creativity

Ideal Day

Sam Falco
Daily writing prompt
Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.
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This prompt reminded me of an exercise a friend introduced me to: “the ideal average day.” Rather than describing the most perfect day you could ever have (which is how this prompt initially read to me), you think about the kind of day you’d like to have, on average, every day.

I like that focus better. The “most ideal” is a day you’re going to have once if you’re lucky. It may be unattainable and then you’re chasing something you can never have. And if you achieve it, it’s all downhill from there. Regression to the mean applies to more than statistics.

Rather than thinking about what the best day ever would look like, I prefer to consider the whole of my life. What’s my ideal daily experience?

What’s Important?

To answer that question, I have to first think about what’s important in my life. Sweetie. Creative expression. Learning. An income.

Yes, I would like an income. As a recently-laid-off guy, I miss the regular paycheck. (Or will once the severance runs out.) Do I want a job, in the form of a forty-hour a week gig? I am looking for one, and I will certainly take a suitable one when I find it. Unless I have another means of making money.

My ideal average day includes the things that are important to me, and it somehow includes an income. For this exercise, I want to envision an ideal average day where my income derives from my creative endeavors.

Morning

I wake up around six. Coffee is waiting for me because Sweetie gets up before I do. Don’t @ me; I’m not being sexist. She’s a morning person who gets up at least an hour before I do and she makes coffee. We have our coffee together if she hasn’t already had her two cups. Then we go for a walk together, pet the neighborhood dogs and cats, and come home for a light breakfast. After washing our hands, in case you missed the part about the neighborhood dogs and cats.

After breakfast, I take about an hour to write in my journal. That often segues into creative exploration that bridges into the rest of my morning’s creative expression. Most likely, that’s writing, although occasionally there’s a computer program I want to work on.

Afternoon

After I wrap up my creative morning, it’s time for lunch with Sweetie. We make it together. She tells me about her morning, spent in the garden. She’s seen new growth on her plantings, caterpillars going into chrysalis, and dozens of birds in the yard.

After lunch, I study or do research. Learning feeds my creative mind. Then I turn to business matters. Remember that income I mentioned? My creative work feeds it, and so I have to attend to it. The afternoon is when my analytical mind is at its strongest and the creative mind is quiescent. I leverage that pattern to play to my strengths.

Evening

Dinner with Sweetie. We cook together again, except on the nights when we visit our favorite restaurant. (Good Intentions. Try it. Your taste buds will thank you.) After washing up and doing whatever other daily housekeeping chores need doing, we go to the living room. The television is tuned to a soccer match. I’m not paying attention to it but I like the background sounds as I read fiction, or play a computer game, or write some more. Between 9:30 and 10:00, I brush my teeth and climb into bed. I sleep well.

Join the content generation

Sam Falco

A nifty extra to WordPress’s writing prompt feature is the ability to see how others have answered the same prompts. During last week’s daily blogging experiment, I discovered some thoughtful and thought-provoking responses. I also discovered ones that I’m sure were vomited forth from ChatGPT.

How do I know? The titles were the first giveaway. I mentioned on Friday that I suck at titles. After I wrote my response to “Who are your favorite artists,” I was stumped for a title. I pasted in my essay and asked ChatGPT for some suggestions. Here are a few it came up with:

  • Art Ignorance: Why I Can’t Choose a Favorite Artist Yet
  • The Vanilla-Chocolate Dilemma: On Having a ‘Favorite’ Artist
  • Exploring the Limits of Taste: Why I Don’t Have a Favorite Artist

These are objectively terrible. Even my worst titles have more life than those. But while scrolling through the other responses, I saw many titles with the same structure. “Blah blah: Yadda yadda yadda.”

So what, right? I can’t be the only person who has trouble with titles, and not everyone will be as put off by ChatGPT’s results. But many of the posts were obviously not written by humans, either. I’ve done a lot of work with ChatGPT, and I recognize its style. Long, bloated sentences. Overuse of superlatives. Filler phrases like, “In today’s modern world.” And the last paragraph often starts with “In conclusion” or “In summary.” ChatGPT’s output reads like you chopped up a million freshman essays, blended them into an unimaginative slurry and put it on tap. Yuck.

It’s not writing. It’s what marketing gurus call “content generation,” which is a horrifying phrase all by itself. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a long, concrete-block hallway illuminated by naked florescent bulbs. Nothing good lies at the end of it.

I read to broaden my horizons with fresh perspectives and insights drawn from personal experience. AI-generated “content” is never going to give me that.

Fiction is life

Sam Falco
Daily writing prompt
What is your favorite hobby or pastime?
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I have far too many interests, and that has translated into a lot of hobbies. I have pursued:

  • Singing
  • Guitar
  • Piano
  • Clarinet
  • Role playing games (which spun off its own host of subsidiary hobbies including cartography)
  • Acting
  • Woodworking
  • Photography
  • Drawing
  • Web development
  • Application development

Some of those were long-term pursuits. I started playing Dungeons and Dragons when I was thirteen and was involved enough in the hobby to do a few freelance jobs for Steve Jackson Games. Then I stopped playing about ten years ago. Most interests waxed and waned. Guitar was on-again, off-again for about fifteen years. Woodworking is currently in the rotation but there have been years when I didn’t even look at a power tool. A few were brief interests. I started acting in high school, decided that I wanted to pursue it as a career, and then lost interest in it within two years. Clarinet lasted six weeks.

The one interest that remains constant is writing fiction. I never tire of creating characters and worlds for them to engage with. That was why I played RPGs for so long, and why I always preferred running the game to being a player. The reason I gave it up was that it wasn’t as satisfying to wait for players to interact with my creations. I wanted to tell the whole story myself.

Writing fiction is my oldest pursuit. I wrote my first short story in second grade and I can’t remember a time since then when I didn’t write stories. Around fifteen years ago, I decided to focus on the mystery genre. The road has been anything but straight since then with a lot of setbacks, but I’ve never quit. I don’t think I can. Telling stories is such a fundamental part of myself that stopping would be like deciding to give up breathing.

Why Sammy Can’t Blog

Sam Falco1 Comment

I have been remiss in blogging for several weeks, in spite of my best intentions. I had a good run for seventeen days. I accidentally broke the streak when I wrote a post but forgot to publish it before bed. That set the stage for skipping a day, then two, and then two weeks went by in the beat of a hummingbird’s wings.

In spite of what this lapse suggests, blogging is important to me. That’s why I keep coming back to it.

I write at least one entry in my journal every morning. That exercise limbers up my mind. Often, those entries are not good writing, but the discipline of doing it prepares me for other forms of writing. Sometimes an entry helps me work through a scene I’m struggling with in my fiction. Sometimes I write about work problems and find a solution that way, or at least come to understand the problem better so that I can solve it later. Rarely, I can revise an entry for a blog post. (That’s how “Letters” began.) That’s never the intention, though. When I sit down at my keyboard with a cup of coffee at hand each morning, I am writing for an audience of one, and that one is myself.

I like the idea of blogging because I crave a different type of discipline. In the journal, I allow my thoughts to wander wherever they will. With blogging, I want to channel my thought into a specific topic and construct a coherent narrative or argument. Publishing that effort forces me to be accountable to an external audience.

Why do I struggle to do it, if it’s so important and I want to do it?

Fatigue plays a large role. I haven’t been sleeping well for the past few weeks, which means I start each day with limited energy reserves. I reserve mornings for writing fiction. I spend my workdays engaged in cognitive labor. By the time evening rolls around, I don’t have a lot of mental energy left to spend.

I don’t know how to solve my sleep problem. If I did, I would have solved it already. But I’ll keep experimenting until I find the solution. Until then, I’ll blog as often as I can muster the energy.