Viewing entries tagged
ambition

Voyage and Return

It is 5am, and I’m downstairs on the couch, sitting right up against the front window. I reach my fingertips out, and feel the remains of the night chill on the glass. It’s beginning to get light outside, but there isn’t any colour yet - just a vague pastel blue grey. There’s a tree by the street, every leaf still and monochrome like a pencil sketch. I know that each minute that passes now will lift those leaves into more vibrance, along with the sky, the streaky clouds, and the limestone wall along our garden bed. And sometime between now and then, the sun will have risen, and the day will become distinct.

January to me feels like this time between first light and sunrise. A no-mans-land of vagary and indistinct shapes, each new day bringing a little bit more colour and clarity to the year, but, who really knows when the sun will actually crest the horizon. After the mad hustle of December, January is a reprieve for some, a recovery for others, a reward for yet other others.

I don’t know if it’s because I have kids, or because I'd shot weddings for so long, or both, but January was never any of those things for me. It was just, messy. School holidays meant a kind of responsibility-overload, paired with the hourly deadlines of editing the outstanding weddings of the last 8 weeks, and then topped off with all the existential questions one asks of oneself each new year:

“where am I going?”
“what really matters in life?”
“did I live a life worthy of living last year?”

In those past years, the only way to survive was to compartmentalise. In this moment, I am fully present with the kids. In this next moment, I am fully present with my editing. The next moment, going for a walk, spending time with loved ones, laughing at a thing.. It went moment by present moment, each of them disconnected from the other.

It’s not like that anymore, thank goodness. For something unsustainable, I sustained it for too long. But, January is still messy.

This year, I’m finding it useful to assign a plot archetype to the month of January. For me, it’s a VOYAGE AND RETURN plot. A protagonist heads out into the big world, experiences some things, and returns changed somehow. There’s a transformation, or an elixir brought back, or whatever else. So I’m looking back over the month as if I have just returned from a great voyage, and I’m sifting through my pockets of experiences, searching for elixirs.

With the sun already warming up the sky, and the leaves across the street bright and dancing in a new breeze, I find that my pockets are full of elixirs. I have a hope here, that I feel so deep. It will support us the whole year I reckon. Rach and I have communities that we can work with and play with, who love us and believe in great things. I find so many vials of encouragement, gifts from distant lands reminding us that we are all connected, and all valuable.

January hasn’t been a mess. It has just been a journey, and we have returned with dusty clothes and happy kids, a renewed focus and a burning drive to create things in the world.

We’re tired, but we are together, and we are as excited about the year as those dancing leaves seem to be about the new day.

Freedom, ambition and Jack Kerouac

This morning Rach and I woke early and walked into town. There's a hole-in-the-wall bakery called Little Loaf, and they make the greatest bacon and egg baps, and it was a great day for a bap.

We turn down Orient Street, which faces us directly into the sunlight, and we’re blinded - everything goes pale and bright. The colour washes out of the landscape, leaving a haze of watercolour impressions, and we have to drop our gaze, forced to focus on whatever is a few metres in front of our feet. We notice the cracks in the pavement, the single tulip by the gate at number twelve, the crunchy-crisp air on our skin. And wrapped in this brightwash, we turn inwards, to our private reflections:
Life is magic. Anything is possible. Am I doing okay? Does it even matter?

The moment stretches, floods, stops time, opens our minds. We can hear each other’s breaths.

There's a beautiful line in Jack Kerouac's book On the Road, where the protagonist, Sal, describes a week in Denver, all late night bars, and girls, and cherry trees in bloom:

“...the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams.”

And I resonate with this so much. These sunlit moments of open skies and in-the-moment experiences. A part of me wants to get off the train, you know? Quit the stage. Just walk away from all the pressure and responsibility and flop on my back in a field.

But, what about goals? Ambitions? How do we get anything done in life?

I’m asking these questions because for the last few weeks, Rach and I have been filming an online curriculum, and it's really hard. We're not on our backs in a field, instead, we pointed to the top of the mountain and said "there!" and began to climb. We made some great progress up the slopes, and then lost our footing and scratched our knees and egos. Then we climbed some more, and slipped back a bit more, and found some paths around and around the mountain, everslowly gaining ground, still nowhere near the top, but now too far from the bottom to give up.

Storytelling theory says that until a protagonist wants something, their story can’t get going. Characters needs to want things - ideally things that are worthwhile - and they need to want them enough to overcome great conflict to attain them. A meaningful story is found on the path of conflict, say the ancient tellers.

Still, who deliberately chooses conflict? I want Kerouac's open-world freedom. No dreams or ambitions, just the in-the-moment experiences of the beat generation he captures so perfectly.

Here’s how I think it resolves:

The world is open before us, like Kerouac writes. With all its options and possibilities and opportunities. And for a while we stand there, without dreams or fears, and just react our way forward, embracing all the wonders of life.

It’s not story, but it is beautiful. It is art, whimsy, a tossing about of our souls on the wind. We're kids dancing in gardens.

But eventually, somewhere amongst all that soul-tossing, we realise that there are, in fact, things we want. Specific things. Things that we want enough to fight for. Things worthy of prioritising above the myriad other possibilities that are out there. So we narrow our gaze, isolate our focus. In a world wide-open with possibilities we choose this one and we get to work.

Now we have a story. A character who wants something, and will overcome all sorts of conflict to get it.

But where does that leave the art? The beauty? The whimsy? Does the having of goals in life require us to give up the open-skies freedom of not having dreams or goals?

What I realised this morning, walking with Rach in the whitewash sunlight, was that when we choose this life of dreams and ambition, we are setting ourselves up for conflict, but the conflict doesn’t break us. It grows us, changes us, and becomes a kind of container that brackets these tiny moments, so that in the breaths between tension, in the sunrise light that blinds us whole, the world is still open to us. And with the sharp clarity that comes from climbing the mountain, we find eternity in every step.

On the road: Gnaraloo Station

Last week I joined a couple of friends for a drive up the coast to Gnaraloo Station. From Perth, Gnaraloo is a thousand kilometres away.

I had a seat in the back, pressed up against sleeping bags, wetsuits, and something that smelled like banana bread. For the two hours before the sun rose, I watched suburban porchlights streak past, all tungsten yellow, then the city lights, giant bug-zappers of brilliant white, then the northern fringe cities with their pale blues and intermittent fuel-station-golds. And then, nothing. Just a comfortable darkness, visited occasionally by a passing car or a stray streetlight.

Nick drove the entire way. For twelve hours he chatted and laughed and shared his stories and listened to ours. Ian is almost twenty years older than me, and engages with others as if we know the secrets of the ages, and just need the time to get it out in words.

My focus drifted from conversations within the car to conversations with the horizon. For hours it was dirt-red, then a splash of canola yellow, forest green, granite and limestone, then back to dirt. It was quite beautiful, an entire palette comfortable with her loneliness.

Gnaraloo is in the middle of nothing. It really is. It's a sheep station, but I barely saw any sheep. Wild goats, though, they were everywhere. They looked down on us with their proud beards and funny tails, like they owned the place, like they were running the show. A people-farm, run by the goats. The locals of Gnaraloo don't dissuade this idea at all: they are wild and earthy and distant, their language is the land and the ocean. People come here for only three things: to surf, to fish and to feel free.

A few mornings in, I asked Ian why he's here. Why it matters to drive all this way, peel yourself into a wetsuit, and take your board out into the hyperthermic waters to ride a few waves. He had just returned from the ocean, and was crunching through an apple, watching Nick finish up his last wave. I got out and leaned on the car with him, and squinted into the glare. Me with my notebook, Ian with his apple.

"Why do you do this?" I asked him.
"Because it's who I am," he replied, then paused, "but only as long as I'm actually doing it."
He talks like this a lot.
"You don't feel like a surfer unless you're surfing?" I ventured.
"No, I still feel like a surfer, for sure. But that identity requires some action, you know? The longer I don't surf, the more I become a person who used to surf, not a person who actually surfs."
I looked at him and blinked twice, and he took another bite of apple.
"It's about identity," he continued, "by doing this stuff, I'm revisiting my identity, empowering it somehow."
"Empowering it?
"Yeah, I'm empowering myself, my belief in myself. It's one thing to become who you want to be in life, but a whole other challenge to stay there. Over time we can start to question ourselves and our abilities, and we can start to doubt ourselves."
"And our identities can lose their way."
"Exactly. Our identities get blurry. And the only way I know to return to clarity is to act. To do something today that reminds me of who I am."
"And who are you today?"
He laughed. "I am a person who surfs!"

Nick appeared on the path just then, and we headed back to the homestead for breakfast.

-

In storytelling, there is always a tension between a character's aspiration and their reality. There is a version of themselves they WANT to be, or that they THINK they are, and then, there is who they REALLY are. It's a gold mine for writers, exploring those gaps, revealing to the protagonist their reality and pushing them off the cliffs that will grow and transform them.

A character can be amazing, but think they are nothing special. Or they can have some serious flaws, but think they are just perfect. In the end, what they, or others, say about themselves doesn't matter half as much as what they do. Like Ian observed: identity needs action.

After that conversation with Ian, I had to ask myself the same question: "Why am I here? Why did I travel a thousand kilometres to a surfing station when I don't surf or fish?" It was an identity question.

While Ian and Nick were revisiting and strengthening their identities as "people who surf", I found myself revisiting childhood memories. Hours of wandering in white-bright sand dunes, playing with shells, drawing in red dirt, watching the shadows from stones stretch out across my bare toes. Being at peace with the nothingness of those places.

By joining Nick and Ian for the trip, I became what I always thought I was, but perhaps hadn't acted on for a while:

A person who seeks wonder and beauty over comfort or progress.

It just took a few thousands kilometres to remind me it was true.

Three layers of questions I ask everyone

I'll let you in on a secret. This business I'm running, where I help you write your best books and tell your best stories, is really just a trojan horse. It's a useful by-product of my real journey to find all the ways to craft a meaningful life.

Every hour I spend researching storycraft, and narrative theory, and story philosophy, I am learning how writers engage their audience, how they create meaningful moments, lasting change, character transformation. And it's incredibly powerful to master all these techniques, so that our stories can be powerful and memorable. But beyond the creating of stories and content and ideas, I'm finding myriad crossovers with the living of meaningful stories.

Everything we respond to in storytelling also holds a truth somehow in real life, and this fascinates me. I think it is important, and you'll find a lot of my writing is trojan-horsing these ideas into the conversations. Just wanted to give you the kind of heads-up that the city of Troy would have no doubt appreciated.

One such story/life crossover is in the questions writers ask of their characters.

When writing engaging characters, we ask questions in layers. From the external layers at the surface, through the feelings and emotions of the internal layers, all the way down to the philosophical beliefs and worldviews that a character has. Finding the answers to these questions helps us to understand and identify with our characters, and also develop deeper more meaningful interactions with them.

Thinking in this way was extraordinarily useful during all the interviews Rach and I conducted for the book we published a few years ago, and it has become something I apply in my daily conversations now, to craft more meaningful interactions.

Here are a few examples of how this External-Internal-Philosphical framing reveals more of a character, enough that we might actually start to care about them a bit:

CONFLICT:

What is the external problem?
"I lost my job, I've lost my cashflow..."

What internal discomfort is being caused as a result?
"I’m frustrated, afraid, anxious..."

What is the philosophical base of all this?
"I care about what others think of me... Status is important to me."
"I don't know if I am enough? Do I have what it takes to choose a new path?"
"Being fired for good morals was wrong, and unjust!"

AMBITION:

What is the external desire of the character?
"I want to exercise and get fit."

What is their internal desire, the subtext, the “why”?
"I want a particular person to find me attractive."

What is the philosophical base? Why is that “why” so important to me, or to the world?
"I believe appearances contribute to attraction."
"I don't think I have anything else of value inside me, so how I look matters."

CHANGE:

After everything, what has changed externally?
"I’ve lost weight, I’m fit now."

What has changed internally?
"I’m confident, I can trust myself with my choices, I actually like myself now."

What has changed philosophically?

"I believe I am loveable and valuable. Appearance doesn’t matter as much as I thought, but self-worth, that’s the big thing!"

—

Obviously these answers can go in so many directions, but hopefully you can see the potential in asking the questions. We uncover more about a character, and eventually we will land on something that resonates with us. I may not care at all about your job, but I totally understand the tension around "do I have what it takes?" I don't really care about what actually happened at recess, but I do care about how it made my child feel, and what he believes about that interaction.

Whatever is going on in another's life, asking questions from all three layers can help us find the common ground, and make their stories matter.

On dreams and actions

Dreams are like ideas in the wind, as common as leaves in Autumn. They land in any open palm, and then they lift and fly off to the next hand.

Dreams are the payoff without the work. A man dreaming of his great future can spend an entire day in the vineyard without harvesting a single grape, while another bends to the work, with dreams only of presentness, and takes giant steps forward, purposeful within each moment, acutely aware of her surroundings, of time, of all the senses, and of the edifying joy of completing worthwhile jobs for a present goal.

In the past, I have judged those who didn't dream. I privately pitied them for their lack of ambition, or lack of hope, or whatever else I thought they lacked and I didn't.

I did this unconsciously, because I wasn't like them. I am a dreamer, after all. I burn hours of my day creating ideas out of nothing, and then sending them back to nothing. My mind is a firework of WTF and at the end of the day I have achieved nothing. The leaves fly to another hand.

Thankfully, I'm growing out of that mindset. My twelve-year-old son started a YouTube channel last week and has already posted three videos. I've had a channel for 15 years, and have posted once. Ever. No, I can't judge those who act more than they dream.

I still absolutely believe in hopes, dreams and ambition, but I'm developing a deep respect for the clean minimalism of a mind at work in the present. Of doing the work of today, before dreaming about all the tomorrows.