2023-01-29 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Sunday 🗓 Date: January 29, 2023 📅 Week: Jan 23 – Jan 29, 2023

Good beautiful morning world. I’m here and I’m writing. What a time! The purest time! To be alive! Reflecting back a bit — it’s actually pretty cool that I’ve managed to maintain some semblance of this habit for several weeks now. Even though I often find these morning pages a slog, especially to get to the final word count, something about them is so fulfilling. Getting words on the page, putting my hands in motion over the keyboard, is so goddamn fun. And what’s more, pairing that with some dedicated time to planning stories means I’m actually generating new ideas. That sounds naïve in many ways, I’m sure, but I was always plagued by this idea that I’m not creative because I’m not always thinking of new ideas. And yet when I started pointing my mind towards getting things down on the page every day, thinking about narrative structure, thinking about characters, they can just come out! They can just happen!

It’s kind of like metta meditation: you’re inclining the mind, over and over again, towards something. It could be love, it could be creativity, it could be storytelling, but at the end of the day, it’s that same gentle redirection, over and over again, that leads to progress. It’s not buckling down and pulling teeth, having “self control,” or any of that. It’s tending to the mind like a garden, planting seeds and just being sure that we water them. That may mean time on the meditation cushion every day or time scribbling in my notebook to at least plant the seed of thinking about plot or character development and coming back to them, over and over again, that’s the source of progress. What a freeing concept.

I’m reading The Soul’s Code by James Hillman, and he points to this study which suggested that of the character traits for creatively successful people — age, intellect, introversion/extroversion, family — not a single character trait mattered in any meaningful way except for motivation. Creative people are simply motivated enough and connected enough to their “daimon” (to use Hillman’s phrasing) or their passion to keep coming back again. That resonates so hard in that historically I’ve failed in writing because I just haven’t kept coming back — I’ve always gotten bored or tired and given up too early.

I think I’ve got a new direction for my Balin and Balan retelling, and it’s quite a bit closer to the original story but I think gives a much better background for connecting with Balin’s “savagery” (as the original tale puts it — in my retelling it’s much more just about anger or fear). I don’t really want that high-noble fantastical setting of King Arthur. Imagine instead the feeling of Matt Bell’s In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, which is surreal and somewhat fantastical, but in a world all its own. The rules are different and it doesn’t matter why — he creates the world and just puts you directly into it. Yes the wife can sing things into existence, yes eating the unborn featus of your wife’s miscarriage will make a ghost live inside you. Shut the fuck up.

The hospital setting I had going for it before was going to make the duality get really messy, because if the main character is in a coma, it’s hard for his Balan to really have any agency. There’s also an aspect of the story that I didn’t really appreciate before. Balin and Balan aren’t just two brothers; Balan is the one who was responsible for calming Balin from his fits of rage! There’s a codependence there, and I wanted that to come through in some way.

And as such, I wanted to reimagine the two brothers in their own world, a spiritual codependence. For Balan, it’s a broadening of experience — he’s a protector, and while he’s protected his brother, he’s called to protect his kingdom. For Balin, it’s a loss of spiritual ground, an insecure attachment cut loose. To recoup himself, he travels in search of something and finds himself under the tutelage of a shaman.

I’m excited about this — it’s a bit more grounded than my other story, which by its nature of taking place predominately in a dream world was almost too limitless. It was becoming difficult for characters to define their flaws and goals and successes and truths when you could literally do anything; in contrast, putting constraints on the dream world felt futile, arbitrary. So here we are — a shaman has the power to access the extended range of human consciousness and the magical, but they’re still limited in that. They can only work with what supplies and people they have, they can only get so far from the real world.

Anyways, I’m a bit more optimistic here, I want to see where all of this takes me, but this feels like a lovely starting place. There’s fertile ground for people going crazy, experiencing euphoria, falling in love, falling in hate, and expanding the possibilities for what’s there. That sounds like a fun novel to me.

Anyways, I need to wrap up therese morning pages. Turbo mode, activate. Computer, write the rest of these pages. (That didn’t work, shoot.)

What else has been going on? Um, basically this. I’ve been sitting at this computer quite a lot, but for the first time in a while, I actually don’t feel bad about that. I feel like I’m creating things, making progress.

What’s more, I feel like I’m spending less time just doing nothing. By that I mean, I’m not spending so much of my day just watching youtube videos and playing overwatch. In fact, I haven’t really had a huge urge to do either of those! Nature is healing.

It’s not that reading books is likely morally superior or anything, but I do feel far more engaged when reading them. Watching TV and movies can be so passive, whereas with a book you have to construct the world to some degree. Words only point to things, whereas visuals can almost be the thing in and of itself.

I’m reading James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code (mentioned earlier before), and I’ll be honest: I’m a little wary of the premise. I’ll see if he can persuade me some more, but thus far, I’m not terribly on board with the premise that our fate exists from the moment we’re born. I think the expectation is that that’s freeing, that our flaws can be dormant superpowers waiting to blossom, but in a way that feels, to put it the most obvious way possible, fatalistic. He’s often working back saying “oh look at these famous people and their childhoods, you could interpret it this totally logical way but with the hindsight of history I can decipher it another way.” I’m mostly wary because he essentially entirely eschews the burden of having this track for the average person. That said, I think he does sort of acknowledge this at the beginning, so I’m hoping he has the intention to work backwards in some way eventually.

Also, ladies and gentleman: Raymond Carver. What a writer. The first story in What I Talk About When I Talk About Love is a home-run. It’s fantastic. The rest of the book is lovely, but I think this book started with a perfect short story and then the rest has no way to keep up with it. I find it so funny that I had literally never heard of Raymond Carver until I heard that Haruki Murakami translated a ton of his stories into Japanese. The other writers Murakami translated were all like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, so it was strange to see a totally unknown name up there, but now I get it. I think I just historically haven’t been as much of a short story kind of guy, but if they were all like that one, I’d be on board. (Most of them just aren’t, but that’s like saying “Why can’t all novels just be perfect?”)

And with that, this morning of writing comes to a close. It took longer than usual, I think, or maybe not. I got a bit distracted reading about shamanism and thinking about Matt Bell’s novels, but so it goes. We can’t all be perfect, but we’re also not inferior to anyone. Good night, I love you, see you tomorrow.

(Blatantly stealing that from Vivid Void, but that’s because VV crafted the absolute perfect good-night blessing for each one of us, and I can’t help but end these pages with it.)