You're wrong about me (and I'm right about you), part 5: Seven Pointers

In this recent series of blog entries you’ve been finding out how easy it is to be wrong in assumptions, convictions, and perceptions. What can you do about it?

1. Give yourself little reminders of how you’ve been wrong in the past, better to soften your certitudes in the present. The Gauguin object that brought me around took on an iconic role: it became the embodiment of my misperception, and as such it held sway over me, made me a little more open-minded, invited me to approach things and people without an overly passionate or dismissive attitude. The syrup of prevention is better than the surgery of cure, or words to that effect!
   
2. Once you discover you've been wrong about something or someone, acknowledge your mistake, to yourself and to the public. I don’t mean quite to the whole world, only to the parties concerned: your wife, a friend, a shopkeeper with whom you picked a fight over a nickel. Acknowledgment frees your conscience and wins you a lot of good will.
   
3. Make amends. There have been many situations in which I became retroactively aware of being in the wrong with someone. I approach the person in question and offer him or her a small gift. I often choose to give a copy of my iconic Gauguin book, telling the gift recipient of how Gauguin had taught me a lesson or two about  being wrong. Books, cards, stationery, candy, flowers, CDs, DVDs, small objects, a bottle of olive oil... the possibilities are endless.
4. You’ve been wrong and you’ll be wrong again. Given that you can never be totally sure of a great many things, it may be useful to develop the mental habit of inserting a little doubt into your verbal interactions. Spice up your conversations with one of these formulations: " I may be wrong, but it seems to me that…" "As far as I can tell, I think that…" "I’ve been wrong in the past and I’ll be wrong again. Nevertheless, here’s what I think about this…" "I may be missing something here, but if I understand it right you’re saying that…" "I’m not sure about this, but let me say it anyway. I may need to retract it before long."
   
5. If you catch yourself engaging in fixed patterns of thought and speech, stop your statement in mid-flight and park it back at the hangar.
6. My wife sweetly allowed me to stay wrong about Gauguin for years, until I came around to the truth when I was good and ripe for it. You may be absolutely sure that someone close to you is terribly wrong about something. Well… you may need to give the person in question minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years to let go of his or her wrong opinion. Remember: facts don’t stand a chance against convictions.
7. To be wrong and learn from it is better than to be right and not learn a thing.

I have every intention of revisiting this subject in the near future. For instance, I'd like to tell you about the Brazilian who didn't believe I was Brazilian regardless of what I said or did. I'd like to tell you about all my ex-friends, the objectionable men and women whom I misjudged for much too long. I'd like to tell you about my ex-stepmother, who so liked picking fights she'd disagree with herself if you agreed with her. But I won't tell you any of these gossipy delights until at least THREE OF YOU READERS write in with stories of your own about being wrong. Capisce?

You’re wrong about me (but I’m right about you), part 4: Perceptions

Many years ago, during one of my summer visits to my family in Brazil, I went to visit my ailing, housebound grandmother. I took the bus to her neighborhood and walked from the bus stop to her apartment building. Way down the block I spotted my father, walking toward me.

Dad wasn’t very tall—about 5-foot-4, I’d say. His large skull was totally bald on top and scraggly on the sides. On this occasion was dressed in the garb he wore daily to his job teaching at the university hospital: grey trousers, white shirt, brown cardigan. His walk was endearing, somewhat ridiculous, and absolutely individual. He took fast, small steps, always looking down at his feet, lost to his inner world, thinking and thinking—that was his thing, thinking.

As he walked toward me, he ate popcorn out of a paper bag. In Brazil you can buy fresh popcorn from street carts, much as you can buy pretzels in New York or crêpes in Paris. I come from a family of popcorn fanatics. We eat a lot of it, we eat it often, and we eat it in public as well as in private.

Dad was so absorbed in his popcorn and his inner world that he didn’t see me walking toward him. I decided to play a joke on him. We got nearer and nearer to each other, and right when he were side by side I put my mouth practically in his ear and asked, “You enjoying your popcorn?”

Dad was totally freaked out, of course. He looked up at me with alarm in his eyes. It’s not every day that a total stranger invades your inner world for no good reason.

For a microsecond I was proud of my joke. Then it was my turn to freak out. The guy wasn’t my father at all! He happened to look like my father, dress like my father, walk like my father, and eat popcorn like my father. And he happened to be at my grandmother’s neighborhood, as my father was likely to be two or three times a week. But—he wasn’t my father.

I have no idea who that guy was or how he reacted to my assault, because I didn’t hang around to find out. When I realized I had made a mistake, I sped away without looking back. I rushed to grandma’s and sat at her feet for an hour, pretending that I was the angel she had long thought I was. Why spoil her illusions? That’d have been quite selfish of me.

The moral of the story is, “You can’t ever be totally sure of anything. It doesn’t matter how much evidence you have in your favor, you still risk being wrong. Everyone in this world has been wrong and will continue to be wrong from time to time, or often, or even always. DO NOT COUNT ON YOUR PERCEPTIONS AND SUPPOSITIONS ALONE TO NAVIGATE THE WORLD! USE YOUR DISCERNMENT TOO! AND THINK TWICE BEFORE PLAYING A JOKE ON YOUR FATHER!”

You're wrong about me (and I'm right about you), part 3: Convictions

I can date the onset of my interest in art to a precise date: the opening of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo in November, 1968, when I was 10 years old. The museum’s building was daring, floating on twin pillars way above ground. And the paintings in the main collection were displayed in a unique manner, intimate and immediate: each painting at eye level on its own glass wall, the collection a labyrinth of glass. My exploration of the art world at the time was like all adolescent exploration: disorganized, in fits and starts, incomplete. Nevertheless, I’ve been looking at art ever since, letting myself become excited by what I see—excited, enthusiastic, fascinated, but also bored, dismissive, and even angry.

Take Paul Gauguin. At some point I decided I hated him. His sense of perspective was so awkward, the bodies on each plane looking too big or too flat or too long or too short. His paintings of naked natives (which the white colonists like himself bedded and discarded, no doubt) struck a politically incorrect note. And the naked bodies weren’t even attractive. A thigh round and fat like a ham, fingers on a hand like so many sausages. As for Gauguin’s colors? Blah.

My wife would tell me, “You’re wrong about Gauguin.” I’d reply, “I know what I like and don’t like. And I have good arguments to demonstrate that Gauguin is no good.” “You’re not looking.” “I just told you, I looked, sensed, thought, and concluded. I don’t like Gauguin.” This went on for several years. One day my wife gave me a postcard of a Gauguin painting. “All right, it’s kinda pretty,” I said. “But it doesn’t change the basic problem.” And I meant, Gauguin was the basic problem.

One day I visited someone who had a little book on his coffee table. “Noa Noa,” it said on the cover. I leafed through it. It was a facsimile of one of Gauguin’s diaries. Watercolors, woodcuts, sepia photos, stories written in a flowing script… The watercolors alone were divine. The whole object and the author’s personality that shone through it blew me over.

My wife was doubly right: Gauguin was brilliant; I wasn’t looking at him properly. He had been inviting me to enter a certain world, and I was too close-minded to accept his invitation.

I bought a copy of “Noa Noa” and, for a long time, kept it within easy sight, the book’s cover facing me as reminder to myself: Despite strong feelings, despite apparently objective evidence, despite aesthetic convictions, despite everything that TOLD me I was right… I was in fact wrong.

Needless to say, I’ve been wrong about many things and many people besides my beloved Gauguin. In a sense that's a good thing: Changing one’s mind about something, and in particular changing one’s opinion from negative to positive, is a heady pleasure, a liberation of sorts. In the visual arts alone, I've had the experience of changing my mind from negative to postivie a great many times: about Andy Warhol, about Piet Mondrian, about Roy Lichtenstein, about Barnett Newman... I'm glad I hate a few things still, because they hold the potential to prove me wrong and to set me free.

You're wrong about me (but I'm right about you), part 2: Words

Recently I told an anecdote about how people assume I must love the heat simply because I grew up in Brazil. The moral of the story was, “Make no assumptions.” But we all do. We make assumptions about people, about things, about situations. We make assumptions without knowing we’re making them. Facts? Who needs facts when we have convictions?

Certain words and expressions are good indicators of a mind that may be looking at the world with preconceived ideas. But we won’t assume that the expressions below NECESSARILY indicate a closed mind, right? See if you recognize some habits of thought and speech in one or more of these statements. And try to suss out why they may reveal a prejudice or three.

• Always. Never. Should. Should not. Must. Must not. Everyone. Nobody, ever!
• As everyone knows…
• I’m sure you’ll agree with me.
• You and I are exactly alike.
• I know what I’m talking about.
• Absolutely. Absolutely not.
• It doesn’t matter what you say anymore. You won’t change my mind.
• I’m surprised you don’t see it.
• You, of all people?
• I was raised that way.
• Where I come from, we really respect other people. Unlike here, where there are so many morons.
• It’s always been that way, and it’ll always be that way. That’s just how it goes.
• I hate oysters. I don’t even have to eat one to know that I hate eating them.
• It’s so obvious.
• You’ll love it! Everyone does!
• It’s the most natural thing in the world.
• I know what you mean.
• Oh, yes, I’ve met many Israelis (or Nigerians, or South Americans, or weight-lifters, or any one group of people). At least five of them.
• It’s a well-known fact.
• That’s what they do, those people.
• You left me with no choice.

You're wrong about me (but I'm right about you), part 1: Assumptions

It’s a hot and muggy summer day, and like a million other people without air conditioning I’m sticky and fatigued. One of my students arrives for a lesson. “You must be very happy today,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re Brazilian. Brazilians love the heat.”

I can never resist this conversation, although I know exactly how it turns out. Here we go.

Me: “You’re wrong about it, and I’d be happy to explain to you why.”

Student: “Uh?”

Me: “First, look at me. Pink skin, shaved skull, blue eyes… From a genetic point of view I’m really European. The sun is very harmful to my biological type.”

Student: “Huh-huh.”

Me: “Also, I left Brazil 30 years ago. I’ve lived in Northern climes since. Brazil is history.”

Student: “Huh-huh.”

Me: “People have very different metabolisms, regardless of their national origins. That’s why on some days you see some people walking around in shorts and tee-shirts, others wearing sweaters and coats. Some people get cold easily, others not. I’ve always preferred cold weather. I was born that way.”

Student: “Huh-huh.”

Me: “Go to Brazil at the height of summer and ask everyone in sight, ‘Do you like this heat?’ Almost everyone will say, ‘No, it’s unbearable. I can’t wait until the summer is over.’ Rich people go to the mountain resorts during the heat waves, because it’s nice and cool up there. The poor suffer miserably. A lot of Brazilians in Brazil don’t like the heat.”

Student: “Huh-huh.”

Me: “So, you can see that I don’t like the heat, even though I grew up in Brazil.”

Student: “But... you’re Brazilian, you must love the heat!”

It’s funny and it isn’t funny. The truth is, we all have fixed ideas on hundreds of subjects. Instead of looking at people and things as they are, instead of learning from each encounter and each situation, we let pre-formed visions dominate our minds. Then we confuse the inner visions with the things and people in front of us. Not all Brazilians love the heat, soccer, and Carnival (although some do, maybe even many). Not all Americans like defrosted hot dogs and watery beer (although some do, maybe even many). Not all Frenchmen cheat on their wives (actually, they all do). (Just kidding!)

In this series of blog entries I propose to look at how we fail to pay attention and grasp reality, and the price we pay for being so sure that the mirage is the oasis. Can't you see it? It's right there, in front of your eyes! Dive in!

Write a story every day, part 5: Helpful Books

A book becomes good or bad, pertinent or boring, constructive or not depending on how you read it. In fact, no two readers will ever read the same book in the same way. For that reason, recommending books we love for others to read may be tricky. What if you hate the books I live by? What if you resent me for making you read a lousy book? Well, you can always post a comment on my blog offering counter-recommendations. And don't forget nobody made you do anything in the first place!

I suggested that finding a concept for a story is the easiest part of writing one. That doesn't mean it's easy, exactly; it's just easier than some other steps in the writing process. But if you're having a hard time finding an idea, a hook, a portal, a trigger, or what you will, help is at hand in Jack Heffron's The Writer's Idea Book. In a friendly and encouraging manner, Heffron comes up with several hundred prompts to get you going. They are numerous enough for you to find one or more that will trigger your imagination or, more precisely, your unstoppable urge to pour words out.

I wrote about the threatening blank page or computer screen that trips up many writers. In The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear, Ralph Keyes looks at the question of writerly anxiety and comes up with many astute and sympathetic observations. Keyes says, quite rightly, that courage isn't the absence of fear, but the willingness to act despite fear. Ultimately you're better off not getting rid of your fear, but learning how to harness it creatively.

I suggested that one way of finding one's inner courage to write was by entering a trance. Trance is a big subject: there exist dozens of types of trances, each with its merits, risks, and dangers. Milton H. Erickson, M.D. was perhaps the 20th-century's greatest expert on trance states. A psychiatrist by training and a trailblazer in hypnotic techniques and their application to individual problem-solving, Erickson was also a master storyteller and a highly sensitive therapist with shamanic capabilities. Milton H. Erickson, M.D.: An American Healer, edited by Bradford Keeney and Betty Alice Erickson, is by no means a how-to on trance. Instead, it's a collection of essays, anecdotes, photo albums, and interviews that paints a delightful and compelling portrait of a free mind. Reading it might inspire you to free your mind in your own ways.

Rhythm & Flow in a Writer's Career is my own book for writers. It contains many dozens of suggestions and exercises to make you a more fluid, confident, and productive writer. My book has a singular defect, however: it hasn't been published yet! Until it comes out you'll have to resort to the other wonderful books on this page. But if you ask me nicely, I just might post my book's table of contents and a sample chapter on my website.

Make a fool of yourself

Today you’re going to make a fool of yourself. This will happen whether you want to or not, so you’re better off embracing the idea and going with it. If you’re a normal human being, you make a fool of yourself every day anyway. That’s the very definition of “normality.” Right now you’re going to do it for a specific purpose.

Meet Peggy Babcock. She’s not old enough to stop caring about how old she is, so she’s probably 57 or 60. But that's immaterial. I just need you to say her name out loud:

“Peggy Babcock.”

Now say it three times in a row, at a pretty fast clip.

“Peggy Babcock, Peggy Babcock, Peggy Babcock.”

Congratulations. You’ve just made a fool of yourself. You’ve become a babbling, incapacitated baby sheep. It happens to everyone. Your lips, tongue, and jaw couldn’t face the challenge of saying sweet ol’ Peggy’s name three times in a row. You tensed your neck and shoulders. You tried to use every last body part to compensate for the failure of speech—head, hands, feet, pelvis, everything. And you became frustrated and annoyed.

First and foremost, you’ve demonstrated that the physical and the emotional are so connected as to be inseparable. A tiny physical challenge gave rise to strong emotions. The relationship between the physical and the emotional may not be always so intense or unbalanced, but there always is some relationship.

Second, you’ve demonstrated that trying too hard to accomplish anything is kinda not very smart, if you know what I mean. You fell apart trying hard and still didn’t accomplish the task. Well, quit it. From now on, don’t try so hard.

Third, you’ve demonstrated that speaking clearly is a function of the whole person—not voice alone, not mouth alone, but the whole body plus the words plus the emotions.

Stop thinking about Madame Babcock for a moment. Calm down. Center yourself. Take those famous deep breaths you see in the movies. Now say “Bab.” It’s easy, right? You can do it without killing yourself, right? Now say, “BAB-Cock,” the Bab louder than the Cock. Lengthen the “a” of Bab: “BAAAB-Cock.”

Now say “Peggy.” You don’t need to stiffen your neck or go berserk. Say it slowly, repeat it a few times. Now say, “Peeeeggy… BAAAB-Cock,” lengthening the “eh” of Peggy, waiting between Peggy and Bab, and making BAB the strongest of all four syllables.

Now say it all a few times in a row, and then start speeding it up gradually, making the vowels not so long, making the separation between syllables not so big, making Bab not so loud.

Congratulations again. You’ve learned how to use inflection, timing, rhythm, organization, and a little self-awareness in order to speak beautifully. I propose you always talk that way.

Here are some more Tongue Twisters. They really ought to be called Person Twisters. Enjoy them.

• Seventy-seven benevolent elephants.
• Sheena leads, Sheila needs.
• Extinct insects' instincts.
• All rural girls will wear jewelry.
• Black background, brown background.
• Double bubble gum, bubbles double.
• Elmer Arnold.

Write a story every day, part 4: The Trance

There you are, trying to write a story every day. You found a good concept—that was the easy part. Now all you need to do is to enter the frame of mind in which telling the story too becomes easy.

A web of oppositions exists inside every one of us: masculine and feminine qualities, yin and yang, right brain and left brain, adult and child, doer and observer. For writers, one opposition is particularly important: between the creator and the editor. The creator is free-flowing, playful, risk-loving. The editor is careful, judgmental, risk-averse. The creator says, “I want to. Let me. Yes.” The editor says, “Not so fast. Not quite. No.”

The real difficulty in writing the first draft of anything—a daily short story or an 800-page novel—is to let the creator prevail over the editor. Just as the masculine and the feminine can become integrated inside us, so can the creator and the editor. Sometimes they work so well together that a story is born perfect, freely conceived yet tightly structured. But if you haven’t achieved such an integrated state, your creator won’t say a word as long as the editor is breathing down her neck. The editor plays a fundamental role in all good writing, but the creator must be left alone for a little while in order to find her voice.

How can you make the editor shut up?

By entering a trance. A trance is a state where the editor takes a siesta while the creator runs the show. When you’re in a trance, you suspend judgment, criticism, the urge to question and to censor. Then the stories come out of their own accord, directly from your heart to the page. You don’t even need to type them. They type themselves! Honest Injun!

Locomotion sometimes creates the trance: walking, pacing, jogging, dancing, and otherwise moving at a regular rhythm all help the editor get tired and want a nap. Music can do the trick. Some sounds calm the editor, others excite it; when I play Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue,” my editor relaxes as soon as he hears the first beat of the first track. If you sit somewhere—at home or in public—and you concentrate your stare on a fixed point, your editor gets bored and falls asleep. Strangely, the opposite strategy also works: sit where you will and keep sweeping your eyes across the landscape, and the editor will get dizzy and call it quits.

The editor is a wimp. But the creator who lets the editor beat her up is a wimp too. Go sit down with a notebook right now. Pump the editor full of sleeping pills. Then just watch as the pencil dances on the page.

Lessons from the balloon's baby brother: Readiness

You’ve been playing with a balloon and learning some surprising lessons about your voice and your upper body. The time has come for you to broaden your exploration. Take a tennis ball in your hand. It doesn’t matter if it’s old and beat-up. If you don’t have a tennis ball at home, an orange or tangerine will do, anything with a similar dimension and texture. Tennis ball or citrus fruit, just hold it as a playful, mischievous, curious child would: What can I do with this thing? In how many ways can I amuse myself? How can I use this object to annoy my mother?

Objects invite the resourceful child inside us to discover the capacity of the hands to hold, squeeze, pinch, poke, caress, slap, throw, catch, and so on. Squeeze the tennis ball, for instance. It yields to some degree, it resists to some degree, both more or less at once. You can feel the ball’s rubbery core at the same time you feel its outer surface, fuzzy like a kitten’s back. And you can also feel the skin, flesh, and bones of your own hand, which—like the ball—is innately resilient and multilayered.

It’s a double exploration: you find out about the object at the same time you explore your hand, or more broadly, your whole self. Throw the ball up in the air, catch it; throw it from hand to hand, find a rhythm and let the rhythm do the work for you. The tennis ball was born to be thrown, and it invites you to go with it, to enter the game and never leave it.  Let your palms, fingers, wrists, and arms enjoy the object's bounciness, and before long their own inborn elasticity will enter your awareness. Hold the ball in between the palms of both hands and roll it about, massaging the ball with your palms and your palms with the ball. The ball’s roundness, its shape, texture, and weight all contribute to making the experience delightful. And the delight comes not from the ball itself, but from your hands.

Every object in your life has lots of wisdom to impart—and I mean every object without exception, including headbands, eyeglasses, furniture, shoes, belts, toothbrushes, cell phones. All you need is to approach each object with the right frame of mind, which I propose to call “readiness.” Needless to say, your violin, your piano, your flute are fine partners in the game of object wisdom. And they’re dying to play with you.

Readiness

Ø n. the state or quality of being ready

Ready

Ø adj. (readier, readiest)

1a prepared mentally or physically for some experience or action

1b prepared for immediate use

2a (1) willingly disposed

2a (2) likely to do something

2b spontaneously prompt

3 notably dexterous, adroit, or skilled

4 immediately available

Write a story every day, part 3: The Threat

After I encouraged you to write a short story every day, I said that finding a story concept is the easy part. What’s the hard part?

Most writers would agree that the blank page or computer screen can be terrifying. What exactly are you going to write? Will it be any good? Do you actually have something to say? And if you do say something, will people listen to you? It’s terrifying to think that nobody wants to hear what you have to say, and terrifying to think that people will indeed hear you—and disagree passionately with your precious words.

Even if you don't mean to show your writing to anybody but yourself, it’s terrifying to write. You can't fathom what is going to come out, what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it. The unknown, the uncontrolled, the uncontrollable all lurk within.

Whether real or imaginary, these threats will always be there. The hardest thing when you write is to write despite the threats.

For me, most writing sessions start with a meditation of sorts, lasting from a few minutes up to an hour. I may be sitting at the computer or walking to a café or doing the dishes while I meditate. And the unspoken subject of the meditation is: “Do I agree to act despite all the threats? Or do I refuse to act?” The actual writing session starts when I finally agree to act.

I agree to try and write a short story about the Devil’s pedicurist in Chinatown.

I agree to try and write a scene involving the protagonist of my new novel.

I agree to try and write a blog entry.

I don’t know what’s going to come out, but I agree to it. If some awfully inept piece of writing emerges, I agree to it. If I reveal my handicaps as a writer and human being, I agree to it. If I make a fool of myself, I agree to it. If I face the unknown and it takes a bite out of my soul, I agree to it.

Day by day, page by page, I agree to face the threats. And to gain my own agreement, I must enter a particular frame of mind. I’ll tell you about it in my next blog entry (if I can get myself to agree to it).

New lessons from the balloon: The Upper Body

All right, then. You’ve been talking to a balloon and discovering plenty of things about sound and vibration. You might as well use the balloon to make other discoveries. Grab a partner for this exercise. Stand facing each other. Hold the balloon lightly in your hands, about a foot or so away from your midriff. Ask your partner to place her palms on the backs of your hands, touching you as lightly as you’re touching the balloon. Tell her to keep touching your hands steadily, then start moving the balloon slowly. It doesn’t matter how you move the balloon: turn it clock- or counterclockwise, move it away from your body or closer to it, move it up and down in space.

Watch your partner as you move the balloon. Most likely she’ll contort her whole body in an effort to follow your hands and the balloon as they move here and there. She might scrunch her head and neck, raise her shoulders, shorten one side of her abdomen, and so on. She won’t be aware of her misuse; and, once she does become aware of it, she'll claim it’s “normal” to move like that.

In truth all she needs to do is to make the articulations of her arms—from shoulders to fingertips—mobile like the joints of a marionette. Then, as you move the balloon, your partner can make constant adjustments to all her arm joints, bending or unbending each as needed, lifting or dropping her elbows, her upper arms, or her forearms. Her head, neck, and trunk don’t need to move altogether!

Take turns holding the balloon and moving it. Then make the exercise more complex. While moving the balloon, ask your partner to sing a children’s song. You’ll be amazed at the effects on her arms: she'll hold them so stiffly you won't be able to move the balloon. Her efforts at singing distract her from paying attention to her arms, and she misplaces her intentions and her energies—as we all do, more often than we care to admit.

The balloon teaches you about your perceptions of yourself and of others, your understanding of what is normal or abnormal, the working of your arm joints, the way you apportion energy and effort as you move. After working with the balloon for a while, go play your instrument—be it the cello, the piano, the oboe, or the didgeridoo—and see what you can do with the wisdom you learned from the balloon.

Write a story every day, part 2: The Trick

A few weeks ago I described how I go about writing a new short story every day: I choose a premise and improvise upon it. Coming up with premises is the easy part of the process—I’ll tell you about the hard part later. But suppose you’re stuck for a theme on which to improvise. Here are a few suggestions. Sit down with a notebook and a pencil, clear your mind, and write a story!

1. “The Devil needed a pedicure, so one Saturday morning he decided to go to Chinatown.”

2. “Snow White came home from a stroll in the forest and found a strange dwarf asleep on her bed.”

3. “One day not long ago, I received a phone call from my mother. She had been dead for twelve years.”

4. “Saint Peter got fired from his job as the gatekeeper of Heaven. It was my fault. Let me tell you exactly how it happened.”

5. “Genghis Khan had a soft spot for his pet guinea pig, until the day Fuzzy went one hair too far.”

6. “God and the serpent made a bet, the outcome of which nobody could have foreseen.”

7. “Sam Thorne woke up one day, only to discover that his entire right arm had disappeared.”

8. “The battle of the sexes started with a simple misunderstanding.”

9. “One day deep in the forest, the bear and the wolf decided to sit down and try to settle their longstanding feud. They retained me as their stenographer.”

10. “The lawyer had a throbbing toothache, so he went to see his dentist. The two of them soon regretted their fateful encounter.”

Lessons from the balloon: The Voice

For this exploration you’ll need a sound system and a balloon—a regular rubber balloon like you see at children’s parties, round and plain, blown to about the size of your head.

On your sound system, play a CD of something lively, vibrant, and variable in dynamics and tone. I love doing this exercise to the Golden Gate Quartet—four guys with very different but well-blended voices, singing tunes of a Biblical bent with tremendous rhythmic vitality. But anything sonorous will do. While the CD is playing, hold the balloon in your hands, as lightly as possible. Walk over your sound system’s speaker; stand right next to it; and place the balloon against the speaker.

The balloon captures the vibrations from the sound system and magnifies them. And the vibrations make the balloon come alive, all sounds, all voices, all musical elements making their own individual vibrations. Sound becomes tangible, something you can hold in your hands. You have to do it to believe it. And even when you do it, you won’t believe it.

After doing this for a while, turn the music off and do another exercise. Hold the balloon (always with a light touch) close to your mouth and speak into the balloon. Yep—the balloon also captures your voice and makes it tangible. Try speaking high, low, soft, and loud. Lengthen your vowels to enhance the vibrations: “Leeeeengthen your vooooooowels.” Do the exercise with a friend: ask him or her to stand facing you, the balloon between your mouths. Take turns talking. You’ll hear and feel the differences between your voices.

While talking into the balloon, push your head back and down into your neck, shortening the neck and spine. Your voice will change considerably, and so will its vibrations. I bet you’ll like your vibrations better when the neck is lengthening and the head well-poised.

Moral of the story: Each sound has its vibration, and the sounds of a well-coordinated musician have the liveliest vibrations. Become attuned to this phenomenon and you’ll develop your field of perception, your coordination, your aesthetics, and more besides.

Write a story every day, part 1: The Task

Around Christmas last year, I felt compelled to write a couple of short stories. One fictionalized my father-in-law's house in Huntington, Long Island (and I mean the house and the people in it). Another was a psychological horror story about a woman losing her mind while trying on clothes at the post-Christmas sales. Okay, maybe I don’t cope very well with the holidays. But something good came out of my distress. I enjoyed writing the stories so much that I decided to write a short story every single day, starting January 1^st.

And I’ve done so, except for a couple of weeks in April when I wrote character and archetype studies instead of short stories. This is how I do it: I sit somewhere with a notebook and a pen. It could be at home, at a café, riding the subway, or—in the case of the horror story I mentioned—at Ann Taylor’s on the corner of 3^rd Avenue and 52^nd Street in New York, while my wife tried on clothes. I think for a moment, lasting from a few minutes up to about twenty minutes. I run a few ideas in my head, discarding the overly ambitious, the clichés, the dead ends. Then I settle on a premise, and off I go.

“Sarah Whitcombe had three fears, and three fears only.”

“The Queen of England accidentally locked herself in the bathroom.”

“The vulture and the hyena liked going out to dinner together.”

Armed with nothing but the premise, the notebook, and my imagination, I write away, essentially improvising upon the chosen theme and aiming, if possible, to create a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Some of my stories are good enough to belong in a book one day; others are unspeakably bad. But if you want to improvise freely, you need to suspend judgment and let things be. What counts isn’t the result but the process: the willingness to face the blank page every day without exception, the steady development of craft, and the insights deep into one’s own psyche. (Some of my improvisations made me afraid of myself!)

Go on. Sit down with a notebook and a pen. And let the demons come out and have their say.

Rich is better than poor

Writing manuals unfailingly tell you two things: (1) Write every day; (2) Establish a minimum daily quota—two pages, five hundred words, what you will—and meet it, come hell or high water.

For years I struggled against these tyrannical injunctions. To me the daily quota requirement felt like a small payment on a credit card with high interest rates—it doesn’t matter how often you meet the payment, you end up owing more and more. Quota = bankruptcy.

I suspect you’re just like me, passionately opposed to tyranny. And up to your eyeballs in credit-card debt.

Know what? Tyranny will always be with us, but there are ways of avoiding writer’s bankruptcy. Stop thinking like a debtor, start think like a saver.

Forget about the quota. Instead of making fixed, obligatory decisions about how much to write beforehand, look back upon the work day and survey whatever you did write. Buy an elegant little agenda covering a week on two pages—an Italian design, say, with a soft black cover and a silk page mark. Every night before you go to bed, make a brief entry on it recording what you wrote that day, with an emphasis on newly written pages. Then your output agenda will work like an old-fashioned passbook savings account, showing you the steady progress of your wealth.

I used to be an irregular writer, sometimes not writing for weeks in a row, and never knowing exactly how much I was writing and when. After I chucked the quota paradigm and started using an output agenda, I’ve become much more productive. I write new materials every day without fail; I can visualize the unfolding of each project on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis; I can catch trends, positive and negative, such as neglecting a particular project for too long. I get so much pleasure flipping through my agenda and seeing how much I’ve “earned” over the months that I feel compelled to continue writing every day.

I first read about the output agenda in Breakfast with Sharks by Michael Lent, a sympathetic writer who knows how to give constructive advice.

Stop the fight!

Tap your head with your left hand and rub your stomach with the right one, and you’ll sense the mutual influence between the right and left arms. This we call bilateral transfer—a dialogue between the two sides of the body on matters of position, movement, tension, relaxation, and balance, all of which affect the body’s overall coordination.

The legs also affect the arms, and vice-versa. Play a fast, loud passage at the piano while holding your feet off the floor. If the active support of the feet and legs is missing, the arms must work much harder. This is quadrilateral transfer—the interplay of energies between all limbs.

The dialogue between the left and right sides of the body, and between the upper and lower limbs, never stops. Like all dialogue, it can be a collaboration or a fight.

To get a fight going, hold a heavy paperback in one hand and a light bulb in the other. Each hand has a specific job to do, but each hand confuses the other and is confused by it. One hand “wants” to relax, the other “wants” to firm up. Their opposing intentions get crossed, and the body and brain go haywire.

Try another experiment. Write a short sentence by hand on a piece of paper. Now write it again, and while writing tug at your hair with the free hand. Make the tug be strong and rhythmic. You may be surprised at what happens to your handwriting. (I did this experiment with my wife, and her handwriting actually improved, becoming bolder and more legible. She did mis-spell a word or three, though.)

Because of bilateral transfer, musicians sometimes misdiagnose their technical problems, becoming convinced that the left hand, say, is to be blamed for some technical accident when in reality it’s the misuse of the right hand that causes the left hand to go awry.

Suppose a cellist is struggling with a tricky passage that challenges her left hand: a trill followed by a large shift along the fingerboard. The left hand is fast and busy, doing different things in quick succession. Meanwhile the bowing arm does something simple and steady. The average cellist focuses on the busy left hand, giving it thought and care. Naturally, her thoughts are coated in emotion: eagerness, worry, impatience, anger. At the same time, the cellist takes the right hand for granted, assuming its role is minor. The passage remains frustratingly difficult, and the cellist puts ever more energy into the left hand and involves her neck and shoulders in the effort.

But if the cellist changes her focus from her left hand to her bowing arm, bilateral transfer comes to her rescue. The right arm proclaims, “My gestures are easy, firm, intelligent; my contact with the string is stable; I have a lovely connection to the back, the pelvis, the legs, the feet, the floor.” It’s a message of intelligence and comfort, with a positive emotional charge. The left hand receives the message, absorbs it, lets itself be influenced by it—and acquires some of those universal qualities (strength, contact, connection, comfort) even though its specific tasks are different from the bowing arm’s simple gestures. As if by miracle, the passage suddenly becomes much easier to master.

In sum, bilateral and quadrilateral transfer are both potentially harmful or constructive, depending on how you go about it.