‘Young literary men in KL’

They might be writing somewhere in a dark room. The keys on their laptops only half-lit from the glow of the monitors.  

They might be writing. They should be writing.

“Who is going to listen to all these words in my head?”

Ideas, ideas, what do you do with all these ideas?

“You analyse too much”

Do they have a life inside of my head, does that make them real? 

“What is wrong with you?”

shut up

There wasn’t any space left for them to speak, so they left the hall. They didn’t write to rule, they thought originality was worth a shot, but they were wrong. Why don’t they just follow? 

“Can you write it so that it says something like this:....”

Literary young men is a concept, a fine shorthand, for the idealised male that no one really wants. As pc as diversity and multiculturalism. 

Do you get what it really means? 

It’s chaos and disruption and doubt and fickleness and weight.

Give it up, give it up

emo-ammo

You could say that a lot of the things we do, they're not grounded on thought but run almost exclusively on emotions.

Trends and fashions, for example. Sometimes the trend appears rational, sometimes not, but when a trend blows up and gets adopted by the masses, you can be sure that its success owes a lot to emotions: to fit in with peers, to be seen as a trend-setter, etc; these feelings act as influential motivators.

For people with agendas to push, to be vulcan, that is to act exclusively on intellect and rationality, is to behave in a manner alien to the people of earth.

As the cliche goes, you cannot force someone to love you, so you attempt persuasion. To love something, is to have a feeling inside of you, burning from your core across your entire being, is very different from knowing the benefits and advantages of an action.

In other words, it is not something you can debate with your mind and superior intellect, but instead is something that needs to be inspired, either by an act, or speech, or presence.

And when the audience has strong inertia away from your intended outcome, you would need a clear ringing stimulus if you were to have the slightest chance of getting your preferred responses.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxx

Jerry Seinfeld is attributed with this interesting productivity method called, ‘don’t break the chain.’

His idea behind it is simple: to be a good comic, you need better jokes. To get better jokes, you need to write better. To write better, you need to write every day.

So to make sure he wrote, every day, he hung a large calendar on the wall, and after every time he wrote, he drew a red cross on the day’s date. If he wrote the next day, he drew a cross on that date, and did the same for the day after and the day after that.

When he had written for consecutive days, there would be a chain of red crosses on the calendar. If he stopped for one day, he would break the chain, and have to start all over again.

The challenge was to make the chain as long as possible.

The outcome was he made a lot of material. Some of which must have been good, if not excellent.

So don’t break the chain.

make your own way

if you want to do something new, stay away from the shiny lights.

Glamour is stale, a dead stump layered with extreme amounts of perfume and paint to make it appealing, but ultimately meaningless and uninteresting.

Status does not disrupt to make things better. It’d rather things get worse, so its value grows higher.

And that little trickled-down wealth that you get? That comes with complacency, docility, and dread

Frustration does not refresh stale routines

If you wake up everyday and find your mind traversing the same paths repeatedly, and you play the same chords on the piano repeatedly, and you write the same scenes repeatedly, you probably should stop.

It's time to break that routine.

This link gives some good suggestion for steps you can take to start anew. Among them:

- Journaling: you need to record ideas and get them out of your head – make room for new ideas
- Puzzles: problem solving, you can train yourself to be better
- Creativity Exercises: you need a purpose to be creative
- Purposeful Exploration: find creative inspiration in traditional media – take a purposeful look at these things – pay attention while watching tv, reading newspaper and find ways that others have expressed their creativity. Often we use these mediums to escape but we should look at them in a different way.
- Human Interaction: we are communal creatures – creativity is born from experience including other peoples. All people solve problems – surround yourself with people different from you. We need new perspectives.

Of all the suggestions listed, it's the last one I find most interesting.

Thanks to the RMIT library, I've had a lot of fun reading books that detail experiments on human interactions. These experiments attempt to figure out what brings individuals to react in certain ways through a variety of means: variation of stimuli, subconcious suggestions, and sometime just plain exposure. They try to be as rigorous as conditions allow them to be, after which the data is collected and analysed to come up with explanations for behaviours and actions.

If you're not already alarmed by the thought of manipulation, let me just say these findings trickle down to the world of advertising, management, and marketing. It is in these fields, that these theories gain their practical forms.

Of course, we've veered off-topic slightly there, but there are thoughts there useful for breaking routines.


Change one thing, unleash a new wave of creativity

In trying to understand human behaviour, the researchers changed every possible variable to see how their subjects responded.

In trying to break away from a routine, we could do the same to see what unlocks the door to a new way of thinking. Start with the small things, it's always the details that matter. Have tea instead of coffee. Black instead of with sugar. Sleep on your back instead of on your side.
Work your way up if it doesn't work: take a different route to work, try a new way of talking to people, pick up a new sport.

Something must eventually work. It might already be working, only that you don't realise it. Not all change drops on you like a ton of bricks. Some simmer from the sides, gradually changing the nature of your thoughts.

Through patience, old routines are broken.