Author: Shawn

I bought Cade a new baseball glove a few days ago. We went out back and threw ball. We were in Charlotte and the sun was warm. The grass was still mostly brown, but the trees were white with buds.

Talk about flashbacks.

* * * * *

Twenty-five years ago a little boy yelled for his dad to come outside and throw ball. And he did. The two of them stood in the grass and the ball flew back and forth between them. They didn’t say much. The ball was their conversation, back and forth, thwopping into their leather gloves like compliments, or points well made.

The air smelled of freshly mown grass. The cows wandered over to the fence and watched, with their endless chewing and tails flopping back and forth. They watched as if it was the most boring thing in the world, but the only thing.

Across the street from where the little boy threw ball with his dad was a church with a white steeple, and a graveyard. The boy used to look for monkey’s gold in the macadem, play hide and seek amongst the headstones. Beyond the church was a creek where he once caught a monster carp which his dad toted around in a five-gallon bucket, showing it off to all the neighbors before dumping it back into the muddy water.

But on the days that he threw ball with his dad, there was nothing else. Just the small white orb with spinning seams smacking into their leather gloves, the smell of green grass.

* * * * *

“Two hands, Cade. Use two hands, buddy.”

“Step toward me when you throw. Look at your target – your head’s flopping all around!”

He laughs and throws the ball. It falls short.

“Sorry, dad.”

“Don’t be sorry, buddy! Don’t worry about it. Just step and throw.”

He reminds me of that little boy. Regular throws, back and forth, bore him. He wants me to throw the ball to the side so that he can make diving catches. He wants me to throw it over his head so he can chase it and catch it over his shoulder. He wants to grind grass stains into his knees, muddy up his elbows.

* * * * *

The little boy’s dad went inside, but the boy stays out, throwing the ball up into the air where it pauses, like a large star, then falls to earth. He whispers commentary to himself as he chases the ball through the darkening sky.

He catches the pop-fly that wins the World Series nearly every night, throws his glove into the air in celebration, rolls around in the sweet grass clippings and closes his eyes. He is the only person in the whole world.

You know the drill. I’ve done this with Napoleon Dynamite, Dumb and Dumber, The Princess Bride, and Airplane.

I’ve taken great movies and proven their multiplicity by gleaning immortal writing secrets from their depths. (Is multiplicity a word? Even if it is, there’s no way I used it correctly).

In other words, I waste time re-watching my favorite movies of all-time, at the end of which I quote the movie and make stuff up about “hidden secrets” and “ancient truths.”

Sounds like a bunch of Stonecutter nonsense, right? Oh, well.

Here are 5 writing secrets I learned from the movie, Inception:

1) You need a compelling hook early on, something that snags your reader and won’t let them turn away. This movie starts off in someone’s dream, but not only that – in a dream inside a dream. That’s what I call a hook.

2) Imagination is essential. You can’t perform inception without using complex images, setting up a detailed scene and making sure all of the gaps are filled in:

Eames: If we are gonna perform Inception then we need imagination.

Writing is no different. Use your imagination. We’ll all be better off.

3) What Mal says in the movie about being a lover also speaks to being a writer:

Mal: Do you know what it is to be a lover? Half of a whole?

Being a writer is like being a lover – always half of a whole. You are one half. The reader is the other half Never forget that writing for only yourself is kind of like, well, masturbation.

4) Every writer needs a totem. What’s a totem?

Arthur: So, a totem. It’s a small object, potentially heavy, something you can have on you all the time…

Ariadne: What, like a coin?

Arthur: No, it has to be more unique than that, like – this is a loaded die. [Ariadne reaches out to take the die]

Arthur: Nah, I can’t let you touch it, that would defeat the purpose. See only I know the balance and weight of this particular loaded die. That way when you look at your totem, you know beyond a doubt you’re not in someone else’s dream.

Every writer needs a totem. Every writer needs something that helps them to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they’re not in someone else’s writing. Maybe it’s your narrative voice. Maybe it’s your style. Your structure. Maybe it’s what you write about. Once you have your totem, hang on to it. It will help you find your way.

5) Loose ends tied up are what people want, but ambiguity gets them talking. People want happy endings – they want to know that they can close the book and all the characters are taken care of. But what gets people talking around the water coolers? Endings like “Lost” (which I haven’t seen yet so keep quiet).

I’m not going to spoil the ending of the movie. Watch it, and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

What writing lessons did you learn from Inception?

* * * * *

Don’t forget to go by yesterday’s post – it’s a Choose Your Own Adventure style post in which the reader’s determine the direction each week.

John Dran stared into his bowl of noodles, trying to divine some sort of wisdom from the tangled lump of strands. It was late. He pushed his spoon through the broth, and when he blew on the noodles the steam scattered. And the muse evaded him.

He wished the rain against the windows was louder – anything to drown out the band practicing in the apartment above him. The drum beat was unbearable – not because of how loud it was, but because of how off-beat it was. He grabbed a broom from the corner of the room and rammed the wooden end up against the ceiling. Suddenly the music grew louder and more chaotic. Several people stomped on their floor (his ceiling) in response.

Just as he sat back down, shaking his head in frustration, his cell phone rang on the other side of the room. He slid the chair over the kitchen linoleum toward the counter and looked at the display on the phone before picking it up and answering.

“Hey, mom.”

He slid loudly back to the table, picking up a piece of paper. It was a lottery ticket.

“No, I’m fine.”

He blew on his noodles again.

“I know it’s late. What are YOU doing up?”

John stared up at the ceiling, then grabbed the broom and knocked again, getting the same response.

“Well, you shouldn’t worry about it. I’ve got a good shot at getting that job. Mr. Campbell’s the only guy in the city who’s still hiring.”

He slurped up a spoonful of noodles, then shook his head.

“No, I’m not eating those sodium-laden noodles…What am I eating?…What does it matter, mom?”

He rolled his eyes.

“Stop it, you know I don’t roll my eyes at you any more.”

He inhaled another spoonful, burning his tongue.

“Yes, mom, I played the lottery tonight. Same numbers as usual.”

He lifted the ticket and looked at the numbers.

“No, mom, I never lie to you.”

He dropped the ticket and slid it under his bowl.

“Look, mom, I’ve got to get to bed. Talk to you tomorrow?…Okay…Yeah, you, too…”

He hung up, slammed the broom handle up against the ceiling a few more times, then stared at the lottery ticket lying on the table in front of him. He hated lying to his mother, but for some reason he had changed the last number. Unbelievable.

John poured the rest of the noodles down the drain and pulled a bag of trash out of the bin. The rain battered against the windows of his first-floor apartment. He had a side door that led out to the alley – there were six bolts that went down the side, and he began unlatching them slowly, one at a time.

* * * * *

Jordan shook his head, and his oversized ear lobes swayed back and forth. Five beleaguered band members stared at him, waiting.

“We suck,” he finally proclaimed.

“Aw, come on, Jordan, just…”

“Get the hell out of here! We suck!”

He started throwing pieces of equipment. His band members knew when it was time to bale. Jordan threw a guitar against the door behind them. Then he heard the person in the apartment below hitting his floor with something.

“Shut up!” he screamed before collapsing on his sofa.

* * * * *

Macy stared at her phone, then peeked around the corner of the dumpster. The girl looking for her had stopped just inside the alley. Macy heard six loud clicks coming from the other side of the alley. A door swung in, and a young man threw a bag of trash in a high arc into the dumpster behind which she was hiding. He moved to close the door but then squinted through the rain toward Macy.

“Who are you?” he asked. Light from the apartment illuminated the alley.

“What’s going on back there?” the girl shouted, walking toward them.

Macy had one second to think. “Sorry Pen,” she whispered to the phone, pushing “ignore.” Then she sprinted across the alley and through the open door into John Dran’s apartment, nearly knocking him over.

Water dripped from her shirt and her hair and formed a puddle on the linoleum floor as she slammed the door closed behind her and slid all six bolts into place. She quickly turned off the kitchen light.

“What are you doing?” he asked, annoyed.

“Shhh!” she hissed dropping down, sitting on the floor. “Get down!”

“What?”

“Get down!”

There was banging on the door. John dropped down behind the cabinets. The banging stopped as abruptly as it began, gave way to the sound of the rain still pelting the glass. Macy jumped to her feet.

“I have to get out of here – she’ll be here any minute.”

“Hey, hold on a second,” he said, grabbing her by the shoulders. “What’s wrong? I’ll help.”

Macy looked at him with a confused look.

“How can you help me? I don’t even know what’s going on.”

* * * * *

The question for you to answer this week is, “Who is John?”

1 – Someone who just lost the lottery after changing the last number.

2 – A guard who knows his way around outside of the walled city.

3 – A psychic.

4 – Someone who just won the lottery with the same numbers as Macy.

To read the story in its entirety, go HERE (you’ll have to return to this page to vote in the comments below).

I don’t shave very much, now that I don’t have a real job. Mostly because it’s kind of a bother, but also because I have a sensitive face.

Did I mention I’m a huge wuss?

I feel bad for my buddies who have to shave every day, and for you poor girls who have so many more square inches to shave than we do. So I spent wasted some time on the internet looking up interesting facts on shaving. Read on – thanks to this website you won’t be disappointed:

1 – It is estimated that a man will shave at least 20,000 times in his lifetime.

2 – While shaving, a person removes about as much skin as hair.

3 – The average person has about 615 hairs per square centimeter.

4 – Men’s facial hair grows at a rate of approximately half an inch per month (6 inches per year).

5 – For men, it would take roughly 16 years of shaving to collect together one pound of hair clippings.

6 – Peter the Great of Russia imposed a tax on beards, which was collected at every town gate.

7 – Nearly 70% of American women prefer a clean-shaven man.

8 – 10 feet the length of the longest mustache on record grown by Birger Pellas of Sweden.

9 – 17.5 feet the length of the longest beard on record grown by Hans Langseth of Norway.

10 – Pseudofolliculitisbarbae is the the medical term for razor burn.

So which of these is your favorite shaving fact, and what do you think about it? For that matter, what do you think about shaving in general?

“What are you looking for?”

To answer this question, or comprehend it, requires so much stillness in our lives, so much solitude. A willingness to step back. To step away. There are too many competing signals in our lives, like a radio simultaneously tuned into 100 different stations. All of these signals distort our ability to know ourselves, fool us into believing that surface level things can be the things we want. So we start looking for things that won’t satisfy our genuine desire.

“What are you looking for?”

A cursory answer to this question reveals all the shallowness that human life has to offer. “More money,” we say, as if what we want can be found in pieces of multi-colored paper, or a larger number on our bank account statements. But numbers and paper, while giving us the ability to acquire, meet no deep-level need.

If the lie – that money is what we truly want – weren’t so sinister, and so believable, it would be funny. Who spends their life hoarding up pieces of paper? Who spends an existence trying to increase a number? But we believe that we need more money to be happy. We believe that money can buy us the stuff of which happiness is created.

When people asked Jesus what they needed to do to enter the kingdom of the heavens, he never said that they needed more money. But sometimes he told them they needed less, or that they needed to leave what they had.

There’s no financial threshold you need to meet before you can begin living out your purpose. You can start fulfilling your purpose anytime. You can start right now.

* * * * *

“What are you looking for?”

Perhaps you’ve gotten beyond the shallow answers to this question, to a place where you know things like “more money” or “a bigger house” or “a swimming pool” aren’t what you’re looking for. Somehow you’ve managed to tune out the “American Dream” signals and arrive at deeper things. You’re looking for stuff that’s not on the surface.

But even at this next level, the things you think you are looking for are still just mirages of something greater. Something more fantastic.

“I’m looking for a spouse,” some say.

“I’m looking for a job I enjoy,” others say.

Those are not bad things, but it’s still not what you are REALLY looking for.

By now I can hear some of you saying, Who do you think you are? You don’t know what I want!

You’re right, I don’t.

But I still think that most people who think they want a spouse actually just want to be truly known by another person, and still loved, even after all their peculiarities get exposed. We don’t want to be alone. We want to be loved for who we are.

Most of us who want to enjoy our job actually want purpose. We want to believe that our existence isn’t arbitrary and pointless.

Deeper still. We have to go deeper. Can you drown out all the other signals?

* * * * *

Somewhere inside all of us, the answer to the question “What are you looking for?” is the same answer the disciples gave to Jesus when he asked them that very question.

Their answer to his question was a question:

“Where are you staying?”

In other words, they were looking for God. And not just, “where is God,” but where is he staying, where is he, AMONG US.

I think all of us, at the deepest level, when asked “What do you want?” answer with the question, “Where is God?” And this question takes us to so many different places.

Some look for God in religion. Others try to find him by serving the poor. Some search for God in the great cathedrals in Europe, or in the solemn temples in the East. Some look for God in sex or material things, in other people, or even inside themselves. Some look for God at the end of a business transaction, or in the temporary high given by chemicals.

Some conclude that the answer to the question, “Where are you staying?” is…no where.

* * * * *

What if we realized that our answer to the question, “What are you looking for?” is not an answer, as much as it is another question. It’s not a destination as much as it is a journey. How would this change the way we lived? Interacted with others? Judged or chose not to?

What if we didn’t spend every waking moment trying to make more money, or looking for pleasure, or searching for a comfortable life?

What if we realized that at the heart of everything we truly want is the question, “Where is God?”

And what if, somehow, we could understand that his answer to our one true question is:

“Come and see.”

Twenty years ago this Easter I got news I wasn’t expecting.

“Shawn? Shawn? Wake up.”

I opened my eyes. My mom was standing beside my bed with a confused look on her face. I could tell she had been crying.

“What’s wrong?”

“Grandpa died this morning,” she said the words as if she was watching herself talk from somewhere else, somewhere impossible. “At his house in Florida. You can stay home from church – I have to make some calls and make sure Grandma gets back okay.”

I remember laying there in bed, staring at the ceiling, feeling shocked. I felt guilty, too, because I was glad I didn’t have to go to church that morning.

* * * * *

When I was young, I went to a charismatic, evangelical church. Easter revolved around celebration. The cross at the front of the church was vacant, and I had no idea what Ash Wednesday was.

When I was young, Easter sort of came out of no where – one day I was mowing the lawn on a cold, spring afternoon, and the next day I was in church, singing “He is Risen.” Then I’d go home,  enjoy a huge meal, look for some Easter eggs and eat about five pounds of candy.

Maybe it was my immaturity, just my own particular focus, or perhaps it was a deliberate choice by the church, but the Easter season in those days barely had room for the cross. Two angels sitting on top of a stone? Check. An empty grave? Sure. But death? Death was the foul smell we were eager to cover up with the flower-laden aroma of Easter morning.

* * * * *

Incarnation. Death. Resurrection. Redemption.

These are four of the key tenants to a Christian world view – can the last two even exist without death? Without death, there is nothing to resurrect. Without death, there is nothing to redeem.

Miniature deaths can lead to all kinds of good things, like freedom and simplicity and social action. When I die to my selfish longing for revenge, I find myself in an unexpected place of freedom. When I die to my selfish longing to have more material things, my life is actually simplified by having less to worry about, less to take care of, less to replace. When I bury the idea that I am the center of the universe, I find myself caring for others.

What about major deaths? What about major losses? Could it be that what fills the vacuum after those larger “defeats” is incrementally greater than the victories that follow “smaller” deaths?

* * * * *

I’m gonna miss you
I’m gonna miss you
When you’re gone
She says, I love you
I’m gonna miss you
And your songs

And I said, please
Don’t talk about the end
Don’t talk about how
Every living thing goes away
She said, friend

All along I thought
I was learning how to take
How to bend not how to break
How to live not how to cry
But really
I’ve been learning how to die

* * * * *

During this season of Lent, beginning with Ash Wednesday two days ago, I am trying to enter a space of death, a space where things that are rotten and putrid and entangling me are allowed to die. For 40 days this process will continue, I hope.

In the words of Jon Foreman, I am “Learning How to Die.”

My hope? A better understanding of Easter, of resurrection, of redemption.

* * * * *

* * * * *

For a beautifully written piece on the cycle of life by a Jewish friend of mine, check out “Living a Life in One Day” by Sara Eiser.

And I know it’s late, but you should also check out Rachel Held Evans’ recent blog post: “40 Ideas for Lent”