Magical solutions to getting stuck
Happy new year, friends!
I don’t know about you, but I have made and plan to make absolutely no resolutions this year. I’ve never been big on resolutions to begin with—I think that’s because I typically fail at them fairly quickly—but this year in particular there seems to be no point. This isn’t a new year. It’s the same year. It’s the beginning of the third same year in a row.
I closed out 2021 by taking a week off work, and just…being. That wasn’t exactly my plan. I’d planned to do a ferocious amount of writing during that time. And I did write. With the exception of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I wrote two thousand or more words each day, and really moved my ghostwriting project forward. While working on it, I even had a little breakthrough realization about The Dark Age, the other novel I’m writing. But the rest of the time I spent doing as much of absolute nothing as I could manage.
- I stayed up very late (and screwed up my sleep schedule)
- I slept in every day
- I watched a lot of movies (I’ve been catching Squish up on the previous Spider-Man and Amazing Spider-Man franchises, so she’s fully prepared for the newest movie in the current franchise, when it ever arrives on streaming)
- I watched a lot of television (I’ve finished Only Murders in the Building and Succession and Yellowstone and Curb Your Enthusiasm and Cobra Kai and am in the midst of Station Eleven)
- I played quite a lot of Halo Infinite (a masterclass of reminders that my reflexes are shot)
- I read a lot, too (Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass House, then a re-read of her Station Eleven, and now Danielle Evans’s Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self)
- Etc.
Something I read recently that I liked, from Robin Rendle’s newsletter:
On the rare occasion that I hit a quagmire with a project I remember this one magic trick that’s always hidden up my sleeve (but one I tend to constantly forget and have to find again). It’s this: when stuck, change the medium. So if I’m certain that I’m writing a book, then I should change it into a presentation. Or if I’m making an essay then I ought to record myself saying it out loud. Simply changing the medium is enough to see something for what it really is with the important stuff highlighted right away, and most of the junk obvious enough to spot from a mile off.
I especially zeroed in on this one line:
So if I’m certain that I’m writing a book, then I should change it into a presentation.
It has never occurred to me to try something like this. And here’s a guilty, dumb secret of mine: I love creating presentations. I don’t love giving them. But I love to design them. If I have the choice between doing important, meaningful work for an hour, or spending five hours designing a presentation in Keynote…I’m opening Keynote. It’s so dumb, I know.
I almost can’t wait to get stuck on one of my two projects, just so I can try this.
This just triggered a memory: In the mid-nineties, I had a Packard Bell PC in my bedroom. (I still remember the wallpaper on that PC: Science, it was called.) Anyway: I had an early version of PowerPoint on that machine, and I made lots of presentations about absolutely inane things. I remember one presentation wherein each slide was a movie I liked, and I typed up the movie’s cast and crew from memory, then applied a custom transition to each slide… The whole deck looked like this:
Pulp Fiction (1994)
- Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino
- Produced by Lawrence Bender
- John Travolta
- Samuel L. Jackson
- Uma Thurman
- Bruce Willis
- Ving Rhames
- Rosanna Arquette
- Eric Stoltz
- Steve Buscemi
- …and you get the idea
The slide deck was pretty long, maybe a hundred pages. I wasn’t online back then, so I relied solely on my memory, which had ample storage for this kind of non-essential information. (These days I think my brain is finally purging lots of my cinema knowledge, or at least it’s shoved it all into long-term storage. It takes me a long time now to remember an actor’s name or where I’ve seen them before.)
I’ve lost the point here. What’s the point? The point: Sometimes you have to disrupt the thing you’re doing just a bit. I wrote about this recently in a Dark Age newsletter: The opening sentences of the book were boring me, and I couldn’t seem to make them better. So I switched from writing on a keyboard to using a blobby brush pen on cotton paper, and the shift in medium helped change the words in a big way.
Makes me think, a little, of the way Laura Lippman outlines her novels “non-textually”. (I lose track of where I find things like this, but I think this one came via Ampersunder, Laura Joldersma’s terrific newsletter about writing and reading.)
I thought it would be nice to kick off the new year with a passage from a favorite novel. Here are a couple of things I like:
For the first three weeks, thunderstorms that last a minute or longer, raging and gray, then sun and bright sky, like nothing happened. J comes home soaked and laughing, as though from another planet. There is rain up the hill on campus and sun in the flats is how. Microclimates like back home. I think of romance movies, where lovers drench themselves making out in the rain in T-shirts and dresses. I never understood why. It seemed impractical, cold, and uncomfortable. Turns out they were living somewhere I didn’t know about until now, where water comes down when it’s hot, a respite.
That’s from Alexandra Chang’s Days of Distraction.
Another:
Here’s something I haven’t thought about in forever. Once, on an afternoon in the third grade, Dad was picking me up from school when we noticed, in the parking lot, a dozen or so hysterical pigeons, assembled on the windshield and hood of another car. We got closer and saw why: there were french fries scattered inside the car, on the dashboard. We watched the desperate birds pecking at the glass for a moment, before my father said, “Let’s go.”
He took us to the nearest drive-through. We bought milk shakes and fries and headed back to the parking lot, where we drank the milk shakes and fed those pigeons, a fry at a time.
That’s from Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin.
And the last one:
But I’ll tell you something. Third base belongs to me—nobody else—and anyone who tries to take it away better be ready for a good fight. You included. So maybe it’s time you found a place of your own in the infield. You need alot of work. And it’s a cinch your old man isn’t minding the store.
Charles Banks 3B
P.S. And by the way. Your not suppose to put quotion marks around asshole. And there’s no space in the middle. Two can play at this one, Kid.
That’s an excerpt of a letter written by a New York Giants baseball player (who can’t spell very well) to an incorrigible, smartass twelve-year-old fan, from Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger.
Here’s hoping your 2022 is off to a safe, happy beginning!
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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