“Art is long,” wrote Henry James. “If we work for ourselves of course we must hurry. If we work for her we must often pause.” If you agree with this sentiment, you may be Honorably Obscure.

Not sure, though?

Consider, then, the following statement from Sir Kenneth Clark, articulated in his masterful thirteen-part documentary Civilisation:

It is sometimes through the willful, superfluous actions of individuals that societies discover their powers.”

Ask yourself, upon reading these words, if something mysterious resonates down in your bones. Yes? Then welcome! You are one of the Honorably Obscure.

Who, Exactly, Are the Honorably Obscure?

They are writers and artists working day and night, in any given locale, in reversal of the common M.O. That is, they live in order to work (not the other way around).

Often they work in shabby rooms, at wobbly desks, in poor light and insufficient heating, with something scratching in the walls.

Seldom do they win honors, receive grants, or hobnob with famous elders.

Unpaid, uncelebrated, they work in service to something larger and more lasting than themselves.

Faced with privation and self-doubt, they draw inspiration from bygone spirits who struggled much the same.

The Honorably Obscure live in their own time, yes, but also across time, and they readily recognize one another over the span of generations.

Their rewards? Oh, how to name them? But they more than mitigate the annoyances of thin wallets, scant praise, and nonexistent reputations. Such things are temporal concerns. The Honorably Obscure are busy with bigger matters.

Sometimes, of course, the Honorably Obscure achieve “success,” but often this experience unnerves them. The following is a little letter I wrote to one of them, a fellow writer who “hit it big.” I’ve included this letter in The Honorable Obscurity Handbook, my new definitive volume about life as a creative person, which offers solidarity and sound advice to fellow creative people everywhere, whatever their field. Comprised in part of material that originated right here on Soul Shelter, The Honorable Obscurity Handbook is, as its effervescent subtitle attests, “A Compendium of Essays, Correspondence, Autobiography & Marginalia, with Ample Quotations Affording Guidance & Consolation from the Ages.”

Letter to a Fellow Writer Who “Hit it Big” & Got Worried About Authenticity

Dear N,

I live by the belief that we artists have got to stick together, and I admire anybody like yourself who would devote so many years, paid or not, to the production of something as invaluable — if unquantifiable and increasingly anachronistic — as a serious literary work.

I have no doubt that your new book is well worth reading, and well worth the astronomical sum paid for it. I take no issue with writers being well paid. I’m all for that! What’s troublesome, to you and me both, is the conventional logic of big publishing we’re already seeing at work here: a logic which holds that to discuss books in terms of the author’s payment is a valid or worthwhile way to talk about literature. Culture, according to such logic, is little more than a byproduct of commerce — the better paid the book, the more worthy of attention.

We object to this. It is success-cult nonsense, long obtaining in society rags and in those Manhattan cocktail parties we read about in the New Yorker, and it spills more and more into respected literary discourse and threatens to become a lingua franca.

‘How big was the advance?’

‘Seven figures.’

‘Well! I should read it, shouldn’t I?’

‘Oh, you will. Like every other reader in the Western Hemisphere.’

In reality, as experience has taught you and me well, literature flowers and fructifies under a different sun. Its servants toil alone, usually at the edge of things. Most of the world’s deserving works are fated to exist in undeserved obscurity while the authors do wage labor in factories, retail stores, or academe — or simply scrounge for food. You and I both recognize that 99.9 percent of all worthy literary creators live by this truth, a truth existent through the ages.

And you believe as passionately as I do, I know, that young writers — or old, still struggling ones — ought to be championed in their wildly impractical, unlucrative pursuits, even if the dominant discourse is all about cash, film deals, and bestseller lists.

Our art lives nowhere but in the work itself, the words on the page. The art surely does not live in what-ever gross sum may be paid for it by the hit-hungry New York publishers.

You know this, and that’s why you’re worrying. Be comforted that you know it. Knowing it, you’ll stay the course.

Yours,

—M

Being one of the Honorably Obscure yourself, you’ll appreciate The Honorable Obscurity Handbook, now available (in print!) from Atelier26 Books.

Here’s to creative vitality — and to sheltering the soul!

In the Soul Shelter spirit of creative commitment and entrepreneurship, my new book project has carried me into the realm of “micro-philanthropy.” How did that happen?  Long story short, it started with …

A Predicament (or: Necessity is the Mother of Invention)

It’s widely known in the creative community that trends in art funding haven’t exactly arced upward over the last thirty years. And now we see near consensus among forecasts in the philanthropic sector, which show public funding like the National Endowment for the Arts all but disappearing before long.

Clearly we need …

A Vision (or: How I Got Hooked)

Last month I got an invitation to join a leading arts organization known as United States Artists, which bestows $50,000 fellowships on creative practitioners every year. Attending a reception here in Portland to learn more, I found the folks at US Artists coolly, unflappably acknowledging the fact that “historically, public support for the arts and artists is unstable and unreliable.” Cool and unflappable, perhaps, because with the launch of an innovative new Web site US Artists has pioneered an effective way to keep its mission alive in the long run, and to:

• “Foster direct connections between artists and the public”
• “Catalyze new funding for artists”
• “Bring creative projects to life”
• “Build community around the most accomplished artists in America”

The vision behind this Web site entranced me immediately. I and my fellow arts supporters will fight to keep civic backing of the arts however we can. But leveraging the power of social media and the hands-on format of micro-finance to support artists on a project-by-project, tax-deductible basis — well, that’s an idea whose time has come! Let’s call it Democratic Patronage. Which brings me to…

My Project (or: A Writer Makes a Video in Order to Make a Book)

Now in its funding stage at United States Artists, Date of Disappearance, a collection of ten short stories, will appear in illustrated limited edition, hand-numbered and signed, and will be sold exclusively through independent booksellers. (It will also launch a micro-press.)

As far as I can tell, mine is one of the first fiction projects to be featured, and I’m awfully excited to be a part of the USA community. If you’d like to help launch Date of Disappearance by reserving a copy or simply making a pledge, you can learn more in the following video.

Or click over to US Artists to get a first-hand experience of this brilliant new chapter in arts funding, where 200-odd projects (in all artistic disciplines) are currently in development.

You can also help with my project by spreading the word far and wide. Blog it, Facebook it, Share it, Like it, Tweet, link, or embed my video. You’ll have my deepest gratitude, eventually you’ll have a sumptuous, collectible book to enjoy, and you’ll have supported the arts. All longtime Soul Shelter readers know the significance of that!

You might also enjoy:

“You Don’t Have to Be an Insider”

“Do We Need a Cultural Bill of Rights?”

“Why It’s Desirable to Be Eccentric”

“Jump-Start Your Career With a Personal Business Model”

“Two Books to Galvanize Creativity”

“Beautiful, Soul-Affirming Untruths”

So before earning an MBA, consider a do-it-yourself “MPA” — a Master of Personal Administration. Unlike an MBA, which purports to train you to manage organizations, an MPA encourages you to understand yourself and manage your own career. Here are some differences between the two:

1. Organizational business plans versus personal business models

Even though the dotcom meltdown demonstrated more than a decade ago that “business plans” are a lousy basis for entrepreneurial action, MBA programs remain wedded to “business plan” thinking. The MPA, on the other hand, calls for individuals to seek meaningful work by designing and testing personal business models.

2. Big/stable/predictable versus small/chaotic/ever-changing

The “A” in “MBA” assumes a need for administration — people to manage large, stable, predictable organizations. In contrast, the MPA approach acknowledges that work today is messy, unpredictable, and constantly changing — and that small businesses employ half of all private sector workers.

3. Greed versus contribution

The U.S. financial meltdown has exposed greed at its worst — and the dangers of the kinds of financial engineering taught in MBA programs. The MPA calls for learners to do good things for others while helping themselves — the essence of ethical business.

4. Commoditization versus differentiation

MBA degrees are increasingly common and therefore an ever-weaker differentiator in a tight job market. But the candidate with a sound personal business model linked to a clear purpose stands out. As Josh Kaufman writes in The Personal MBA, “Skip business school. Educate yourself.”

So, are you tempted to start studying for your MPA? Where should you start?

Well, there’s no formal curriculum, and no diploma at the end. The first step is to develop a personal business model — a concise definition of your Customers and the Value you provide them, all driven by a Purpose that binds work and personal life. You do this with a Business Model Canvas, which looks like this:

You can find the Canvas and more at Business Model You, where 276 work life wizards from 37 countries are developing the personal business model methodology (thanks to personal branding expert Andres Perez Ortega for his inspiration on the MPA acronym, which I’ve rendered in English).

At Business Model You you’ll also find other resources and experts to help you make the MPA honor roll. Now, that doesn’t mean working on an MPA is easy: One member who uses our methodology in business courses says that “students think making up strategic plans for business is easy, but creating a strategy for yourself is hard — because the personal strategy matters more.”

In fact, I’ll be the first to admit that none of us has actually earned the MPA credential yet. We may never graduate! But maybe that’s the biggest advantage of all. While an MBA costs tens of thousands of dollars for two years of classes, an MPA is free — and the learning continues for a lifetime.

Why not enroll today?

Work life. The business world. So often, jobs and the businesses that provide them are framed as an opposition of sorts — as adversaries compelling us to be someone other than ourselves. That representation is true to a degree: Many people strongly feel that their work and personal pursuits, while both essential to survival, are fundamentally incompatible. Perhaps you do!

Despite this common notion, there’s a place for business lessons in our personal lives. This point was brought home to me last year while editing a now-bestselling book about business models. The book was created to help organizations become more successful — but I was struck by the notion that business model thinking can help individuals succeed, too.

Business Models and Organizations

What does “business model” mean, anyhow? There’s little agreement on a precise definition, but two common explanations are “a blueprint for a business” and “how a firm makes money.” These definitions are general and don’t mean exactly the same thing. Still, both suggest that business models play a key role in business success.

Among its many exciting features — such as its title! — the book I edited, Business Model Generation, provides a more complete definition of “business model”:

A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value.

In other words, a business model explains how an enterprise provides value to customers — and gets paid for doing so. Specifically, “providing value” means helping customers with a job that needs doing.

The Business Model Canvas

This logic is expressed in a Business Model Canvas, a simple diagram that shows a business model’s nine key “building blocks.” These building blocks include Customers, Value Provided to Customers, and Channels, among others:

Let’s see how the Canvas works by diagramming the business model of Jiffy Lube, a drive-in, quick oil change service company.

Jiffy Lube helps car owners accomplish a crucial but messy, hassle-laden job: maintaining their vehicles. Jiffy Lube helps customers with this important job by quickly and expertly changing oil — and saving them from dirtying their clothes or having to recycle used oil. Customers, in turn, pay Jiffy Lube for the value it provides in keeping their cars running trouble-free.

Here’s a Canvas that shows Jiffy Lube’s business model. It includes Customers (car owners) Value Provided to Customers (keeping cars running trouble-free) and Channels (how value is delivered — in Jiffy Lube’s case, on-site at Jiffy Lube locations):

Seems simple enough, right?

Here’s the key point: Though it embodies crucial organizational logic, a business model is also invisible — an undefined, intangible asset that resides…well, nowhere. That’s the beauty and value of the Business Model Canvas. Drawing the model on paper makes typically unspoken assumptions explicit. And this can help organizations clarify their goals, adjust them to fit changing economic climates, and even provides a method for reinventing themselves to deal with changing needs or to pursue new customers or opportunities.

Business Models Go Personal

Now, here’s some good news for individuals: Just as business model thinking helps organizations transform the status quo into something new and successful, you too can employ the same tools to improve your current career.

Of course, by better understanding how your organization operates, business model thinking can help you perform more effectively at your current job. But more than that, once you’re familiar with the Business Model Canvas, you can use it to adjust or even reinvent your work life.

How?

Simply by thinking of yourself as a single-person enterprise with a “personal business model.”

For example, we all work for others (Customers), helping them complete the jobs they need to have done (Provide Value) — and we do so through various mediums (Channels). Of course, we don’t usually use business terms to discuss our work. (Not if we want anyone to listen to us, anyhow!) But that’s where the Canvas proves useful. When we use its structure and language to help us describe what we do, we open the door to personal and professional innovation.

Last year, for instance, my friend Chris developed a side business copy-editing scholarly papers for university professors. After listening to me prattle on about business models, she decided to analyze her new job by drawing a Business Model Canvas. In the “Value Provided to Customers” building block, she wrote, “improve article readability and style.”

But after pondering Value Provided, Chris realized the job she was doing was something far more valuable: helping professors get articles published in leading scholarly journals. For university professors living in a “publish or perish” world, this was a mission-critical job indeed. Chris raised her rates significantly — and attracted more, not fewer, customers.

Clarifying your personal business model can be an eye-opening experience — or even the first step toward reinventing your work life.

Interested in using these ideas to improve your career? Here are three simple takeaways:

• Learn to use the Business Model Canvas — it’s a simple but powerful tool for both organizations and individuals.
• Like Chris, put your personal business model down on paper to clarify the value you provide to customers.
• Use Post-it notes to change the content of different building blocks and imagine new ways to add customers, serve them through different channels, or boost your “value provided.”

Be Part of a Bestseller Business Model

Chris’s story isn’t unique; anyone can benefit from defining a personal business model. With this in mind, together with the authors of Business Model Generation, I’m now working on a new book about applying business model ideas to personal career development.

The work is tentatively titled Business Model You! We figured a book about business models should itself adopt a non-traditional model, so that’s what we’ve done. We’re inviting readers to co-create the book by critiquing draft chapters, voting on design elements, or simply supporting the effort through online forum membership. In exchange for pre-purchasing one copy, each member will be credited within the final work as a contributing co-author (this is a traditional paper book, not an e-book).

This is the same model that made Business Model Generation an international bestseller — you can read about this rule-busting approach in an essay by Jeffrey Krames, the agent who represents us.

Nearly 500 contributing co-authors from 45 countries joined us in the production of Business Model Generation. Now we’d like to invite people with strong interests in career development and/or writing to join us at Business Model You! While we can’t guarantee that the new book will also become a bestseller, if you join us, the odds are in our favor — and yours.

Most important, try drawing your own personal business model. You may find that it helps you jumpstart your career.

Yes, I am shooting straight here, both about 1) you becoming a contributing co-author, and 2) our new book breaking a whole batch of publishing rules.

Here’s the backstory:

Last year, I edited and served as a contributing co-author for Business Model Generation, a book that turned into an international bestseller — so far, it’s shipped more than 115,000 copies worldwide and sold translation rights for 14 languages.

We didn’t take the usual path to success. In a blog post that explains the counterintuitive reasons for Business Model Generation’s success, Jeffrey Krames, the agent who represented us, wrote that BMG “breaks most every rule of business book publishing.”

Our book did break all the rules. It was:

• Self-published
• Authored outside the U.S.
• Suboptimally titled
• Too expensive
• A non-standard size
• Etc., etc.

But that’s not all. Business Model Generation itself became a living example of the innovative business models it advocates, turning the traditional publishing approach upside down by attracting 470 contributing co-authors from 45 countries — all of whom supported the work by pre-purchasing copies and providing feedback on chapter drafts.

Now, hang on. I’ve been bandying the term “business model” like a high-priced consultant. What does it mean, exactly?

Put simply, a business model is the logic by which an organization sustains itself financially. Kind of like a blueprint for an enterprise.

Given worldwide recession, white-hot international competition, and the U.S. financial market meltdown, companies (along with governments, schools, and other nonprofit organizations) are finding it essential to examine, analyze, modify, or even completely revamp the models by which they sustain themselves.

That’s where Business Model Generation comes in. By creating an understandable vocabulary for talking about business models, as well as a simple, visual tool for sharing those models, our team produced a work whose precepts have been adopted by thousands of companies worldwide. In fact, Inc. Magazine dubbed Business Model Generation one of 2010’s “best books for business owners.”

Readers, here’s your cue.

While working on Business Model Generation, I was struck by how relevant business model concepts are to our personal careers. Even people who aren’t solo entrepreneurs, I realized, can apply business model thinking to their own work lives. By reconceiving ourselves as “single-person enterprises,” we can take four simple, powerful steps toward reinventing our work. The steps are:

• Draw a simple one-page “picture” of your career (see Business Model Canvas below)
• Reflect deeply on Step One and decide how you want your career “picture” to change
• Diagram your new, reconceived career
• Act to make your re-envisioned worklife a reality

The process uses the Business Model Canvas created by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur:

I came up with the notion of a “personal business model” and proposed to the original five-member Business Model Generation team that we work together on a sister book: Business Model You!

The answer was a hearty yes, and the project is now underway at BusinessModelYou.com.

Please take a look, and if you are sincerely interested in career development, consider joining us as a contributing co-author.

While we can’t guarantee that our new book will also become a bestseller, if we work together with the right tools, the odds are in our favor — and yours.

*****************************

Business Model You! book site

Business Model You! Facebook page

Many thanks to Allie, Lindsay, Chris, Steve, and other friends who sent e-mails over the past weeks, checking in and gently reminding us to write. Now, how to explain ourselves? Mark?

Well, we haven’t exactly been sitting around.

True. We’ve each been sunk deep in our respective core projects. In past months those included completing a new novel, editing a best-selling business book, and finishing a doctoral thesis.

Mark’s too modest, so I’ll tell the latest about his writing: he completed his third novel and immediately won an offer, so the book will be published next year. What’s the new title about, Mark?

Part-love story, part-historical mystery. It follows five generations in an American family, beginning with an immigration in the 1820s, continuing through the Civil War, and concluding in the final years of World War II. Wow, that sounds extremely tedious. But I promise, lots of stuff is left out and I kept only the juicy bits.

You also participated in that wild artist retreat in upstate New York in August. I imagine that involved lots of drunken skinny dipping, orgiastic body-painting, and so forth?

Well, ahem, I had to sign this non-disclosure thing… What I can say is … it was very nice and everybody was, ahem, well-behaved. Also, lots of work got done. But what about you, Tim? You’re even more academically distinguished these days, aren’t you?

I wrapped up my doctorate of business administration (DBA), a daunting task, believe you me. The degree was awarded August 27. My thesis dealt with the question of why some business models transfer more readily to overseas markets than others. As I see it the answer lies in how business models are “culturally imprinted” — and how those imprints affect a business model’s viability outside country of origin.

But you had more on your plate than that.

Yep. While finishing the research, I served as editor and co-author for an extraordinary new book. Business Model Generation is the first book I’ve been involved with that’s sold more than 7,000 copies, so it’s been a thrill (95% of all books published sell fewer than 5,000 copies).

How many copies are we talking? (Author to author here.)

55,000-plus in print.

Whoa, Holy Gutenberg! And overseas?

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Dutch, and Indonesian translation rights have been sold.

What, no Antarctic?

I wasn’t supposed to say anything. The contract isn’t quite finished.

Remind me to ask you more often about success in one’s writing life. Now, there’s an interesting story behind the way this book was put together, right? You helmed the editing part of a really sharp team.

Yes, the project involved a remarkable entrepreneurial network (about which more later).

Where can I get a copy?

Barnes & Noble stuck their neck out for us: they ordered an average of more than four copies each for all of their almost 800 U.S. stores (that’s unusual for a $35 business book). So please consider buying it at Barnes & Noble — we’d like to support the remarkable commitment they made to us.

You got it. Well, as for Soul Shelter, the way we’ve kept things shuttered here lately, I think we owe ourselves a reminder of why we started this blog in the first place.

We had a wonderful book of medieval Japanese parables to promote, but more important, we wanted to experience this remarkable medium for ourselves.

Right. We wanted an outlet for the ideas we always tossed around between us in regular conversation. But I think it’s become clear that we lack the, uh, stamina of real bloggers.

Are you saying we fizzled?

Fizzled? No! Flagged a little, maybe. The ideas are still there in abundance. The tough part is the regular blogging thing — the format and upload business…

True. It’s safe to say that we are absolutely, positively, incontrovertibly convinced that we will never, ever, be pro bloggers.

You said it. Blogging is hard, incessant work.

Uh-huh, and to be successful, you’ve got to either 1) have good products or services to flog, 2) write about a subject that’s attractive to advertisers, or 3) be so crazy about writing and self-publishing that you’re care-free about any financial return on your efforts.

That’s why with this post, we’re switching to an occasional rather than a regular posting schedule (actually, we made that transition months ago, but hey, here’s official notice).

And how should we define “occasional”?

Let’s just say, stretches of quietude will not be rare.

And quietude is good for the soul!

Yeah, nicely put. Quietude: un-blog-like, but not without soulful benefits!

Meanwhile, the Soul Shelter archives are fully accessible via the categorical groupings in our sidebar, or via the search box on the bottom right side of all full-post pages.

Soul Shelter lives, and more good writing is (occasionally) on the way!

Tim Clark and Mark Cunningham are both writers, and welcome any inquiries. Write to <authors> at this domain.

Your neighbor talks too loudly. Your son grabs ridiculous mouthfuls when eating. Your husband never lifts the seat.

The world is full of inadequate, annoying, problem-ridden, frustrating, frustrated people — and that’s what makes it beautiful.

As a young man I struggled to hide my inadequacies, to show the world a better face. I didn’t understand a great truth articulated by Nicholas Dawidoff, author of The Crowd Sounds Happy:

When you are young there is the terrible inability to understand that it’s your deficits that will make others not only like you but feel close to you.

Yes, it’s precisely the exuberance behind that overly-loud voice, the impetuousness behind those inadequate table manners, that make us who we are.

While some imperfections certainly deserve to be addressed, here’s the truth: The perfect person is uninteresting. As Joseph Campbell said, “it is the imperfections of life that are lovable.”

As one who exemplifies imperfection, I’m with Dawidoff: Let’s cherish, rather than hide, our inadequacies.

I know, I know — in the past I’ve touted the breaking of habits in Three Ways to Become More Entrepreneurial Now. But there are some things about ourselves that we can change and some we can’t (see Can We Really Change? Yes and No).

So let us embrace our soulful imperfections (Lord knows we have many to embrace). In the meantime, here are some other flawed, inadequate essays you might enjoy:

“The One Place You’ll Always Be Indispensable”

“Are You an Amateur? Why Not?”

“The Post That Never Was”

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

The coming weeks will find me deep in the throes of composing a new novel—always a damn complicated process. While it’s my life’s passion, it’s not constantly enjoyable by any means. Working up a manuscript is as reliably dispiriting and uplifting an undertaking as anything I know. It’s what they call a labor of love.

I perform this labor because I believe in story. I want, in my own humble way, to be a steward of story.

But why? Why should anyone care to write stories? Or read them? What use are they? These are useful questions, and I tend to think their answers touch upon certain important truths about the human soul.

There’s a peculiar experience that the American writer Wendell Berry beautifully describes as: “the intimacy the mind makes with the place it awakens in.” My own intellectual and creative life began in Northern California, in the great shadow of Mount Diablo. For all my fondness toward the mountain and its surrounding country, I never suspected I’d set a book there. Still, Diablo exerted a mythic force in my imagination, and I ended up publishing a novel in which the mountain appears as a primary character.

I never intended to write about my own locale because, I guess, I thought that setting a novel at home was like aiming for nothing higher than to get one’s name printed in the high school paper. But then I discovered the works of John Steinbeck.

With his talent for evincing the mythic resonance of his native California — which he did most powerfully in his book East of Eden – Steinbeck helped me to see the potential for universality that lay in the land and history of my own Diablo Valley.

In a letter of 1933, well before he’d started East of Eden, Steinbeck said of his native Salinas:

I would like to write the story of this whole valley, of all the little towns and all the farms and ranches in the wilder hills. I can see how I would like to do it so that it would be the valley of the world.

Reading this, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, my mountain stand for the mountain of the world. And so I wrote a strange little book about a boy growing up in a 19th-century coal-mining town in the foothills of Mount Diablo. And I strove to make it a story about something more than this boy, or his neighborhood coal mines, or his local mountain — a story about things that would prove much more relevant and familiar to readers anywhere.

To some, this sort of storytelling equates to “provincialism” or “regionalism.” I find both terms demeaning, for they insinuate “quaint” or “boring.” In fact, I suspect that Steinbeck himself often comes in for unreasonable bruising (his fiercest detractors argue that he did not deserve his Nobel honors) largely because he dared to set the greater number of his novels and stories in a provincial corner of the western United States. Worse, he had the impertinence to handle this provincial setting, the drama of its denizens, as if it were the whole universe, or at least a clear microcosm of some universal experience. The nerve!

Despite the crabbing of cynical critics, Steinbeck understood, as have many important writers, how stories rooted in the local go back to the earliest artistic proclivities of humankind — and he believed in the artistic value of tapping into those old narrative roots. He knew that this kind of storytelling is essentially an expression of mankind’s mythologizing tendencies. (Oftentimes, “regional” fiction, or stories of “place,” consciously follow mythological patterns. Thus, East of Eden restages the Book of Genesis in the Salinas Valley, seeking to elevate the setting, magnify its overtones, and make it resonate with people everywhere.)

Recently, the writer Barry Lopez remarked:

It is not necessary, in fact I think it is rare, that a story teller or a writer be a wise person. What is essential is that the writer be able to create a trustworthy pattern, a pattern in the modern idiom that serves the reader in her effort to remember who she is, and where she is going.

For ages, human beings have told one another stories, and these stories have sought to address the mysteries of existence — such mysteries as, for example: how we human beings happen to find ourselves plunked down on earth without warning, without previous consultation concerning whether we’d like such an experience, and certainly without any instruction booklet.

What is that experience all about, ask our most enduring stories? What’s the meaning of it all? What’s the significance of arriving here, living a while, and eventually going back to nonexistence?

For everybody, life can seem somewhat arbitrary at times (or on a daily basis for some). Science hints at explanations in terms of astronomy, geology, physics, etc. — but only in those terms, which are causal terms, and which remain fragmentary because they do not address the nagging human need, in all of us, to glimpse the Meaning Of It All.

Meanwhile, we have religion and stories, the modes by which human beings have addressed these mysteries for a very long time. And much contemporary fiction and autobiography is in fact an integral part of our age-old mythmaking process.

In an essay entitled “The Sense of Place,” another great California writer, Wallace Stegner, discussed the restlessness of modern America, and suggested that it causes us a spiritual danger, for it makes us “mythless,” i.e., storyless:

Always hopeful of something better, hooked on change, a lot of us have never stayed in one place long enough to learn it, or have learned it only to leave it. In our displaced condition we are not unlike the mythless man Carl Jung wrote about, who lives ‘like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.’

But in reading stories (the best, most lasting ones — and particularly those firmly grounded in place, be it our own or somebody else’s) we orient ourselves toward mythology again. Indeed, I believe there is a very ceremonial quality to a good story — in the way it can furnish us with a sense of spiritual expansion, ennoblement, humility, empathy, inspiration — or even provocation.

I would even say that stories are, in a sense, sacred – not least because they offer (as no other forum does — not institutionalized religion nor politicized scholarship) a chance to engage with, dwell upon, challenge, be challenged by, things not immediately universal: the Taboo, the Other, the Unorthodox, the Inscrutable, the Mysterious, the Hard-To-Swallow, sometimes the Hard-To-Sympathize-With.

Stories are sacred not because they propound theories, ideas, or morals — but because they invite reflection, evoke a long gaze, and thereby illuminate the common truths of certain human dilemmas, desires, or even failures.

Following the publication of my first novel, I was asked in an interview to comment on my literary influences and to offer an opinion about critic Harold Bloom’s notion that most writers struggle against an “anxiety of influence.”

While I usually wince to be reminded of my own answers to questions regarding my work, I find I’m surprisingly satisfied, years later, with what I said in this instance:

I have very little anxiety about being influenced… I guess I tend to view literature as a collective celebration of sorts, in which the strengths of one generation or school are freely hailed or reincarnated or played upon in another. I think that to fear influence is to let the electrical currents of art, cross-generational and cross-categorical, go astray, instead of harnessing them and letting them galvanize new work in powerful ways. I guess Bloom speaks partly to the fact that an important tension naturally exists between works that have come before and those now being created — I find that tension to be very creatively invigorating, rather than something to overcome.

I see now that I was talking about the long continuous ceremony of story. A ceremony conducted across generations, it can strengthen our involvement in the human adventure, bring us together and maybe help awaken us to the ground beneath our own feet — to our very own present moment, replete with mysteries and meaning.

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

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Many believe the answer lies in “time management.”

What nonsense!

I’ve tried to manage time. Once I decided to put the fourth of July into May. Didn’t work. Then I struggled to delay my 40th birthday for a few months. It steamrolled toward me anyway, moving at the precise rate of 24 hours per day.

Believers in time management may benefit by reading Getting Things Done, the David Allen bestseller which I’ve found useful, mainly for two pieces of advice taken to heart:

1. Buy and use only plain manila tab folders
2. Buy and use a label maker to create professional labels for all files and notebooks

The rest of Allen’s advice is no doubt helpful for busy, busy people overwhelmed with long and short-term directives, deliverables, family and civic responsibilities, and general information. A terrific overview of the GTD approach is available at the 43 Folders blog.

But for those who’ve achieved some success in being underwhelmed by administrivia, Getting Things Done seems too long by, well, about 257 of its 267 pages.

I prefer a simpler, “higher altitude” approach advocated by my London-based buddy Mark Fritz, an aspiring achievement guru who recently came out with his second book, The Truth About Getting Things Done.

The Truth’s key point is that “time management” is an illusion. Everyone gets the same amount of time, and no one can “manage” it.

Instead of trying to manage time, says Mark, manage your focus.

“I’ve coached a number of people over the past few years,” Mark writes, “and one of the key problems they face is confusing activity with accomplishment. With today’s business complexity and the flood of information deluging us hour-to-hour, many workers fall into an ‘activity trap.’ They wind up reacting to everything that hits them all day long. They feel constantly busy and active, yet at the end of their day wonder what they’ve accomplished.”

So how to stop confusing activity with accomplishment?

“It’s all about changing from time management to focus management,” says Mark. “Time management is about fitting the most activities into the smallest amount of time. Focus management is about accomplishing your most important goals.”

For one Fortune 100 manager, changing from time management to focus management had a dramatic impact on what he and his team accomplished each week, says Mark. Two new habits made the difference:

1. Weekly Focus Review
This manager invested 30 to 60 minutes each Friday afternoon to list and review the key things he and his team needed to accomplish in the week ahead and weeks ahead. Then, he reviewed both his planned actions and actions he thought he needed to take (the ones he was thinking about but hadn’t yet written down), and made choices on what to do and what not to do.

Benefits of the Weekly Review: First, he clarified his Focus (important outcomes) and the key actions that would deliver it. Second, he went into his weekend with less stress, because he knew what needed to be done in the coming week.

2. Daily Focus Reminder
The manager started each day by reviewing his Focus: the key outcomes and actions he defined during the previous Friday afternoon Weekly Focus Review. He knew priorities often change, and that refining and keeping clarity on his Focus was key.

Benefits of the Daily Focus Reminder: First, the manager reminded himself of his Focus before the pressures of the day started. A clear Focus helped him make wise “yes/no” choices on actions throughout day. Second, he had a chance to refine his Focus based on new priorities that were beyond his control.

The Weekly Focus Review and the Daily Focus Reminder provided clarity that led the manager to better choices on how to use his time: What to do and what not to do. It also helped him guide his team toward better choices.

The way to stop confusing activity with accomplishment, says Mark, is focus management, not time management.

So, if like me, you sometimes find yourself struggling to accomplish goals, give the Mark Fritz approach a try. And stop trying to make Christmas come in July.

(This post is from the Soul Shelter archives)

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Conventional wisdoms are sneaky things. Moderately useful sometimes, they often have a way of eroding confidence in one’s better instincts, even undermining the valid insights of independent thinkers.

Not long ago, while reading through a book of collected interviews with my favorite contemporary filmmaker, the late Anthony Minghella, I felt a fluttery thrill upon finding the following quote:

I think any sane person resists the idea that there is a formal and ineffable structure to films, which is what the Americans have diagnosed as the ‘three-act’ structure. They’ll talk about the problems in the second act, problems in the third act. It seems to me to be absurd that such a liquid form should be calcified into three acts.

The “Three-Act Structure” is a conventional wisdom of American film-writing. It’s referred to, sagely, as “The Form.” And while many a fine movie owes much to The Form (Robert Redford’s stellar Quiz Show comes to mind), Minghella is right. We Americans are absolutely obsessed with a screenwriting approach which is essentially, let’s admit, an industry dogma. The Form, let’s further admit, would more aptly be called The Formula.

Minghella’s words struck home because some time ago I completed my own first screenplay, and subsequently engaged with various industry people in deep and thoughtful conversations pertaining to “plot-points” and other facets of the all-holy Three-Act dogma of The Form.

These industry people had read my screenplay and liked it, but some couldn’t get around certain nagging “issues” in the script’s “structure.”

I was all ears, because I found The Form to be a new and refreshing challenge. I’d read some screenwriting guides about The Form, had analyzed some movies flawlessly structured thanks to The Form, and I was striving to get a handle on The Form myself, all in the aim of improving my script, which was, well, a quiet, quirky little comedy/drama about a father and a son, about growing up, about learning not to be one’s own worst enemy.

My script, in other words, was essentially plotless. It was about relationships. It consisted of a series of small, (hopefully) moving human moments. Characters talked to one another, had memories, felt sad, embarrassed, regretful, unsure, talked to each other some more, and finally came to feel a little bit hopeful, but no less clueless.

My movie ended there. That, in a nutshell, was it. It wasn’t a happy ending, but not a sad one either.

That’s all my movie wanted to be, and in truth that’s all it needed to be in order to live up to itself and my vision for it. Still I listened intently to my professional advisers, wholly confident in their counsel, poised all the while to “fix” the script I’d already revised about a hundred times.

For years, I had heard the gospel of The Form and believed it would be my artistic salvation.

My movie needed a plot. It needed big, unmistakable turning points. It needed a First, Second, and Third Act. That, after all, was The Form. I couldn’t expect to produce a worthy screenplay without abiding by The Form. I wanted to sell this thing, didn’t I? Absent The Form, how could I expect anybody in MovieLand to know what to do with my odd little script?

I must have been nuts—not because I should have known I’d already authored a perfect screenplay (no, though it was pretty good), but because I’d somehow failed to recognize that among my small handful of favorite films, the films that never ceased to inspire me (by Agnes Jaoui, Ingmar Bergmann, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Scorsese, and others), nary a one boasted the tried-and-true Three-Act Structure, The Form.

At the top of this private pantheon was Minghella’s The English Patient. I had watched that film forty-three times.

Here’s Minghella in that book of interviews again:

The screenplay of The English Patient was always odd. I remember I sent it to a successful American actress whom I liked a lot, not to be in the film but just as a friend. She wrote back to me saying, ‘I beg you not to make this film –- it has no third act.’ I wrote back and said I didn’t think there was a second act either. It was so far away from the hegemony of the American screenplay –- Act One, Act Two, Act Three –- there’s no way to fit it into that box at all. One of those guys who goes around ‘teaching’ people how to write a screenplay actually uses The English Patient as an illustration of how not to … He’s right, of course.

I looked up from the page, newly awakened. Lordy, it’s shocking to realize the insidiousness of conventional wisdoms. If you’re looking to lead a free and fulfilling creative life, beware “wisdom.”

The funny thing is, I’ve never been a big fan of dogmas—religious, political, or aesthetic. I hear the resounding ring of truth in these words of John Dewey, from his 1933 book Art As Experience:

Impulsion beyond all limits that are externally set inheres in the very nature of the artist’s work. It belongs to the very character of the creative mind to reach out and seize any material that stirs it so that the value of that material may be pressed out and become the matter of a new experience.

Henry James, another favorite voice, also puts it beautifully:

It appears to me that no one can ever have made a seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase—a kind of revelation—of freedom. One perceives in that case—by the light of a heavenly ray—that the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision.

You could say I’ve done my best to go my own way, do my own thing, write my own rules. Yet despite my finely tuned B.S.-detector where artistic ideology is concerned, in this case something had scrambled my instruments, burrowed into me, undermined my self-reliance.

Something had led me to look away from the organic aesthetic demands of my screenplay in search of a formula. (Is this why dealings with Hollywood are so often equated to Faustian bargains?)

Whew. Close call.

Granted, my script may remain nothing more than words on a page. I’ll likely never sell the thing. But that’s OK.

The magnificently talented (and prolific) writer William T. Vollman put it nicely in a fascinating New York Times feature last week when asked whether he was concerned that his new, uncompromisingly long book might cost him readers:

I don’t care. It seems like the important thing in life is pleasing ourselves. The world doesn’t owe me a living, and if the world doesn’t want to buy my books, that’s my problem.

Plot-points or no, three acts or no, I like my script just the way it is.

(This post is from the Soul Shelter archives)

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