About What They Said

Post 60:

            You are either growing or regressing. It’s impossible to stay idle in a world that is in a perpetual state of ebb and flow. If you stand by and become a spectator it’s only another form of regression. Adaptation, betterment, learning—these are the options for those who wish to do something with their lives.  

            Obvious, I suppose. So how is this positive growth accomplished? There’s a constellation of ways, but a solid place to put yourself is where you don’t want to be. Sounds counterintuitive, but I’ll expand. If you want to learn nothing, surround yourself with the same people, having the same old conversations. Talk about the game, talk about how your politics are right, let the echo chamber pound you in the face until you’re nothing more than a battered and punch-drunk husk of whatever you were to start.

            This is applicable to writing. Dialogue can get stale and a lot of writers tend toward the same forms, the same kinds of back and forth between their characters. It’s a projection of their own lives. Creating sympathetic stories and characters is hard to achieve if you’re not sympathetic to all types of people in the real world. It just makes sense.

            Can you imagine what that person just said? If you ask that question when you hear something contrary to your own line of thinking, stopping right there, sloughing it off as nothing more than a thing to be dismissed, you’re missing a big opportunity. Here’s the point: Imagine it. Actually, really, truly attempt to imagine it. Ask yourself what brought that person to the point where they said what they said or did what they did. Here’s where some learning, some brain-expansion can actually take place.

            This doesn’t mean you have to lose your voice. That should be prevalent in all your work. If you don’t have something to say, what’s the point in adding to the conversation that is art or literature or life in general? But be careful. There’s only four Gospel’s, and you didn’t author any of them. Be adaptable. Get better. It takes strength to be open; you may find that in losing yourself a little, you get a little stronger. It will overflow into your writing and your characters and your life.

            At least that’s what I think.

            See you after.