A Useful Metaphor for Curing Writer's Block

 

Writing nonfiction is like sculpture, a matter of shaping
the research into the finished thing.

— Joan Didion

All weekend I've been obsessed about a seven-year-old who's suffering writer's block. Her challenge is no small matter: the block is so immovable, it's affecting her schoolwork.

Despite all the ready advice for overcoming writer's block, writers of every age struggle with beginnings.

I certainly did, until I encountered a metaphor for writing that helped me leave writer's block behind.

Writing is like sculpting in clay.

Professional sculptors use a metal frame called an "armature" that audiences never see. It serves to undergird the clay form. 

Your first draft is like that armature: although ugly and crude, it allows you quickly to start adding and subtracting bits of clay—words—to produce the final form.

With your armature built, creating a second, third, fourth and fifth draft becomes easy, because you're simply adding and removing words as you work to refine the form. Audiences never see that activity, either. 

All they see, for better or worse, is your published piece.

Just as no sculptor ever sweats the armature, no writer should never sweat the first draft. 

Who cares if it's weird and unsightly—no one will ever know.

The Dying Animal

 

Make no mistake, we're dealing with a dying animal.

A new survey from American Enterprise Institute reveals that one in four GOP members believes, "if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions."

Who are these insurrectionists? 

You know who they are. 

They're white guys from the country with guns and trucks. 

They never read, never travel, and never watch anything on TV but Fox and A&E.

They dress like life's an audition for Born Losers; hold no or only menial jobs; and—when exogamous—are drawn to tattooed slatterns. 

They're often high all day on Four Roses or Percocet or both. 

High or sober, they despise lesbians and uppity women (who're the same thing). They despise gays. They despise Arabs, Asians, Blacks, Jews, Latinos, and Native Americans.

Most of all, they loathe the Whites whose parents demanded they apply themselves at school, grow up to be responsible adults, secure well-paying jobs, pay taxes, and save. 

They loathe Whites who have achieved those things, but don't acknowledge the last part: they believe only Jesus saves.

This Confederacy of Dunces has no future in our meritocracy. It belongs to a breed of ne'er-do-wells that's dying.

And as every game warden knows, a dying animal is a desperate one.

So how should you deal with a dying animal?

The best way, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association, is to provide them "peaceful release."

Because gassing, poisoning, drowning, decompression, electrocution and shooting are all deemed inhumane, according to the association, animal euthanasia via an injection of sodium pentobarbital is recommended.

But we're not speaking of animals—not literally; and anyway, we need first to administer all those millions of Covid vaccines.

So I recommend that the government mail every insurrectionist a $2,500 check and a one-way ticket to Uzbekistan.

The insurrectionists will feel right at home there, where the natives don't take kindly to women, gays, most people of color, and white adults, either.

A Mulligan Mashup

Everyone's entitled to a mulligan.

— Sen. Mike Lee

Utah's Mike Lee told Fox News this week that Donald Trump should be forgiven for inciting violent insurrection. "Everyone's entitled to a mulligan," he said. 

Sen. Lee's reprieve isn't Trump's first. Evangelical leader Tony Perkins also gave the former president a "mulligan" for porking porn star Stormy Daniels.

A mulligan—meaning a "second chance"—comes from golf.

Called by Sports Illustrated "the most significant innovation in the lowering of golf scores this side of cheating," the mulligan is named after Buddy Mulligan, a legendary Depression-Era golfer from New Jersey who demanded a warmup shot whenever he teed off.

Anti-immigrant sentiment among Wasps—whose exclusive clubs were being "invaded" by Irish-American golfers at the time—assured mulligan stuck. They relished the name, because, in their minds, all Irishmen cheated. (The term for a second chance could just have well been a cohen.)

Off the green as well, mulligan has a storied past, beginning in the 19th century.

In that century, barkeeps would place a bottle of whiskey on the bar for customers to sample. They called the bottle of free booze a mulligan.

Inmates called a prison guard a mulligan.

And hobos called the meat-and-potatoes stew they made mulligan. 

The hobos' mulligan derived from the name the nation's newspaper reporters gave to the dinners whipped up by Coxey's Army, a ragtag militia of 10,000 unemployed men who stormed the US Capitol in 1894, demanding federal jobs.

In labeling the marchers' meals mulligan, those reporters were recalling, of course, "Irish stew," a cheap chowder made from leftovers; but they were also recalling "The Mulligan Guard," a pop hit of the day written by the comedy team Harrigan and Hart. 

"The Mulligan Guard" mocked the low-class Irishmen who gathered in mobs to parade the streets of New York whenever they felt the urge to look tough. 

The song was based in part on an actual militia group run by James Mulligan, a horseshoer and ward-heeler active in Tammany Hall throughout the Gilded Age, and parodied the antics of the same militias Martin Scorsese depicted a century later in Gangs of New York.

Harrigan and Hart, alas, bear no relation to 20th century songwriters Rodgers and Hart, even though the latter mentioned mulligan stew in the first line of their classic "The Lady is a Tramp."

In Defense of Complaining

My primary hobby is complaining.

— Jay Duplass

I once shared an office with a coworker whose sole contribution to the company was a steady stream of complaints.

He complained eight hours a day. About the management. About the clients. About sports teams, television shows, restaurants, traffic, technology, medicine, politics, the economy and the weather.

No one ever asked him his opinion about anything, nor sought his help, expertise, or companionship at lunch. More often than not, his name was left off the invitation list for team meetings, and he was the last man in the office to learn the latest gossip.

The wry nickname he earned, after only a month on the job, was "Darth Vader."

Stoics—and most other moral philosophers—condemn complaining as depressing and fruitless. So do clerics, coaches, psychotherapists, moms, and motivational speakers.

“Don’t be overheard complaining," Marcus Aurelius said, "not even to yourself.”

But hold on a cotton-pickin' minute.

If I couldn't indulge in complaining, I don't know what I'd do. Probably lose my ability to speak, curl into the fetal position, and begin chewing on my blankie.

For me, complaining functions like hydrogen and oxygen: as a requisite to life.

For me, complaining is a lifestyle.

Surly to bed, surly to rise.

Sure, complaining can be mind-numbing; but it can also be masterful. Just consider these eight delicious gripes:

• Why is “abbreviation” such a long word? — Steven Wright

• Somewhere on this globe, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped. — Sam Levenson

• Santa Claus has the right idea: visit people once a year. — Victor Borge

• History keeps repeating itself. That’s one of the things wrong with history. — Clarence Darrow

• What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance. — Havelock Ellis

• Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. — Robert J. Hanlon

• I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous: everyone hasn’t met me yet. — Rodney Dangerfield

• I’m not indecisive. Am I indecisive? — Jim Scheibel

Philosopher Kathryn Norlock argues that complaining can be a "duty" when others share your peeve. 

When they do, you become not a bellyacher but a "fellow complainer." Your complaint "extends your vulnerability," offering your fellows an "opportunity for solidarity."

"Complaining helps ameliorate isolation and helps people bond," Norlock says.

But to be an effective complainer, the philosopher insists, you have to practice. 

Practice allows you to distinguish the occasions that call for complaining from the ones that don't. 

Practice, Norlock says, lets your sharpen your "skill at sociality" and "complain excellently."

I like that.

So if you're sick of hearing my complaints, let me remind you: I'm not whining.

I'm practicing.

Best Explanation

In order to learn you must desire to learn, and not be satisfied with what you're already inclined to think.

― Charles S. Peirce

Victimhood and illogic drive many American tragedies, as they drove Nashville Bomber Anthony Quinn Warner to target AT&T on Christmas Day.

Films like "Silkwood," "Erin Brockovich" and "Radium Girls" teach us that all industrialists are avaricious and amoral victimizers, and that to stand up to them—as the Nashville Bomber did—is heroic. 

And conspiracy theorists, knowing illogic is our tragic flaw, teach us that to believe is to know, when it's not.

One conspiracy theory afflicting us now—the one that consumed the Nashville Bomber—holds that the industrialists behind 5G are killing us. Cigarette-makers killed their customers, after all, so why wouldn't AT&T?

Proponents of the theory claim that all wireless radiation is deadly, but that the research which proves it has been willfully ignored. 5G, proponents of the theory say, is the deadliest of all. Once deployed, it will expose people for the first time in history to a steady shower of super-fast millimeter waves, and cause hair-loss, memory-loss, sterility, cancer, neurological disorders, genetic damage, and even structural changes to the human body.

But physicists know a lot about wireless radiation, including millimeter waves. 

Millimeter waves—like all radio waves—carry little energy compared to other forms of radiation, and cannot damage genes or upset metabolisms. Millimeter waves are for all purposes inert, and will travel uninterrupted through human bodies—as well as the rest of the universe. If you want to worry about possible damage to yourself, you're better off worrying about your exposure to light: a single visible-light photon has a trillion times more energy than a millimeter-wave photon.

If the proponents of the 5G conspiracy theory don't strike you as paranoid, consider that some believe 5G, besides causing cancer, is a "Chinese plot" against America; that 5G is of a piece with vaccines, fluoridation, genetically engineered food, and fracking; and that 5G, designed by Bill Gates to reduce the world's population, transmits Covid-19.

The 5G conspiracy theory is an example of flouting what philosophers call inference to the best explanation. 

According to that principle, when faced with a question, you choose the theory that best explains the available data. You don't choose a theory that ignores the data, presupposes other data, adds a bunch of data, or invents data out of whole cloth.

If you're rational, when your kitchen appliances all stop working at once, you infer that a fuse blew in the basement. 

You don't infer—although it's possible—that a secret cabal of Chinese manufacturers has coordinated, to the precise second, the mass failure of your appliances; that the cabal seeks only to victimize American customers; that it's covering up its ability to plan mass, simultaneous product failures from the West; and that Bill Gates must be on the payroll.