As Yogi Berra once said: “If you come to a fork in the road, wash it before you put it in your mouth.” Good advice if you ask me.
I can’t just sit down and write off the cuff. I need a plan. I need to know who the characters are, where I want to take them, and where they’re going to end up. Only after all that stuff is nailed down am I ready to write.
Almost all of that preliminary work takes place when I’m doing something else – showering, eating, or working at my day job. Much to my wife’s chagrin, it also happens late at night in bed. I scribble notes. I make doodles. I outline. Sometimes it takes a long time to do all this preparation, but luck favors the prepared, so I do it.
When I finally sit down to type, I have a tall-ish stack of notes and doodles and outlines by my side.
But then I type – and the plan I spent oh so much time crafting is pushed aside and ignored. My carefully constructed characters are no longer the characters I had once envisioned; they say things I never considered, they do things I had never imagined, they shove the story in directions I never contemplated, and I am transfixed and fascinated by it all.
It is at that moment I know that I am on a creative roll. I’m in explore mode. It’s a kind of heaven.
Since I am so eager to abandon my writing plan once I begin writing, one might assume that I don’t need a plan at all. But I do. I’ve tried working without one, and the results have been uniformly terrible.
I’m not exactly sure why this is, but if I was to guess, I think it is because I need something rigid to rebel against. I need something to thumb my nose at and say, “Pfft. I can do better than that.”
The only other time I have ever abandoned my plans with such reckless delight took place years ago when I embarked on a solo cross-country trip. I had my route, and my maps, and knew where I wanted to settle down each night. Once I got in the car and started driving, however, I was all “Oh. My. God. The world’s biggest rocking chair is just 100 miles north of here!” And, in a twinkling, I was off down a potholed two-lane blacktop passing an alarming number of stores that sold both fireworks and alcohol.
I discovered this big guy on one such unscheduled detour. His name is Big Amos and, if you push a button by his knee, he will beg you to try the shoofly pie.
Sure it might be a colossal waste of time to drive hours out of the way to someplace that might as well be called Lickspittle County just to see a ginormous chair, but none of that mattered to me. I was in explore mode. I found joy in the journey.
My wife, Ellen, describes our relationship as very similar to Bert and Ernie’s. And she’s absolutely right.
I’m Bert. While I have never considered collecting bottlecaps or becoming a pigeon fancier, I do have a rather large collection of Nixon political buttons and own two pet rats. Like Bert, I am also a fussbudget who likes things to be in their proper place.
Another similarity: Bert is the kind of guy who, without Ernie by his side, would live the life of a hermit, emerging from his house only to buy food and confiscate the Frisbees that accidentally land on his lawn. His death would be noticed only after the neighbors started to complain about the smell. Without Ellen, I could see myself moving in this direction. I wouldn’t necessarily be happy about it, but is seems like something I might do if left to my own devices.
Ellen is Ernie. She’s disorganized, peppy, sociable, friendly, and has an easy laugh. Also, she, like her Muppet alter ego, takes giddy delight in getting her Bert’s goat.
Look! Bert even likes goats! If Bert was real, he and I would be best friends!
But when night falls, things change. After the lights are turned off and the house becomes quiet, Ellen and I experience a sort of role reversal. Night is when the silly ideas start to fill my brain and I, like Ernie, have an insatiable desire to share.
“Ellen,” I whisper. “Are you asleep?”
“Mm,” she replies into her pillow.
“I just made up parody lyrics to the song ‘The Candy Man.’ The song from the Willy Wonka movie. The lousy one with Gene Wilder.”
“Don’t.”
“The Pickle Man.”
“Stop right there!”
But I have a song in my heart, so I sing: “Who can make the sun shiiiine, with cucumbers and briiiiine…”
Or I might want to discuss why Act II of The Music Man isn’t nearly as good as Act I. Or quote extensively from Wallace and Gromit. Or think up some titles for the most inappropriate children’s book ever. (My personal favorite: The Sluttiest Mennonite.)
Ellen, like Bert, is less than thrilled by all of this.
“I will kill you,” she says.
From left, Mike and Ellen.
I also come up with ideas that I can use, too. Good ones. My best ones. I share those, too.
I don’t mean to be a pest, it’s just when I lie there in the dark, my mind becomes so very fertile. This is why I love quiet moments. This is why, during the day, I become Bert the loner. And it is also why, at night, I come dangerously close to becoming Ernie the murder victim.
So! Let’s open up the comments section. Here’s a prompt:Which Muppet is your alter ego?
When I’m not promoting the historical dynamo that is Sarah Josepha Hale (My children’s book comes out on September 1, by the way!) or working on a story ideas about the disgusting habits of Fluff Monkeys, I get paid to edit an alumni magazine. It’s a wonderful job where I get to interview a number of fascinating people who have great stories to tell.
I also interview teenagers, and, well, that’s sometimes a different story. It’s not that the kids aren’t smart or have nothing interesting to tell me – they are and they do. The problem is that some of them don’t yet know how to answer questions about themselves. Even the most casual interview environments make them uncomfortable.
This discomfort often manifests itself in one of two distinctly teenage ways:
1. The teen (a girl, usually) goes on a caffeinated ramble, filling the briefest of silences with lots and lots of words. Any words will do, really.
2. The teen (a boy, obviously) grunts to say “yes.” Or maybe the grunt was a “no.” Maybe it’s a “maybe?” Or maybe it wasn’t a grunt at all; maybe Mr. Teen just has gas.
All teens I speak with aren’t this way, of course, many really do shine in an interview. But I’ve encountered the above types often enough to wish that I had some kind of crystal ball to get inside their heads and pull out what I need.
Fortunately, I have one!
I first decided to get a Magic 8 Ball after watching an episode of Friends and noticing that Chandler had one on his office desk. I’m not a huge fan of either Friends or Chandler, but I loved the idea of having an 8 Ball of my own. I had one when I was a kid, but in my tweens I purged it with my other toys. I was under the impression that a toy-less room would make me more of an adult; instead it just made me a sullen teen with an un-fun room.
My plan was to keep the 8 Ball on my desk at work and, whenever one of my colleagues suggested an idea for a magazine story, I would consult it by asking, “Is that idea stupid, or what?”
Fun fact: the thingamabob that predicts the future is a 20-sided die with 10 positive responses, five negative responses, and five vague “ask me later, I’m sleepy”-style responses. So if you think an idea is stupid, the odds are pretty good that the 8 Ball will agree with you.
My antics with the 8 Ball were good for a few laughs. Soon thereafter it became part of the landscape, just another thing on my desk.
Little did I know that my 8 Ball would soon be important tool of the trade. This epiphany came less than a week after I brought it to work.
I had to interview a senior who conveyed all the signs of the Type One teen I mentioned above. She was blathering before she could even finish wrestling her book bag through my office door. She told me that she was having a crazy day and she was tired because there’s a test coming up and she’s nervous about it and she would very much like to check her email if it was okay with me and it would only take a second and she’s so sorry that she’s late and keeping me waiting this way and blah and the blah blah blah and blah.
While this little train wreck was playing itself out, she sat herself down in the chair next to my desk and started to play with the 8 Ball, shaking it with vigor and peering into the viewfinder.
I interrupted her. “What did you ask it?”
This stopped her monologue cold. “Ask what?”
“The ball.”
“Oh” she looked at the ball in her hands as if for the first time. “Nothing. I was just…” And then she trailed off. I could tell her answer was honest. She grabbed the ball just to do something with her hands.
“Nothing?” I sputtered. “I hope you realize that you are holding in your hands a powerful piece of black magic. You don’t hold a Magic 8 Ball and ask it nothing. It is not done. You gotta ask it something or it will get annoyed.” (And yes, I really said this. My tone suggested I was joking and not crazy. It’s the same tone I use on my six-year-old son when I want him to get into a giggle fit.)
With only a little more cajoling, I got her to ask the 8 Ball a question.
“You have to say it out loud,” I explained. “It needs to hear you.”
“Oh,” she said. She paused and asked, “Did I get into Brown?”
The ball replied with a “Most Likely,” and this report actually relieved her. We talked about Brown and about what made the university so important her. Then we talked about that test and what she was up to these days and yada yada yada. The formal setting of the office was not as intimidating as it was a few minutes before. We were just having a friendly chat. A friendly chat where I was taking notes.
When she began to slip back into her old conversational habits, I reintroduced the 8 Ball, which forced her to focus her mind on a specific, single idea. Then the 8 Ball forced her to sit still and wait for an answer to the question she asked.
I interviewed that young woman several years ago. At the time I had about 10 years of professional interviewing experience under my belt. In other words, I knew how extract information from people. But I had never, ever, seen anything like this before.
It was, well, magical.
On this blog I like to write about a lot of different things. But I always make an effort to keep all of my posts thematically linked under the common umbrella of “Creative Thinking.”
Creative thinking can come in many forms. Sometimes getting your mind to work in a new and innovative way takes a great deal of conscious effort. Other times a great idea comes by way of a happy accident. My Magic 8 Ball was one such happy accident.
Could it have been my happiest accident? I’m not sure. But according to one inside source, “All Signs Point to ‘Yes.’”
Hey, Look! A Writer Fellow! 