A Case for Sunday Dinner

Every week, my grandma hosts Sunday lunch (dinner, not supper). All the aunts and uncles and cousins are there, and Grandma makes a pot roast or chicken, with all the fixings, plenty of them.The scent drifts down the hallway to the garage, and in the kitchen the smell mingles with hustle and bustle. Someone is always talking, there's food set out on the kitchen table ready for the dining room, and small grandchildren run about with toys in hand. The kitchen is the hub, the boys lay around in the living room, and Grandpa dozes on the couch waiting for lunch. A granddaughter bangs keys on the piano; none related, no melody. Just glee. When dinner is steaming on the long seasonal tablecloth in the dining room, grandma calls everyone in. Each sits in his or her own chair, the same for years. After Grandpa prays, dishes fly. Within twenty minutes everyone is done eating, the little ones are roaming, and the boys are asking for dessert. Grandma always has it, plenty for everyone.

It is the quintessential Sunday dinner; hubbub, food, community, generations, noise and confusion. It is tradition, Sunday Dinner—but no one is there for the food. If it was, everyone would make their own meal and stay home. It's for the experience. The togetherness, community, hubbub, and all the week's fresh talk.

Grandma changes the food week by week. If she didn't, after weeks of the same meal (even though no one really comes for the food), everyone would be sick of it. Sunday dinner isn't about the food—but it does matter.

Technically, writing isn't about the fixings—but the fixings do matter.

If Grandma had everyone over and said there was no meal prepared, the mood would turn sour fast (behind the polite "Oh-it-doesn't-matter"s. Even if something isn't actually necessary, we notice (and experience varying levels of displeasure) when it's missing.

You can write a story without creativity; it's the bare bones and basics of what happened, like a bullet point list. Or, you can write a story with all the excellence of careful craftsmanship. The details of the story won't change—but the reader's enjoyment will be far greater.

Everyone wants to read a well written story, even and balanced. The details without the colors are monotonous; the colors without the details are frivolous.

Write colors into your details, like a good Sunday Dinner. Your readers will thank you.

What colors do you write with?

Why Fall is Writing Weather

Fall is writer's season. Winter is full of short days of gray skies and cold wind, punctuated by the short thrill and glitter of a fresh coat of snow. Winter is reader's weather; all it begs is a cozy blanket, a hot beverage, and a thick spine. Spring is a universal sigh of relief, across profession and personality, as the heart and the soul remember that cold is not the only temperature. Summer is working and playing weather—for playing just as hard as working. But fall, fall. Fall belongs to the writer. The crisp nights, the sun-warmed noons, the leaves that rustle louder and louder as they change colors. The colors that defy even imagination and leave us stunned with their humble beauty. Fall is the writer's because everything about fall is worth writing about. The sunrise that creeps later and later into the morning, so those of us who sleep past 6am can actually see it some days; the smell of dust and must and fresh chill, and the steady stream of leaves wandering to the ground that prove Isaac Newton right once again.

There are many schools of thought about the best environment for writing. Some prefer the middle of the night. Others want the calm of a long summer day. The gray of poverty to stimulate the imagination, the sparkle of riches to write about 'what is,' the open room with a desk and a chair and sheets and sheets of cream paper and a smooth pen. But left out of every description is the most important part: fall. Fall makes the soul sing when the body must continue routine. There is good to find in every season—but it's easiest to find in fall.

*What's your ideal writing place? I'd love to hear from you.

Making it Matter—P6

6 Steps to creating something that matters: Find other people who care about the same things, and work with them: 

Nothing fuels synergy like a common passion. Working with someone who loves the same thing as you not only gives energy, but also fuels creativity. There are twice as many ideas, twice as much excitement, twice the brain power to catch errors and mistakes. Usually the creator has blind spots—working on something long and hard takes concentration and effort, and by the time you've completed a project, you've made it as perfect as you can. Someone else who comes along can spot a problem from a mile away, and if you're humble and willing to accept correction, they can help brainstorm a solution.

Sometimes it's hard to work with people who are just like you; they might remind you of yourself, and it's not always pleasant to be confronted with all of your qualities (both positive and negative) mirrored in another. But the extra vantage point and different maturity levels are indispensable. You may feel like you're alone in your passion—but you'd be surprised how many people care about the same things, if you just look for them.

There are several benefits to creating together. We can create more, faster. We don't burn out from isolation. We think of different ideas, bigger ideas, ideas that one person can't do alone but two can do together.

Create together. Though it may be scary, it's worth it.

Making it Matter—P5

6 steps to creating something that matters: Be patient: Rome wasn't built in a day. In elementary school, you are given a project that may seem daunting, but you complete it by the next day. In actuality, it was fast, easy, and, even though you probably stressed about it a lot, it's likely it didn't take very long. Real life projects are not like that. Writing something worth reading takes a long time; even if you do the initial draft very quickly, refining something into a product (or a book, or a song, etc.) that's worth the consumer value takes time.

It's hard not to rush ahead and finish, and call a sloppy version complete because you're sick of it and you want to be done. But in the long run, it will be worth it. The better you make your work, the longer it will last. And when you're old and it's old, the more you'll appreciate having taken the time to make it good.

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well. Even if it takes what feels like forever.

Making it Matter—P4

6 steps to creating something that matters: Create carefully: This is the internet age, the time that means you can write something, and less than 5 minutes later, publicize it so that anyone in the world can see it.This may seem like a dream come true to the masses, but is it really? It used to be a rigorous process to publish (and not only in the writing sense) anything at all. You couldn't record music in your home, you didn't just walk into the museum and hang your painting on the wall next to Van Gogh's (of course you can't do that today either), you couldn't bind together pages by hand, call them a book, and start selling it to the entire country. The standards were high. Creating took time, patience, and lots of hard work. Getting published by a publishing house meant months of revisions, discussion, communication, and sometimes scrapping your entire piece and starting over (this is a great article about that process with someone famous.).

Now, getting published is as easy as making something and posting it for the world to see—and before long, you're a sensation. The standards seem to be considerably lower now; but are they really?

Years ago, consuming art was a commitment. If you wanted to read a book, you had to buy it from a bookstore, or at the very least, request it from the library. Sometimes you had to wait, while they ordered it and it came in. In almost every case, there were less books (pun *relatively* intended), making the ones that you did acquire highly valuable. Getting a book was like finding an oasis in the desert.

Now, the commitment level for art intake is minimal, at most. I have access to most books or articles (or as many other written works as you can think of) on my computer. I can read them whenever I want, pull them up and comment on them, expressing my opinions. It is instant gratification, instant satisfaction. I don't have to wait for anything—if I want a hard copy of a book, Amazon will ship it to me, guaranteed delivery in two days. I have whatever I want.

This may seem nice, but underneath the cream cheese frosting, the carrot cake has a bitter twist. The old fashioned high standards were set by experts in the field, as they moderated content and searched for good value. Now the standards are set by... Me. And you. And your uncle, and my neighbor, and the man who cleans the gum off the sidewalk. We decide what we want (we always did that), we decide if it's good or not (we always did that), and we decide that it's not worth it to keep reading (we didn't exactly always do that). People used to read books even if they weren't the best, because it was all they could get their hands on. Now, we can get our hands on whatever we want. There is no limit to the literature that we can access, and so if we don't like you, or we think someone else wrote a better book about it, we're done with you. We have rocketed the standards to out of the atmosphere, because in becoming more eclectic, and having access to whatever we want, we've become literary snobs.

So create carefully; make your writing good, make it the best. Do your research, your homework, edit carefully, ask intelligent opinions and experts in the field. Because we're a tough crowd to please, and we want the best. And if you don't deliver, we're clicking the next link we see, and moving on.

Making it Matter—P3

6 steps to creating something that matters: Create for yourself: When something matter deeply, it's hard not to talk about. The artists that make a difference (the ones who create things that last) do their best because they care. They write the song, but don't produce it until they've rewritten and sung it over and over and over, to catch the tones, the pitch, the melodies and harmonies, to perfect the riffs and all the minute details that make a good song great.

At the end of the day, the first (and really only) person who needs to like your piece is you. If you're creating for meaning (not to get rich quick), you are the one who makes the decisions, who puts the finishing touches on it, who creates it as the master (even if you want to get rich quick, this is recommended). If you don't like it, even if the entire world does, you'll have the nagging voice in the back of your heart telling you it could have been better.

Writing is used for all kinds of things; catharsis, communication, and entertainment are the big three. Writing for catharsis is almost entirely for self. Writing for communication is two-fold, both for your good and for others, and writing for entertainment is mostly for the audience. When you're writing for catharsis, you're not thinking about the reader—in many cases, it's likely it won't be read by anyone besides yourself.

What if all of the writing we did was catharsis style: honest, open, genuine. Rather than trying to be something or impress someone, it is just simple communication of ideas that mean something to you. Then, if your life work fell into the ocean tomorrow and all the ink washed off, though it would be a terrible pain and travesty, you would still have written. And that is the goal (also, be sure to back up or copy your writing, just in case of force majeure).

*Note: This would seem to disagree with the previous point about writing to your audience, but it's really just capturing two different stages; write for yourself first and foremost, always. But, after you've established writing something that's your passion, then consider who you're writing to, so that they can also benefit from your work.

Making it Matter—P2

6 steps to creating something that matters: Look at who you're creating for: Teaching a five year old how to drive a car is ludicrous. He doesn't need to know that yet—it doesn't matter to him. You'd be better off teaching him how to ride a bike, or showing him how to tie his shoes. The same goes for creating: if you're going to bake cakes, don't feed them to someone on a low carb diet. If you're going to write music, don't play it for someone sworn to live in silence.

If you're writing to writers, use words and concepts they'll understand. If you're writing to engineers, tailor your language to them. In order to keep your audience, you have to care about them. You have to listen to them. You need to talk to them and know what they want and know what they're watching and listening to and reading, because then you can make what will interest them.

If your audience knows you care about them, they'll care about you.

Making it Matter—P1

6 steps to creating something that matters: Create by passion: If you are passionate about what you're making, it will matter. If you're passionate about coffee, become a specialist and learn to create the best cup of coffee you can. If you're passionate about carpentry, practice, tirelessly and endlessly until your reputation precedes you and people can't stop talking about your work. If business is your passion, never stop researching, learning, innovating, growing. Often it isn't the passion alone that brings the meaning—it's the repeated practicing, learning, and growth, over and over and over again.

What's even better is, that if something is your passion, you don't lose it. Don't confuse losing it with the burn outs, dry outs, and disillusionment that come with creativity. Low spells happen to everyone; without them, we'd have no fuel. In the dark times, in the low times, in the hard times, keep track of them—how you feel, what you see, what it's like.

Then, when you wake up one morning and the passion has woken up too, create with the hard times in mind. The depth of feeling and emotion is what gives art the extra fuel, what brings it from good to great. And your passion is what makes it matter; first to you, then to others.

Write to Your Audience

Language is given meaning by context. We've all heard that before, it was a drilled and repeated point in high school english, college writing, and every linguist will have an opinion about it. You will likely understand the people who you spend the most time with.  Another aspect of this is situational. If it's your birthday, and someone says, "Haps," to you, it means the same thing as if someone said, "Happy Birthday" to you. But if it's three months after your birthday and you fell into the water at duck pond because you tripped over a tree root, and someone says, "Haps," to you, it most certainly won't mean happy birthday. This is why it's important to write to your audience. Obviously, if you're writing a book, you need to understand the individuals you want to reach. The same goes for other publications. Blogging, advertising, newspaper articles; if you're writing to baristas, use their lingo. To talk about horses to a rancher, don't call then all ponies (unless he breeds ponies, then call away).

Use words your audience will understand—but in order to do that, you have to know you audience beyond just 'intended target audience.' You have to meet people who read those books, who watch those movies. You have to go to coffee shops and talk to baristas; and cattle ranches and meet people who work with horses, who understand them and breed them and who can tell you all about them.

If you can communicate with your audience on their level, your work will actually mean something to them. And, after all, creating something that has meaning is what we're all aiming for.

Writing Through Writers Block

Writing about how writing through writers block is all good and well when the tank is full and the brain is buzzing—enter writers block, and writing is impossible. None of the ideas take root for longer than a sentence, and every sentence looks flat and colorless. Grinding out one sentence after the next feels like punishment for a crime you didn't want to commit, and the longer you spend laboring over words, the less you can think of to say. It's a vicious cycle. Most good writers say that the best way to break writers block is to write through it. I've said it myself, on days when I wasn't experiencing the dread sensation. But days like today, it's difficult to take that advice. Terribly difficult. It feels like every word on the page is awful. And it doesn't make sense, and the jokes aren't funny, and the witty insights that are usually so good just sound like I tried too hard.

But, even though writing through writers block is so hard, and so awful, there is good news. It doesn't last forever. And you can always edit.

Because maybe tomorrow, when your brain isn't slogging under the weight of ill-clarity, and you look at your work again, you'll see that it wasn't as terribly awful as you thought, and without that word that's clogging things up over there, and that other phrase that's in the way there, it could be really not too bad, maybe might even be good!