Anyone who wants to write well should do stuff with their hands.

Run a band saw. Weed a garden. Unclog a drain. Mow your own yard, instead of paying someone else to do it. Replace a bike chain. Replace a ceiling fan. Make a bird house. Make a free throw.  

 I’m not saying we should master all of the above skills, but we should be able to do some of them. And we shouldn’t be afraid to get our hands dirty trying. Anyone who is too precious or navel-gazing to work with their hands is unlikely to produce interesting writing.

Our thoughts take the shape of our tools.

Flip that around and it’s equally true – the tools we use influence the way we think.

This is strange to consider, and perhaps a bit unsettling. We want to think of ourselves as rational actors, and our thoughts the result of reasoned analysis, not influenced by something as trivial as the tool we use to express them. But tools matter.

The great songwriter Harry Nillson has a tune called “Good Old Desk,” which celebrates a piece of furniture whose chief virtue is that it doesn’t go anywhere:

My old desk
Does an arabesque
In the morning when I first arrive.
It's a pleasure to see
It's waiting there for me
To keep my hopes alive.

Perhaps this seems trivial. I assure you it is not.

In 1983, Apple was pushing like crazy to get the Macintosh done. They had been losing market share to competitors and Steve Jobs wanted to create a product that would reverse this trend. The Mac wasn’t the only thing Apple was working on. They had another personal computer called the Lisa, which you probably haven’t heard of because it’s been long forgotten. Jobs was (rightly) convinced that Macintosh was the company’s future and he brought his considerable energy to the project.

A spiritual practice of Buddhist monks is to write calligraphy with water. That is, they dip their pen in water, instead of ink. This is done as a reminder of impermanence. No matter how beautiful the strokes are, they begin fading as soon as they’re formed.

I love running, especially in the cold and especially when it’s early. There are few things more beautiful than sunrise over a lake, mist shrouding the water, webs of frost on the greenway asphalt. The geese are hunkered down, eyeing me with beady suspicion.

I can’t stand vague language. It’s the writer in me, the person who values communication that is both precise and concise. A lack of specificity drives me nuts. You know, wimpy passive voice constructions like “Mistakes were made.” (Made by whom, dammit??) Rambling work emails that fail to diagnose the problem, fail to clarify next steps, fail to make clear who the stakeholders are.

When things are successful, it’s easy to look back and think of them as inevitable. We see the polished finished product and forget the messy, uncertain process that created it. Star Wars, as ubiquitous as it is now, was far from a sure bet when it was being made. In fact, many of studio executives at Fox hated it, certain it was a money loser.

In football, there is a cult around the idea of the “studious quarterback.” Tom Brady is a good example of this, as was Peyton Manning back in his playing days. So much of these guys’ public image is about work ethic. They show up at the facility early. They study film until their eyes are bloodshot. They work out maniacally, even in the off-season. The public is captivated by this image of asceticism, the warrior-monk flagellating his body so he can then show up in the arena and deliver high-quality, ass-kicking entertainment.

When I see a stranger reading a book, I like that person better. There is something about the act of reading – especially fiction – that is endearingly vulnerable, almost naïve. The reader’s attention is wholly submitted to the page, breathless with anticipation about what happens next (if the story is any good, that is). This is a uniquely human experience. No other species on Earth has the capacity to enjoy storytelling.

A common writerly axiom is that novels aren’t finished, they’re abandoned. The way this is phrased puts a negative spin on it, as if the bedraggled author gives up after years of toil, bitterly resigned to the impossibility of realizing an artistic vision. I don’t think this is the best way to frame it, though. Where others see abandonment, I see healthy non-attachment. Or, to put it another way, the 85% rule.

While humans communicate with words, we don’t understand with words. We understand with images. The use of mental images is so intuitive that we often don’t know we’re doing it, but stop reading for a moment and think of something complex that you understand (an internal combustion engine, the workings of Congress, the proper way to make a souffle, etc.) If you think to yourself, “What’s going on in my mind that allows me to grasp this?” you won’t find words, you’ll find pictures (or mental models, if you prefer the academic term). The level of our competence is tied to the usefulness and accuracy of our mental models.

1 in 20 writers are able to support themselves by writing. I got that number from Stephen King’s On Writing, written by a man who, of course, is among that profitable five percent. But even the great Stephen King was once a part-time writer. He wrote three novels before he hit the jackpot with Carrie. During that time, he was a high school English teacher in Maine. He taught all day, then came home and wrote in the laundry room of his family’s trailer. In recounting his time as a part-time writer, King writes that “by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I’d spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain.”  

The one-and-only Kurt Vonnegut has a list titled “Eight Rules for Writing.” All eight rules are helpful, but one has stuck with me more than the rest:

Rule #1: Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

 Gertrude Stein voiced a similar sentiment, saying, “I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way I can do it.” I think about these quotes frequently, especially when revising. One of the biggest steps to make as a writer is to stop writing for an audience of people you know and to start writing for total strangers.

Considering that Game of Thrones is in its final season, it seems fitting to devote a post to it. I could spend the next 900 words praising the show, but that seems pointless, considering that endless ink has been spilled on the subject. Anyone who watches knows about the compelling plotlines (all 50 of them), the complex characters, and the bad-ass dragons. Nor will I engage in unfounded speculation about how the series might wrap up. That’s what Reddit is for.

In the Avett Brothers’ documentary May It Last, Scott and Seth Avett reveal an interesting tidbit about the band’s early days. When it just consisted of the two brothers, they didn’t venture far from their home base of Concord, NC. However, when they recruited their bass player (Bob), he pushed them to begin touring.

As Scott Avett put it, “We were self-centered hillbillies who thought the world was going to either come to us or not. And either way they were missing out. And Bob was like ‘Are you going to go play for anybody? Other than Cabarrus County?... Do you guys want to go anywhere?’”