LIFETIME MISTAKE TO CHANGE?

Have you made a lifetime mistake?

Better yet, have you done it quietly so no one would notice?

Good job.

Now, since we’re all getting down the road with less lifetime in front than in back, in theory, you want to change, you want to fix that mistake.

Good luck.

We’ve all known people with a happy heart, spring in their step, the ones who brighten every moment they’re a part of, and any other moment they find worthy of their attention.

And we love, love, love them.

It’s like a Beatle song:

 

There’s nothin’ you can know that isn’t known
Nothin’ you can see that isn’t shown
There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be

 

Except you’ve always wanted to know more, see more, and be someplace other than where you were.

You realize how unsettled you’ve felt, and that’s your lifetime mistake.

How do you change that?

It’s not easy, no matter what some Beatle claims.

 

Getting Started Is The Hard Part

If you have feelings, and you want to express them in some meaningful way, which way is the best way?

Think in terms of evidence.

How long do you want your feelings, the expression of your feelings, to last?

Go ahead and make up a song on the fly and sing it like it matters, sing it like Freddy at LiveAid.

But it’s not enough.

 

There’s nothin’ you can do that can’t be done
Nothin’ you can sing that can’t be sung
Nothin’ you can say, but you can learn how to play the game

 

Try writing the song down. Put the words on paper, on a screen and look at them.

They look pretty stupid? Not your best work?

Now ask yourself, ‘When is the last time I put something I just made up into words?’

It’s a couplet?

 

If you’ve ever read Shakespeare or Dr. Seuss, you are familiar with the couplet. A couplet is two lines of verse that follow one another and are connected by rhythm and rhyme. They make a poem pop with their lyrical language and pacing, like this couplet from English poet Alexander Pope:

*True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance. *

Poets use the quick pacing and brief language of couplets as a technique to make their poems memorable.

 

Something To Work With

After you sing a song, what’e left?

The memory. If anyone else heard you, it’s a shared memory. So write it down.

What have you got once you write it down?

You’ve got a tool.

Somewhere between Dr. Seuss and Shakespeare, you landed it just like they did. You wrote it down.

Now you can expand it from two lines to four, from four to a page, two pages, until oh my god it’s an avalanche of words.

What next?

 

Everything caught in print has a flow, should have a flow.

It should have better flow than a grocery list of milk, eggs, and bread.

Flow comes from a sequence of events, which calls for a sharp eye.

A sequence of events can be a story. If it’s not, and it’s also not a grocery list, and for some reason you can’t leave it alone, then do the work.

Get started and keep going. Eventually the story momentum will carry you.

That’s what it means when writers say their book wrote itself.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

But it didn’t write it’s own beginning, middle, and end in that order.

Fight me on that.

When has anything sprung onto the page fully formed? It all takes some tinkering, some adjustments, some additions and subtractions.

The writer builds anticipation with foreshadowing so the reader wants to know what happens next.

The biggest part of the story happens when the reader turns the page, or scrolls down to continue, and tells their friends what they’ve found.

 

Writing Advice From A Blogger For A Lifetime Mistake?

I remember when educators sounded a warning about kids who don’t read.

Language went to die in front of a video screen.

That was before smart phones where language lives on a video screen.

 

Almost two decades ago, the National Reading Panel reviewed more than 100,000 studies and arrived at recommendations for how students should receive daily, explicit, systematic phonics instruction in the early grades. Why is this literacy research not more widely known? Why is the fact that reading skills need to be taught, and that there is a well-documented way to do it, not something highlighted in many teacher-preparation programs (or parenting books, for that matter)?

 

Funny how that worked out.

Now we get to see people as they present themselves in words.

Some are formal, some do it in shorthand, some reject the whole idea of texting.

My buddy once told me he’d have no relationship with his kids if he didn’t text.

If you have to ask if your kids are worth the time to text, the answer is yes.

Now you can stop wondering why they don’t answer their phone.

 

The question is no longer whether you’re a writer or not.

We’re all writers in the modern world.

But it’s not the modern world of writing we’re talking about.

Put on a robe, a hat, a cape, whatever you’ve got to remind yourself, and sit down at a keyboard or tablet.

You don’t have to start at the beginning with a big dump of what’s to follow.

Why not give yourself a mystery and find a fun way of telling what’s next?

Is it easy? Let’s ask Johnny:

 

Nothin’ you can make that can’t be made
No one you can save that can’t be saved
Nothin’ you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time
It’s easy