Domestic and brain-training.

[mrissa]

markgritter got home last night, yay! Frontier lied to me about his plane, though, so I had an hour in the airport waiting. I was finishing the book I'd brought when he walked up. Timing, as they say.

And once again this year, Mark's timing was impeccable: he was gone the week the tomatoes started to go nuts. We only have three tomato plants, but they're producing like crazy. If anybody knows of a south Mpls or suburban shelter that takes fresh garden produce for the homeless and hungry, we may get to that point this year. Or we may just make a lot of soup and salsa and give tomatoes to everyone we see. Beware, bewaaaare!

I was wiggling my fingers in kind of a scary way there. Sorry you couldn't see it.

Anyway, clever, tasty tomato recipes are welcome here.

Quite awhile ago, when I had one of my posts where the book had eaten my head for a bit, rose_and_ivy said, "I've been there, but not with a story. How did you train your brain that way?" And I've been thinking about it, trying to get at the real answer, especially as I suspect that I am not very far from another, longer brain-eaten period, so I may not have my head up to think about this sort of thing for awhile now if I don't do it right away.

I think the brain-eating parts are in some ways the easy parts. They're the fun parts, the glamorous parts, the parts where being a writer is a similar kind of fun to being a reader. If you're writing a novel and you never, ever have a time when you're really excited about it, when you just can't stop working on it...then maybe it's time to think about writing a different novel. At least one person should be excited about every novel written for at least a little bit, and you don't have any guarantees about anybody else.

I think there are two harder things to train one's brain to do. Among relevant things, I mean; there are all sorts of hard things to train one's brain to do. One of them is to work on the current project when it isn't shiny and absorbing, and the other is the pattern-matching thing.

How I trained my brain to work on the current project when it isn't shiny and absorbing: well. See, I was a physics grad student, and when you are a physics grad student, being a physics grad student can very easily eat the entire rest of your life if you will let it. It's like any other creative pursuit in that it permits you to pour as much of your time and energy into it as you care to. So if I was to remain a physics grad student and SF writer, rather than becoming a physics grad student who used to dabble in writing a little SF, I was going to have to make absolutely sure I got writing done whether it was sparkly or not. The one field demanded discipline of me, and so the other had to have it if it was to compete. If I wanted both, the external pressures were all with physics: I had a grad department, classes, an advisor, administrators at LLNL in charge of handling my fellowship. With the way those things pushed, if I didn't push back, deliberately and hard, the writing was going to become a hobby, and then it was going to become something that used to be a hobby. When we were figuring out how our lives were going as adults, one of my old friends said, "I don't want us to become people who used to send each other Christmas cards." I agreed with him about him (and we've succeeded in that), but I also felt that way about writing. The other alternative in this case was clear and worse, and so I just got used to writing whether I felt like it or not. I stopped asking myself whether I particularly felt like writing and started just doing it. Sometimes it was no fun, sometimes it was no good, but nobody asked me if I particularly felt like going to physics classes on a given day, or whether I felt like doing my homework, or whether I felt like going into the lab. Because it wasn't about what I wanted in the moment, it was about what I wanted in my life. The things you're serious about are a sum of moments, and not all of the moments are shiny, but they all have to be there, or the whole thing falls apart.

I can now trust myself a bit more. This week, for example, has been fairly light on prose, and I didn't push it, and as a result I ended up with several things I needed to figure out presented to me, as though on a mental platter. Sometimes letting my brain be for a bit will give it room to figure stuff out. This is not the same as slacking off. Sometimes it's hard to get my bulldog brain to figure out the difference, though.

The other thing, training the pattern-matching brain -- well. You're looking to train it the way you would learn to spot anything else, really. Like people who do jigsaw puzzles get better at them with time, or like people who make jewelry learn to spot the exact bead they need in a bunch of beads that look similar to the rest of us. You read a lot, you write a lot, you poke at what you're reading (whether it's something of someone else's or something of yours) and see what makes it work or fail. I did a lot of freewriting in my paper journals. I still jot titles there, first sentences, notes for particular stories. Writing a lot of short stories has probably helped with some of this, because it means seeing story possibilities in all sorts of things. But writing novels also has its own pattern-matching thing, where everything falls together. Street signs and commercials for auto insurance and washing the dog's nose-prints off the windows all start to make your brain go sideways into book. I don't know how I trained my brain to do that, because it isn't automatic with writing a book. The texture, the bumps and bits that snag a reader's brain and keep it down in the book -- that doesn't come right away. But eventually books create a gravitational pull, and the trick becomes keeping the kitchen sink out of them instead of finding a place that will sell you a kitchen sink.

I fear it's one of those annoying things that you do by doing it, and thinking hard about doing it, and then doing it some more. Probably there are people who are more naturally brilliant at this than I am and got there just by thinking really hard first, rather than by writing things that weren't much good and then making them better, and by reading a lot. And by thinking about story stuff in other structures, sculptures and songs and making brownies with your grandmother and whatever else you've got. I don't know, though; if you read a lot and write a lot and try to improve what you've written, and the pattern-matching never clicks in and the automatic stubbornness never clicks in, well, hey, you've still gotten to read a lot and write a lot, and that's worth something even without this specific category of external results.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I fear it's one of those annoying things that you do by doing it, and thinking hard about doing it, and then doing it some more.

Only way I've ever found.

My favorite tomato thing is salad caprese, which is good tomatoes and good mozzarella and fresh basil and olive oil and balsamic vinegar and sea salt and fresh black pepper all cut up and mixed together. For a variation, pile it on toasted italian bread and put it under the broiler for a bit.

I could pretty much live on that all summer.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. This is why "fresh mozz" is on the grocery list and basil is in the garden. I also like the variation of sandwich with pesto instead of loose basil and olive oil and balsamic etc.

Every single summer, because I am not very bright, I have at least one week when I eat so much of acidic foods that I make my mouth hurt, and then I can't come up with anything good that isn't really acidic. ("We could go to Cam Ranh Bay for Vietnamese food! Ooh, orange chic...um. So maybe not. Oh, I know, we could stay home and I could make chili...no...or company chicken...with lots of fresh lemon juice...so also no...same objection to chicken soup...ummmm...barbecued -- no, crud....") I am trying to avoid that this summer. It is Hard.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

everything's better with yogurt!

[numinicious.livejournal.com]

I was wiggling my fingers in kind of a scary way there. Sorry you couldn't see it.
I could totally see it. *g*

And your comments on grad-level physics vs. writing very much reflects my current situation. I obviously have no intention of pursuing writing as anything other than a hobby, but regardless, I want to do my best at it. So I was waving my hands and going, "Hear, hear!" as I was reading your post. Classes and work are pushing very, very hard right now, and only last semester I decided to let writing push back again. Lately I haven't been writing, but the creative juices are definitely flowing, and it feels good to see little hidden stories in things I would normally overlook. It feels really, really good.

And this is why I really love reading your blog. So often, I find myself nodding frantically and muttering, "Finally, someone gets it!"
Plus you have a cute puppy. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Her Cuteness is draped over my lap at this very moment.

Being a serious student in one of the sciences is not much like very many other things. Throw writing into the mix, and a lot of the people who really "get it" don't have time to say so!

[numinicious.livejournal.com]

Gods, yes. I agree wholeheartedly.

It's especially hard when people don't understand that you have to write to keep yourself fed (grants) and you also have to write to keep yourself sane (fiction).

And what's worse is that they're technically different, but the process is so similar. I sometimes worry about mixing up the two, i.e.; thinking of fictional writing more as work than play. I'd hate for that to happen, there seems to be a very fine line between the two.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Maybe you should read -- who was it, Diane Ackerman? Anyway, there was someone I was reading on creative play, serious play if you will. Whoever it was, they were smart. Sigh. Useful, I know.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'm in a thorny situation where the external demandy-ness of grad school has fallen off sharply at the exact same time that I find myself under contract for books and the like. Ergo, grad school is in danger of turning into the hobby for me. I'm trying to figure out how to get around that.

But eventually books create a gravitational pull, and the trick becomes keeping the kitchen sink out of them instead of finding a place that will sell you a kitchen sink.

You come up with the best metaphors.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You come up with the best metaphors.

Thanks! I think it's my total lack of personal dignity. Helps in many situations: sick people, the very elderly, small children, metaphors....

Grad school has moved out of hobby position for me and into "thing I used to do," so I am the very last person who should give you any advice on that.

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

I assume that's tongue in cheek. You have amazing personal dignity, and it is well deserved. What you lack is personal self-aggrandizement. Don't confuse character with self-importance. You have loads of the former and, in my sadly limited experience, none of the latter.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think dignity may be one of those things that is not enhanced by great consciousness of same.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But to be a bit clearer, I think it's important not to be afraid of doing things because one might look silly. That may be the difference between having dignity and having awareness of one's own dignity.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Also, thanks.

[brooksmoses]

Ergo, grad school is in danger of turning into the hobby for me.

Some thoughts, from someone who is just now rather surprised to find himself coming out the end of the grad-school tunnel:

First, at a rough guess, was the fiction-writing something that you did as a "hobby" for a while before now finding yourself under contract for books, etc.? If so, it sounds like you still managed to have that work out, yes?

Second, looking back at things, I'm pretty sure that not letting grad school eat one's life is a key part of surviving it, at least for some of us. I spent two or three years going through a bout of depression in the middle, and an honest assessment of the amount of work I got done during that time is pretty much consistent with what I'd have gotten done if I were treating it as a serious hobby, especially if one isn't counting the month or so each year of crunch time before a conference publication was due. (Unlike a hobby, though, I was sitting in my chair and trying to work for quite a sufficient number of hours to be "full time", but the depression meant that I wasn't accomplishing much with that time.) And I got through okay in the end.

I don't know if those are helpful thoughts or not.

[cissa.livejournal.com]

Tomatoes: My favorite way to preserve them is roasting. Slice a sufficiency of tomatoes thick- like, 0.5 in. Take a rimmed baking pan and sprinkle with olive oil. Add chopped basil if you like. Layer tomatoes about 1.5 tomatoes tick- shingle them. Sprinkle with more olive oil,and some slivered garlic if you like.

Bake at 350-425F until all the liquid is condensed and they start to caramelize- usually 2-4 hours, depending on juiciness of tomatoes and temp. Scrape into freezer bags in the sort of amounts you'd tend to use, and freeze.

I like this because there's no need to peel the things, it reduces a lot of tomato bulk to a compact format, and the results are lovely on pizza or pasta.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Cool -- I am fond of roasted tomatoes! (Unfortunately, probably fonder than anyone else in the house, but if it's not all the tomatoes, no problem!)

[cissa.livejournal.com]

When I make homemade pizza, I use the roasted tomatoes plus chopped caramelized onions as the "base"- usually all I add is cheese and some basil, though sometimes I'll use pepperoni or mushrooms as well. That's mostly what I use the tomatoes for, though sometimes they appear on pasta. I'm sure they could stand in for canned diced tomatoes etc., too.