Nate Dickson Thinks...

When I was a junior in high school I was in two classes with my favorite teacher ever. I was in her advanced English class and on the Literary Magazine staff. She was a great teacher, one that shaped my life ever since. I don't know what she saw in my writing, but I'm grateful she saw something. She encouraged me, offered actual critiques, advice, and treated me like I was actually onto something when I wrote. It's safe to say she's the reason I'm still writing.

At the end of my junior year I was sitting in her classroom working on finishing up our notes for the literary magazine that year. I had already agreed to come back and be “Head” editor the following year, so I wanted to leave myself a few reminders.

As I was working she came over to the desk where I was working and said “Nate...this is probably a good book for you to read.” and placed a trade paperback on my desk, then left the room. She seemed a little nervous, I guess because giving gifts to one student instead of any others might seem somewhat preferential.

The book was Red Sky At Morning by Richard Bradford.

I read somewhere recently that Terry Pratchett had a goal to write four hundred words a day. Anyone who is familiar with Sir Terry's body of work knows that he must have written far more than that most days. You don't create the Discworld and Good Omens and all his other projects without putting in a fair amount of time and effort daily.

Let's say it one more time for the overachievers up in the front: “Quality over Quantity” is for consumption not creation. When you are choosing what to bring into your life it makes sense to be choosy. When you are working on your output you need to just keep producing. Writing 200 words a day is a far better practice than fretting over a thousand words for a week. “Thinking about writing” doesn't make you a better writer. Writing does. The only way to write the things you're really proud of is to write a whole lot of other stuff as well.

I'm an introvert. like, a serious introvert. One of my employees asked recently if he could get a subsidy from our organization to pay for him to work in a rented office space instead of working from home. All I could think was, “WHY????”. For me working from home is the dream, it's a thing I never imagined would happen. I can't imagine paying good money to have to work in an office; I would pay a portion of my paycheck every month to avoid going back to an office.

I've been thinking about the overstimulation of our reward centers. Not in those words exactly, but considering how we behave these days, as a species.

It's very easy to be entertained or distracted at all times. In older days, a term for a person who was addicted to substances was “Dissipated,” and I think it's very accurate. When we allow our attention to be taken at all times like this, we allow ourselves, our energy to be spread too thin, to be quite literally dissipated across all our interests. When water is dissipated, it has less ability to exert force. A focused stream can cut metal, a slowly seeping puddle takes much longer to effect any change.

I was thinking about sound the other day. Sound is fascinating and our sense of hearing doubly so. If you reduce sound to its most elemental level, it's nothing but a series of higher- or lower-pressure waves that stimulate a specific nerve in our auditory canal. But given those very basic impulses, we can discern many different sources of sound. The sound of me typing on my keyboard differs not only from the sound of my son playing the piano, but also from the sound of typing on a slightly different keyboard.

And for some reason this has always annoyed me. If you look at a visual representation of an audio file, you'll see the overall outline of the waveform, and it seems impossible that such a primitive shape could contain music with voices and instruments and beauty.