I’d Rather Be Writing – Tom Johnson

Last Sunday we celebrated Father’s Day. I don’t know if this is a global holiday, or if it’s just a U.S. holiday, but reading an article in the Father’s Day edition from the New York Times made me think about my role as a father.

I am a lot of different things to different people. To some, I’m a blogger and podcaster. To others, I’m an employee and team member. To others, I’m a church member and scout leader. To others, a basketball player. To others, a friend. To my wife, a husband. But to three young girls, I’m a dad.

In the NY Times article, Michael Winerip explains that some years ago, he was putting in 11 hour days with a 2.5 hour daily commute. When he finally arrived home in the evenings, his children would catch just a glimpse of their father before bedtime. Winerip was upset about missing his kids grow up. And his wife felt like her career was suffering due to being off track as a stay-at-home mother. So they switched, and he became the stay-at-home parent to raise their children while she worked. Read the rest of this entry »

Having arrived a little early for the Transalpine Conference, where I’m giving a WordPress workshop and a couple of presentations, I spent the day wandering Vienna. In the morning I saw the Schonbrunn Palace, which is kind of mind-blowing in how huge and magnificent it looks. It housed 1,500 people at the time, and makes the White House look like servant’s quarters. One of the emperor’s wives had a special room where she beautified her ankle-length hair, the keeping of which took several hours a day. The same emperor’s wife often skipped dinner so she could stay thin. Apparently she was attractive and knew it, and wanted to keep it that way. Read the rest of this entry »

Lately I’ve been reading Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin: Selling Ideas and Solving Problems Through Pictures. In the book, Roam asserts that drawing pictures can help you solve problems. It’s a simple but profound assertion.

You’re no doubt familiar with the same assertion with writing. Writing is a tool for thinking, a method for unlocking ideas. Writing about something helps you think about it, helps you see the problem more clearly, helps you see what you’re trying to say. Most people who write know this. It’s what teachers in writing courses tell students who dislike writing—that even if you’re not going to be a writer, writing is a worthwhile skill because it extends your critical thinking faculties.

Roam essentially says drawing provides much the same critical thinking tool. Read the rest of this entry »

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success challenges assumptions about innate genius and natural-born talent. Through a series of detailed examples, Gladwell explains away these gifts by attributing them to practice, timing, circumstance, upbringing, culture, and opportunity. In other words, those really smart, successful people we admire—Mozart, Bill Gates, the Beatles—weren’t born with natural talent. Instead, they had the right upbringing, were in the right place at the right time, and through 10,000 hours of hard work and a few lucky opportunities, landed success. Read the rest of this entry »

The past few days I was camping in southern Utah at Sand Hollow State Park. When we entered the park, the ranger knew — but did not share with us upon entering — that the area sported some of the windiest regions in southern Utah. The ranger later explained that only three days out of the last month were non-windy.

Had we known this from the start, we might have pitched our tent in a more secluded shelter. But as we had no idea about the wind, we put up our tent in full view of the lake, which spanned out before us majestically alongside green buttes and round red-rock formations in the sand.

During the first night, after enjoying a more or less windless day, I awoke to the sound of my tent panel flapping in the dark. It sounded like footsteps in gravel, and my senses alerted to the idea that someone might be right outside my tent. I knew, however, that it was only the rain fly, flapping off and on, sometimes violently. The wind blew and blew, but I finally fell back asleep.

The next day, after traveling to see petroglyphs and a gypsum rock formation, we returned to the campsite to find the wind blowing harder than the previous day. The wind blew so hard it was bending back the poles of our tent, and my brother-in-law urged me to quickly collapse my tent to avoid damage. Had we not staked it down and had numerous bags and blankets inside, I’m sure the tent would have blown a hundred feet away.

I removed the poles from the grommets and folded the tent down on the ground. It laid there a defeated clump of material, like a parachute wrapped around bushes. We sat inside the trailer for the next few hours, where my in-laws and their family slept, and watched the wind whip across the lake. White caps and incoming waves repeated all afternoon. At times the trailer rocked, as the wind gained speed and then let down again, and then rocked the trailer again. The flags on the four wheelers whipped in the wind, and we all felt trapped inside the trailer. Read the rest of this entry »

When you first start blogging and even years after you’ve been blogging, the question of what to write about is constantly on your mind. In the past, I’ve followed traditional advice (from people such as Lorelle at WordPress.com) and maintained a specific focus to my blog. I’ve also recommended this strategy to others. In fact, after recommending it to one blogger, she reported that having a specific focus helped her come up with ideas to write about.

This past week I’ve been rethinking the need for a specific focus. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I had an epiphany the other week about my life, and I looked at my blog and felt that I wasn’t writing the way I truly wanted to write. If someone were to hack into my database and corrupt it, causing me to lose all, I wouldn’t be broken-hearted. A lot of these topics — on technical communication — don’t have a lot of meaning to me. Read the rest of this entry »

Stephen Fry on the pleasure of language

This podcast from Stephen Fry on language is one of the most entertaining, thought-provoking, well-read essays on language I’ve ever heard. In the podcast, Fry says he often encounters people who consider themselves high-minded grammarians, who assume he is on their side when they express their disgust of common grammar errors, such as “12 Items or Less” signs in grocery stories (rather than “fewer”), or misuses of “disinterested,” or conversions of nouns into unconventional verbs (such as “actioned”).

Rather than become cramped by rules and purist ideas of correctness, Fry argues that language should be a source of pleasure. Language is an innate right (even a biological inheritance) that everyone is entitled to. People should be free to to bend and modify it as they please. It is a flexible and elastic source of pleasure, not merely a vehicle for communication. Like wine and cheese, which are more than just means of sustenance but rather sources of delight, Fry says language can also be used for delight.

A few months ago I attended a creative/professional writing conference in Idaho in which the keynote speaker spent thirty minutes explaining that, when you become a writer, you begin to notice grammar mistakes everywhere. She had an extensive number of clippings from newspapers detailing myriad usage errors. Although her talk was funny and light-hearted, it revealed a tragic mindset. Writing (at least the more creative kind) isn’t about learning correct grammar. It’s about learning to find pleasure in language, especially when you steer it outside convention.

James Hall's book of essays, "Hot Damn"

On my father’s recent visit from Florida, he brought me a stack of books, one of them James Hall’s collection of essays, Hot Damn!

James Hall is a poet and crime novelist, but he once wrote essays for a newspaper for several years. This book is a collection of those essays.

The topics of Hall’s essays range widely — from adventures in Florida to experiences as a boy in a library, to buying a house, to eating Cheetos while watching sports. But one theme is consistent throughout: the celebration of life. Falling in love with something. Getting excited about an adventure or place that others might simply regard as ordinary.

I believe this attitude is something I’ve largely forgotten. Let me excerpt a few paragraphs that demonstrate his love for life, especially Florida.

In “Home at Last,” Hall explains that he turned down the Air Force Academy to attend Florida Presbyterian College — not for religious reasons, but to escape in to Florida:

I did four glorious years of college in the charming and soporific Satin Petersburg of the sixties. On holidays I explored the west coast, the Keys, camping at starkly primitive Bahia Honda, building bonfires on midnight beaches, discovering out-of-the-way taverns that served cheap pitchers of beer and spectacular cheeseburgers, bays where fish jumped happily into frying pans, the unair-conditioned piano bars in Key West where writers huddled in the corners and talked the secret talk. I had never felt so at home.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I had the opportunity to listen to Chad Hymas, an inspirational speaker (not the Chris Farley type), who related several powerful stories that changed him. A quadriplegic after a tractor-hay bale incident, Hymas shared how one can live a happier, more fulfilled, more productive life even without the use of one’s limbs.

We all sat mesmerized while Hymas related story after story. His speech wasn’t polished or his diction articulate, but his life-altering stories held me at full attention. As I walked back to my department, I wondered how he had become a motivational speaker. Was it the handful of life-altering stories, which he could deliver in sincere, moving ways, that made him inspirational?  I thought, perhaps if I had a handful of life-altering stories … Read the rest of this entry »

Thinking a little about my philosophy of life

A couple of months ago I started writing little thoughts on post-it notes next to my monitor at work. The thoughts consisted of random little epiphanies or conclusions about life. I took the best 10 post-in notes and have collected them here as an attempt toward a philosophy of life. It’s not much of a “philosophy,” but I don’t know what else to call it.

In writing, story is what matters — everything else is a footnote.

When I was an undergrad majoring in English, I knew then what appealed to me about literature: the stories. Everything else was secondary. Story is also what gets my attention in blog posts, presentations, and conversations. Story creates meaning. Even bad writing is forgivable if the story is good. Read the rest of this entry »