Writing Prompts

Currently, I’m slogging through Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Braid. I say slog because it’s a challenge, heavy on the math and science of formal systems and their connections. This is the kind of reading I regularly do, even if I come away with a muddied sense of things. How is the world connected? What does this or that mean? I feel an odd sense of joy in reaching middle age with more questions than answers.

Curiosity is a skill like any other. It has to be practiced and encouraged. Children are naturally curious, but somewhere along the way, we teach ourselves to be cynical sophisticates who stop asking why? The culture, too, is teaching us the immediate gratification of having information spoon fed to us. Not asking questions or researching for our own answers impacts our brains and it impacts how we understand the world. Many of us are simply wrong, basing our judgment on faulty and/or incomplete information. Curiosity is the basis of critical thinking. And we need it more in the world than ever.

Welcome to Fearless Friday.

Fea canstockphoto13410470 rless Fridays are about lives lived in spite of our fears, living a life that is about curiosity, compassion, and courage. If you just got published, something wonderful happened to you, you witnessed an act of kindness or bravery, or you have someone in your life who amazes you, drop your story into my contact page or email it to TheGreenStudy (at) comcast (dot) net and I’ll run it on a Fearless Friday. If you’re a blogger, it’s an opportunity to advertise your blog, but this is open to anyone who would like to share. These will be 100-300 word stories, subject to editing for clarity and space.

Teach Our Children Well

Curiosity begins as children, so that’s where I’m going to start. Today is Multicultural Children’s Book Day. One of my writer friends, Carolyn at Wise Owl Factory has written children’s books about multicultural adoption and has a fantastic website of resources for parents and teachers. Literacy and representation matters. Little humans are curious, but like adults, they are most curious about themselves – how do I fit into the world? Who can I identify with? Who do I look to for example?

As a side note: There’s apparently a lot of free goodies if you pay attention to #readyourworld on Twitter. Great opportunity for parents, grandparents, and teachers.

Curiosities for Grownups, Too

canstockphoto31504305 If you want to really challenge yourself, read Valerie Tarico’s latest post “The Righteousness and The Woke – Why Evangelicals and Social Justice Warriors Trigger Me in the Same Way“. I forced myself to read it even as I bristled at the title – I find myself extremely sensitive to the fallacy of both sides, as if they are equal and only two. But her post is very thoughtful, boiling down to a lack of critical awareness when you become so dogmatic in your thinking that no light can come in. That is what curiosity does – it lets in the light, airs out the room, allows space for nuance and change. But more importantly it doesn’t make it easy for us to categorize and dismiss other humans.

On a lighter note, I’ve mentioned her blog before, but Ellen Hawley over at Notes from the UK always makes me laugh. She writes of the sometimes very odd stories that emerge from over there. As a writer, I never read one of her posts without coming away with a story idea.

Curiosity from a Writing Perspective

I’ve learned this year that if I ever experienced writer’s block, I no longer can. One of the exercises we do at writing group is a random selection of subjects and a timed writing session writing either an essay or short story around the subject. I wasn’t particularly good in the beginning, feeling the panic that any effort to time or rush me inspires. I used to poo-poo writing prompts as an individual exercise, because I always had something I wanted to write, even if it were laborious. But not when it came to writing fiction.

canstockphoto31420073 One of the tools we use is The Storymatic, a collection of cards containing characters, items, odd situations. We draw random cards and there’s our story basis. It’s a muscle you learn to use – making up things on the spot. We’re training ourselves to be pathological liars on paper. The outcome is not only a stronger skill set, but in the aftermath, I end up with vignettes of potential characters to develop, plot lines to follow, and narratives that could be more.

So be curious about what you’re capable of, have patience, and be open to things you’ve made fun of in the past. That’s a lot of work for me. I make fun of everything and then have to shamefacedly turn around and say, oh, that really worked. The lesson is: what you mock today, might be something entirely worthwhile the minute you start being curious.

Writing prompts have never appealed to me for a couple of reasons. There is the Rule of Obstinacy that guides most of my life. Suggest something to me? You’re not the boss of me. Join a group, a trend, a club? To paraphrase Groucho Marx, I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would take me. Recommend something to me? What are your supporting sources? I need to do the research.

The second reason that writing prompts don’t appeal, is that I cannot eat a simple breakfast without my mind falling over itself with ideas and thoughts. I so often start conversations with people, “I was just thinking about…”, which is to say, I spend a lot of time inside my head. I get up at 4am every morning, so that I can sit in solitude and silence for a few hours. I read or write, eat breakfast or have some weird-ass epiphany.

This morning was no different. I woke up at 3:42am with a cat sitting on my chest, purring its sycophantic feed-me purr. I had a post ready to put up on this blog, but I didn’t like where I ended it, so it stays in the draft pile. I wonder if I’ll post anything at all. No worries, time for breakfast.

The first order of any day is to put on the kettle. We have a lovely ceramic electric kettle. Tea has been a part of my life since I was born. It was the cure-all for whatever ails thee and the only proper way to begin, well, anything. Nothing happened until the tea was made. Visitors could not talk, Christmas presents could not be opened, phone calls could not commence.

My family came to the United States from England in 1953 on the last White Star liner built, the MV Georgic. They arrived rumpled and tired at Ellis Island, and made their way to Savannah, Georgia. They lived there for a year with a disagreeable relative before taking a train to San Francisco. Eventually, my mother, reluctant father, and I moved to the midwest, where I have lived most of my life. This is all to say, that much of what was British was left in a trail all over the country, with the exception of tea and accents and a certain reticence about…everything.

The tea is not a fancy one. In my cupboard, there is almond, chai, green, white, jasmine and a lot of made up flavored teas. I’ve tried them all, but my regular cup is black pekoe with sugar and soy milk. The soy milk is a nod to my newly acquired veganism, but I expect with all the soy I’ve been consuming, that I’ll be growing a third breast any day now. Moo.

The mention of veganism is an awkward segue to the other part of my breakfast, toast. I baked the bread yesterday, after making vegan adaptations to the recipe. I use the oven, don’t have a dough mixer and the recipe has no weird ingredients. This means I’ll be finding flour in the kitchen for weeks to come. It takes 3-4 hours to make this bread, which allows several hours of proofing the dough, pounding it down again and letting it rise. And if you can’t see the analogy to writing in that, there’s no helping you.

I once worked in a bakery at a grocery store. I’d arrive at 5am, mix dough for doughnuts and plop those little rings into the fryer. I didn’t last in that job long. I was still wearing the Hi My Name is Michelle. I’m New, but I’m Exceptional nametag when I quit. I now have a lifelong doughnut and nametag revulsion. The doughnut’s history is disputed, but it is thought that olykoeks, meaning oily cakes, were brought over by the Dutch settlers. I went to Amsterdam once and got food poisoning (not from doughnuts), but no pot. It was a disappointing trip. Except for the tulips. They were pretty.

Which reminds me that I have to get some fencing up around the still dormant flower beds. The rabbits go to town on the tulips, spitefully biting off full blooms mid-stem and leaving them on the ground. They don’t even like to eat them, the little nobs. Still, every year, I plant in excess to make sure that after all the animals get done with our open buffet, we get a damned salad out of it. This year, our full ecosystem is in swing. The rabbits, mice, voles and chipmunks have brought in owls, hawks and last year, a red fox. Population control is cruel, but innate.