I was worried, at first, because sitting down to tell a story is extremely hard for me. I’ve tried writing 9-5 and my creative process just doesn’t work that way. So, I actually gave up on this goal. But in the middle of the week I realized that storytelling is a part of everything that I do.
I would show you examples in my cover letters, but that’s pretty boring. I did manage to knock out the intro to my next short story. This is another story that no one is supposed to “understand” – rest assured, if I did it right, it should still be pretty to read.
A serpentine dragon coursed across the sky, its glittering scales composed of every star in the heavens, its claws rending the air. Its mouth opened to reveal a giant white pearl, perfectly round. As its maw gaped wider and wider the pearl grew larger and larger, revealing oceans and dimples.
Smoke rose from the wreckage of a tiny cottage on the edge of the forest, a casualty of the dragon’s wild rage. The man stumbled out of it, dazed, but glanced only in passing at the home he’d built with his own hands, fixating instead on the sinuous twists of the dragon above him. He wasted no time climbing on the stacks of firewood in the back to mount the roof.
The dragon soared and coiled in the night sky, a living constellation that the man had no choice but to gape at, in awe. He gave no mind to his safety, so entranced was he by the serpent’s beauty. It roared and shook its lion’s mane, whipped the ground with its fiery tail. The sky shattered, the earth shook, and fire sparked in the forest depths.
The building below him creaked precariously as fire licked up its walls, weakening them from the inside. Still, the man gave no notice. Instead, he reached a hand out slowly toward the dragon. It turned toward him and screamed in fury. Still not satisfied, the man reached up higher and higher. The beast’s tail whipped out, ensnaring him. Its bristling scales grated his flesh as its grip tightened. His scream escaped as a puff of air crushed out of his lungs. His ribcage cracked under its grip, but his eyes never left the dragon. His questing fingers still reached for its eyes.
The cottage burned beneath him and the roof caved in from the heat. His eyes began to glaze over as blood ran down the scales of the beast. Finally, his hand dropped, flopping weakly in the dragon’s grasp. It screamed celestial rage and triumph and dropped him into the flames below.
“How long will it take to master aikido?” a prospective student asks. “How long do you expect to live?” is the only respectable response.
-George Leonard, Mastery
Week 4, last week, was about Apprenticeship. In short: Never stop learning. This book was about useful methods (design patterns) the authors found for learning. While they were primarily talking about software development, the patterns can be applied to any pursuit. Wherever I look, whether it’s software craftsmanship, movement arts, or writing, the Long Road is daunting. I found the problem statement for Retreat into Competence to be very fitting:
“Problem: As you are introduced to the vast reaches of your ignorance you are overwhelmed.”
I became obsessed with the idea of software development apprenticeships, so I compiled a list of apprenticeships that I found online. I drew my own map by reading all the blogs of all the Code Cadets (Code Academy students) that I could find and scouring them for Ruby and Ruby on Rails resources. You can find them here.
I highly recommend reading Mike Ebert’s blog, which chronicles his 12 weeks at Code Academy as he goes from zero development experience to “adhering to Agile standards” in authentic, captivating prose.
I worked my way through Chris Pine’s Learn to Program and did some more Ruby Koans and Project Euler problems. Anxious to work through Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper and finish the Rails Tutorial, this time for Rails 3.2.
I applied to Code Academy and my fingers are crossed, but I think I’ve started off with a good foundation – whether I’m accepted this year shouldn’t matter in the long run.
I set myself a goal of “hustling” without really knowing what it meant. I knew official definitions ranged from “work hard” to “con people into doing what you want.” I think I’ve somehow landed in the middle – working really hard at people.
It’s come down to applying for employment, reaching out to interesting people, and looking into meetups and interests that languished before: Chicago’s indie game dev scene, startups, acting, software craftmanship. Applying to software development apprenticeships. Reading more about apprenticeship here – I really like the concept, and that you can apply its lessons to so much more than software development.
It’s been a good week so far. But I’m anxious to get back to Ruby, Rails, and learning how to morph from my caterpillar-like self into something that can fly and shoot laser beams from its antennae. If only I could find two tiny women to sing to me.
That’s my excuse, anyway. I’ve been wanting to write, but unable to drudge up the “artistic” aesthetic in my last two posts. Still, I suppose a short recap is in order.
Since my return from St. Louis, I have been experimenting with incremental productivity – building habits that lead to positive outcomes. For instance, a little writing each day. A little bit here, a little bit there, and I’ll have a book. That way, as long as I keep going forward, I’ll be ahead of the game in no time. I’d read so much about habits through productivity blogs. I did, in fact, write some stuff and learn to code some stuff. I was sure it was the way to go.
It wasn’t.
I’ve accumulated over 12 hours’ worth of Korean lessons over the past three days as a result of a complete abandonment of my other goals and habits. Sure, maybe I’m doing it wrong. I don’t care – whatever I have been doing has not been producing results. This, however, does.
I am forgetting about habits for now. Maybe they’ll work for me in the future. But for now I’m going to leap into the next adventure. Complete a 68 lesson Korean course in a week? Sure. Next? Who knows? But it will be fun and exciting.
It took me over 6 months to re-learn the fact that I am an adrenaline junkie.
The cold wind swirled just outside the shed where I killed her. Her eyes were so blue.
Her heartbeat raced in her neck. I could feel it against my palm as I clenched her throat and steadied her thrashing. I placed a hand around her mouth, the blade against her throat.
She did not die easily.
I danced all night so I could forget, but she was waiting for me when I came home with her blue eyes and her frantic heartbeat. When the blood stopped gushing, stopped pouring, stopped dripping, she was still watching me with those eyes. They seemed to capture and reflect the endless sky she had seen every day. As long as she stared at me, I knew there was no way she could be dead.
She did not die easily.
I cried, heartbroken, into the crook of my arm. Saying “I’m sorry” wouldn’t bring her back. I tried it enough to know. She would never forgive me, nor stop accusing me with those beautiful eyes.
She did not die easily.
But when she did, we bagged and paid for her. We plucked and cooked her. Then we ate her. Her blue-eyed stare stayed with me. She would never die.
And I would never forget the day I took responsibility for what I ate.
So far, I’ve felt the most productive in my career as an author when I wasn’t writing. Eight hours a day or more, five days a week, a happy buzz, and exactly 0 words written. Clearly, I was doing something wrong, so I began to write every day.
At first it was easy, but my subconscious was working against me. I wrote 8,000 words of drivel a day during National Novel Writing Month 2010, which, though crappy, still set unrealistic expectations. I couldn’t even write 2,000 words a day. I found myself less and less motivated, and the harder I tried and the longer hours I set, the worse it got. The more I forced myself to sit down and write, the worse I failed and the longer I spent contemplating that failure instead of living life – life, the fabric of stories!
I dreaded the act of writing. Meanwhile, the stories and world still came to life in my mind when I daydreamed, which I found myself doing a lot. The story was still alive, but my ability to set it down on paper was in the midst of a slow and painful death, 9-to-5 Monday through Friday.
I came to a few important realizations:
If I couldn’t make writing a positive experience, I would not be able to continue. Period. End of stories. End of dream.
Time spent daydreaming was productive, but it could not be confined to a 9-5 workday. Nor could I track it, since it happened in my sleep as well.
And finally, I read a BoingBoing interview with Ran Prieur that allowed me to give myself some slack. I was, and am still, learning to self-motivate.
“When you quit that, and you have these vast blocks of time where there’s nothing you’re supposed to be doing, people get depressed. What you’re doing during that time is you’re learning to self motivate.” -Ran Prieur
So the new plan:
All writing “counts” as productive writing: dreams, journals, and blogs. I pay myself in karma and kudos.
Social motivation is huge. Get my stuff in front of people as soon as possible. I <3 Wise Readers! You'll see stuff soon, I promise.
Relax time constraints and do other things. Have more adventures. Have fun. Life sucked as a “full time writer,” so I’m making it a priority to be Brian Kung full-time.
What I forgot was that it’s not about wasting time hammering my head against the clock. It’s about telling stories and having fun doing it. It’s about being a complete person.
I awoke from the nightmare of the American school system bent on reclaiming my lost time. I spent the summer practicing spoken and written word with Jeff, biking into the heart of Missouri with Wells, and making trips out to Iowa to visit my sister and Albany, New York, for a friend’s wedding. I spent a month getting to know the Chicago trickers and wander around downtown. Then I returned home with a mission to carve out a work space from the untamed wilderness of my parents’ home or burn everything to the ground.
Living at my parents’ house is not something I’m ashamed of, whether it’s because of our Chinese culture or our ability to work out our individual problems. But after living in a car and out of my backpack for so long, “less is more” was not as accurate as “less and more,” and the house drives me crazy. It is in a state of endless clutter, which is what happens when there’s too much form and not enough function. Like their namesakes in web design, the function of our tables is to hold clutter so that we don’t have to deal with it in a concise, purposeful manner.
Once my room was in a workable state, I began to launch ideas. Real estate, t-shirts, drop shipping, digital goods, movement concepts, videogames. Websites, godawful websites with cats. Thankfully, they failed. Most either turned out to be unactionable at that point in my life or just a momentary infatuation. I learned a lot, in terms of knowledge and self-knowledge, but when the perfect opportunity came up, everything else faded into the background. My life clicked into alignment.
When I wake up, I know what I’m supposed to do. I know where I want to be next week, next month, next year. I have a reason to get a full night’s rest every night, to exercise every day, and to eat well.
Our time on earth is limited. We’re all counting down from about 100 years. What would you do if you had to spend just one of those years doing any one thing of your choosing?
And why aren’t you doing it? Because you will end up doing what you choose. As difficult or unrealistic as it may be, why not choose what you like?
Life is better in alignment.
PS, I’m following my childhood dreams of becoming an author: http://eepurl.com/fjpKk
It’s one of the tricks I told myself that, once I got them, I would be able to rest easy and stop tricking.
That was a complete lie. I’m not about to stop tricking.
Perhaps it was related to getting a double full, but I had a thought about dance that I posted on Tim Tang’s Facebook Group, Insight. I said “All movement is dance.” I had immediate misgivings about the way I phrased it as I took a shower and added a comment to clarify. As it turns out, I had it backwards. All movement can be dance, but not all movement is dance.
Movement is everywhere. The arc of an arrow in flight, the vibrations of an atom, a ballerina’s elegant, pointed toes. I realized that there is nothing to differentiate the radiation signature of a red dwarf star from the ballerina – all just molecules. What really makes it different is that someone appreciates the ballerina. Not to say that no one appreciates the star. Actually, someone does appreciate the star and its radiation signature.
That’s what makes dance different. The human element. The human appreciation of movement. This appreciation is what makes sports entertaining. This appreciation is what makes the arc of a rocket as it escapes Earth’s orbit a beautiful, man-made gift to the heavens. This appreciation is what makes bboying, ballet, and tango irresistible and captivating to watch. As the music moves us through time, the dancers move through space. It’s why they call it a “movement” in music composition, is it not?
Maybe I am alone in this nearly universal appreciation of movement. After all, I am the only person I know who will stare at an iMac’s screensaver for over ten minutes, mesmerized. I played with Google’s bouncy bubble logo for 45 minutes. I have a witness to my weirdness.
But if anything, I think I’m just an extreme case. Everyone has some sort of appreciation of movement, unavoidably. Everything in our universe is in a state of change. So while you admire the football player’s charge toward the endzone, you may equally enjoy the wild stallion’s charge through a racing river, and the sure, rolling thunder of a bowling ball headed for a strike. A dancer may duck and dodge like a football player, charge like a stallion, or even roll like a bowling ball. Even if you don’t appreciate the similarity the dancer will. She will appreciate the movement that she is trying to bring to life for you.
Try. Please. For your own sake. The entire world, and every instant we spend in it, is full of opportunities for enjoyment and amazement. And it’s all in the appreciation of movement, whatever that movement may be called. I’ve been calling it dance, but I’m beginning to think that there might be a better term.
I carefully wrote down each thought, each idea, each quote. They were like little gems handed to me from ages past, from the greatest thinkers and the wisest sages.
Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
The little shreds of paper were like oversized fortune cookies. It was somehow disappointing that these ideas would even deign to fit on them.
Be yourself and I promise people will enjoy it. And if they don’t, forget them.
Each one fluttered to the bottom of the bin in a different manner, some twirling like helicopter blades, others tumbling, some dropping directly while others looped in circles.
Don’t be afraid to fail. Be afraid not to try.
My hand was beginning to cramp up. I hadn’t written anything in a long time. Nothing by hand, anyway.
There are three choices in life: Be good, get good or give up.
I swept my arm against my shirt to soak up the sweat. The sun arched overhead, hot and humid.
Seek to understand before you seek to be understood.
When the wind picked up, it was like a giant dog panting at my back. I could feel the air, heavy with its slobber, wetting my clothes against my body.
Love is wanting others to be happy.
I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. The metal bin was filling up.
What would you do if you knew you were going to die tomorrow? In a month? A year? Everyone dies. Only a few truly live.
Sometimes I didn’t realize where the thoughts had come from, or how they’d affected me.
People first.
Sometimes, I didn’t remember who had said it, where I’d read it, what it even meant. Just that it was important.
Courage, originally meaning to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.
Like tattered photographs of relatives I barely remembered, but photographs that made my lips turn upward in a smile nonetheless.
Who would you be, what would you do if you could not fail?
I took one final look at the words that provided guidelines for my life, words that have comforted me in times of sorrow and driven me to strive against my limits.
Ideas are worthless.
I took one final look into the bin and then lit the match.
