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Sue Shellenbarger wrote an interesting – to me, at least, and given the blog posts I’ve read lately about our creative endeavors, interesting to some of you on the same blog circuit as me – article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal: Lesson From Buffett On Following Dreams.
 Seems that Warren Buffett, the richest man in America (or maybe the world, I forget which, but he’s right up there), gave his 19 year old son Peter “enough [money] to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.”
His son promptly dropped out of college, set up a music studio and began playing the piano, writing music, and experimenting with electronic sounds. He’s been successful enough that he’s now (this is Peter Buffett, not Jimmy – I have no idea if they are related) an Emmy Award-winning musician.
And now, of course, he’s written a book, and this, I guess, is the ‘lesson’ of the article. “If I had faced the necessity of making a living from day one, I would not have been able to follow the path I chose,” he wrote.
Well.
Shellenbarger, who writes regularly on juggling work and family, followed that statement with this one of her own: “If someone had given me the gift of time, for example, as Mr. Buffett did for his son, I imagine I would have squandered it writing bad novels, rather than getting useful paying work as a secretary, then as a teacher, and then going to graduate school in journalism, a far more practical path in my case.” [emphasis added]
Ouch.
Her career trajectory runs pretty parallel to mine – though right now I’m writing what is arguably a bad novel (I refuse to think I’m squandering my time, though) and her WSJ article today focuses on decluttering her house. Yeah, she can park her car in the garage now, but how about her soul? Her muse?
I spent many years as a single parent running my own business, and during those busy years, I almost never read a novel, let alone tried to write one. I was on that practical path that paid the mortgage and the orthodontist. Now I have a bit more time – even though Warren Buffett has not yet graced me with my own pot of gold – and I don’t want to think I’m squandering it.
If I don’t complete a successful/marketable/critically acclaimed novel, does that mean I’m squandering my time? I sure hope not. Do I need to write a best-seller to show I’m not wasting my time?
How about you? What drives you?
And why?
Squandering? Really?
 …I thought I’d post this picture of the seitan I made and wrote about a couple of weeks ago.
I wanted to show that delicious, healthy food can look just as unappetizing as the artery-clogger I posted on Friday. This is my seitan, right before getting sliced and tossed into a yummy stir-fry. Sorta like skinless chicken breasts, which also look pretty nasty, especially to chickens.
If anyone is interested in the recipe, leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll write it out for you. I combined a bunch of recipes, added some ingredients, forgot to add some others, and it came out great.
I do have a couple of southern vegan/vegetarian cookbooks: Cookin’ Southern Vegetarian Style and a really neat split cookbook: Hot Damn and Hell Yeah/The Dirty South Cookbook. They are both filled with tasty recipes. Big Bubba Tofu in the Trailer Park Specials section is living proof that grease and salt are not just the provenance of the meat and potatoes set.
 But Southern cooking is a lot more than barbequed rodents and chicken-fried tofu. If you drive along a country road in the south you’ll pass cotton fields, tobacco barns, then a Free Will Baptist church. More cotton fields, then the Pentecostal church. Tobacco and another Baptist. And so on.
Southern cooking is covered-dish lunches and suppers at these little country churches. (I know, it’s not just a Southern thang, but since we’re here….)
I got to experience real Southern cooking and hospitality during the middle of NaNoWriMo. It was a glorious clear, warm fall day and my little church choir drove a couple of hours to sing at a tiny Universalist Church that was celebrating its 125 years as “an oasis of liberalism in a desert of orthodoxy.”
What an understatement. In the church foyer, looking like the Smith Bros. cough drop box, hung two pictures of the founding ministers, side by bearded side. One had served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, while the other had fought for the Union, indicating from the get-go “the congregation’s willingness to embrace diversity of opinion and outlook.”
After the service, we went out back where picnic tables were piled high with the most amazing assortment of dishes: fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, fried okra, fried tomatoes, succotash, Crowder peas, baked beans, mashed potatoes, hush puppies, fruit salad, collards, green beans, ham, cornbread, biscuits and gravy, all waiting to be washed down with big pitchers of sweet tea.
While we ate, the kids played hide and seek in the ancient church graveyard next to the picnic tables. Birds sang, the sun shone, leaves rustled in the breeze. Time was…timeless.
Then we moved on to the dessert table, and Lordy, Lordy!! Pecan pie, chocolate pecan pie, red devil cake, lemon squares, cherry pie, chocolate cream pie.
Yeah, I had two slices of the made-from-scratch 7-Up pound cake. It was awesome.
And that is Southern cooking. Enjoy, y’all.
The whole trailer shook when JimBob slammed the door on his way out.
“Berneice, that man gonna explode from mad one of these days. And with his heart — Uh uh.”
Berneice kept stirring the gravy; JimBob didn’t like it lumpy.
“Well, Lord’ll decide that one. I just try and help Him along as best I can.” Berneice winked at Loreen as she threw an extra mound of bacon grease in the gravy.
She added more salt.
 This is in some ways an add-on to my post on Signs. I spent most of yesterday sitting in the emergency room with a friend and watching dozens of people’s life dramas play out under the blare of daytime television, reeking of second-hand cigarette smoke and old sweat. By the time I got home for good around 9 PM, I didn’t feel much like posting.
I’m plowing through The Truth About Fiction, which I posted a little about here. Most of the book is pretty basic, which is okay; it’s supposed to be for introductory creative writing classes — which is the ONLY way the publisher can get away with charging an arm and two legs for it, IMO.
I’m struggling with my boring old main character Becca, and I got to watch a lot of humanity yesterday. This line from the book jumped out and danced for me when I read it:
The choices the character makes should be irrevocable. If he can go back, where’s the tension?
Choices that don’t matter that much is why Becca is so boring, and and having made irrevocable choices is why so many people were hanging around the emergency room on a bright sunny day.
Thoughts?
Wow, talk about Signs. I’ve had a bunch of them in the last couple of days. First, my brother called and started talking about The Situation forty – forty! – years ago. I don’t want to get too far into it here, but I did something selfless back then to help my family. It radically and completely changed the entire trajectory of my life, and not necessarily for the better. (I’ll never know, will I?)
If my family had listened to even one word I’d said for the preceding eight years, The Situation wouldn’t have existed and who knows where I’d be now, but probably not Here.
And no one noticed what I did and what I lost (or possibly gained) by doing it, or acknowledged it, or even had the good grace to thank me for it.
Until my brother brought it up in a phone call yesterday. He had noticed, it turns out, and has felt bad for the past forty years that he couldn’t do anything to change the situation at the time.
Well. Ya think this is conjuring up a whole host of thoughts, memories, ‘what if’s’? My mind is in overdrive.
While noodling over this, I got a Facebook message from an old friend who remembered that thirty – thirty! – years ago I told her I’d wished I’d written the book Kinflicks.
Kinflicks? I can barely remember it, and I haven’t read anything by Lisa Alther since then, although that’s about to change. According to an Amazon review, it’s ‘a realistic warts-and-all view’ of coming of age in the ‘60’s. Since that could describe my life back in the day, fer sure I’ll catch up with it again.
The grand finale in the ‘What next?’ sweepstakes came this morning when I finally organized my office and put things into my new filing cabinet. I was putting something on the already-crammed bookshelf when a book fell to the floor.
Hmm… Steven Schoen’s The Truth About Fiction. I don’t remember buying it, let alone reading it, but there was a yellowed strip of newspaper holding my place, so I must have at least started it. I opened it to the bookmark. Ah, Chapter 4: Plot.
Here’s the first page of the chapter:
If you want to make yourself depressed, all you have to do is go to a library or one of the new superstore book vendors. Wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling books and magazines. Page after page of fiction. Obviously, everything that can be written already has been, right? What new is there left for you to do?
Take heart. The fact is, in the broad strokes, on all those pages, there are really only six plots.
First of all, there are only three basic conflicts:
a. A person at war with another person.
b. A person at war with his (sic) world.
c. A person at war with himself.
And there are only two outcomes: either the protagonist wins, or he loses.
3 possible conflicts X 2 possible endings = six plots.
Whaddya think?
I’ll let y’all know what I think of the Schoen book. I can already tell you that it’s 115 pages soaking wet and that Amazon.com is charging $44.40 for it new. Which makes me think it must be used as a text in college writing classes, where the cost of student textbooks is shameful. Which pisses me off, and is another reason I’m glad I’m not in academia full-time anymore.
So: Now I need to figure out how to connect all the dots life has presented me with in the last 48 hours. Stay tuned.
I always thought that left-handedness was supposed to be the mark of creativity and original thinking, as well as that illegible backward hand-writing.
So I looked into it a little. Alan Searleman, a psychology professor at St. Lawrence University did some tests and concluded there were more left-handed people with IQs over 140 than right-handed people. According to Searleman, “Left-handers have a higher ‘fluid’ intelligence and better vocabulary than the majority of the population. This is perhaps why there are more of them in creative professions, such as music, art and writing.”
Ya think?
Not according to Paul Satz, chief of the neuropsychology program at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute: “Being a leftie is not a marker for creativity. That’s sort of nonsense. Creative geniuses have been left-handed and right-handed. Lefties in the population have basically the same level of [thinking] skills as right-handed people. They also live as long. Being left-handed has nothing to do with it.”
(The above kind of stuff is why I’m glad I’m no longer in academia full-time.)
Turns out lots of famous people are lefties. Every U.S. president since Reagan except for Dubya is left-handed. Albert Einstein. Bart Simpson. Half of the Beatles (Ringo and Paul). M.C. Escher.
But not that many authors. Eudora Welty. Mark Twain. Dave Barry? So that brings me to the burning questions of the day:
Are lefties different than righties, and vice versa? If so, how?
Are you a leftie or a rightie?
Does it matter?
Please submit your answers in a blue examination booklet, using APA Style Sheet as your grammar and punctuation guide.
JUST KIDDING! But I am curious to know your answers. I’ll do it too. Thanks!
Senator Hagan was in town today. That’s me in the pink baseball cap (from the local TV news).
I’ll be back tomorrow.
A is helping me streamline and simplify my blog, so stay tuned for some improvements.
Namaste.
I finished yesterday’s post, published it and looked at it again — something felt Not. Quite. Right. I did a little research, and sure enough, cardinals eat nuts and seeds, NOT bugs. Shoulda known that from my bird feeder.
So I edited Ms. C’s invitation from “Let’s go eat some BUGS” to “Let’s go eat some SEEDS.”
Phew, much better.
And then I thought about it some: I spent actual real-time minutes researching whether a talking – hello? — wild songbird would eat bugs or seeds. I was aiming for authenticity in my dialogue. In billable hours it would have been only five bucks or so, but still.
That’s just plain nuts. If I were Ms. C chattering away in my front yard, I’d say, for sure, “Let’s go get some chocolate croissants and maybe a latte.”
Next time I’ll try for more authenticity, more true grit.
I know y’all are anxious to find out what’s happening with my kamikaze cardinal, so here’s the latest:
Whoops, wrong cardinals…. sorry.
This morning I walked down the driveway to get the paper and there in my palm trees (minus the snow, thank heaven) were not only the male cardinal, but a female cardinal as well. Phew. A couple of minutes later I saw them both in front of the garage window, where I overheard the following conversation:
Mr. C: …and then I fought him – bam bam bam – until I scared him out to kingdom come. (Cardinals = get it?)
Ms. C: Oh, you brave thing. Just look at your crumpled feathers from defending the territory for me!
Mr. C: Yeah, you shoulda seen the other guy. I just knocked him out of the park. (Cardinals = get it?)
Ms. C: You are my hero! Let’s go eat some seeds to celebrate and then gather a bunch of sticks for a love nest.
And they sailed off into the oak trees.
**
Obviously I am having difficulty working on my novel this morning.
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Notable Quotable
"From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’.
I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”
-- Howard Zinn, 1922-2010
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