Being born after both Stephen King and Anne Lamott, I am in no way situated to give writing advice. But while I won’t presume to try to help you produce your best prose, I am going to presume that I am pretty good at writing consistently. And I’ll also presume that you want to live the life of a writer a little better than you do now.

So! These are not revelations, but they are helpful. You could even call them “life-hacks,” but then we can’t be friends. Your call.

1. Get up early.

The easiest way to add bonus time to your day for writing is to rip it right from Dawn’s rosy fingers. No, it isn’t necessarily fun to get up before sunrise and yes, I do have an unfair advantage at this because of farm conditioning and a natural larkiness. But it’s not just a personal predilection, I swear: if you can rouse yourself from sleep and put in an hour or half an hour or even ten minutes, you give your writing the best brainpower, jacked-up on caffeine and undiluted by actually having done anything yet that day.

Make coffee. Eat breakfast. Then go.

2. Do not touch your smartphone at crucial times.

If you need to make a call, sure, you pedant. What I mean by crucial are times when you can sneak in some hardcore daydreaming: train rides, waiting for the bus, chopping up food for dinner, etc. Phones are like antibacterial soap for ideas: they wipe everything out of your head, good and bad. Keeping your Angry Birds caged up in your pocket or backpack and resisting the urge to dial up Terry Gross’s dulcet tones to blot out the background noise will let all kinds of things grow in your mental terrarium. Be alone with your thoughts. Walk and woolgather. Stare out the window and let things get funky.

3. Learn to like lentils.

Day job or no, writers must live cheaply. But food is non-negotiable, especially if you’re one of those delicate flowers whose personal hierarchy of needs includes things like “breathing” and
nourishment”  before you even get to art. Lentils are an excellent source of protein and fiber that are easy to cook from dried, cost next to nothing, and go well with the economical vegetables that will last for weeks without getting limp and pathetic. You can make a giant thing of salad or soup and subsist on it for days and it will usually taste good enough to keep you from feeling too Bob Cratchit-y about your situation.

Let’s not bury the lede here. This is my family’s Christmas card this year:

I could tell you a long story about why we recreated this particular picture, but I think I’ll let the letter I wrote speak for itself.

Merry Christmas!

Happy New Year!

Happy Valentine’s Day! Whatever!

Look, we’ll be the first to admit that we’re a little behind. But we have good reasons: we forgot, we were busy (see below), and we needed to send cards as part of the 2013 fiscal year for tax purposes.*

Mostly, though, it was in the name of (re)capturing the special moment from 15 (!) years ago for the family photo. The story is, way back in ’98, David and Rebecca were all dolled up in white tie for the Academy Ball (as they do every year)**. They were smiling, Alice was sad to see them go, and Blair was…swimming? Sure, fine. Whatever happened, it was a moment that defied logical description then and begged for re-creation now.

As the least physically changed of the family, David has been dutifully preserving an aging portrait of himself in order to keep eternally youthful (just kidding, folks! That’s just good, old fashioned healthy livin’ for ya). When he’s not pulling his tuxedo out of mothballs for contrived photo ops, David is still the fearless leader of the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania, which continues to flourish Fels-ily. He’s maintained his obsession with the ’88 Vanagon and learned important skills like Soundproofing Your Van and What You Should Do Now To Keep The Coolant From Leaking. Besides rocking out with the Reckless Amateurs and The Miners, David has also added to the household instrument roster with another lap steel guitar and a banjo for the kid (Blair). Online reviews of his work with the Miners praise “Gary” Thornburgh for peddlin’ the steel with feelin’.

Marvelous matriarch Rebecca continues to be endlessly creative: besides illustrating her 115th and 116th children’s books, she wrote a draft of a mystery novel set in a coffee shop, created a whimsical and wonderful book of “What I Drew In Church” doodles, sang with Reckless Amateurs, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, and a women’s chamber choir, and fiddled. Her recent birthday present of a playhouse was a dream come true (and you’re all invited to come help build it over Memorial Day weekend!) Her signature punk-rock-pixie-cut continues to be the coolest hairstyle that anyone has ever had (is the pink natural? Only her stylist knows for sure!) She also avows an addiction to watching ’24’ on Netflix, at which her family lovingly restrains from rolling their collective eyes.

Elder daughter Blair (your humble amanuensis for this epistolary endeavor) has been busy growing about eight feet (see photo). She graduated in June from the University of Chicago, where she not only wrote a 40-page thesis on Latin and Old French literature for her Medieval Studies degree, but was also one of three student speakers at the Convocation ceremony (her speech, however, was in English). She spent the summer in New York City as an intern at the Jewish Daily Forward, where she was published on the front page and finally learned to spell the work “shtup” correctly (though for different articles). She then departed in September for a three-month long finding-yourself-in- a-foreign-country thing in Montreal, where she spoke French, wrote two young adult novels, and diligently avoided detection by the Royal Canadian Mounted Immigration Police. As of, like, three weeks ago, Blair is the newest member of the editorial team at Quirk Books (they of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies fame) in Philadelphia, and she doesn’t think it’s premature to say that reading and writing about groovy and wonderful books all day is the best job forever and ever, amen.

Lastly, little Alice, who is actually NOT so little any longer, had the coolest adventures of anyone: she spent the fall of her junior year in college studying abroad in Florence, which is in Italy, which is awesome. With a veritable smorgasbord of studio classes spread before her, Alice learned to do all kinds of crazy things like sew clothes, illustrate children’s books (say…), paint in many media, and inform Italian waiters that she is dead***. Also, she got to walk past the Duomo on the way to school every day, which CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE. After bidding Italy arrivederci, Alice has returned to her natal nation for the remainder of her year at Vassar, where she intersperses her art studies with video games, sketchbook drawing, and lending her ethereally graceful soprano to the Vassar Camerata.

Our standard poodles, Rory and Zero (not pictured), keep up a rigorous daily schedule of barking, sleeping, eating, attempting to open the fridge, eating some more, and barking. We love them a lot but would really like them to stop climbing on our legs at night.

Well, there it is. You’ll excuse us for not lingering, but we really need to get the ornaments off the tree.

See you in another fifteen years!

*No.
**No.
***This was actually a comical cultural misunderstanding.

Today’s my birthday, and I’ll get to that, but first I want to talk about passive verbs.

You remember passive verbs! They’re the ones your English teachers abhorred and your physics labs demanded. Whereas the active verb has the subject doing something (i.e. “I snarfed the Oreos”*), the passive verb has the subject having something done to it (i.e., “The Oreos were snarfed”).

In every language that I’ve studied–which isn’t a huge number, but it’s non-singular–there is one verb that always takes a passive form. In French, it was one of the ones you learn after you’ve got the basics of the passé composé down, and you have to remember to conjugate it with être: je suis née. In Latin, as always, it’s one conveniently compact word with a wealth of information jammed into a few letters of morphological difference, and the reason you’re always chanting hodie Christus natus est around this time of year. In English, well, try this: tell your life story from the very beginning. Just like that, your English teacher recoils instinctively, because the first thing out of your mouth is going to be a passive verb!

I was born!

It sort of goes without saying that, duh, you don’t bear yourself into life. But grammatical voice doesn’t always align with the absolute truth of an action: cf. “this article reads like a novel” (articles are read, but they can’t do it themselves) or “sex sells” (true, but someone else is doing the selling). And I know, I’m supposed to be over metaphors! And this is boring and technical! And no one cares about grammar but me, anyway!

I could excuse myself for being selfish since I’m the Birthday Girl, but that’s just the point: I didn’t do anything to deserve such dispensation. I was–just–born.

As far as I’m concerned, there is no way to talk about the start your life off except to place yourself, grammatically and literally, at the mercy of some greater active force. It could be your mother, or your father, or their mothers and their fathers, or the doctor yanking you out, or forces conspiring against you or the universe going inside out for the only time in your whole life. Whatever it is: it’s cool.

Whatever the greater significance of the passive verb, there’s one thing that’s for sure: an acted-upon subject requires an acting-upon agent. Whatever the circumstances, the subject is not alone. You were squeezed out into this world with inky little feet, and only after that first irresistable action do you get to tramp out a story everywhere you go.

You were not born by yourself, not in any sense. Be made happy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSlxeOPnUZU

*Example borrowed from Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, of course

Author’s note: in honor of the year anniversary of this story, I present you with a revised-and-expanded director’s cut of the tale, now with more ruminating on the meaning of my degree! So please enjoy, and if not, well…honi soit qui mal y pense.

I.

You know your academic position is terrible when you envy philosophy majors. People may rail against the impracticality of studying philosophy, but at least philosophy is something they’ve heard of. You’ve got to know something exists to disdain it, and philosophy’s notoriety for uselessness makes it identifiable, acknowledged, real.

The field of Medieval Studies should be so lucky. Despite the damning nebulousness of the “studies” suffix that tends to raise red flags relative to its rigor and eyebrows relative to its inclusion on a resume, it’s not, generally speaking, something people know about. It’s not surprising, really: it’s an interdisciplinary field that few schools offer as an undergraduate major, since it can reasonably be subsumed into History, Comparative Literature, Religious Studies, or even Philosophy, depending on the bent of the student in question.

But even with the discovery of its existence, its purpose doesn’t really compute. Despite denoting a sizeable chunk of recorded history, the medieval era—the period roughly between the fall of the Roman Empire and Columbus’ first voyage—is defined in our collective consciousness as a time of backwardness and ignorance. The customary labels these years bear (Dark Ages, medieval [Latin media aeva, in the middle age]) indicate either ignorance, or, at best, a stopping ground midway to the “rebirth” and “enlightenment” of the epochs to follow. These people lived on a flat earth, ate mud, and genuinely feared dragon attacks like some kind of Ye Olde Rednecks.

And yet, as willing as we are to dismiss the serious scholarly contributions of the medievals, we’re more than happy to ape, mock, and even meticulously recreate their way of life. Our popular imagination is obsessed with a romanticized pageantry of powerful kings and beautiful princesses, blithely gnawing at a turkey leg while watching a recreated joust. The middle ages are for spectacle, for sport, but not really for study.

Depending on whom you ask, Medieval Studies is the epitome of either everything that’s right about college education or everything that’s wrong with it. Because medieval scholars were themselves polymaths trained and productive in many spheres (what we would now call, rather unfairly, Renaissance men), the prescribed courses for a Medieval Studies degree typically involve work in the all-stars of the liberal arts pantheon: literature, history, art history, foreign languages, etc. But unlike other interdisciplinary fields (International Studies, Political Science) that seem to be able to translate a load of reading-and-writing-heavy classes into at least a few practical careers, Medieval Studies is fairly firmly locked in the realm of the theoretical. You just can’t argue that translating Beowulf is going to serve you in the professional world. Maybe you can parlay it into some kind of vaguely-related job doing something like curating museums, but if not, there’s always grad school to flee to and more debt to accrue before a long, publish-or-perish struggle to ascend in academia.

But what if you don’t want to be—if there is such a thing—a career medievalist? What if you genuinely love and believe in the works and writings of people dead almost a millennium, a people whose era has become synonymous with draconian, ignorant, and hopelessly underevolved? What if, like me, you wanted your four years poured into 12^th century French romance and biblical exegesis and Gothic architecture to end up as more than a quarter-million-dollar party trick, to make good on their promise to give you the coveted critical thinking skills that were supposed to be part and party to a holistic discipline like this? And what if, despite all this, you found yourself in the pouring rain, wearing a paper crown, and sobbing into your cell phone in the parking lot of the Schaumburg, Illinois, Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament theme restaurant?

Welcome to my education.

II.

You need two things to enjoy the Medieval Times experience: a liberal attitude towards historical accuracy and a willingness to waste money on ridiculous shit. Being both a Medieval Studies major and a congenital dork, I am a prime sucker for their brand of schlock, and I refused to go anywhere else for my birthday. I recruited four friends, and despite varying levels of enthusiasm, our spirits were high as we piled into my ancient Volvo to head for the castle in nearby Schaumburg, IL.

“I went to the New York Medieval Times when I was six,” my friend Briseida was saying. “You eat with your hands. And it was the best fucking chicken I have ever eaten.”

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When I was six or seven, my parents and I were watching Wallace and Gromit’s “The Wrong Trousers,” and, at a particularly emotional scene where the bipedal, sentient dog Gromit dons a yellow slicker and leaves his hapless human friend Wallace with his new penguin friend, I asked what seemed like a straightforward question.

“Why is it always raining when it’s sad?”

I did not go on to a lucrative career in film criticism (if such a thing exists), but I did go on to love metaphors. Metaphors are the building blocks of stories, after all! Or maybe they’re the vanishing point of stories, that gives everything depth. Or! Maybe they’re the pulsing mall-music of stories, pitched at exactly the right frequency to make you vibrate, Tacoma-Narrows-style, with a desire to buy buy buy whatever emotional tenor the author has orchestrated therein.

See what I mean? Good, bad, mixed, or mangled, I never met a phor I didn’t like.

When you’re a writer, this is a desirable quality. If you’re dutifully showing, and not telling, you trot out all kinds of masterful, lyrical symbols to climate-control the biodome of your story’s universe. Every character shaves with Occam’s razor and offs themselves with Chekov’s gun. Things are portentious, ominous, foreboding, pregnant (not literally, of course), and zeugmatic. Of course, spilling your story’s guts into this kind of augury can easily tip into overkill, but if you can keep a light hand, I would argue that your metaphors will be the single elevating grace of any work.

When you’re a person, though, a love for metaphor is dangerous. A metaphor is like a lens into or out of something. It’s a way to see what isn’t there in what is–good for art, bad for life. Because if you let the sundry inconveniences and arguments of normal living in a normal life echo out into Grand Significance, you are going to make yourself sad. You are going to make your boyfriend a Shepherd’s Pie and despair when he adds chili powder because it means he thinks you’re boring. You are going to fall out of crow pose and fret about the intrapersonal implications of not being able to literally hold yourself up. You are going to break your banjo strings and think you are impotent and helpless as an artist. You are going to see the brunch place’s shortage of bacon sandwiches as a sign that you can’t connect with your family while they are in town even though everyone is perfectly content to order eggs instead.

Stop. Don’t think so much. Your life may be your art, but you are not the ultimate artist. Just because you’re a writer when creating stories doesn’t mean that you are a thing written when you are living them out. Some things just happen, and most things aren’t showing you anything. Sometimes you need to break down the imagined artifice of everyday life and remind yourself of facts: your boyfriend likes spicy food. Arm muscles take a while to build. Banjo strings are finicky. Bacon sandwiches are understandably popular and that place has good gingerbread lattés anyway. 

So. It’s not raining because it’s sad, it’s raining because there’s a low pressure system coming in. And  when a double rainbow shows up afterwards, you can drag your visiting best friends out onto the porch and admire your sheer, collective luck at being privy to the unknowable and random machinations of nature.

Say “I love you.” Use your words. Tell, don’t show, your life to yourself.

For the last two years of my life, I have seen a movie, in theaters, at least once a week. In the past seven days, I have gone to the movies six times. I am likely to go again today, possibly twice, and then again on Friday.

Yes, I’m still working on all those projects. My second novel-in-progress is chugging pluckily along and the freelance stuff is getting lanced for (mostly) free. I’m also devoting non-zero amounts of time to practicing the banjo, cooking sufficient amounts of food, and learning to hold myself up with my arms at yoga class. I am dealing with crises by thinking positively and constructively. In short, I am still making good use of this time for Personal and Creative Development. And movies are a part of this, no question.

When I was in Paris, I went once or twice a week as a way to practice my language skills without having to talk to anyone, because I’m an introvert and because who knew when else I would get a chance to see Le Princess Movie? When I was in Chicago, I worked in the projection booth at Doc Films and unrolled celluloid strips of everything from avant-garde shorts on 16mm to all 7 (!!) reels of the Lord of the Rings: Extended Edition. In Montreal, there’s a film festival every damn week, Le Cinéclub, and six-dollar-cheapie-Tuesdays at the AMC three blocks from my apartment. I have been racking up points on my Scene card and Cineplex and could probably recite every line of dialogue in the “Silver Linings Playbook” trailer from memory.

I don’t go because I’m a film person. I love popcorny dumb movies and actually get to the theater early to watch the 2wenty* and all the trailers and engage in single-player games of “spot the visual metaphor.” I go because I just like movies. Roger Ebert, who is one of my favorite writers, critic or otherwise, once wrote something about “hunkering down in the womblike security of the theater,” and while I don’t want to get all Freudian nirvana-instinct on you, I’ll hazard at least that it’s a truth universally acknowledged that every moviegoer must be in want of some kind of temporary yet all-encompassing escape.

And yet I have this idea that people think going to the movies alone and frequently is weird. While it may be charming and quaint to have the cheesemonger at the market recognize you and start wrapping up your favorite sharp cheddar as you approach, it’s embarrassing for the ticket girl with the glasses to see you three days in a row and punch another movie out of your carnet étudiant**.

But. I saw documentaries on all of the following: a quirky Icelandic grandma-cum-musician, Dominican monks, teenagers in America and teenagers in Quebec, even though the latter group of kids had such thick accents I didn’t understand much. I saw Cloud Atlas and then I read Cloud Atlas. I saw Peaches Do Herself. I was unimpressed with Wreck-It Ralph and incredibly distracted by JGL’s fake eyebrows in Looper. And I didn’t have to coordinate schedules or justify seeing The Perks of Being A Wallflower without reading the book first or avoid French movies because my companion wouldn’t understand without subtitles.

It might be incredibly self-indulgent, but as addictions go, this one is minimally expensive and nominally enriching, so I think it shakes out. If you have yet to go to the movies alone, please do make a date with yourself. And bring your student ID.

*pronounced two-wenty, a-duh
**though I am not technically a student any longer, I am still as poor as one, so I feel that this is morally justifiable