Flash Fiction: Sometimes Writing Feels This Way

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A quick work of flash fiction. Tried to write something very different tonight. This came out instead.

*****

Harold had no idea what time it was or exactly how long he had sat staring at the empty white field on his screen. She was gone. He had no idea how long she had been gone. It felt like weeks. He hadn’t heard her go. There was no final closing of the door, no last flip of the switch. She had been there when he was not paying attention and now she was gone.

Harold thought about getting up to look for her. It would do no good. He had called her name five times already, each time expecting her to bound into the room with an offer of help. The right word. Some lascivious whisper. One delicious sentence to get him started.

There would be no more of that. She was gone.

The screen was blank. His eyes ached from the glare. Was he watching the screen? Was the screen watching him? It was hard to know which was which.

He hadn’t heard her go. How long ago had she left? He felt like he should still be able to catch her scent in the room. There must be some trace of her perfume, some phantom tendril to remind him of her. She wouldn’t have been gone that long. She wouldn’t have left him completely empty. She would have left him with something with which to remember her.

He looked around the room, confused and crippled feeling from his time spent hunched over the chair.

Had he slept? Impossible that she had left while he was staring at the screen, not writing. He must have fallen asleep. He must have slept.

Harold pushed away from the desk. He was trying to remember the last thing she had said to him. What had it been? Was there some clue contained inside?

I’m going out. He could certainly imagine her saying that. He could hear the words in what he believed to be her voice. I’m going out. So casual. So normal. She was going out, just like had a hundred times before. She would be back. That was how it worked. She went out then she came back. He tried to satisfy himself but the words sat false. That was not what she had said.

Harold stood up, unsteady on his feet. He was drunk with exhaustion. It was hard to keep himself steady. He walked across the bedroom, ready to grab for balance if needed. The room was moving around him.

The bedroom door was open, a mouth open to the long dark hall beyond. Seeing it made him panic. He had not left the door open. He always closed the door when he was writing. Or not writing. She had opened the door. She had left the door open.

He thought of calling her. Certainly not the first time he had thought of that. The idea was no good. She didn’t have a phone.

What kind of person these days doesn’t carry a phone?

Harold shuffled down the long, dark hallway, feeling like a person in a horror film about to stumble across the dead body. And it would have been some kind of relief for him to find her lying there. Then he would not need to know that she had left him and was not coming back. Dead was better. If she was dead, that was one thing. But she wasn’t dead. At least, she wasn’t dead in his apartment, and Harold was left alone once again with the more awful truth.

She had left him. He had not heard her leave. She was not coming home.

Another Google Tool Gone: Google Reader

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Twitter is abuzz right now with the news that Google will deactivate Google Reader on July 1. I haven’t sifted through all the conspiracy theories, hand-wringing and lamentations yet. I will. There will be blood. Nothing gets nerds more bestirred than the loss of free tools that work so well and with such single purpose that they disappear into the background like plumbing.

Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what this feels like. Google just told me that they are coming to my house on July 1 and removing all my plumbing. Sorry. We just áren’t doing plumbing anymore.

Okay, not exactly, but this isn’t the first time Google has taken away a tool that I found essential, useful and brilliant in its simplicity. A few months ago, I lost Google Desktop, which for several years had been the easiest way to find anything in my work computer files. I file things pretty well but Google Desktop was a master tool because it indexed the fulltext of every document and every email on my hard drive. Major power. When I received a new laptop from work, I tried to reinstall the application only to learn that it had been discontinued months before. I have been limping along ever since with the Windows 7 native search feature. Useful but weak in comparison.

More recently, the migration from Google Docs to Google Drive broke some of my documents and made it hard to edit documents that started out as Word files. It took a while to realize that you can still save those documents as editable and shareable Google docs files. They just don’t make it obvious. I have since caught on. No big deal.

The loss of Google Reader is a bigger deal. I have been using Google Reader as my RSS aggregator for years. I particularly like the way it integrates with third party iOS apps like FeedlerPro. I’ve got a few months to research options. Lifehacker offers a few suggestions.

In the meantime, enjoy the firestorm on Twitter. The nerds are bestirred. Long live the nerds.

Remembering a Master Teacher

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My college lost an extraordinary colleague today. Dr. John Thomas taught history. He died after a long struggle with cancer.

I won’t eulogize him here. There are so many people who knew him so much better than I did. They will tell his story.

What I want to say is this: when I think about the point of educating and becoming educated, I often think about a lecture series John put together in the aftermath of September 11. In the frenzied, frightening months after the violence of September 11, 2001, John Thomas delivered a series of lectures about British mercantilism. John’s stories of the British sugar, tobacco and rum trade with the American colonies helped me understand why the study of history matters. In the lead-up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, John’s impassioned, amusing stories helped me see my own times in a more rational light. I majored in history as an undergraduate, but John’s lectures were the first time I felt that I really understood what the study of history was about.

I wasn’t learning about mercantilism, colonial politics or international conflict. I was learning about the kinds of questions historians ask. I was learning how historians think about the problems they encounter in their own lives. I was observing how the well-disciplined mind brings patience, perspective and light into confused, chaotic times.

John helped me understand why teaching and learning matter. We teach to help others discipline their minds to think in useful ways that make new kinds of ideas possible. We learn to train our own minds so we can become more patient and perceptive.

John’s response to the fear and uncertainty of September would have been the same no matter what discipline he taught. It could as easily have been math, literature or biology. The subject content is not the point. Teaching can be an act of bravery, a  bold affirmation that our learning leads us forward, gives us clarity when times are unclear and offers the right questions when everything feels uncertain.

I am grateful to John Thomas and the other master teachers I have known. They remind us that the work has dignity and purpose. They remind us that the work is vital.

Becoming well-informed

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Yesterday’s post about information rituals missed the point. I was working with the idea of information rituals as intentional, useful information habits. Yesterday’s post was a screed written by a madman, crippled  by the compulsive need to stash web links in the virtual nooks and crannies of his web space in the misguided belief that there will someday be enough time to visit them all, watch them all, read them all and use them all. There won’t be enough time and there won’t be a point. Yesterday’s post was more about link hoarding than about information rituals.

Yesterday’s post failed to consider this: why bother? The goal of link catching, organizing and follow-up can’t be to visit them all. There is no point to that. The web is immense and growing on a scale far beyond the human mind. Before we can consider useful information habits, we need to consider the goal. What are we trying to accomplish?

You can’t learn everything. You can’t be interested in everything. If you are, you certainly can’t invest your attention equally in all directions.

Information rituals should help a person benefit from their information streams: Facebook, Twitters, blog feeds, social bookmarks, emails and so on. The benefit is gathering the raw materials needed to be well-informed.

Being well-informed means seeing an idea or event from many different directions. Being well-informed means having a sense of understanding about a thing, how that thing relates to my life and how that relationship changes over time. Being well-informed is about gathering resources that help you make good decisions. Being well-informed helps you set goals, plan actions and assess outcomes. Being well-informed helps you lend value to others who can benefit from your specialized knowledge and focus.

And so, before I can think about developing useful information rituals, I need to establish my purpose. What is it about which I wish to become well-informed? This, it seems, will determine the most suitable rituals to cultivate.

So here’s the list of things about which I am trying to stay well-informed. These are more than just recreational interests. These are events, themes or concepts about which I need to become and remain well-informed in order to accomplish my larger goals. Here they are, in no particular order:

  • writing: as an action and a process
  • libraries: why we need them, how they operate, what they do
  • leadership theory and practice
  • books: what is being published, how are those books being received, what is their impact
  • eBooks: emerging publication models and the business of eText,  how reading eBooks compares to reading print books, how to connect readers with eBooks through library collections
  • mobile technologies and their use in education
  • open education: models, platforms, possible goals/outcomes
  • educational technologies: how technology intersects usefully with teaching and learning
  • pedagogy and learning theory: how people learn, how we teach people to learn more effectively; how libraries contribute
  • information theory: what is information, how is it used, how do people seek, find and interact with information
  • changes in web technology
  • social media: how they create communities of interest and how to use them to deliver messages to audiences
  • Buddhism and mindful living
  • parenting
  • creativity and things that inspire people to accomplish useful goals
  • politics and political action
  • world news
  • local news

Ah. I begin to see the problem. This is a very broad list, and I know the list is incomplete. I am trying to wrap my mind around too much. I am becoming somewhat informed in a number of these areas but am not being purposeful enough in finding where these areas overlap. I am sipping from streams of information that pertain to all of this but not focusing intention on developing deep knowledge.

I need to pare down my daily information diet. I need to identify the most beneficial sources of information in these specific areas, find places where these overlap and pursue those channels with greater focus. This might mean dropping some blog feeds. This might mean reshaping my Twitter feeds. I need to raise the criteria I use to screen what sources I try to follow to increase the value of time spent with each.

I do realize that this thread of posts may seem crazy. What I am talking about here is cultivating a mindful approach to information overload. We all suffer. We can all benefit from new habits. I suspect in the future, the ability to quickly filter information, screen out background noise and act quickly on the highest quality information will be a basic requirement for survival.

The mind evolves to survive our circumstances. I believe we can take control of this process. In fact, I believe we have to take control of this process or we will get bewildered, blinded and lost. If we don’t find ways to cultivate useful information rituals, we will become more and more poorly informed in the most information rich time our species has yet seen.

Information Rituals

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Update (11march2013) – This post misses the point. I consider this a first, misguided draft. I am still working with the idea of information rituals. Step one: figure out what information rituals need to accomplish.

****

I need to develop new information rituals. My current habits are not working for me. I have three email accounts — one personal, one for work, and one Gmail for capturing data posted to web forms. All three have become link hives,   hundreds of emails with nothing but unvisited links to sites I need or want to visit.

My email situation, though tragic, is not uncommon. But then consider the other places I have stashed unvisited links:

  • Google Bookmarks
  • starred posts in Google Reader
  • favorited tweets
  • Evernote for articles that require some action
  • Instapaper for articles to read during downtime
  • ScoopIt for articles to share with others
  • PDFs scattered across iBooks, Adobe Reader for iPad, Blue Fire and Dropbox

This is a mess. I not in control. If unvisited weblinks were physical objects, you would be watching my tearful family on Hoarders begging me to let these links go and just live a simple, uncluttered kind of life. I cannot let them go. I need these links. These links have something for me, some small but essential insight.

The problem here is discipline. My information habits lack purpose and rigor. My information habits are thoughtless and unexamined. I need clarity. I need a streamlined system that makes sense, and then, I need to develop the rigor required to operate and protect the system.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, I am kissed with a little bit of OCD. Some people wash incessantly. Some people drink or do drugs. Some people are compulsive about light switches. My manias are list-making and link catching.

I can’t stop catching interesting links. I am a librarian. I work on the web. I am online all day. I get interested in things. I share links. People share links with me. It is the nature of what I do.

I need a better system for organizing my link hoards into coherent clusters that can be dealt with, delegated or deleted.

I need new information rituals.

Something like this:

  • Only keep Google bookmarks that matter. If a link gets tagged read or explore, then read or explore that link. Delete the links that don’t matter.
  • Triage all interesting emailed links into one place. Maybe a folder inside one email account or a dedicated email account. Funnel all emailed links to that one place and prune that one place ruthlessly. Bookmark the links that matter. Delete all emails.
  • Do not favorite tweets or star items from your Google feed. Push them to the folder and deal with them when there’s time. Bookmark then delete.
  • Keep Evernote clean for links that require some follow-up or associate to a particular project, like this blog.
  • Read Instapaper articles daily.
  • Push all PDFs to iBooks because iBooks allows annotation and also allows organizing features on bookshelves. Adobe Reader and BlueFire  have no organizing features to prevent the tumble. Dropbox is crowded with other things.

There are the tenets of the faith. Here’s the ritual:

  • Read Facebook and Twitter in the morning, preferably via Flipboard. Push links as needed.
  • Read Google Feeds at lunch. Push links as needed.
  • Read ScoopIt in the late afternoon. Push links as needed.
  • Read Evernote before blogging in the evening. This is where the blogging ideas get saved.
  • Visit Google Bookmarks for new sites and to delete unneeded bookmarks.
  • Read Instapaper with evening leisure time.
  • Read PDFs as needed.

Fascinating. This is completely unsustainable and I sound like a complete lunatic.

Okay, you get the idea. I’m stopping now.

I need to think a bit more about the idea of information rituals, those habits of searching, finding, clicking and reading that get us through the day.

What are your information rituals? How well do they work for you?

See Farther, Work Faster: A Workplace Prayer

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At some point in your career, I hope you are asked to work at the edge of your limits. I hope someone needs you to offer up more than you believe you are able to provide. I hope you are asked to see farther and work faster than you ever thought possible. That’s where growth happens. That’s where you make yourself vulnerable. That’s where you discover your limits. That’s where you surprise yourself by what you are able to accomplish and by what others around you are able to accomplish because of your support.

You will find yourself failing. You will find yourself falling behind. Keep at it. There’s no prize for taking it easy. There’s no prize for doing what everyone knows can be done. Do hard things. Help other people do hard things. Rest when you must but do not stop. Be more than you already are. Be what is needed. Be what is required. See farther. Work faster. Be ready.

Why TED Talks Matter

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Yesterday’s post was about TED Talks as a platform for big ideas and John Spencer’s observation that, as a platform, TED Talks don’t leave much room for critique or response. TED Talks are idea packages, tailor-made to get an idea out into the world. They aren’t a platform for actually vetting those ideas and figuring out how and if they should be used. That kind of work happens someplace else. Or doesn’t.

I was captured by the plain truth of Spencer’s observation, but I can’t leave it there. Yesterday’s post was about what TED Talks are not. We need to talk about what TED Talks are.

I love TED Talks. The world needs TED and, I believe, the world is a better place for the kind of sharing that takes place there. TED is like a giant Enlightenment-era salon, where smart people get together and trade smart ideas and work to understand some kind of idealistic truth and then return to their daily lives feeling refreshed and inspired. That’s part of what TED is.

Today I watched Amanda Palmer’s talk about the art of asking. You should watch it. Her basic idea is that music companies (and presumably other media companies) should stop trying to figure out ways to force people to pay for music and, instead, figure out ways to allow people to pay for music. People love music. People connect to music and, by extension, their favorite musicians, on a deeply personal level. Those people want to pay to for music. You just have to let them. You have to know how to ask. It really is an interesting and inspiring talk.

Watching Palmer’s talk, I was struck once again by something very essential to the TED Talk experience. TED Talks are about storytelling and how stories connect people to ideas. Good stories do more than illustrate ideas. They create visceral, emotional connections to ideas, concepts and goals. Stories are how we get people to do things. Stories are how we get people to help us change the world.

My friend Daryl mentioned that TED Talks really are sales pitches more than they are lectures. He’s right. Maybe there are other places where big ideas go to get vetted and improved. Maybe the unique gift of TED presenters is their very powerful grasp of how story connects people to ideas and motivates people to want change. Maybe that’s what we need TED to be, a place to find stories that motivate and inspire us to want to change or try something new. Maybe TED isn’t really only about big ideas. Maybe TED is about connecting people to each other with story. If so, that may just be enough.

The Tyranny of Big Ideas

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I am a person who loves big ideas. You may have noticed.

I can’t really help it. I get inspired by other people’s bold thoughts, sweeping visions and prophetic pronouncements. I walk around with this sense that we are living in radical times and believe that the scale of change around us requires a comparable measure of audacity, brilliance and courage.

I am not alone. The world is filled with people who are ever-watchful for the next brilliant solution to a once seemingly intractable problem. You find these people, people like me, more often than not, watching TED Talk videos.

John Spencer sees a problem with TED Talks. TED Talks are conceived as being a way to jump start meaningful conversation about worthwhile ideas. The point of the conversation is, of course, to vet the ideas and improve them through critique. Spencer doubts the quality of the conversation that follows.

Spencer describes TED Talks as a kind of “Secular Scripture”, a text that  cannot be refuted. For Spencer, TED Talks are sometimes brandished as a kind of idea bomb that gets tossed his way whenever he offers a counter-narrative to the prevailing wisdom. This has not happened to me, but I see the danger of the experience he describes.

Big ideas can be habit-forming. Big ideas can be addictive. There is an element of wishful thinking that sometimes hounds the believer of big ideas, a willingness to trade away the obligation to be skeptical and mistrustful of ideas that have not yet proven themselves or arrive unaccompanied by detail and practice.

This is where most big ideas suffer. Big ideas are often celebrated and lauded before they get connected to details and practical application. Worse, big ideas get praised as half-solutions before the nature of the problem is fully explored. And then, the person who is casting doubt is a naysayer. But the work of skeptic is necessary. Otherwise, we lurch from big idea to big idea, each time willing ourselves to believe that problems have been solved, really and permanently solved, simply because we would like for them to be solved.

Sometimes big ideas are used as a tool for political manipulation. (Recommended listening: DecodeDC’s “There’s a Plan for That”)

It can very difficult to argue with big ideas. This is partly because bold ideas are generally conceptual in nature and painted with broad strokes. It is hard to deconstruct broad strokes without nitpicking. Nobody likes a nitpicker.

Sometimes, big ideas arrive with such force that there is no space left for critique or examination. In Spencer’s view, if TED Talks are a conversation, the original presenter gets to speak with a megaphone and everyone else answers in scattered whispers. The TED Talk viewer is given easy access to new, challenging ideas but does not often see those ideas presented in context with opposing, contrarian views. In this way, TED Talks can sometimes become a kind of sales pitch — quick, to-the-point, ready to sell and, ultimately, unanswerable.

Spencer’s critique is fair. Like Spencer, I think TED is an excellent site rich with powerful, challenging ideas that deserve to be shared and discussed widely. We just need to be sure that we aren’t giving these ideas a pass just because they are big, bold and lovely. Ideas get improved by being pulled apart, debated, and, sometimes, refuted. Not all ideas deserve to be implemented. Not all big ideas need to be tried.

More to the point for me, there is a warning here to beware the lure of the big idea as a magic tonic that cures all ills. People like me are called idealists. People like me have a lot to offer the world, but we have to be careful. We should never expect big ideas to save the world. Ideas never saved anyone or made things better. Hard work makes things better. Easy to forget sometimes that the way to change the world is to work hard. The process is iterative. The process is incremental. The process can be frustratingly slow. Without the work, however, the idea is just a false comfort, a fun diversion that keeps us from the discomfort of disagreement and uncertainty. Nothing useful ever happened without discomfort and uncertainty. We work through that.

We need big ideas. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t need to be so complex. Sometimes we need smaller idea, so long as it is the right small idea and it is coupled with lots and lots of work.

Libraries Help People Get Better Questions

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Last week, I wrestled a bit with articulating what libraries contribute to the college, school or community to which they belong. As usual, I overgeneralized a bit, ramped up the enthusiasm and tossed in a double dash of hyperbole. That’s just how I roll. I had some really get conversations with people, librarians and not librarians, about those posts.

For me, everything comes back to curiosity. Libraries are places that should promote and reward curiosity. And so, the treat of the library as a knowledge place isn’t only about finding answers, it is about learning to ask the right kinds of questions. John Spencer writes about this in his recent post, “In Defense of Librarians“. He writes about his school age son, but his observations might apply to all librarians, I think. You should take a look.

Here’s the question for conversation: Should librarians be more about the questions or the answers? Which is more important? How does a library that values excellent questions look? What does a question-centered library do differently?

Creative Advice from Ira Glass

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I have been writing off and on for 24 years. I’m not really sure why I do it. Sometimes I write because I feel like I have to. Sometimes I write because I feel like there are stories stuck inside of me. Sometimes I write because I have ideas in my head that I don’t really understand and I want to understand them better.

I take writing pretty seriously. I stress out about writing. I talk about writing. I read about writing. I pretty much obsess about writing. The one thing I don’t do enough, it turns out, is actually writing.

The writers I admire most say that the secret to being a great writer is writing everyday. Just writing and writing and writing. It makes sense, but it isn’t particularly encouraging advice when the writing feels so thin and poor on the page.

Ira Glass says that’s normal. In fact, mediocrity is part of the process. All good artists start out being mediocre and they are dissatisfied by their own mediocrity. This dissatisfaction dissuades most people from sticking with it. Don’t give up. The cure for mediocre art is to create lots and lots of mediocre art. The fact that you recognize your own art’s mediocrity is a sign of good taste. Keep working at it. Work at it for years. Slowly, you will close the gap. Someday, your art will be as good as your taste, but only if you stay with it and only if you do it a lot.

Here’s how Ira Glass says it:

Keep doing it.