Archive for the ‘writing’ Category

I Never Know

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

A day doesn’t go by when somehow I’m reminded to always keep my eyes open.

Yesterday, while turning down an industrial area, I saw a large white crane low in the sky. It circled, and then fluttered to the ground. I can’t remember the last time I saw a crane outside of the zoo.

Today, my 5 year old kept asking to go to Boney’s and get some fruit ice pops. His request was a bit remarkable to me. Cody hadn’t had them or asked for them in 3 months. As they are somewhat healthy, I relented. We went to the store. Inside, I ran across a very good friend I hadn’t seen in a dozen years.

It always amazes me that I never know when I’m going to hear, see, or experience something will carry with me my whole life. Often times, it’s something unplanned that is in the moment, awesome.

Why People Need Drama in Their Lives

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Derek Sivers has an excellent post about attending a lecture by Kurt Vonnegut. The acclaimed author of Catch 22 and other great reads explains why people crave drama in their own personal lives.

Kurt Vonnegut-drama

Time moves from left to right.  Happiness from bottom to top.

It starts with her awful life with evil stepsisters, scrubbing the fireplace. Then she get an invitation to the ball! Things look up. Then the fairy godmother makes her a dress and a coach. Even better! Then she goes to the ball, and dances with the prince! This is great!  But then it’s midnight. She has to go. Oh no. Sadness. Back to her humdrum life scrubbing the fireplace. But it’s not as bad as before, because she’s had this encouraging experience.  Then, the prince finds her, and the happiness factor is off the chart!  Happily ever after.

“People LOVE that story! This story arc has been written a thousand times in a thousand tales. And because of it, people think their lives are supposed to be like this.”

But the problem is, life is really like this…

Kurt Vonnegut-drama

Our lives drifts along with normal things happening. Some ups, some downs, but nothing to go down in history about. Nothing so fantastic or terrible that it’ll be told for a thousand years.

“But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think are lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.”

That’s why people invent fights. That’s why we’re drawn to sports. That’s why we act like everything that happens to us is such a big deal.

We’re trying to make our life into a fairy tale.

Derek Siver’s post has another great chart about disaster stories. I’m a big fan of info graphics. Done right (like they are here) and coupled with a bit of text, they rapidly and effectively convey a lot of information.

A lot of writers, song writers, and large scale marketers may find his post very useful.

He Blazes on a Keyboard

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a devastating writer and observant.

On Michael Jackson, responding to this criticism,

Commenter: “But the man’s flaws are not the kind you overlook. If anything, they are the kind of thing you hope he burns in hell for.”

I don’t want to relitigate Mike’s case, but I will say a couple things. I’m sure there will be plenty of MJ condemnation, and people are welcome to do it. My own perspective is formed by two factors.

1.) I’ve, at times, heard of the death of awful people and thought “Good riddance.” But upon reflection, that feeling rarely keeps. When Jeffrey Dahmer died, I initially thought it served him right. And then I got to thinking about the internal torture that must have made him who he was, and I lost my righteousness. When the mountain falls on people who’ve spent their lives inflicting pain on others, I am rarely comforted for long.

This is a point of religion, for me. I don’t expect everyone to see it my way. Death is fucked up. I don’t wish it on anyone. I don’t have much use for evaluating who deserves the sword, and when they should get it.

2.) Ray Lewis may well be an accessory to a man’s murder. But when I watch him run up and down field on Sunday, it sparks something in me. Woody Allen wooed his wife’s adopted daughter, and may well be a child molester. But I think Bananas makes me laugh. Mike Tyson is, among other things, a convicted rapist. But I had not lived until I saw him demolish Trevor Berbick. And so on…

I guess I could peel these people out my life. I guess I could stop seperating art from men. Regrettably, I think, I wouldn’t be left with much art worth admiring. Sometimes awful people, do beautiful things. One doesn’t cancel the other. And mourning the loss of human life, does not excuse the sins of that life.

On Richard Pryor-

I think writers should watch more Richard Pryor. I watched part of Live On The Sunset Strip back in college–or rather part of it. I actually didn’t think it was that funny. Looking back on it now, a large part of the problem was that I came up on Eddie Murphy Raw and Def Comedy Jam. In other words, I watched it wanting to laugh from beginning to end.

Yesterday, I rewatched Sunset Strip on a lark, and thought on it, and realized that one-way of watching the film is not to think of Pryor as a stand-up comic, but as a theater dude doing a comedic one man show. Sunset Strip is really funny, don’t get me wrong. But there are moments of great seriousness. It felt like memoir.

Pryor is not so much commenting on the world, as he’s commenting on how the world (God?) keeps inverting his own assumptions. He goes to prison talking black pride, but comes out thinking “Thank God, we got prisons.” He picks up a hitch-hiker in Africa and is offended by his odor, but then finds that the African is so offended by Pryor’s odor that he asks to be let out the car.

All of this is really, really late. People smarter than me, older than me, and wiser than me have likely already said as much. I actually remember them saying it, but I was to young and dumb to get it. But I understand, now. I understand  why Cosby, and others, were so incensed by Def Comedy Jam. Don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of those guys–Bernie Mac, D.L. Hughley, Cedric etc. But I’m put in the mind of my reflections on the great Biggie Smalls. I loved Biggie for his technique, not for the stuff about cars, drugs, girls etc. He was just a nasty technician, subject matter be damned.

On criticism of Barrack Obama’s dialogue about Dads walking out on their kids-

There may be great stats out there that show that a father walking out on his blood, has zero impact on a kids life. But with my history, it’s very hard for me to come down on a guy whose own father walked out on him, for saying something as imminently sane as, Be a father to your child.

Allow me to lay my cards on the table. This thing is in my blood, more than I actually have the freedom to say, publicly. But let me offer this: I’m the son of two people who were raised by single mothers, after the fathers essentially walked. It’s something to attend the funeral of a grandfather who wanted nothing to do with you or your mother. I have a very close relative, who at this very moment, is raising a son whose father has, essentially, walked.

I would say that the majority of the kids in my old neighborhood in Baltimore had extremely limited contact with their fathers. I was the only one, out of my crew, with a Dad in the house.

Here’s something else–I’ve heard a chorus of complaints about Obama’s rhetoric on fathers from black male writers. But I’ve yet to hear from one complaint from any single mothers. I’ve yet to hear a peep from a woman who was raised in that situation. I think that that’s telling.

On Steve McNair’s Death

People should read up on Sam Cooke–greatest soul-singer ever, dead in a cheap motel, with no pants, after a prostitute took his clothes.

We should think hard on Steve McNair, shot in his sleep; he fell out on the couch and never woke up. He had no idea what happened.

I keep wondering what he was doing with a 20 year-old girl who worked at Dave and Buster’s. I understand the regular temptations, but the recklessness of it all is amazing.

I don’t want to blame McNair for his own death, but the fact is that men who are reckless, often leave behind families to pick up the pieces. I can’t imagine the personal work his wife will have to do reconcile all of this, and then explain it to their four sons.

This isn’t one of those “men’s rights” riffs, and it’s clear that men will never face the same sort of physical dangers that women face. But I think brothers could give a little more thought to who they take their clothes off in front of, or at least who they go paragliding with. I’ve seen things go wrong for men in so many other ways. Brothers forbidden from seeing kids. Brothers paying insane alimony. Brothers coming outside and finding their car missing. Brothers wondering if a kid is actually theirs.

The temptation is to rail against women. A more introspective approach would begin with, “What the fuck was I thinking?”

Micro Jokes and Quips

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn’t work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.

Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

The early bird might get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.

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Tips on Writing

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

William Zinser offers good advice on writing. Like Steinbeck, he believes in never using a longer word when a shorter one will do.

On stripping sentences down and removing any clutter, ”

Is there any way to recognize clutter at a glance? Here’s a device I used at Yale that students found helpful. I would put brackets around any component in a piece of writing that wasn’t doing useful work. Often it was just one word that got bracketed: the unnecessary preposition appended to a verb (“order up”), or the adverb that carries the same meaning as the verb (“smile happily”), or the adjective that states a known fact (“tall skyscraper”). Often my brackets surrounded the little qualifiers that weaken any sentence they inhabit (“a bit,” “sort of”) or the announcements like “I’m tempted to say.” Sometimes my brackets surrounded an entire sentence—the one that essentially repeats what the previous sentence said, or that tells the reader something he doesn’t need to know or can figure out for himself. Most people’s first drafts can be cut by 50 percent—they’re swollen with words and phrases that do no new work whatever.

My reason for bracketing the extra words instead of crossing them out was to avoid violating the sentence. I wanted to leave it intact for the student to analyze. I was saying, “I [end of page 17] may be wrong, but I think this can be deleted and the meaning won’t be affected at all. But you decide: read the sentence without the bracketed material and see if it works.” In the early weeks of the term I gave back papers that were infested with brackets. Entire paragraphs were bracketed. But soon the students learned to put mental brackets around their own clutter, and by the end of the term their papers were almost clean. Today many of those students are professional writers and they tell me, “I still see your brackets— they’re following me through life.