a map of political beliefs

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After watching this video about the history of fascism, I was surprised to read that people disagreed about whether the Democratic or Republican party is closer to fascism. I realized that we easily confuse these terms, and after some online research, I made this diagram to help me understand how various political terms relate to each other:

TL;DR — Fascism and communism are two vastly opposed forms of authoritarian rule. Republicans are probably closer to fascism, but Democrats are probably closer to communism.

I’d be curious to know how my understanding matches up with yours.

the skill of chasing inspiration

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During my second semester of graduate school, I began to mentally sort my projects into three categories.

  1. Projects that feel like my heart’s work.
    This is the gold. When the story you’re telling and the words & music you’re writing feel aligned with your inner sense of purpose. When your idea fuels your inspiration and your heart wants intently to discover this thing you’re making. I pretty much always wish I were writing pieces in this category.
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  2. Projects that feel like skill-building opportunities.
    Especially when deadlines loom, we don’t always have the luxury to discover the work that feels like our heart’s work. Even if we don’t feel inspired about the ideas themselves, we can find inspiration in the opportunity we have to build our skills so that when we find project ideas that do feel like our heart’s work, we have the tools in our toolkit to make the most of those moments of inspiration.
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  3. Projects that feel like doing laundry.
    Occasionally, we run across projects that we have to do in order to be reasonable graduate students, even though we struggle to find the excitement for them. These exercises can feel like going through the motions without aim; these are the most frustrating pieces to write. To minimize the frustration, I often give these exercises as little time as possible; whatever comes out of me goes into the piece without much foresight or afterthought.

This mental sorting has been helpful for me, enabling me to prioritize my favorite projects while behaving reasonably about my least favorite projects.

However, I’m beginning to understand that part of being an effective artist means knowing how to bring a project from a lower category to a higher category.

I call this the skill of chasing inspiration—of noticing when you aren’t feeling inspired and venturing out in search for a kernel or framing that re-sparks your excitement.

Sometimes, this skill will feel like an active “chasing” or “pursuing.” Other times it will feel like a natural “following” or “finding.”

This skill becomes especially necessary as we begin to write longer pieces. Of course, we should avoid embarking on a longer piece unless we already love the idea enough that it drives us out of bed in the morning, but if we start to feel lost and uninspired—and inevitably, we will—we must know how to find the tinder and kindling to reignite our own inspiration.

We don’t always have to do this alone. Our collaborators, teachers, and supporters can help us. But we will get stuck. So we’d better cultivate the skill of getting unstuck.

personal brand, revisited

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Two years ago, considering my personal brand was a helpful method for understanding who I want to be and become. As I begin a new chapter of active collaboration with others, I reflect again on who I want to be when I’m interacting with folks.

 

How do I want others to perceive me?

She is a vibrant force upon the world
  • Creative — She keeps coming up with amazing / interesting ideas
  • Individual — She has a clear and unique artistic voice
  • Ambitious — She sets high standards—and meets them
She creates work that makes me feel things
  • Insightful — She knows how to get to the heart of a thing
  • Empathic — She really understands people; she really understands me
  • Effective — She oozes competence; she is highly articulate
I like working with her
  • Kind — She cares about me as a human; I feel good about myself when I work with her
  • Honest — She unflinchingly chooses to make our work better
  • Learning — She listens, learns, and adapts
A few “how” keywords: Caring, Vulnerable, Intentional, Proactive, Generous

 

How am I afraid others will perceive me?

  • An organizer, but not a creator
  • Not unique; another x just like everyone else
  • Shallow, unthoughtful
  • Slow to get work done
  • Inaccessible, difficult to understand
  • Mean, unfair, inflexible

art as an opportunity for connection

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“To be honest, I don’t really remember the show, but I do remember that I held hands with my date!”

I think this might be how most people perceive art, most of the time—as an opportunity for connecting with others. Perhaps we can embrace the humility of letting our art be merely an occasion for people to cherish a person they love or get closer to someone new. Perhaps this is more than enough.

Thank you to Connie, Matt, and Anna for inspiring this post.

the bogus condition

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In The Musical Theatre Writer’s Survival Guide, author David Spencer proclaims:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS WRITER’S BLOCK. NOT WHEN A musical with a decently developing foundation is under way.

There is emotional turmoil and personal mishegoss that can interfere with writing, to be sure; and certainly the need to juggle a pay-the-bills “civilian” job with limited creative time can sap one’s energy and concentration—at least until you figure out how to prioritize and pace yourself. But allowing for the absence or the moderation or the mastery of such real-life distractions, and the presence of even mild professional-minded functionality, writer’s block is a mythical malady borne of four quite real symptoms:

1. You don’t have enough information.
2. The song or scene you’re trying to write is resisting you because the underlying premise is false.
3. Something is intrinsically amiss with your story structure or your underlying theme, and in trying to accommodate that flaw, you’re running up against its limitations.
4. What you’re trying to write simply isn’t good enough by your own standards, and your internal barometer is urging you to start again.

What I like about this framework is that if you can categorize which symptom you are experiencing, you can take concrete actions to resolve the “block.” If 1), you need to study your character more closely, or research the parameters of the situation, or find music that inspires the sound palette you want. If 2), you need to rewrite the scene or musicalize with a different moment or a different character. If 3), you need to re-examine your assumptions about the larger story and see if one of those premises is problematic. If 4), you just need to identify the part that’s dissatisfying and rewrite it completely, or even start the whole song over from scratch. And if you’re not sure which symptom it is, you can try any number of these solutions, and see what works.

advice for writing lyrics, for beginners

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A friend recently asked me if I had any advice for writing lyrics. I’m not sure I have especially profound songwriting advice to share, as I still feel very much like a beginner myself, but here are a few thoughts on songwriting that I found helpful when I got started.
  • Look at and learn from songs you like! How the writer moves between ideas, uses structure, chooses words, etc. Lorde’s “Liability” is one that I’ve enjoyed studying this way.
  • It’s okay for lyrics to not feel right / up to your aesthetic standard in the first draft. Rewriting is very common and normal. Getting better at something over time is normal, too.
  • Many—most?—successful songs are about one core idea. Ideally, the core idea will develop or vary throughout the song so that it’s interesting for the listener. In typical song structures, the core idea is in the chorus, and the variation happens in the verse—but you can play with that. 
  • You don’t have to rhyme. Also, playing with “near rhymes” can be really fun. Jason Mraz’s “A Beautiful Mess” is one song I love that uses near rhymes in a neat way.
Getting stuck while writing a song is normal, too. Depending on the type of stuck-ness you are experiencing, different things might help:
  • Go back to the character. Who is singing this song? What’s happening in their lives, and what would they want to say about it? This is especially helpful for musical theatre lyrics.
  • Freewrite. Choose a topic or symbol in the song and write whatever comes to mind about it, just to get yourself expressing (however unartfully) about the song’s key ideas. Describing the five traditional senses (and the less traditional senses, too) as they relate to your idea/symbol can open up your writing. Sometimes, an interesting idea will pop up and you can capitalize on that.
  • Let your thesaurus & rhyming dictionary spark new ideas. Picking a few keywords and then roaming through a thesaurus or rhyming dictionary with them can generate unexpected ideas.
  • Ask other folks to read/listen. Though it’s often good to take folks’ advice with a grain of salt, folks tend to represent their own reflections fairly honestly, and you can use that information to influence your writing.

Thank you to Nathan for inspiring this post.

productive and reflective journaling

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Productive Journaling: Caveday Focus Questions

In November, I attended a CreativeMornings FieldTrip by Caveday, an organization that teaches people how to work smarter by facilitating deep work sessions. Before we began our work sprint, we each wrote down the answer to three questions:

  1. What do you want to accomplish?
  2. How will you approach this?
  3. What does finished look like?

I like Questions 1 and 2, because it’s surprising how often I sit down to “write” or “compose” but don’t have a clear picture of exactly what I’ll be doing. By being more specific about what I’m doing—whether it’s clarifying the story I want to tell, browsing rhyming dictionary entries for key words, designing the verse melody, or re-composing the music for the bridge—I give myself the clarity I need to take action without second-guessing myself. I may later discover that my approach isn’t working, but at least I’m using my time trying out an approach, not waffling about which approach to try.

I like Question 3, because I sometimes get distracted from getting closer to completing my task because I’m refining something that’s already “good enough.” The temptation to refine is especially true for me in artistic/creative endeavors, where the details do matter, and sometimes “good enough” isn’t actually good enough. (To elaborate, I do think there are some art forms that I can enjoy even if the quality isn’t all there—for example, I can enjoy a nascent singer-songwriter’s work even if they’re rough around the edges—but for some art forms, notably ballet and opera, I have a hard time enjoying the form when it’s done in a mediocre way, even though it’s truly sublime and unlike anything else when it’s done at the highest level by the most talented people.) But done now is better than perfect never.

Reflective Journaling: The Five Minute Journal Questions

I probably first read about The Five Minute Journal a long time ago, but I rediscovered these questions a few days ago. The premise is that you take just five minutes a day to reflect on 2-3 answers for each of the following questions:

  1. I am grateful for…
  2. Would would make today great?
  3. Daily affirmation. I am…
  4. 3 Amazing things that happened today…
  5. How could I have made today even better?

I like these questions because they orient your reflection in constructive ways. You’re primed to feel grateful, to create greatness in your day, and to affirm a positive self-narrative. You celebrate the highlights and look toward how you can improve things for the future.

I also like that these questions are often straightforward to answer, because they’re grounded in how you’re currently feeling as well as the day immediately before and behind you, which makes reflection feel natural, less forced.

Reflective Journaling: Morning Pages

If you want to create, but you experience self-doubt about your ability or energy to create, I highly, highly recommend Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. This book significantly changed my view on what it means to create and be an artist, and I’ve spoken with countless others who have been positively transformed by this book too. Yes, a lot of the content and tone is hokey, but in spite of that, this book has been extremely effective at empowering artists to feel freedom to create.

With regarding to journaling, one of the most valuable exercises from the book is Morning Pages—a ritual of writing three pages of stream-of-consciousness thinking every day. One of the benefits of doing this much stream-of-consciousness writing every day is that you allow space to reflect on life experiences that you may not have been fully aware were affecting or bothering you in a way that needed more processing and reflection. The sheer volume of writing allows these experiences to surface and demand attention and action. If meditation gives you the quiet space to observe thoughts as they happen and set them aside, morning pages give you the freedom to record those thoughts and how you’d like to act on them.

There’s a copy of the book here which I found from elsewhere on the internet. Read it!

loneliness

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If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry. — Anton Chekhov

how we talk about love

Many romance stories—from Hollywood rom-coms, Disney princess tales, and American romance novels to Japanese shoujo manga and Korean dramas—celebrate the idea that finding your life partner is a magical and effortless experience. When you meet your partner, you’ll love them at first sight. Your partner will immediately understand you and your needs, even though you have never communicated those needs before. Your partner will match you in every imaginable way and do everything for you that they can. And you will never feel lonely, ever again.

The reality, we learn, is not so rosy. It turns out that many of us take time to fall in love. It turns out that most people aren’t mind-readers, and even though your partner might be great at interpreting your body language or know your history and personality well enough that they often have a good guess for what you’re thinking, it’s just not reasonable to expect that they’ll always know your every wish. It also turns out that most people have lives of their own, and even though your partner might be there for you most of the time, they can’t always resolve your needs for you. In fact, sometimes, they might choose not to resolve your needs for you, even if they can. And sometimes, that doesn’t make them a bad or mean partner—it just makes them a person who sets boundaries and has needs of their own. It also turns out that if you are prone to feeling lonely, you will probably still feel lonely, time and again.

your needs are your own

I once walked into a management coaching session the morning after my then-partner and I had a fight. Unable to focus on work, I blubbered about the situation: essentially, my partner and I had been talking over the phone about a different upsetting issue (that I can no longer remember), and in the midst of this conversation filled with sad and negative emotions, he told me that he needed to sleep and couldn’t keep talking.

It really wasn’t an unreasonable request on his part. At the time, I lived on the west coast and he lived on the east coast, so he was actually already staying up very late to comfort me, even though he had to wake up very early for work the next day. But it still hurt me a lot that even though he knew I was hurting, he wanted to sleep more than he wanted to be with me. I felt abandoned. I felt that if he loved me more, he would stay awake and be with me. I was supposedly in a healthy relationship with the person I love, and yet I felt so alone.

It sounds like you had a need for companionship that he wasn’t able to fulfill, my coach said. It sounds like he decided to take care of his own needs, and he didn’t continue tending to yours.

I feel like if he loves me, he should put my needs before his own, I said. I know that I’m being hypocritical, because I should have put his need to sleep before my own need for companionship. But I was really hurting.

From what you’ve told me about him before, it sounds like he often does put your needs before his own, my coach said. Let me ask you: do you want him to be there for you because he wants to, or because he feels like he has to?

I feel like he should always want to be there for me because he loves me.

And yet it seems like he loves you, and he wanted to be there for you, and he needed sleep, and he decided to sleep. He tells you this, and you ask him if he would please stay up with you, and he says he’s sorry, but no, he won’t. So let’s say, at that point, you angrily demand that he stay up with you. How do you think he would feel?

Silence.

I don’t think you want him to resent you. It’s good that you communicate your needs to him, but if he can’t resolve your needs, you need to remember that your needs are your own, and that it isn’t his responsibility to resolve them. You can go to him, and he will often be happy to be there for you—to comfort you, distract you, cheer you up. But sometimes he will say no, and you will need to find another way to deal with your feelings.

people who are not our partner

There are many ways that we can feel better with self-care. But if our need is for companionship, we turn to people who are not our partner for emotional support. That’s healthy and a good thing in many cases. But it’s also probably how most emotional affairs begin—when one partner feels like they can no longer depend on the other for emotional support, and instead turns to someone else.

feeling seen

Years later. You hear a piece of music, or see a performance, or behold a work of art—that moves you deeply, to your core, that twists you up inside. What did you think? you ask your partner tentatively.

I thought it was okay, they say. Casually. As if you hadn’t just had your soul ripped out of you.

And you stare at this person you love, and you feel like there is this huge part of your inner core that they can’t see, and you wonder why they love you, and if those are the reasons for which you want to be loved.

love without boundaries

We’re taught by stories that love without boundaries is beautiful. The man who gives up everything to be with the woman he loves. The parent who sacrifices everything to support their child. The soldier who jumps on the grenade to save his comrades. And truly, it is beautiful when people care deeply. I find deep caring to be one of the most beautiful things in the world.

But it’s certainly not “healthy.”

But the beauty of love isn’t in dramatic gestures, they say. Love is beautiful in the everyday. And it’s not wrong that there is a beauty to love in the everyday. In fact, I’m a huge proponent of giving life to the stories of love in the everyday, because I think it isn’t done enough, and I think we (read: I) develop unrealistic expectations about relationships as a result. But the fact that love is beautiful in the everyday doesn’t actually prevent love from being beautiful in unhealthy, unrealistic dramatic gestures. We (read: I) still love The Notebook, not just in spite of its romantic extravagance, but also because of it.

And so there’s this tension between the beauty of deep, self-sacrificing caring—of love without boundaries—and the healthiness of taking care of ourselves.

what we want

So what does it mean, for two people to come together as partners? Are we just two separate humans who decide to experience life together because we like to fulfill each other’s needs, participate in each other’s experiences, and make joint decisions on our collective happiness? I think that’s a healthy definition—that although relationships serve merely as a salve for the loneliness of existence, the beauty of the salve is worth celebrating.

And yet, I feel like something is missing from that view of love. Perhaps it’s the unhealthy and unrealistic beauty of dramatic stories, and perhaps we shouldn’t want that—and we don’t want it, but we also do. Or perhaps it’s this sense that no matter whom we choose as our partner, we still won’t escape being alone.

modern stories of love

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There’s a new crop of stories emerging that try to center on more realistic views of romance and relationships. Examples include Alain de Botton’s novel The Course of Love, John Bowe’s collection of anecdotes Us: Americans Talk About Love, The New York Times’ Modern Love column, Sue Johnson’s couples therapy book Hold Me Tight, and Esther Perel’s couples therapy podcast Where Should We Begin?. All of these works have their flaws, and it’s no surprise that only the first of the five is a work of fiction; the rest rely on the fact that the stories are real in order to engage their audience.

An alternative to telling realistic stories is using hyperbolized humor to reveal the underlying problems with idealized romance. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does so with aplomb, and even Disney has begun to caricature its own romanticized world with Frozen’s “Love is an Open Door.” The heightened emotional nature of song and dance that audiences love might not suit a low-drama, high-realism story, but it can suit an obviously exaggerated situation. By redirecting those heightened emotions for satiric occasions rather than realistic ones, humor could play a fascinating role in influencing us to examine our unhealthy assumptions about love.