Writing with Purpose

Music therapy.

Quick! What’s the first thing that pops into your head?

As a sapling musician, when I used to hear the words “music therapy,” I would imagine myself sitting cross-legged in a circle with a bunch of kids with behavioral problems, playing a guitar and singing while having pudding cups and cookies thrown at my face.

Needless to say, music therapy was never a profession that really interested me.

However, after some research, I am starting to get a much clearer (and more realistic) picture of what music therapy is all about. 

According to the American Music Therapy Association, music has been recognized as a healing power for thousands of years. However, people have only recently started to study the affects that music has on people and how to use music to help those who are suffering. The start of music therapy as a profession began in the 1940s, when musicians would play for veterans in hospitals suffering from physical and mental injuries. Improvements in the veterans conditions were noticed, and hospital staff started to request the presence of musicians full-time to perform for patients. 

Today, music therapy is "an established health profession in which music is used within a therapeutic relationship to address physical, emotional, cognitive, and social needs of individuals" (AMTA: What is Music Therapy?). Some of the conditions that music therapists work with include: strokes, heart disease, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, dementia and epilepsy. 

Now, how does all of this relate to writing? 

What do you write for? Do you write for fun? For money? Do you dream of fame and success? Do you dream of fans waiting in lines at bookstores for your autograph? 

I know I do.

What if we viewed our writing as something more important? What if we viewed it as the potential to speak to someone else? To help someone who is suffering? What if we viewed our writing as something that could possibly improve the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of our readers? Instead of writing for ourselves, or just for readers that we hope will someday become paying fans- what if we wrote to try to help people?  What if we gave our writing a higher purpose? 

Would that change the way you write? 

What I Learned in the Cave about Writing

Left: Taking a break in Mystic Cave

Right: Photo of Rushmore Cave 

Last summer, I worked as a tour guide at Rushmore Cave in South Dakota. (Yes, it is near Mt. Rushmore...and no, you can't see Mt. Rushmore while inside the cave). Tourists... 

Anyway, most people I have talked to think giving cave tours sounds like a cool job. For me, it wasn't so cool. I’m claustrophobic.

I knew about my phobia before accepting the job offer. I also knew that once I started there was no turning back, because I live 13 hours away from the cave. 

So, why did I do it?

To conquer my fears, of course! To be adventurous! To do all those things people tell me I am supposed to do "while I'm still young." 

And... I did it, with success. I went from whimpering through the standard walking tour through Rushmore Cave to conquering Mystic Cave, one of the most dangerous caves in South Dakota- that starts off with an hour of just crawling.

 By the end of the summer, I felt like a total bad-ass.

This last week, I went back to South Dakota- itching to get back into the cave. I packed up my spelunking clothes while dreaming of digging my way through passages, finding new rooms and naming them after myself. 

Guess what happened once I got into the cave?

I freaked. I was incapable of crawling through holes that were much simpler than things I had conquered last summer.

It was a humbling experience, to say the least. 

After nursing my wounded ego, I related my experience to writing. Sometimes, my excuse not to write is because I believe writing will come as easily to me tomorrow as it does today.

I'm here to tell you, if writing is anything like spelunking, it won't. 

For your own good, write everyday. Even if it's just for 10 minutes. Don't let yourself get to the point where imagining a simple plot and writing bullet points for it seems too difficult. If you do, your brain will probably feel the way that I did in the cave last week- grunting and  flailing my legs while trying to fit through holes that in reality probably could have fit two of me.

You don't want your writing brain to look like that. 

Imaginative Writing: How Far is too Far?

PTSD victim. Vietnam vet. School teacher.

What is the connection between these words?

They are all labels that describe a character in my latest short story. 

Now, I have written characters that are different than me before, but this is a stretch. Sure, I briefly studied PTSD in an abnormal psych class, read some articles, and attended a reading by Jen Percy for her novel, Demon Camp. (Which I can't wait to read.) But I do not have PTSD, and I am not close to anybody struggling with the mental illness. I am not a war veteran. I have a grandfather who served in Vietnam, but he lives far away, and I have never gotten the chance to hear his stories. I am also not a school teacher. Although I have spent many years in school, I have been a student, and therefore can only guess at what the teaching experience is really like.

This is a problem that all writers have to deal with. We have to write characters that are different from us. If we didn't, our stories would be dull and flat. How can we write a story when all the characters have the same opinions, situations, and experiences? We have to stretch ourselves, be imaginative, and put ourselves in other people’s shoes. But how far is too far? Is there a limit? 

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand."

-Albert Einstein 

Should writers heed Einstein's words? Can imagination (with a good dose of research) really substitute for knowledge and experience?

I think the only answer is to start writing and find out. 

NSA and 1984

After reading 1984, I acquired a taste for dystopian literature. I got my hands on a copy of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley from the local library to satisfy my appetite. Once I finished both of these classics, I started to think about other dystopian novels I have read,  including Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, and The Hunger Games.  I would recommend all of these titles to those of you who dream of  danger, experimental science, government conspiracies, and, of course, frighteningly possible futuristic societies. 

Lately, the media has been creating a lot of buzz about the monitoring of phone calls by the NSA. When the story was first developing, reports claimed that only the times when calls were being placed and the duration of calls was being monitored, and if the NSA wanted content, they needed a court order. But now, rumor is that the NSA does not need authorization to listen to the content of calls. It has also surfaced that the NSA monitors emails, texts, and instant messages as well as phone calls.

Politics aside, this news has really interested me. A few weeks ago, I finally got around to reading George Orwell’s classic, 1984. The term “Big Brother” has certainly been thrown around a lot regarding the NSA. I couldn't help but laugh when I heard a reporter say that Big Brother and the government is watching us…I think she needs to reread Orwell’s dystopian novel to understand the redundancy of her statement.

But this brings me to my point. Like the reporter who didn't have a grasp on Orwell's novel, I also did not understand what 1984 was all about before reading it. I always thought it was a sci-fi novel about a futuristic society with a government that kept too close of a watch on its citizens. Now that I have read it, I’m not sure if this novel is science fiction after all. 

Forgive me for my lack of intellectual integrity, but Wikipedia defines science fiction as “a genre of fiction with imaginative but more or less plausible content such as settings in the future, futuristic science and technology, space travel, parallel universes, aliens, and paranormal abilities.”

The latter of this definition certainly does not describe 1984. There are no purple googly-eyed space aliens invading from Eurasia and Eastasia. Winston hasn't been bitten by a radioactive spider, and he doesn't have the ability to fly or make himself invisible. But the former part of this definition describes 1984. The world George Orwell created was imaginative, and for his time, futuristic. (1984 was published in 1949.) Although there isn't an abundance of cool tech gadgets that you would expect from a standard sci-fi novel, Orwell imagined a device called a telescreen. It is similar to a television, except there is always the potential that people are watching you from the other side.  

Although my argument is limited, I believe that 1984 is a science fiction as well as dystopian novel. If you look online, you can find compelling arguments for both sides. There are certainly people out there who don't believe that 1984 should be classified as sci-fi. This brings me to my closing thought.The fact that we have the ability to share different opinions online, whether if it’s about the genre of a book, our thoughts about presidential candidates, or how we feel about gun laws- makes me realize that we are still living in a society with the freedom to say just about whatever we want. Yes, maybe the government will look at it, but the difference between our society and the world of 1984 is that when we say something that the government doesn't like, we aren't punished for it. (Unless, of course, we threaten to kill the president). Winston and Julia did not have this freedom in the world that George Orwell imagined for them. So today, let’s be thankful for our freedom of speech, knowing that we can say almost whatever we want and not be punished for heretical opinions…at least, not yet.

Flash Fiction

This is a "short short story" that I started working on during spring semester in my creative writing class. For now, this is my final draft. Let me know what you think.

Dr. James M. White

You give your wife a good-bye kiss. You don’t feel anything. You look at her. She has gray roots underneath her platinum-blond hair. Her tight dress shows off her body. It is larger than it used to be from bearing your children, but has retained its hourglass shape. You recall the last time you went out with her to meet up with friends from work. You remember the way a colleague elbowed you in the side as your wife left the table to get another drink from the bar. “She’s still got it.” he whispered in your ear.

You stand at the front door of your home, listening to your children rush down the stairs as they do every morning, because they like to see you off to work. They run past their mother and up to you, grabbing on to your body- one on each leg. They look up at you with wide eyes, still gunky from sleep. “Bye, Dada.” says your son. You stoop down to give him a quick hug, and you get a whiff of his morning breath. You let him go and grab on to your daughter, who has a runny nose. After briefly holding your arms around her, you stand up and walk out the door, accidentally letting the screen door slam shut behind you.

You drive to work in your 2011 Audi R8. When you first bought it, you would take your wife for quick joyrides at night once your children were asleep. Now you just drive it to work and for errands. You drive into the Mercy Hospital parking garage and pull into the space that is reserved for you, next to the elevator.

You deliver six babies during your workday. You used to feel awe in your career, marveling at the fact that besides the womb of the mother, you were the first human contact the babies you delivered had in their lives. While you guided an infant into the world, you would think of all the other people that would guide and support them during their lifetime, and felt a joy and honor in being the first person in their life to do so. But now when you go to work, you don’t feel the way you used to. You simply pull the crying babies from their mothers and hand them away to the nurses, as if you are handing over a product in an assembly line.

You go to the same coffee shop ever Monday and Wednesday night after work. You tell your wife you are late on those nights because that is when you catch up on paperwork. As you drive to the coffee shop and think about the lie that you told your wife, you think about the lie that you tell yourself every Monday and Wednesday night. You tell yourself that you go to the coffee shop because you prefer coffee over alcohol. You tell yourself that you go to the same place every time because they have the best cup of coffee in the city. You tell yourself you go to the same place because you like the live music, the artwork, and the relaxed atmosphere. But you know that what you tell yourself is not the truth. You know why you go to the same coffee shop every Monday and Wednesday night. You go, because when you push your way through the tall glass doors and walk up to the mahogany counter, and the barista named Anthony with the light-brown eyes looks up from the drink he is making and smiles at you, it is the first time you feel something special all day. 

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