Tag Archives: education

Just say k(no)w

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What once was common knowledge may now be a lie

What once was common knowledge may now be a lie

There was a time in my life when knowledge was vitally important to me. A time when nothing was more important than learning new facts that would help me understand my universe. I wanted to be smart and being smart meant knowing lots of stuff.

This belief lasted decades. Kept my shelves full of books. Kept me glued to documentaries. And in many circles, made me “that” guy.

More recently, however, I have come to decide that knowledge isn’t all that important in my life. That its pursuit, while never a waste of time, can never be an end unto itself. And as much as anything else, I have decided this because I have learned that knowledge is transitory.

I don’t mean transitory in the sense that I will ultimately forget the very facts I spent all that time learning, although this is true. You can’t believe how much stuff I don’t remember. Rather, it is the malleability of the knowledge itself to which I refer.

Facts are not absolute and unchanging. Facts are incredibly well supported theories given what we know right now. Tomorrow, those thoughts I considered facts today may no longer hold.

I look at the book I received from my great-grandmother decades ago—a very trusting woman who understood a young child’s thirst for knowledge. When this natural history was published in 1886, its contents were fact. In the intervening 127 years between now and then, however, many of the “facts” have changed or been significantly reinterpreted.

The same is true for the science I studied and practiced only 20 years ago. In many ways, I might as well have been chipping rocks to make spears as measuring compounds on scales and in Erlenmeyer flasks.

Knowledge doesn’t just expand—more true for some than others, sadly—but it also morphs into new and wondrous things, like so much quicksilver. Grasp knowledge too tightly and it runs everywhere, and again like quicksilver, may poison you and the people around you.

I no longer feel the need to know anything but merely to allow knowledge to wash back and forth over me like a tide, and with each arc of the moon, taking what I need to function that day and leaving the rest to chance or another day.

I don’t know and for the first time in my life, I am comfortable with that.

Who's the dodo now, eh?

Who’s the dodo now, eh?

Feel this, would you?

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I used to stare at this poster trying to gauge what I felt...sometimes it worked, sometimes not

I used to stare at this poster trying to gauge what I felt…sometimes it worked, sometimes not

I have to admit I find it difficult to write characters. No create them, but to actually make them come alive on the page.

To develop a truly realistic character, you need to be able to give a sense of his or her emotional state, and this is where the wheels tend to fall off for me.

For most of my life, you see, I have focused on facts, not feelings. I might even go so far as to say I have completely shut feelings out of my life—or at least as completely as possible without (yet) ending up in prison as a socio- or psychopath. Thus, I have been ill-equipped to deal with the myriad emotions that form the human condition.

If I look or think back to the writing of my youth, I seemed to be able to manage moral outrage and on occasion, actual rage, but any other emotions, no matter to what extreme, came across as flat. And forget any of the subtle shades in between. I did not do subtlety.

About the only character I could develop was the noble stoic who was a tad self-involved. Hmmm. Seems familiar somehow.

Lacking experience with these various emotions, how could I hope to bring them to my characters?

I’ve never believed emotions were something you could study in the traditional sense.

If I want to understand a polar landscape, I can go online or check a variety of books. Determine the behaviour of a jet that loses one engine? I’m sure there’s a Wiki for that. But emotions, by their very nature, preclude such an academic approach.

Ah, but what about other books and movies?

Good in theory, but without a personal foundation, you run the risk of simply reproducing Glenn Close’s interactions with the rabbit or Peter Lorre’s fear of Moroccan Nazis.

No, to be able to realistically reproduce emotions in my characters, I needed to have experienced them to some extent in my life. Call it Method Writing, if you wish.

Luckily, for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with screenwriting, I have been accessing my emotional centre over the last couple of years. Through a challenging process of self-examination and “coaching”, I have started to feel—allowed myself to feel—emotions like sadness, irritation, pleasure, enthusiasm, boredom and the like. And the impact in my writing has been immediate, if continuing to develop.

When my character is angry, I find myself getting angry. When my character feels loss, I can remember when. Ecstasy? I’m all over it (the emotion, not the chemical).

And I’m not the only one who notices this. As friends, colleagues and classmates read my material, I sense they too experience the emotional rainbow. And sometimes they introduce feelings I never envisioned for a scene.

This isn’t a threat to what I wrote. It is a bonus prize I receive for paying attention and sharing, for they have found something in my words that I did not see or did not know I was channeling.

Maybe it’s gold. Maybe it’s lead. But always, it is valuable.

Like my characters, I am still a work in progress, but at least I feel like I’m progressing.

(Image is property of its owner and is used here without permission. I don’t know how I feel about that.)

Faith

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Faith is believing when common sense tells you not to.

– Fred Gailey (John Payne), Miracle on 34th Street

 

We all have doubts.

Doubt that we are good enough to accomplish our goals. Doubt that our goals are even realistic or rational.

And sadly, most if not all of us have had or currently have a long line of people who are more than willing to feed those doubts with their own. Often, their superficial motive is to be supportive, to help cushion the blow of failure, to save you from certain doom. But more likely, their motive is to take comfort in the belief that your doubts make it okay for them to have doubts about their own lives.

But, if you’re lucky, you have those special few in your life who have absolutely no doubt in your future success. They’re the ones who listen to your ideas with a smile, an eager nod, and perhaps some sage constructive advice to help make your goals even more realistic.

The latter group are the people you need to heed, for they see the potential of your efforts in the absence of your fears and just as importantly, in the absence of their own.

I am not a religious man—although I have become quite spiritual—so faith has never been top of mind for me until recently. It’s not that I didn’t have faith, in hindsight, but rather that I had a very narrow definition of it. And, like my friends for me, it was easy to have faith in things external. It was faith in myself that I lacked.

More recently, however, I have realized that faith isn’t about rejecting the possibility of failure. Rather it is about accepting the possibility of failure but with the further understanding that failure does not mean your journey has ended.

Failure does not put your destination off limits. It is merely a diversion from your original path to that destination.

I know I am a good writer and story teller, but I also know I have challenges ahead in translating those skills into the money I need to make to continue writing and story telling.

Faith comes in telling myself (and believing) that through hard work on my part (e.g., networking, classes, practice) and unknown forces outside of my control and understanding, those challenges will dissipate at the appropriate time.

Like those well-intentioned naysayers, drawing a line in the sand about giving up (e.g., going back to my former career) only gives voice to my doubts. I will not allow myself to do that anymore.

I have faith that I will endure failure and that I will succeed at whatever it is I am to accomplish, no matter what street I live on.

I wish you that faith as well.

 

For an interesting piece on questions about talent and faith therein, check out this post from Plotting Bunnies: The ingredients of Writing: Talent…?

(Image is property of owner and is used without permission because I have faith they’ll get my point.)

Birth of a reader

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Okay. I admit it. I have a book problem.

I, Randall (Randy) C Willis, am a book addict.

In my defense, it is my mother’s fault…she was my first dealer.

From my earliest days, I remember being surrounded by books…books purchased for my enjoyment and edification (I read that word in a book).

Books were my companions. Books were my connection to the greater universe. Books were my babysitter. Books were my escape. Wherever my books are, that place is my home.

As I said, my mom started the process, as seen below in scans of some of my earliest books. Each of these volumes was published within a couple years of my birth, and either my mother or I have schlepped these things around for almost five decades.

I still smile as I flip through the Counting Book, testing my acumen. So far, so good.

And I sit in awe of the Adventures of Beany & Cecil, which was way too hip for kids as a short trip down YouTube indicates.

At the peak of my addiction, I think I owned 3000 books, give or take. I am presently sitting around 500, the rest being donated over the years to Good Will stores in Canada and the United States.

I know libraries exist, but in a twisted way, that would be like going to a strip club or brothel. A bibliographic quickie instead of a committed relationship (told you it was twisted).

No, I’ll stick with my books, thanks. Constant companions in an inconstant world.

When life interferes

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It has been an incredibly slow week on the blog as far as new posts are concerned. But whereas most people slow down periodically to take care of things that distract us from our writing like work, family obligations, vacations, etc, my absence from the blog has had more to do with writing than with not writing.

The past week has been an endless series of projects, all of which require some degree of writing.

Last Thursday, I started the latest of my screenwriting classes and needed to do some final edits before bringing my pages to class to be read aloud. As well, I needed to read the works of other students to get a handle on their work and to offer insights.

Friday brought meetings with potential clients to discuss their web and marketing strategies (and a lovely Indian buffet to boot). And the afternoon was spent doing research for an upcoming article on the anniversary of the elucidation of the structure of DNA (Happy 60th Birthday, DNA!), followed by an evening at baseball (yaaaaaawn) and then drinks with my screenwriting circle. I also picked up a new medical writing freelance gig.

Saturday and Sunday were chock-a-block full of my attempts to live-Tweet two hockey games between my Toronto Marlies and the St. John’s IceCap in the American Hockey League. You want to miss half a sporting event? Try live-Tweeting a hockey game. By the time you look up from your phone, you have another incident to Tweet.

The weekend and Monday were also spent on that freelance writing gig, so I buried my head into the wonders of neuropharmacology and tried to make sense of a chimera of a slide deck, trying to tease a coherent story out of the presentation. Yes, even medical information comes in the form of a story…or at least the better ones do.

And then to rattle my brain a little, I headed back to Art & Fear; a little book on the challenges that present themselves when trying to create art (more on the book in a later post). Step One: Go, create Art. The guilt from the book was enough to make me sit in front of my laptop and churn out 3 more pages for my latest screenplay…a lovely little family drama-comedy set in Eastern Canada.

And so, my poor blog languished in neglect. No doubt, feeling unloved and forgotten.

Not so, my blog, not so.

But you will need to learn to share my attentions with others. It’s all for the best, I promise.

Lucked into a team photo with the Toronto Marlies (me=last person, second row, right)

Lucked into a team photo with the Toronto Marlies (me=last person, second row, right)