Seven Swans A-Swimming

Six Swords A-Sweeping

FIVE SPACE SHIPS

Four Short Reviews

Three James Woods

Two Naughty Cats

A Super-Lazy Blog Entry

Eventide

The bar was quiet, the room practically empty, except for one young man sitting in his customary booth in the back.

"You're still here?" asked Ben, sitting down across from him.

"Apparently," said Dan carelessly, turning over the pages of the book on the table in front of him.

"Thought you'd get out of town for the break," said Ben, pushing across one of the two glasses he'd brought to the booth.

Dan accepted the beer in silence, took a drink.  

"Still here for another day or two," Dan said, but didn't elaborate.  "Are you staying?"

"Clear through 'till next semester starts," said Ben.  "In August I was slow to act and had slow business, this time I need to be ready to start catching them as they fall, so to speak."

"Right," said Dan.  "Not a bad idea."

"Right," said Ben.  “By the way, I heard Wilkins flunked comp.”

“Yeah, he did,” said Dan.  He said no more.

Ben nodded, surveyed the quiet room in silence, then turned back to his companion.

"What's that?" he asked, nodding at the book.

"The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," said Dan, holding up the book to show its spine.

"Old copy," said Ben interestedly.  "Which one are you on?"

"The Blue Carbuncle," said Dan.

"Is that the one with treasure hidden in one of the plaster heads?" asked Ben.

"No," said Dan, "that's the Six Napoleons."

"Right," said Ben.

"But you're not far off," said Dan.  "It's the one with the jewel hidden in the goose."

Ben said, "Ahh, I know that one."

Dan shrugged.

"It's the Christmas episode, as it were," said Ben.

Dan shrugged again.

"Funny how those go," said Ben.

"Christmas episodes?" asked Dan.

"I suppose," said Ben.  "Holiday stories, anyway."

"How do they go?" asked Dan.

"Well," said Ben, "I don't usually generalize--"

"Although you just did," remarked Dan.

"But I would say," said Ben, "that generally they come in two varieties."

"Go on," said Dan.

"Either they're a standalone piece," said Ben, "usually from an author with an existing audience for other work, or they're a holiday-flavored Special Issue from an existing series."

"Sounds reasonable enough," said Dan.

"If they're the latter," said Ben, "they are of course set at Christmas time, or around there, or leading up to it, they are usually colorful, dressed up to fit the fashion of the season, so to speak, the way you might have a Cowboy Episode or a Race Car Episode, what have you."

"Superficial," said Dan. 

"They also usually," said Ben, "have at least one serious conversation between the characters about the meaning of the day, whatever that happens to mean, usually being un-specifically good to people.  Someone who generally doesn't believe in the spirit of things has an epiphany and turns around.  In the end, everyone's a little kinder, a little friendlier, a little more warm-hearted."

"Vague enough," said Dan, "to be applied across the board."

“Well anyway,” said Ben.  “I said it was un-specific.”

“You want to talk about standalone pieces?” asked Dan, with an air of wanting to have it over with.

“You know, I don’t much care for Christmas these days,” said Ben, as if to change the subject.

“Really,” said Dan, sounding unsurprised.

“Well, it’s a funny thing,” said Ben.  “I think I don’t like how much people say one thing and do another.  They say that Christmas is the time for being good to people, and sometimes that’s true.”

“You know what I like best about Christmas?” said Dan.

Ben looked attentively.

“Playing ordinary music,” said Dan.

Ben raised an eyebrow.

“Everywhere you go,” said Dan, “you go to get motor oil, to get groceries, to buy pet food--”

“Pet food?” said Ben.  “You don’t have pets.”

“Whatever,” said Dan, “no matter where you turn you hear Jingle Bells, Silver Bells, White Christmas, every year the same stuff.”  

“I’m coming to that,” said Ben.

“I’m sure,” said Dan.  “What I like is getting home, taking off my shoes, and putting something on the stereo that has nothing to do with the time of year, or with presents, or anything of the kind.

“I think I understand,” said Ben.  “But how do you even notice the difference?  If you avoid the Christmas stuff altogether, I mean.”

“Well,” said Dan, shifting in his seat and looking away, “it’s very difficult to avoid.”

Ben nodded.  He noticed his companion’s glass was empty, rose and came back with two more

“So they say Christmas is about being good to people,” said Ben.

“You’re about to say,” said Dan, “that everyone is lying, and that it’s really all about buying stuff.”

Ben spread his hands as if to say ‘what can I say if you already know it.’

“I find myself thinking about hypnotism at this time of year,” he said.

“Hypnotism,” said Dan.

“When a person is to be hypnotized,” said Ben, “there are certain things you need to bring the trick off properly.”

“Like they have to believe in hypnotism in the first place,” said Dan sarcastically.

“You’re joking, but you’re not far off,” said Ben.  “Apart from that, you need for instance a quiet, dimly-lit room, a more or less comfortable and safe-feeling place, like a library but with less of that weird pressure to concentrate.  Just a room that’s been carefully prepared so that they can feel a certain way.”

“If I follow you,” said Dan, “you’re talking about decorations, and music, and, whatever, baking cookies for the smell.  And all this combines to make people feel a certain way they wouldn’t otherwise.”

“More or less,” said Ben.  “It’s not really a form of hypnotism, but it is a way of creating, what, a mood.”

“People like it,” said Dan.  “It makes them happy.  If it is a conditioned response, it’s at least one that brings people together.”

“Yes, it is,” said Ben.  “What I’m saying is that the way it makes people feel is possibly the only way to justify it.  Personally, I like when my home feels like Christmas.  Maybe, maybe, the main street of our little town here.”

“But it’s everywhere,” said Dan.

“It is everywhere,” said Ben.  “And it’s not charming after the second week, no matter what people say.  We start, most of the time a month out from the date or more, and it makes me sick of it.”

“I have a feeling,” said Dan, “that you’re building up to your comments about the standalone works.”

“I am indeed,” said Ben.

He took another drink.

“I heard,” he said, “that Professor Cook offered Wilkins a chance to re-submit his essay.”

Dan looked steadily at his companion but said nothing.

“And that he just needed help getting it right,” said Ben.

Dan took another drink in silence.

“Standalone works,” Ben said then, “are the ones that don’t belong to a larger series, like the little story about Mr. Holmes here, where they start with a goose and a stolen gemstone and end with-- if I remember -- Holmes breaking habit by letting the criminal go free, because it’s Christmastime.”

“Actually it starts with a hat,” said Dan.

“Whatever,” said Ben.

“And,” Dan went on, “Holmes lets the criminal run any number of times, there’s the Abbey Grange, Boscombe Valley, the one with the guy who woos his step-daughter--”

“Whatever,” said Ben again.  “My point is, standalone works don’t have ordinary episodes to fall back on for contrast, they’ve got to say something on their own.  And of the major works that have influenced such upstarts down the years, I trace most of the new Christmas stories you’ll find back to three major sources.”

“List them please,” said Dan, in a tone to say get on with it.  “And you may as well start with Dickens.”

“First,” said Ben, as if he had not been anticipated by his companion, “and foremost, is Dickens.”

“Shocked,” said Dan, taking a drink.

“His little story did more than anyone in recent history,” said Ben, “or so I have read, to make Christmas into a day worth celebrating.  It wasn’t his only Christmas story, but it is an old favorite.”

“The movies always frightened me,” said Dan.

“The principle emotion,” said Ben, “is fear.  The man is scared straight by seeing uncharitableness as the start of his emotional misfortune, and by seeing that the world would be a better place, and also still a miserable one, with him out of it.”

“Even the second ghost, the giant,” said Dan.  “He had those two kids under his cloak...” He gave an apparently involuntary shudder.

“The boy Ignorance and the girl Want,” Ben intoned.  “‘Most of all beware this boy,’” he began quoting, “‘for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.’”

“This is why I’m your only friend,” said Dan.

“Long story short,” said Ben, “fear being bad, so be good.”

“Dickens made up a nice little hell on earth,” said Dan, “and populated it with his antihero, I understand.  People who need the fear of hell not to be bad people will probably be bad people anyway.”

“That’s a self-defeating notion,” said Ben, “but we can go into it another time.  The second primary work is from Mr. Seuss.”

“That’s the same story,” said Dan, making a face and sagging into his seat.

“It’s the opposite story,” said Ben.  “Sure, the main character is the antagonist, and they hate Christmas until the end, when they become good people because of it.  But--”

“But,” said Dan, “one is green.”

“That’s only in the cartoon,” said Ben.  “In the book the Grinch is grey.”

“I’m not sure that’s right,” said Dan slowly.

“Anyway,” said Ben, “But the difference is in the Seuss the primary emotion is love.”

“What does the Grinch love?” asked Dan with a laugh.

“The Grinch loves the Whos,” said Ben flatly.  “And he thinks they don’t love him back.”

Dan raised a hand to comment, then closed his mouth and considered.

“I disagree,” he said.

“I’m sure you would,” said Ben.

“But I can’t explain why just yet,” said Dan.

“We can discuss it later,” said Ben.  “I can’t stay long to chat over it now, because I’m late.”

“Late?” said Dan in surprise, looking up from his text.

“Yes,” said Ben, “I have to go to mass.”

“Mass?” said Dan, sounding twice as surprised.

“I’m going with a friend,” Ben said.  “He said he didn’t want to be that guy who only goes to church on Christmas Eve this year, and I said I’d go with him, because I never go and won’t mind taking all the attention for being a heathen on myself.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Dan.  “And who cares anyway?”

“To summarize,” said Ben, “the Grinch loves the Whos, and is only looking for the slightest excuse to show his love to them, and there you have it.”

“What does this have to do with hypnotism again?” asked Dan.

“Both Scrooge and the Grinch,” said Ben, “hate the superficial obnoxiousness of Christmas.  Everything that I said before was like a quiet room for hypnotism, all the pudding and holly and noise noise noise.  It’s what they hated the most about it, anyway, that people are partying when they have no good reason to, and partying too much to boot.”

“Scrooge hated everything,” said Dan.  “Paying his employee to have Christmas off was just part of it.”

“Fair enough,” said Ben, “but you see where I’m going, so just bear with me.”

“I thought you were late,” said Dan.

“I am Scrooge,” said Ben.  “I am the Grinch.  We all are.  We all get sick of people, especially of other people being happy when we’re not happy ourselves.”

Dan shrugged and finished his drink.  Without a word Ben got up and got them both two more.

“That was my round,” said Dan quietly.

“On me,” said Ben.  “The point of those stories is, that if you allow yourself to be happy for other people because you’re happy, even if it’s only once a year, you’ll find the reward is better than the price to do so.”

“I’m not sure I followed that,” said Dan.  “Hurry up and tell me what the third master work is.”

“Die Hard,” said Ben.

“Very funny,” said Dan.

“I’m completely serious,” said Ben.  “It’s either Die Hard, or some other story about an out-of-towner stuck in an inconvenient situation and, eventually, putting his life on the line for a bunch of strangers who don’t really deserve it because he knows there’s at least one who does.”

“You’re very clever,” said Dan.  “I suppose you also want to point out that at the climax a guy with a beard is killed?”

Ben shuddered.

“This is why I’m your only friend,” he said.

“Did you really have a third masterwork?” said Dan.

“Anything that teaches the value of self-sacrifice,” said Ben.  “I didn’t say I’d be specific.”

“Well it’s better than being ordered to buy a bunch of stuff I guess,” said Dan.

“A person simply doing something good for someone else without reward,” said Ben.

“I get it,” said Dan.

“I talked to Professor Cook this evening,” Ben said, rising from his seat.

Dan looked up at his friend with sudden interest.  Ben looked back at him for a moment.  “Wilkins will pass,” he said.

Dan nodded.  “Thanks for letting me know,” he said.

Ben raised his glass, drained it, and walked out the door, heading in the direction of the church a few streets over.

Dan closed his book, shouldered his bag, dialed a number on his phone, and walked home to start packing.

Comic: Schrödinger's Gift Box

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Comic: Stop Helping

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On Resolutions

(Inspired by actual imbecility)

I’ve never been overly fond of New Year’s resolutions.  I’ve also never been able to avoid making them.

I think the real problem when you get down to it is that there’s only one time of the year that I think about New Year’s resolutions, and that’s at New Year’s.  Either I’m trying to remember what I resolved to do this past year (and cringing), or trying to think of reasonable and useful things to resolve to do for next year (and feeling pessimistic).

So why am I thinking about them now, when New Year’s is weeks away?  Two reasons, really.  

First, I was actually able to accomplish one or two of the small projects I set out for myself this year (I’m just as surprised as anybody, and also don’t worry, I failed to finish or even start many more).  Before I get swept up in New Years Mania again, I’d like to try and reverse-engineer an explanation of how that actually worked, so that I can possibly use that information in the future.

Second, for some reason, the more I thought about New Years and whether I’d like to get things done next year, the whole idea of resolutions in general started to seem silly to me.  I started trying to think of a way to get out from under this creeping feeling of self-obligation and standardized failure I seem to set myself up for, and get free of the cycle of New Years for good.  I don’t know if the thoughts I came up with would work for everyone, but I’m looking forward to trying them out for me.

How Not To Make a Resolution

First, some thoughts on why my resolutions have failed in the past.

The list is a short one, really just one entry long, because I think it’s where I’ve gone wrong most often.  Don’t set vague goals for yourself without developing a plan for making them a reality.  

It doesn’t have to be a perfect plan, or even a good plan.  What it does have to be is specific.  If you’re going to get anywhere, you’ve got to start with a goal that you know you can accomplish, and do some thinking about it.

One thing I’ve learned from reading Trent Hamm’s blog (thesimpledollar.com, seriously look it up if you haven’t) is the best thing you can do to yourself if you’re trying to accomplish something that seems impossible is to break it down into smaller, specific steps that are more manageable and easier to picture than vague statements like “lose weight” or “change my career.”  All good ideas start out vague and unspecific, but if you don’t take the time to try and make your goals make sense on a smaller, quantifiable scale, you’ll never really get anywhere.

Once you have a goal in mind, sit down for an hour or so and write down what you really mean to get done.  Write that down.  Then figure out, doing research as necessary, what the steps for getting that done might be, and write those down.  Break down the steps into smaller steps if they seem too big.  Or, better yet, realize that your goal is probably more than a one-year project, and plan accordingly (although this is sometimes frustrating).

Sooner or later you’ll reach a way of looking at the project where you have small things that you can do with only a few minutes of time each day. 

Hopefully, it will now seem manageable.  Instead of one overwhelming and open-ended idea, you have simple steps you can carry out every day, and you have three hundred and sixty-five chances to get that part right. 

The catch is, you’ll just have to absolutely and without fail manage to get yourself to put in that small amount of time each day, or it’ll still come to nothing.

How Not to Fail a Resolution

It’s simple really.  You just have to put in the time every day.

How do you make yourself do this?  Don't be distracted.  Yeah, but how do you do that?

Well, this is where I wish I had a $10,000 secret to tell you guys.

First, I wish I had one because I could charge each of my readers $1 apiece to see what it was, and quit my day job.  Or buy a sandwich, whatever.

Second, I wish I had one, because if I did I could accomplish anything I want.

Sadly, I do not have any grand secrets for how to make this part a reality.  All I have is the things that have worked for me before.

1. Self-Guilt

I like to picture myself as a five year old version of me (this is never difficult) who was promised a trip to the movies today.  Or better yet, it’s his birthday, and you promised him a trip to the pool.  This imaginary child symbolizes the me I want to be if I could manage to fulfill my resolutions (or dreams, if you like).

Then, I tell myself that if I don’t do the few-minutes-a-day thing for that day, then that little five year old doesn’t get to go to the pool, even though you promised him.

*insert expertly-drawn picture of pitiful mini-Den here*

In a nutshell, this is my secret.  I coach myself into feeling worse over letting myself down than I feel when I have to live up to the obligations I set myself.

I still fail, I will always fail, but I try to fail as little as possible, and to be aware of my failure when it happens.

In the end, the time you truly fail yourself is when you forget that you even had dreams to try and live in the first place.

(nota bene: pretending to forget until bedtime and then saying out loud “Oh! I was supposed to do X today, I’ll have to do that tomorrow” doesn’t count.  Don’t do that.)

2. Habit

Say you’re able to bully, beguile, badger, bribe, and bamboozle yourself into doing what you said you’d do for a few minutes a day, something magical starts to happen.  Well, maybe not magical, but at least sufficiently outside your direct control to seem neat-o the first time you notice it.

You’ll find you don’t have to remind yourself to set aside time to do the thing anymore, you automatically know that you’ll have to take time to do it.

You’d think this is where things get easier, but sadly not.

This is where you enter an even more challenging phase, because you start to bargain with yourself to get out of your responsibility, of course always on a temporary basis.  I’m doing great, you tell yourself, so I deserve a break.  

Logically speaking this strikes me as somewhat hilarious.  Consider a man, marooned at sea, whose only job is to not punch a hole in the bottom of his own boat with a pickaxe.  He manages to go without for three months without doing so, and he feels great.  He’s really accomplished something, three months straight, what a victory.  He feels so great about not breaking his streak that he decides to celebrate.  And how does he celebrate?  By punching a hole in the bottom of his own boat with a pickaxe and ending his streak there and then.

Don’t do it!  Don’t bargain, don’t procrastinate, don’t alter anything in your course if you can help it.  Just keep going.

3. More Self-Guilt

Just when you think you’re free.  

The really good stuff comes in when you’ve got a streak going, you’ve gone almost two months without missing a day, and then suddenly! you skip a day.  Or two days.  Or a week.  What happened?  Is it too late?  Should you just give up and try again next January?

No!  Remember that kid who’s crying over the pool!

If you fall down, get back up.  Get back on track.  You’ll feel worse if you don’t!  Or at least I do.  The worst is when you wait to get started again long enough for starting again to make you feel guilty too, because so much time has gone by that you’re rusty and it’ll take that much longer to get done.  But keep going!

Don't you ever start to feel good, like you're getting things done?  Sort of, but for me that's always sort of mixed up with this growing dread that if I ever completely miss a day, it all goes back to square one.  This isn't a bad feeling altogether, but it's not like you'd expect to feel as the plan becomes reality.  It's complicated.

As for how I’ve managed to accomplish the resolutions I’ve done this year, it’s simple.  I’ve also failed at them.

When I think over the things I managed to get done this year, I can’t think of a single one that I was trying to accomplish for the first time.  At least once already I’ve gone out, had a try at getting it done, and either found that my goal was too ambitious and laid it aside, or run out of steam for some other reason.

I guess this is why it’s a positive thing that good old December Thirty One rolls around again and again, to remind us of what we wanted to accomplish before, and that there’s still time to try again.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t think it would be better if we could get rid of the whole system altogether. 

How to Get Rid of Resolutions Altogether

When I was a kid, I used to wish I had a camera with me all the time, because the clouds in the sky would do remarkable things.  Vivid colors, huge dramatic shapes.  I could never quite remember it right, or draw how it had felt after the fact, and I thought that if I had a camera and an unlimited amount of film I could make a wonderful collection of the ways the sky looked, to reflect on whenever I liked.

Now that the world is twenty-some-odd years older, I find myself equipped virtually at all times with essentially just that: a phone, of course, with a camera built in, like everyone’s, that I can take as many pictures with as I like.  And I can see the pictures immediately after taking them, and try again if they didn’t quite turn out.  Wonders indeed.

From time to time I’ll be clearing out the memory on my phone and I’ll find a tiny picture of some clouds.  The trouble is, I’m almost never able to recall just what the sky looked like to cause me to take that picture, because it’s never the same.  Sometimes I’ll be able to guess at a reconstruction, but it’s just a representation.

Perhaps if I studied photography, carried sophisticated equipment, went out on purpose in pursuit of interesting weather, was diligent and bold in my decisions, and had some luck, I could collect a few images that seemed to represent the sky when I took them, or that would be dramatic and interesting on their own, whether the sky had been interesting or not.  But it still would not be the same as being there yourself, it would only be a winning representation.

This is roughly how I’ve come to feel about New Year’s resolutions only backwards.  No matter how carefully I plan out the goals I have for the coming year, it’s just a photograph, a representation.  Worse, it’s a representation of something that hasn’t even happened yet!  How can a person possibly know how things are really going to turn out six months in advance?  I occasionally have a hard enough time visualizing next week.

The point is, don’t let the vision take the place of reality.  Part of this is being specific and concrete with your plans, part of it might have to do with adapting those plans to fit your personality as you continue to rise to meet the challenges you set for yourself.  But mostly it’s in remembering that the reason you’re making these resolutions in the first place is to try and make your life better.  So don’t get so bogged down with plans for the future that you forget to live your life along the way.

In the end, New Years is a time of dreams.  We all want to think that next year will be better than last year.  Will it?  It never hurts to hope so, in fact hoping is sort of the first step towards doing the work it takes to make it better.

I wrote a longer version of this portion and deleted it, because it really boils down to one sentence.

Stop looking at time in terms of years.

No matter what you want to do, the first step you’ll have to take  to get it done has to be done today, or tomorrow at the latest.  It can’t be done in March, or June, or September (unless it’s witnessing a Lunar Eclipse or something, and even then I’m sure there’s something you can do to get ready).  It has to be done today or you’ll never do it.  Don’t trust the future version of you with your dreams, he or she is a good-for-nothing dirtbag and will promise you whatever they like.  You’ve got to do it yourself, or it will not happen.

And the best part is, if something takes you more than a year, just keep working on it!  If something takes less than a year, you get to do whatever’s next!

There must be a day coming up some time (obviously for many of us who celebrate the holidays, it may not be soon), whether it’s an hour in the evening, or half of your next solo lunch break, or even if you’re lucky a random weekend afternoon.  

Take that time.  Walk somewhere you don’t normally walk to, and sit down if you’re able.  Daydream.  Think about who you’d like to be but aren’t, the answers might surprise you.

If you make time to do that as often as you can, you will hopefully never be short of ideas that deserve to be made reality.

Then all you have to do is dragoon yourself into doing the work.  Once you’re used to it, that’s the easy part.

Comic: Done And Done

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Comic: Security to Aisle Nine

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On Ideas

Where do ideas come from?

Well, I’m not really sure.  Each idea, when it turns up, seems different from the others, and I can’t really claim to be an expert on even how my own ideas come to be.  

In my experience, knowing where they come from isn’t really that important.  What you need to know if you want to have ideas is how to recognize them when they come about, how to catch them, and how to put them to use.

You will need three things to do this.  First, patience; second,  practice, and third, a small notebook.

Patience

Patience trumps any other aspect of the inspiration enterprise.  Without it, you might well spend your whole life waiting for a good idea to occur to you, and wait in vain.

This might sound a little paradoxical -- you have to have the patience not to wait for something -- but let me explain.

You can’t force an idea to come into existence.  In my experience it’s practically impossible.  No matter how crushing your deadline, no matter how hard you stare at your computer screen, no matter how desperately you exert your will for an idea to appear, your brain will stay blank.  Nothing will happen.

For me, the secret is to relax and do something else.  Go for a walk, clean the dishes, try drawing something (this only works sometimes; it can be a way to become DOUBLE stymied). However it happens, I’m almost always doing something else, and certainly thinking of something else, when the tug of an idea first occurs to me.

So what does this mean for other people?

Simple: if you’re stuck, vary your experience.  Go do something you don’t normally do, and forget about thinking about ideas entirely, and see what turns up.

Generally for me when ideas turn up they’re in the form of a question.  I get to wondering about something, familiar or unfamiliar, and some part of it will suddenly not make sense to me or get me wondering.  The easy ones are generally “what ifs,” and the really big ones (which seem impossible) are usually “hows” and “whys.”

It’s difficult to describe, because you’re mostly working by feel, but you’ll recognize the sensation once it happens.  Jerry Seinfeld described it once as “there’s something there.”  You’ll get a sense that there’s something more, hidden inside of or behind or in back of something familiar, that’s waiting to be brought out.

So, stop trying.  Wait by doing something else.  “Vary your experience,” but going into that in detail is for another post.  Listen for questions and wonderings.

Of course, if you’re in a real crisis of a deadline and you need an idea, you can always drink a lot of coffee and start writing down everything that comes to mind, and hope that something worthwhile will come out of it.  It never gives good results, but hey, it might work for you!

Practice

Practice really goes hand in hand with patience.  

I know I just said you have to stop trying to force an idea into existence if you’re going to get anywhere.  At the same time, if you don’t do anything to make ready for ideas when they come along, you’ll have a hard time getting any use out of them, or even realizing when they’ve appeared.

What you have to do is this: set aside some time every day for scribbling.  If you’re a musician, set aside some time to just mess around without having any set tune or song or rules in mind, just stay in one place, try to relax and not feel stupid (this is not easy and is exactly what the practice is for) and just play for a while.

If you draw, just scribble and doodle.  Do not, I repeat, do not care if it looks good or not (without practice, this is almost impossible).  If it helps, cover a page with random squiggles of pencil, then look for images in that and trace them with a marker.  Draw a large “X” on the page first thing, then draw around that, so that you know that it’s messed-up and won’t be perfect from the start, and you don’t have to worry about it.

If you’re trying to write, do the same thing but with words: put down whatever the first thing is to come to mind.  If you don’t keep a journal, start doing that.  Once you’re keeping one, try to also set aside some time to do writing prompts, or find some exercises online, there’s almost an infinite number.  Pick a random news article and try writing it from the perspective of someone inside the story.  Just do something to get yourself writing, and to get that part of your brain that says “well this is hardly pulitzer-prize stuff” to switch off for a while.

You’re basically making a habit of being comfortable acting like a creative person.  That way, when actual creativity suddenly appears in front of you, you won’t be struck dumb with the mortal terror of feeling responsible for causing something interesting to exist.

It’s kind of like courtship, really.  For best results, figure out how to care a great deal, and at the same time act like you don’t care at all.

This goes hand in hand with patience because it will take some time for you to actually get comfortable.  Don’t be surprised if you still feel silly and uninspired the tenth time you sit down; eventually you’ll get there.  You can’t force this part either, but you can force yourself to keep showing up.  In fact you’ll probably have to.

Once you’re comfortable, and have acquired something like a knack for Patience, then maybe you’ll feel the tug of an idea.  (I’m not saying that these conditions are enough to guarantee that they’ll happen: all I know is that for me, if I don’t do these things, I get nowhere.)  Once you think you have one on the line, you have to know how to finish catching it.

A Small Notebook

This is where the small notebook comes in.

When I was in high school I kept a small flip-top spiral notebook in my pocket to jot things down in.  When I was in college I was more pretentious, so I wore a suit jacket everywhere in order to have a inside jacket pocket in which to put one of those fashionably overpriced black leather codices that I could write and draw in.  I may or may not still have a number of these lying around; I certainly still have the jackets.

Now that I’m grown-up (ha!) I no longer have any excuses for keeping my pretentiousness in check, so I carry a smart phone.  I’m pleased to say that, in addition to social media and sudoku, I’ve managed to use it as an idea-catcher as well, by keeping the notepad application open most of the time, and giving that notepad a direct line to my email inbox.

Whatever you’re using to catch your ideas when they show up, here’s how to use it:

When you get the notebook, put a dot on first page somewhere so that it’s not blank.  Or, write the stupidest thing you can think of on the first page.  Or draw a stupid picture, or just draw another large “X”.  

No matter what you do, do something to take off that edge of “you need to be perfect” that we all know radiates poisonously from any and every perfectly blank page that ever existed.

The reason for this is simple.  You need to never, never be afraid to put something down.  If that first tentative spark of an idea has a nemesis, or an antimatter counterpart that can annihilate it instantly from existence, it’s uncertainty.  Never question whether something is worth remembering.  Just write it down.

Once you’ve defaced your notebook, or whatever, keep it and a pen  on you at all times.  When you go out, keep it in your pocket or purse.  When you get in the shower, leave it on the sink counter (or somewhere it’ll stay dry).  Keep it near your plate when you eat and near your bedside when you sleep.

The reason for this is simple: never believe yourself when you say, “I’ll remember this, there’s no need to write it down.”  You won’t.  So put down everything you can about the idea when it comes to you, all the detail you can clearly see, because you don’t want to have to reconstruct it later, it just won’t have the same feel.

Congratulations!  You’ve got an idea!  Who knows if it’s good or bad, there’s no time to judge -- time to put that idea to use!

Use Them!

An idea that’s never brought to life never really happened.

Once you’ve got your idea noted down, at your very next opportunity to practice with it, give it time, and see where it takes you.  Don’t try to be careful, or wait until the perfect time, or feel like it’s not a complete idea yet because you don’t have all the information.  Just start exploring your idea, without being worried over whether it’s any good or not.  

Concentrate on the work itself, on doing it the way you’ve found to do it through practice.  If you don’t know what that is yet, practice more, but kill time by working with that idea of yours and see what happens.  If you find questions that need answering in order to do more work, note them down for later and keep working anyway.  Just try to engage with the material.  

If you do it right, you won’t have to tell yourself to work.  You’ll have to tell yourself to stop, so that you can eat or sleep or get ready to go to your day job.

The best and strangest thing about being creative is seeing how little work it takes sometimes to turn one good idea into many.  Give them time and energy and you get to watch them grow seemingly on their own.  The work takes over for itself, and all you have to do is marvel at all the surprises that have turned up in the details -- but going into this at length is also for another post.

Uncertainty kills ideas.  This goes double for ideas that have been written down in small notebooks and then ignored for fear of not being good enough to use them.  It doesn’t matter if the idea seems lousy or if you don’t know how to use it: being too careful is the best way to let an idea whither and kill it dead.

So practice every day to keep this part of your brain ready.  Stay on guard.  Be ready to recognize your ideas when they happen, accept them without judgment, and press them into service.  Above all, relax and have patience.  Being creative is a great way to flex your mental powers, to boost your day-to-day morale, and, dare I say it, to find or add meaning to life, But it’s also supposed to be fun.  Live for doing the work while you’re doing it, and forget about how it turns out.  If you get too focused on results, you’re never going to get anywhere.

Most of all, be patient.

Either that, or drink all the coffee you can get your hands on.  Write down everything that come to mind, and see what happens.