When I talked to published authors at a writers’ conference that I attended at Biola in the early 1980s they always began the conversation asking me if I was writing fiction or nonfiction and for which genre¹. At the time I was doing mostly observational essays and fiction short-stories, so I didn’t know how to answer the question. That seemed to stump them and after an awkward pause they just moved on to the next person in line. Wow. When I started blogging, I approached it like my other writing and wrote mostly observational essays, sometimes about relationships, sometimes about tech problems and sometimes about my personal religious thoughts. Okay, I have to admit that there were a lot of entries about working through tech problems that I didn’t think anyone would care about. But writing it out helped me work through things. It was a release, not meant to be anything more than that. Just a release, nothing more, that’s what I thought even though I had been reading Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor column in Byte Magazine for years, just because he would talk about the problems he was working through with his computer systems. Ack.

Through all of my college experiences at three universities studying Religious Studies, Biblical Studies, Anthropology and Journalism, I got great feedback for my writing efforts. But somehow I didn’t take my own writing seriously enough and got an elementary ed teaching credential after finishing my journalism degree. Actually, I don’t really remember exactly why, but while at CSUF’s Daily Titan I wrote for the entertainment Back Pages section and maybe that contributed to my thinking that if I couldn’t decide on the one thing that I wanted to write about then maybe I should do something else ². 

Decades later I continued to attend writers’ groups. The dominance of Amazon and YouTube had made self-publishing a real thing and most of the writers I met came from that world. They’d ask what kind of writing I did and I’d say that I blog and that would kill that conversation. Next! Then when I met with the local blogging community, it was mostly WordPress programmers selling something, so I didn’t fit in with those folks. In 2014 I started my own podcast, JBB’s Final Thoughts, and, not too surprisingly, it was all over the place subject-wise. One episode might be about writing, the next about religion, the next about some tech thing, then relationships (do you see a pattern here?). 

I knew that most of the blogs and podcasts I followed were single subject sources of information and whenever they ventured out of their depth it was usually embarrassing. For example, when the Diggnation crew, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht, ventured from their usual banter about beers, technology and bro-life and shared their thoughts on religion and the after-life I was embarrassed. Youth and a certain level of public success can encourage the sharing of not-fully-developed thinking. So, I concluded that my approach to writing was destined to obscurity because I could never resolve myself to write about any one thing. I lacked focus and so I couldn’t possibly gather the audience necessary to be successful as a writer. Then I ran into this guy and that sealed the deal for me:

Shit. I am so screwed. 

My whole creative journey had been an exact mirror to the unsuccessful “before” story shared in the video. I started songwriting as a teenager but stopped writing in my mid-20s because I felt like the things I wanted to write about no longer fit my limited musical skills³. I wrote short essays and short fiction stories throughout my college years and continued in the form of my blog posts about religion, relationships, families, technology, teaching, journalism, and whatever was happening in the media or the world. I picked up photography during my journalism degree program and became that guy who always has a camera at whatever event and when I went digital and the iPhone became “camera ready” I shot everything all the time. I had played with 8mm film in junior high and high school, switched to video tape in the 1980s and 1990s and then went digital video as soon as I could. I can’t tell you how many times I bought and/or got a copy of Apple’s Final Cut Pro, but because I was able to do what I needed with iMovie I never bothered learning Final Cut. I taught Yearbook and Journalism in a middle school in California in the late 2000s, so I was always shooting, helping students cover events or editing for the yearbook and journalism classes. I shot stills and video of everything that was going on when I came to Full Sail University and Full Sail Lab in Florida and Fitzgerald Elementary when I moved to Las Vegas. When I wasn’t at work, I was following a few bands in Florida and later in Las Vegas, shooting stills and videos. I was definitely all over the place but not able to point to any one thing as an example of what I wanted to do, if I could do “this” full time. I was definitely the dude with the ten tiny piles instead of the one big one needed to be successful. Damn.

When I was looking for an image of Dr. Pournelle, I read his obit in the New York Times and was reminded that his Chaos Manor column was never what one might call a quick-read. They were long, detailed and personal. The pursuit of better computing was the spine to his columns but he brought in any subject that crossed his path. The column often included stories about the foibles of trying to write his novels with his writing partner, Larry Niven, using twin CP/M computers or work his son, Alex, was doing in university or work he was doing assisting his wife create reading software, software that reflected traditional reading strategies (in others words, NOT anything new fangled like Whole Language…). It was more travelogue than some bullet-point feature list or Top-5 summary. When BYTE Magazine called it quits and the Chaos Manor column went online, Pournelle became even less restricted in his commentary or verbosity. Interesting. Pournelle’s life was hardly that he just did one thing and focused on that one thing. 

Rewatching struthless’s video, I noticed that drawing Ibises every day was the medium and subject that he started with, but even during that first year, when he decided to add humor/commentary he showed a side-by-side example of the same drawing using Ibises and then using people. He was told that he needed to pick one thing to do everyday and his mentor decided that it would be drawing. Struthless decided that Ibises would be the subject matter, probably because he saw that his mentor was a single-theme artist (even though his mentor did NOT limit himself to a single medium). Choosing either one medium or one subject was designed to get over the blank-page thinking-not-doing problem. The “scattered” problems isn’t a multiple subject or multiple medium problem as must as a doing-not-just-thinking problem. It’s the 10,000 hours issue.

When I think about my creative efforts journey, I made a lot of “progress” as a teenager when I was playing and writing music everyday, meeting with my musical buddy, Jim Davis several times a week to play together and share our new songs. From 1974 to 1983 I wrote 66 songs and then just stopped because I wanted to focus on prose writing and other life changes. One misstep that I can see now is that in the beginning I was probably writing every day, but I didn’t have anyone like Jim Davis who I could regularly shared my work with. Eventually life got in the way and the writing was more of a coping thing that I didn’t share with anyone and certainly didn’t do on a regular basis. When I switched from working for the phone company to teaching, I used writing and my media skills to create curriculum but my own personal creative writing or journalism skills were shuffled off to winter or summer break moments. When I moved things to the web and stepped up my blogging skills, even when I was teaching blogging I wasn’t writing on a regular enough basis to get any momentum going. I must have eventually figured this out and committed myself to trying to do four posts a week on specific chosen themes⁴. This idea lasted all of three cycles, then CIDP took over my life and most of the blog posts for the next year were Video Fridays/Video Mondays highlighting a YouTube video that crossed my feeds with a short one-paragraph comment, with huge month long gaps between posts. That was a definite, re-evaluate low-point in my creativity journey. Scattered wasn’t a problem about what to write about as much as the gap between my posts. 

One thing that popped up reading Pournelle’s obit was his recommendation to beginning writers that they need to write a lot. Struthless’ question to his mentor about how many days he works on his art: “All of them,” would support this recommendation. My problem hadn’t been limiting myself to a single subject or genre, but that I was inconsistent doing and sharing my work. The question of single subject matter came up in a podcasting class I took that was taught by Daily Tech News’ Tom Merritt. Merritt and attendees agreed that it can be a challenge but whoever is listening to your podcast is there because they want to hear what you have to share, not necessarily just a single subject. It reminded me of Pournelle’s column, I wasn’t there to hear about one specific thing but his journey using technology. 

For entirely unrelated reasons, I decided last October that I would take the daily writing prompts that I was creating for my students and post them to my blog, with my own reflection responses⁵. I had been making some writing/thinking prompts for the past two years, so I already knew that I’d need some kind of subject rotation to help come up with five prompts every week for the 40 week school year. When the school year ended I kept the rotation⁶. and opened the posts to explorations and content levels that might not have appropriate for middle school students. It was not my original intention, but I ended up writing an article every day, except for weekends and a couple holidays, for the past 11 months and I feel like I’ve started to hit a real stride coming up with something interesting every day to write about. The problem was never about having multiple areas of interest but writing enough every day to find my voice worthy of this life time of exploration and observation. It was never about narrowing down to a single subject or even genre as much as just doing it AND sharing it every day. Pournelle was right about the need to write a lot. Now all I need to concern myself with is getting enough readers… Help! 

Sources:

• Image: Jerry Pournelle in 1985 by George Brich/NYT, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/obituaries/jerry-pournelle-science-fiction-novelist-and-computer-guide-dies-at-84.html, retrieved 2023-08-17
• Diggnation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diggnation,  retrieved 2023-08-17.
• The Drawing Advice that Changed My Life by struthless (2020-01-08), https://youtu.be/M6NsEDwHHiE, retrieved 2023-08-17.
• The Daily Tech News Show, https://dailytechnewsshow.com/

1. At the time, American Evangelical Christianity was just beginning to accept the legitimacy of Fiction writing as a worthy pursuit, seeing the possible evangelistic usefulness of telling stories that were made up and therefore NOT TRUE.[↩]
2. And even then, I had hesitated on becoming a teacher, partly because I couldn’t decide on what I wanted to teach… which led me eventually to elementary ed where I had to teach everything. I only ended up teaching technology and then robotics because I was better at it than my peers and motivated by how using tech was an improvement over typewriters and writing longhand.[↩]
3. I kept playing music off and on over the years but didn’t work at trying to convert what I was feeling into song since the early 1980s.[↩]
4. I loved the themes that I came up with, such as “Mistakes were made,” Too Much Information,” and “What Do online Educators Do” A fourth theme that would take several years to find the light of day was “Better Online/Better Face-to-Face.”[↩]
5. I decided to share the reflection prompts on my blog because it felt wasteful to spend so much time every day to come up with the reflection prompts and media only to get minimal responses from my students.[↩]
6. My current weekly rotation: Meditation Mondays, Technology Tuesdays, What’s in the News Wednesdays, History Heroes/Education Issues Thursdays & Video Fridays,[↩]