Empathy for the Devil

“What few people realized or perhaps dared admit was that the thick walls of the caste system kept everyone in prison. The rules that defined a group’s supremacy were so tightly wound as to put pressure on everyone trying to stay within the narrow confines of acceptability. It meant being a certain kind of Protestant, holding a particular occupation, having a respectable level of wealth or the appearance of it, and drawing the patronizingly appropriate lines between oneself and those of lower rank of either race in that world.”
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns

The Warmth of Other Suns, about the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the Jim Crow south and to the rest of the country in the 20th century, is an excellent book. It’s taught me a good deal about a span of American history my own education glossed over, and given me tools and concepts that have really helped me to understand the nation I was born to and live in. One of the usefullest is Wilkerson’s conception of life in the South as ruled by a strict caste system, one that not only assigns people to their place within a strict hierarchy, but also sets the protocols for how they can and should treat one another, and the incentives and disincentives that enforce those protocols. More importantly, Wilkerson shows us — often in heartbreaking detail — how the simple fact of the caste system’s existence so incentivizes the commission of cruel and unjust acts, systematically and at the individual level, that it’s probably more accurate to say it demands them.

Status, after all, must be demonstrated. Power unexercised isn’t power.

It’s got me thinking, of all things, about Karens. Karens, in case you’ve been living under a rock (and if you have, is there a spare room I can use? Shit’s crazy out here), are white women of a certain age who weaponize their privilege, particularly with regard to people of color. The lady who calls the police because black people. The woman who wants to speak with your manager because when you said ‘Have a nice day!’ you didn’t mean it sincerely enough. The ferocious protector of the status quo for whom the notion of keeping her opinion to herself is anathema if not outright unconstitutional.

Now, I spent thirty years or so in the hospitality industry, so I’ve known Karen since before she was Karen. She was the one who took the game seriously, the customer service addict who mistook the staff pretending that she was important and that what she wanted mattered for the real thing. Who thought service was not so much a quirk of the transaction but her God-given due, and who reveled in treating you like shit because either you swallowed it, thus reifying her status over you, or you kicked, and then she could call your manager and try and get you fired. Now of course that’s way better than when she calls the police and they come kill you, which is what Karen likes doing to black folks. Gotta acknowledge that. But it’s still shitty and, believe you me, it predates the slang term ‘Karen’ and, well, the internet itself.

So, aside from Karen’s leveraging structural racism, what does Isabel Wilkerson’s book about the Great Migration have to do with the modern-day white lady who knows exactly how the system is rigged in her favor and joyfully exploits it for her own advantage and/or satisfaction?

As you may have guessed, it comes down to the caste system, and the tensions and limits involved in trying to live inside one. Because Karen is also oppressed and unhappy. Why else do you think she acts out? It’s not an excuse — there’s a difference between empathy and sympathy — but I do think it’s helpful to understand the motivations that drive her.

When the post-mortems came out for the 2016 election, one of the heartbreaking-est takeaways was that something over half of white women declined to vote for their fellow white woman, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and instead chose white supremacist and patriarchal poster-child Donald Trump. There was a lot of head-scratching in the media, but it wasn’t that hard to figure out. If there are two aspects of your identity, one of which is privileged and one of which is not, which one do you think most people will identify with?

Karen exists in a curious intersection the American caste system. Her whiteness, and her embrace of the advantage and privilege it confers, put her just one tier shy of the very top. It empowers her over almost everyone, which incentivizes a full-throated acceptance and embrace of the hierarchy the caste system posits as real. But with that embrace comes the acceptance that she can never be more than number two: she herself is always subject to, and subjugated by, the men in her life. Whatever her inclinations or aptitudes, her dreams or desires for herself and her own future, she is trapped just as surely as those she sees as below her, her options constrained by the strictures she otherwise celebrates. It’s a tension that can’t be resolved without rejecting the hierarchy that so values and validates her.

So Karen acts out. She externalizes her misery at the gilded cage her life must be lived in. Misery, after all, loves company, and so begets cruelty even when status doesn’t demand it. Shit always rolls downhill.

***

Learning to deal with the Karens of the world was one of the hardest things about making a career in hospitality. Thanks to my own immersion in the America in which Karen’s caste system holds sway — we don’t all buy it, of course, but we all know it’s there — swallowing shit didn’t come easy. But you learn ways around it, or you find a new line of work. For my own part, the trick turned out to be the simple realization — and constant repetition til it stuck — that while this person would make my life miserable for the next five minutes, they had to live in that misery all the time.

Not to say that I sympathized. Because Karens do real harm, and often as not they do it intentionally. That’s not a thing lightly forgiven, even if you understand where it comes from. But understanding where it comes from can help, at least a little.

If nothing else, you can take solace in the fact that, as miserable as she wants to make you, Karen is miserable, too. And she’ll never break free of that misery, because it stems from the caste system she takes her identity and validation from. And while that may not provoke much in the way of sympathy, schadenfreude’s a pretty good substitute when Karen’s just tried to offload some of that misery on you.

Drunk at the Barcon

Since it seems like SF/F is having another #himtoo moment, and certain chickens are coming home to roost w/r/t the bad behavior of certain men, I’d like, if I may, to address one small fragment of the overall situation. One that I — a man but, more particularly, a retired bartender with two decades in the weeds — feel specifically qualified and, to be honest, called on to address.

That is the excuse “I was drunk.”

As excuses go, “I was drunk” is, frankly, bullshit. Let me explain.

See, ethanol is, first and foremost, a disinhibitor. That’s why we drink socially, to help us slough off the cares of the day and enjoy the moment. Yes, those first few light up the reward center in your brain, which is another reason we drink for social fun. But the thing poisoning yourself mildly does best is shut down those pesky higher order brain functions so we can get our relax on and let our freak flags fly. And sometimes, man, sometimes it’s just fucking great. Everybody has a good time. Funny shit happens. Friendships and memories are made, even if they might be a little blurry.

But sometimes somebody’s just fucking great is somebody else’s this fucking sucks. We don’t always remember to pay attention to the cues of people around us, or that we’re supposed to respect them. Sometimes we only pay attention to what we want.

Here’s the thing, though. Alcohol doesn’t make us do things. Alcohol frees us to do things. Things were already there. You might not have known about them, but you probably did. You might’ve even tried to balance them out in your regularly scheduled life, by being loudly feminist or whatever.

In vino veritas is latin for ‘in wine there is truth’. The oldest known expression comes from Cato the Elder, who was surely quoting what was, even then, ancient wisdom. So this is not exactly a new observation. As a retired bartender, I can tell you that if you pour enough liquor into somebody, good, bad, or indifferent, you’re gonna see who that person really is, what they want, and how entitled they feel to having it.

So yeah, I get it. You’re at a con, so you’re already basically on vacation, even if you’re a pro and it’s a working vacation. And everybody knows the barcon is where the real action’s at. Shit, when I go to cons — not often — I pretty much post up at the bar the whole time, unless a friend is reading or it’s time to catch a meal with old friends or whatever. Get yourself a couple-few drinks in, and just throwing vibe out there to see if anyone bites seems like a perfectly reasonable, even desirable thing to do. If like me you’re old enough to have been raised in the ’70s and ’80s, you might even believe it’s your manly right or duty or, hell, even burden to get that smolder on and let the ladies know you’re a fellow who likes ladies.

Whatever it is, what you do is on you. That was inside you all along, just waiting to come out. The ethanol? That’s the excuse. That’s what sets you free to be the man you are. You are, and remain, responsible for your choices and actions. I don’t fucking care how drunk you were, and no one else does, either.

Time was, I would have said something about how you ought to ‘man up’ and face the consequences of your actions. As a more or less traditionally-raised cisgender male I’m still inclined to put it in those terms. But the man I’ve learned to become would tell you, instead, to human up. What do I mean by that? It’s pretty simple. It’s the basic but fundamental recognition that all humans are human first and foremost — before gender or phenotype or sexuality or anything — and, as human, accorded the dignity, validity, and value we would accord to any other. When your actions harm another — whether you were drunk or not, whether you meant to or not, it doesn’t matter — you are responsible for the hurt you caused, and liable for the consequences. The measure of your humanity is in your recognition and acceptance of that.

Apologizing helps. But only if that apology is accompanied by a change in behavior. If the behavior doesn’t change, the apology is invalid, as are further apologies. Maybe once upon a time that shit flew. But it doesn’t anymore, and it never should have to begin with.

Nor should you, to my eternal shame, think I’m up on some high hill lecturing. I’ve done my share of sins and then some. That’s how I know your truth so intimately. I have been that guy, and come to see the error of my ways. It’s nice over here. I sleep better and I have more authentic relationships with people. If you want to know how to do it, it’s easy.

Admit wrongdoing and accept fault. Listen to the women who find you valuable enough to try and salvage. Do what they tell you. Repeat until it sticks. When you fuck up, and you will, start this paragraph over.

Back to that barcon. It really is fun, right? Everybody having a good time and talking shop with that small segment of the greater population who find all this shit so fascinating. If you’re going to be there, be part of the fun. For everyone.

If you can’t be? Well, maybe you should go sit in your corner a while and think about what you did til you come to that whole ‘everyone deserves dignity and respect’ epiphany.

Hear Me Out

What if we just… took care of everybody? No, wait. Hear me out. What if we decided that nobody should go hungry, or be without a safe place to go? What if we decided everybody should have reliable lifelong health care, safe housing, opportunities for meaningful work, the chance to be part of a community, and all the education they wanted? What if we made that the birthright of every American, every human being ever born from here on out?

What would things be like if we decided to do that? If we decided to invest in a world worth living in and everyone living in it?

Would it be paradise? Utopia? Probably not. Humans gonna human. But it’d be a damnsight better than what we’ve got now. Think about it this way. What if all the economic stress in your life right now was gone? No worries how you’re going to pay the rent/mortgage. No stress where your next meal’s coming from, how you’re going to afford your meds, or your tuition, or clothes to wear. How you’re going to help out your parents or feed and clothe your kids or go see a doctor about that thing that’s been making you worry. Feels like a vacation, doesn’t it? Now imagine everyone else is on that same vacation. Oh, sure, there’s work to do. But there’s time to spend quality time with friends and family, time for the important things, the ones that make a life. The things you’ll look back on from your deathbed and be glad that you did them.

Crime would go way down, because without poverty and the misery and stress that go with it there will be less reason for it. Productivity would go up, because people who are rested and who choose to do the work they do get more done than desperate drones living paycheck to paycheck who know how disposable they are. The arts and sciences would thrive. Communities would thrive, too, yours and mine and everyone’s. We could finally turn our attention to climate change, and our crumbling national infrastructure.

The usual answer is that we can’t afford to do that. There’s not enough to go around as it is. But that’s a lie, and everyone knows it. A few hundred people have as much wealth as hundreds of millions. If that wealth were circulating in the economy instead of sitting offshore, everyone would be middle class.

The point is: we can afford it if we decide to. And that brings us to the real question, the one that doesn’t get asked enough.

The real question is: why don’t we decide to do that?

Why don’t we decide to just take care of everybody, invest in every person and every community, put a floor under everyone, a foundation solid enough to build one hell of a high ceiling on? If we can — and we can — why shouldn’t we?

That’s a question everyone has to answer for themselves. To me, it seems obvious that we should. I’d think any person of conscience would say that. Wouldn’t you?

How will we do it? How will we pay for it? What is the plan? These are all good questions, with long, complex answers, the minutiae of which could occupy us for years, and will. But for now, for this moment in history, where we stand at a moment of grand possibility for both destruction and renewal, what’s important is to decide where you want to go. What kind of society you think we should build. Figure out what, and put how in the service of that.

We can work out the details as we go. We’ll surely make mistakes. But the clock’s ticking down, and it’s time to get moving.

The Customer Is Always Right

Give me liberty or give me death. That’s what the sign says. She stands in front of the Baskin Robbins, not a manager in sight, her roots growing out, her mouth open mid-rant when the shutter clicks. She has her weight canted forward, on the balls of her feet, and a small American flag in one hand.

A vintage troop transport pulls up to a corner downtown, filled with cosplay paramilitaries in masks and sunglasses and ball caps and body armor. Each carries his customized Armalite one handed, to keep the other free for high-fiving. This is even better than the titty bar.

A quad-cab faces off with a nurse in mask and scrubs, tired of this shit. Not pictured: the hospital, maxed out and running out of PPE. A woman hangs out the passenger side window, hollering. Her hair is bleached. Her shirt says USA. The truck gleams, freshly-washed, in the sun.

***

For most of my adult life, I worked in bars and restaurants. And while food and drink were what we charged the money for, that wasn’t all we were selling. Core to the transaction, if unspoken, was customer service: treating people like they’re important and like what they want matters. In due measure, it can be rewarding both ways. But one of our exceptionally American cultural pathologies is that we take it waaaaaaay too far. Here the customer is king, and always right, and we’ll be happy to comp the meal you didn’t like and bag up the leftovers so you can take it home with you for later. Have a nice day and like us on Yelp!

You see that same sense of entitlement on display at these astroturf ‘protests’ that keep popping up like cold sores on state capitol steps. Like cold sores, they look like a lot more than they are, especially with the camera zoomed in so the people fill the frame, and all the empty space around them disappears from the context. They carry signs that say things like ‘I need a haircut’ and ‘Give me liberty or give me Covid-19.’ Maybe one in ten has a sign that says ‘I need to work.’ The one in ten has a valid point, but what the other nine want is only going to make things worse. More people will get sick. More people will die. The economy will, in the long run, take a bigger hit.

Doesn’t much matter when you’re broke and hungry and the rent is due now.

Do you know what else has that kind of urgency? When an addict needs a fix. Because let me tell you something: for every alcoholic, functional or not, that I served a drink to, I served three people addicted to being served.

The nine in ten? Didn’t know they were customer service addicts. Didn’t realize how much they depended on that presumed (purchased) deference. They thought that was just how the world worked, how it ought to work. How God wanted it to work, with his hierarchied omnibenevolence and preference for white Christian Americans. Take that away — take away any addict’s fix — and all they have left is the hole they’re trying to fill, the damage they never healed, the emptiness, uncertainty, and dread. For half a month or a month, they’ve been drying out in quarantine, no one to treat them like they’re important, like what they want matters.

And they are freaking the fuck out right now. Their roots are showing in more ways than one.

But it makes for good TV. And the operation was successful. The record shows: people protested. Those governors looking for a reason to kick poor people off unemployment rolls and deny small businesses support have their cover story. Someone else will come along and open new gyms and nail salons and restaurants after all this is over. The economy will go on.

(Someone else’s) death is a fair price to pay for liberty. Anything else would be tyranny in the land of the free.

And the addicts? They get their fix. Everybody wins.

Except the people who die.

***

I tried to quit smoking the first time when I was nineteen. Don’t think I made it a day. It wasn’t til I was in my thirties that I managed to quit for more than a couple weeks here and there. Every time I tried it was like every negative emotion, every hurt and disappointment and anxiety and guilt I’d ever felt and repressed welled up in me all at once all the time no matter what was happening around me. It was like that because that’s what was happening. My addiction tamped all that shit down, so I could get through my day without screaming or hurting myself or, as too often happened anyway, someone else. Because what is anger but weaponized pain, and what does a weapon want but to be wielded?

It took a lot of years and a lot of tries before before this last time I quit. It took also a lot of hard looks in mirrors and calling spades spades and a lot of coming to terms with things and a lot of humility and work. I also lucked out in having a first date with my partner the day after I last quit. That probably has more to do with my success in staying quit for this long than anything else.

***

It’s hard to feel sympathy for the entitlement of the customer service addict, especially as someone who made a career of abetting them for three decades. Negotiating with someone who’s just waiting for a reason to ask for your manager — or being the manager who has to step in and grease the squeaky wheel — will erode your faith in humanity and leave a dirty taste in your mouth. Doing it for not enough money to live on sucks even worse.

Early in my career, I found a way to console myself when I encountered such a person. True, they might make my life hell for five minutes or an hour. But it was always like that inside their head. You’d be surprised how much that realization helped.

Anger is weaponized pain, and now, without service industry people to point their anger at, these pampered beasts are finding their pain again. How can they know they’re always right if they aren’t anyone’s customer? Who will treat them like they’re important, like what they want matters?

***

Once upon a time, some scientists addicted some rats to cocaine. They put it in the water, put regular water next to it, and watched the rats choose the cocaine water again and again. Who wouldn’t, living in a scientist’s cage?

Someone had the idea to put the rats in different circumstance. They put the rats in rat paradise: room to run, things to do, other rats to be friends with. They offered them cocaine again. They wanted it less.

***

The guns the boys are playing with are real. So is the virus that shut down the service industry. The one they’re protesting from their self-defaced cars so they don’t catch it. So are the people they’re willing — implicitly or ex- — to sacrifice the lives of so they can have their fix again. So they can feel like the always-right kings they’ve always known themselves to be.

No addict quits without wanting to. Because when you quit you have to deal with all the things the addiction tamped down for you. It hurts, and it takes a long time. To be honest, it’s more ongoing process than final result, journey and not destination. But like anything, you get out of it what you put into it.

But what the one-in-ten need (the ones whose signs say ‘I need to work’) is more like what the people the customer service addicts want to go back to work need. It is, funny enough, the same thing our economy in its present form needs: free money to keep the charade going until we can build our own robust paradise, free health care in case we get sick, a rent and mortgage and debt payment freeze, and a reason to believe we might come out of this in a better place.

This doesn’t serve the customer service addict, nor the governor who has interests and oligarchs to placate.

But I can’t help but wonder: if we build the paradise that the rest of us want, where everyone gets what they need and no one has to worry about problems we have the means to solve, maybe the rats in their self-imposed cages will stop wanting the cocaine water so much.

Probably not. But I think we should do it anyway.

How to Writer

So here you are, stuck inside – if you’re a person of conscience anyhow – for the foreseeable future. And while it’s a perfect time to tackle your to-read pile, or catch up on your binge-watching, maybe you’ve been thinking about starting that novel or memoir or other big writing project you’ve wanted to do for so long. To which I say hell yeah, go on with your bad self, let’s do this thing!

But maybe you’re not sure exactly how. You’ve got the passion. You’ve got the idea. But you haven’t ever had the chance to sit down and do the thing. You know it’s probably not like in the movies – it isn’t – but knowing what it’s not is only so helpful when you need to know what it is. ‘It’ being the kind of writing practice that can get a big project done. Because if you’re relying on flashes of inspiration and feverishly scribbling in a notebook til all hours of the morning to get you there, well, best of luck to you, cuz that never worked for me.

You may be asking yourself right now: ‘I’ve never heard of this guy. Who the hell’s he think he is?’ The answer is: no one of consequence. But I have written like three million words in the last fifteen or twenty years, and continue to write almost every day without much in the way of outside validation.

Now, one thing I can’t teach you is how to write. That’s something that can be learned, but not taught. What I can teach you is how – for lack of a better term – to writer. And yeah, I know, ‘writer’ is a noun. But it’s also, as we’ll see, a verb. And it’s the verb that makes the noun, not the other way around.

***

The key thing is to establish a writing practice, by which I mean an ongoing routine, integrated into your daily life, like going to the gym or to work. It means finding time – and space – to do your work, and keeping at it consistently.

Let’s break that down:

First, if you can, find or make a dedicated workspace for your writing. It doesn’t have to only be for writing – I am at my kitchen table, right now, because our house is small and that’s the space I have – but it’s good, in my experience to have a particular place you go to to work. Much of what I have to teach here amounts to self-programming, building chains of association and habit in your mind that will prompt your writing brain to kick in when you sit down at keyboard or note-pad.

For that same reason, it’s also good, if you can, to set aside a specific, regular time that you write. Lots of people will tell you first thing in the morning is best. Others will say late at night, when the day’s work and worries are done. Myself I tend to be most productive in the mornings, but the takeaway here is not that you need to write in the morning so much as it’s good to write around the same time every day, or every day you’re able to write. It helps prime your mind, teaches it that this is what you do this time of day, and it will, sooner than later, learn to grab its shovel and headlamp and descend once more into the word-mines to dig up today’s nuggets of gold and/or shit.

For now, especially while establishing your practice, there is no functional difference between shit and gold, by the way. You will also, for various reasons, sometimes think shit is gold and gold is shit.

Now for me, I like to strengthen those chains of association with the music I listen to while I write. By which I mean I have a writing playlist, which evolves over time, but which I listen to consistently and in the same order every time. It’s just as useful to have some ritual (Stephen Pressfield, author of the War of Art, which you probably ought to read, likes to read the invocation at the beginning of the Odyssey) or other that you do, no matter how simple or even what it is. It’s the ritual that’s key, the thing that signals passage from one kind of time to another, in this case not-writing time to writing time.

It’s important to remember: none of this is magic. It’s training and discipline, programming your brain to devote unconscious resources to the problem of turning the nebulous inchoate desire/idea/intuition into something that will move someone reading it, cause things to happen in their brain such that they, too, can begin to grasp this thing you’re reaching after. Okay, so maybe it is magic. But it takes a fuck-ton of practice to say abracadabra right.

***

Okay, so we’ve made time and space. We’ve got some ritual or trigger to activate our writer brain, and we’re ready to actually, you know, write. So what about that?

I said before I can’t teach you how to write, and that’s true. But that doesn’t mean I can’t help you teach yourself. So here are a few things I’ve picked up along the way, that have proved useful in my own writing practice.

Hemingway famously said ‘Write drunk, edit sober’, which is pretty on-brand for such a famously alcoholic person. But his formulation is actually pretty useful, because writing and editing are two totally different things. It’s like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, in which you can know either a particle’s position or velocity but never both at once and, in practice, the more you know about one, the less you know about the other. It’s the same with writing and editing. Put it this way, you can create or you can judge. Trying to do both at once is a recipe for failure.

I’m going to set aside editing, because that’s a whole other thing that comes way later in the process, and has no place here, where we’re establishing a practice and finding our way to the end of a shitty first draft.

Yes, your first draft will be shitty. Accept it. Embrace it. It’s what first drafts are for.

Put it this way: it’s easier to fix something that’s broken but already exists than it is to conjure it up in the first place. And that’s what you’re doing, right? You’re conjuring something into existence that wasn’t there before. Even if there are other things like it, that you made it makes it different from what anyone else can make. So give yourself, and your draft, a break. You can get all judge-y later, when it might do you some good.

Should you outline? Probably. I almost never do, and when I do, it never makes it onto the page how I meant it to. But it’s a good exercise, and it can save you some time if you’re the sort of person who sticks to plans that they make. Me, I’m more of a headlights writer, in which metaphor the draft is a journey by car, driven at night: you never see farther than the headlights, even if you know which roads you plan to take and where you’re ultimately trying to get to. It may or may not be the best, most efficient way, but you’ll get where you’re going, and you might find some things along the way you’d have missed if you’re too stuck on keeping to your itinerary. Still, outlines can be useful, even if you outline as you go. Planning the next night’s leg, in this metaphor.

What if you get stuck? Unlike a road trip, you can totally skip these parts, and come back to them later, either during the first draft or later, when editing or revising. I’m not much for it, myself, but I know lots of writers better and more successful than I am who won’t think twice about writing “[insert awesome swordfight/space battle/conversation about feelings here]” and move on to whatever’s next. In fact, you don’t have to do the whole thing in order at all if you don’t want to. I mean, I do, but the purpose here isn’t to turn you into me, but to take what I’ve learned to help you find your own journey to the end of the draft.

Another thing you can try if you’re stuck is to switch your method. Writing longhand? Switch to keyboard. Tapping away at the laptop? Bust out pen and paper. The two use different parts of your brain and sometimes you can get yourself unstuck by switching which part you’re using to try and solve the problem.

If all else fails, take a walk. Even if the solution to your problem doesn’t come to you, it’s good to get outside and get some exercise.

One thing, though, and I can’t stress this enough. Even if you hate what you’re writing, and intend never to show it to another living soul, try and get all the way to the end before you go back and try and fix things. Yes, there are writers who do edit as they go, but we can’t all be William Gibson, however much we might wish we wrote Neuromancer. He’s also been practicing since then, so…

Believe me, I know it can be hard. But it really is best to write one draft at a time if you can, in my experience.

***

So what about inspiration? Where do the words and ideas and stories come from? The answer is mostly ineffable. But let’s see if we can’t eff it just a bit.

The usefullest way to think about this I’ve found comes from Kate Wilhelm’s book Storyteller, about the founding and early years of the Clarion Writers Workshop (which I attended in 2010 and highly recommend, but that’s a whole different post, and not all of it’s about writing). In it, she talks about what she called her Silent Partner (her real-life partner, Damon Knight, called his Fred). Your Silent Partner lives in your unconscious brain, which I’m convinced is about ninety percent of you, and is where that canard that people only use 10% of their brains comes from. You can’t speak to one another directly, but you can send messages across the transom, and receive insight and inspiration in return. Training your Silent Partner what to work on and when, and yourself to ask the right questions and listen close for the answers, is what I was on about earlier, when I urged you to set up a consistent writing practice.

I call mine the Tinkerer. He has a giant workshop full of half-finished projects (not all of them having to do with writing, either) and is easily distracted. If I don’t keep the work orders coming, he’s really good at wandering off and thinking about things like how to build and run a socialist restaurant, or how life might have turned out if I was smart enough to date that one woman in college, or whether I ought to start an online magazine in my roughly zero hours of spare time. And of course I let him, when it’s not time to work on my novel, because he deserves to have some joy, too, and there are only so many hours I can write before I turn cross-eyed and things get weird.

I do my best to keep him fed and happy. I read, I exercise, I stare into space for minutes on end, letting him put on his conductor hat and play with his train-of-thought set. Most of all I take him seriously – I take my work seriously – and in return he keeps whispering more crazy and awesome shit in my inner ear than I could ever get on paper.

***

I know, things got a little woo-woo there at the end. What can I say? As pragmatic a person as I am, and as much of the practice I’m trying to teach you is programmatic, even mechanical, at the end of the day, creation and creativity remain ineffable, part of the spark – be it magic, divine, or just random chance – that makes us want to take that nebulous inchoate something inside ourselves and wrestle it into a form others can understand.

If you want to do that, you can, but it takes practice, and discipline, and faith.

That’s how I writer, anyway.