Kevin Brown

Intentionality, Consuming, and Art

4/4/2016

I was listening to an episode of the Design Matters podcast this morning, an interview with Eric Zimmer. If you're wondering why I was listening to a podcast about design, you can thank Steve (see examples of his work at his blog or his website), as he sent it to me weeks ago, thinking I would like it. He was mainly right, as I liked a lot of what he had to say in the last quarter or so of the podcast. The first part focuses on his life, which is interesting and inspirational in its own right, but not what caught my attention.

Near the end, he starts talking about living intentionally, though he doesn't really use that word. He does talk about decision fatigue and a cognitive bank (though I'm not sure if that's the exact term he uses). What he means is that we have a limited ability to make decisions or think about things. If we wake up and have to decide what to wear, what to have for breakfast, what time to leave for work (even what time to actually get out of bed), etc., then that leaves us less cognitive ability to make important decisions (you can read about the same idea in Willpower by John Tierney and Roy Baumeister). Anyone who knows me understands that I largely try to live my life this way.

This idea led into his next one, which was about consuming. He quoted a friend of his who said that we spend 95% of our time consuming, consuming, consuming, and only 5% of our lives reflecting on what we're consuming. He talked about how the internet and Netflix are designed to lead us to click to the next article or blog post or show rather than stopping and reflecting on what we've read or seen. His argument is that, if we stopped and reflected on whatever we've consumed for even thirty minutes, our lives wouldn't be the same.

I like this idea a good deal. Even the lists I make (movies I've seen and books I've read) can lead me to do the same thing, as it can become about numbers, not about thinking about or digesting what I'm watching or reading. Our society encourages such an approach to life, as everything focuses on consumption. If Thoreau wrote that "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation," our society needs to hear that most people lead lives of quiet obliviousness (they might even lead lives of loud obliviousness, given all of the noise in our world, but quiet refers more to the quality of our lives, I would argue). We consume emails and texts and (ahem) blog posts and videos and pictures and on and on through our supposedly smart phones, and we ignore the world around us. The only way to be able to create art is to be aware. For all of the argument that our technology connects us, I tend to see it distract people from what is really important more than anything else (and, yes, I'm fine to sound like a crotchety old man here).

All of this leads him to envy. He quoted Theodore Roosevelt on envy (I would put it here, but I can't find the quote, unfortunately), where he effectively says that envy hurts both ourselves and the other person. The host of the show, Debbie Millman, tries to argue that social media forces us to envy people more (or create more envy), but Zimmer disagrees. He responds that nothing forces us to envy people, and I agree. We have choice in the matter, and we need to choose wisely.

He doesn't directly relate this idea to art, but it's clearly implied. He talks about how we believe we'll only be happy once we get x or y in our lives (connecting to consumption, of course), and that's true about creating art. We believe that we'll be happy when we get a poem published in that journal or a novel accepted by this publisher. The truth is we won't be happy then, even if our book becomes a best seller or we begin receiving invitations to speak all over, maybe even give a TED talk. The art itself needs to make us satisfied, not because it is perfect, but because we love the act of creation itself.

If you have thirty minutes or so, you should listen to the podcast. Then, you should take thirty more minutes and think about what he has to say. It might just inspire you, too.

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Weird Writing Goals

12/28/2014

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I never believed I was going to have any kind of success as a writer. I spent the first decade or so not taking my writing very seriously, getting a few poems published in journals that were mainly hand-stapled and distributed in local coffee shops and pizza places. When I had my first book accepted for publication (it was the third one actually published, due to all kinds of problems with the publisher), I got to write an acknowledgements section, which I sent to some friends. One responded that it sounded like I had thanked everyone I might possibly thank, as if I didn't believe I would write another book. I didn't. I was surprised I had written one that had gotten published.

Along the way, though, I had a couple of goals that I did believe I could meet, though I thought it would take me an entire lifetime to do so. They were strange goals, but I thought they were realistic and reachable if I continued writing on the pace I had set out for myself. It turns out I've already met both of them.

First, I wanted to be read by the same number of people who live in my hometown. There is clearly no way to prove that I have met this goal, as I cannot say who has or has not read my work. When it comes to print journals, I can only give their circulation, not the number of people who actually read my work in that particular issue. I also don't know how many copies are passed from one person to another. Now that many journals have moved online, it is easier to keep up with those statistics, though harder to get from journals. It's not like I'm going to email all of the editors who have published my work and ask them to give me a count for my particular work.

However, I can use the circulation of print journals and the number of hits an online journal receives. Using those statistics, I actually hit my goal seven years ago with one publication. My hometown has a population of about 65,000 people. It probably would take my entire life to get to that number just going by my poetry publications, as most journal have a tiny readership, numbering in the hundreds, not thousands. However, I had an essay published in the online version of The Chronicle of Higher Education, which has about one million distinct readers a year. I'll take my chances and say that 65,000 people looked at that essay. In the years since, I've published more essays with them and other similar sites, so I'm fairly confident I've hit this goal.

What I like about this goal is that it reminds me of my primary concern as a writer. While I like to sell my work, I know I'm not going to make a lot (or any) money writing poetry. Thus, my goal is to get my work in front of as many people as I can, as I want to share that writing widely. I want as many people as possible to read that work. It doesn't matter if they buy a book or not. I used to worry about building a career by publishing in the right places. Now, I'm just concerned with being read by people who enjoy the type of writing I do, whether that's my poetry or essays.

The second goal has more to do with quantity. I've always wanted to fill an entire shelf on my bookcase with my writing. It doesn't have to be all my writing, as a journal I've been published in counts, and I know my work might only take up one page of that journal, but it has to be a work I've been published in. My books certainly count, of course. If I were starting such a goal today, it would be much more challenging, given the move to online publications. However, since I started about sixteen years ago, I've been able to meet this goal, as well, as you can see from the picture below.

The top shelf is creative writing, and I have clearly run out of room for some more recent publications. There are the hand-stapled journals in the middle, with some anthologies and my books more toward the left. The bottom shelf is academic writing, which is why it is much smaller. I used to have the two shelves combined, so I technically met this goal some time ago, but I liked separating them out, even thought it's a false distinction. Writing an essay for something like The Chronicle is much more in line with my creative work than it is with academic writing, but I put such writings with the academic, as it's part of my academic life.

Since my focus is getting my work read, I like this visible reminder that a number of people have had the opportunity to read my work, whether or not they have taken it. Writing goals should help us remember why we do what we do. For me, it's not about the money; it's about the people who read my work. Like most writers, I want an audience, and I'm glad I've been able to find one, no matter how small it might be.

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Two Pieces of Writing News

11/5/2014

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First, the publisher of my memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, informed that it is now available on the Kindle. You can see it here and buy a copy, if you would like. You can also preview it, should you want to see what it's like.

Second, that same publisher, Wipf and Stock, sent me the proofs for my third book of poems, Liturgical Calendar. Thus, we're moving along with that process, and the new book should be out soon, maybe even by the end of the year. It might even make a nice Christmas present for that poetry lover in your life.

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Fame and Small Successes

10/19/2014

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If you ever talk to people who are just beginning their writing career, they will often talk about their first book as if it will change their lives. That happens for a few people, someone like Jonathan Safran Foer, for example, who sold his first book for $500,000, if I'm remembering correctly. For most of us, though, we publish that first book, and life continues on just as it did the weeks before the book came out.

I was remembering a former acquaintance/co-worker/maybe friend this week when I was thinking about this subject. He's one of those people who seems to enjoy the idea of fame from writing more than the writing. He was writing in one genre and having some success with it, though nowhere near what he wanted. Thus, he switched genres in an attempt to try to become famous that way. He's gone through a number of ventures over the past decade to try to finally get whatever recognition he thinks he deserves, but he has largely left his writing far behind.

I have to admit that it took me some time to get over this, as well. When my first book came out, I did have some success. I was invited to Colorado to give a reading, and they paid my way, something that I had never imagined happening. One of my poems showed up on The Writer's Almanac, and I received emails from strangers telling me of the effects the poem had on their mornings (in looking up my poem, I find that it was five years ago today that poem showed up; odd that I should be thinking of it this morning). I expected the emails and invitations to continue, but they didn't. I just had to go back to work writing poems, finding the pleasure there, which I did, thankfully.

This week, I received an interview request, not from The New York Review of Books or Paris Review, but from The Mockingbird, the literary journal from East Tennessee State University, where I received my Master's. I was thrilled and honored, and I accepted the request quickly. This request will seem small to most people, but it matters greatly to me. I grew up on the campus of ETSU long before I went there for any academic reason, as both my parents worked there. My two years pursuing my Master's degree were two fabulous years, as I made great friends and finally began to take myself seriously as an English student. I didn't yet know I wanted to be a writer, but I was beginning to try (I submitted to The Mockingbird both years I was there, and I was rejected (rightly so) both times).

There are other students there right now, and they're trying to be writers, as well. Perhaps they're just starting to take English seriously, as I did. They need to see that there are people who come from ETSU, who attended a poor county high school, who can still have some success in the world. It would be better if I had the name recognition of a Morrison or Franzen, but I can only bring to them what and who I am, and I can hope that is enough for them.

After my first book, one other opportunity I had was to go on a local radio show done by a friend of the family. It was in the upper level of a Food City, and it broadcast on an AM station. I didn't sell any books from that appearance, and I don't even know who heard it that morning. I just know that I had a great time talking about poetry to people who might not care about it otherwise. That's success and fame enough for me.

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October 03rd, 2014

10/3/2014

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For years, I said that I would never be able to write a novel. I tried when I was fresh out of graduate school, and I got to page seventy-something (I believe that was chapter 12, by the way) before running out of steam. I had also already passed the climax of the novel by that point. Whenever I tell people about the plot of that novel now, they ask me if it was satirical or humorous. It was not intended to be so.

My running joke about my inability to write prose fiction was always the same. I would tell people that I was good at writing fiction, save for two things: character development and narrative arc. Really, I would say, other than those two, I'm fine. Most people just looked at me sadly at that point.

But I've written the first draft of a novel now, just over 270 pages, in fact. The obvious question is about what changed in the past 17 years to cause me to be able to actually sustain a narrative for that long. Here are a few thoughts.

First, I simply began to take writing more seriously during the intervening years. When I was an undergraduate, I started trying to write poetry because I thought that's what English majors did. I was not a natural at English, and I struggled through my first few years. This was at least one way I thought I could try to be like those whom English came naturally to. I even had one of my poems published in the student literary publication, though, looking back on that poem, I have no idea how. I wrote intermittently throughout the next decade or so, often quitting for long stretches of time, maybe writing twenty poems and a handful of stories or essays in a year.

Once I began to take my writing more seriously (I had a poem published in a journal I didn't think I could get in, which was the catalyst), I started developing discipline about my writing. Donald Hall has a quote I love: "Anyone who loves accomplishment lives by the clock and the list." I needed to learn this lesson, so I began trying to write more regularly. I did a project where I tried to write a poem a day for a year (I ended up with about 250 drafts of poems), which helped tremendously.

Now, whenever I take on a project, I find that I need to write on it every day, if at all possible. With this project, I was able to do that (save for a few days for travel). I took Sundays off to do other writing, but I was at the computer six days a week otherwise. I didn't generate a great deal of material every day, as my goal was simply one single-spaced page, which works out to between 550 and 750 words (roughly) a day. Some days I wrote more than that, but I seldom wrote less. At 2 pages (double-spaced) a day, I knew I could write a draft in roughly 150 days or 5 months.

However, the increased discipline doesn't explain the switch to prose fiction, which was a greater problem, given my trouble with the genre. One thing that helped was that I wrote a memoir a couple of years ago. That showed me I could sustain a narrative over a longer period of writing, and it was easier in the sense that I was not having to create the world of the book. Since I was drawing on personal experience, many of the details were already there for me. I needed to shape that narrative arc, but taking away the need to create something from nothing freed me to focus on that arc.

Also, I took a year and tried to write short stories. I repeatedly told myself that the stories were simply practice, that if they never get published (which is true so far), that wasn't the point of them. In each of them, I tried to focus on creating characters, as that was my other major weak point when it came to fiction. In fact, I had once tried to write a story where the reader was supposed to feel sympathy for the main character. When my wife read it, she assured me she felt no sympathy at all; in fact, she didn't like him. I definitely needed the practice with character. Those stories gave me the practice I needed to feel comfortable creating a character who could change and grow over the course of a novel.

Most importantly, in the 17 years since I last tried to write a novel, I have read hundreds of contemporary novels. It helps that I teach a course in contemporary literature, so I spend my summers reading some of the more recent books. Even though I never really thought about them from a writer's point of view, I was certainly beginning to learn what worked and what didn't in a long fictional narrative. Then, when I decided to take on this task (last October; for the record, attending the Southern Festival of Books and hearing Allan Gurganus read provided me with the inspiration I had been looking for), I started looking at stories and novels differently. I started to ask questions about how the authors did what they did, to break down stories and novels to see how they worked. Whenever writers are asked for their advice about writing, they always tell people to read more. That's good advice.

Overall, I needed discipline, practice, and models. Those all seem self-evident, but most of us forget about most, if not all, of them. We forget we need to just make the time (and, yes, we all have the time if we truly want it) to sit down and do the work. We forget that the first try at anything is going to lead to failure (or learning, which is a much better way to look at it). We forget that there are many others out there doing what we're trying to do, and we can learn so much from them.

Even if this draft never gets published anywhere, if no one other than my wife and a few friends read it, I'm glad I did it. If nothing else, it was simply fun. I enjoyed walking every morning, thinking about my characters and their world. I loved trying to solve the problems that came up in the writing, how my characters were going to get where they were going and how I could pull that off as a writer. I enjoyed it so much, after the revisions and another poetry project, I think I'll try to write another one.

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Advice to Writers

9/25/2014

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David Mitchell gives some good advice about writing in this article from The Atlantic. Not surprisingly, he talks about how to create worlds, which he's so good at.

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Kurt Vonnegut

9/15/2014

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I've liked Kurt Vonnegut's work longer than I've liked any author's. However, over the years, my opinion on that work has changed, sometimes rather significantly. Here's an essay from storySouth I wrote about that relationship.

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Getting the Writing Done

9/7/2014

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There's a quote I love from Donald Hall that talks about what writers need to do to get their writing done. In his book Life Work (which is fabulous, by the way), he writes, "Anyone who loves accomplishment lives by the clock and the list.” I thought of that quote earlier this week when I saw this blog post about getting up in the morning and writing. It's a good reminder that we must set aside time to do what is important to us, whether that's reading or writing or whatever. In this case (and in mine), it's writing.

Similarly, I liked this article from The New Yorker about how walking helps us think. When people ask me how I find the time to write and work out, I explain that I think through things when I'm walking. Then, once I get to the computer or pen and paper, the writing comes much more easily, as I've already been doing it that morning. Of course, if you really want to read about walking and thinking (and writing), you should read Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust, which is completely devoted to walking (it has chapters on Socrates and the Romantics, for example).

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