Search Results for: log book

How writer Kio Stark keeps going

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

My friend Kio Stark, author of the books Don’t Go Back To School and When Strangers Meet, sent me a message yesterday and I asked her if I could share it here. (Maybe we’ll make this a regular thing? We’ll see.) Here’s what she said:

I just wrote a new strangers newsletter, and not having sent one in 6 months, I realized that writing it is one of my best “keep going” strategies. It’s small and doable, and reminds me that I am good at writing. Because it’s about documenting interactions with strangers, it also pushes me to pay more attention when I’m out in public with other humans.

It started as a blog in 2009 — they were very short back then — as a way to keep in touch with my writing self while I had a day job. I used to write them on my lunch hour. They were maybe 100-150 words tops. The newsletter ones now are longer because I don’t have a day job anymore…

Kio told me that a lot of those short pieces on her blog eventually made it into her novel, Follow Me Down. (A very Show Your Work! type of case study.)

You can watch her TED talk and subscribe to her newsletter here.

How to read more

Thursday, March 21, 2019

“I always read a lot. I read the same amount, no matter what season it is. I read every night. When I’m on book tour, I’m on airplanes all the time, so I’m always reading. People say, ‘How do you have time to read?’ Oh, come on, it’s simple! You’re single and you don’t watch television.”
—John Waters

“How do you make time for that?” can almost always be answered with, “I make time for that.”

Still, here are 5 things that have helped me read more, and might help you, too:

1. Quit reading books you don’t like.

“I believe that the phrase ‘obligatory reading’ is a contradiction in terms; reading should not be obligatory… If a book bores you, leave it; don’t read it because it is famous, don’t read it because it is modern, don’t read a book because it is old…. If a book is tedious to you, don’t read it; that book was not written for you.”
—Jorge Luis Borges

“Nobody is going to get any points in heaven by slogging their way through a book they aren’t enjoying but think they ought to read.”
—Nancy Pearl

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”
—Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

If you aren’t getting anything out of a book, put it down, and pick up another book.

Every hour you spend inching through a boring book is an hour you could’ve spent plowing through a brilliant one.

When it comes to books, quitters finish more.

Sometimes a book just isn’t for you, or it’s not for you yet.

It helps if you choose the right books in the first place. Stop reading what you think you should be reading and just read what you genuinely want to read. Read what you love and read at whim.

2. Carry a book with you at all times.

“Because I was carrying the book around all the time, I pulled it out all the time: On the subway, walking down the block to get groceries…”
—Clive Thompson, “Reading War and Peace on my iPhone”

Get used to carrying a book around with you wherever you go and reaching for it in all the spare moments you’d usually pull out your phone. (Commutes, lunch breaks, grocery store lines, etc.)

Go to bed early and bring your book with you. If you fall asleep while reading, pick it back up when you wake and read for a bit before you get out of bed.

Always have a book queued next in line for when you finish the current book you’re reading.

Feel free to read promiscuously — date 3 or 4 books at the same time until one makes you want to settle down with it.

I am partial to carrying paper books and reading with a pencil, but I also love my e-reader, and a smartphone is undeniably handy, if you can avoid social media and the internet.

Which brings us to our next point.

3. Keep your phone in airplane mode.

“Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.”
—Mary Karr

A big part of reading is visiting other worlds, and you can’t visit another world if you’re constantly distracted by this one.

If you’re gonna read on your phone, switch it into airplane mode so you’re not even tempted to go online.

When you sit down to read a paper book, either put your phone in airplane mode, or plug your phone in across the room so you’re not tempted to reach for it.

Get a paper dictionary, so when you read at home or in the office, you don’t have to pull out your phone to look up words.

4. Make regular trips to your local library and/or bookstore.

“You must go to the library and fall in love.”
—Ray Bradbury

I find a lot of great books through friends and online and through my own reading, but there’s nothing quite like the “serendipity of the stacks,” the magical discoveries that often happen when you’re browsing in a library or a bookstore.

If distraction is terrible for book reading, it’s great for book discovering. You never know what you’ll bump into in the stacks. You go hunting for a book and you find an even better book shelved a few books down from it.

I frequent the “New” and “Recently Returned” shelves at my local library and sometimes I’ll even snoop to see what people have on hold on the reserve shelves.

Nothing beats a well-curated selection in a great indie bookstore. It’s glorious to spend an afternoon shopping at Bookpeople or Powell’s or The Strand or any number of the great stores I’ve had the pleasure to visit on book tour.

5. Share books you love with others. (They’ll give you more books to read.)

“Read the books you love, tell people about authors you like, and don’t worry about it.”
—Neil Gaiman

Keep track of what you read, whether it’s in a private notebook or on a site like Goodreads. (Take inspiration from Art Garfunkel, who has a list of every book he’s read since 1968.)

Share the books you love in whatever way you can. (Every week, I share what I’m reading in my weekly newsletter, and every year, I make a list of my favorite reads.)

The great thing about sharing your favorite books is that you meet other people who love those books, and they’ll share with you even more books to love.

Take notes, and let the books stack up. Gigantic book piles aren’t a sign you’re doing it wrong, they’re a sign that you’re doing it right.

* * *

If you need something to read, check out my newest book, Keep Going.

You’ve got to be kind

Saturday, March 9, 2019

A page from Steal Like An Artist. — A page from *Steal Like An Artist*. The t-shirt doesn’t fit anymore, but the motto still does.

Whenever someone I know has a new baby, I re-read this part of Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:

In this short video James Martin, author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, suggests that rather than giving up something for Lent, we try instead to do something active and positive: “Be kind.”

His tips:

1) Don’t be a jerk.
2) Honor the absent.
3) Always give people the benefit of the doubt.

The video made me think of George Saunders’ wonderful commencement speech, Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness, in which he says, “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.” He suggests a worthy goal in life is to “Try to be kinder.” How?

Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation’s good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition — recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us.

He also says the good news is that we tend to get kinder as we get older: “as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.”

When Roger Ebert was at the peak of his blogging in 2009, death on his mind, he wrote a post about his beliefs, and wrote about kindness:

I drank for many years in a tavern that had a photograph of Brendan Behan on the wall, and under it this quotation, which I memorized:

“I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals.I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.”

For 57 words, that does a pretty good job of summing it up.

“Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

Why is being kind so hard? From a review of On Kindness, by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor:

The punch line of the book is that we are, each of us, battling back against our innate kindness, with which we are fairly bursting, at every turn. Why? Because “real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can. . . . By involving us with strangers . . . as well as with intimates, it is potentially far more promiscuous than sexuality.” By walling ourselves off from our inner kindness, we end up skulking around, hoarding scraps from the lost magical kindness of childhood, terrified that our hatred is stronger than our love.

As with so many things in life, it helps to think of kindness as a verb (something you do) and not a noun (something you have). Here’s Emily Esfahani Smith:

There are two ways to think about kindness. You can think about it as a fixed trait: either you have it or you don’t. Or you could think of kindness as a muscle. In some people, that muscle is naturally stronger than in others, but it can grow stronger in everyone with exercise.

I suspect that one way to be kinder to others is to be kinder to yourself. Being kind to yourself isn’t just about saying affirmations in the mirror or whatever. It’s, for example, giving yourself time to be completely absorbed in something. I love this post by Liz Danzico about playing music:

Learning to play music is an long exercise learning to be kind to yourself. As your fingers stumble to keep up with your eyes and ears, your brain will say unkind things to the rest of you. And when this tangle of body and mind finally makes sense of a measure or a melody, there is peace. Or, more accurately, harmony. And like the parents who so energetically both fill a house with music and seek its quietude, both are needed to make things work. As with music, it takes a lifetime of practice to be kind to yourself. Make space for that practice, and the harmony will emerge.

I don’t know how to end this, so here’s a couple lines from W.H. Auden’s “Moon Landing,” collected in Selected Poems:

We were always adroiter / with objects than lives, and more facile / at courage than kindness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymDPQodemU4

And here’s Philip Larkin, from “The Mower”:

…we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind

While there is still time.

The Yamaha

Monday, February 18, 2019

For the first time since my first son was born, I am living in a house without a piano. What I have now is a Yamaha “electronic piano,” a decades-old leftover from my pre-piano, pre-children days. The Yamaha is a hefty plank of plastic with “weighted” keys that make a sad thunky plastic sound when you play them. Unlike the vegan cashew queso my wife made for dinner the other night, it is a poor substitute for the real thing.

But The Yamaha, for now, is what I have, so I am making the best of it. The Yamaha has ten different voices: 2 pianos, 2 electric pianos, 2 organs, strings, 2 harpsichords, and a vibraphone. I hate the two pianos and never play them. The organs make the room sound like church. The other voices I can work with. As with many things in life, I like it more the less it tries to pretend to be something it’s not.

Can you have a moment of transcendence on such a sub-par instrument? I got close the other night. I was practicing some Bach, and I felt something like, I am putting my fingers on the same keys as Bach. He wrote these notes down 250 years ago, and now I am playing them. I may be doing a clumsy job, but I am making him come alive again.

I thought of Margaret Atwood’s “frozen music”:

Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.

And I thought of my friend Alan Jacobs, who is writing a book called Breaking Bread With The Dead. The title comes from a lecture by W.H. Auden, who said:

…one of the greatest blessings conferred on our lives by the Arts is that they are our chief means of breaking bread with the dead, and I think that, without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.

I suppose you break bread with the dead using whatever tools you have on hand. Sometimes it’s a fine, dusty hardback, and sometimes it’s a free ebook on your Kindle. Sometimes it’s an old wooden piano, and sometimes it’s The Yamaha.

Images in the head

Thursday, January 31, 2019

“Imagination is when you close your eyes and think of a door.”
—Dave Hickey

Yesterday I read Mary Ruefle’s chapbook, On Imagination, in which she writes, “Anything involving an image in the head is an act of imagination.”

The imagination — the ability to make images in your head that aren’t right in front of your eyeballs — seems to me such a crucial human tool that I find myself resenting people who don’t seem to possess much of one. It’s one of the reasons I shout at the television every time a guest on House Hunters whines, “I don’t like the carpet.” (A lack of imagination will cost you — especially in real estate.)

The other day on my walk I was rushed by an off-leash pitbull. “He’s friendly!” his owner shouted, like they always do. I usually curse off-leash dog owners as stupid or entitled or whatever, but on that particular day I wondered: Do people who let their dogs off-leash simply lack an imagination? Or do they simply refuse to use it when it comes to their beloved pets? This makes much more sense to me: that they simply cannot or will not picture in their minds the worst happening.

Me, on the other hand, I spend all day thinking about the worst that can happen. “Fear comes with imagination,” writes Thomas Harris in Red Dragon. “It’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.”

(I fear, now, that I plagiarized him in Show Your Work!: “The trouble with imaginative people is that we’re good at picturing the worst that could happen to us. Fear is often just the imagination taking a wrong turn.”)

This is an idea at the heart of Ruefle’s essay. She says it “irks” her when artists speak of the imagination as only a benevolent tool, “as if there were nothing pejorative or destructive about it.” On the contrary, she writes, “the imagination is a full, rounded, complex thing.” She calls the imagination her “daimon” because it is “my best friend and my worst enemy.”

Something that stopped me in my (admittedly) prejudiced tracks a few years ago was the discovery that there are literally people who cannot think in pictures. It’s called “congenital aphantasia.” Researchers estimate that 2-5% of the population are “non-imagers,” or “mind blind.” Here are a few non-imager testimonials:

“Part of me still believes that when people say they’re ‘picturing’ something, they mean it metaphorically, like I do,” says Kelly Sandoval, a fiction writer from Seattle who is a natural non-imager. “To me, seeing images in your head sounds like a superpower.”

“It’s kind of like learning your best friend can move objects with his mind,” agrees Bruno Ferreira from Rio de Janeiro. Having no personal experience of thinking in pictures, non-imagers often grow up seeing references to mental imagery as simple figures of speech.

(It’s interesting to me that this is the exact opposite of Temple Grandin, who writes about her autism and visualization abilities in her memoir, Thinking In Pictures, “When I was a child and a teenager, I thought everybody thought in pictures.”)

Is there a silver lining to not being able to make images in your head? According to Kelly Sandoval, “Not picturing things means that when I write, it’s fairly easy to get the words down.”

If she could teach the world just one thing about being a non-imager, it’s that “it’s not a lack of imagination. You don’t need pictures in your head to be creative. You just need ideas. And ideas come in all sorts of forms.”

In fact, the imagination need not be limited to pictures. In his essay, “The Reach of Imagination,” Jacob Bronowski writes, “To imagine means to make images and to move them about inside one’s head in new arrangements.” But, “I am using the word image in a wide meaning, which does not restrict it to the mind’s eye as a visual organ.” In his usage, “image” includes signs, and, oh hey, words: “the most important images for human beings are simply words, which are abstract symbols.”

So, basically, as Sandoval noted: Just because you can’t see pictures in your head doesn’t mean you don’t have an imagination.

Oh, also: Not being able to make pictures in your head might help you avoid the bad stuff that comes with along with the skill (in his essay, “Of the Force of Imagination,” Montaigne said that he made it his business to avoid and resist his imagination!):

Overactive visual imagery is thought to play a role in addiction and cravings, as well as the development of anxiety disorders such as PTSD. It may be that the inability to visualise might anchor people in the present and allow them to live more fully in the moment.

Oddly, this one of the last points of Ruefle’s essay. She feels like she’s not as good of a teacher as she used to be, because she’s older now, further away from the age of her students, and she simply doesn’t care about the same things that they do.

One way to look at it is to say they are interested in the future, and, having a very difficult and limited kind of future, I am not much interested in it, while at the same time I am more and more interested in the present moment, and I don’t mean the general state of affairs this month, I mean the bug walking across my lettuce leaf.

For those of us who are still interested and invested, we’ll need our imaginations, in whatever form they take.

“One idea about the imagination is that it is the agency of our soul which creates the future,” says Lewis Hyde. “It allows us to call into being worlds that don’t yet exist.”

To create a future, we need better imaginations, and for better imaginations, we need to feed them better ideas and better images.

Search Results for: log book

How writer Kio Stark keeps going