L.E. Henderson's Blog

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I write about imaginary characters who save imaginary worlds.

But that seems so frivolous  when the real world keeps hurtling toward new perils.

That is why I often find myself trying to remedy real world threats in my head as if they were just plot holes in need of plugging.

Or I get mixed up. I wonder: How should my protagonist rescue democracy, defeat dragons, prevent climate apocalypse, procure the sacred elden wand, and stem the tide of irrationality that has seized public discourse?

But trying to solve global problems in my head is exhausting. And it is always with the knowledge that any solution I come up with is bound to be embarrassingly absurd.

Perhaps, my brain helpfully suggests, the world only needs more fantasy authors, perhaps entire brigades of us, magic-obsessed wordsmiths brandishing pens and highborn notions. “Have no fear, just step aside, fantasy novelists coming through, saving worlds is our specialty, no need to thank us, no worries, we got this!”

But saving pretend worlds is so much easier than saving real ones. Authors get to rig the game. J.R.R. Tolkien imagined a ring that emanated darkness but he also threw in a convenient disposal mechanism: a fiery ring-eating mountain.

The equally underhanded writers of Star Wars got to toss a convenient  “flaw” into the Death Star, a vulnerability due to an apparent lapse in the dark lord engineering handbook.

When “saving” a fictional world, authors don’t even have to find solutions: we get to make them up. And if no good solutions are handy we can just tweak the problem until it has one.

Addressing actual threats means paying close attention to the real world, the one outside of books and dreams, a place of laundry and taxes and expensive cereal, a place where heroes are scarce and dragons are found not in castle keeps but on toy shelves.

But confronting realities like expensive cereal is anathema to us. There is nothing drearier to a fantasy author than facing real life, but maybe, at some point, some of us ought to try it.

Besides, who has more of a stake in saving the actual world than a fantasy author? If the world goes away, no one will be around to read our books! What better reason to seek world peace and preserve a habitable planet for future generations?

But I do realize that the planet is not just some rough draft in need of a snappy plot twist.

That may be why every time I try to find solutions to real world problems, my imagination lets me down.  My answers are the sort that most editors would consider too hackneyed to print.

Maybe everyone just needs to love each other more. Then every problem will be solved! World peace will ensue!

Except, I know better. If love were going to bring about world peace, justice, and responsible technology, it should have done so by now. Everyone has been pushing love as a social panacea for eons. But Utopia seems more remote than ever. Besides, some people are incapable of loving. We need a “Plan B.”

Which leads me to hackneyed solution number 2: Maybe humans just need better self-esteems. Maybe we keep rushing toward existential precipices because we secretly have a low opinion of ourselves. Maybe out of sheer self-dislike we unconsciously want to end the human experiment once and for all.

I wonder: With all of our hand-wringing over human hubris, have we finally become victims of our own cynicism? The pageantry of horrors marching through the pages of history books seem to confirm that humans are nefarious creatures. But maybe we need reminding that history is mainly the story of power addicts who think they need more power.

Crazed power addicts do not represent the human population as a whole, if only because most people lack access to armies or word-ending bombs, the obscene levers of power wielded by those who prowl the world stage.

The best people—the people we meet everyday—rarely make the history books, yet they are just as much a part of the past as Alexander the Great or Hammurabi.

History books never mention your grandmother who baked your favorite oatmeal cookies when you were five even though her back was achy. Orthe taxi driver who waived your 80 dollar fare just because he learned it was your birthday.

But such characters do appear in fiction, a venue where they are duly honored.

So, maybe if enough fiction writers, who understand that kindness matters, put their heads together they could find a non-hackneyed way to preserve humanity for a few more millennia.

It is strange, though, how, in all of my fervor to “save the world in my head,” I keep forgetting a important fact: the world is still here.

When I look at the news I can hardly see what is in front of me for the fogs of portent in my head.

I forget that the world has been teetering on the brink of annihilation for some time now, and humans have lasted much longer than many people expected.

Maybe the world has already been saved many times but somehow it just never made the news. Or maybe there was a clandestine peace-making special ops unit involving cookie-bearing grandmas and generous taxi drivers—people  who preferred birthdays and brownies to breaking things.

That being said, no one can save the world for all eternity. And there are no guarantees that if we save the world once, nothing will ever menace it again.

But for whatever reason, here we are, still going about our lives, dreaming, doing laundry, chewing gum, and feeding our cats overpriced tuna treats.

The world, despite everything that threatens it, is still here.

But just in case the grandmas and taxi drivers need help, we as fantasy writers are honor-bound to do our part.

So, Other Fantasy Authors, do what you do best—imagine.

Imagine world peace and Utopia. Imagine a future safe for people, frogs, cats, kids, and new video gaming systems.

And if all else fails attempt the impossible. Unleash magic. Call down the dragons. Prepare the elixirs. Send forth the elven armies. Summon the sorcerers gone berserk with pious rage.

A storm is coming, and the time has come to vanquish the forces of darkness before it is too late.

Just think. By saving the real world from climate disaster, pandemics, and autocracy, we will be saving our imaginary worlds as well.

And we have to do that because that is our job.

The post Fantasy Authors Really Need to Start Saving the Real World appeared first on PASSIONATE REASON.

As a child, whenever I told adults that I wanted to be a writer, they always smiled and asked if I wanted to be famous.

Famous! Like Mickey Mouse and Elvis and Stephen King. Of course, I did!

I was always starting novels that I felt certain would induct me into the literary hall of fame. “Ten-year-old reveals astounding insight in her debut horror novel The Heart Stop! A tour de force of stupefying scariness!” (This was an actual title and I was very proud of having come up with it.)

As I grew older, I started to realize how hard literary fame was to come by. You would do well to get a publisher to even read your novel, the writing magazines said. The stars in my eyes dimmed.

I adjusted my ambitions. If fame was unobtainable, maybe I could at least draw a steady paycheck and make a living doing what I enjoyed. That would be a feat worth celebrating since most adults I knew hated their jobs.

A paycheck would confer a humbler version of fame: respectability.

I had a sobering image of myself as an adult trudging to a mailbox carrying a stack of bills, feeling self-contained, responsible, and independent—a far cry from the glitz of universal adulation but there was a certain respectability in it.

Unfortunately, while respectability oozed pious pragmatism, it killed my inspiration. Respectability seemed to demand relentless conformity. It encouraged grammatical nitpicking and safe creative choices.

I had originally been attracted to writing because it was fun. Attempting to make it responsible killed my subversive joy, and I became blocked.

Finally, after many years of stuttering out grammatically correct unfinished stories,  I gave up on being “respectable.”It was the best decision I ever made.

I started back writing like I did when I was ten: with unapologetic, exuberant abandon. If I wrote anything too silly I could always tell myself, “That was brilliant for a ten-year-old.” My block went away and never came back.

Sometimes I still dreamed of becoming famous. But I noticed a troubling pattern with my heroes, how one after one, the writing celebrities I had once admired were tossed off their pedestals after revealing an unpopular opinion, a bad habit, or a dark past. Fame, like, money, only existed in the collective human imagination and could evaporate like a passing thought.

I came to view fame, paychecks, and respectability as dispensable relics of a dream that others had implanted in me.

The creative process was where the true wealth was, the elixir buried beneath a mound of misguided virtues that society extolled such as discipline, efficiency, and competition.

The art, I thought, is where the awe is.

I still think so. When I write, I enter vast creative chamber where any mistake is allowed. It is an anarchic place without competition, rules, or hierarchies. The chill I sometimes feel when an idea captures my imagination borders on the numinous.

I am an agnostic. But there are brief pockets of time, usually at night, when an idea for a story strikes me and I have the thought, “There is a God after all.”

The thought comes with a feeling of euphoria, and with it a desire that eclipses everything else that is going on in my life.

I think, This story has to exist. It has to exist even if it no one else ever reads it. It has to exist even if it turns out to be awful. It has to exist even if writing it is the last thing I do before I die.

Usually the afterglow of my epiphany has vanished by morning. But the idea remains.

Sometimes it comes with a mild sense of foreboding. I know that no matter how good my idea seemed the night before, the actual writing is going to be hard. My story idea, incandescent as it might have been in my head, is bound to pale beneath my pen.

It is remembering my moment of “epiphany”—however dubious—that emboldens me to tunnel through many wobbly rough drafts, rewrites, and painstaking edits.

I am doing more than just writing. I am nailing together a staircase of words to climb back to my original feeling of enlightenment—that feeling  that I was onto something, that some dull curtain of perception was parting to emit the seductive light of truth.

After many false starts and adjustments I begin to see, once again, why my original idea seemed so luminous.

When my writing is going really well, all thoughts of “winning” fall away, and hierarchies prove to be what they have been all along: imaginary.

But childhood fantasies die hard.

Fame would mean a lot of readers, and I like readers. And money is useful for things like buying chocolate. I like chocolate.

But If I had all the money in the world I would still write. I would write for the same reason I still play The Legend of Zelda, cram my coffee full of cream, and keep a cat around me at all times.

Fame tarnishes over time and money looks alike no matter where it comes from, whether babysitting, school teaching, or insider trading.

I was right to give up on respectability. Respectability is a lie. The art is where the awe is. My ten-year-old self knew that well. And after too many years of block, so do I.

The post Fame is Fickle. Money is Impersonal. Art is Where the Awe is. appeared first on PASSIONATE REASON.

Months ago, a relative told me that his ambitious author friend was earnestly seeking a book deal.

“She wants to be a big writer,” he said. “Not like you. I mean, you’re just kinda sorta of content to self-publish. But she wants to make a living at it.”

I was dumbfounded. Even offended. Who wants to be called just kinda sorta anything?

But I believe he meant well. And after thinking about his remark for a while, I realized that he was right. I am content to self-publish. And I am happy that the technology exists to for me to do it so easily and economically.

I have self-published all of my books since iUniverse emerged around the turn of the millennium, and I have no regrets.

My memory of my brother telling me about the new technology is  one of my favorites. He had heard about it on NPR. “Print on demand technology,” he explained, “means that you can self-publish without the risk of going broke.”

Just out of college and writing my first novel, I was nearly in despair over my publishing prospects. I had been reading how-to-write magazines that were less about writing well than pleasing publishers and agents. The gatekeepers seemed to want minimally modified duplicates of popular releases that had already made scads of money.

Such risk-averse publishers  seemed unlikely to applaud my novel Thief of Hades. Not because my story was bad but because it was strange. It did not fit into a neat genre or age category.

My main character was the mythological boatman of the river Styx, an immortal man, cursed to age forever, who ferried dead souls to their afterlife destinations.

He was not a typical hero. He was not sexy or young. He did not fit the “chosen farm boy savior” fantasy trope. I had never even considered who my audience would be. I just wanted to tell a good story, the kind I would want to read.

The new technology opened doors to all kinds of bold weirdness and seemed too good to be true.

I had always imagined that the most I could hope for was to hire an elusive boss called a publisher who would extol my talent, then override my editorial decisions and take most of my profits. And even that was a long shot. Because apparently all writers wanted that, and there were only so many aloof, profit-grabbing publishers to go around.

But iUniverse shifted the vast power from the editorial gods to me. No need to query and wait months for a reply from a “busy agent.” No more jumping through arbitrary  formatting hoops merely to submit the first few paragraphs of a manuscript. No need to prove that I could adeptly say popular things that had already been said before. I was allowed to write weirdly and originally and recklessly. And so I did.

Because of the new technology, a cosmos of creative voices that had been muted could finally be heard—potentially by wide audiences. For some reason, though, I never foresaw indie publishing becoming the robust movement that it is now, transforming the publishing industry in a seismic way.

For many years, the publishing model I had known my whole life still held its sheen for me, especially since companies like iUniverse were at first dubbed “vanity presses.” The belittling label always set my teeth on edge .

Why was publishing a book on my own “vain”? Did entrepreneurs who started their own restaurants endure accusations of building “vanity restaurants?”

Regardless, I wanted to escape the assumption that I had a character defect because of how I had published my novel. So, about six years ago, I did submit a manuscript to a traditional publisher.

Months later, I received a glowing acceptance letter. I went around in an ebullient daze, feeling like I had been inducted into some lofty pantheon.

The deal was a disaster from the start. For six months I was under the impression that my novel was being edited, and when I finally wrote to inquire about it, I discovered that the editor had not even begun. Plus, the company had lost my manuscript. I had to resend it.

When I finally did receive the edits, the parts that the editor wanted me to cut were the parts I loved the most: the scenes that had real emotion in them.

She thought that my novel had passages that were too depressing. She wanted me to delete them and make my characters more likeable—especially the parents.

Feelings of resentment lodged inside me. If I made all of the changes that my editor demanded, my novel would be  unrecognizable, a thin forgettable adventure, a milquetoast amusement park ride. I ended my book deal.

Before self-publishing became economically viable, my decision to refuse the edits would have been far more gut-wrenching. If I had ended the deal in, say, 1990, I could not have counted on my novel getting published at all. The editor would have had vast power to reshape or dilute my vision.

But self-publishing does more than grant creative control to authors who have existing manuscripts. Sometimes, just knowing the indie option exists encourages aspiring authors to write stories that they never would have otherwise.

Shortly after I published my first novel, I received a phone call from my former next-door neighbor, a talented columnist for the local newspaper. His name was Steve Biondo.

He wanted to know whether I liked my experience with self-publishing. For many years, he had kept an incomplete manuscript of a novel in his desk drawer, a novel he yearned to finish but that had been gathering dust.

It fictionalized a local legend—a civil war hero named Manse Jolly. Because Manse Jolly was such a niche topic, the publishers Steve had queried expressed no interest in it.

Steve was frustrated. He dreamed of finishing his novel anyway, but his job drained him so much that by the time he got home from work, he was loath to write or do much of anything else.

But when he learned from my mom that I had self-published a novel, everything changed for him. He realized that he had a new power, which motivated him to finish his book The True Story of Manse Jolly. In fact, he ended up publishing an entire trilogy.

I was proud of him. And I was moved that self-publishing my novel had encouraged him to achieve a previously thwarted dream.

But a few years after writing his third book, I stumbled across a stunning item in my hometown newspaper: an obituary.

Steve had died. A breathing complication had taken his life after he was admitted into the local hospital.

My throat grew tight. Although I was just a neighbor, I had considered Steve to be the first “real writer” I had ever known. He had even had the perceptive squint that I thought all writers were supposed to have. Real writers with perceptive squints, I thought, were supposed to live forever.

Months later, I learned that—in a way—they could. When I attended his memorial service, I saw something unexpected. Someone had brought out a table to display his three Manse Jolly novels.

I could not stop staring at them. I kept thinking that, inside those covers, Steve was still alive. His wit and intelligence and imagination were preserved there. And every time someone read his words, his mind would flicker to life again.

Those books were repositories of his knowledge, quirks, personality, and passions— novels that would never have been born without a technology that eased the burdens of self-publishing.

My friend was not a “big” writer. He never got rich or earned enough from his fiction to quit his day job. But those novels were ends in themselves. They mattered.

Some aspiring writers view self-publishing as the option of last resort, a trashy gimmick for no-talent writers or a vanity press for impatient hacks who only want to see their name in print.

Not true. Self-publishing is not a cheap imitation of “respectable” publishing; it is its democratic gold standard that legions of writers throughout history would have killed for if they had known it were possible.

Self-publishing permits all writers to share their stories. It honors niche interests. It allows authors to take creative risks that mainstream publishers discourage.It lets authors focus on the writing rather than pleasing agents.

Despite the many benefits of self-publishing, some writers still consider it to be the plebian option of last resort. That is like saying that democracy is something you had to settle for because the right tyranny never came along. 

My relative was right. I am content to self-publish. But not just kinda sorta. I am content without reservation or apology.

Self-publishing means that I never have to beg for permission to share my ideas. It empowers and inspires me. It censors no one. It shifts the focus from how to package my thoughts to the prize that matters most: the art itself.

The post Self-Publishing is not a Last Resort. It is the Holy Grail. appeared first on PASSIONATE REASON.

When my friends go on trips for fun, they spend most of their time taking photographs. Cheaters, I say. Why go anywhere new if my camera is going to do my observing for me?

Cameras are indifferent observers. At most, they capture shadows. They are blind the full tapestry of experience, which includes not just sights and sounds, but temperatures, scents, and textures. A camera can never grasp my thoughts and feelings either. I prefer journals.

I have journals that go back decades. The year after I graduated from college, I took serial vacations to Myrtle Beach with my brother. While walking along the pier, I would write in my head. As soon as I got back to the hotel, I would record my observations in my journal. I wanted to describe everything from the foaming wave tips to the cigarette embers left glowing in the sand.

Maybe someday I would need an ocean scene for a story. If so, I wanted to remember the beach exactly as it was, the jellyfish strewn along the shore, the hotel lights shimmering on the ocean, or the chill in the air as I ate a blueberry ice cream cone. If I ever forgot those details, I would just consult my old journals, my reservoirs of experience that I hoped would inspire me whenever I needed them.

A couple of weeks ago, however, when I went to New York, I tried to write in my head the way I used to. But this time, words failed me.

I felt so bombarded by cars honking, vendors yelling, and pedestrians screaming into their cellphones that parts of my brain went offline. Writing in my head was impossible. It was all I could do to get from one place to another. I felt like I was missing most of what was going on around me.

I needed a separate pair of eyes to look at the city while I navigated the crowds. I wondered whether I should re-examine my aversion to cameras.

A camera is never afflicted with sensory overload. It is fast and easy to use, whereas word-wrangling can take hours. A camera can clone reality whereas my memory is prone to hazy distortion.

A camera reproduces the most intricate tableaus in an instant. Yet it never has to worry that its audience will lose interest. A viewer can easily absorb every visual detail without a thought. Unlike reading a novel, watching a video requires almost no work.

A camera never “marries the fly” either—a common writing error according to Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones. Writers who “marry the fly” emphasize all of the wrong things. They focus on boring, irrelevant details and distract from the content that really matters.

For example, a writer who is describing a wedding might suddenly lurch into a wild digression about a housefly that lands on her drinking glass. The writer tells everything she knows about the fly: its wingspan, its weight, its early history, its anatomy, and its food preferences. Her pen unfurls reams of text about the fly. All the while, the story has come to a standstill, and the bride has been relegated to a footnote.

A camera would never marry a fly. But if it did, it would get away with it. No matter how many superfluous details a photograph presents, the viewer is rarely—if ever—annoyed by them.

Given all of the advantages of using a camera, I wonder how many travel writers still use words alone. Mark Twain did. He wrote voluptuous descriptions of his life as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. Maybe a present-day Mark Twain would have just made a YouTube video.

What would a YouTube video by Mark Twain be like? Would it convey his humor, his wit, and his biting narrative voice? One way or the other, it would not be the same. His memoirs allow me to read his mind in a way that a camera never could. His prose traces the contours of his unique perceptions, revealing a Mississippi River that was his alone. Through no other eyes—including the lens of a camera—would it have looked exactly the same.

Art is more than showing reality as it is. Otherwise, why go to the trouble of painting or drawing? You could just snap a photograph and get the same results. Art is art because it expresses the artist.

This goes for writing, too. Writing captures more than its subject. It simulates thoughts. It reveals a personality. It expresses a point of view. Thus, reading fiction by other writers lets me escape my narrow vision to explore thousands of perspectives from people who are different from me.

I will admit, though, that cameras have their place. Photos can be—and often are—art. Sometimes they even inspire me to write. They are also an excellent resource for research and a way to verify the accuracy of my memory.

But when I visit interesting places, I am still inclined to keep my camera in my purse. I want to enjoy exploring a shore or a park, which is hard to do if I am fretting over what to record. If a point of interest becomes just another place to aim a camera, I am not really engaged.

Snapping photographs might be efficient but it is a poor substitute for seeing. To experience the world in its unframed glory, I have to lower my lens and just look.

The post Why I Prefer Words to Cameras appeared first on PASSIONATE REASON.

When you have bipolar disorder, waking up in the mornings can feel dangerous. The world seems to bristle with emotional landmines. A disappointment can send me spiraling into an abyss where I stay for days, weeks, or months.

So, I focus on prevention.  I avoid common triggers. I keep my distance from insulting relatives. I steer clear of gloomy news sites. I limit social media.

But reality is ever-changing and the universe is too big to control. The world is not designed to make me feel secure. Triggers are the inevitable result of life being life, which by nature defies predictability.

The temptation is to make your world small. Retreat into a Cave of Caution, seal its mouth with a boulder. Draw into yourself, detach yourself from all other humans, shield yourself from the unpredictable.

Though this sounds extreme, there can be vast freedom in decreasing social noise from the outside; solitude allows me to fully focus on my interests.

Social clamor distracts me.  In my emotional confusion I forget what I like to do. In my Caution Cave I remember.

In The Cave there are books to read, stories to write, and video games to play. In a severely enclosed space, I can control the emotional temperature. For a while, my bubble surrounds my personal Utopia. I forget that I have bipolar disorder or social anxiety.

A cave is not some gloomy void after all. Some caves brim with life. They harbor thriving ecosystems replete with fish, bats, and underground rivers. They have waterfalls and stalagmites that glisten when light shines on them.

But at some point, the Caution Cave always starts to feel cramped. A glance outside reveals an enchanting summer world screaming its greenness at me.

I miss surprises. And what is more surprising, more unpredictable, than other people?

What have I done? I wonder. Why have I condemned myself to a life of safety? Who is this Trigger Guardian dwelling inside me, holding my mood hostage, and decreeing what I can and cannot do? Life is risk.

What if I have been an unwitting prisoner? The rebel inside me stirs to life.

Bring on the insulting relatives, it says, and the social media trolls and the disappointments. My depression is not the boss of me! Besides, I am going to die someday. Who cares if a troll corrects my spelling?

A life without walls, even with all of its traps and triggers, is ultimately irresistible. Even above a field of emotional land mines, fresh air beckons.

Inhaling freedom, I suddenly want to embrace it all. I want to immerse myself in life, even with its uncertain shifts. And why not? The universe is unpredictable, even in a Caution Cave.

Seize freedom, I think. Pain is inevitable. Rocket toward it rather than waiting for it to come to you; deal with it on your own terms. Make it count somehow.

Bit by bit, I leave the Caution Cave and find myself blinking in the sunlight. Emotionally speaking, my eyes hurt. But I am glad to see the sun.

I know the depression will return someday.

At the same time, depression always ends—always. And sometimes it leads to interesting places like getting over creative block, seeing through harmful religious dogma, or finding out who your real friends are.

When I emerge from a depression, I almost always understand more about myself or about life than I did before.

One day the clamor of crowds may once again become too much. Or a new trigger will send me reeling away and grasping for emotional balance.

If so, the Caution Cave will be just where I left it. Its protective space, stocked with books and games and art, will be waiting for the day when I need it again.

But for the moment, I leave them all behind to rejoin the multifaceted, unpredictable ever-changing world.

This time, I tell myself, it will be different.

This time, if a trigger goes off, I will meditate. I will persuade my irrational emotions with unassailable logic. I will be a robot or a saint or a zombie; I will surrender all desire and tumble into the snug, waiting arms of enlightenment.

Until then, I will do the best I can, groping my way toward the future and watching my step, careful yet hopeful as I merge with the flux of life once again.

The post The Tyranny of Mood appeared first on PASSIONATE REASON.

When you have bipolar disorder, waking up in the mornings can feel dangerous. The world seems to bristle with emotional landmines. A disappointment can send me spiraling into an abyss where I stay for days, weeks, or months.

So, I focus on prevention.  I avoid common triggers. I keep my distance from insulting relatives. I steer clear of gloomy news sites. I limit social media.

But reality is ever-changing and the universe is too big to control. The world is not designed to make me feel secure. Triggers are the inevitable result of life being life, which by nature defies predictability.

The temptation is to make your world small. Retreat into a Cave of Caution, seal its mouth with a boulder. Draw into yourself, detach yourself from all other humans, shield yourself from the unpredictable.

Though this sounds extreme, there can be vast freedom in decreasing social noise from the outside; solitude allows me to fully focus on my interests.

Social clamor distracts me.  In my emotional confusion I forget what I like to do. In my Caution Cave I remember.

In my Caution Cave there are books to read, stories to write, and video games to play. In a severely enclosed space, I can control the emotional temperature. For a while, my bubble surrounds my personal Utopia. I forget that I have bipolar disorder.

A cave is not some gloomy void after all. Some caves brim with life. They harbor thriving ecosystems replete with fish, bats, and underground rivers. They have stalagmites that glisten when light shines on them.

But at some point, the Caution Cave always starts to feel cramped. A glance outside reveals an enchanting summer world screaming its greenness at me.

What have I done? I wonder. Since when did I condemn myself to a life of safety? Who is this Trigger Guardian dwelling inside me and decreeing what I can and cannot do? Life is risk.

The rebel inside me stirs to life. Bring on the insulting relatives, it says, and the social media trolls and the disappointments. My depression is not the boss of me! Besides, I am going to die someday. Who cares if a troll corrects my spelling?

A broader life, even with all of its traps and triggers, is ultimately irresistible. Even above a field of emotional land mines, fresh air beckons.

Inhaling freedom, I suddenly want to embrace it all. I want to immerse myself in life, even with its uncertain shifts. And why not? The universe is unpredictable, even in a Caution Cave.

Seize freedom, I think. Pain is inevitable. Rocket toward it rather than waiting for it to come to you; deal with it on your own terms. Make it count somehow.

Bit by bit, I leave the Caution Cave and find myself blinking in the sunlight. Emotionally speaking, my eyes hurt. But I am glad to see the sun.

I know the depression will return someday.

At the same time, depression always ends—always. And sometimes it leads to interesting places like getting over creative block, seeing through harmful religious dogma, or finding out who your real friends are.

When I emerge from a depression, I almost always understand more about myself or about life than I did before.

One day the clamor of crowds may once again become too much. Or a new trigger will send me reeling away and grasping for emotional balance.

If so, the Caution Cave will be just where I left it. Its books and games and art will be patiently waiting for the time when I need them again.

But for the moment, I leave them all behind to rejoin the multifaceted, unpredictable ever-changing world.

This time, I tell myself, it will be different.

This time, if a trigger goes off, I will meditate. I will persuade my irrational emotions with unassailable logic. I will be a robot or a saint or a zombie; I will surrender all desire and tumble into the snug, waiting arms of enlightenment.

Until then, I will do the best I can, groping my way toward the future and watching my step, careful yet hopeful as I merge with the flux of life once again.

The post The Trouble with Triggers appeared first on PASSIONATE REASON.

Last spring, I became obsessed with the writing of William Zinsser, who wrote the book On Writing Well. The music of his lean, lucid sentences dazzled me.

I loved his muscular verbs and his original figures of speech. The quality of his writing seemed to prove that his advice worked.

Not that his rules were new to me. In principle, I already agreed with most of them, particularly his belief that clarity is the cardinal goal of writing. I agreed, too, that the best prose is direct, vivid, and clutter-free, and that the short and direct word communicates more effectively than a ponderous abstract one.

I read many of the chapters of On Writing Well multiple times not so much for his content as his style, trying to absorb his brilliance.

Only deeper into the book did I discover a surprising revelation: William Zinsser did not enjoy writing. His book is peppered with cleverly worded complaints about the agonies of author-dom. He insists that there is nothing a writer hates more than writing. A writer, Zinsser insists, will go to any length to avoid doing his job.

This was true of me at one time, but not anymore. I love to write. But unlike Zinsser, who refused to progress to the second sentence without perfecting the first, I allow myself to write terrible rough drafts and revise later.

How could such a good writer view writing as drudgery? I can guess. In the past, whenever I became obsessed with following rules, my pleasure in the process would decrease exponentially.

This was particularly true if I tried to follow them while also creating new content. For that reason, I stopped reading how-to-write books for over five years. They made me too self-conscious.

Only recently did I end my “how-to” hiatus. But after I read On Writing Well, my old problem came creeping back to me. Whenever I took Zinsser’s rules too seriously, my forehead muscles would tense and my writing would feel forced. The words I was trying to wrangle into submission were bucking me and leaving me emotionally tattered.

Frustration arose as I tried to tighten every sentence until it crackled. I agonized over rhythm. I fretted about finding exactly the right word, rather than the almost-right word. I suffered from decision fatigue as I compared different versions of each sentence.

When I finally did find a word that had exactly the right meaning, I worried that it had too many syllables. Maybe my word was not pithy enough. Or maybe it was too abstract. Or maybe my verbs were too weak.

But my biggest frustration came not so much with choosing the right word but with trimming verbiage. While I was already in the habit of cutting text, I was pursuing a new level of Zinsser-style succinctness. Zinsser urged chiseling away at text until all that remained was a kind of pristine thought sculpture, a fat-free model of efficiency, a laconic conveyer of clarity.

Following the leaner-is-always-better principle, I became rabidly obsessed with cutting text —more so, even, than usual. The faintest sign of verbosity had to be swatted into oblivion. I curtailed my essays with mercenary efficiency—always careful to save my sprawling first draft in case I wanted to restore some of my deleted writing later.

After all of my cutting was done, I would return to my original draft to compare, hoping to see dramatic before-and-after improvements, a suitable reward for all of my efforts.

But usually, I liked my previous version better than I expected. In fact, I often preferred it to my torturously revised drafts.

One day when returning to look over a rough draft, I made a startling discovery: I had changed almost all of my original content, leaving me with two distinct essays about different topics that were only loosely related.

I was not only trimming verbosity; I was pushing out my own original thoughts. Instead of saying what I wanted to say, I was losing my voice. I was becoming buried by my own rules.

The “rules” had stopped serving me; instead, I was serving them. I was allowing them to jettison me from my own prose. Now I clearly remembered why, at one time, I had stopped reading writing advice.

It was not just that I tended to take it too far. It was that no blanket rule of writing—no matter how wise it sounds—will work for every situation. No rule can take into account all of the factors that might affect an essay, story, or novel.

When I came to my senses, I remembered that shorter is not always better; in fiction it takes more words to show a character throwing a tantrum that to merely tell what he did. But showing characters in action is generally more vivid and engaging than dropping a line of exposition. Even within individual sentences, my pursuit of brevity can destroy rhythm, voice, and tone. And while short clear words may be the easiest to read, so-called “big” words have flavors, textures, and nuances that simpler words can never emulate.

Somehow, I had forgotten a the most important tenet of writing: the rules must serve my purpose. If the rules are upstaging my message, I have to let them go.

While advice from other writers may be useful, I always have to take it with a grain of salt. I do still love the way William Zinsser writes. And as rules of thumb go, his make good sense. But they are only guidelines, not oracular pronouncements from a celestial mountaintop. Obedience should never be the guiding principle of any art—not if I want to master writing instead of it mastering me.

On Writing Well now rests snugly on a bookshelf behind a glass door. Maybe five years from now, I will go back and look at it again. For now, I will simply write what comes to me, preferring to revise with a lighter touch. Unlike Zinsser, I love to write. And I want to keep it that way.

The post My Love-Hate Relationship with Books on Writing appeared first on PASSIONATE REASON.

Last spring, I became obsessed with the writing of William Zinsser, who wrote the book On Writing Well. The music of his lean, lucid sentences dazzled me.

I loved his muscular verbs and his original figures of speech. The quality of his writing seemed to prove that his advice worked.

Not that his rules were new to me. In principle, I already agreed with most of them, particularly his belief that clarity is the cardinal goal of writing. I agreed, too, that the best prose is direct, vivid, and clutter-free, and that the short and direct word communicates more effectively than a ponderous abstract one.

I read many of the chapters of On Writing Well multiple times not so much for his content as his style, trying to absorb his brilliance.

Only deeper into the book did I discover a surprising revelation: William Zinsser did not enjoy writing. His book is peppered with cleverly worded complaints about the agonies of author-dom. He insists that there is nothing a writer hates more than writing. A writer, Zinsser insists, will go to any length to avoid doing his job.

This was true of me at one time, but not anymore. I love to write. But unlike Zinsser, who refused to progress to the second sentence without perfecting the first, I allow myself to write terrible rough drafts and revise later.

How could such a good writer view writing as drudgery? I can guess. In the past, whenever I became obsessed with following rules, my pleasure in the process would decrease exponentially.

This was particularly true if I tried to follow them while also creating new content. For that reason, I stopped reading how-to-write books for over five years. They made me too self-conscious.

Only recently did I end my “how-to” hiatus. But after I read On Writing Well, my old problem came creeping back to me. Whenever I took Zinsser’s rules too seriously, my forehead muscles would tense and my writing would feel forced. The words I was trying to wrangle into submission were bucking me and leaving me emotionally tattered.

Frustration arose as I tried to tighten every sentence until it crackled. I agonized over rhythm. I fretted about finding exactly the right word, rather than the almost-right word. I suffered from decision fatigue as I compared different versions of each sentence.

When I finally did find a word that had exactly the right meaning, I worried that it had too many syllables. Maybe my word was not pithy enough. Or maybe it was too abstract. Or maybe my verbs were too weak.

But my biggest frustration came not so much with choosing the right word but with trimming verbiage. While I was already in the habit of cutting text, I was pursuing a new level of Zinsser-style succinctness. Zinsser urged chiseling away at text until all that remained was a kind of pristine thought sculpture, a fat-free model of efficiency, a laconic conveyer of clarity.

Following the leaner-is-always-better principle, I became rabidly obsessed with cutting text —more so, even, than usual. The faintest sign of verbosity had to be swatted into oblivion. I curtailed my essays with mercenary efficiency—always careful to save my sprawling first draft in case I wanted to restore some of my deleted writing later.

After all of my cutting was done, I would return to my original draft to compare, hoping to see dramatic before-and-after improvements, a suitable reward for all of my efforts.

But usually, I liked my previous version better than I expected. In fact, I often preferred it to my torturously revised drafts.

One day when returning to look over a rough draft, I made a startling discovery: I had changed almost all of my original content, leaving me with two distinct essays about different topics that were only loosely related.

I was not only trimming verbosity; I was pushing out my own original thoughts. Instead of saying what I wanted to say, I was losing my voice. I was becoming buried by my own rules.

The “rules” had stopped serving me; instead, I was serving them. I was allowing them to jettison me from my own prose. Now I clearly remembered why, at one time, I had stopped reading writing advice.

It was not just that I tended to take it too far. It was that no blanket rule of writing—no matter how wise it sounds—will work for every situation. No rule can take into account all of the factors that might affect an essay, story, or novel.

When I came to my senses, I remembered that shorter is not always better; in fiction it takes more words to show a character throwing a tantrum that to merely tell what he did. But showing characters in action is generally more vivid and engaging than dropping a line of exposition. Even within individual sentences, my pursuit of brevity can destroy rhythm, voice, and tone. And while short clear words may be the easiest to read, so-called “big” words have flavors, textures, and nuances that simpler words can never emulate.

Somehow, I had forgotten a the most important tenet of writing: the rules must serve my purpose. If the rules are upstaging my message, I have to let them go.

While advice from other writers may be useful, I always have to take it with a grain of salt. I do still love the way William Zinsser writes. And as rules of thumb go, his make good sense. But they are only guidelines, not oracular pronouncements from a celestial mountaintop. Obedience should never be the guiding principle of any art—not if I want to master writing instead of it mastering me.

On Writing Well now rests snugly on a bookshelf behind a glass door. Maybe five years from now, I will go back and look at it again. For now, I will simply write what comes to me, preferring to revise with a lighter touch. Unlike Zinsser, I love to write. And I want to keep it that way.

The post How Books on Writing Both Entice and Ensnare Me appeared first on PASSIONATE REASON.

As an art major, I drew for a grade. But as a child, I drew because I wanted to understand. I wanted to explore why houses, people, and dogs looked the way they did. My tools of discovery were colors, lines, and shapes.

My drawings mirrored my growing understanding of what it meant to live in a world teeming with oddities like bicycles, fish, and stars.

I stopped drawing when I turned 13, partly because the private school I attended in middle school offered no art classes. My skills faded from neglect.

But later on in my junior year of college, at a time when I was deeply depressed, I abruptly changed my major from liberal studies to art. I left some of my professors scratching their heads, but there was something about drawing that I missed profoundly, and I wanted it in my life again.

Majoring in art, however, was nothing like drawing as a child. Each project had strict rules, not to mention the looming threat of a grade—and a potentially humiliating critique for every project.

Although there were parts of my art major adventure I loved, I was always tense. I never really felt like the art was a way to express myself. It was about pleasing teachers for a grade. That is why, when I left college, I stashed my oil paints, brushes, and drawing pencils in a closet. I would only return to them many years later in 2020 during a pandemic.

The pandemic reminded me that life is strange—and that my most basic assumptions could be inverted overnight. Suddenly I was home-bound, and at night there was a sense of loneliness as I got ready for bed. For company, I got into the habit of listening to YouTube. I stumbled onto a speech by Alan Watts, a self-described entertainer and “mystic” who in the sixties popularized eastern religions to the western world. Although I am a religious skeptic, I was intrigued by a video called, “Life is Not a Journey.” I thought that he had an interesting point of view.

I would listen to his lectures as I put dishes in the cabinets. His voice—which sounded like Gandalf—consoled me. And a topic he kept returning to was the unity between opposites such as objects and the space around them. Although they contrast, they depend upon each other to exist.

The speech reminded me of the importance of negative space in drawing. In the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards emphasizes the need to be aware of negative space when you draw. It matters just as much as the “positive” forms because without each other, neither could exist.

This principle goes without saying, yet it is not how most people conventionally think about forms and the space they inhabit. The “unity of opposites” seems strange. But the most basic rules of drawing direct attention to it.

Art makes the familiar seem new again. While drawing I feel like I have gone back in time, like I am a child trying to grasp what makes something look like a house or a dog or a car. Art restores me to a more innocent–and interesting–way of seeing.

I think I know what runner looks like until I try to draw one. Then I realize that I have no idea what a runner looks like. Running has become a musty symbol in my head.

Besides, a running person looks completely different according to the point of view you adopt. Are you drawing them from the side or from behind? Which of the hundreds of fleeting positions that occur in mid-run are you going to capture? Which position should you choose?

Conventional ways of thinking—which usually involve symbols—can lead to boredom; drawing is a way to unlearn them. According to Picasso, “The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”

While I am no Picasso, I get it. When I draw, I become aware that the rules of what makes a thing look real are incredibly odd.

What can be stranger than foreshortening—a distortion of size that occurs with variations in distance? A foot of a recumbent figure, because of its proximity to me as a viewer, can look mountainous while dwarfing his more distant moon of a head.

If I crave new sights, it is not always necessary to travel. Sometimes it is enough to peel the stale skin off the familiar and make it novel again.

Drawing is a way to do that. It rewards you for looking at objects as if you had never seen them before. This mindset yields better drawings and a more interesting life.

But if you persist in drawing what you know rather than what you see, your drawings will look amateurish. To see honestly, you have to unlearn—for the moment—that a head is bigger than a foot or that the lines of a road run parallel as they recede from the viewer.

Another Picasso quote beautifully expresses the relief of “unlearning” old ways of seeing: “It took four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

But studying the rules of perspective can only take me so far. Art also enables me to see beauty in things that people normally think of as unattractive: dilapidated houses, a cracked car window, or the wrinkles of an elderly person. A photography teacher once took my class to a lot full of broken, discarded automobiles. It was a visual feast.

But what about other arts? If drawing can make me relish objects ordinarily overlooked or reviled, can writing? In a different way, yes. Just as drawing from life means honoring whatever you see, in fiction I have to honor my observations of real people.

That usually means I have to let my characters have flaws. Those flaws, even the most egregious ones, are an essential part of who they are.

Instead of rushing to edify my characters by making them more mature or reasonable or pious, I relish those flaws in the same way I could be dazzled by a yard full of battered cars.

As a writer who thrives on drama, I have no interest in reforming my characters or forcing them to conform to some arbitrary definition of perfection. If my characters are jerks, as a writer I am duty-bound to preserve their naughty integrity. That makes them seem more real than if I make them all goodness and light.

Besides, conflict is the engine of fiction. “Flaws” in characters are—for story-telling purposes—pure gold.

We are a culture obsessed with what we can change, improve, reform, rehabilitate, or control. Art is a way to step out of this mindset, to suspend judgement, to observe, and—at least for that moment—to accept what we see. Art is about celebrating whatever is.

Baruch de Spinoza said, “I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.”

The best literature is about understanding. If I populate the pages of my story with pious, unselfish people who always get along, my story will stall.,

But it is not just that characters must clash for drama. In fiction, and maybe also in life, we love characters not just in spite of their flaws but because of them.

This should be obvious. But—like negative space in a drawing—it seems so strange.

The post Art Makes the Familiar New Again appeared first on PASSIONATE REASON.