I have always been a heavy sleeper, and I have trouble with alarm clocks. This is probably why I wasn’t terribly surprised six years ago on the morning of my Astronomy final to find that I had exactly zero minutes to make it to campus. I was in a panic, just not surprised. Everything was a blur, in that just woke up kind of way. I rushed through the routine: get dressed, put on glasses, tie my shoes, pack my bag, grab my keys. I ran out the bedroom door, and down the stairs. No thinking, just doing what I had to do. It would be better to show up late than not show up at all.
Then, everything went black.
When I came to, I was on a gurney in the corridor of a hospital, my friend Alex next to me, and with a very large lump on the right side of my head. I didn’t know where I was, how I had gotten there, or what happened to me at all. Hours had passed in the space of a black instant. Alex filled me in: I was at Jefferson Hospital. I had a concussion. And, yes, I’d missed my Astronomy final. Eventually a room opened up, and they wheeled me in, sticking electrodes to my chest and hooking me up to monitors. There was nowhere to go, but I had a book, my cell phone, my iPod and headphones. Alex had to leave but I was joined by another friend, and eventually my oldest sister. I called my girlfriend, desperate to hear her voice. At the time, my parents were on vacation, having just arrived in Florida after driving from Philadelphia. When they heard what happened, they immediately turned back around for home.
I had to stay overnight for observation. By the time things had settled down, the hospital kitchen had closed, but they were able to get my a roast beef sandwich. Sleep was almost impossible with the things stuck to me, but somehow I managed. The next day, I was set free, and taken home by my sister. I got a call, almost immediately from my Astronomy professor about the missed exam. I ended up taking it at home, after explaining the situation—an automatic open book exam that I aced. Despite being told to stay home and rest for 24 hours, I went to campus the next day for my Humanities final, knowing there was no way I could reschedule. The professor was leaving for Japan the next morning. Word had, apparently, gotten around about my accident, and my Professor seemed surprised to see me. I aced the exam, despite my unsteady state.
The attending physician had told that the memories I lost in the concussion would, eventually, return. They did not. Even today, the entire morning is a complete blank in my memory. Chance encounters in the following days and weeks helped me fill in some of the blanks. Another student told me that he’d found me wandering the building where my astronomy class was held, confused and clutching a check that I couldn’t explain. (I had won it in the semester’s creative writing competition.) He was the one who called 911, and sent me to the hospital. Alex would later tell me that I spent my time in the hospital hallway calling for my girlfriend Kassandra. Weeks later, a man on the El recognized me and told me that I had fallen down the stairs of the Spring Garden El station that morning.
I remember none of these things happening. Once I left my bedroom, everything just went black. In my memory, that morning does not exist. Lost time. A reel of blank film with no soundtrack. Damaged sectors on a hard drive. I wish I knew what happened, but I don’t think I ever will. If the memories haven’t come back by now, they never will. The accident itself stays, however. All I have to do is touch the right side of my head, about two inches above my ear. There, under my hair, is the knot from where my head made impact. Unlike that morning’s events, it has never gone away, and it probably never will.
When I tell people I’m a writer the conversation often moves to the question, “Oh, what do you write?” Since I’m working on a novel, the response to my response is often “That must be hard,” or something along the same lines. In an attempt at wit I’ll often say “Oh, starting a novel is easy. So is finishing one. It’s that middle bit that’s hard.” Of course, the truth is much more subtle.
It is well known that many people are afraid of the blank page, and see it as a detriment to even starting to write. Personally, I’ve never had that problem. Beginning is always easy. It takes no effort to start a project. I could list enough endeavors I’ve started and never finished to fill a encyclopedia, if I wrote large enough. As for ending a project, well, almost every project you can think of has a state that can be considered the end, whether that means it’s actually done, or you just have to turn it in to the person who needs it. Deadlines may be rigid or flexible, but you can only blow past them enough times before it’s just over. Then again, David Foster Wallace wrote thousands of manuscript pages over twelve years for his unfinished, final novel The Pale King and was nowhere close to an ending. DFW may not have had a problem with the middle, but we’ll never know.
For me, the middle is the tricky bit. That’s where the actual work happens—you hope. For my novel, the middle bit is where I’ve been stuck for the last five years. The words have come in fits and starts. I’ve started over, given up starting over, picked up where I left off, revised and re-revised what I already had, skipped ahead, went back to fill in what I skipped. I’ve done any other thing you can think of to either make the work or avoid it. So, the work remains, an unfinished building worked on sporadically when there’s something in the budget. Hard as it is, the only way out is through. It’s not a question of knowing what’s next in the story. The narrative is plotted out. I know how, where, and when it will and must end. I’ve written the ending. I’ve written it several times. (This is another brilliant way to avoid working on the middle.) The main events to carry the story to its conclusion are all there, in the outline, in my head, in chicken scratchings in notebooks and text files in nvALT. They’re just, for the most part, unwritten. For now.
“Write every day.” That’s the summary of 99.99% of books ever written about writing. It’s the gist of On Writing, Writing Down the Bones, The War of Art, Bird by Bird, No Plot, No Problem… and I’ve read them all. Much like Reading books on writing won’t result in you having a book of your own. Reading up on the writing habits of famous writers, like how Ernest Hemmingway sat at the typewriter every morning, revised his last five-hundred words, then wrote a new five-hundred words, won’t result in you having the same work ethic. Critiquing other people’s writing won’t result in you having writing to critique. Seeking inspiration in music, movies, nature, novels and short stories won’t result in inspired work. Changing your environment to write in coffee shops, bars, restaurants, public parks, and cabins in the woods won’t result in a change in your habits. Switching your writing medium to pen and paper, a typewriter, or a full-screen, minimalist text editor on your Mac won’t make the words appear on the page. I’ve done all of these things. All of then can help, but you have to do the work to have any results. Merlin has it right.
My writing workflow hasn’t changed a great deal since I wrote about it a year ago. The main difference is that I use Byword for iOS as my primary editor on my iPhone. I’ve looked at ways to modify my workflow, particularly when it comes to fiction writing, but—of course—fiddling with a workflow won’t result in the work getting done, either. What gets the work done is setting aside the time, making the commitment, focusing, and making the clackity noise, or whatever onomatopoeia suits your method of writing. This is hard. Steven Pressfield calls the force that prevents you from doing the work, any creative work, The Resistance, capitals intentional. Resistance comes from within and without. The majority of my Resistance is temporal. I have a twelve hour work day, social obligations to meet, chores to do, and fit in the occasional good night’s sleep. Either I fit my writing into those gaps, the very essence of my existing writing workflow, or I get nothing done. Then again, when I had more free time, I got even less done. The Resistance found new avenues of attack to keep me from writing the middle, all of which I’ve outlined above.
It’s monumentally hard, and even harder than fighting The Resistance is that this novel isn’t my only project on the burner. I have this site, my articles for Kittysneezes, and other projects all in various states of incompletion. This is the result of a terminal inability to focus on one thing for very long. Only hard deadlines, like I have for the ongoing Residents Project on Kittysneezes keep things like that from falling by the wayside. It’s a mark of personal pride that I’ve not yet done any “last minute” writing for that project, though I have done some editing and spit-shine on pieces that weren’t quite ready to go when that deadline came flying by. [1]
This essay began life in November of 2011, and—though coincidence—the day I picked it back up was the day the first episode of Systematic, a podcast hosted by the brilliant Brett Terpstra, dropped. He, and guest Mike Schramm both have their fingers in multiple projects, professionally and personally, and part of the show focused on how they choose which of their personal projects gets the attention it needs. The method, more or less, is based on need, desire, whim, and energy. This made me feel so much better to hear. When it’s time to work on their apps, they work on their apps. When it’s time to write, they write.
By necessity, this is the approach I have to take with my writing (and other) projects. As long as the work gets done, and on time, does it matter which work gets done? It’s liberating to know that I don’t need to feel guilt about choosing one thing over another. That I have to spread my attention around is something out of my control. I can’t control what flower the bumblebee of my attention lands on today, but as long as it lands on them all, in time, things will be okay. All I have do is know what has to be done, and do it, in time. All I have to do is find the time, and do the work. If I do, that middle bit will eventually be taken care of.
As much as I love Douglas Adams, I can’t agree with his sentiment about deadlines. The sound they makes only leaves me guilty and frustrated. ↩
Ten years ago, I registered sanspoint.com. In truth, my parents paid for the domain and my first year of hosting as a High School graduation present. It began as a replacement of my now long defunct LiveJournal. I built a design in Dreamweaver, set up Greymatter as a blogging platform, and spent a period from the summer before my first semester of college until my eventual fail-out, journaling my life. Over the intervening years, I’ve struggled to find a format that suits me. Among the various things I’ve tried are a personal journal, semi-weekly experiments in fiction, vaguely lifehack-esque productivity wank, blogging about literature and books, and finally what you see here. There have also been fallow periods where the site consisted of little more than a placeholder page. [1] If you’re genuinely curious, you can plug my URL into archive.org—I refuse to do you the favor, so as to spare myself easy embarrassment. It’s been two and a half years since I last started over, opting for another clean slate, when blogging about literature failed me—or when I failed blogging about literature.
Though I refuse to link to it, it is interesting and informative to me to rediscover the roots of my voice as a writer and put myself back in the mindset of my eighteen-year old self. Ten years ago, I was preparing to move to New York City, trying to determine who I am, wondering what I would become and what my future would be. Now, I’m preparing to move back to New York City, trying to determine who I am, wondering what I will become and what my future will be, now with an additional decade of experience and knowledge under my belt. In that time, Ideas have risen and fallen, projects have started and been abandoned or failed on their own. I’ve learned failure, repeatedly. I’ve designed and re-designed and re-re-designed this site at about once a year. The constant has been, in one form or another, maintaining this site and pouring out words. I keep at it, hoping, for some reason, people will want to hear what I have to say.
Some people do want to hear what I have to say, but if they didn’t, I’d still keep at it. I’d still keep writing and clicking that publish button as often as I can. The words come from somewhere inside, sometimes in a trickle, sometimes in a torrent. Some of them land on a page. The words never stop coming, but the frequency waxes and wanes. One reason I publish on here so infrequently is that I’ve come to believe in curation. What I put up for public consumption deserves to be the best of what I can create, not just unfiltered brain droppings. For that, there’s my Twitter account, and I’m trying to apply some of the same focus to that.
As I write, big things are happening. Crush On Radio is picking up steam. I’m quitting my jobs, packing up the bare minimum of my posessions, and moving to New York City to be with the most amazing person I know. I’m learning new things about myself that I never expected to learn. I’m seeing big, exciting things happen in the lives of my friends. I’m simultaneously falling back in love with my home town even as I get ready to leave it. There’s so much happening condensed into so little time that it’s hard to keep it all in focus.
Focus may well be the watchword here. The next few months will give me the unfettered freedom I had in my lost year writ even larger. To survive, both creatively and financially, I will need to focus: focus on doing the work—focus on finding work, focus on making the work better. This is the test of all the lessons of my last decade, an open book, open notes, open ended essay format test with no length limit and no time limit, graded on the steepest curve imaginable—my own. At least I have help, or more help than before. The flip-side of focus is commitment. I’ve committed to this relocation, and I’ve committed to producing a podcast every week. I’ve made commitments before around Sanspoint, too. The question is: “Who am I making this commitment to?”
The successes I’ve had came from committing not to any theoretical audience, but to myself. Sure, I have the aid of my co-hosts for Crush On Radio, but I’ve taken on the heaviest lifting. If I don’t sit and record and edit, if I don’t write the post and compile the notes, there is no show. If I don’t make the time to sit and write and edit, there is no Sanspoint. The artistic dilemma inherent in this case is quantity versus quality. Andrew Marvin has something new every single weekday, short or long, and I respect and admire that. I don’t think that’s what I should be doing.
Ten years in, I’m committing to myself to make this thing real. Each week, one new thing that goes up, of length and substance, the sort of thing you could and would throw into Instapaper for later perusal if you don’t have time to read a thousand-plus word essay. That said, I don’t want to force myself to hit an arbitrary word count if I can’t. What is most important is having well-written, well-thought out, long-form work under my name, because that is what I choose to write and it is what I want to read.
Primarily, this was because my previous host had been hacked, and someone injected malware code into all of my pages. I jumped ship to MediaTemple and never looked back. ↩
I consider my iPhone to be my second brain. Some would even argue its my first brain, but let’s not go into that. My iPhone remembers phone numbers, my calendar, and the items on my to-do list, but this is nothing new. Increasingly, I’ve taken to using it to remind me to eat better, to go to bed and wake up at a reasonable hour, and make sure I get enough sleep. It tracks every step I take to make sure I get some exercise during a twelve-hour work day spent mostly with my butt in a chair. It reminds me when my bills are due, and thanks to Siri, all I have to do is ask and it reminds me of anything on my mind I’ll need to remember later. My iPhone is, in many ways, the superego I lack. It’s my Skinner Box, offering myriad forms of behavioral reinforcement techniques.
How is an iPhone like a Skinner Box? The phone gives me a cue, offers an action, and then I get a reward. Let me start at the end and mention that the rewards are often intangible. I track my walking and my food intake, but the reward for that isn’t another food pellet—it’s quantifying calories burned and consumed. It’s knowing I hit a goal, and it’s taking my belt in another notch when I get dressed in the morning. It’s the pile of completed to-do items and finished things I’ve made. Compared to that, who needs food pellets?
Let’s use weight loss as an example. At 9:00 every morning, my iPhone buzzes to remind me to tell the Lose It! app what I ate for breakfast, that is if I haven’t told it already. At 1:00 and 6:00 the same thing happens for lunch and dinner. Lose It! tracks what I eat, it’s calorie content, my exercise, and my weight. It reinforces good eating habits—that bag of Peanut M&Ms looks good, but that’s 250 calories I could spend on something better, or not spend at all. Another example is the Motion-X Sleep app which, yes, monitors sleep, but is also an excellent pedometer. I work a desk job, and when the app notes I’ve spent an hour at my desk without moving around, it cues me to get up and take a walk, tracking my steps and estimating how many calories I’ve burned based on my height and weight. These sorts of apps are proven to work, too, if you follow through.
I also get prodded to get things done. Recently I bit the damn bullet and finally switched to OmniFocus from Things. Two features were the impetus to switch: Siri integration and geofencing. Siri makes getting things into my trusted system as easy as pushing a button and speaking. Really. Siri reminders appear in my OmniFocus inbox automatically, and iOS 6 is only going to make the integration more powerful. The other feature is geofencing, which allows me to be reminded of various tasks wherever I go. One simple application is the humble grocery list. If I create a context for my local supermarket, OmniFocus can detect when I’m there and ping me with the list of stuff I need to pick up. It works the other way too. When I walk out of my building, OmniFocus buzzes with reminders of any errands I need to run. The power here is almost limitless, especially since contexts don’t even need to be linked to a specific place, but can search for any sort of location type, post offices for example, when you have an action in that context.
The iPhone even helps with the actual doing of things. There’s a whole holy host of apps for creating content, but also apps to help just manage the time it takes to do the work. For tasks that I dread but have to get done, there’s Phocus which allows me to set up an hour of Merlin Mann’s 10+2*5 Productivity Hack with enforced work and recreation periods. Other timer apps like Due keep me aware of anything I’m waiting for, be it laundry or a power nap—though Siri has taken over a lot of my single-use timer needs. And let us not forget the simple Pomodoro Timer.
This system isn’t perfect though. One thing I’d simply love is a The Now Habit-esque time tracker/procrastination journal. I’m sure I could repurpose another app for this, maybe one of the kajillion time tracking for invoicing apps, but one dedicated to just giving me a buzz every thirty minutes to log what I am doing right then would be terribly handy. As it stands, I do have the Fathm app which allows me to track how I spend my time but it’s fiddly, not automated, and a bit buggy. Sure is pretty though.
Of course, the biggest problem in the system is the human element. Namely, me, and my grumpy, change-resistant lizard brain. All the alerts and dings and sirens are useless if I decide to simply ignore them. Call it “alert fatigue.” I noticed it happening to me when the daily reminder I’d set to nudge me off to bed in Due hadn’t gone off in a few days. This was because I had ignored an alarm to go to bed without acknowledging it in the app. I had taken to simply dismissing the notification and going about my business for another hour or so before crawling into bed.
To avoid this, I’m spending time thinking about where and when I need my alerts. Is it enough to have a buzz when I get home, or should it pop up at a specific time? Is this task so time and context sensitive that it even deserves an alert? Clearly my phone buzzing at 11 PM to remind me to sleep is a bit much. There is a balance to strike, and a well timed or well placed iPhone alert works far better than tying a string on your finger. Why did I tie the string to my finger? To remember something, but now I don’t remember what I was supposed to remember. If I’d fed what I was trying to remember into OmniFocus, it would be there for me to find.
It all comes down to mindfulness, and the subtle distinction that I control my second brain, it does not control me. An iPhone, Lose It!, OmniFocus, and other apps are ways to build and break habits, but not an end to themselves—and the trick to habits is to try and change them one at a time. In fact, you can only do one thing at a time, period, but that’s something for another essay entirely. My second brain, my iPhone, is no substitute for mindfulness, but it is an aid to it. That’s the best part of it—these apps take my iPhone from being a shiny device I can use to browse the web, listen to music, and take phone calls and make it a way to actually change the way my mind works.
I’ve spoken before about fear. Fear is a terrible motivator, at least in the long term. Fear takes a lot out of a person. Fear amps your body’s systems to the maximum. While fear is in control you can accomplish incredible feats at great physical cost, true. However, you can only run so far, and you can only fight so hard before your reserves are depleted. When that happens, you’re done. With any luck, whatever your body stored up in preparation for your fear event was enough to get you through it. If not, you’ll end up worse than when you started, drained and pained, and in deep trouble.
Living a life in perpetual fear is a guaranteed recipe for utter and complete misery.
Why?
Fundamentally, it’s biology. The human limbic system evolved in a way to ensure our survival against very real, very present, very specific threats to our person. I’m talking about “being attacked by a hungry lioness,” or “facing down an angry rhinoceros” sort of threats. Now-a-days, however, our chances of facing down a dangerous animal that could kill us is exceedingly rare. The limbic system is well-suited for when a car veers out of control at you while you’re crossing the street. It is not suited for when you have, say, an overdue tax bill that you can’t afford. One is an immediate threat; you either escape, or don’t. There’s going to be a very quick resolution when a car is coming at you. The other threat is going to linger…
When you become afraid or experience a threat, the body experiences a number of symptoms that work to prepare it for either fight or flight. The heart accelerates, lung action increases, blood vessels in the muscles dilate to increase blood flow, and the body becomes ready for action. Sure, in the face of a less tangible threat, you can leap into action and start doing stuff, but you’re probably not going to neutralize anything in the time it takes for your hormones to metabolize and your body to crash. At this point, the body needs rest and nutrients to replenish itself, which—one hopes—are in supply, and rest is hard to get when you’re still afraid.
It’s not a huge leap from here to the effects of the fear cycle we can get ourselves caught up in, but fear isn’t the only thing that taxes our systems. Anger triggers a lot of the same systems as fear. An angry life is just as bad as a fearful life. When we talk about stress, this is, in many cases, a function of long term fear and/or anger. Think about it: you’re not going to be stressed if the thing you’re afraid of or angry about is not a threat anymore. That is, if the mind can let go of it.
Severe and chronic trauma… causes toxic stress in kids. Toxic stress damages kid’s brains. When trauma launches kids into flight, fight or fright mode, they cannot learn. It is physiologically impossible.
When you’re afraid, when you’re stressed, when you’re angry, it drives you toward one thing above all: to escape. This is biology. Nothing more. Our bodies evolved to address threats that manifest as tangible, physical things. If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you’re not living the sort of lifestyle that would put you in the presence of free wild carnivores and other dangerous beasts. Instead, your threats, as stated, become more existential and far less tangible. We can be paralyzed by this, unable to fix anything, and unable to escape. You may know someone like this. You may be someone like this.
There are no easy answers to escaping the fear cycle. Medication, meditation, and therapy, are all options, but as I am not a licensed psychiatrist or therapist, I can’t give you a prescription.
The worst part, though, is that when you’re afraid—at least early on—you can accomplish wonders. Think of all the all-nighters you’ve pulled in college, or the last minute preparation for your work presentation. Think of every time you’ve flown by the seat of your pants, and lived. If that number is greater than the times you’ve done it and crashed, you’re going to think that it’s okay. I’ve gotten plenty of A grades on papers I churned out the day before, night before, or two or three hours before they became due.
That doesn’t mean I couldn’t have done better.
That doesn’t mean you can’t do better, either.
Fear is a motivator, but it’s a terrible motivator, because it doesn’t keep things going for very long. If you expect to keep moving, keep surviving and fighting, and doing the work, what motivates you needs to be something more sustaining than sheer, blind animal fear. What that is will vary from person to person. Whatever it is, long- term success will only come from using a motivator that can sustain you in the future.
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.