Gun on the wall

I don’t own a gun, I’m not a playwright, and I don’t know all that much about Chekhov. But I do know he supposedly said this:

“Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

Or, in my vacuum-shrunk version:

“Don’t bring up the gun if you ain’t gonna shoot it.”

Even when I’m not writing anything creative, even when there’s no story to tell or scene to write, I often put the rifle on the wall. And too often, it ends up not doing anything.

Instead of racing into something, I’d be much better off taking the time to work out where I’m headed—make myself look at every detail not as something to get done, but as part of a composite problem, something with a beginning, middle, and end. Something like a story.

Before I plod through a task (like, say, manually entering data on a 1000+ cell spreadsheet), I should figure out what exactly I want from it: what I want to accomplish, what this action is doing to get there. That way, I wouldn’t spend an hour finding out it wasn’t necessary. I’d only spend a minute.

I can have all the speed in the world to finish things, but the advantage gets neutralized the moment I use it to complete something extraneous.

I should figure out that rifles are no good when you don’t need to shoot anything.

Wednesday

If today could be Yesterday,

then Today would be tomorrow.

And tomorrow would be Friday.

And that would mean…Weekend.

 

Certifiably sane

“To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing”
– William Butler Yeats

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

It’s one thing to write, paint, sculpt, compose, film, basket weave, et cetera et cetera, and to be paid – at last – in either riches or praise.

But it’s another to keep creating, to keep writing, painting and basket weaving even after that hope fades – to keep strumming along like a mad woman, the only audience to your own performance in a lonely amphitheatre of stone.

It’s another thing entirely to do it all for yourself, for no reason but that you want to, and for no end but your own, maniacal mission.

And I’ll be damned if that’s not the hardest (and most reasonable) thing that one could do.

How to get found

We were on vacation in the North Carolina mountains. Naturally we were far from relaxed.

This was back in the day when a printed Mapquest page was our guide, rather than the passive aggressive, too-kind commands of a GPS. Dad was driving, as usual. Also par for the course: both my mom and brother were asleep, and the hotel Mapquest assured us was directly in sight proved not to exist.

We’d spent the last 12 hours in a hunk of moving metal; we were grumpy, we were tired, and Dad refused to stop for directions.

New endeavors

I get along well with projects.

Project and I, we make a good team.

Admittedly, sometimes, the relationship can feel a bit one-sided. It can feel like I’m putting in all the work.

In the end, though, what we have is mutually beneficial: there’s no question that I’m the ‘doer’ in this partnership, but Project is the man with the plan. And when he shows up with his blueprints, and I show up at all, together we get things done.

Of course, it can be tough. Some days, he disappears. And even when he’s here, I might lose faith, and forget everything we’ve done.

But almost always, when we get together, we make it happen. And the result proves worth the pain.