New Year’s Enigma
The more I tell myself New Year’s Eve doesn’t matter to me, the more I realize it does. That’s the power of negative suggestion. The more you tell yourself not to think about something the more you do (quick, try not to think of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man).
I try to roll my eyes at the Calendar, thinking the New Year is just another number; an arbitrary changing of the digits, a human construct with as much meaning as daylight savings. It’s still going to be cold in Minneapolis on January 2. Nothing significant is going to change, but that’s the thing that always gets under my skin. It isn’t merely about the festivities of the evening. It’s about how much distance I’ve put between this version of myself and the one from the year before. Continue reading How to Make Practical New Year’s Resolutions →
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A lot of people avoid moments of quiet contemplation for fear they’ll get stuck in them. They don’t see the therapeutic value in journaling. Some writers even discourage the practice, saying that an abstract record of your thoughts won’t enhance your ability to write narrative fiction, but what if journaling could benefit your writing and your state of mind with the right direction?
When I started journaling it looked like I was transcribing the ravings of dizzy man pacing a bus station. I switched from the past tense to the present tense without sensing a disturbance in the time space continuum. I switched from the first person to the second without warning. I started sentences with confusing modifiers. I left my particles to dangle. I was less concerned with good sentence structure as I was with getting my free floating feelings out there. Continue reading How to Use Writing as a Remedy →
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Advice for writers, stories about the world they live in.
