This isn’t a tip on writing, but then again maybe it is.
I won’t bore you with what you likely know, but social media as we know it: Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and others are doing way more harm than good. The details of which I can’t and won’t get into here.
My real quandary is how do we get notices and broadcast our work if we’re in the digital sphere. After all, I make podcasts and blog, so how can I get the word out if I’m not findable in the context of social media?
Watching “Chopped” several years ago, I remember one young chef talk about his time coming up in the kitchen. He obviously had skill. He was on Chopped.
But I suspect like most prestigious schools and the entitlement that comes with having graduated with what amounts to a worthless piece of paper, there’s a tendency even in the chef ranks to think you’re above a certain task.
Not this guy. I wish I knew his name.
In one of his testimonials, and I’m paraphrasing, he said, “If there was a pile of onions I had to chop, I was going to be the best damn chopper of onions.”
Man, I loved that sentiment. He wasn’t “above” cutting onions. How many thousands of onions had he chopped to that point? This was a job the dishwasher could do in a pinch. Here’s a trained chef being put on onion duty and he embraced it. The mundanity of chopping hundreds of onions in a shift, hunched over a pile, trying to make them as uniform slices and dices as possible, no doubt eyes burning the entire time.
In our work, no matter our experience, our privilege, our education, how can we embrace chopping onions? How can we get lost in the most banal of tasks that have overreaching implications?
He wasn’t really chopping onions. He was become more skilled with his knife. In the meditative trance of cutting onions, he was writing recipes. He was dreaming. He was developing rigor.
Again, he wasn’t really chopping onions. Not the winners, not the people seeking to make change, anyway.
It seems our devices don’t want us to shut them down. Without us, who are these objects?
The same might be said for you when you’re even tempting to shut it down (but do you ever really?). If you want to take that nap, take that vacation, god forbid work less than an arbitrary eight-hour day, isn’t there some part of your psyche that says, “Are you sure you want to shut down your computer now?”
Guilty, you work more. Guilty, you burn more fuel. Guilty, you drink more coffee because in order to “make it,” you’ve been told you must work until you can no longer keep your eyes open. Anything less and you’re lazy.
Tell yourself whatever story you need to tell yourself to accomplish your dreams, but understand that these machines operate better when you give them rest. The same can be said for you.
You wouldn’t call your computer lazy if you shut it down every night, would you?
As we keep unpacking great writing lessons from “The Queen’s Gambit,” let’s take a look at subtlety.
“The Queen’s Gambit” never hits you over the head with signals and symbols. Early on, her prized dress with her name Beth sewn into it was burned at the orphanage. She identified with that piece of clothing. It’s no wonder she grows up to love clothes and to identify with fashion. It was taken from her and she sought to take it back.
Halfway through The Queen’s Gambit, Benny Watts, the top U.S. chess player with swagger, confidence, and sharp wit, asked Beth why the Soviets were so dominant.
Whitney Terrell is the author of The Good Lieutenant. He also is a journalist who covered the Iraq War. He teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He’s on Instagram and Twitter.
During my conversation with Mason Gravely (@alive_adventures on IG), I asked him what a good interviewer is like. I admire him as an interview so much, I had to know.
He said, “You know, it’s someone who listens. Someone who really is present. You can really tell when an interviewer is distracted, or they’re just kind of going off. They’re calling it in.”
Mason does incredible work for Athletic Brewing, the nations best and only (?) brewery only brewing non-alcoholic beer. Amazing stuff.
Where’s the juice? Where’s the juice in the enterprise?
The juice is in coming up with an idea and convincing an editor that the idea is worth pursuing, convincing a person, selling a person on that idea. When I get an idea for a story, it’s almost a giddy feeling. It’s a feeling that that you have a secret that no one else knows about, so you want to just tell as many people as you can about that. It’s like gossip, it’s a big piece of juicy gossip, and you want to share it and get it in the right hand.
Pete Croatto from Episode 231 of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast
In a recent conversation I had with the freelance writer and journalist Pete Croatto, he said pitching outlets is a lot being a quarterback.
You have your first option for big yards. Then you go through your progressions.
Sometimes you check down, sometimes you tuck it and run. Maybe you take a sack or punt and wait for the next possession. It does no good to keep throwing into triple coverage.
