Newsletter No. 2

Rhythm and cadence have occupied my mind this month. I am trying to pay attention to the rhythm in various things such as literature, how I do creative work, and how I like to take breaks. By paying attention to the natural rhythms I am trying to build a new rhythm of sorts.

Rational thinking, which dominates my brain, wants to set the metronome first and then cast the rhythm. I certainly tried to do so with this newsletter last weekend. I set the metronome to a weekly cadence — which I failed to do last week. I should have probably set the metronome after the rhythm has set.

Staying with the metaphor a bit longer… setting the metronome first would work only if I was trying to play someone else's music. What I am trying to do is find my own tune in exploring thoughts, ideas and skills. But nothing I am doing is new: blogging, podcasting, reading and thinking. Others do it more and better. It feels easier to imitate.

I see other creative people who I admire produce so much work and it makes me think I can do it too. But I need to remember that I spend 40 to 50 hours a week doing my day-job which is also creative and very analytical and takes a lot of mental energy. It also pays the bills. I can not share a large majority of the work I do in my day-job because we are under strict NDAs with our clients. So it seems that the work I can share is small and slow.

I don't want this to be an excuse. So I have started a time-block Plan from 6 AM to 6 PM for both, my professional job and my personal creative work. It is a challenging schedule but I deviated from it on only a few days in the last two weeks. By all measures it is working.

Here is the stuff I have written in the last two weeks:

Van Neistat

I discovered Van Neistat's new youtube channel. It reminds me of one of my favorite short movies on YouTube called 10 Bullets. Read the post here

Fiction and Non Fiction

I've been reading too much non fiction and discovered a hunger for fiction, like I was starved of something essential. I tried to explore that idea. I have to admit, my writing is not great in this one. As I read it now, it feels like I wrote before the idea had fully crystalized. Read the post here

Rhythm

I explore another rendition of the Rhythm thought with which I opened this letter. This time I hit up the writings of Ursula Le Guin. Read the post here

On the podcast front I am nearly finished writing the copy of my next episode. I am also close to having my recording studio set up so I don’t have to juggle the home computer that my wife also uses for her work. I should post the episode soon. You can find it listen on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, and Stitcher. Search for "Sighthound Studio" on Google Podcast, or directly use RSS in your podcast app.

Rhythm

I have been drawn to Ursula LeGuin's literature for many years. And I can't really tell what draws me to her works other than the simple knowledge that I just love to read it. There are great many fiction books out there and some just take you for a ride.

I tried to (poorly) explain the draw I have towards fiction when I have been reading too much non-fiction in my previous blog post. I think there is another explanation.

I am reading "Conversations On Writing" by Ursula LeGuin and David Naimon. It is a series of interviews between Naimon and Leguin. In this book Naimon brings up a quote from Leguin's talk at the Portland Arts & Lectures in 2000:

Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention, beneath words, there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move. The writer's job is to go down deep enough and feel that rhythm, find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words.

Further, Leguin expands in the interview:

That is something I learned from Virginia Woolf, who talks about it wonderfully in a letter to a friend Vita. Style, she says, is rhythm -- the "wave in the mind" -- the wave, the rhythm are there before the words, and bring the words to fit it.

I had to stop reading here.

Reading these passages felt like I was on the precipice of something, about to leap off, a new idea waiting below. It felt like something was starting to crystalize in my brain. I felt my eyes darting to find it. I eventually continued reading the rest of the book but I kept feeling a pull, like a rubber band, back to this idea, to page 17 of this book.

Reading this reminded me of a comparison I made some time ago in a blog post titled Showing, not telling. I had felt something click when I read the first excerpt in that post. The second excerpt -- the poor example -- didn't connect. I had chalked it up to what novelists often recommend -- show, don't tell. While I think my assessment back then was true, I may have missed the rhythm piece entirely.

The passage that I had liked, the one that showed instead of told, that passage was written by Ian McEwan. I feel drawn to his writing like I feel drawn to Leguin's.

Presently, I am reading Richard Russo's Empire Falls. This novel has a lot more about character's lives and their conversations. But there are a few paragraphs here and there that makes me think the author himself appears in the pages. Not just the narrator of the characters, the invisible author behind the lens looking into the lives of Empire Falls -- no: It feels in some passages that Richard Russo's personality is showing up as a distinct character. And I think I can tell that because it has a particular rhythm to it. I'm not sure.

I am, however, anxious to finish Empire Falls so I can start on two new McEwan's books. I'll be looking for that rhythm, and I will try to steer away from affirmative bias traps.