Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Finding Good

Finding Good

In a small business you have to separate your personal finances from the finances of the venture. The same is true for writers. We need to suspend our personal feelings for a writer or the text and look at the work we’re reading. This applies to more than writing. Sometimes, someone we don’t like figures out the best way to do something. Rather than disregard it because we dislike them, we need to compartmentalize our emotions and seperate the person from the action.

For thousands of years humans made decisions based upon emotions and most of us still do. “You’re either for me or against me. If you’re for me you’re golden if against,,, something dark brown in texture."

In my profession my best friends were often my worst enemies…I felt obliged to side with them when they were wrong and provide encouragement, often when none was justified. With children this can be especially difficult. Some of my most profound insights came from those who wished me ill. The Greeks offered us an alternative called the Problem Solving Process. This approach to decision making is so effective that it has taken our civilization to a level it would have never reached otherwise. Many people however, who understand the process, often use it to justify emotion based decisions. They do things out of anger or spite and then garnish them with elements of a rational thought process. “You see?” they say pointing to the embellishments, “my decision was based upon this factor or that and not on the fact that I despise you." In politics this is particularly evident. Politicians are forever couching their decisions in reason and logic when they are really based upon survival, greed and self interest.

Getting back to writing, there are writers who have views you don’t share and writers from orientations you might find obscene. If the material is that offensive then don’t read it but ask yourself, is this stuff offensive because it fails to resonate or because it resonates too much. What ever you conclude is not really that important from the standpoint of "Good". What is important is the issue of excellence. If the work has excellence then we should try and learn from it. Becoming a writer is a journey and you learn many things along the road.

Our muse tries to get into our thought loop from many different angles and as life goes on our filters get thicker and more refining. It’s as hard for our muse to reach us sometimes as it is for a wife to get her husband’s attention and vice versa. However we need to keep a channel open and listen for that voice that comes in the dark of the night like a whisper. Sometimes it comes to us in the middle of a work. Often in a contest this happens. A part of me might not in receptive to the prompt. Still, I force myself and low and behold ideas begin weaving themselves into the context of a story or scene I never imagined possible and upon finishing I think…did I write this? I wrote a piece “The Pirate” that turned out well, that I never would have approached otherwise.

Finally let me stress two points. First, read a lot, second keep an open and receptive mind while you write. Inside every block of text, no matter how crappy it seems, lurks a nugget. The mission of the writer is to coax it out.