The other day, I happened upon an interesting question on someone’s private blog: how important is plot to your enjoyment of a book, and how much does it spoil the fun if the plot is flawed? My response quickly grew beyond sensible comment size :-)

Logical consistency

I don’t like things happening that actively contradict the previous logic of the book, leaving me as a reader with “But wait a minute…”.

One glaring example that sticks in my mind, though it’s actually from a film and not a book, is the end of the film Dune where it suddenly starts raining for some unexplained magical reason!

In the book, the unlocking of the planet’s water was a gradual ecological transformation, over years and years. But when they made the film, oh no, that wasn’t good enough – an instantaneous result was required for dramatic purposes even though it made no sense.

I still recall seeing it in the cinema one day many years ago, when the film first came out. As the rain began to fall, and young Alia said in wondering tones “He is the Kwisatz Haderach”, my response was the actual words “Oh, leave it out” ::haha::

This also has something to do with why (a) I don’t watch many films and (b) I almost never watch any film of which I’ve enjoyed the book :-)

Character realness

But getting back to actual books and their plots:

One thing I’ve noticed more about my reading habits since starting the BookTrail microblog is how often my enjoyment of a book is mainly about the vividness of the world and especially the characters.

So probably the worst kind of plot weakness for me is when one of the characters is written to do something that they “just wouldn’t do”.

I can’t remember which book it was (and I didn’t bother putting it on BookTrail), but there was a novel I read a while back which was all from the point of view of this bloke. Well, in order to make the plotline for him go a certain way, this woman he was involved with had to do certain things. And what she did was utterly implausible to me. It just didn’t make sense in terms of what she would’ve had to have been thinking at the time.

After I got to the end, I had this fantasy of challenging its author to write the same story again from her point of view. Not that I actually thought he could have – I don’t think the gaping holes in her motivation could ever have been reconciled into a plausible shape – but if he’d accepted the challenge, the struggle to attempt it would have been fitting reward for writing such a tokenistic puppet of a character!

The same thing arises in smaller ways sometimes: “But why did they suddenly say that then?” “But people don’t talk like that.” “Why didn’t A just ask B, like any sensible person would?”

Cleverness in plot

I do appreciate it as a work of art if an author manages to set up a genuinely unexpected twist. But for me that’s not essential.

I remember discussing the Narnia books a while ago and someone suggesting to me that Voyage of the Dawn Treader doesn’t really have much of a plot. That thought had literally never occurred to me before. There’s nothing twisty in it, but there’s the redemption of Eustace, and the destiny of Reepicheep, and lots of shorter adventures. That’s good enough for me!

Domestic and practical

Likewise, I don’t have any requirement for the scale to be momentous. And even if the scale is momentous, I like it when practical, domestic details form part of the narrative.

There’s a bit in Prince Caspian, where they’re travelling through woodland and a bear comes after them and they kill it – actually I’m going to find this and quote it:

Raw meat is not a nice thing to fill one’s pockets with, but they folded it up in fresh leaves and made the best of it. They were all experienced enough to know that they would feel quite differently about these squashy and unpleasant parcels when they had walked long enough to be really hungry.

Isn’t that just 100% true about how food seems different depending on whether you’re hungry? I always think when I read that bit “That was written by someone who’d been out hiking”. (Which i.i.r.c. is true actually – C S Lewis did like to go and spend time walking outside. I think he lived near some hills, can’t remember exactly now.)

I’m thinking now too of the way the magic items in Elidor, when brought into this world, interfere with the TV reception. Magic and ordinariness mixed is much more satisfactory to me than magic by itself. And I always like it if the protagonists’ challenge is partly formed by logically consistent tricky side effects or limitations of the magic.

The domestic/practical side is also part of what I enjoy about Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple: she has a great line in domestic detail :-)

Gradual revelations

Part of what I like about detective stories is that at the beginning there’s lots of stuff you don’t know, and then you gradually find it out throughout the book. When well done, I find that very enjoyable. A lot of non-detective novels feature that puzzle/solution trajectory too; it doesn’t have to be officially “A Mystery”.

Sometimes it’s learning something about the characters’ past; sometimes it’s learning something they don’t know themselves. In Dune-the-book, the “what you don’t know at the start” includes all kinds of details of the planet’s culture and ecology, and the gradual discovery of all that is a lot of the plot. I think for me that’s the main reason why none of the Dune sequels could live up to the first in the series: it would’ve been really difficult to generate an amount of new unknown-ness in that same universe comparable to what’s kept from the reader at the start of the first one.

Characters and what they’re dealing with

The Narnia books also provide good examples of possibly my major fiction-enjoyment criterion: that the characters are rewarding to spend time with in terms of their inner life and how they respond to the challenges life puts in their way. I want to glean something from their fictional learning and thinking that has some relevance to my own life, or at least enjoy their company.

One of my favourite Narnia episodes is in Prince Caspian when Lucy sees Aslan and the others don’t believe her. That’s such a beautiful metaphor for the challenge of following your own intuition.

Likewise with the Dorothy L Sayers stories. I like detective stories anyway, but Gaudy Night is especially rich because of the way Harriet thinks, and the questions of integrity and ethics she’s grappling with. It’s a pleasure to hang out with her.

So yeah, for me the plot has to have a shape consistent with itself and the people in it. But I think what most often brings me back to books again and again as favourites is the people.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2012. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

I did write something about this before, from my own thinking: the “Gearing up” metaphor, and a follow-up article giving examples. But this article is about ideas I’ve liked from other people, on similar territory.

Here we have

Motivational surface tension

I already microblogged about The Procrastination Equation:

Not great fave, but liked evolution bits & metaphor of breaking “motivational surface tension”.

(In case anyone’s not familiar with the original thing that he’s drawing the metaphor from, here’s Wikipedia on the literal meaning of surface tension, i.e. about how liquids behave.)

In fact there’s more than one metaphor in the text – a little constellation of them, all about difficulty changing state & getting into the new thing:

… many find that the hard outer shell of a chore, the first few minutes, remains the initial obstacle. How many times have you put off a task only to realise it wasn’t so bad once you got started? Cleaning, exercising, and even writing are often difficult at first.

It is a bit like swimming in the lake by my in-laws’ cabin, just north-east of Winnipeg (the coldest city in the world with a population greater than 600,000). The water is deliciously invigorating but, for most, the initial temperature shock is an effective barrier against reapling the subsequent reward. By focusing solely on the initial jump off the dock, I can plunge in and, after a few intense seconds, enjoy myself.

An extremely short-term or mini-goal, then, is excellent for busting through such motivational surface tension. Ten-minute goals are an application of this technique, such as the ten-minute clean-up around the house.

Consequently, if you have trouble writing, just sit down and type a few words. If you don’t want to exercise, at least get your workout clothes on and drive to the gym. Once you have completed your mini-goal, re-evaluate how you feel and see if you are willing to immediately commit to a longer stretch.

Having broken through that motivational surface tension and immersed yourself in the project, you, like most, will opt to continue.

This is definitely relevant to me.

The Now Habit

And here’s my micro-blog summary of The Now Habit:

Good ideas. One to re-read. “I can take one small step.” “When can I start?” “I must take time to play.”

These were my three favourite angles from a set of five in “How to talk to yourself”, which is itself part of a whole system. I recommend the whole book! but wanted to share these little gems in particular, and keep them handy as a reminder to me.

Note: I’ve added some paragraph breaks into the book quotes, just to make them easier to read on screen.

When can I start?

Telling yourself “I must finish” keeps you focused on the completed product somewhere in the future, without ever telling you where to start. “Finishing” is in the vague distance, a long way from where you may be now in terms of skills, confidence, and perspective. This focus will make the task seem even more overwhelming, almost impossible. …

Replace “I must finish” with “When can I start?”

“When can I start?” … works like a feedback device that pushes any wavering focus back to the starting point of the project.

And when it is impossible to start now, “When is the next time I can start?” works to preprogram you for a directed and easy start-up in the near future, with a clear picture of when, where, and on what you will be starting.

I must take time to play

Replace “I don’t have time to play” with “I must take time to play.”

Actually, Neil F’s reasoning for this statement and my reasoning for it are different. Here are some extracts from his:

Statements such as “I’ve got to work all weekend,” “I’m sorry I can’t join you, I have to finish this project,” “I’m busy tonight, I’m working under a deadline” will make you feel the resentment toward your work that comes from long periods of deprivation and isolation. Repeating these statements creates the feeling of having a life of obligation and demands that cause you to miss the things other people enjoy in life. …

Insisting on your regular time for exercise, for dinners with friends, for frequent breaks throughout the day, and for frequent vacations throughout your year increases the feelings of inner worth and respect for yourself that are at the heart of unlearning the need for procrastination. Knowing that you have something to look forward to in the near future – a firm commitment to recreation and time with friends – lessens the dread of difficult work.

Well, most of my work, I don’t resent at all – I enjoy it once I get going! (And “deserving” isn’t a meme that I hang out with much at all.) If I fail to take breaks, it’s quite likely just to be a failure to switch states – as described by the surface tension metaphor – quite similar to my failures to get going on work.

But, for different reasons, I still completely agree that planning breaks from “work” is a good idea. For me, it’s about refreshment and variety.

If I take an hour out to go swimming, I can pretty much guarantee that I’ll have some good ideas while I’m swimming, as well as feeling emotionally more contented afterwards. If I have a long chat with a friend, I’m very likely to come out of it feeling “unloaded”, and with a clearer picture of what’s going on in my life. Even going off to help a friend reorganise – which is often physically demanding – is a change of scene that can raise my energy.

Perhaps I should add a bit into Neil F’s catchphrase:

Replace “I don’t have time to play” and “I get stuck into something and I forget to take a break” with “I must take time to play.”

Havi

While discussing destuckification, it would be remiss of me not to refer you to the genius who is Havi Brooks! (And her duck Selma.)

Here are some of Havi’s wise thoughts right here right now, and you don’t even have to go to the library for them:

Doing just one thing.

Destuckification 101

Avoidance! Oh, and getting out of it.

Feel free to comment with your best unsticking tips :-)

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2011. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

Troy Davis was killed, executed, in the US on 21 September, despite enormous and widely-held doubts about whether he actually did the crime he was convicted of. For a few days after his death, this was in my mind a lot.

OK, I wasn’t there at the scene in 1989 when the crime went down, so I don’t absolutely know what happened then. But from what I’ve read about it, I don’t see any reason to believe that he was guilty. And there are other people apart from Amnesty who have gone into it in proper depth and come to the conclusion that the crime was actually done by someone else (see article); if despite all appearances he did do it, it’s certainly not proved to the average reasonable person’s satisfaction.

I’m not convinced anyway that it’s a good idea to kill people in the name of the state. But one of the best practical arguments against it is there’s no going back later if the person later turns out to be innocent. So you’d think even the people in favour of it would try to make sure that wouldn’t happen. And yet, despite enormous numbers of people saying “wait – this isn’t right”, the excecution was carried out; he was killed.

People

So I was thinking about Troy himself. I got an email from Amnesty after his death, in which he’s quoted as saying “I’m in good spirits and I’m prayerful and at peace.” I hope that remained true for him.

And I was thinking about his family and friends. How must that feel? to lose your brother or someone you were close to, in that way and despite years of your own struggle for the justice that would have saved his life? Can’t imagine the pain of that. (Troy’s parents both died during the years he was on Death Row. Troy’s sister, Martina, said her mother “died of a broken heart.”)

Then I was also thinking about all the thousands of people who’ve become aware of the case, and have contributed in some little way to the campaign for justice. For some people, it will be one sadness among many, one injustice among many they’re already aware of. But I was thinking especially of the younger ones, who really believed that Troy’s death couldn’t happen if enough people spoke out. For some people – maybe especially the ones who live in the US – this will be the crushing blow to their faith in the system and the world will never seem the same again. I hope it won’t also be a crushing blow to their faith in their own powers to make a difference.

And there’s the jurors from the original trial: “four of the jurors who originally found him guilty have signed statements in support of Mr. Davis.” Imagine that: you helped form the guilty verdict, now you’re sure it’s wrong, and yet someone’s died because of it. Coming to terms with that… not easy. You might feel very bitter about being put in that position, or feel that you had a death on your conscience.

But I’ve got to admit, I’ve probably spent the most time thinking about the people on the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole. These are the people who ultimately had the responsibility of deciding whether Troy Davis should live or die. What must they have been thinking?

Trying to imagine that… so much commitment to a path that wasn’t underpinned by facts or justice. What must they have thought they were upholding?

Parallels

Something that came to mind: a conversation I was having with a friend recently about a software project which had gone live with loads of stuff not really working, and fallen over an embarrassing lot in its first days.

As I listened to the story, my mind was sort of boggling at the detachment from reality implied in the contractors’ thinking, to have convinced themselves it was all gonna work fine on the day. And my friend explained it along the lines of: Well, I think if they’d begun to admit to themselves what the signs were pointing to, it would’ve been a huge “OH SHIT” that they didn’t want to deal with, so they managed to block it out with lots of positive thinking like “It’ll be OK, we’ll sort it out”.

And then I was thinking of someone quite familiar to long-time readers of this blog, Mr Graham Badman. Here we are Mr Badman, telling you about our lives. But anything we say that’s inconvenient to your beliefs, somehow that part doesn’t go in.

And then I suddenly found myself searching for another recent memory which faintly rang a bell – “what was it? something in that book of Doris Lessing’s…”

To digress: A thoughtful, sometimes sad, book which I read recently and enjoyed is Doris Lessing‘s African Laughter. The author grew up in what was then Southern Rhodesia. For some years, she was banned by the (white) government from coming back into the country. Then, after the country became Zimbabwe, she was allowed back, and the book is autobiographical accounts of four visits between 1982 and 1992.

The ability to learn

This was the bit I was half remembering:

Research into the workings of the mind shows that a percentage of people are incapable of changing their minds, no matter what the evidence. If they have been imprinted at some point in their lives with, let’s say, the information that all cats are black, then forever after they will say that all cats are black, even if white cats are paraded before them with labels saying White Cats. (p276)

I don’t know whether that’s literally true. (When someone claims “research shows” anything whatsoever, I find it safer not to assume the statement has any content about the actual research! though it may tell you something about the opinion or agenda of the speaker. Having sight of the research itself is sometimes a bit more convincing.)

But as an emotional truth: yes, it certainly seems as though some people operate like that.

Later in the book, DL writes about political ideas persisting in that way:

An historian, the father of Rhodesian-Zimbabwean history, told a class in the university that he had made a mistake in certain interpretations. The students would have none of it. ‘But that’s not what we were taught.’ ‘But I’m telling you, what you were taught is wrong. I wrote that history and now I know parts of it are wrong.’ But it was no use: what they knew was history. (p401)

I suspect every human being is prone to that kind of error to some degree; but some are more so than others. If there’s hardwiring for the trait, then it may be an excuse for the people with the trait, but it’s no excuse for anyone who then gives those people the power of life and death.

I don’t really believe that’s the problem with the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole, though. I mean, I don’t know them, but I can’t help guessing that their thinking was maybe a bit more like the contractors with their OH SHIT.

Hanging out in imagination with the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole

I don’t know. The whole thing just somehow caught my imagination. These five people… what were they thinking?

How much of it was loyalty to their colleagues who made the earlier decisions? What pressures were they under?

Did any of them doubt in their hearts that Troy Davis was guilty? Did they all manage to convince themselves completely that he was? that all the other people who’d looked into the case and come down on the “unsafe conviction” side were simply deluded? Did they feel something, consciously or unconsciously, like “If we admit we were wrong this time, we’ll be opening the floodgates”? – to what? to people questioning other miscarriages of justice? Will this decision help or hinder their careers, and if so how?

What part did racism play? How much of it was a belief that Black lives matter less? A report sponsored by the American Bar Association in 2007 concluded that one-third of African-American death row inmates in Philadelphia would have received sentences of life imprisonment if they had not been African-American. Was some part of it “Well if he didn’t do that crime he probably did another one?”

Was the Board unanimous and if not, who dissented? (The Board is 1 white woman, 2 white men and 2 African American men.) I wonder how the pressures were different on each of them.

What are the parallels with, or differences from, state killings of white people? How often do white people get executed despite widespread belief in their innocence, and what commonalities exist in terms of class and income background?

I wonder how many previous deaths or prison sentences each of the Board people had seen where doubt remained and they had to squash it down to get on with their jobs?

What language did they use among themselves? What were their metaphors? Did they speak of “holding the line” or “showing strength” or “sending a clear message” or “upholding principles”?

I wonder did any of them ever say in discussions with each other that they thought he was perhaps innocent? Did one of them perhaps ever convey to another, not in so many words but so they both understood, that it was a bad business and they both knew it and felt bad about it, but it could never be said?

Or were they really truly all 100% convinced that they were right and the rest of the world was wrong?

This is how I have been hanging out in imagination with the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole.

In closing

Troy Davis, shortly before his death:

The struggle for justice doesn’t end with me. This struggle is for all the Troy Davises who came before me and all the ones who will come after me.

Amnesty International page with facts about the US death penalty

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2011. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

I’m one of many people across the world who, in July 2011, felt my world rock a little bit at the unexpected death of Kay Dekker.

I’d known that Kay’s health wasn’t exactly tip top, ever since his back injury some years ago. But the idea of his death had never been in my mind, except in the general sense that anyone could die any time. I think it’s beginning to sink in now, but in the last few weeks, I’ve often remembered the news with a tiny jolt, “Kay is dead”. And then, just for a moment, I’d feel “No… that can’t be”.

By way of explanation for people who didn’t know Kay, and celebration for those who did, I recommend Doug’s lovely post “Kay Dekker: an insufficient tribute“.

Thinking back

I first met Kay in 3d in 1995, at BiCon. (That was the first year I went to BiCon.) But before that, I’d already seen him around online, on soc.bi which was then in its heyday.

Last time I remember hanging out with him in 3d was on the last day of BiCon 2001 – he, I and Nat were all out on the grass by the accommodation blocks, in “last day winding-down mellowness” mode. That BiCon had included lots of discussion of androgyny and genderqueer, and I remember we were talking about the gender identity question in the BiCon survey.

There’s a sense in which, by external measures, Kay wasn’t a big part of my life and I wasn’t a big part of his. In recent years, I only saw him online, and even that had dwindled as he wasn’t posting much any more.

But my thoughts and feelings when he died were 100% “a friend has died”. Not just “someone I slightly know has died”. And I know I’m one of many people who feel the same way, even if their connections with Kay were similarly small by external measures.

Mosaic metaphor

In the few days just after Kay’s death, I was thinking a lot about who he was for the UK out-bi community, in particular his gift for connecting with people and nurturing them. I was thinking: If the community were a mosaic of different colours, then Kay wasn’t just one tile (maybe kingfisher blue with a slightly golden-green glaze), he was some of the mortar as well.

In imagining the mosaic metaphor, I also had this vague mathematical concept of Kay’s ability to be adjacent to a number of other tiles which would require four or more dimensions to be possible! a sort of fold in space-time! (I think he’d have been amused by that.)

It really struck me how much connectedness he’d created all around him. I’ve never before been in a community where so many people around me were all tipped into grief at the same time. So as well as thinking a lot of Kay’s closest people, I was thinking of the many others across the UK & across the world who would miss him.

Song

This song dates back some years now. I didn’t only just write it. But it was the thought of Kay’s friends (many of them also my friends) grieving right now that promoted it to “next up” in the song release plan.

Note: This is a sad song, hence possibly not entirely safe for work, depending on your workplace & how susceptible you are to tears.

(If no playback button appears, you can still play the song back from its Bandcamp page.)

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2011. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

I ran out of light reading just before Christmas, due to forgetting what time the local library would close on Christmas Eve. Oops!

Vron kindly let me peruse her bookshelves, and one of the things I spotted was Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose: What do I do when I want to do everything? I had read that before, but it was a long time ago and I’d been meaning to re-read it. And oh yes, it is a lovely book.

Beads, cycles and other metaphors

My closest fit to the profiles in this book, I think, is as a “cyclical scanner”. Most “scanners”, as Barbara describes them, are continually getting interested in completely new things. But cyclical ones come back to the same things again as inspiration shifts.

OK, I do have what you might call “underlying themes” to what I do. But I don’t have one big project or genre occupying my whole creative life. I don’t write about the same things all the time, and I’ve got more than one music project and more than one source of income, and I like coding and d.i.y. as well as writing and music.

I was thinking about that a while ago and I came up with the metaphor of a series of beads of different colours. The necklace as a whole is my creative life; the beads don’t have to match.

“Cycles” too is “one of my metaphors”. For a long time now, I’ve used the expression “work cycles” to describe the way I’ll be immersed in something for a few days, then come to a natural end of that burst of inspiration and move to something else.

Or at least, that’s how it works when I’m on a roll – though a lot of the time I accidentally fall out of that mode, e.g. discombobulated by the looming presence of some conscience-driven task for which I feel no inspiration :-/

As it happens I don’t really identify with the term “scanner”, as a word. Metaphorically, I think that fits better to the people who are less cyclical and more on a continual quest for completely new stuff. But the label hasn’t got in the way of me finding lots in the book that’s useful and validating to me.

Here are a couple of book extracts which I most want to remember for the new year:

Random Acts of Passion Life Design Model

Every Scanner knows what it’s like to be suddenly taken with a desire to stop what he’s doing and pick up something else that calls to him. … If that’s something you do, I advise you to just give in. Pick up any project that calls you and give it an hour, a day, or a week, however long it keeps you fascinated, and then put it away and get back to what you were doing.

This arrangement is called the Random Acts of Passion Life Design Model – and it might be just right for how your creativity operates.

So true!

(One of these days I should really write up my “Timed seed and herb dispenser” model of inspiration. And my concept of “Pingalation”.)

Avocation Stations

I used to wish that I had a huge, empty room with rows of long tables against the walls and, on each table, everything I needed for one of my projects. Then I could leave everything out in the open on its own table and walk over to it and start working whenever the mood took me.

I don’t have a room that large and I bet you don’t, either, but the fantasy gave me the idea of Avocation Stations, and I started wondering what kind of arrangement could replace all those tables and take up less space. …

Then, last month in a home furnishings catalog, I saw a little rolling stand with drawers and a couple of fun gadgets like a desk space that opened, a slot for large pages, a shelf for books. It was called a bill paying center, as I recall, but to me it was a dead ringer for an Avocation Station. …

If you’re a Scanner with lots of projects going on at the same time, you should have some variation of those little pices of furniture. You can make your own to suit yourself … and keep a whole bunch of them ready to go.

In an ideal world I’d have an ENORMOUS wooden multi-cupboard thing, taking up say one whole wall of my workroom, which incorporated lots of different sizes of drawer and cupboard, so that everything half done had a perfectly suited storage space and was easy to get out and put back.

I don’t think I’d actually want everything out at once. In fact, I imagine I’d probably dislike that. When something’s not hot, I’d probably rather it was out of my space, to leave the space clearer for the few things that are. For me, what appeals about the “Avocation Station” idea is the easy getting out and putting back, plus the “all relevant bits together ready to go” – not the idea of everything at once being literally visible.

And it’s not that I don’t do something like that already – I do. I have shelves and boxes and drawers, and some of them are designated for particular projects.

But I think the principle of “ready to go” could be optimised further, and I think that would be a good thing. So that’s why I wanted to remember that bit of the book.

Barbara’s blogs

And then, poking around on the net, I discovered that Barbara has several blogs, a Twitter account and a web site! I don’t know why it never occurred to me before to look for these.

Here are two of the blogs, which seem to be the most current:

And here is a funny and insightful video about different people loving different things:

Barbara Sher: “Design, Execute, Maintain”, on YouTube

Happy creative New Year, everyone.

Here, have an index…
Top of article
Beads, cycles and other metaphors
Random Acts of Passion Life Design Model
Avocation Stations
Barbara’s blogs

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

After coming up with the gears metaphor, I thought I’d sketch out what the gears might be for me. I imagined them something like this:

0 Not moving. I could have called this “neutral”, but somehow that seems like the wrong word. Stuck isn’t neutral. Exhaustion isn’t neutral. Moping around being mopey and miserable isn’t neutral.

On the other hand it could be a kind of relaxed resting peacefulness – but in that case, I’m probably not stuck, and some other metaphor would apply.

1 Minimal engagement. Playing computer games or just slightly pottering about e.g. tidying up. If this is the aftermath of some intensity, then I might be “processing” in the background. (Simple computer games can be a form of meditation, I think – they occupy the surface of your mind while things happen under the surface.) If pottering about, still feeling like each new thing is a re-start – not really any momentum from one task to the next.

2 Beginning to build momentum. Tidying could still be in here as long as it’s just putting things away that have an obvious home, or straightening up. Sewing or making badges as long as the process doesn’t really take any thought. Tinkering with writing (though not the process of deciding that something’s finished – I need to be more awake for that and it would be more like 4th gear).

3 Ordinary sized tasks. Returning emails, going to the library, sorting possessions, putting a wash in. Maybe some DIY that only requires repeating what I’ve already done, with no original thought.

4 Thought and organisation. Things that require more thought and a certain amount of awakeness. E.g. interesting DIY, planning. If I’ve had a day in 4th gear, I’ll almost certainly finish the day with a nice sense of satisfaction about what I’ve accomplished – which often involves some kind of tangible result in the 3d world.

5 Tricky interface stuff. Anything involving making arrangements with people I don’t know, especially if it involves some kind of time pressure and especially if I have to actually talk to them. I often have a sense of needing to “gear up” & “get my head in order” to do that kind of thing, but sometimes if I “get on a roll” it seems easy.

6 Immersion time. Song recording, coding, or any other complex task like accounts. This is often stuff that takes a while to reload into the brain, so that fitting it into “too small” chunks of time is very inefficient, and to me tends to feel intuitively like “there’s not even any point starting”. (And “too small” varies with the task – anything from half an hour to a day might feel that way.) Often, though not always, it’s the kind of thing I can “get lost in” so that time disappears.

This 6th level isn’t necessarily any harder than 5th gear; it’s the “chunk size” which distinguishes it. It needs to be preceded by ensuring that if I do give it that much time, nothing’s going to go wrong while I wasn’t paying attention to all the other stuff. Perhaps it’s more of a turbo button than another gear.

Writing

One thing which surprised me in a good way when I thought this through is the fact that tinkering with writing comes out so low-gear for me. I lucked into a good “effort-to-satisfaction ratio” there. The point is that despite being quite easy to do, it’s also quite satisfying to me, which helps me to move up through gears. I thought “Must remember that”.

This insight was definitely part of the source of the new era of “more than one blog post a month” :-) I realised that as a rule of thumb, “if in doubt, do some writing” had a lot going for it. And around Christmas and New Year I did have a successful gearing-up on the writing front.

Different cars

What was interesting, though, was that after a week or two of that, I realised that (slightly contrary to my expectations) my writing momentum hadn’t transferred onto the DIY. I was just doing more and more writing!

I found that to get going on the DIY, I had to give that a separate gearing-up all its own: starting with a bit of tidying, then assembling the tools and resources I’d want, and only then actually embarking on the work itself.

Not definitive

Of course everyone’s list of gears would be different – and the above isn’t the definitive list of gears even for me, just an approximate sketch. And there are different ways to apply the metaphor – including, as I’ve said there, considering each field of endeavour as its own separate gear system.

But the basic metaphor seems to be working well for me so far. Regardless of specifics, I can still tell myself: “Don’t bother trying to talk yourself into tackling big things. And don’t sit around waiting for the desire to tackle them to return. Instead, get stuck into the little things within easy reach. And trust that in a while, when you’re more rested and have some little accomplishments to be satisfied with, the desire to tackle big things will return of its own accord.”

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

Sometimes I get into a sort of negative feedback loop like: “not accomplishing much, hence feel frustrated and incapable, hence no momentum / energy, hence not accomplishing much”. And I mope about.

Typical thoughts I might have in this state include “I ought to be more productive”, and “Look at these important things that aren’t even moving at all – aargh!”

Then by way of reaction, I might get a slightly exasperated urge to “go for the main things right now and stop faffing about”. Which, if I were to heed it, would launch me straight into the hardest tasks.

But in fact, it seems from experience that this is usually unrealistic for me, and trying to do it only leads to more stuckness. If I’m feeling stuck and low-energy and maybe a bit hopeless, what I’ve found usually works in fact is to start with minor pottering about and build momentum.

So e.g. rather than telling myself “Must… do… accounts…”, it might work best to tidy a small area of a room, and then think “Yay! what next?”

Gears in a car

A while back, I was talking about this on a thinking session, and I came up with a new metaphor: it’s like gears in a car.

Suppose you’re driving a car, and you try to set off in 5th gear. What’s going to happen? Probably the car will jolt, and make a noise it’s not supposed to make, and stall. And probably what won’t happen is the car goes off zooming really fast.

It’s not designed to work like that; you’re supposed to start in first gear (or maybe second, depending on vehicle and circumstances), and work up.

Remembering

And I thought: I must remember this. It’s pointless trying to make myself get all majorly active straight from a mope, when it’s so much more workable and natural to build momentum gradually. I know this, but it seems to be one of those things which is easy to forget :-)

I have more to say about this topic! But that will do as a start.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

(tip of the hat to Mike Fortune-Wood for the link.)

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2009. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

I was thinking about the ways that information gets lost. Sometimes it gets handed on and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it gets written down and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes people forget, and sometimes they remember till they die, but then they die.

Histories and skills

There’s a story that because so many builders died in the second world war, some of the previously-common knowledge about how traditional UK brick houses are “supposed to work” was lost with them. So some of the houses built in the 50s and 60s had problems, and lots of the houses built pre-war aren’t being maintained optimally.

[E.g. my house has some damp at the back, which is probably because (a) someone's put down a concrete back yard and it doesn't slope away from the house sufficiently, and (b) it's now got rendering over some of the brick, so the brick can't "breathe" as well as it would have originally. 100 years ago when it was new, it would have had blue brick paving sloping away from the walls, taking the water quickly away from the house, and it wouldn't have had the rendering. Whoever made those changes probably had no idea that they were interfering with the house's functional integrity. Some practical info on this subject, for anyone who's interested.]

I’ve heard it said that queer activists are particularly prone to not knowing their own history, sometimes attributed to the fact that each new generation of queer people is mostly born to non-queer parents.

Or take the example of NHS midwives and breech birth (where the baby comes out bottom-first or feet-first rather than headfirst). As more and more breech babies are born by Caesarian surgery, so midwives get less and less opportunity to learn from the older midwives who know how to manage a natural breech birth safely.

Come to that, NHS midwives nowadays have less and less opportunity to see any birth without some kind of intervention, even if the intervention is as seemingly minor as “internally examining” the labouring woman. (An experienced old-style midwife will usually be able to tell from observing the woman roughly “how far on” she is.) The art of “not interfering unless necessary”, and the observational skills which support it, are still kept alive by some radical woman-centred midwives, but I don’t get the impression that their knowledge is highly valued within the NHS.

From me now to me later

On the other hand, the handing-on of information doesn’t have to be from one generation to another or even from one person to another. It could be from the me of now to the me of later. Sometimes I have an insight but then after a while I forget it again, and then later I have the same insight again and think “Hang on! I knew that! how did I forget?”

Either way, the question is: how do you capture that information – ideas, insights, experience, skills – and make it available for later?

Dynamic and static Quality

In Lila, the sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M Pirsig describes what he calls Dynamic and static Quality.

To give a tiny bit of context to the following quote, what he means by “static quality” is something like: traditions, rituals, rules, documentation and so on.

Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive, when they demand blind obedience and suppress Dynamic change. But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from degeneration. Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order, preserve our world. Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the other.

Somewhere, I’m pretty sure he uses the metaphor of a ratchet to describe the working-together of static and dynamic – dynamic new development as the turning, static the holding steady so it doesn’t turn back. But can’t find that quote now. (Every now and again, I wish I could use a search engine on a paper book, and this is one of those times – I could do a search on “ratchet” and I bet that bit would come up. Unless of course he used a different word.)

(As an aside: I highly recommend both books. They are stories, but full of ideas that go beyond the stories.)

Branching

Another metaphor I’m thinking of – this one more relevant to communities or organisations evolving over time – is the one of “branching” software. Some existing software is developed in two or more initially-incompatible directions, and the code bases may or may not ever be merged again.

I was thinking at first that the “branching” analogy was meant to be with tree branches. But then the metaphorical parallel would have to include sometimes merging two tree branches back together.

I’m not sure that’d be impossible – I think it would be a bit similar to the grafting of fruit tree branches onto root stock – but at any rate it’s hardly a common sight.

Closer might be a canal splitting into two different channels, or a railway with different branch lines, which may or may not rejoin further along.

Or, in the case of merging software, perhaps a yet better metaphor would be a piece of weaving – since an important part of rejoining the weave would be to decide which pieces of yarn to weave where, which is a bit like the art of deciding which code to keep.

Anyway, the point is that sometimes different people continue a chain of ideas in two or more different directions, and they don’t reconnect further down. Then, sometimes you get one side continuing to develop and be handed on, whereas the other channel peters out into a dead end (like some kind of silted-up backwater). So for example with software, a version which is no longer maintained might contain a cool feature, which the main trunk had never developed.

There are parallels to this in activism, I think. A project ends, a group stops meeting, people move away, and sometimes the experience and knowledge along that branch is lost.

Retrieval of insights

For myself, I do write things down. I’ve usually got things stuck on my wall, and a few key files on my Psion which I re-read every now and again. But writing has limitations.

One is that retrieving an insight from something I’ve written down relies on re-reading it at the appropriate time. And I’ve written a lot of stuff down :-)

Another is that it seems to be easier to document practical stuff than emotional findings.

The ideas I lose tend to be not so much the kind like “Oooh! Wouldn’t it be cool to do this!” but more the kind similar to “If you are feeling mopey, here are some probable reasons why, and here are some ways which may work for getting unmopified”.

One of the things which works best for me is having thinking sessions, as invented by Nancy Kline and described in her extremely marvellous book Time to Think.

Thinking sessions seem to provide an environment where I’m better than usual at retrieving useful stuff from memory. It’s not quite just remembering it, though, either. Accessing a thought during a thinking session is more like recreating it. Re-finding it on a bit of paper doesn’t necessarily have the same emotional resonance.

Writing for remembering

A lot of my ideas for future blog posts (and a few of the existing ones) are in the category of “I want to remember this – maybe if I write it down here I’ll make it a bit bigger in my landscape!”

Some of the more recent posts haven’t been that kind. There’s always some thinking involved in writing them, but at heart they’ve been more motivated by “I have some thoughts that I want to tell to other people”.

But I like the idea that over time this blog could become a sort of documentation of “what works for me”, that I could consult for my own benefit in future.

Here, have an index…
The art of remembering
Histories and skills
From me now to me later
Dynamic and static Quality
Branching
Retrieval of insights
Writing for remembering

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2009. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.