I can remember the exact moment I rejected my generation. It occurred in General Music class, which was where they shunted all the people who didn’t play an instrument. (I did play electric guitar, but it was not considered band- or orchestra-acceptable. Which made it not-an-instrument as far as the school was concerned.) I walked into the auditorium with “The Beatles” sparkling in silver pen on my binder, and most of the rest of the non-instrument-playing class jeered me for liking what was deemed Parental Music. (It didn’t seem to matter that my own parents’ knowledge of the Beatles didn’t go very far past “they were a band.”)

At the end of class, the teacher let somebody put a favorite tape in the tape recorder so we could all listen to it. Being steeped in the Beatles and oblivious about what was on the radio, I had never heard it before. It was “I’m So Excited” by the Pointer Sisters. Everyone else seemed to know it; some of them sang along.

I walked out of my first general music class (still being taunted as we exited the auditorium) feeling horrified. Then I sat in my next class feeling pissed off. That’s it, I thought. I don’t understand my generation. They had just dissed the Beatles in favor of a dorky pop song that rhymed the line “I’m so excited” with “And I just can’t hide it.”*

When you realize you don’t fit in with your cohort, you can react in one of two ways. You can go native and throw aside the things you like that aren’t cool, and you can be assimilated, Borg-like. Or you can go all Daria and decide you don’t want what the popular crowd is pushing on you, and you’re just not going to take it. So you reject them in turn. I chose the latter.

A mere three years after this watershed moment in my adolescence, the 1960s made a comeback. This happened because the Baby Boomers in charge of pop culture were hitting middle age and feeling nostalgic; because it was sort of time for a new retro thing anyway, what with the 50s craze of the 70s having worn off; and because the compact disc was ascendant, and the works of the Beatles were being translated to digital with great fanfare, starting with Sergeant Pepper on June 1, 1987, the twentieth anniversary of its original Summer of Love release.

But the craze extended beyond the Boomers. The same kids who’d harassed me over my sparkly binder pen were now declaring their love for the Fab Four. Suddenly the Lads were good enough for them. Yet I’d been loyal the whole time, and nobody was acknowledging this. These mulleted, rubber-bracelet-wearing, Valley Girl-talking preppie fuckers were roaming in my domain, listening to my music and pretending it was theirs? Who the hell were they?

But really, who the hell am I?

Who am I to decide whether their Beatles experience is legitimate? How do I know their experience was any less profound the first time they heard “Within You, Without You”? Just because I got there before them doesn’t make me any better. And just because I was angry about being trashed, and having my favorites trashed, didn’t give me the right to trash in turn. Because it wasn’t just that select group of non-instrument players. It was everybody, the whole student body, suddenly into my stuff. But it was never my stuff. I was just feeling resentful and bruised. Some of them could have had transcendent experiences while smoking dope and hearing “Because” at a party; or they could have received some Greatest Hits mishmash via the one-cent CD club** and fallen in love with the boys at the opening chime of “A Hard Day’s Night”; or they could have heard “Julia” on the radio after the funeral of a loved one and forever after associated its lilting acoustic ache with that person, and that became their song. How can I possibly know?

We tend to think that those who follow trends are superficial cowards. And those of us who dare to buck them are deep and brave. Once the trendy folks take our alternative thing and make it their trend, we despise them. We must let the world know that we are authentic, and they are certainly not.

And as soon as we do that, we’re the exclusionary jerks. You can’t like that thing. It’s mine. How dare you desecrate it by dragging it into your cold, trend-loving, puny little world!

I speak from the viewpoint of another Star Wars resurgence—there have been several in my lifetime. But I was there at Ground Zero.

Okay, not quite. I wasn’t allowed to see it in the theater in 1977 because I was five, which apparently was considered too young even for a PG movie, according to the Parental Guidance rating system determined by my parents. Luckily we moved out of the country, and it came to Caracas a year later. (Watching it for the first time in a Venezuelan movie theater with Spanish subtitles only added to the experience.) It was, in fact, the cornerstone of my childhood, thanks to the books, the figures, the playsets, the t-shirts, the jammies, and the trading cards that came with desiccated chewing gum. I loved Star Wars so much, I continued to love it well after it became a trilogy, and the trilogy was committed to videotape. Its universe lived on only in novels and comics and, to my squealing early adulthood delight, the D6 roleplaying game.

Anyway, by the time I was rolling up my first character and becoming acquainted with the Heir to the Empire novels, Star Wars was at pretty much an all-time nadir in terms of public popularity. Sure, everybody would rent it once in a while, and those of us with poor social skills had the trilogy memorized waaay too well. But Star Wars was so yesteryear that I commented on it in my high-school graduation speech. I said I was feeling old. I did not say this from the vantage point of somebody who had grown up with an elderly person’s disease (entirely) but because I had discovered that little kids—now known as the Millennials—didn’t know who Darth Vader was. Seriously. I asked a bunch of them.

And God, do I miss those times. To me, the grunge era was the best time to love Star Wars. Why? Because all these goddamn popular kids weren’t in the way, getting their hair gel and wine coolers all over my stuff.

And those Millennials? Oh, they found out who Darth Vader was. It took another decade, but they wound up stepping into my sacred territory. Yeah, you, you—you Kids Today. The hell do you know? You dare to wear a Star Wars t-shirt and start referring to the sacred original by its fucking episode number? You weren’t even alive in the glorious, feather-haired days when Star Wars was brand-new, and nobody had ever seen anything like the riot of space opera that was its Cantina aliens and Leia’s danish hair and that big breathing dude all in black and its big explosions and ships and all our toys with tiny weapons that you had to keep from getting vacuumed up and—and—

Wait. Why am I hearing that echoing back at me?

Oh, right! That’s the sound of the children of the 60s jeering at me. You know, those people who were around when the Beatles actually existed. I wasn’t at that particular Ground Zero. I wasn’t even alive. In fact, I was born into a world in which they had just broken up, bitterly and eternally. I didn’t even discover them until a couple of months before John Lennon died. So what the hell do I know, when most of what I do know made itself known to me in the cascade of nostalgia that followed John’s murder? I never knew a world with extant Beatles in it. I have only ever known of ex-Beatles.

And yet. It is my right to put their name on my binder because of what I feel when I hear Sergeant Pepper or Revolver or really any of their albums. Because my heart still jumps when I see any film footage of them performing. Because I hear their music from ridiculous distances and respond having sensed a presence I’ve not felt since….

So. Who am I to deny anyone else?

*To be fair, I did wind up enjoying “Neutron Dance” later on. I just didn’t mention that out loud.

**Hah! I’m kidding. There’s no way you’d receive even the worst EMI/Capitol Records train-wreck of a Beatles collection. Everybody knows you get one halfway decent Jimmy Buffett CD and then things like The Very Best of Cecilio and Kapono.

Over the years, I have acquired a lot of self-help books. It’s actually reached a point where I’ve had to sanction myself into not buying them anymore (an idea I got from a fantastic self-help book).

Most of the people I know seem to find self-help off-putting. It’s understandable, because so much of it promises that you can accomplish anything you want once you realize your potential—and then once you get past the cat-poster affirmations, you’re given no blueprint for getting anywhere.

Three days later the euphoria of possible full-scale change has worn off, and you feel like a failure. 

The worst is when these books try to make you hurry the hell up to change everything about your crummy, subpar self. What does it all boil down to? Failing a lot and finding your passion now, I said now,damn it, because it already took you twelve thousand nanoseconds just to read this paragraph and YOUR LIFE IS TICKING AWAY SO WHY AREN’T YOU PASSIONATE?!  Do you even KNOW how many nanoseconds that is?  According to the Food Network, it’s the exact same number of Twizzlers it would take to encircle the Earth 12,130 times!

Changed yet? No?! Loser. (I meant that in a life-affirming way.)

Frankly, nothing shuts me down faster than a panicked assurance that my life is ticking away every second I’m not engaged in whatever the hell my passion is supposed to be. I guess some people find this motivating, since the citation of one’s draining hours is a very popular self-help technique, but there’s no way to be sure how many of these people can sustain that motivation for very long before getting overwhelmed and giving up.

Oh, tragedy. All those wasted hours, wrapping around the earth like artifically flavored strawberry licorice. Still, amid all this candy coating of pointless affirmations, I have actually come across some very helpful stuff (for me, anyway). Usually these have a Zen aspect to them, like Thomas Sterner’s The Practicing Mind, or they make you look at the way you actually are and give you a roadmap to actions you can take immediately, like the works of Barbara Sher.

The most intriguing one I’ve found, though, is something I came across entirely by accident in the stacks of Swem Library at the College of William and Mary. I’m not offering it here as an example of how you should live your life, but the advice in it is strikingly familiar. In a good way.

Don’t Give up Because of Your Crummy Handwriting

I’m talking about a faded, red book with 1930s car-grille lettering stamped on the spine. It is called Streamline Your Mind,by psychologist James Mursell. He was best known for his books on music education, adopted by schools, but this general self-help book seems to have been lost in the shuffle over the decades. Although it never reached the same popularity as the works of Dale Carnegie or Arnold Bennett or William Danforth, Mursell manages to say, regarding the matter of self-improvement, a fair number of the same things I’m finding in the modern canon.

Let me go get some Earth-encircling Twizzlers and tell you what I mean.

In 1936, “streamlining” was a fairly new concept, employed by “scientists and practical engineers” as they sought better and faster and easier ways to bring humanity into the future (cue sprightly, industrious Rube Goldberg assembly-line music).

Mursell felt that this new-fangled notion could be useful in the quest for self-improvement. His book puts the reader on the couch, a theoretical patient bemoaning his sorry, mediocre life. Mursell diagnoses the problem as “your toleration in yourself of needless personal inefficiency in an age which requires efficiency….Nature has given you just so much power. About that there is nothing [the psychologist] can do….But…if you really are the average man you are putting to productive use only a fraction of the power you possess.”

“An old fashioned car or an old fashioned ship cannot be streamlined. They can only be junked. But you are different. You can reorganize yourself. You can rebuild your mental contours. And this process of rebuilding, of streamlining, has an old and familiar name. It is what we call learning.”

How does Mursell suggest we go about this? Hiring a glowering 1930s Pink Floydish schoolmaster to stand over us with a whip, amid assurances that it will build character and warnings that we can’t have any pudding because we and the Brits have very different ideas of what constitutes “pudding”?

Nope. Here’s where Mr. Mursell takes us in the quest for betterment:

“Can one always learn? May it not be that success and failure are due to inborn ability or its lack, and that we can do little about it?…Are we licked before we start?” No, because “One man may have a greater fund of native mental energy than another. And he will go further if he uses it effectively. But that is a pretty big ‘if.’ Nothing can make a twenty horsepower car perform as well as a hundred horsepower car if conditions are equal. But what if the small car is efficiently streamlined and the big one is not? The fact that some people may have a bigger mental endowment than you is no argument for quitting. On the contrary it is an argument for making every scrap of ability and power that you possess count to the limit.”

Furthermore, “Mere repetition is not the cause of learning. If you want to improve a skill you already possess, or to acquire a brand new one, do not rely chiefly on lots of practice. Going over something again and again is by no means the quickest way to master it. Indeed, if this is all you do, mastery may never come…One may repeat a performance innumerable times without improving.” He advises, instead, a more focused approach. It’s extremely important howyou go about the job of learning and what elements of the new skill you put your efforts into.

The best way to go about this? “Make a start! Begin! Write a story. Get up and make a speech, even if only for half a minute….Whatever the job you have in mind, get busy at it.”

And while you’re learning this new thing, “Don’t be afraid of making mistakes,so long as you keep the experimental attitude.” Errors are inevitable, and certainly there is a need to guard against learning something the wrong way, repeating the error until thatbecomes your habit. But “you must be on your guard against the insensate tendency in human beings to start banging their heads against stone walls, and indeed to keep up the performance until sheer pain and misery and despair makes them stop.” How do you avoid having this frustration set in? “Make your early tries very easily, very slowly, very calmly, and with just as little anxiety as possible…Your business at first is not to perform perfectly; your business is to feel yourself out on the job.”

The examples of endeavors he gives are at least sort of relevant today–improving your golf swing, your ability to speak in public, your, ah, typing skills, your…handwriting skills…(someone really came and lay on Mursell’s couch all depressed because of his chicken scratch?) “Perhaps you want to learn by heart a poem or a bit of prose. A most valuable piece of advice–exactly like the advice of the golf professional–is, take it easy at first.”

There’s no talk of noses to the grindstone or stiff upper lips. Mursell wants you to fumble about, try things, even make a fool of yourself if it means you’re getting somewhere, so long as you don’t work yourself so relentlessly you just decide to give up.

“In the early stages of learning, when the new skill is just in process of being created out of chaotic clumsiness, work only for short periods and space those periods widely….Do not say to yourself: ‘I’m going to stick to this job until I’ve mastered it.’…It may quite probably be that at the end of half-and-hour’s practice you will feel that you have learned absolutely nothing. Do not be too much discouraged. The learning process is not like building a wall. It is like inventing a machine. And you cannot always see the work progressing. You have to discover what changes are needed to improve the streamlining.”

So, all this must be addressed to the younger crowd, right? The idea of learning well into old age is a twenty-first century concept, being that we all live so much longer. “I cannot learn because I am too old,” Mursell’s jazz-age patient groans. “I shall always be a dub at golf because I was thirty-five when I took up the game. I wish I could play the piano but I didn’t study it when I was a child and my hand was still flexible. No one can master a foreign language if he starts when he is over twenty, so it is useless for me to try. A new job at forty? Impossible! I couldn’t tackle it.” Really? Bosh, says Mursell. “Mature men and women in evening courses in high schools and universities do about as well as younger people.” He adds, in a blunt way you probably wouldn’t hear today, “A stupid old person will not learn as well as a bright young one; and a stupid young person will not learn as well as an able old one. If we disregard everything but the difference in age, ability to learn seems to be about the same….We say that it would be ridiculous for us to take up dancing or painting or writing or salesmanship at forty. It might be ridiculous, but it is far from impossible….If your learning is expertly directed many of the effects of lack of time can be overcome.”

Make a start. Baby steps. Slow improvements at first so you can build ability and confidence. Make your practice deliberate, not just repetitive. Age isn’t that much of a barrier in terms of learning. Talent is useful, but effort often counts for more. Do these ideas sound familiar?

If you’ve read The Talent Code,Talent Is Overrated,Mindset,and/or any other new(ish) studies, if you’ve heard about Anders Ericsson’s landmark 1990s study regarding deliberate practice and 10,000 hours (which pretty much everyone cites in everything now), then you’ll recognize all of these concepts. Except that they’re eighty years old, not twenty.

Slow Down, My Good Fellow!


What I find most interesting is that there is no emphasis on hurrying the hell up with your damn learning. You would think Mursell’s approach would be to inform his Depression-era audience that streamlining one’s hours is an essential part of streamlining the mind. Heck, in 1936, the average life-bemoaning person had nearly twenty fewer years of said life to bemoan than the depressed sad sack of today. But even if Mursell’s stressed-out patient has fewer years in which to better himself, there’s none of that desperation. As a matter of fact, Mursell urges his patient, “Do not hurry. Do not be ashamed to loaf, for learning can take place sometimes while you loaf.” Amen. Don’t have time to loaf? Turn off all your damn electronic devices and get into that backyard hammock straightaway.

Mursell didn’t need modern behavioral studies–the vaunted 10,000 hours of practice, the learning-happy myelin hugging the neurons in your brain, or the…weren’t there children trying not to eat marshmallows in there somewhere for some reason?–to inform us of a simple concept. “Properly directed learning gets results with a minimum of effort and in a minimum time. It is not a grind. It is a thrill. You find yourself mastering your own resources, moving faster, travelling further on a given expenditure of energy. What could be more fascinating?”

The Christmas season is, of course, a stressful time for everybody, but especially so in our household. My husband works for UPS. Not as a driver (or I’d never see him); he works in the warehouse, gassing up the trucks, parking them for loading, lifting and scanning boxes. He also serves as a shop steward, which is basically a public defender for hourly workers. Normally, he works an 11 p.m.-to-8 a.m. shift. From Black Friday until Christmas, it expands to an 8-to-8 shift. That’s twelve hours a day, five days a week. Sometimes half a shift for a sixth day. The holiday schedule wasn’t always quite so brutal, but nowadays, you know, Amazon. He never quite gets enough sleep, is perpetually tired (probably not great for his coronary artery disease), and invariably catches the seasonal holiday crud that goes around and hits you when you haven’t slept in four weeks.

On my end, I spend a lot of the holiday season feeling lonely and worried, and also sometimes wanting to go around hitting people with a shovel if they say one negative word about UPS (especially if it’s along the lines of, “I ordered the gift on December 24 and it didn’t come before Christmas! Why can’t UPS compensate for my stupidity?!” I’m paraphrasing).

Adding to my slightly homicidal urge is the condition of being at the end of a 150,000-word project. I sit at my MacBook at five in the morning (also my husband’s lunch hour) tying up and polishing enough problematic plot bits, historical questions, and less-than-spectacular prose to fill a UPS warehouse.

But it also adds to my sense of isolation: few people out there seem to offer any actual advice on the end stage of the project. They purport to do it, but most of the advice deals with what to do after you’ve finished (Finish it . . . then get an agent!), or it sounds a lot like advice that could be applied at whatever stage. (Write an outline! Use index cards! Practice gratitude!) I’m not just talking about having a good ending to the story; I mean getting through the finishing touches, the editing that can drag on and on and on. And on. Whenever I’ve griped to someone about being blocked or stuck or just tired of the damned thing, the response is always the same: “Oh, just come back to that. Move on to something else.”

I can’t. There is literally nothing else for me to do.

Oh, sure, it was all breezy at the beginning. What British railway lines existed in 1844? Why does this once-lovable character suddenly not fit the plot? Why did every British metaphor I know have to originate in the World War II era, 100 years later than my story’s setting? Pfft, who needs to know that?! I’ll worry about that later. And then, quite a lot later, I’m worrying about it, and everyone tosses my own advice back at me. Worry about that later!

But . . . but it is later!

Oh, well, then, uh . . . practice gratitude?

(Reeeeaching for that shovel. . . . )

Anne Lamott, in her classic Bird by Bird, likens this stage to tucking in an octopus, with tentacles constantly popping out and thrashing from under the bedclothes as you’re trying to account for all these scattered, final bits. (Yes, that pretty much nails it.) But this metaphor appears in a very short, page-and-a-half chapter on how to know when you’re finished.

Why so little guidance on this stage, versus how to get yourself started? I think it’s because few people ever get here. And because all the instructions, suggestions, and war stories about finishing can’t substitute for the actual slog of just doing it.

I admittedly don’t have much to add, either. Except, if you’ve reached this point, you’ve already gotten further than most. That probably won’t cheer you; in fact, you might be filled with an urge to quit. You’ll think it’s because of your creeping sense that the project isn’t good, but it’s more likely you’ve found out that beginnings aren’t hard at all compared to endings. You now face not only the unanswered plot questions and nitpicky details but also the fear of looking at your carefully crafted, finished project and hating it . . . or, worse, loving it, and having someone else hate it.

But you might hate yourself if you don’t finish. Sure, your instincts tell you that you should shy away from this and put the novel project down and go do something much more enjoyable, like gas up UPS trucks. But I advise you to run headlong into the discomfort you’re feeling. Dr. Neil Fiore, in The Now Habit, likens this situation to hitting the wall when you’re running a marathon: you’re going to be sore either way, so you might as well finish because there will be a lot more payoff in the end.

Also, discomfort probably means you’re learning something. Not just about how to write and how to get to this rare point never reached by the majority of people who declare they are writing a novel, but also why nobody in 1844 wore bowler hats or said something was going “pear-shaped.”

Seriously, I can’t have anybody say “oh, bollocks, it’s all gone pear-shaped”? What’s the point, then?!

Oh, I could just say “gone to pot.” There, that’s one fire extinguished. And on to another issue, and another, one by one, until I look at the whole thing and say—in a different tone, this time—”There’s literally nothing else to do.”

I feel so much better, I might actually put the shovel away. 

It took five years and several false starts, but I did finish writing a whole novel. (I have not finished shopping it around. That’s a different struggle for a different post.) It’s not easy going the distance. It required a lot of groaning, a lot of carb-based sustenance (yes, carbs, because I still live in the 80s), and one affirmation I kept repeating to myself.

The internet is alive with affirmations, by the way, isn’t it? How did we ever get along before now? Aside from the odd cat poster or bumper sticker? (Again, living in the 80s, though I have openly admitted to having rejected that decade outright while it was going on. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t live on in my head, much like the Scorpius clone implanted in John Crichton’s brain. I’m getting off the subject, sorry, plus most people don’t get Farscape references anyway.) There’s one creativity-fueling quote in particular I keep seeing everywhere, meant to evoke maximum output:

“FIND WHAT YOU LOVE AND LET IT KILL YOU.”

— Charles Bukowski

Yes. This. This is the path to greatness. This is how a person will get that novel finished/golf handicap down/opera composed. Because what are we doing, screwing around with our everyday, balanced, mediocre lives, never really feeling alive, never letting anything just kill us anymore? What’s happened to us?

Let’s do it! LET’S BE LIKE CHARLES BUKOWSKI!!

Oh, wait, nobody wants to do that. Good thing, too, because there’s no evidence that the hard-drinking, deeply depressed Bukowski ever actually said it. So, first, let us distance ourselves from modeling our lives on that of a raging alcoholic with bipolar disorder (no matter how brilliant). The quote is now thought to derive, instead, from Texas musician/philosopher/politician/mystery writer Kinky Friedman.

Second, let us consider what “let it kill you” even means in the creative world. I guess what people are attracted to is the thought of giving yourself over to the muse in a violent, sexual way, and being devoured by it until you are transformed into this beautiful, tortured creature with a world-shattering work of art. Whatever. In reality, this is the sort of idea that makes you give up your endeavors the minute they stop being interestingly ethereal or dramatic and turn into clock-stalling time logged day after day at the keyboard or easel or music stand. This concept doesn’t really make you want to quit the job you hate that is already killing you. It suggests you should add one more thing that’s killing you. That’s exhausting. Not least for me, because my joints are already killing me.

Instead, I decided to heed the words of somebody from a country known mostly for its purported suicide rate.

“I AM A NINE-TO-FIVE MAN, YOU KNOW? I HAVE TO SIT HERE AND WAIT FOR GOOD NOTES TO SORT OF COME FROM SOMEWHERE. AND IF I’M NOT HERE, THEY’RE NOT GOING TO COME. IT’S LIKE, THERE’S A DRAGON IN A CAVE, RIGHT? AND YOU KNOW IT’S IN THERE, BUT IT’S NEVER COMING OUT. YOU HAVE TO SIT OUTSIDE AND WAIT FOR IT….IF YOU GO HOME AND TAKE A NAP, YOU WON’T SEE IT.”

— Benny Andersson

That’s right, erroneously-attributed-Bukowski-work-ethic-modelers. Not That. This. Fie upon your social media-feed memes about creativity’s requirement of self-destruction; I finished that novel because I took my work ethic from one of the B’s of ABBA. (I think he’s technically not even the first B.)

Whether or not you like Andersson’s 70s-tastic Swede-pop group, it doesn’t hurt to pay mind to someone who turned down a billion-dollar reunion tour because he didn’t need the money. Still, the idea here is not to focus on the mass appeal or the wealth (the sheer, blinding wealth) but the ability to produce. Because obviously Andersson finished the songs he started. Lots and lots of them.

There’s no poetry involved in this…except maybe the cool dragon metaphor, but notice it’s not about letting the dragon kill you. It’s about showing up, whether you want to or not so you can see something amazing. Turn up at the page, the canvas, the amplifier, the piano, no matter how you feel, and something will eventually happen.

As a matter of fact, my best days of writing seem to come on the days I least wanted to get started. I don’t know why that is–maybe it has to do with just putting my head down and working rather than jumping happily into it like I’m about to sit down at the keyboard and play Rise of the Triad (see, now I’ve moved all the way into the 90s!). Most of the time, I wouldn’t have started in the first place if I hadn’t thought, “But I want to see the dragon.”

So, if you haven’t put in your time today–however much you can manage, even if it’s not a lot–quit reading this and get off to the cave.