What do You Do (When it Quits Being New)?

Not long ago, I saw a short, but thoughtful placeholder blurb by a remarkable reader that I follow. Fiona’s reviews are usually comprehensive as well as insightful, and so the brevity intrigued me. She included a link to Tobias Buckell's website that explored the idea of whether one becomes jaded and cynical about reading or writing if one spent too much time at it. In the spirit of fairness to the book just read, Fiona decided to think a while before writing the review, to give herself time to consider whether her opinions about it were warranted because of the book itself or because of some of the factors mentioned in the blog.

Now, I don’t know if you read blogs in the same manner as I do. I tend to right-click each referenced link to open in a new tab so that I can read them after I finish the entire post. But I know many who jump immediately to each link as they come to it and read the reference before coming back, though sometimes the link takes them to other links and they may or may not ever return to the original post at all. (Even so, they have a very interesting reading session inspired by the blog). And some simply ignore all links in a posting and count upon the blogger to give them the main ideas and save them the trouble of clicking away on their own. I’ll try to make this work for those of all inclinations, but for those in hurry and tempted to stop right here, you could listen to Francine Reed and Lyle Lovett lament “What do you do, when it quits being new?” That’s pretty much the dilemma under consideration.

Buckell’s posting that Fiona was mulling offers these interesting points:

“…Book bloggers are doing it for the love, they’re not making mad money. They’re enthusiastic spreaders of the word…So what happens when a lot of that joy fades? Do they continue on momentum? Look to monetize the blog? Focus only on the books that they love, and risk losing the audience and community they created (because they’re interested in artist’s artists, or decrying the lack of originality, while readers who enjoy the books being decried decamp)? Get bitter and throw some bombs, which will certainly create debate and energy, but can also create pushback and enough argumentation that they get tired of the fighting about stuff (unless they’re trollish in nature, in which case they feed off the acid and you’ll always have that)?”

I suppose too much of anything could make a person jaded and hyper-critical. In those circumstances, it’s probably not a bad thing that we live in an age of JezzBall attention spans. Whenever my attention seems to waver in something that I’m doing for the love of it – whether it’s reading, writing, or researching something I’m interested in – I just stop doing it for a while and try something else. That’s obviously not an option for obligatory tasks for work, but it’s certainly fine for hobbies and recreation/re-creation. It might seem undisciplined to some, and admittedly, I had trouble doing it at first. I’m the kind of person who likes to finish whatever I start. But the freedom to put things down before I get really sick of it makes it more likely that I’ll pick it up in a more charitable mood later.

And sometimes, even at work, putting things down briefly is the very best thing to do for insight and productivity. In my very biased view as someone who hates to sit for long stretches of time, anything to be done that requires one’s backside to be pressed firmly into a chair (or other device designed for immobility and passivity) will ultimately stifle creativity, analytical ability, and perhaps even one's love for humanity (whether on the other side of the world or the other side of the cubicle wall). I’m convinced that one’s energy and ideas stagnate along with blood flow in one’s posterior and can only be set flowing again by walking, running, pacing, or climbing stairs for a few minutes every few hours. Writer’s block? It could be that your thoughts have become numb by being trapped under the largest part of your body. Stop sitting on them and go outside and see what’s happening in your corner of the world. Listen to the birds and guess which species are there around you. Once the feeling comes back in your bum, maybe they will in your thoughts.

Or perhaps you could try to incorporate more mulling and fermenting into your life, as well as in your mind. Make yogurt regularly, or tempeh, or wine, or anything else that starts as one thing and becomes something else with time and strategic stillness in the right setting. Ideas and opinions are very amenable to fermenting, often with very felicitous results.

Whether I’m reading or writing, I find it helpful to take a book’s characters out and about with me. They listen in on conversations and I try to imagine the responses of each. It helps them come more alive, and back in the days when I used to write for fun, it helped keep me honest and fair where varying perspectives were concerned. I wanted the complexity of real people and not caricatures and stereotypes in my stories, particularly when dealing with controversial issues and polemics. To make sure I wasn’t subconsciously channeling my own biases, I listened with all my heart to those across disparate political and religious persuasions. I tried to let my characters emerge as people that real humans could identify with, even if they were very different from me. Whether they were atheists, liberal believers, fundamentalists, conservatives, progressives, extremists, or non-committed, I wanted them to be someone that their real-life counterparts might nod and say, “That’s not me, but it’s someone that I could relate to.” And once those characters were created, they stayed with me, and listened along to new conversations, giving me a better appreciation for understanding things from the point of view of others. That often meant revising to let them evolve as I met more and more people and had some really terrific conversations.

Reading and writing are things I’m intensively drawn to, but I do get restless doing them sometimes. I don’t write stories anymore because at the moment there’s no joy in it for me. It’s a lot of work, and revising and editing are far easier to do if left in one’s head. Coming up with an occasional blog post is enough for me for now, but only if I feel like there’s something that might be useful for someone.

Reading is still something that I enjoy doing, though I’m not particularly disciplined about it. There are times when I really enjoy discussing what I read – online and off – but I don’t always feel motivated to express an opinion right away. I’m rather inclined to allow time for mulling, fermenting, and wandering around, even where books are concerned. That makes writing reviews difficult, particularly if I’ve devoted all my sitting tolerance during non-working hours to the reading itself. (I may put that down for a while too and pick it back up when the weather turns raw again. I’d be a terrible professional reviewer or book blogger.)

Maybe its the inner physical restlessness that keeps me from becoming too jaded when reading too much. Or maybe I’m naturally inclined to prefer Buckell’s strategy:

“For myself, I do some things to help blunt the impact of reading so much. I read outside of my genre a lot, to prevent burn out. I also revisit books that I remember fondly. With my new lenses, I usually am able to recover what fired me up about those books, while also being able to see their flaws. For some, that destroys the magic of it all, but for me it reminds that I’m the one who changed, not the book. If the book that made me want to write doesn’t read so well now, the words haven’t changed… but I have. That lets me know that other books I feel the same way about right now need to be more objectively examined.”

I think writing, even as an amateur, has made me a more open-minded reader, just as gardening made me better appreciate the food I eat. But when that’s not enough - when I notice that I might be judging something or someone too harshly about something - I have another tactic to ward off feeling disgruntled and petty. I go out and try something that is so beyond my abilities and experience that I flail about ridiculously and clumsily. Some examples of things I've tried that have helped me keep alive a sense of being a hopeless idiot that's so vital to a person's happiness: Shotokan karate, a musical instrument that’s physically difficult to manage, or portrait art despite a dyslexia of facial features recognition. They have all done very well in keeping me grounded in humility with a wide tolerance for things that don't matter in the long run. I think this even helps keep the Suck Fairy out of some previously-beloved books that seem unsatisfying years later.

And if I still somehow manage to be afflicted with a contentment deficit disorder with acute hyper-criticality despite those things mentioned (i.e, putting something down for a while, getting up to allow energy and creativity back into ass-smashed thoughts and ideas, taking books and characters out into the world to let them listen in and respond, turning to writing if I’m stymied with reading and more reading if I’m stymied with writing, or trying something I'm astoundingly horrible at), I take a hint from Joseph Campbell and follow my bliss for a bit. That often means reading a string of very good mysteries with intriguing settings to pull me right in and follow the characters over books and time. Tony Hillerman did it for me with his Navajo country books, Iain Pears did it with Italy and art history, and now I’m spending a second weekend in a row happily immersed in the Shetland mystery series by Marsali Taylor.

But even so, some things that we expect to like turn out tiresome and unsatisfying. Reading and writing are forms of communication, and communication needs an interactive connection. And sometimes, there just isn’t one. Maybe the reader and writer are at mutually exclusive places at a particular time. Maybe they'll never connect despite best efforts and good intentions. If it’s ok to follow our joy, it’s equally ok to acknowledge our frustration and disappointment, particularly if we were as fair and thoughtful as Fiona ultimately was when she gave her review the benefit of introspection and self-challenge before writing its final form in her typically thorough style.

Buckell concludes:
“Over time, I’ve been able to move back into a place where I can focus on what works about a book, and focus less on what doesn’t. Author C.C. Finlay has a quote he uses that runs something like: ‘A novel doesn’t excite readers because you took all the bad stuff out of it, it excites them because of all the good stuff that’s in it, regardless of the bad.’”

In the end, it’s the story that counts and not how famous a writer is, or how prolific, or how many sales he has. If the reader and writer connect in the story, that’s where the joy is. It could be in a book, in a movie or on stage, in a spontaneous tale in a supermarket check-out line, or anywhere else there’s a form of Once Upon a Time happening. And if there’s no fun in that, it’s time to get up, and do something new.