will eventually get just as burnt out and done with this whole thing as if I researched only things that held no interest for me whatever.

Hopefully it’s fairly clear where I’m going with this: since the moment I sat down and realized I really was going to have to find a way to do actual research and then write about the NFL draft, I’ve been struggling to find a way to weasel out of the promise I made to me to try and challenge my creative side to deal with things it wouldn’t normally deal with.

I’m wondering now if there’s a useful way to do that weaseling, or if I should just try and do better at picking un-interesting subjects that are still a little bit interesting somehow, perhaps as if they were in disguise.

Equilibrium

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The thing I learned about the NFL draft that I thought was most interesting was its undisguised goal of promoting balance in the league.

Well maybe not balance per se, but at least the chance for competition; apparently the draft first started as a way to keep the most successful teams from continually signing the best new players and simply being more successful.  While no expert, I am originally from Buffalo, and can tell you that one-sided football games are typically a lot less interesting to watch.

For those who don't know, the basic idea of the rules of the draft are that the teams who did the least well in the preceding season get first pick of the new players, that is, college football soon-to-be-graduates, or basically anyone good enough to turn pro who's been out of high school for three years, whether they've been playing on an actual team or not.

The teams that didn't even make it to the playoffs pick first, the team that won the latest super bowl gets to pick last.

So I suppose the fact that the league felt it was necessary, in order to ensure their continued existence as a form of compelling entertainment, to try and ensure that their is at least some sort of struggle to keep it interesting.  If the same teams always win year after year, it might be interesting to a select few diehard fans, but the rest of humanity would most likely stop tuning in just to see a sure thing.

Then again, when I wandered a bit on the wikipedia, I learned that Super Bowl XXIX (or is it 29, are we doing only Arabic numerals now?) was expected to be a one-sided game by pretty much everyone, a game between the 49ers and the far less favored San Diego Chargers, and even though that is exactly what happened, it still had strong ratings.  But then, it's the Super Bowl.

Rehearse

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I suppose the first and most obvious 21st century solution to the problem of getting a question answered is to read the wikipedia article about it.

So I did that, and only afterwards I realized that my plan wasn't really finished when I started: I decided to do research on the NFL draft, something that doesn't interest me at all, without any definite question to answer or goal in mind other than "go do research about that thing."

So having absorbed the basic summary of information on the NFL draft through the wiki, it seems like the only thing I'm well-suited to do is re-state whatever someone else already said about it in slightly different words (story of my life).

I think the real goal has got to be to go into an uninteresting topic and find something, any one thing, that is interesting enough to write six hundred words about -- preferably not the first or second or third thing to come to mind, either, but it's a new idea, so let's not get overambitious.

Afield

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I guess the next step is: come up with a question to answer, and then try and find out the easiest way to get an answer to it.

If I had to say the thing that interests me the least in the world right now, with the exception of politics, which I will not utter here, the first thing that comes to mind is... the NFL draft?

Upshot

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I like the idea about getting answers to questions; I wonder if there's a way to research the best way to get a direct question answered in detail and on short notice.

Impediment

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I mentioned something before about doing research into how to do research -- I had to do papers a plenty in High School and at University, but I’m not interested in buying any 3x5 notecards just yet.

Aim

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The best plan, at least to start, seems to be to research a specific topic, or question, and try to find something interesting about the answer that I find, and write up 600 words or less and then move on to something else -- and I can switch off from things that interest me and don't interest me, every other, or however it works.

I suppose I should start with a topic that I’m not at all interested in, in order to dive in and get the measure of the worst of it if I’m able.

Deviation

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After some thought, the way I see it this is actually pretty simple: there are only two kinds of things I can research on -- things that I find interesting all on their own (for instance, learning to cook better, steam-powered ocean liners, laser swords), and things which I do not find interesting whatsoever (higher mathematics, learning to eat better, pro basketball with the exception of Space Jam).

If I only do research on things that don’t interest me in the slightest, I’ll burn out and the project will go back into hibernation.

If I only do research on things that do interest me, I’ll get bored and the project will go back into hibernation.

So that means... hang on, I know it’s -- something, dang it what does that mean

Arbitrary

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I’ve started thinking about this research question, and how to go about figuring out going about beginning it (without doing any of it yet of course), and a few things have occurred to me.

First, I should maybe look into how to research -- this is surely a thing, everything is something in the age of the internet (there are too many people like me trying to make Something out of Almost Nothing by multiplying it times a URL code).  Maybe if I knew a little better about how proper research is conducted I might be able to think more clearly about getting started.

Second, I need topics to research -- I feel like I’m stumbling further down the endless tower of turtles on this one, first needing writing practice to be good at writing, then needing topics to write about, then needing research to fuel those topics, and now -- and preferably ones that will minimize enthusiasm drag.

Enthusiasm drag is an idea I just made up; I have a mental image of a project as being like an extremely (or maybe not) aerodynamic car, but one which has no engine.

They only way it gets forward momentum is from the big initial push of enthusiasm for the project -- you can drift a bit from minor successes, but you’re more or less waging a war against the constant weight and air resistance of eventually not giving a damn.

Third, I need a goal for what I’m planning on doing with the research -- for one thing, this can help me plan how much research is needed, a lot or a little.  It can be a very vague goal, at least to start with and especially until I understand a little better about how the research I want to do will be done.

What’s important is trying to visualize, in some way and up front, what I’m going to do before I do it.  And this is problematic as it requires me to do something I’ve become reluctant to do -- put effort into this blog that doesn’t wind up going directly onto the website.

In other words, if it’s not directly getting me out of having to do more work, why should I do it?  Isn’t that just more work?

Haphazard

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As much as I enjoy imagining following the footsteps of Mr. Lucas, Professor Lewis, or Professor Tolkien one day, and contributing something that straddles the line between genre and actual lit, if I had to say there was one piece of writing advice that’s taken something I’m writing to places I hadn’t expected and was thankful to have been to, it’s the obvious old chestnut “write what you know.”

Research, eh?  Sounds like a tall order.

But it’s where most of my past essays and remarks have fallen somewhat short, and where I think a lot of my work finds its limit -- most of the time my writing is confined to “maybe it’s X” or “maybe it’s Y” and arguing between the two out of whole cloth.  

It’s not a bad occupation for leisure time, but it doesn’t get us very far if we really wanted to figure something out -- sooner or later I start bringing in quotes from old movies, or ideas from other people’s work, something to give my ideas some kind of ground to figure against.

And that’s not a bad thing either, I like writing that takes different ideas and crams them together to try and reveal something not the same as either -- but the problem is that it’s too easy.

There are no stakes when it’s just you walking around inside your own head -- maybe ‘stakes’ is the wrong word, maybe ‘consequences’ is closer -- there’s a sense that you can get away with anything, there’s nothing to bring the content down to reality.

Especially when the only outside content one can haul in, often completely by head and shoulders, is just more fiction.

In Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (god damn it), the narrator remarks that Mike, a enormous, essentially immobile, sentient and friendly computer with many eyes who can (and probably has) read everything ever written in almost no time, gets something out of stories he can’t get anywhere else.

“I used to question Mike’s endless reading of fiction, wondering what notions he was getting.  But turned out he got a better feeling for human life from stories than he had been able to garner from facts; fiction gave him a gestalt of life, one taken for granted by a human; he lives it.”  (Heinlein, 1966)

In Mike’s mind, the flavor of life and the inherent pressures of conscious experience were lacking because of who he was and where he came from, what he knew and what he was able to learn on his own through self-inspection and reflection.

I may or may not have mentioned before that I was a philosophy student once, which means I was however briefly heir to a number of thinkers who could probably be justifiably described as long on thinky-talky, short on specifics.

So endless speculation and armchair long-windedness come naturally to my disposition, apparently; I need more research in this blog because I can free write all I want, but it’s tough to say whether anything that’ll get written will be actually useful for anything.

Plus original research is where good ideas come from.

I’m not saying you go out and steal whatever sounds good when you encounter it, turn it around and make it into a story (though you can do that, knock yourself out, you can say whatever you want if you’re not planning on selling it, or even publishing it).

Sure you can get some ideas from thinking over what you’ve already read and experienced (for me a lot of classic fiction and genre fiction, a liberal education, a lot more contemporary popular film, some scattered nonfiction books on tape here and there, and tons and tons of repetition on top of everything), but there will hardly ever be any real surprises, and whatever you come up with will probably feel a little forced, and probably a little vague.

So what then, how do I start researching, what do I even want to do research about?

Quandary

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What about the drawing and the comics and what not?

Those take more time.  I’m not sure that there’s an easy way to churn out one of those as quickly as I’m able to churn out six hundred words.

The biggest problem with those wasn’t the workload, it was getting the ideas together -- I can write about anything, but for drawing or making a comic, there has to be something there to make for me to get interested enough to see it through.

If I say that I’ll do it once a week, then sooner or later I’ll get sick of doing it once a week and make excuses.

I’m not trying to find a way around making willpower happen, I’m trying to find a way to not to have to use willpower in the first place, and I’m beginning to think that that problem is an unsolvable one.

Maybe I should only plan on publishing something, even if it’s just a sentence, even if it’s just a few words, every day -- pretty lame way to go about filling in a proper blog, but burn out is real, too.

The reason why the six hundred word limit is exciting is that it cuts back to the first goal of the blog in the first place, and maybe helps to put it somewhat into perspective.

There are three sort of blanketing statements of personal ideology that  have recurred to me a lot since I became a grown-up -- it’s not important to list each and every one of the three examples that come to mind and where they come from and why -- if I want to I can do that in a later article, and hopefully do it with a definite purpose in mind.

The summary of the ideology is, act the way you want to feel, and keep acting that way, and sooner or later you might come to feel that way without any more complicated effort than that.

What does that mean, more complicated -- I mean that, when all else fails, forcing yourself to try and achieve what you want to achieve, or to at least appearing to do so, 

Some things you need a teacher for; I’m not going to start tap dancing like Gregory Hines just because I’m pretending like I can … although now I’m a little tempted to prove that claim wrong, but more tempted to not potentially go to the hospital from having slipped and fallen down.

If I tried to learn to tap dance without a teacher, I might get good some day by sheer trial and error, and probably luck, but along the way I would (maybe?) wind up duplicating a lot of the work other people have already figured out over the course of the history of tap dance in the first place.

But how can I learn to write like me without simply writing like I do as much as I can? Sure there are thousands of “how to write” books, and they’re each better or worse than the others and better or worse for me, I’ve read (or browsed) dozens and found similar points in most.

I (more or less) think I’ve found a voice, what I’m trying to do is keep that voice in practice and try to make it clearer.

But don’t I need stuff to write about -- aren’t we going in circles here?

Which leads to the other great problem keeping I think my blog from being a more stimulating and enjoyable experience: research.

Incite

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I like the do a little bit every day plan, I think it’s got potential.

One thing that perpetually gets me into trouble is trying to think of all the potential liabilities in a plan basically from its inception; maybe this is a way of hashing out its logical shape, or maybe it’s just mis-guised pessimism, but it’s the next thing that comes to mind, so let’s write it.

The first problem with the plan is that doing “a little bit every day” is vague, and I’m not sure how to make it more specific without stumbling into a rigid set of rules that eventually will rub me the wrong way and I’ll let the whole thing drop again.

A single sentence, or a few words, or a “deep thoughts” type entry perhaps?  Originally each nonfiction entry was supposed to be about six hundred words -- regrettably I soon learned that I’m not a strong enough writer to say what I need to say that quickly.

Wait a minute.

A strong enough writer -- a stronger writer would be able to make their point in as few words as possible?  I’m not sure that’s one hundred percent true, but The Elements of Style has in the past at least made me feel like if I could say less I would probably feel like I was saying more.

But the idea that limiting myself to six hundred words an entry, or fewer, in order to get myself to make my points clearly, or at least more quickly, is an appealing one, and not just because it means I don’t have to work as much to keep going.

Idleness

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If maybe I did just something, no matter how little, to keep this thing moving forward every day, that would be better than doing nothing.

It's easy to blame my lack of enthusiasm for blogging every day on not having enough ideas, but after thinking about it more, I don't think that's really the issue.

Sure, it's tough to come up with material, and it's even tougher to force yourself to develop vague ideas into concrete posts or stories or comics, when it takes hours of concentrated effort to do so.

But I think one area that went wrong more than others was the imaginary standard I tried to keep up in terms of quality of posts and comics, which was difficult to meet without rigorous, earnest, and steadfast effort -- and when that effort is met with the same compensation as putting in almost no effort at all, it's difficult to keep up that enthusiasm for it's own sake indefinitely.