“The earth used to be God’s body
but he took too many wounds and abandoned it.
He left us with the husk we made
of his body like a wasp’s nest.
Man shits his pants and trashed God’s body”

– Jim Harrison, Untitled, from Jim Harrison: Complete Poems

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“At its foot, this dam is twenty-eight meters thick and poured from specially hardened concrete. This lower part would still almost certainly be there, standing majestically without relaying any message, no message for anyone. There at the foot of the smooth concrete wall there would be a crystal clear trickle of water from the rocks to the side; it would be sought out by herds of deer, as though”

– Werner Herzog, Every Man for Himself and God Against All

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Werner Herzog stopped his memoir mid sentence when a hummingbird flew into his vision through the window.

Jim Harrison died at his writing desk with his notebook open to his last, unfinished poem.

One ending was a choice.

The other was chosen.

I like the idea of Jim Harrison writing til the end of his life.

What else was he supposed to do?

I love Werner Herzog’s singularity in being his absolute self in everything he does.

No summing up for him.

His memoir ends in mid flow- he is still living and working.

There is no conclusion for him.

Just more work that he wants to do (and I want to read!).

“And I want him to see that what is most important, regardless of the social or economic circumstances in which he finds himself, is the intention that he brings to whatever he does. Saint Catherine of Genoa’s advice might help him stay the course if he remembers, “We must not wish anything other than what happens from moment to moment, all the while, however, exercising ourselves in goodness.””

– Charles Johnson, Grand

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“Dancing our sorrow away (right on dancing)
No matter what fate chooses to play (there’s nothing you can do about it anyway)
Just do the steps that you’ve been shown
By everyone you’ve ever known
Until the dance becomes your very own
No matter how close to yours
Another’s steps have grown
In the end there is one dance you’ll do alone.”

– Jackson Brown, For a Dancer

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If you try to copy the moves of someone else you are merely collecting their spent skin.

Better to emulate their intention, what got them moving.

Everyone’s moves are their own and they work for their circumstance.

I like to look for examples of intention to help me build up my moves.

We all start our journeys in our own place.

We travel at our own pace.

We end up building our own space in the world.

“Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.”

– Paul Tillich

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“I think what makes me at peace while writing is that it is the only time I am completely alone…
….I get to walk down the hall, close the door, and disappear

– Eric Roth, in Riding the Alligator by Pen Densham.

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This space, online, is a record of my snatches of solitude.

There is nothing lonely in the act of creation.

I am alone but surrounded by the ideas of others.

I am writing in solitude, but will share these words in public.

This time I spend alone is glorious.

But I do not seek glory.

Only the opportunity to do this again tomorrow.

“And so, I worked my day job while also writing and promoting the Dilbert comic for several years. I later wrote books and did licensing. For over ten years, I had the equivalent of three full-time jobs. I worked seven days a week, including holidays. I did everything I could do to promote the comic, putting 100 percent of my mind and body into it…

…But I didn’t merely want to succeed, I decided to succeed. And once you decide, the psychology of the situation changes. My crushing workload felt like a privilege. I reminded myself that almost any cartoonist would want to trade places with me. It was never easy, and it was never painless, but I was unstoppable because I had decided.”

– Scott Adams, Reframe Your Brain

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“I just wrote and deleted this phrase: I really miss those days.

I will forevermore, I expect, be trying to re-create the purity of that time. Having done nothing, I had nothing to lose. Having made a happy life without having achieved anything at all artistically, I found that any artistic achievement was a bonus. Having finally conceded that I wasn’t a prodigy after all, I had the total artistic freedom that is afforded only to the beginner, the doofus, the aspirant.”

– George Saunders, Author’s note to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.

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I love to read successful authors looking back at their beginnings.

The wistfulness of creating something on the side.

A private creativity not to be shared with colleagues.

Creating because you have to.

No expectations except that it makes you feel more alive.

Rather than looking at their success and saying, “I wish that were me”, I feel they are looking at me, my fledgling efforts, saying “I would love to be in his shoes.”

Anonymous but energised.

No one can see me but for the first time I can see myself.

I’ve asked myself, “what do you want?”

My answer, “this…”

“Aegean islanders like to tell a joke about a prosperous Greek American who visits one of the islands on vacation. Out on a walk, the affluent Greek American comes upon an old Greek man sitting on a rock, sipping a glass of ouzo, and lazily staring at the sun setting into the sea. The American notices there are olive trees growing on the hills behind the old Greek but that they are untended, with olives just dropping here and there onto the ground. He asks the old man who the trees belong to. “They’re mine,” the Greek replies. “Don’t you gather the olives?” the American asks. “I just pick one when I want one,” the old man says. “But don’t you realize that if you pruned the trees and picked the olives at their peak, you could sell them? In America everybody is crazy about virgin olive oil, and they pay a damned good price for it.” “What would I do with the money?” the old Greek asks. “Why, you could build yourself a big house and hire servants to do everything for you.” “And then what would I do?” “You could do anything you want!” “You mean, like sit outside and sip ouzo at sunset?””

– Daniel Klein, Travels With Epicurus

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“What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure?

Whether you go up the ladder or down it, your position is shaky.

When you stand with your two feet on the ground, you will always keep your balance”

– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

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Arrive at what?

Ambition?

Goals?

Competition?

More?

Might it not be better to have the balance of enough?

Where we stand right now is where we should be.

Be wary of following the heard around the ways, only to discover you end up where you started.

Incomparable to others.

Only with what we want to do.

Who we want to be.

“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”

– Leonard Cohen, Anthem

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“As a reader, I prefer a critic’s notebooks to his treatises.”

W H Auden, The Dyer’s Hand

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Some of us are more interested in how the thing is made.

Rather than standing back to enjoy the view.

We want to know the cement used to place the stones.

We want to see the architect’s notes.

The talk in the pub after a days work.

The obstacles and the solutions found.

I enjoy poetry.

I admire W H Auden.

But I find his essays and comments on the creation of a poem more compelling than the finished product.

The work is never done.

I’m always learning

There is advice in the cracks where every made thing is assembled.

I love to look.

“New ideas are like small children; we need to encourage them, nurture them, help them to walk, talk, and to grow.”

– Pen Densham and Jay Roach, Riding the Alligator

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“Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple—or more difficult. Difficult, because to trust children we must trust ourselves—and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted. And so we go on treating children as we ourselves were treated, calling this “reality,” or saying bitterly, “If I could put up with it, they can too.””

– John Holt, How Children Learn

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Writing is the opposite of everything else in life: it’s easier to clear up the mess than create it.

It’s much easier to be a cleaner, editing work that already fills the page.

Your creative genius is a toddler.

Let them draw on the walls and get out every toy.

Make a mess.

Its in the tidying and packing away where we catch a glimpse of the good ideas.

As adults we are inhibited from making a mess.

Thinking of our creating selves as a toddler frees us from thinking.

We just play.

“The fact is that I have hardly ever taken time off to write. Writing with me must be an in-between thing. When it comes to rewriting it is different. But the first draft must be put together on the run.”

– Eric Hoffer, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront

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“Not a single word of this book has been written in my office – just as David Ogilvy did not write a single advertisement in the office (‘Too many distractions,’ he said). And perhaps 80 per cent of it has been written on days where I had done pretty much nothing the previous day. As John Lennon observed, ‘Time spent doing nothing is rarely wasted’, yet the modern world seems to do all that it can to destroy the moments where alchemy might flourish.”

– Rory Sutherland, Alchemy

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To write, I want to avoid the terror of commitment.

I want my first thoughts to be casual.

I don’t want to propose marriage straight away.

When I put them down on paper, it’s just a first date.

I need to get to know them before I make them permanent.

A formal writing practice can seem like a heavy commitment.

To sit at a desk with an empty screen.

Worried about commmiting ideas to the Word file.

Performance anxiety.

I embrace casual writing.

A scribble on the notepad here.

A tap on the iPhone here.

I am a liberated writer.

I have a hand on the run.

“I type on plain white paper with three holes punched into the left side of the sheet so I can place the finished pages into a loose-leaf notebook and move them around if I decide to change my continuity or if I want to replace the scenes already written.

Also, I never write a script in continuity. I always write my favorite scene first. I always ask myself, ‘What is the single most important, most moving, most dramatic scene in the film, the single scene people will still be talking about a week later?’ I write that scene first, no matter where it might play in the finished script.

And I put it into the notebook. Then I write my next-most-favorite scene and put it into what may end up being its appropriate position. And so on and so on until I have to start connecting those fragments.

The last thing I write are these connections and I spend hours thinking of them in terms of images and locations.”

– Stirling Sylliphant, quoted in Stirling Sylliphant: Fingers of God by Nat Segaloff

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“As a beginning writer I assumed every writer began with some form of “Once upon a time…” It seems safe to say that readers assume that writers create stories in the order those stories are eventually read. Beginning at the start. Ending at the end. And it took me years to get past that tendency. 

Now I realize that my best stories start from a thousand places, like crystals forming in a solution. Each of these small sub-assemblies reaches out in all directions until it bonds with other sub-assemblies. At any time, the scene I’m writing might eventually fall at almost any place in the finished book.

If you accept the nonlinear way of writing, then any small observation or anecdote you work on today is valid. It’s you putting together a few pieces of the puzzle. Say, the red pieces, or a few edge pieces.”

– Chuck Palahniuk, Plot Spoiler Needletter, 19/02/24

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Both of these quotes were read on the same day.

I finished Nat Segaloff’s excellent biography on the Oscar winning (In the Heat of the Night, 1967) screenwriter Sterling Sylliphant.

I received Chuck Palahniuk’s (author of Fight Club) newsletter the same evening.

Writing advice decades apart.

Starting with the most exciting scene.

Collect fragments and assemble the story later.

Both writers avoid the dread of the beginning.

Straight into the action.

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it . . . but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill . . . Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”

– Søren Kierkegaard, Letter to Jette (1847)

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“You never feel worse for a walk.”

– My Mum (2011)

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Walking really is one of life’s great pleasures.

Walking makes you feel better and it’s never wasted time.

And it’s free.

We do not need equipment or specialist training.

To identify as a walker we just need to get going.

Every route we take is borrowed for the duration of the walk.

Like a library book, we return ourselves to home, anticipating the next loan.

Wandering and wondering.

Being well.