Writer Wander 029 - Give Yourself a Present Every Day

Assuming you earned it, of course.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Rider Wander 29, give yourself a treat every day. Ladies and gentlemen, I finally found the trick to being able to record successfully while you are outside. And it is just as simple as raising your voice to a level where you are consistently uncomfortable that someone is going to run into you and ask you why the hell you're talking to yourself. But this seems to be the only way to be out and about and recording while I'm trying to block out whatever ambient noise is going on in my background. So we'll see how this goes, right? Because uh, you know, it's not really much of a ride or wander podcast if there's not a lot of wandering going out. But wandering unfortunately means leaving my house. So the title of this episode is actually a reference. Give yourself a present every day. It is a reference to Twin Peaks, a great show, by the way. And um, in sort of like a little, I was it's not really a throwaway scene because it just reveals a lot about the character of the main character. But the main character, Dale Cooper, who is a an FBI special agent, who is in this small town to investigate a murder that has just occurred. You know, he's talking to the local sheriff while they're I think they're going out to like a diner or something, and he gets himself like a little piece of pie. And uh, you know, one of the things he says is that you know, one of his philosophies in life is to make sure he gives himself a present every single day, right? And it's easy to like hear that and just dismiss it as like you know, your typical wasteful mentality, your typical mentality of like wasting money, spending it on useless consumeristic crap. But I think that there's a lot more to that idea of giving a present to yourself. There's a very similar concept present in the concept of like a personal finance sphere, which is like um pay yourself first, which is this idea that before you spend your money on anything else, you you put it for yourself. Now, this is typically conceptualized as setting aside a certain amount for savings or or investing, but I I would apply it broadly, and that's how I'm gonna apply it here. I would apply it broadly just to anything that brings value to your life. So, really, anything that brings value to your life that makes your life better by adding it to that, it is a worthy investment for yourself. It is worth it to put money aside for things that make your life better, that add them up. Now, in the case of Twin Peaks, for you know, for for Dale Cooper, it was a cherry pie, but what doesn't it doesn't matter as much what the exact thing you're gonna spend your money on is or your time on is what matters is that it is something that adds value to your life and that gives you an incentive to keep moving forward, sort of like the carrot on the stick, if you were a proverbial horse, um, so to speak. But obviously, we are humans and not horses, and I'm a writer, not an FBI special agent trying to investigate a murder that has occurred in a small town. So, in what sense could this be said to apply to me and my process? One of the things that I talked about when I first started writing this particular novel is that I was going to make a concerted effort to maintain the mystery, the the allure, the secretive nature of the story, of the story, while I was writing it, right? And to do this, I was explicitly going about a process in which I was not going to world build as heavily as I typically would have, as I have done in my previous novels, where I make sure to have a much more detailed understanding of the history that I'm that I'm putting forward to my setting. I, you know, I explicitly decided I am going to focus on the plotting aspects of the story, and I'm gonna focus on just making a plot that flows naturally, and a lot of those world-building details that happen in between are going to be filled in as I write, and I'm gonna trust in the process and I'm gonna assume that whatever answers I come up with on the fly will, by their nature, simply be better and more impactful than anything else I could have come up with while I was um just in the planning stage, right? And so far, I I think that has definitely proven to be the case. I feel myself very motivated to continue this novel, um, even even after like the the initial week that I've worked on it has passed, because there's a lot of things that I myself as an author left for myself to to find out. And I think that there's something very important that needs to be highlighted there, and it's that as an author, as a creator, who is the first person that is going to consume the piece of media, be it a movie, video game, piece of art, that you're going to be creating. It's gonna be you, you're gonna be the one who's gonna be consuming it for the first time as an author. That piece will be virgin to any eyes except your own. In fact, it could be argued that the vast majority of works of art that have ever been made have only ever been seen by their creators. Whom is to say that there are many works of art that have only ever been seen and you know, never published, never shared with anyone else outside of a creator's particular circle, his inner, his inner sphere, right? So that's more stuff to chew on. But when you when you visualize that you yourself, when you are an author, you are not just an author, you're also a reader. Obviously, you're not the same kind of reader that is going to be reading your novel because you have the element that you are a novelist, so you you I think I think that you know novelists or or writers or creators they enjoy things differently than people who who just consume the thing, right? You know, not necessarily better, but just differently, right? And you know, I I think that we we often like will focus more on like the structure of our how a thing was constructed because naturally we will want to ask ourselves, how could I make something like this? How could I execute something like this? Um, and usually that's why as novelist um and as a as a plotter myself, I do get a lot of kicks out of structuring a story, but I feel that recently with my prior stories, the error I was coming to was that I was leaning in too much into that writer structuralist engagement side, and I forgot that myself, even being a writer, I am also a reader, and I also need to give myself an incentive, some degree of mystery, to keep pressing forward to find out just what this story is about. Because something that I always ran into with writing advice very early on, um, was this idea that you know the story is its own thing, it unravels. You you are the one who's writing it down physically, but at the end of the day, it's its own thing, and oftentimes you will find your own characters surprising you, doing things that you would not have expected them to do. However, for a long time I had disregarded that aspect, you know, I had foolishly and dare I say arrogantly assumed that this was just some artsy fartsy, you know, stuff, you know, some hipster craft that we that we tell each other to to feel that we as writers are somehow more special than other types of of artists. But because of that, my process had become detached. There had been a lot of soul that I had lost in the the process of writing the novel. I have killed a lot of the mystique, a lot of the magic, a lot of the myth that surrounds the very act of creation, which when you really think about it, and maybe maybe this is cutting a little too deep, but yeah, we're going there because that's what we do in Rite of Wonder. Creation, the act of creation, artistic creation. Well, you're replicating the divine, you know, to create, it is an act of a divinity, it is the act of God. When the artist creates, you are behaving in a pattern modeled after God. The first act ever was creation in some variety, so you're engaging with that with that primordial state. But when you demysticize things, when you when you boil them down, when you reduce them to their material elements, well, you do lose a lot of the magic that propels them in the first place, and that had been what had happened. So give yourself a little treat every day. How do I apply this to my writing? As the artist, as the writer, leave yourself a little mystery every day in your writing. Give yourself something that you don't quite know how it's gonna be resolved yet, so that you have something to look forward to as you write. Give yourself a little inkling of mystery, a little kick in the bum that'll push you forward, that'll make you ask yourself, hmm, what if what if this thing happens this other way that I was not that I was not expecting, right? One of the things that um is keeping me motivated with this novel is that you know I'm still ultimately not quite sure of the ending. I know that the the character will arrive in the city he's gonna go to, but I don't know what direction I'm gonna take this story because you know as I was preparing, as I was, as I was writing, and as I was leaving the outline open, I could visually see how the how it was setting up multiple independent plot threads in the story that I could hypothetically continue in other novels, and it would not be a sequence akin to what you would consider to be a normal series of books. It would be very it would be something completely different from that. It would be like a series of like um narratives that yes, that are inter interconnected, they take place in the in the same world, but they're not following a singular thread. It's like a it's a structure that I don't think I've done before where I'm deliberately leaving multiple threads open, dangling, because first of all, that makes it so that the actual plotting and storytelling can be a lot lighter and a lot quicker, and I can get to the fun part, which is the drafting and the writing. But aside from that, um it's also uh leaving me with things to find out, mysteries to unravel. So giving myself a present every day when it comes to the context of like writing the novel is an understanding that the novel is not just a product that comes out of my imagination, it's not just something that I have to execute from point A to point B. It's also a present for myself, it is a form of self-expression that is meritorious and joyful for its own sake. It is something that is good to do for its own sake, and in a world where you're constantly working, where you're constantly involving yourself in things that that you might not necessarily wish to be doing in a given moment, I think that's powerful. There's just a certain a very real sense of joy when you recover this idea that you're you know this art for art's sake is worth it. It's worth doing. So I I've been walking earlier through this episode through the Museum of Art where I'm currently from. What's really cool about it is that behind it there's like these very cool, there's like a you know a garden around it with like little little pools with koi fish and stuff like that. And I just wandered out of it and I stumbled into like this this huge open plaza that you know there's not really anything particularly impressive about it, it's just like a bunch of like like office buildings, but it's a very huge and expansive space, so it's very easy for me to find a space where I can talk to my microphone just alone a little bit more. But what I find fascinating about this is that uh I was here a couple years back, and um I remember that I came around here and I I saw it when it was sort of like still in construction, it was very dingy, and uh it was kind of a depressing place, but I also enjoyed walking in there because it felt it felt like ruins. But now that I've returned to this place after such a long time, um now I see that it is actually um it has been renovated, it's been put in much better condition than what it was when I when I first stumbled upon it. So it's just it's pretty cool to to see that, right? It's not often that I see something like that happen. Usually where I'm from, it's the other way around. It's that you know things just keep getting into deeper states of deterioration. So it's certainly refreshing when the opposite is the case. One of the key lessons that I've had in in my life up until now, in recent times, and that I'm now applying into my creative sphere is the joy of white space in our own existence, in our in our daily life. The joy of finding moments in time that we we could simply wander, we can be we can be in leisure, you know. The Greeks and the scholastics had it right that you know, in a very real sense, leisure, contemplative leisure was the highest form of activity available to man. And that's something that I'm growing to to understand more. That there's you know the joys of the unfettered life, and by unfettered, I don't mean that you lack principles, that you lack morals or or virtues, but there's a certain goodness to you know just chilling, to just enjoying and being present in a in a particular in a particular moment, and you can also apply that to writing. There's a certain joy to the unfettered art, to the art being done for for its own sake, the art that allows itself to unravel beside any grand plans of how things are gonna go, any marketing plans about how things should be directed, or the overall structure, or or what's particularly um marketable, right? The gift is the act of writing itself that will naturally reward you as a writer as you come to discover things about characters that that you thought you had already known, that you thought you had already you had already created. That's that ad that's the magic, right? And I think that particularly, you know, for if you're a plotter like me, right? You know, I take great pride in being a plotter, right? I think that you know, and this is just my opinion, don't quote me or anything like that. I feel that most people who want to write a novel and never get around to it, a lot of times it's because they're they're more plotter than gardener, right? They're more plotter than Panzer, right? Panthers are like people who write the novel spontaneously without an outliner. But I think you know, personally, I think that most people would do well with an outline, and it's only very rare cases where an author can work spontaneously without an outline. It's just that you know, an outline often feels like extra work, so people, you know, I I guess a hot take, most people cope about being a discovery writer or a panther when in reality they're probably just a plotter that doesn't want to sit down to plot the events of the story. And I'm always great, very grateful that I was able to under uncover that I was a plotter early on because that has allowed me to finish novels whereas there have been many people that have struggled for a long time. But there's something to be said that you know, as a plotter, perhaps I have taken too much advantage or taken too much, felt too much safety in this idea that uh I was gonna make my creative process into a structured process that I could predict, that I could, you know, that I could put on a given timeline or a thing, and I still do that. I still do that, but when you lean in too much into that, you do start losing that magic. You need to make white space in your own work, those are the presents because otherwise you'll just be writing with no presence, you'll be writing to execute a plan, and that's not that's never fun. I I don't know about you guys, but that's just that's just that's never that's never fun. And I know that there's degrees of things, and that's the point. There's degrees of things. No one is fully an outliner, and no one is fully a panther. There are always things that we you know we fall into a spectrum as as writers or as creators between between both of those of those things, right? And I I was falling into a period of time where I was leaning in too much into the plotting aspect, and um it is time to recuperate, to heal, and a lot of this can also be connected to my insecurities around around leadership and around the current positions I've taken up recently in life. You can also see that dichotomy between you know the person who wants to um who wants to give presence for himself and who wants to set up everything, right? So art art reflects life. And uh to a certain degree, life reflects art. But that was Rider Wander. Keep wandering.