How to be a Human Animal, Chapter 13: My New Quest as an Author

Chapter 13: My New Quest as an Author

One of the main reasons I am engaging in this 100-Day Creative Project is to find a new voice as a writer of essays.Since 2006, I have written more than 7,000 articles here at Dangerous Intersection. Since becoming an attorney in 2006, I have drafted thousands of court filings, including hundreds of lengthy appellate briefs. Doing so much of this work doesn’t mean that I’m good at it, but I do think I’ve learned a lot of things along the way and I do seem to be competent at that writing style.

But I want to learn how to be a better writer by exploring new styles. Most of my writing to this point has been technical and precision advocacy of a point of view. I am using this Project to explore a new style of writing. Still persuasive, but also more fluid, more free, more creative and with a dash of humor here and there. The only way I'll know to get better at a new style is to have a lot of reps. Over and over for 100 days would be a good start. I’ve addressed (in my former writings) many of the ideas I am discussing in my lessons for “the newborn baby,” but I’m now working to present them in newer ways that might be more effective for a different audience. I hope t break down some old writing habits so that I can draw from heretofore rather quiescent parts of my brain. I hope those parts have been merely sleeping and that they haven’t completely died off.

I was inspired to create new styles of articles as my 100 Day Project after enjoying about a dozen essays by Freddie DeBoer, who describes himself as a “Marxist of an old-school variety.” https://dangerousintersection.org/2022/02/15/the-type-of-real-life-government-freddie-deboer-can-believe-in/ With his writing, Freddie successfully does a lot of the things that I want to do better. This Project will thus be a 100-step experiment and it’s clearly off to an uneven start, although I am clearly writing in a more unvarnished and less edited style (as you can see from the typos). I am forcing myself to write a lot and to do it more spontaneously. I am keeping in mind Mario Andretti's admonition: "If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough." I'm not striving for any length of these essays, but I am noticing that by the time I've emptied out my quiver, I've spilled out more than 1,000 words, which is a fairly grueling pace for me in the context of the other demands (including self-demands) I face in my life.

I am consciously trying to modify many deeply ingrained and ossified writing habits. I hope that by the end of this project I will have noticeably moved the needle regarding my style. It would be fun to see a difference by the hundredth essay, but more importantly, that the difference is for the better, which is not a given when one screws with some that has worked reasonably well. For more insight into a few of the things I'm aiming to accomplish, here's an excerpt from my new writing guru Freddie DeBoer’s recent article: “If you Absolutely Must: a brief guide to writing and selling short-form argumentative nonfiction from a somewhat reluctant professional writer.”

Your politics are your affair. But fear all political fads, resist all political peer pressure, and be ruthless in asking yourself whether you actually hold a position or if you are just afraid of the consequences of appearing to not hold it. Then express yourself. Whatever you do, be weird. As a consumer of writing, please, for me, be weird. Whatever this profession needs, it does not need more hall monitors or commissars and it does not need more writers who seem to have nothing to offer beyond looking down their glasses at the world in shrill derision. That territory is covered. That corner has been taken. The whole point of writing, the only reason to have an alphabet, is to say what no one else is saying. To be singular. What is the value of replicating words that have already appeared in the same order? You can’t choose to be good and you can’t choose to be successful. But you can choose to be your own.

Be brave and tell the truth. Absolutely everyone and everything in the life you are choosing will try to force you to conform. They will hate you if you break ranks, but they’ll hate you if you say something inoffensive but easily misrepresented too. All they want is to root out heretics; it’s the only thing that makes them feel alive. So you may as well not live in fear. If you let them in there will be little of you left when they’re done, so don’t let them in. If you can hold on to some piece of yourself that does not care what they say, you can have the one pure thing left in an industry now made up only of snitches and nuns, that last virtue for a writer, the courage to be human.

. . .

But do write a lot. Writing is like playing an instrument: it’s all about reps. I know that this is as banal as advice gets. But I think we live in an age of distraction where there are so many other things fighting for your time; I think it’s easy to tell yourself that composing social media posts improves your longform writing when it does not; and I think there remains some unfortunate impression, perhaps left over from the Beats, that great writers produce writing the way a bird produces song.

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About Doing the Next Right Thing.

"Do the Next Right Thing" is a phrase that has often focused me.  Where did this phrase originate?  The Marginalian explains that on December 15, 1933, Carl Jung responded to a woman who had asked his guidance on how to live. Jung wrote:

Dear Frau V.,

Your questions are unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. If that’s what you want you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what. Moreover this way fits in with the average way of mankind in general. But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what this is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate. With kind regards and wishes,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung

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Mental Health and Extrinsic Goals

Are you looking for psychological research that you can immediately and directly use to improve your own life? Jonathan Hari has described important research by Tim Kasser. The article in the LA Times is "We know junk food makes us sick. Are ‘junk values’ making us depressed?" The research explored what happens when we are primarily motivated by extrinsic goals rather than intrinsic goals.

Imagine you play the piano. If you play it in the morning because it gives you joy, that is an intrinsic motive — you aren’t doing it to get anything else out of it; you are doing it simply because that experience is worth doing, in and of itself. Now imagine you play the piano to impress your parents, or in a dive bar you hate to pay the rent, or to seduce somebody into sleeping with you. That would be an extrinsic motive — you aren’t doing it because you think the experience is worthwhile; you are doing it to get something out of it.

Kasser found that people who are motivated primarily by intrinsic goals are much happier than those motivated by extrinsic goals.

People who achieved their extrinsic goals didn’t experience any increase in day-to-day happiness. None. Your promotion? Your fancy car? The new iPhone? The expensive necklace? They won’t improve your happiness at all.

But people who achieved their intrinsic goals did become significantly happier, and less depressed and anxious. As they worked at it and felt they became, say, a better friend, they became more satisfied with life. Being a better dad? Dancing for the sheer joy of it? Helping another person, just because it’s the right thing to do? They do significantly boost your happiness.

Kasser discovered that people whose lives were dominated by extrinsic values had a worse time in almost every respect. They felt sicker, and they were angrier. They experienced less joy, and more despair. They had worse relationships, and they were more insecure. [T]he more materialistic and extrinsically motivated you become, the more depressed you will be. . . .

Junk food looks like food, but it doesn’t meet our underlying nutritional needs. In a similar way, junk values don’t meet our underlying psychological needs — to have meaning and connection in our lives. Extrinsic values are KFC for the soul. Yet our culture constantly pushes us to live extrinsically.

Hari discussed Kasser's research with Joe Rogan in 2018:

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Walking Turbo-Charges Creativity

There is a significant connection between walking and creativity:

Oppezzo designed an elegant experiment. A group of Stanford students were asked to list as many creative uses for common objects as they could. A Frisbee, for example, can be used as a dog toy, but it can also be used as a hat, a plate, a bird bath, or a small shovel. The more novel uses a student listed, the higher the creativity score. Half the students sat for an hour before they were given their test. The others walked on a treadmill.

The results were staggering. Creativity scores improved by 60 percent after a walk.

A few years earlier, Michelle Voss, a University of Iowa psychology professor, studied the effects of walking on brain connectivity. She recruited 65 couch-potato volunteers aged 55 to 80 and imaged their brains in an MRI machine. For the next year, half of her volunteers took 40-minute walks three times a week. The other participants kept spending their days watching Golden Girls reruns (no judgment here; I love Dorothy and Blanche) and only participated in stretching exercises as a control. After a year, Voss put everyone back in the MRI machine and imaged their brains again. Not much had happened to the control group, but the walkers had significantly improved connectivity in regions of the brain understood to play an important role in our ability to think creatively.

Walking changes our brains, and it impacts not only creativity, but also memory."

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How to Avoid Getting in our own Way

I'm a longtime fan of Eric Barker's blog, "Barking up the Wrong Tree." He opens a recent blog post with this incredible story:

George was late again.

It was 1939 and math PhD student George Dantzig arrived to find he had already missed much of the lecture. The two homework problems were already up on the chalkboard. He scribbled them down.

But this day only got worse. When he got to work on the problems that night, he realized they were hard. Really hard. George was a super smart guy but these problems were insanely difficult. They took him days to complete. So now he was going to be late again, this time turning in his homework. Yeesh.

He delivered them to his professor, Jerzy Neyman, apologizing profusely. Neyman’s eyes went wide. George worried he was going to be in a lot of trouble. But that’s not why Neyman was reacting so strangely…

The two problems on the board hadn’t been homework at all — they were two issues in statistical theory that had been deemed “unsolvable” by the best mathematicians in the world. Far from being angry, Neyman was blown away.

Yeah, George was a genius. And, no, the lesson here is not “show up late.”

Point is, if George had known what he was up against, he never would have even tried. His amazing potential might never have been recognized.

Barker springs off this anecdote to offer five tips for getting more done. The title of his article: "How To Stop Being Lazy And Get More Done – 5 Expert Tips."

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