Casualty of Words – Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

Time to Recharge

As with anything, sometimes the growth the comes when you step away and rest.

For instance, when you’re lifting heavy weights, you don’t grow during the workout; you grow when you’re sleeping, when you’re recovering, assuming, of course, you’re nourishing those muscles with the right kind of nutrients.

And isn’t that the perfect metaphor for this entire enterprise?

You stretch yourself, push yourself, but then you have to replenish the stores, fill back up. In our case, that’s reading, that’s watching good movies, that’s taking notes on things that inspire us, that’s actually going through and reading those notes, reading those Kindle highlights. That’s sleeping on it. That’s taking long walks.

And maybe that means not writing for a day, or a week, or a month.

I remember I was plateuing with my deadlift. I stopped deadlifting for an entire month and just swung kettlebells, 10,000 swings over the course of four weeks. I then re-tested my deadlift and PRed by 30 pounds, this after not deadlifting for an entire month.

What I’m saying is: stepping off that treadmill and stopping might be the best way to move forward.

So with that, I’m closing Vol. III of Casualty of Words. There are 47 of these little guys in this volume and many more from Vol. I and Vol. II. Check those out if you need a fix. Subscribe and share because I will be back after I do some more reading, do some more writing, and come back stronger than ever, another casualty of words.

The Interstate or the Back Roads?

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By Brendan O’Meara

My stock and trade is conversations.

I typically know what I want to coach out of a guest to best celebrate her work while also providing the most possible value for the listener.

But what’s the map?

Sure, the interstate system of highways is straight, efficient, and fast. You can drive 90 miles per hour in Montana.

But what if you take the back roads? The scenic route? Well, now you’re getting into the weeds, the great details, the scenery is richer. You’re going slower so you can take more in. I guess you can say it’s speed dating vs. that rich first date.

You still need to get somewhere, but one is far more revealing and less superficial. Depending on your goal and the time you have, consider the back roads.

Writing prompt: How can you turn more conversations from interstates to back roads?

The Perils of Wanting It All

By Brendan O’Meara

If you’re anything like me, you get a bit distracted by the shiny new thing.

You get excited at the possibilities of the new hobby, the new story because it’s that thing that’s going to bring you the satisfaction you want.

If I shared with you the myriad things I do and/or want to do, you’d wonder how I get anything done at all.

And that’s when I always go back to professional athletes or people with singular drive and singular vision. Prima ballerinas aren’t consumed with baking bread or writing or drawing or web design. Bodybuilders aren’t consumed with woodworking, welding, or making baked goods. Professional athletes, let’s just say in season, focus on their game, preparation, study, not gardening, painting, or book binding.

Yes, we need hobbies. We need ways to distract ourselves and to relieve tension.

But I think many of us stay in the mud because we lack a certain ruthlessness to finish the job, to truly master our craft. While we flitter over here, our main skill, the main reason we got into whatever mess we got into, it operates at a fraction of its potential, and yet we wonder why we don’t thrive.

I guess what I’m saying is this: It’s a long life, if we’re lucky, and I think we’d be better served giving our entire selves over to the thing for as long as the thing means something to us. Reevaluate. Does this still serve me? If not, there’s no shame in quitting. Your identity isn’t tied to your art. Your identity is tied to your generosity and willingness to share.

The Quidditch Problem

By Brendan O’Meara

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You remember quidditch, right? It’s the wizard game at Hogwarts that is sorta like lacrosse and hockey and soccer and capture the flag … but on brooms.

It’s really cool. That said, it’s only cool for so long when it comes to the story.

J.K. Rowling described quidditch matches in great detail early in the series. As did the movies. The movies used them as bigger set pieces early in the run.

But what can you really do with them after the novelty wears off? It’s like any sports book. You might want to recount all the games, all the races, all the events, but what you’ll find is they get very repetitive. They start sounding the same. There’s only so much these games can show the reader or the viewer.

So you need to use them sparingly. Once that novelty wears off, they must only be used to illustrate character and to move the story forward.

Otherwise, you’re left with what I call the Quidditch Problem.

So ask yourself: Am I putting in a game of quidditch because it moves the story forward or because I just think it’s cool?

The Only Writing Lesson You Really Need

By Brendan O’Meara

If you read and/or listen to this little show, you’re likely a writer of some kind.

In an age of life hacks and the seduction of short cuts and quick hits, we often seek answers to questions that will take out the growing pains, smooth over the pavement when what we really need to do is drive over those potholes and feel the chassis rattle.

And I guess what I’m saying is the answers are already on your bookshelf. I’m looking over at mine right now. Who do I most want to emulate on my way to finding my voice?

Pull down the book.

Get in there and read it with intention. Stew over it on a low heat. Stir the words around. Write in the margins. Take a big-picture view of the structure of the book then the micro-structure of each chapter.

The answers to how to do this are in the books. They aren’t how-to or prescriptive in the traditional sense. Rather, it’s a whole lot like Jeopardy!

The books have already given you answer: You now have to engineer the question. And it’s along that journey that these books will teach all you ever need to know about this silly little game.

Writing Retreats are BS

By Brendan O’Meara

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OK … so I don’t have an issue with writing retreats, per se. It’s nice to have a place to go and write free of distraction and really focus on the work.

But my sense of retreats is this: It’s a status symbol. I earned this retreat or I won this retreat, so look at me.

I doubt people truly get that much work done on a retreat.

But more importantly: I think a writer of a certain mindset feels that if only I earned a writing retreat or bought my way into one, then I will be able to write my book, finish my book, and be a capital W writer.

It looks good on Instagram. A great peeve of mine is the bucolic vistas writers take as if THIS is the writing life. Look at the dappled light. Look at the mountain. Look at the trees. I don’t know about you, but seeing that outside my window makes me want to go climb stuff and not be at the ledger writing paragraphs. That’s just me.

My point is this: You don’t need a retreat to write. Yes, you need time alone. Yes, you need time away from distraction. You can do that in your basement. You can do that at a hotel in town. You can get an AirBnB if you really need to change your context.

But don’t be fooled by the writing retreat industrial complex and the graduate school industrial complex that preys on the insecurities of the impressionable artists.

Pick a spot. Make it special. Do the work.

Adding More Weight

By Brendan O’Meara

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In order for me to understanding something, or to make sense of something, I need to dumb it down into athletic and physical terms. Sport metaphors work real well for me.

I was scribbling in my journal this morning about my inability to gain any kind of altitude. And yet I do the same thing every day expecting to generate lift. Isn’t that the definition of insanity?

But something more apt came to mind: weightlifting. This is my favorite form of exercise. It’s objective. Lift more weight, you’re stronger.

Say you’re squatting 135 pounds and it’s hard the first week. You do it the second week and it’s easier. Third week easier still. At some point, you need to add weight to the bar to test yourself, to stretch yourself, to test your limitations.

I know this is true for me regarding my writing, career, podcasting: I’ve just been squatting the same 135 pounds day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year and wondering, why am I not getting any stronger?

The real question becomes: What’s the equivalent of adding weight to the bar in a progressive manner that doesn’t create injury but still gets us to where we want to go?

Best Book Marketing Tip Ever!

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You’ll pardon the click-baity feel of the title to this little post, but hear me out.

The best book marketing tip ever is this: Write a damn good book.

Write a book that you want to read. Write a book that is so charged with your passion and expertise that the energy spills out from between the covers.

And write a book people will talk about. Write a book that people will buy five copies of so they can talk about it with their friends.

You can have the biggest audience on social media. You can have an email list of 20,000 people and maybe that buys you 10,000 books sold. Not too shabby, but you won’t get on any best-seller lists. Not that you should want that to be your goal anyway.

Point being, the way to sell a lot of books won’t have anything to do with social media reach. It’ll be because you wrote something so good, so important, that good old fashioned word of mouth moved mountains for you.

Tweet that!

Never a Wasted Word

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It’s easy when looking at the finished works of the people we admire to think that what comes out of their pens and pencils and keyboards is fully formed and finished.

It’s especially dispiriting to read their journals, the rawest form of their prose (one imagines) and to see how polished and lucid those are.

But though our work pales by comparison, every word we scribble in a journal, on a napkin, in a zine, every email we write or note we pass or text we send, it’s all words and it’s all language.

Every keystroke is a chance. An opportunity to get a little bit better.

There’s never a wasted word if we don’t let words go to waste.

But There are No Gaps

By Brendan O’Meara

Again, and I apologize, I come back to social media.

Ever notice how you don’t notice when someone has taken a break from social media?

Really, the only time you ever notice if someone has taken a break from the hamster wheel of social media is when they return to social media and tell you about their break.

Then you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t notice you were gone. Well, welcome back, buddy!”

That gets to the point of how insidious the whole machine is: We need to then broadcast on the very platform we’ve abstained from the fact that we left in the first place for the bump of dopamine and validation. But we’re back … on the platform … to tell you how great it was to be away from the platform.

There are no gaps in your feed. Imagine if you saw a gap in your “programming.” A channel that appears on or off. But no, there are no gaps. It gets filled in with whatever the bots have detected you need at that moment. Not because you liked so-and-so’s riff, but because something in your browser history, or a link you clicked, or something else told the AI that at this time, we’re gonna shovel this coal into your furnace.

And I don’t need to tell you: coal doesn’t burn clean.

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Brendan’s Monthly Newsletter: First of the month! No spam! Can’t beat it!

Brendan’s Monthly Newsletter: First of the month! No spam! Can’t beat it!

Brendan’s Monthly Newsletter: First of the month! No spam! Can’t beat it!

Brendan’s Monthly Newsletter: First of the month! No spam! Can’t beat it!

Brendan’s Monthly Newsletter: First of the month! No spam! Can’t beat it!

Brendan’s Monthly Newsletter: First of the month! No spam! Can’t beat it!

Brendan’s Monthly Newsletter: First of the month! No spam! Can’t beat it!

Brendan’s Monthly Newsletter: First of the month! No spam! Can’t beat it!

Brendan’s Monthly Newsletter: First of the month! No spam! Can’t beat it!