Alice Thomsen

on the wrong side of sunrise

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Trapped in the Pages

June 5, 2013 / / 4 Comments

In 1973, John Platt published an article called “Social Traps” in American Psychologist. The idea of a social trap is simple enough. From the abstract:

[Platt] Uses the term “social trap” to describe situations like a fish trap, where individuals, organizations, and societies get started in a direction that later proves unpleasant or lethal but difficult to back out of; actions or inactions prompted by self-interest create long-range effects that are to almost no one’s interest.

The easiest illustration is on a personal level (what Platt calls an “individual trap”) where a short-term gain comes with long-term loss. Let’s say I smoke a pack a day. I recognize that my habit has costs—it costs money to buy cigarettes, it costs time to step out and smoke, it costs health, etc. The trap comes in when I realize that, even if I might one day be rewarded for quitting, right now, if I go too long without a smoke, I’ll be punished.

It’s a little like telling someone, “If you walk across the room, I’ll give you fifty bucks,” and then punching them every time they take a step.

Through individual and social traps, we get stuck in all sorts of inefficient, counterproductive routines. It can be small things—the sort of things we might not give much thought. Maybe it’s as simple as taking a long route to work because figuring out a better one would take more time and energy than just going the way we know. I, for instance, have been a Mac user as far back as I can remember, so when it comes to word processing programs, ClarisWorks/Appleworks/Pages have been an individual trap of mine.

How much time and hassle could I have saved over the years if my files were .doc, like everyone else’s? How much easier would it have been to read other people’s work if I could open their files on my computer without worrying about formatting losses? How much better would I be at working with the ubiquitous Microsoft Word if I had learned it from the start, rather than becoming proficient in a less useful, less prevalent program?

Of course, there are costs with pursuing Word at a later stage. The Office Suite costs money, for one, and there’s a learning curve—for a period, I would be less efficient than I am in Pages. Pages is, in its way, sufficient.

Still, I’ve been working on investments. I started using a program called Scrivener a little while ago, and I’m experimenting with other programs. I’m trying to find the most effective, efficient way to go through the different stages of writing, and I’ve come to grips with the fact that I’ll pay a price up front. This is what it takes to break out of the individual trap.

In the next few posts, I’ll be discussing first my experience with Scrivener (spoiler: I love it) and then my explorations into a few other programs: Scapple, for idea mapping, and Aeon Timeline, for timeline tracking. Learning to work with new programs designed for unique functions comes at a price; I’ll aim to decide if these are worth it.

Stay tuned.

The Future

May 26, 2013 / / 1 Comment

So. Let’s do it. Let’s talk about …

Two days ago, with the help of my family, I loaded my old apartment’s contents into a truck and then drove three and a half hours to Muncie, IN. I signed a lease for my new apartment and, with further help, unloaded everything again. Since then, I’ve been unpacking, arranging and rearranging, and making repeated trips to Meijer to buy a new shower curtain (free of claw marks), floor lamp (that doesn’t wobble back and forth), a silverware drawer divider (because my drawers are now wide enough to fit one). That, and frequenting The Cup, because I don’t have internet at home yet.

But there are more important things a few months off.

I’ll be starting in Ball State University’s two-year graduate program in creative writing. Although I was accepted to a couple other programs as well, I picked Ball State for a few reasons:

  • Cathy Day. Last year, I saw her on an AWP panel about midwest gothic as a genre, where she also read a story from The Circus in Winter. Both the story and her thoughts on midwest gothic captured my interest, and my discovery that she was on Ball State’s faculty was the primary reason I applied there in the first place.
  • Funding. Unlike the other programs, Ball State offered me a funding package that gives me the ability to pay for all my expenses without having to take up an outside job. My tuition is covered, and I have a stipend that will give me enough to live on comfortably.
  • Teaching. I earn my funding with a graduate assistantship. My first semester, I’ll be working in the university’s writing center, as well as taking a course designed to help prepare students to teach freshman composition. The next three semesters (and over the summer, if I want) I’ll teach two comp classes of roughly twenty-five students. As much as this intimidates me (given my something-short-of-outgoing nature) I do want to try teaching. It’s one of the obvious day jobs for someone with a creative writing degree, but I figure I should probably find out if I like it before I stake my future livelihood on it. That, and it will give me an appropriate place to correct people’s grammar.
  • The Mascot. While I can’t claim the cardinal is much more innovative than the eagle of my undergraduate institution, I can say this: Charlie Cardinal’s eyes have that special manic look that makes a seed-eating bird as intimidating as it can hope to be.

University events begin August twelfth, so I have some time to get acclimated, get oriented, and, if I’m lucky, even get the gas for my stove turned on. That box mac and cheese isn’t going to boil itself.

I’m going to hack my brain (but I’m not qualified to instruct you as to how to do the same)

May 2, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Not so long ago, I claimed that I would finish out the semester and then give an update on my plans for the future. I still intend to, but for now, a brief digression.

I graduated last Sunday, with a double major in creative writing and psychology. And here’s the thing about undergrad psychology students: we have a tendency to feel more knowledgable than we actually are. This can be handy—if you want something in your life framed in terms of rats in a behavioral psychology lab, for instance, I am your girl—but also dangerous. It’s not so unlike the pre-med student who decides to diagnose friends or go Charlie Bartlett and open up an amateur psychiatry clinic. There’s a sweet spot between total ignorance and sufficient expertise where you know enough to really mess things up, if you’re not careful (even if you try to be).

This is why I say that, when I discuss how I’m going to use psychology on myself in the coming paragraphs, I am not encouraging anyone else to do the same. This is not I earned $50,000 last year working from home, and you can too! (Although really, you should probably be wary of that, too.) This is also why I call it brain hacking. I’m not a qualified life coach or motivational guru, just someone trying to break into somewhere with security about at the level of password1234.

So, with that disclaimer, here’s my plan to hack my brain.

We all know Pavlov and his dogs: ring a bell before you feed the dog and eventually the dog will start to salivate when the bell rings. (Sadly the set-up was not nearly as pleasant for the dogs as one might hope an experiment centered around food would be.) Classical conditioning is all about stimulus pairing.

Something similar to this is useful in setting up routines. Writers talk about their Writing Place, or their Writing Notebook, or their Writing Sweatpants—whatever it is, it’s something that has become linked in their mind to writing, so that the simple act of going there/opening it/putting them on/etc. kicks their brain into writing mode without any conscious effort on their part.


Photo credit: Maria Brundage

This is why I’m very particular about pens, for instance, and having different pens for different situations. I have my general purpose pen, my writing pen, and my revising pen, which is purple rather than the standard red. It’s also why, whenever I embark on a big project, I make a project-specific playlist. Even now, I think of my tenth grade novel whenever I hear A Perfect Circle’s “The Outsider”—but only the version that was on the Resident Evil: Apocalypse soundtrack. If I’d seen the movie first, perhaps that would be different, but as is, that song comes on, and there I am, perched on a window ledge before class, off-brand Discman tucked next to me, working on that old, terrible novel. I can’t claim it makes me drool with desire to return to the project, but there’s still that instant association.

Without applications or final projects tying up my writerly energy, I find myself with time to write on my own terms … and struggling to really commit to it. There’s time to write, sure, but it’s not Writing Time, and I struggle to get “in the groove” in that sense.

The key, I think, is those associations, those triggers. Those things that make you feel, in your gut or salivary glands or whatever, that it’s time to write.

Now that the term and my undergraduate studies are done, I’m wholly responsible for making my schedule. With that and Pavlov in mind, I aim to maximize it. Find all sorts of ways to trigger the “It’s writing o’clock!” impulse. Maybe I’ll even get a bell. Who knows? The future’s full of surprises.

[insert card pun here]

April 13, 2013 / / 5 Comments

After doing months of research, using up all my print credit and then some, submitting thirteen applications, and wishing I at least had some pins and needles to wait on so as to be a little more comfortable, my graduate school plans are taking shape. This fall, I’m going to begin working on a master’s degree in creative writing at Ball State University, home of the cardinals (a.k.a., the cards).

This plan, of course, is predicated upon me completing my undergraduate degree, and that is why this post is so brief. Once I’ve finished my end-of-term work, I’ll go into more detail about where I’m headed with all of this.

Readings are the worst thing ever, until you realize they aren’t.

March 29, 2013 / / 0 Comments

When I was working with a professor to finalize my portfolio for grad school applications, she suggested I apply to read one of my pieces in the university’s Undergraduate Symposium in March. It was November at the time, and with my mind ensnared as it was in the application process, concepts like reading and Symposium and March seemed like abstractions, whereas something to list on your minimalist CV was all too real. I gave brief thought to the fact that I’m not very comfortable with that sort of thing, then submitted a proposal and went back to thinking about grad school.

January rolled around, and I got an email saying my proposal had been approved, but I was still too caught up hoping for other acceptances for it to really register. Then it got to be the weekend before the Symposium, and it suddenly occurred to me, in an uncomfortably real way, that I had to give a reading soon.

I get the sense I am not unique in my performance anxiety—after all, it combines the usual stress associated with sharing work with the stress of public speaking. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a perfect storm, because there are always ways to make it worse, but it’s a pretty damn good storm. We’ll call it 8.5/10.

So what do we, as writers, do? The reading is a potentially powerful medium for sharing our work … but also potentially disastrous, if we, for instance, become so nervous that we vomit on the podium. I don’t think there’s a single formula for success, but the first step is often to stop fixating on the possible nauseous disasters. Beyond that, it breaks down to being aware of your weaknesses and then doing those things better (a strategy that applies to most areas of writing, and life in general, thanks to its vagueness).

It helps to have someone who can act as a coach, or at least a one-person audience that doesn’t mind listening to you read the same paragraph over and over. For me, this came in the form of a more performance-savvy writer friend, who pointed out some of my bad habits and gave me some advice on how to remedy them, along with words of encouragement. Accept those words—this goes along with not thinking about the disasters. Don’t try to undercut or debunk encouragement. I am guilty of this, and it hasn’t made me any better off.

On a more general level, though, perhaps it would also help to read regularly. When you finish a draft of a story or chapter or scene or sentence, read it aloud. I sometimes do this to help catch mistakes, repetition, awkward structures, etc., but the actual reading element has always been secondary. In retrospect, I think those are missed opportunities to practice performance-grade reading, rather than mumbling through the lines under my breath. Cats make a pretty good trial audience, in that they let you practice coping with that sense that you’re reading to someone who has no interest in listening to you.

I survived, by the way, as have most reading-shy writers before me. If you’re curious, I read a version of “Confidentiality” cut essentially in half to fit the time limit. I don’t envy the people at Reader’s Digest, but that’s another matter entirely.

Bottom line is, reading for an audience is hard, and anyone who says it’s not is either lying or a sociopath (or maybe both). But it’s also a good thing. During the Q&A after I finished, I got very positive feedback, signs that people had enjoyed my work. I was even able to not-too-tackily-I-hope point them to this blog. Have I suddenly developed a huge, thriving fanclub? No. But I connected with people, at least for fifteen minutes, and maybe that will give me the opportunity to connect with them again. Plus I didn’t vomit even once.

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