Piling On Is the Greatest!
“Excellence in obscurity is better than mediocrity in the spotlight.”—Matshona Dhliwayo
Oh man, now that’s below the belt. But John don’t never lie, and his quotes are part of the reason. Do You Want to Improve Your Writing or Become an Algorithm Hack?
Weiss says he retired from his police work—successfully so—and I’ve not heard that he missing it at present.
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I have an acquaintance of many years—Bob married a svelte woman in our running club and came with the package. He was also a Prince William County policeman who climbed from patrolman up to captain before he retired. And being from Scranton, he can tell some stories. He’s an old school Republican who’ll tell you straight how he sees things, which is how I like my friends. If we disagree on the means, we don’t disagree on the end goal.
All of which is to say, I don’t envy John Weiss’s years in his former profession. You don’t exactly meet the cream of society very often in his field. For a while now, John’s been living out a new work/life balance—it’s all about painting, cartooning and writing, while staying in touch with people and life. He’d need to tell you in what order.
His closing cartoon that he often uses on Medium sticks the landing. Scan down a few pages in his story;—first line, middle sketch, and look at his eyes and pen poised. To explain, that’s been a signature sketch for his essays on Medium.
What seems most obvious, he makes an effort at both writing and sketching—aiming for a sweet spot observing life, celebrating the better parts and the reasons why. You don’t get the impression he was burned out on people by the police work, which my buddy Bob will tell you is an occupational hazard.
Unlike moi, John’s not a wise ass, best I can tell from his pieces on Medium.
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As for myself, writing easily absorbs 40-50% of my week. Before I retired, still working full time as an architect, I was writing evenings and weekends—so possibly 5-10%? Dunno; I wasn’t keeping track, though it never felt there was time enough.
Losing Ryan in 2002 made me double down—it also stole my humor. Pale semblance of an Irishman’s wit as it was, I still wanted to get it back.
Unlike Weiss, who uses his online experience as a cautionary tale—he admits to once being caught up in his online success, and working to ‘feed the algorithm’—my own writing was a means to wrestle with ideas one doesn’t bring to dinner parties. Employing one’s own life as the closest illustration—both good and bad—has its risks, but I’ll be dead, and as long as the internet is still transmitting, the world will have to deal with the stories. Ha!
How my writing has evolved—these days it’s less fiction and more essays—mainly resulting from feeding the website. Keeping it fresh keeps me busy. The website also keeps me reading, looking for topics. I also don’t like the thought that moving into senior status means my mind’s eye is losing focus at the same rate as my knee.
And presently, instead of writing fiction, I’m designing a beach house which may not get past modeling stage. Though the rise at the top of a dune on the Outer Banks certainly deserves a memorable design—as long as it’s not a Victorian horror.
Taking a cue from the well known tradition of starving writers, I’m not pursuing writing for monetary gain—just annoying folks. Besides, I’ve supported the IRS long enough. Though, what sticks in my mind about Weiss’s article is the cautionary tale of distractions. I started on this online gig to find an audience for the fiction and found it’s become a full time occupation. Point taken.
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Weiss’s article is an insider’s take on being driven to write, and so if you were hoping for a inciteful piece on literature to develop here—nah. Not his fault, but nah.
Only reason Dickens did OK starting out was because he had a newspaper serializing his stories, earning pennies at a clip. Otherwise, he might well have joined his old man on a debtor’s prison ship in the Themes. Thus but for circumstance. If Dickens isn’t deep as Goethe, you can’t fault the man for writing fluff either. A Tale of Two Cities is hardly that.
“I see a similar phenomenon with artists and photographers on platforms like Instagram. They’re all doing the same thing, copying one another. Scrambling for approval and followers.
“Want proof? Check out the images in this blog post from Pocket-Lint.com.
“They lose their original creative vision and fail to innovate. They put enormous faith in the masses to define what quality is when most often, the masses are swarming around sexy bodies, cat videos, and superficial, derivative content.
from John Weiss’s Do You Want to Improve Your Writing or Become an Algorithm Hack?
I know I don’t need any more distractions—so I don’t go after that particular time suck. My best success—what makes me continue—comes from stumbling across an idea and tippy typing into the laptop, cursing auto-correct. Pursuing popularity steals too much time away. Like Weiss says, it’s paying too much attention to the side effects instead of the main event. When you become famous, life gets cluttered with empty calories at best.
Mind, the money might help pay for a beach house…
But if I’m not already wanting to write before making coffee in the morning, it’s not going to be a productive day. That’s how this gig works. Some crazy writer folks are known to keep notepads bedside to record their dreams and walk around muttering stuff at Siri—or Ceres one—so they don’t forget their pearls. My opinion is, if you can’t remember them past a morning shower, they’re not so special.
And it’s not like I’m so supremely confident in any ability to design or to write; I’ve just been hardwired to run that way.
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“I find it difficult to do just the one thing well.” Sir James Stirling, RIBA, commenting about my ambition to write and practice architecture, gently put in his understated English way. We lesser creatures practice architecture; Stirling created architecture.
James Stirling—photo by Gorup de Besanez
Stirling was my second year studio critic at Yale. If you didn’t sign up early for his studio, you were SOL. In the 70s, he’d been unable to buy a design commission in Britain due to the institutional taste for staid Modernist design. Their loss was Yale’s gain, even if he did get me hooked on those little square cigars he always smoked during our juries.
To explain, concluding each studio, students would present their semester’s work to a jury of practicing architects. These could be brutal affairs. Jim’s were known for the cheese and wine he insisted being served—with wit and insight—that and assembling awesome juries. I think his point was we young turks were to work hard and play the while because it’s all too short.
Though I can just see a steel and glass pavilion like Jim Stirling’s bookstore in Venice floating atop a certain dune rise on the Outer Banks; I might ought to turn down the volume a touch so it doesn’t come across as too much Vienna Secession, but otherwise, I’d be dumb not to ‘borrow’ (read ‘steal’) his idea.
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In the end, what difference if one plants tulips or daffodils for the spring? Howling at the moon won’t do more than make the neighbors yell out their windows to pipe down—and one never pipes up for some reason.
Borrowing a last quote from John Weiss’s story:
“Write when drunk. Edit when sober. Marketing is the hangover.”—Ashwin Sanghi
With that kind of sagacity, how can one go wrong?
Harold Bloom implied Yeats deliberately misread Shelley—needing someone to argue with, mayhaps? I’ll not try that with Weiss; he’s too generous a person. Besides, being an ex-cop, he knows people.