Thursday! Between the 'Zines: The Secret to Being an Interesting Writer Who Writes Interesting Things

V4, I20

Do you want to be an interesting writer? Do you want to be a writer who writes interesting things? Do you want both, you greedy creative wonder you?

OF COURSE YOU DO!

Who wouldn’t, right? Well, as luck would have it, I know that secret. I learned it after years of rigorous training in a secluded temple high in the mountains of…I can’t say. The monks up there made me pinky promise I wouldn’t tell anyone where to find them and as I flew home from Tibet wearing my Order Of Interesting Creative Wonders Monastery t-shirt, I reiterated that promise to myself and everyone on the flight. No one would learn of their location at [INSERT GPS COORDINATES HERE] from me! No way no how!

Anywho, back to the secret. The usual move right now would be for me to drop you a professional, slick Call to Action with a website where you could sign up for my Secret of Interesting Creativity Interestingly seminar for the low, low early bird price of $149.99¹. To be honest with you right now, I don’t feel like dealing with all that mess. I’d have to get a new website and pay some poor web designer peanuts to build it. Then, I’d have to wrangle how to accept payments² and actually build the seminar course. Oh, and learn how to use Zoom, which I hate with a passion reserved mostly for the new rules Major League Baseball has installed to make the game more “fun”.

Nah. I’ll just give it to you for free. Ready? Grab a pen, or whatever you young people use these days. Snapchat? TikTok? Yeah, okay. Here’s the secret.

Pay attention.

That’s it. Pay attention. Want to write interesting poems? Pay attention to what’s happening around you. Look at the sky. Listen to traffic or the too-loud conversation happening in the car next to you. See that butterfly careening drunkenly from flower to flower? That’s a haiku right there. Connect two things you noticed together in some way — the way doesn’t have to be “sensible” either. Maybe that butterfly is carrying about the sky that way because the Federal agent controlling it is having technical problems that will blow the whole government surveillance operation wide open. Doesn’t that sound interesting, or at least more interesting than the same old “Spring has sprung / The butterflies are lovely” poems everyone else is writing.

I know this probably comes across as crotchety — the old man shaking his fist at all the whippersnappers³. I don’t mean it that way. I honestly do mean for this to be helpful because there are a lot of us writers out there who want attention. You know this. You’re one of them, or you’re a painter or an illustrator or a singer. You want people to notice what you’re doing and the sheer blind luck of discovery is driving you just a little bit nuts. The truth is none of us can control who sees anything we do. What we can control is how interesting our stuff is — how “clingy” it might be, how much depth it contains, and/or how much it doesn’t look or sound like everything else out there in the big wide artistic world.

I’m convinced, the only way we can avoid being boring is by seeing things most everyone else misses. To see, you have to look. Your eyes and ears have to be open. You have to want to notice odd little things that the average person — even the average artist — might miss. Attention is your best weapon against average, lifeless art.

But here’s the other thing. Paying attention doesn’t just help your art; it helps all of you. The more you pay attention, the more you notice things about the people around you and the better friend/spouse/significant other/sibling/co-worker/Dunkin customer/teacher/mentor/whatever you will be. You’ll seem like a wizard to people around you because, let’s face it, most folks out there in the world don’t pay attention to very much. Just look at cars on the road! Watch people around you in the store. Remember how often you nearly (or not too nearly) get run over in the grocery store. Most of the world isn’t paying attention. If you are, you’ll seem almost superhuman. Plus, you’ll be happier and probably you’ll find more spare change on the ground, so there’s that, too.

I don’t really have anything else clever here, assuming what I said before was clever, which it may not have been. Honestly, the past couple weeks have been rough and I’m not feeling like a very good motivator. BUT! I’ve been paying attention, which had led to some interesting little poems the last couple days⁴ and that makes me feel less like crud and more like a competent adult who isn’t a half-bad writer.

And with that, how about a story, read out loud! I recorded this one in the car just yesterday, because time to do cool creative stuff hasn’t been plentiful lately. Let me know how it sounds to you!

The Most Timely Recipe

1. Hurry! It goes up to $549.99 on May 1. Mayday! Mayday!

2. Bundles of small, unmarked bills are frowned-upon by the IRS…APPARENTLY!

3. That’s you. You’re the whippersnapper.

4. Which you will probably see soon…(dun dun dunnnnn).