Greg Learns To Write

Written by Jarom, my 10 year old: I began to come into existence—a brown pit, surrounded by yellow, soft but firm, fruit. Only a small amount of light bled through it. Then, slowly, the light was extinguished.

I panicked. I rocked back and forth in my fruity prison, attempting to break free, wishing I knew what was going on. Then, I heard a whistling sound and something rocked my prison to the ground—and I was caught by something even bigger than my prison. Then, I saw freedom. A large, gaping hole had appeared in the side of my prison.

I made a break for it—rolling as fast as I could. I rolled out and fell to the ground. Then, I heard a deep, manly voice from over head. “Wow, look at that,” it said, “the pit just rolled right on out of this peach. Huh.” So it was a peach that held me! I silently vowed to destroy all peaches, and free other pits from their fruity prison.

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“Greg, figure out what you need to do to fill your cup.” Filling your cup, meaning, you can’t give to others what you don’t have yourself. If your (emotional/mental/physical) cup is empty, then you can’t take care of your (kids/family/friends/self). “Figure out what you need to do to fill you cup…”

I’m struggling with that.

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I hate running.

I’m slow. I can’t run far. I hate the feeling of my heels sending shock-waves through my legs as they hit. Plus, running is boring as heck.

But, I’m in pain most days recently.

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As I was starting to write my own blog, I’d try to write, and the myriad options of words, phrases, images, opening-lines, and conceptual directions all lay before me; and I was humbled, like a man seeing all of the Creation from God’s view, wondering “Where do I start?”, then “What comes next?”

Funneling the complex image inside my brain, which looks vaguely like a tag-cloud, into a linear set of serial words was baffling.

I’d read other blogs and think: So obvious! So clear! Of course they would write it exactly that way! It was as if they just followed the natural flow of the idea they had. But I was struck with, “But, which idea?!?” When I think about something I want to write, five different ways that it could start and flow come to mind nearly simultaneously. It finally dawned on me that the longer I wait to write, the more options flood my brain… rending it paralyzed.

So, I decided I was just going to write — write until I got in the habit of being able to maintain one stable conceptual flow in my mind long enough to actually type it out in those irritatingly linear words required by written English.

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My daughter needs to clean up the old things before playing with a new thing; I tell her to clean up; I’m working; you can guess what happens… I forget to check! She doesn’t clean up!

Ahh, but now, the poor girl is suffering under the tyranny of the TIMER!

I have a timer by my computer that I use when I’m working on something that lends itself to becoming a tangent — searching the web for new technology that could help me solve a problem, for instance. I set the timer for 15 minutes and then enjoy exploring, knowing that I’ll get reeled in before I’ve spent an hour on a string of interesting things when I didn’t mean to.

It just occurred to me to set the time for 1 minute so that I can look at my daughter, tell her to keep cleaning, set the timer for another minute, and then get back to work.

Refreshing, for me. Probably not so refreshing, for her.

Not everyone likes efficiency, I’ll bet.

I’ve analyzed enough eyetracking data (analyzing what people look at and read) to be able to say this:

When you write, you have no capacity to hook the reader. You cannot get them to read, make them, or even facilitate them reading.

You have no control as the writer.

You only have the capacity to walk beside the reader, and only for as long as they wish to walk beside you.

With 15 years of eyetracking experience, I’ve seen a trend in how people read the initial several phrases or sentences and use those to determine how they will process the rest of the page. Unfortunately, typically those initial sentences establish that the writer is going to waste the reader’s time and so the reader starts to skim. But, sometimes those first two sentences are good and valuable. And so the reader engages more. Feels a bit more trust.

So, how do we get someone to read walk beside someone with writing?

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this is just a draft

The title
Writing the right title will create an image in readers’ minds, one that interests them to walk with, or away from, you.

A good title will help readers realize they’re not interested in the least in what you are saying. And ironically, they will to some degree be thankful to you for not wasting their time.

But a good title will also enable an image to germinate in their mind that they would like to investigate more.

The first sentence
Your title set the mood. Don’t slap them in the face with the wrong first sentence.

Also, don’t create deja-vu for them by repeating the premence of the title in the first sentence. Deja-vu is a weird experience — not one that makes one / facilitates / smoothly flows with the idea .
The first sentence needs to extend the

Writing the wrong title, one that does not mesh in some way with the first

If you write the wrong title, then it will be harder to walk with the reader.

The correct title not only enables the reader

People have free agency. You cannot control them, make them, entice them — or, at least you can’t entice them for long, lacking real wholesome value.

Kids: Dad, let’s go biking!
Dad: Um, … it’s really cold outside… aren’t you hungry?
Kids: No! Let’s go biking!
Dad: … do you guys want to watch a movie!?
Kids: No!
Dad: … Okay! … Let’s go biking! Get your helmets! Yahoo, let’s go!!

Actually, it’s not “doing things you don’t want to do.”

Instead, it’s “doing things you don’t want to do, but happily!”

“When a problem is over, it’s over.” I heard this phrase last week, and have been ruminating on it since. I applied it with my beloved child this morning, and learned something… I think.

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If you’re not a programmer, then this might bore you to tears…

Ahhh, what a beautiful feeling. True, it is 3:55 a.m. and I should have been in bed hours ago, BUT I just deployed my first cloud-based app to Heroku using a new-to-me framework, Sinatra. Not bad for a few hours of work. Granted, it took me forever since I didn’t quite get the idea of how Sinatra worked beyond the basic examples people seem to always talk about, and using Heroku required learning about Bundler and several other things. Now, I will sleep the sleep of a sleepy geek.

Oh, and comments now work on this blog. And I’m not using Disqus because that just seems wrong.

This one is a bit surprising for me to write.

I’m not a big curser, or at least not anymore. I remember in high school, when I moved from a farm into what I considered to be a huge city high school, that I ended up cursing up a storm there, mostly, in retrospect, because I thought at the time that city-kids probably cursed a lot so I figured that was what I was supposed to do too.

So, when I started cursing recently, multiple times over the last couple of weeks, I was perplexed, upset by it, and got to thinking about cursing. A few years ago, my younger brother, who was then in the Army, and I had a discussion about “respecting the F*ck”—the pivotal thesis being that cursing had its place as an expression of extreme emotion (somehow, saying “That REALLY hurt!” when you’ve just hammered your finger just didn’t seem to do the experience justice), but that overusing it served only to reduce or dilute the effectiveness of it, as well as label you as a person who isn’t coping very well with life such that you believe that you’re having extreme emotions every day.

So why was I cursing recently!?

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I’ve always liked the ‘sketch’ look. But I can’t write nearly clear enough to actually use my own handwriting. So, in looking for some nice sketchy fonts, I stumbled upon this by Ryan Putnam.

It turns out that I also like the fonts: SketchRockwell-Bold and Jellyka Estrya Handwriting (though, now that I look at it more, I’m somewhat less ensconced with it).

Wait, wait… I’ve now discovered abstractfonts.com, which enables you to browse fonts effectively. I particularly like this free, and beautiful, list of fonts.

Viewing 30 fonts at a time, I got to page 10. I’m enjoying this so much that I now have to force myself to go to bed at 12:38 a.m. [sigh] A geek that enjoys fonts.

If, like me, you have a 7-year-old that has a bigger 10-year-old brother, then you might empathize with the 7-year-old’s keen interest in learning wrestling and karate.

I got stomped as a kid when I wrestled. I remember one of the few wins I had was against a guy who looked just like Clark Kent—I won, but in trying to savor the victory I tried to ignore the fact that I think that mentally he wasn’t all there. Two years on a high school team didn’t teach me all that much, because my coach taught us the moves, but I never learned or really internalized “why” I was supposed to do each move. If you had asked me back then which move to do, I probably could have recited an answer, but I didn’t feel the answer.

I want my son to learn to feel and know — in his body — how to wrestle.

…to be continued.

I liked this article about writing so much that I ended up keeping it open in a tab for a month. That’s a long time. So, I finally decided that I want to keep it around to think about it more later. Maybe I will try my hand at writing some “List of N things” just to try it out. …I’ll put that on my list to do.

Using “5 Whys” means literally asking “why?” around five times in a row — like you’re a 3-year old — and is a way at getting at the root cause of a problem. It comes from Lean Manufacturing and particularly from Toyota and Taiichi Ohno. You can read about it in laymen terms here and here.

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Dewayne: Given that the natural stopping point for our talking about a programming language named Ruby came an hour and a half into sitting in your car in my driveway, I believe I can safely say that you and I are geeks.

So, here are some references to help you get hooked:

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I’ve been in a food rut recently. For me, eating well means eating healthy, but eating healthy for me is different than for others: I’m not trying to lose weight, I’m trying balance my energy so that I don’t have crashes or brain “fuzz-outs” during the day.

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I’ve been writing once ever 4 months. That’s not often. Yet I have wanted to write. So why didn’t I? And what can I do to actually write when that’s what I want to do?

I struggle with writing, and therefore I don’t enjoy it. I have an idea that excites me; I enjoy thinking about it; I start to play around with ideas of how I’d like to write about it; I sit down to write; and the myriad options of how I can write and what I could say spread out in front of me like minnows darting away; and, not being able to decide which direction I’d like best… I write none of them. I can empathize with those poor sharks trying to eat those little pesky darting minnows. I bet it pisses the shark off and makes them want to eat all of them… but I can’t write all of them and so I write none.

It’s difficult to figure out how to write well. Heck, it’s difficult to take the idea I’m thinking and turn it into a serial sequence of words!

It’s easy to know and recognize good writing… it flows and is fun and natural. I read [good examples](http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2008/11/9/legos-play-doh-and-programming) that impress me, and it seems so easy: just write clearly what you want to say. Yet…

So, I’ve decided that, like an artist who needs to sketch everyday and keeps a little sketch diary, that I will start writing everyday just to write. My little written sketch diary. My little blog.

I hope to find my voice. My writing voice. So that instead of being star-struck over how many different ways I could talk about something, I will instead be able to express what I am thinking abstractly in my mind.

I’m looking forward to it.

A MOOG is a beautiful thing, and today I had one. I received so much — from some stranger. Someone I don’t know. Someone who doesn’t know me. Yet this stranger completely helped me in ways that I couldn’t do for myself.

And that, minus all the details, was my moment of overwhelming gratitude.

I’ve been wanting to write down what I do for soccer practices as I do them since every year I forget what I did the year before; I kick myself; say “This year I’m going to write things down”; and then I don’t. I’m pretty sure this is my 6th year coaching soccer. This season I’m coaching my one daughter’s U 7 Girls team, and coaching my other daughter’s U4 Girls team.

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People make mistakes all the time. Do dumb things.

But what do you do about it?

When you make a mistake that is large enough or real enough to be categorized as a sin, it tarnishes your soul. For those who don't believe in God or a supreme being that uses a different name, translate for yourself my words into your own language such that "sin" indicates an action that will truly hurt you in who you are if you leave it just sitting around... like acid on your skin, to perhaps use an analogy; and "soul" to mean that true inner part of you that drives how you react to the world and that a boxer can't hurt even with a stiff upper-cut.

When you make a mistake that is a sin, the question is, what do you do? Are you going to leave the acid on you, or are you going to get it off?

Lying takes what is initially laying on top of your soul and thrusts it deep into your soul, deep enough to hide from others, but also deep enough that it will do real damage to you. The most obvious initial problems are that all of the subsequent lies and untruths that you start rehearsing so that when confronted you can effectively lie about the initial lie, which is like shoveling crap on top of the hole you made shoving the lie deep into your soul, all to cover the lie. So, it's deep inside of you, and covered in crap. That's graphic, and not good.

(Note: This entry initially was twice as long, meandering into entirely related, yet new, topics. To this my father sagely said, "People who give talks (or write) often try to cover too many topics... so if you're asking yourself if it's too long, it probably is." Cutting it off here kept the entry focused better. I expect that the truncated content will appear in future, full-blown, entries.)

This evening I had the opportunity to reflect on true parenthood, and being a dad, as I thought about my daughter and the tomatoes she had eaten for dinner, skins and all, as I tried to clean them out from the joint in the toilet seat after I had finished cleaning the chunky-tomato-vomit that covered both toilet seats, along with both walls on either side of the toilet. I think parenthood can clearly be defined as the period of your life during which you can clean up someone else's vomit without a problem while teasing them about what they'd had for dinner, hoping that they will feel better.

I'd love to see someone write the paragraph above better...

(Oh, and this entry did take 30 minutes, if you count the clean-up time.)

11 kids.

Some short sentences just sum it up better.

(... and this entry did not take 30 minutes to write.)

Merry Christmas. Ah, the intensity with which that meant something when I was not yet an adult. It meant something above and beyond just being a holiday. It meant something in a wonderful secular way — a time period when people were more friendly, when you could address a stranger and wish them well, when it meant a very specific thing that only occurred in December unlike anything else during the year.

And it meant, as I grew older and could appreciate something beyond the gifts and friendliness, something in a wonderful ‘larger than life’ spiritual way — a time when people could remember that we are all brothers and sisters, truly, and that we should act like good siblings instead of arguing, competitive, resentful, fearful siblings, when we could remember that Humans are not the top of the chain, but that a higher being called by many glorious names throughout the world and religions is higher than all of us and has a plan for us, a plan larger than we could obtain alone.

It’s now with a sense of underlying sadness that I lament that my children will never experience what I and so many others my age experienced as the end of an era when one could say “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Hanukkah” (and once I got to college and learned about Kwanzaa, “Happy Kwanzaa”… which actually now makes me wonder what one can say to a Muslim during December… let me check… … oh, interesting: see last paragraph for my findings, but for now, back to our normally scheduled program).

We’ve made a mistake.

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I have always had a difficult time writing. Yet I find myself having to write, which causes me stress. Real stress. So I need to do something about that. And I need to practice so that I can improve, and ultimately, I need to feel comfortable writing so that I stop procrastinating the writing that I actually need to complete.

This blog is going to be my way of improving my writing. And I will document my way of doing it. Hopefully it’ll be helpful to you too (whoever you are) as it is helpful to me. And I hope that you contribute and provide feedback — we’ll help each other perhaps.