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I finished this book Sunday night.

I started it Sunday morning.

I wasn’t hooked at first, but then I got into it and…

I was going to write about it yesterday, but I had two hour long phone calls and I’m still wound up after those. They were personal, not business. One the follow-up to my annual physical (you should get one, no matter what anybody says), the other about money, but… I’ve been wound tight ever since.

I know this is the life of most people. But it’s not the life of someone doing creative work. Someone in traditional business goes to the office, talks on the phone, answers e-mails, ultimately concludes and then does their best to decompress until they start all over again the following morning. But if you want to be creative…

I have my radio show on Saturday, and it takes at least a couple of hours to calm down from that, so by time I make it to Sunday, actually, for the rest of Saturday, I want to disconnect.

Now growing up in the sixties, the weekend was filled with activities. It was a roving party of family activities. It was almost like you lived in multiple houses…the parents were best friends and…

It doesn’t happen that way anymore. You can’t drop by unannounced. You might have seen that Sebastian Maniscalco bit:

People are afraid, they want to be safe. Furthermore, everybody’s in touch all the time, via the smartphone. And if you don’t respond right away, you’re seen as either a pariah or…maybe you’re ill.

So I feel kind of guilty laying low on the weekends. After all, this is when most people leave the house and participate. Then again, when I was in college, we used to say the weekends were for amateurs. The true believers, the true outcasts, knew that it was all about Thursday night, and Sunday and Monday were not bad either.

But as the years have gone by I find myself staying home more and more. And I’m wondering if it’s my age, or an aftereffect of the Covid lockdown, I wasn’t like this before, or it’s just me.

Like Bob Dyan once said, I’m not going to tell you my hopes and dreams, because you’ll laugh at me, you’ll think they’re far-fetched and grandiose. However…

I don’t want to waste any time. And I was thinking about this. In the seventies, I’d go to the movies, constantly. That’s where I connected. I was on the outside looking in. But now I’m on the inside, I can reach tens of thousands with the stroke of a key, and that feels so good. I don’t want to let that go. But to be readable, to do something great, I’ve got to be disconnected, which I know is a conundrum, I’ve got to disconnect to reconnect, but that’s the way it is.

So Saturday night, I finished reading this book “The Sisters.” I tried once before, not really hard, but I decided to give it one more go and I got hooked. What you’ve got here is a story set mostly in Sweden, with the main characters half-Swedish and half-Tunisian. “The Sisters” is not a short book, and it creates a whole world. You get invested in the characters, all of whom have different dreams. The Tunisian father who wanted to set the world on fire, but ended up working on the subway for years and years. The girl who is the life of the party but just can’t find her direction. Her sister who took a year off from college and found herself working for a decade in a job that was supposed to be temporary. The other sister who is too uptight to let loose, saving a dollar, making sure all i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed. What we’ve got here is normal people. Normal life. No one is famous, yet the people are not downtrodden. And it’s a great antidote to America, where everybody’s on the road to the top or the road to ruin. But after finishing “The Sisters” after midnight, I just couldn’t get into “The Award.”

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And I wasn’t doing such a great job of getting into it on Sunday either. You know how you can see the day slipping away? Knowing that you’ll regret the time you’ve burned? I decided to commit, I wouldn’t pick up the phone, and that’s when I got hooked.

“The Award” is not a difficult read. But unlike “The Sisters,” it does not center around everyman, rather a writer. They say to write what you know about, but if you’re a reader of fiction you might believe that writing is the number one profession in America, when so many people don’t even read books, never mind write one.

But the main character makes an amoral choice not long into the book and I winced. Because this character seemed otherwise reasonable, and I wouldn’t do this.

But then…

“The Award” ultimately turns into a thriller. Which I didn’t anticipate. And every aside, every throwaway from earlier in the book, comes back into play.

But the bottom line is “The Award” made me tense. Had me on edge. On some level I could see where it was going, on another it didn’t go quite that way.

And then reading for hours, getting up to go to the bathroom, I was inspired, I wanted to write about what was going on in Minneapolis.

That is how it works. You have to do something else to do the thing you want to. You get inspired, it hits you. This is when all the great work is done. As for writing sessions, cobbling songs together, there is great work achieved by those methods, but it’s the bolts of lightning that render the best stuff.

Actually, I saw this great Ray Bradbury video on TikTok. I certainly know who he is, I’ve got respect, but I’ve never read any of his books, science fiction is not my thing. But Ray said…

“Never went to college. Don’t believe in college for writers. I think it’s very dangerous. I think too many professors are too opinionated, and too snobbish, and too intellectual. And the intellect is a great danger to creativity. A terrible danger because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things instead of staying with your own basic truth, who you are, what you are, what you want to be. And I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for 25 years now which reads ‘Don’t think.’ You must never think at the typewriter, you must feel, and then your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. You collect up a lot of data, you do a lot of thinking away from your typewriter, but at the typewriter you should be living.”

@contemporary.blueprint

Ray Bradbury: Don’t Think, Feel ? Do your thinking away from the page.?? Write from your basic truth.?? When you’re stuck, stop explaining and start describing. Don’t let overthinking choke your work while you’re making it. Study, analyse, gather references — then, when you sit down, let the writing be a lived experience. Making should come from instinct, emotion, and what feels true in the moment. ——— #art #creativity #writing #literature

? original sound – The Contemporary Blueprint

Eureka, that’s it!

People talk about writing, how hard it is, how they like to have written as opposed to writing. How writing is really about rewriting. It’s all intellectualized, and that’s why it’s not transcendent.

Writing, whether it be a screed or a song, should be channeling. The rest of your life is practice, background…when you sit down to create you’ve got to be uninhibited and inspired.

School is about squeezing the creativity out of you, making you conform. Writers are born, not made. It’s a calling. You can learn how to do it, but you won’t be great if you weren’t born with the instinct, the passion.

As for MFAs… Some decent books come out of those programs, but they excise the inspiration, it’s all about the rewriting, as it is for the main character in “The Award.” Who has to question whether he is good enough, or whether he should give up.

He’s got a girlfriend who believes in him. But he ends up losing the plot. And there’s the legendary writer who lives beneath him who is a grade A a*shole, but no one says this out loud, for fear of being on the wrong team, never mind offending this legend.

As for the thrilling plot… Doesn’t have to be a writer, could be anybody. The choices you make… One false move that seemed irrelevant yesterday catches up with you tomorrow.

“The Award” is a ride. I think it’s the kind of book those on BookTok who brag they read a book a week like. This is not literature for the ages, this is plot. But it takes you away, not as well as “The Sisters” does, but there’s that tension.

And when it broke I wrote “More Minneapolis.” I was primed and didn’t even know it. I was completely disconnected from society, and then I reconnected instantly.

But now I’m pissed I can’t get enough distance, I’m caught up in the b.s. of the world, and when that is the case you can’t get into the space you need to to do great work. And there are no tricks, you’ve just got to wait it out. To calm down, for the inspiration to return.

But I’m booked solid going forward and I might never have the time to write about “The Award,” and I wanted to, but this does not have the tone I wanted to convey. Which is you’re just an average person, reading a book, looking for a break, and then it happens, you get hooked, you’re on the ride. You’re there alone, in your own bubble, but you know the writer is with you. And it’s different from a movie or TV series. But it’s akin to a great record. But today’s records are written first and foremost for commercial success, and that rarely works. You’ve got commerce, not art.

And we’re looking for art.

But we don’t want anybody to be an artist.

And most of those who say they’re artists are not.

But we’re still hungry, we’re still looking for that resonance.