marie kondo – The Red Pen of Doom

Listen: this silly blog started when I needed to sell the Epic Black Car, then romance authors and readers found that post—and you rock, all of you. What is up with your bad selves?

Later, I needed to hock The Nikon of Infinite Beauty. However: Today is different. See, we packed up and moved out while contractors went wild with hammers and power tools. Now we’re back in but still unpacking boxes, which in America are not allowed to be opened until they’ve been seasoned in your garage or basement for at least seven years.

I am therefore finding a mountain of things to sell, give away, or offer up to anybody passing by as I walk Ruthie, the Friendliest Dog in the World, who lays on the street to show skittish dogs that she is Friend and tried to do this to my neighbor’s red pickup truck, which did not reciprocate. But that’s cool, Ruthie still wants to play with the Shiny Red Truck.

Also, this is only the first batch. There will be more. Help me get my Marie Kondo on.

PLANT DECAPITATOR

I have used weed-whackers, which have little strings that keep breaking, especially when you try to attack a nasty armored weed. Weed-whackers are not my favorite.

This thing, now, doesn’t mess around with plastic strings. This is a Ryobi BC30 with an invincible steel blade. It stands against the garage drinking Mad Dog 20/20’s until the weed-whackers run out of string, then it saunters down to absolutely destroy any sort of unwanted vegetation, be it blackberries or scotch broom.

Scotch broom is the Devil and the reason I own the Vorpal Two-Handed Machete, which also likes to cut down trees and does a better job of it than Mr. Axe, who supposedly specializes in trees and only trees. Mr. Axe, you have been eclipsed and made redundant. Sorry.

Condition: Gently pre-owned.

Price: $40 or a bottle of sake. Yes, you can get good bottles of sake at Trader Joe’s for like $10, and that feels like a cheat code. Cheat away. I like sake.

ROTATING METAL TEETH OF DEATH

This is a gas-powered instrument of destruction, commonly used by jugglers who have lost the plot and get the idea that “Hey, keeping eight balls in the air is difficult and all, but what would really impress the ladies and fill up my tips can would be throwing at chain saw in there. And what if I set this thing on fire?”

Artists also use this Stihl MS 170’s like this to delicately turn blocks of ice into dragons and such for weddings or whatever, or to transform blocks of wood into friendly bears that guard your driveway.

Carhartt People have been known to grab these things and attack trees, who with their dying Ent breath try very hard to fall on those who attack them or nearby Ford F-150’s that cost more than our first house. Do not mess with people wearing striped shirts and doubly-reinforced jeans.

Condition: New, never been used. I believe these things cost $300-something new.

Price: If you are a juggler, $5,938 and proof of current health insurance. Yes, that price is stupid, and so is lighting death machines on fire and juggling with them. For everybody else, $100 or two bottles of bourbon.

PONDERING SURFACE

You can’t think deep thoughts while driving, running, or eating. But you have to remember all those glorious ideas until you have the chance to sit down at desk like this to write them down.

How you write them is up to you, artistic person. Maybe you plop down the laptop, one-finger an old Underwood, or go wild with a fountain pen. I don’t care if you use this to knit hats for cats–you need a surface to get your groove on like it’s a roller rink in 1976 and Rick James is on full blast.

Condition: Good, and not chewed up by puppies at all. Now, this is a utilitarian desk, something we probably bought at Fred Meyer, assembled, and painted blue. It looks fine, but it’s not some solid-wood heirloom to pass down to your kids.

Price: Free. Want to give it a home? Take it. If taking free things make your tummy feel funny, throw me a tiny airport-sized bottle of tequila.

Note: Now, the natural question is, don’t you need something to sit on, because otherwise a desk is kinda useless? Yes. The good news is you probably have a chair or three already. Desks like this and standard chairs go together just fine. It would be crazy to expect me to also have a handy chair to go with your new blue Desk of Deep Thoughts.

CHAIR

A trendy mesh chair, bit too small for a tall Swede like me. I like old-fashioned chair with leather. The picture above is the same chair, but new. Saw it in the store and took a shot.

Condition: The corner of the right arm looks like it got chewed by a puppy. Otherwise, good.

Price: Give me a number, or a puppy that doesn’t chew things, or three gray kittens with bright blue eyes.

Note: Now you’re gonna ask for a laptop. Bahahahaha no, I am not Santa Claus or some kind of genie trapped in a lamp.

HP LAPTOP

Do you have a lap, or a spiffy blue pondering surface that’s empty and lonely?

Stick this thing on there. Mash the power button and see the glory of Windows 10 or whatever. Watch as Microsoft tells you a bunch of times that this laptop may have six gigs of RAM but does not have the secret technology to run Windows 11. Connect to the series of tubes via this magic called “wifi,” which kinda looks like “wife” when you glance at it. Not even close. Wives are different and special and not for sale, barter, or trade. They pick you, dummy.

Fire up the internets and download OpenOffice, because I’m not leaving my copy of Office on this thing. Get paint.net and other stuff without paying a dime.

Go wild with your creative self. Write a short story about a lonely widow in Kansas who finds a purpose in life and a family of sorts after she starts a biker gang at the nursing home, except their bikes are souped-up Little Rascals, and their first crime spree is a mistake when Harold decides they should rob a bank, and because he’s hungry he picks the Food Bank, where the staff happily help them load up and ride off at full speed, thinking the cops will be right behind them.

Write the spec movie script COCAINE BEAR VERSUS PREDATOR VERSUS ALIEN, but don’t hit send on that sucker until after the writer’s strike is over, because no, AI cannot write shows and movies and novels, and Hollywood execs living in mansions need to stop giving writers crumbs and realize there is no movie business without dorky writers with dorky haircuts who have brains seventeen times bigger than theirs.

Price: It’s an old laptop that still works fine. Hell if I know what that’s worth on the free market. Let’s say 10 medium-sized avocados.

Note: Now you’ll expect art lessons or a camera, and I am sorry, this is not happening, I am not a department store named Guy’s Warehouse of Power Tools and Random Stuff.

TWO DIGITAL CAMERAS

When I first took my own shots at Papers of News, we had 35 mm film cameras that came in rolls of 24 shots, which went down to 12 shots once the papers got into financial trouble by stupidly going deep into debt to buy smaller papers that they then shut down. Brilliant! This is why the global list of the world’s billionaires is chock full of former newspaper executivies.

With these two digital cameras, there’s not need to worry about only having 12 shots. Machine gun it, because every frame of film costs dollars while digital is free free free.

These are little cameras, the kind you stick in your pocket. Can your iPhone take better photos? Probably. Can you give these things to two kids who need to turn off the screens and go outside to take shots of bees in flowers and deer poop and extreme closeups of a chocolate lab’s nose? Yes. You can do that. Totally recommended. Because little kids will only lose or break iPhones, where if they lose or break one of these things, meh.

Price: Close your eyes, reach into your wallet, and throw two random bills at me. Has to be random, no cheating. Does a one feel that different from a twenty or a fifty? Does anybody have fifties in their wallet these days? Doubt it. Haven’t seen one in forever.

Note: Cameras are window to the world. Every kid and adult should shoot photos to find out what they see as beautiful and share that beauty with others.

DETAILS FOR ALL ITEMS

Shipping and handling: Just like Amazon, I offer free shipping if you are Prime member, except I haven’t started giving out Prime memberships to anybody yet, so we’re not shipping anything, especially heavy thing like chainsaws and big bulky things like desks or long-ass machines like plant decapitators.

Pickup or delivery: I will deliver any or all of these items to anyone in the continental United States. Not kidding for once! Just pay mileage (0.655 per mile, standard federal rate) and meals (not Burger King, can’t do it) along with lodging. To be fancy, we go all Latin call all those things per diem. I will blog my way along I-90 to Missouri or whatever, where we will eat ghost peppers at a biker bar in between shots of cheap tequila before you return to the yacht club to brag about sending a speechwriter on a giant road trip to hand-deliver a $20 desk.

Other items: The other 498 bins in the garage and basement are what J.J. Abrams like to call mystery boxes, as in, it takes me two hours in a dark room to figure out what’s inside all of them, and popcorn is optional.

Making a trade or purchase: If you want any of this stuff, or have a request—Blue Ray or VHS movies! a single 3.5″ disk!t—hit me up in the comments or on the Twitters @speechwriterguy, because it’s probably in one of these boxes.

Yes, that headline is an intentional nod to Marie Kondo and her method of tidying up, where you hold up each possession and ask yourself, “Does this spark joy?”

I keep seeing some writers talk about how hard, or even painful, writing can be.

And sure, writing at a high level isn’t easy. It takes a lot of time, talent and sweat.

Yet I’m going to argue that conventional wisdom here is completely wrong. The entire process of writing and editing not only can be, but SHOULD BE, a joy. And if it’s not, you should switch things around to make it fun rather than torture.

Reason Number 1: A better product

Humans are designed, through millions of years of evolution, to seek out pleasure and avoid pain.

If your writing and editing process are inherently painful, your body and brain will rebel every time you sit down at the keyboard or pick up a pen.

That’s unhealthy and unsustainable. And it makes for a bad product, because you’ll rush through it as fast as you can, to get that pain over with.

I’m not arguing against speed here. Writing fast, and in the flow, is a beautiful thing that should be embraced.

Yet if the process itself is painful, you’re going to (a) avoid it, (b) catch writer’s block a helluva lot and (c) not produce what you’re capable of doing.

Reason Number 2: You have to make a mountain, then let things go

Marie Kondo’s key instruction when tidying up is to make a mountain–of your clothes, your books, your papers, whatever it is you’re cleaning up. Then you go through each item and decide whether it sparks joy. If it doesn’t, you give it away to Goodwill, recycle it or send it off to Never Never Land.

Writing anything important should begin the same way.

Never try to research and edit while your write a first draft. Make a mountain of your research, ideas and notes. Look at each item. Does it spark joy?

Put the ones that spark joy in a special file or folders.

Keep the marginal things in Give Away place, a scratch file. This is also a good way to let yourself edit ruthlessly, and avoid feeling terrible about possibly killing words that took you hours to research and write. You’re keeping them in a safe home. They’ll be fine, and you can recycle them for something else if needed.

Trash what you’ll never use. And surprisingly, doing all this tends to cut your mountain down to a hill that’s only 25 percent of your original pile.

When you’re only dealing with a tiny hill instead of a mountain, writing anything of length becomes insanely easier. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, you feel confident, and all the raw material’s you’re working with spark joy.

Writing anything of length takes discipline to get through the hard parts. Which will happen.

Joy is the fuel that gets you over those speed bumps. It’s hard to crank away at something kind of boring, like proofing a document, or doing layout, if you don’t have a reward waiting on the other side. If you only anticipate more drudgery and pain, why push through it?

Cutting down your mountain of raw material to a small hill that sparks joy also helps make these tough spots a lot smaller and more manageable.

Reason Number 3: You have to feel the emotion you want readers to feel

This is literally the advice we give, as speechwriters, because simply delivering lines without mangling them–in a speech, a play or a movie–isn’t enough.

You have to actually feel the raw emotions you want your audience to feel.

Because an audience doesn’t feel what you TELL them to feel. They mirror your emotions.

And I’ll argue that the best writing and speaking evoke the emotions of joy and wonder.

Sure, there are times in novel, screenplay or speech when you want the audience to feel sad or angry. But you can’t write anything of length that’s entirely angry or 100 percent sad. There has to be a mixture of emotions.

What do people want? They want joy, wonder and laughter. The other emotions, like anger, fear, sadness and horror, are powerful spices you can’t pour into a dish. They need to be used carefully and sparingly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1CvTC1CH7Y

The best writing I do is full of joy and wonder because that’s what I feel while writing it. And yes, if you’re doing a story or speech about something sad, it’s a good sign that you tear up while writing it. If I don’t cry a little when writing something profoundly sad, then I’m doing another draft.

And if something buried in your mountain doesn’t spark joy–whether it’s a chapter in your epic novel about elves with lightsabers and the trolls who love them, a play where all the actors are hanging upside down the entire time or the process by which you edit and proof something–try something else.

Talk to other writers and editors on Twitter, by email or in person at conferences. They’re a friendly bunch. Ask what they’ve figured out to make some of the hardest and sometimes painful tasks into activities that are fun. Personally, I find the final spell-check and editing of a novel to be a long, hard slog, so I’ve turned it onto a game to see how many words I can kill, especially repetitive words or phrases. And now it’s a kick in the paints.

So please, embrace the pleasure of writing and editing. Feel the emotions you want the audience to feel. All of them.

Because writing and reading should do always, always spark joy and wonder.