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3d6, straight down the line

Lately, I’ve been rolling up zero-level characters for DCC RPG. Not for any reason, really, just for the fun of it. It’s weirdly meditative. Roll 3d6, straight down the line,  and see what unbalanced, horrible/incredible stats ensue. Then roll for birth augur, occupation, random equipment, and copper pieces and bingo! Instant player character.

Why is this kind of character creation so satisfying? I think it’s due to the randomness of it. The character that begins to take shape, with her 16 strength and her 7 luck, her beggar bowl and her random candle, all leads to a low-pressure but satisfying imaginative exercise. I have to start making sense of this weird and sometimes contradictory amalgamation of numbers, stats, equipment, and info. Why was her birth augur “conceived on horseback”? What’s the story with that?! Why does she have such high strength and such low luck? Where did she get the candle and what was the last thing that someone dropped in her beggar bowl?

I’m not planning to use the character for anything, but even if I were going to run her through a funnel adventure, the whole thing is still very low-stakes. I can let my imagination drift through this hazy fictive world and spend a few moments dreaming up an entirely new  person. There’s no real purpose, it’s just me playing a game. And when I’m done, I feel both satisfied and energized. The combination of rolling dice, checking charts, and drawing the outlines of a fictional character all help me chill out and relax.

And yeah, I need to relax. Often, when I sit down to write or work on my fiction, I’m tense. “It’s getting late, I only have twenty minutes,” or, “I have no idea what to write and it’s gonna suck.” I sit down tense. Pressured.

I hate that.

I know Bradbury’s advice: “Relax. Don’t think. Work.” But I really struggle with the “relax” part. I can’t get past my perfectionism, and I’m always under the illusion that I’m running out of time.

So. I grab my 3d6, some percentage dice, a d24, a d30, and 5d12, a pencil and paper, and suddenly I’m in the midst of CHARACTER CREATION: such a simple process and yet the possibilities feel inexhaustible. It relaxes me, let’s me do something with my hands, let’s me explore a little corner of my imagination without worry or pressure.

Whether I play these characters or not doesn’t matter. They didn’t exist a couple of minutes ago, but now they do. A handful of random rolls and a new character came into being. Where once there was nothing, now there is something. It’s that simple, and it’s awesome. It might not seem very creative since the entire process is so formulaic and random, but I’m gonna go ahead and argue that it IS creative. As the dice fall and the stats gets filled, my brain starts to take over inventing and filling in the blanks. The numbers on the paper don’t really make the character; I do. Through my imagination, the character becomes a character and not just a series of game mechanics. This is what I love about randomization. It isn’t a substitute for creativity and invention: it’s a tool for creativity and invention. It allows the player to synthesize disparate elements, and in that act of synthesis, the player engages in the highest order of thinking and creation. All thanks to a roll of the dice.

Readying Myself for the Circle

Every school year as spring gets under way, I begin thinking in earnest about the next school year. Looking back on all the mistakes I’ve made and contriving ways to do better next year. Figuring out new lesson plans, new texts to read with the students, new methods and such. I do it every year; before the current term is over, I’m already on my way to the next one. By April, I’m ready to chuck everything and restart in September. I suppose it’s my way of renewal, of keeping myself on my toes, of trying constantly to improve. I want to be good at my job. I want to get better. So I start looking back at what I did wrong and try figuring out how to make it right.

Except this year, when I wasn’t even sure I’d return to teaching at all. That was in December/January. I was having an existential crisis (which I tend to have every few years or so), and I wondered if my dedication to teaching was waning. I had been lured by the work-from-home days of early COVID and started looking for ways to get out of teaching. I was ready, I told myself.

But I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t even very willing. I knew this because I was still reading tons of books and articles about teaching, pedagogy, schooling and unschooling, education philosophy, “how to be a better teacher,” all that jazz, and I was still thinking like a teacher: How can I share this with my students? What’s the best way assess their work? Why is learning important? What is worth learning? A lot of my mental space was taken up with teacher-y stuff, and I found myself not disengaged but reengaged, recommitted.

It helped that I started forming the habit of daily fiction writing (and blogging!). One of my biggest reasons for wanting to leave teaching was the fact that I seemed to lack any meaningful time for my own creative writing. I felt like my fiction writing was drifting further and further out to sea and I was standing on the shore, helpless and abandoned. So, of course, I had a grass is greener moment (or several) as I pictured myself working from home and having copious amounts of free time in which to write.

But as we all know about that green grass on the other side: it’s been spray-painted on.

Once I got into the groove and started writing more each day, I discovered that teaching wasn’t what was making me gloomy, it was the fact that my writing had fallen by the wayside. Once my writing was back on-track, teaching no longer felt like a terrible grind. It has immense perks, not least of which that I get to spend a good chunk of my time talking to students about writing and helping them develop their own skills as writers and readers. The other perk is that I get to spend my time thinking about big ideas, about literature and politics and language — all things I enjoy thinking about. And finally, I get to spend my time with the students, who are funny, passionate, goofy, clever, insightful, and kind. And I get to work on being kind too, and patient, and compassionate. It’s good for my immortal soul in that way.

All of this is an immense preamble to my main point, which is this: I think I am at last ready to embrace the “Harkness Circle” in all my classes (with one large caveat: this will be a Harkness Circle on my own terms; see below).

Until now, I’ve been using it as one tool among many; every few days we’ll have our “Harkness Discussion” and the students will lead the discussion and I’ll take notes and we’ll all pretend like we’re doing something important and educational, but in reality, we all know this is just a performance, just one more thing to enact in our elaborately designed game of “playing school.” I’m not saying these discussion aren’t sometimes really excellent. They are. Sometimes the insights and ideas are surprising and astounding. I’ve come away from some of these discussions seeing new things about a novel or a poem that I never would have thought of on my own, and that is all due to the ingenuity and insight of the students.

So, it’s not like the Harkness discussions I do now are garbage. They’re not.

But there’s something lacking in them because they are simply one thing among many. They are days to endure for students who don’t like them, and they are days that feel different from all the other days in our week or our month. They stand out, and not always in a good way.

What I’ve decided is that I need to stop making these discussions just one of the many tricks in my bag. Instead, I need to focus my entire classroom around them.

Everyday, students will enter my room and they will find a seat at the circle. (Side note: this year, because of COVID, we can’t have the desks arranged in a circle; this has severely hampered the discussions because students can’t face each other. I pray to God that next year we can arrange the desks how we like.) After students enter the circle, they will write for a few minutes to clear their heads or prepare for our discussion. And then, with myself usually seated amongst them (but not necessarily always), the discussion can begin. I may start it. I may ask someone else to start it. I may propose a question or have students begin sharing their commentaries on the reading. I may have a student share her writing and we conduct a writing workshop on it. I may just have the students ask me questions or tell me what they want to talk about. But whatever we do to facilitate the discussion, each day we’ll meet in the circle. It will be our thing. Not just a card trick we do every few days to impress, but the very air we breathe, the sun around which we revolve.

This is where my caveat comes in. One problem I’ve always had with Harkness is that the teacher is supposed to fade into the background. This is how it had been presented to me by other faculty and some articles I’d read. But after a bit more training and reading some published work from Phillips Exeter Academy teachers themselves, I’ve come to see that the teacher doesn’t have to disappear (in fact, she probably shouldn’t, most of the time). The teacher can be in the circle too. She doesn’t have to always stay, but she doesn’t have to disappear either.

One thing that’s been missing from my classes this year (and this is mostly due to the COVID restrictions we have in place) is the spontaneity with which I like to teach. I always imagined the Harkness discussions as being somewhat formal; they weren’t authentic discussions, but instead these rigid performances where everyone tried to score her three points. They had topics that were to be discussed or a text or whatever. But they weren’t supposed to veer, they weren’t supposed to swerve.

I reject that. I want swerves. I like looseness. I want discussions to be natural and real. And my voice as the teacher is part of that realness. I’m part of the class too, not just an overseer. My voice might be needed, just as the voices of the students are needed. For me, the circle is more important than the method. By being in the circle everyday, by being able to see each other’s faces and talk directly to each other, to allow that kind of connection to happen in the circle, that is the important thing. That is what I want to embrace. Disappearing into the aether or pretending I don’t have opinions or ideas doesn’t feel right. If I’m in the circle, then I’m in the circle.

This doesn’t mean I lecture in the circle while the students all stare off into space. It simply means I’m part of the discussion too. Sometimes the students need to hear my voice, my ideas, my idiosyncrasies. All of us our necessary, including the teacher.

And it reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about for a long time: the importance of design. The way we set up our classrooms matters. The way we design our spaces matters. One of the most important things I plan to do next year is keep my desks in a circle. The circle matters. It is the means by which we will engage with one another. It IS the pedagogy, in a sense.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at. My late spring reassessment and preparation for next year has sprung these seedlings. I hope I’ll get to see if they flower next fall.

Poem #10

She’d said she wanted to go back to Naples one more time.

She’d said FDR would always be her president.

She’d said things about my Uncle Leonard

that I didn’t quite understand.

At her death, I was home, the football game on TV.

They’d said she had died.

I’d said something unremarkable because

that was all my lips could say.

It came out all wrong.

It was like the salt sea waters had choked me,

the waves crashing the shoreline of Ischia,

and gray water and rocks.

 

[This poem came from a writing exercise that we did in the Exeter Humanities Institute online pilot program that I’m participating in. We started with a poem written by someone else, and then after reading it aloud several times, each of us taking turns with a line or a phrase or a sentence, we had to choose one line or one fragment of a line and make it the start of our own poem. I took the simple fragment of a line: “she’d said.”

The original poem had been about an aunt, so then I thought about my own great-aunt. I had been thinking about her earlier in the day, while showing a film to my students. It was an old movie — 1934’s Imitation of Life — and the movie famously ends with a funeral procession. During the film, I had been thinking about — and regretting — that I have often been absent from the deathbeds of my family members. As the day wore on, however, my mind moved on to other things: grading papers, making dinner, getting the kids ready for their sleepover at Grandma’s.

I knew I had this online class to attend, but I hadn’t been thinking about Imitation of Life or my great-aunt or anything beforehand. And then we read the original poem together, which really had nothing to do with my own aunt, but it triggered memories for me. It helped, I think, that we had to go around the Zoom at the beginning of class and name our race, ethnicity, and heritage. I named my heritage as being, in part, Italian, and that must have started my brain thinking again about my great-aunt.

When the poem was read over and over, the simple line — “she’d said” — stuck out to me. The things we say can seem unimportant, just off-hand remarks, but other times, those same remarks can have a kind of resonance. They can take on new importance when we hear them again, or think of them again. It was with all of this swirling around in my mind that I began my own poem, the result of which is above.]

Why I Blog, Reason #17

My daily blogging has taken a hit lately. Part of that is due to being more focused on my fiction stuff at the moment. When I only have 40 minutes each day to devote to writing, those minutes are better spent working on my stories and novels. The cool news is that I finished “The Wind Masters,” I’m almost finished with “Things” (which is being re-titled “Berserker” or “A Good Defeat,” not sure yet), and I’ve written several chapters for my novella, Avalon Summer, and two chapters of a new novel (The Gates of Illvelion). I’m just writing what feels right, so each night I sit down and see where my subconscious takes me.

I do miss blogging though. It’s nice to write my thoughts and see where my mind wanders. The process for the blog is that I usually steal stuff from my writer’s notebook and type it up here, maybe adding or tweaking a bit. But generally, I start with my notebook and then formalize or expand on those thoughts here on the blog.

Sometimes, however, I just craft a blog post without any previous drafting or anything. That’s what this post is. Just me writing random stuff. Sitting down with the WordPress dashboard open and typing away. I’m not sure what the point of this post is; there is no point, really. But I’m old school, and that means I think of this blog more as my personal space than as some kind of marketing thing or whatever. I’m not trying to get “traffic.” Maybe I should be, but I’m not.

(Note: This wasn’t always the case. Early on, when I first set up the website, I thought the blog should be some kind of marketing or “branding” thing and I tried to fit my writing into that model. After struggling to add “content” and finding the whole thing burdensome, I gave up that approach. When I restarted blogging these past few years, I did so with the intent to write more personally, more randomly, and more authentically. Thus you get blog posts like this one, which are little more than idle thoughts.)

Is it self-indulgent to write all these random thoughts and ideas? Perhaps. I mean, if I’m not writing for some specific audience, or about some specific topic, then one may ask, “What’s the point?”

But I’d like to think that if — on some off chance — someone stumbles onto my blog, they might find solidarity or comfort or interest in my odd ramblings. Maybe this hypothetical reader is also a struggling writer, and maybe this hypothetical person might enjoy reading about my travails and ups-and-downs and whatnot. Or maybe they like the blog posts about the different writing exercises I use in my classroom. Or maybe they like to laugh at my poetry. Who knows.

I don’t really write for anyone, though. Just myself.

Confessions, Part 2

I know I’ve mentioned on this blog my dream of working from home, but as I’ve been thinking about that dream more and more, I realize I need to refine it. It’s not that I want to work from home, it’s that I want to work from home as a writer. I want writing to be my work.

(Readers are now thinking, “Yeah sure, you and about ten million other people. Quit yer dreaming, lady!” And I would echo their sentiments. My working-class, Midwestern upbringing has instilled in me a kind of ultra-realism that considers it highly irresponsible and borderline insane to pursue a career in the arts. I have spent many years trying to shake these sentiments, but they return to me time and again. Like, it’s hard to lose the values of your childhood.)

Anyway, the reason why I want to write for a living is because I like it. It’s fun. That’s as simple as it gets, really. I mean, I could blather on about feeling “called” to write, or thinking I’ve got a bit of a knack for it, but those are secondary to the fact that I really enjoy writing and think it would be awesome to spend my days doing it (and getting paid to do so).  To tell tales and string sentences together sounds like just about the best kind of work there is.

Now, I’m ultra-realistic enough to know that making a living as a writer is a HUGE long-shot. So I’m not banking on it. But since Covid (and perhaps even a bit before), I’ve been thinking about whether or not I should stick with teaching or start working from home as a freelancer of some sort. The idea being that if I worked from home, I would have more free time to get my writing done. For awhile — when schools went remote last March — I got a taste of what it would be like to work from home, and not gonna lie, I loved it. I started craving it, even when my school returned to in-person learning in the fall.

But the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more I realize what I loved about being home last spring wasn’t the working from home part, it was the fact that I had more time to do my writing. What I was craving wasn’t necessarily a remote job; what I was craving was time. Covid allowed me and many others to suddenly have more time on our hands. I filled that time with my writing (and reading and going on walks with my daughter and playing in the backyard). And ever since school started back up in the fall, I’ve been trying to recover that feeling of having time on my hands to do my writing. For awhile, I thought that this writing time could be recovered if I worked from home as a freelance editor or something. But I’m starting to see that a change in job isn’t the answer. The answer is a change in myself.

I recently read Atomic Habits by James Clear and have been implementing some of his strategies in my life. One such strategy was to write everyday. I “habit-stacked” and made sure that as soon as I put the kids to bed, I would go down to my desk and start writing. I started this habit toward the end of December and I’ve been consistently doing it since then. Which means that I’ve finished a short story, begun another one, written two chapters of my novella, and blogged nearly everyday in January and ten days in February.

Recently I started challenging myself to write 1,000 words per day. By my calculations, that could get me 306,000 words written by the end of this calendar year. In years past, I would have said 1,000 words EVERY DAY wasn’t doable because I just didn’t have enough time in my days. I work almost-full-time and have three children ages six and under. “No time!” I would say.

But the funny thing is, once I started organizing my day around small habits, I found that I stopped running out of time. The hectic, wasteful days that seemed to plague me were suddenly gone. I could pray everyday, write in my writer’s notebook everyday, read a book everyday, grade papers everyday, exercise everyday, and write fiction everyday. And I could do all this without skimping on my other responsibilities, like taking care of my kids, spending time with husband, and looking after the house.

So I started thinking: Do I really need to abandon teaching and start up a freelancer career in order to have more time to write? Or can I continue teaching AND have more time to write?

I don’t want to get all mushy and start slobbering all over the Atomic Habits book, but honestly, it’s helped me realize that I can do the things I want to do without having to rearrange my whole life or making sweeping and dramatic career changes.

And look, I would still love to work from home because I’m an introverted homebody who enjoys hanging out in sweatpants, but I want to work from home as a writer, and that might never happen (that old ultra-realistic Midwestern upbringing dies hard). And even if it does happen, it won’t be until I have several books written and published, and that won’t happen if I don’t write several books. So the “writing books” part has to be at the center of what I do and how I spend my time. Whether it’s Covidtide and I have time on my hands, or it’s now and I’m working outside the home. Either way, I need to write.

The insight I had recently is that I HAVE been writing: my new habit-filled days have allowed me the freedom to do just that. I want writing to be my work, but I don’t have to wait for some far-off future for it to be a reality. It’s a reality right now.

Creative = Make

I’m rereading Tom Hodgkinson’s How to Be Free. I find this book, and its companion, How to Be Idle, eminently re-readable. Both Hodgkinson’s style and his philosophies are so buoyant, so carefree and merry, that I always feel emboldened and inspired when I read his books.

So I’m rereading How to Be Free, and this afternoon I read the chapter entitled, “Reject Career and All Its Empty Promises.” This chapter is relevant for me because I’m thinking about just such a thing (i.e.: chucking my career).

Anyway, the thing that struck me was how Hodgkinson implored his readers to do more manual work — not for money, necessarily, but simply for its own sake. For instance, there’s something quite wonderful about gardening or whittling a piece of wood or knitting or whatever. Not all of our work needs to be “mental work,” and not all of our time needs to be spent focusing on our narrow and restricting “careers.”

This whole thing got me thinking about creativity.

In one of the classes I teach, we spend some time trying to define creativity. Most often, my students come up with some variation of this: “Creativity is figuring out a new way of doing something or an original way to solve a problem.” It’s all about “thinking outside the box” (a most unoriginal expression if there ever was one).

I’ve always rebelled against this definition, though I don’t often say so to my students. I might prod them a little bit with Socratic questions, but I never outright dismiss their ideas. But what annoys me about “originality” and “newness” as central pillars of creativity is that it elevates novelty above all else, AND it ignores the root word of creativity itself: CREATE. Not that newness and originality aren’t aspects of creativity, but they aren’t the center of the thing. Creativity means creating.

To create. To make. To bring something into being.

When looked at this way, creativity is less about ideas and much more about THINGS. When we are creating we are making. And if creativity is making, then anyone can do it. It’s not something that only the rarefied among us is any good at. It’s open to all. Anyone can make something. And thus, everyone is creative.

Being creative, i.e.: CREATE-ive, could mean baking a cake, or drawing a picture, or throwing a party. After all, what does throwing a party really mean? It means creating a party. You gather people and food and drinks, you decorate the place, you make up a list of games and activities for everyone to play. Where once there was no party, you have MADE a party. Brought it into being.

Same thing for knitting, or gardening, or dancing. Or making music, or tinkering, or writing, or building something (or making a baby!). Anyone who does these things is being creative: where once there was nothing, something has been made.

I often hear students remark that they “aren’t very creative,” as if it’s a special skill or something. But it’s not a special skill. It’s simply the act of making. A creative person is one who creates.

And everyone is capable of creating. Everyone can make something.

Leave out whether it’s good or bad; that’s not important. The creating is what’s important. The making.

If I could implore my students to consider one thing, it would be to realize they are, in fact, creative. And that they should spend a good chunk of their time making things, whether it’s a cake or a song or a fabulous party. When we are making things, we are imitating our own Creator. I can’t think of a better way to live.

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