As promised, I’m moving my writing to a new, self-hosted blog over at betterthanithought.com.
I did a few fancy backend changes, so many of you will continue to receive updates as you have been. In fact, most of you will never even see this message. However if you’re reading this and didn’t see my most recent post (it went up today just minutes before this one), then you may have to subscribe again on the new site.
_____________________
I’ve been editing Yellowstone photos for two weeks. I should clarify that when I say ‘editing’ I’m not talking about something truly difficult like photoshopping them. Or cropping them. Or even fully opening them. I mean I’m deleting the bad ones and the duplicates and giving the rest names. And it’s taken me two weeks.
In my defense, I was in Yellowstone for four days and it’s one of the most picturesque places I saw on my trip. I didn’t count how many photos I took, but after my first round of edits I still had 298 to sort through.
The problem isn’t just the photos though, it’s the significance of finishing them. Because once I get rid of all the ones I don’t need, and I name the ones I’m going to keep, I can finally make my last Photo Tour post. And with that, I will be done with trip posts. Once I’m done with trip posts, I can export the whole blog and move it over to my new hosting account. Then I can launch the new blog. The one I’ve been saying I’d do. The one without a clean, easy finish line like writing about a trip. The one that goes on indefinitely. The one where I talk not just about strangers, but about friends. The one that I’ll take into my professional writing career. The one where I’m not only writing about doing scary things, but where writing about certain things scares me. The one people keep telling me to start.
But there’s 298 beautiful pictures of steam floating off of geysers standing in the way. There’s buffalo and thousand-year-old trees and those tiny snowmen someone built on that bench. That’s why there hasn’t been a post in a while. Because there’s only one left. One last thing before this part of my life is folded completely into the past, and my present becomes something else. Something new and exciting and scary. Like a solo trip around the United States once was.
Today I wanted to share a comic I found a few months ago by artist Natalie Nourigat. I think she manages to strike a tone that is often difficult to achieve: honest and confident but still accepting and humble:
Don’t Let Fear Stop You From Traveling
__________________
_________________
(I wrote the following in November of 2013 with no intention of publishing it. However in looking at it now, I realize that this might be of some interest to a few of my readers.)
I have one and only one cure for writer’s block. Sometimes it will take me a while to realize I even have writer’s block. I like to mull things over in my head a lot before I write them, so I can easily stare at a screen for awhile without being truly blocked. But occasionally I will find myself staring off away from the screen after having sat in front of the computer for several minutes. I’m not thinking about writing anymore because whatever I’m trying to write isn’t working. So my brain goes off in other directions. What’s funny is that I am still writing during these times, I’m just writing off-task. Rather than mulling over the thing I need to work on, I’m mulling over what makes a person good at cleaning or how television transitioned away from the single-season-with-summer-break schedule. I write dialogs of imagined conversations I wished I would have had with people I was previously angry with. I imagine how I might introduce myself were I to become a Wall Street consultant, or the many things I would say to congress were I ever given the chance. These are tiny, separate essays that I write in my brain all the time. I have no where to put them, which is why I continue to mull instead. And they are the things I escape to when writing isn’t happening.
After an unknown period of staring into space while I write one of these lost essays, I realize that I must be stuck. There is a block between what I know I must accomplish and the act of accomplishing it. And that’s when I employ the only means I have of getting unstuck from this particular problem. I write about why I can’t write.
It may go something like this: say I want to tell a story about someone close to me, but I’m afraid of casting them in an unfair light. I know I don’t think poorly of them, but I worry that I won’t have the craft to convey the facts in a way that remains both true and positive. And I get stuck. I try to think through my writing and I can only think of explanations that are unfair to my friend. I may not realize this unfairness is why all the words sound wrong, I just know they do. And so I begin to type out my reasoning. I drop whatever voice I’m using, I ignore any sense of time or space. I start typing as though I am directly addressing the page, and therefore the problem. And I usually can’t get through more than two paragraphs before the problem is solved. Either I have eased myself into the problem and started on the path towards my intended topic, or I have stumbled upon something even more interesting to write about. Either way I am writing. When I am done I typically go back and trash those first two paragraphs and, like magic, my story starts exactly where it ought to.
Writing through the problem is in fact what I am doing right now. The thing you are currently reading is an example of me getting over writer’s block. It’s National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. The goal is to finish a novel of 50,000 words in 30 days. I did it last year and had a lot of fun. Since I still have a lot of trip to write about, I decided this year I would make my 50,000 words go towards getting the rest of the journey down on paper. This means that rather than writing a blog post every other day, I have to write 1-2 posts every day, depending on their length. It’s tiresome and difficult to do NaNo anyway, but I’ve managed to back myself into an especially difficult corner: I’m not allowed to suck.
That’s the phrase: Allow Yourself to Suck. I credit Mur Laugherty with those exact words, but the sentiment is true for everyone during NaNo. Your goal is to get a lot of words down on paper. Not all of those words will be great. It doesn’t matter. Editing is for December. For now you must keep writing.
But I can’t wait until December. I need to produce 13 fully edited posts before November is over. And considering it often takes me as long to edit a post as it does to write it, and considering many of my blogs have gone over the 1,667 words needed per day for NaNo, I have been writing with a NaNo-level time commitment for FIVE MONTHS. And for four of those months I was also trying to figure out where I was going to sleep every night.
I know there are professional writers who will easily crank out 4,000-10,000 words a day all the time. But I am not there yet, and as I understand it that kind of production takes many people years to reach. And so I’m left with my only recourse, my only solution. I write out my problems. Perhaps tomorrow I will be able to get back on track. Maybe I’ll have to write through some more problems first. But for now, I can clock the rough draft of this post at 864 words, which brings me over the edge for how much I needed to write today. It’s a long way to December. But it was a long way across the country and back. And just like hiking up the Grand Canyon or driving through Oklahoma farmland, sometimes forward is the only direction. Walk, walk. Drive, drive.
Write. Write.
_________________
Some of you may remember a post I did awhile back about choosing a thing to do in every place I visited. While I did take many photos of people taking pictures (more on that later), I also went ahead with my plan to photograph my sleeping arrangements for every night. Few of these photos are interesting on their own, but in aggregate they seem to tell a story. I hope you enjoy:
_________________
I saw this article some time ago, but it’s been making the rounds again and someone pointed out how similar the thoughts are to my own:
Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed
While I was always a fan of the article itself, I’m becoming a bigger fan of David Cain. While reading an article he wrote about his experience eating vegan for 30 days, he mentioned the difficulty of finding vegan options when you don’t control the menu. To which he added this amazingly precise bit of wisdom:
“This marginalization was a new experience for me, being a young, white, non-religious, non-disabled English-speaking male, and maybe it’s good for my character to get a hint of what it feels like to live in a world that wants you be different than you are.”
__________________
__________________
Better Than I Thought 