How To Write With Heart

When trying to describe what it is about a scenario that makes you feel a given way, the immediate instinct (in my experience is to hop straight into the abstract. Trying to talk about things with precision while still trying to puzzle out your own feelings about things is an exercise in delusion. This is not a world created for abstraction but it is so difficult to properly encapsulate precise thought that leaves a writer with conflicting approaches to the same end goal: how do I make people understand my words in a way that is both effective and entertaining without alienating the reader entirely.

It is nothing to open a blank document and word vomit. Often, it’s not just nothing it’s extremely worthwhile. Just getting thoughts from within the void of thought and onto the page or the screen (depending on medium of record) is often enough just to start. I think one of the best writing exercises I was forced to partake in was during a writing course in my second semester at college, the professor having set us a relatively simple assignment to simply bring an apple into class. Any apple. Any old thing. I was a smart ass and decided to bring in my old, bright green iPhone 5 or whatever model it was, regardless it was certainly an Apple™ in the most capitalistic sense of the trademarked, delicious word.

Some people forgot to bring in an apple of any flavor, and instead made due with whatever they had on them, not limited to but including a sticker someone just happened to have laying around that was affixed to her notebook (the kind your elementary school teacher gave you for being a teacher’s pet and you cherished with all your heart). Then, we sat our apples of all varieties on the professor’s desk, picked one to describe in exquisite detail and were then challenged to guess which apple belonged to each description thereafter.

Simple enough, just an exercise in description. Honestly, very fun and an excellent use of time. There’s a reason why I had - have, I still own the computer – a folder that’s just a bunch of descriptions of people in a coffee shop. Taking the time to sit and force yourself to observe and garner insights based on what you see in front of you is such a helpful tool to teach you how to better talk about things and also how to look at someone in the least creepy fashion possible for the longest possible period of time. Both useful skills.

Which brings us back to that same point: writing effectively and entertainingly while maintaining a sense of personal integrity and the wherefores and how’s that such a goal implies.

If I knew the full answer I would either topple god or be god, nothing in between. Look upon my bounty and see how it rots. Rejoice in the fact that I have not commemorated your failings nor engraved your shortcomings upon the face of reality.

Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel. I say this as a fact because I’m pretty sure I’m right, but don’t really want to google the thing and see if it’s true. If it is, I’m a low-level intellect who can pull random Renaissance facts straight out of my head and translate them into words. If it’s not, I’m fairly typical and a fake smart person, but I’m pretty sure I’m right so I’m not going to bother to google this particular strain of truth and the strain I put upon it. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel.

I bring this up, specifically because of the stories that he painted forever on the walls (forever being entirely subjective, the damn thing will fall eventually and current global climates might push that earlier than its guardian would prefer) are depictions of scenes from the Bible. Cool. Whatever. It is the entire crux of the Renaissance minus the heretics of Hellenism. No, what’s infinitely more interesting is the faces in particular he used to model some of those characters that stand in a house of worship.

If you had a guy that you really hated beg you to do some grand beautiful thing in the vein of your particular mastery, you would presumably say no. Maybe you would put barriers on being able to do the damn thing that surely this guy could never come up with, like paying an exorbitant fee for your work or in the case of Tina Fey and producing 30 Rock maybe it’s asking for specific people to work with you (it was Alec Baldwin and she was shocked he said yes, she says so in her autobiography). For Michelangelo, these deterrents failed spectacularly so he did the only other thing a person of his caliber can be expected to do: paint a guy getting his junk bit to shit by a snake and make sure he looks like the shitty religious official you hate, forever literally painted as not just a villain but a sinner so bad that he’s name dropped in the Bible.

Rad as hell.

This all to be illustrative of the point that to create is to set things into memory. It’s to add to the collective that is human memory and human care, it’s to increase the memetics of cinema and decrease the remembrance of why.

Why is a banana peel the thing all cartoon characters slip on? Because originally it was straight up poop in the street that people slipped on, but poop isn’t child friendly so it was swapped out with a banana peel as a tongue in cheek way of saying the same thing. Except, we forgot what that thing was, and now we just live with the knowledge that banana peels are very slippable and have been since Bugs Bunny in our childhood.

Why are traffic lights red, green, and yellow? Because red has always been a warning sign associated with the halt of movement so one dude back in the early days of railroad production used that as the stop color and green, well green is the exact opposite of red so that’ll be the next one and yellow… well yellow is different than both of those so we just go with that. It’s nothing. It’s one guy’s decision several lifetimes ago that still dictates the way we drive to work every day.

Simple decisions shape the world. The little things ripple outward and do not stop making waves on other people until… what, exactly? Until the waves hit the shore? Well, no because those ripples bounce back and with them take small particles of the shore they splashed against. And with that, that shore becomes slightly smaller, a pinch more unstable. Over the years, decades, centuries, that grows or shrinks and the landscape of an area shifts momentously. Perhaps as new plants come in to cover empty ground, it resolidifies those shores or breaks away at it even more and in the end you’re left with a river like the Mississippi and then eons later, the Grand Canyon. Then maybe it’s hit with a meteor and the mass on planet earth changes and throws off gravity by the barest pinch and that shifts how the moon orbits us, as it moves further out of our orbit every day anyway, which in turn changes the tilt at which the planet revolves around the sun as we hurtle through the galaxies to an unknowable destination.

Because nothing is little, nothing is insignificant. I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion, trust me I’m an expert.

So, why make myself known? Why vomit out thoughts until I am empty of them? Is the aim then to empty myself of all my quandaries and worries or is it to fill someone else up? Where do my problems end, and where do they merge with someone else?

I write this, sitting under an overcast sky that started off as a bright blue. The colors of the trees around me are the myriad bright greens that are indicative of early summer. There is a breeze that plays at the hair on the back of my head and at least a half dozen different birds singing in the background. But, it’s not just me and nature. I can hear someone absolutely Blasting Billy Joel somewhere far away, the rumble of a motorcycle peeling away or a car with a bad muffler adds to the cacophony around me. I can feel more than hear the road a half mile away swarming with cars and I can smell the scent of warm, cut grass. I write this with no one around me, yet utterly surrounded by life and the impact of humans.

I also write without glasses. I cannot see what is more than a few feet in front of me without it dissolving into blurs, but I can see each individual speck of condensation on the unnaturally bright can of grapefruit beer at my right. I can see the carcass of a dead mayfly and I can feel how god awfully dry my fingertips are for reasons I’m not entirely sure of. The chair under my butt that I sit cross-legged upon eats into my ankles and I can already feel the way the imprints left behind will interact with my dry, dry fingertips. The ache in my bones, the one that tells me rain is on the way, the discomfort of not being able to clearly hear a voice far away, these are all present as well just as an author’s curtains might be blue.

If all decisions big and small are full of meaning, then so is this moment. So is the breath too hot in my lungs and the swift movement of blood beneath my skin. The click of fingers on keyboard is just as worthwhile as the drill of a woodpecker somewhere to my left. This moment has meaning and worth in the same way that misplaced paint holds depths of intuition, but that doesn’t stop me from wondering at the precise meaning therein.

Talking and thinking makes me no less tired, it does not lessen the ache in my bones nor the pounding of my heart. It simply lets my uncertainty unfurl itself in the same way that birdsong tells me there are birds. It’s plain and blunt and ultimately leaves me both more and less hollow.

Sometimes, you sit and write and catch a glimpse outside of yourself in the middle of trying to formulate what that “self” is (do not quote philosophers at me about the idea of self, they’re all dead and I’m mostly alive) and just laugh and laugh and laugh.

I guess that joy is the ultimate goal then, no matter how fleeting.

Insert fart joke.