Wrestling with Uncertainty – My Favorite!

“Your beliefs are in jeopardy, only when you don’t know what they are,” said Jay Allison. However, beliefs can change, and they often do. As John Updike observed, “A person believes various things at various times. Even on the same day.” Therefore, if our beliefs can be changeable things, we need to understand their part in our lives.

Think about a time in your life when your beliefs were challenged—throwing you into a “moral dilemma.” Your beliefs steered you in one direction, but your actions led you in another. What made you “cross that line?” What was the justification for stepping over it? And were there repercussions in doing so?

The term cognitive dissonance refers to the feeling of uncomfortable tension which comes from holding two conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time.

Cognitive: concerned with acquisition of knowledge: relating to the process of acquiring knowledge by the use of reasoning, intuition, or perception
Dissonance: inconsistency: lack of consistency or compatibility between actions or beliefs

Dissonance increases with:
• The importance of the subject to us.
• How strongly the dissonant thoughts conflict.
• Our inability to rationalize and explain away the conflict.

Dissonance is often strong when we believe something about ourselves and then do something against that belief. For example, if I believe that I am a defender of the downtrodden, but then turn a blind eye to someone in need, the discomfort I feel as a result is cognitive dissonance.

To release the tension we can take one of three actions:
• Change our behavior.
• Justify our behavior by changing the conflicting cognition.
• Justify our behavior by adding new cognitions.

Think of the factors that influenced your decision in such a moral dilemma. What made you step over your boundary (or to side with one side of your beliefs, over the other).

As a writer, I love wrestling with such uncertainty. How one justifies, or comes to terms, with this cognitive dissonance makes for some great writing. Think of a time when you faced an internal conflict and write about the motives for the decisions you made: personal, circumstantial, social, political.

This is the set up for some great writing! Good luck.

What’s Your Truth?

Write a list of 10 things you know to be true.

Writer’s Block

Writer’s Block? No such thing! There is always something to write about. Challenge yourself to chart out “things you’ve changed your mind about.”

Categories: moral values, political beliefs, religious beliefs, cultural values, personal/life priorities, ambitions/goals, people. Return to this list every day for a week or so. This is good material!!

Once you have a list, choose one. Ask yourself: Why do beliefs change? What made you change your mind from a previously held firm belief? How did society/peers/teachers/family influence you? Think of people in your life. Did any of them influence your beliefs?

Or perhaps your opinion on an important person in your life has changed. Look back on your list. Is there something/someone that you used to value/prioritize much more or less than you do now. Try to think of beliefs/issues that you used to have a “black and white” stance on, but now you have a more nuanced opinion.

Writing Tips

Writing Tips

In my role as teacher, I have shared these tips with students:

WRITING IS EXERCISE FOR YOUR BRAIN.  Some writers might be lucky enough to have ideas just pop into their heads.  For me, I have to decide to write.  This means, making the conscious effort to put my brain in a writing mode.   For me, my brain is usually “idling,” like a car: it’s on but it’s not really moving.  When I’m ready to write I have to tell my brain: think about this!  When I do this: actually put my thinking cap on, I can feel my brain change; it goes to a deeper level.  Almost always, I come away some nugget I can work with.

WRITE IN THE MOST BASIC TERMS.  Do NOT take the time to come up with the perfect word or the perfect image.  If you’re imagining an old gnarled tree swaying its bare limbs in the dark gray of a storm and at the moment all you could think to write is: It was dark and there was a scary big tree, then write that.  You will have many opportunities to come back and work the magic of words and phrasing.  What you don’t want is to lose the image you have in your mind.  You want to be able to recall that dark afternoon with the tree.

WRITE BIG – Delete nothing at first.  Save everything, you never know when you might need it.  On your laptop, create a file that’s called: “extra” or “dump” or “deletions.”  One day you might decide to cut an entire paragraph because you don’t think it’s serving your main theme and that’s great, you want to pare down your writing but you never know when you might need something you’ve deleted.

READ YOUR WORK THREE WAYS.  Use your laptop to create, move your text around, even edit.  It’s your main writing utensil.  But every now and then, print your story on paper and read it.  Your mind reads off of a computer much differently than it does off a piece of paper.  I ALWAYS find more edits when I’m reading off of paper rather than my computer.  THEN, and this is most important: read your story OUT LOUD.  There is a definite rhythm and poetry to how your writing sounds out loud.  On paper, you might not notice that two or three words together are fighting for the same sound.  Reading aloud also alerts you to word repetition.

REWARD YOURSELF FOR GOOD WRITING.  Each day when you pull up your work, before you dive into the parts that need work, reward yourself by reading a paragraph or sentence that you think came out really well.  It will put your mind in the right spot, make you think: oh, yeah!  I can do this.  Let’s write more like this.

LET YOUR WRITING SIT.  Whenever possible, let your writing sit.  When you let it sit for a day or two and then come back to it, you see all sorts of things that you had missed previously, and new ideas flow forth.

The Six-Word Memoir

Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a novel in just six words. His heartbreaking result:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

The constraint, it turned out, fueled rather than inhibited creativity.  The six-word memoir is now a common exercise for students, challenging them to encapsulate a story in just a few words:

“Sometimes lonely in a crowded bed.”

“My life made my therapist laugh.”

“Wasn’t born a redhead — fixed that.”

“I still make coffee for two.”

“Said he loved me, he lied.”

“Two girls, both of them me.”

“Big dreams, big heart, big mouth.”

“Life is better with headphones on.”

At its core, the six-word memoir offers a simple way for anyone of any age to try to answer the question that defines us all: Who am I?

Chef Mario Batali certainly did when he wrote, “Brought it to a boil often.”

Others try to capture one aspect of their life such as, “According to Facebook we broke up” or

“Mom’s Alzheimer’s: she forgets, I remember.”

The six-word memoir takes a basic human need—self-expression—and makes it accessible, easy and often quite addictive.

Give it a try!