Complexity brought into the light.

I came home from a long day of teaching in mid-January of this past year, tired in that uniquely teacherly way where your voice feels a half-step lower and your head is still buzzing with lesson plans and half-finished conversations. When I walked into the bedroom, I noticed Io outside the window, standing perfectly still, his stubby little fluffy nub of a tail quivering. And in his mouth, dangling from his white beard, was a limp squirrel.

He did not whine. He did not bark. He simply stood there, displaying his prize through the glass, waiting with unwavering confidence for us to notice him, as though he were presenting the culmination of a very important personal project. And there he was: our gentle, snuggly, universally adored Mini Schnauzer, beloved not only by my wife and me but by every human who has ever crossed his path, holding the very clear evidence of a life he had just taken.

My brain leapt immediately, involuntarily, to one conclusion: "Our dog is a little murderer."

Of course, Io was not committing a crime. He was not breaking some moral code. He was not even doing anything unusual for his species. Io acted out of instinct, older than squeaky toys, older than his groans when you try to move him off your pillow and he goes limp like a ragdoll, older even than the many generations of domestication that have softened dogs into the companions we have turned them into.

But this is what humans do: We narrativize.

Nature does what nature does, and we immediately assign intention, symbolism, even ethical weight to it. A dog catches a squirrel and we tell ourselves a story about violence, about innocence lost, about moral disruption.

Io did not moralize. I did. And that gap between his world and mine is where something interesting cracked open.

We tell ourselves stories like "I would never do that," or "That is not who I am." But beneath our neat self-definitions lies something messier, something older, something more honest.

That proud, frozen stance outside the window, tail nub vibrating, eyes shining with expectation, reminded me that every creature, no matter how domesticated or adored, carries hidden layers of instinct, wildness, ancient behavioral scripts, and a lineage of reactions older than awareness. We tell ourselves, and each other, stories like "I would never do that," or "That is not who I am," or "I am the calm one / gentle one / predictable one." But beneath our neat self-definitions lies something messier, something older, something more honest.

Just like Io, we all contain capacities we do not expect to use. We all carry instincts we rarely confront. We all hold wildness beneath the surface.

Io was not being "out of character." He was revealing the parts of himself that are not shaped by our praise or expectations.

And I realized I do the opposite. I often hide the parts of myself that do not fit the narrative I want to tell.

When we finally took the squirrel away, Io clearly crestfallen, still trying to make sense of why we would reject such an obviously magnificent accomplishment, he trotted off with a strange mix of dignity and disappointment. But in that tiny interaction, I understood something: Io believed he had done something good. Something meaningful. Something praiseworthy.

The moment, as he understood it, was simple: He hunted, he succeeded, and he presented his success to his people. And I, as a human, inhabited that same moment with a fundamentally different internal logic: I gave it meaning, judged it morally, built a narrative around it, and then worried about the implications.

Io's unexpected trophy taught me something about the nature of being alive: Instincts, whether his or mine, are not flaws. They are part of our design, part of our inheritance. And when I assume that people, including myself, are simple, predictable, "tame," or fixed in identity, I am forgetting everything evolution has layered within us.

The day Io killed his first squirrel did not make him a murderer. It made him honest. It reminded me that we are all, in small and sometimes startling ways, continuations of something ancient: something not fully under our control, something we can acknowledge without shame.

Io actually did not change at all that day.

But I might have.

The principal's words hung in the air like chalk dust after an eraser strike. If they are putting forth an effort, they should be getting no less than a C. As if effort could be measured. As if I hadn't seen RJ sleep through three consecutive classes and claim, when grilled, that he had been "thinking hard."

The digital gradebook on my screen seemed to mock me. Tests and quizzes only accounted for twenty percent of the kids' grades. I had built escape routes into my system: homework, classwork, participation, Academic Virtue. A maze with multiple exits. Still, some students insisted on walking into walls.

I wanted to ask about the basketball team. About whether a D could bench a point guard. Whether that threat might translate to opened textbooks, completed assignments, some evidence of care. But the principal had already moved on, solving a problem no one had presented, answering a question no one had asked.

I could give my students more rope or less. Either way, some would fashion nooses, others would climb.

That night, I revised my gradebook again. Moved percentages around like furniture in a room whose feng shui would never feel right. Twenty-five percent tests now. No: fifteen. And in this shuffle, I realized something: it really did not matter at all. I could give my students more rope or less. Either way, some would fashion nooses, others would climb.

RJ scored eight points the next game. In my class, he scored a 34 percent on the next quiz. When I handed it back, he crumpled it up until it became small enough to forget.

"Good game Friday," I said.

He looked up, surprised I had noticed. "Thanks, Mr. M."

"Wish you would put forth that same effort in here."

He nodded the way you nod at someone you'd heard but hadn't understood. Then class was over, and he was gone, and my gradebook was still mocking me, still demanding I measure what cannot be measured, weigh what has no weight.

When you teach writing to ten-year-olds, you start to see writing less as an artform and more as experimentation. Each and every sentence is its own small hypothesis: If I say it this way, people will better understand me. In this sense, every young writer is an engineer of meaning, testing, whether purposefully or not, how much the bridge of language can hold before it collapses.

Adults tend to forget this. We try to polish the experiment before we even run it. We try to control all the variables. But children remind you that the magic of writing lies in the unpredictable space where confusion turns into clarity. It lies somewhere in the collision of the understanding of the required mechanics and the freedom and audacity of expression. Here are some lessons I've learned about writing from my time teaching fifth grade students.

Clarity Is an Act of Empathy

You cannot hide behind cleverness when you are explaining what a metaphor is to a room full of kids who are still learning that "the sun smiled down on me" does not mean the star at the center of the Solar System has a face. Teaching forces me to slow down and to make each sentence carry its own weight. Practically everything read in the classroom gets the meticulous attention of a close read, and so everything written should get that same treatment. When I write now, short fiction, lengthy fiction, scripts for video essays, or even emails, I can almost hear my students asking, "Wait, what does that mean?" And if I cannot answer their question simply, then I probably do not fully understand it myself, and I should almost certainly rephrase it, or omit it altogether.

Clarity, I've realized, is not merely simplification, but empathy. It is choosing to guide a reader rather than impress them. It is not holding their hand or spoon-feeding them, but rather organizing ideas with logic and consistency so that one idea flows into the next in a way that is easy to follow no matter how difficult the subject matter. It is in this sense I suppose you could consider this to be the "Golden Rule of Writing": Write in a way that you would want to read.

Curiosity Beats Perfection Every Time

When we start a writing project, my students are fearless; this is a quality of theirs of which I am exceedingly envious. They do not worry about whether their idea is "good enough." They just start writing. Their stories end up being about things like a laundry monster made of dirty socks, or a dragon that is allergic to fire, or a hamster who accidentally becomes the ruler of the moon, or a time-traveling goldfish who can only go forward five seconds at a time. Somewhere along the way, we adults lose this reckless, creative curiosity and start editing before the sentence even exists.

Watching my students create reminds me that discovery usually happens during writing, not before it. Sometimes the story changes shape halfway through, a side character takes over, the conflict fizzles out, or the ending sneaks up from a completely different direction, and that is fine. In fact, not only is it fine, but often it is optimal. And it is certainly better than sitting paralyzed in front of a blank page just waiting for genius to strike.

The paradox of creativity is that it flourishes best when it has something to resist.

Constraints Are Creative Fuel

Fifth graders thrive on structure. If you tell them to "write anything you want," they will usually just freeze up completely, paralyzed by the enormity of endless possibility. But if you give them a quirky prompt, something specific yet playful, like "Write a story that begins with the words 'It all started with a sandwich,'" then suddenly the room becomes positively abuzz with creative energy. Pencils start scratching, muffled laughter ripples across the room, and even the quietest and least confident students begin to find their footing. The clarity of direction does not limit creativity; it liberates it by giving them a starting point, or a boundary to push up against.

As a writer, I am very much the same way. Give me utter freedom and I am likely to stare at the blank page for hours. But give me a constraint, a deadline, a word limit, a strange, self-imposed challenge, "Write a short story from the perspective of a sentient nebula," and suddenly the synapses start firing. The paradox of creativity is that it flourishes best when it has something to resist. There is no limit to a properly and thoroughly exercised imagination, but it definitely needs walls to ricochet ideas off of.

Voice Is Born from Play

When my students first start writing, they mimic their favorite authors. Their stories sound suspiciously like Percy Jackson or Harry Potter fanfiction. But the more we laugh and experiment, rewriting fairy tales as news articles, or turning science lessons into haikus, the more their authentic voices start to surface.

Adults are no different. We spend so much time trying to sound like "serious writers" that sometimes we forget the joy of sounding like ourselves. The voice worth finding is not the most polished one; it is the one that can still surprise you.

Writing Is Always About Connection

Every time a student brings me their story, they are not just asking for feedback; they are asking, Did you see me? Did you understand what I meant?

And is that not what we are all doing when we write? Whether it is a novel, a poem, or a blog post, we are trying to bridge the gap between our private thought and someone else's experience. We are saying, Here is how I see the world. Does it look that way to you, too? Teaching fifth graders has taught me that writing does not have to be a solitary act. Teaching young writers is helping to strip away the pretense. It has made me more patient, more playful, and a little more forgiving of the messy drafts, both theirs and mine. If there is one universal truth about writing, it is this: you learn by doing; you get better by failing; and you find joy not when the work is perfect, but when it is unique.

I track every book I read.

Religiously. Compulsively. Joyfully.

I use Goodreads to log titles and dates. I keep an Excel spreadsheet that catalogs my entire personal library, sortable by author, genre, and whether I've actually read it or am merely hoping to someday. I record YouTube videos reflecting on what I've read, what I'm reading, and what's slowly clawing its way up my towering, guilt-laced TBR. I jot down notes or excerpts in a physical commonplace journal, though, admittedly, that's more sporadic than it is sacred.

So when I recently watched a Memoria Press video in which several members of a group of adults, well-read, thoughtful adults, casually mentioned that they do not track their reading at all, I felt a strange, complex combination of awe and disgust.

They just ... read?

No spreadsheet? No charts? No annual wrap-up posts complete with genre breakdowns and five-star favorites? No log to look back on with quiet pride, or self-reproach?

I will not pretend I'm not intrigued by that approach. There is something beautifully unburdened about it. But I'm also not giving up my system anytime soon. Because for me, tracking my reading is not about showing off, or chasing numbers, or wringing productivity out of a pastime that's already deeply nourishing on its own.

It's about attention. And retention. And gratitude.

A Conversation with Myself

At its most basic level, tracking what I read is a way of staying in conversation with my past self. That version of me who picked up No One Is Talking About This on a whim during a rough patch in November of 2024? Or the me who finally got around to reading The Dispossessed after a decade of false starts? The me who could not get through the assigned reading of Moby Dick as a teenager? They are still in there, still shaping the contours of my inner world, and my reading log is one of the few places where I can go back and listen to them.

It is not always deep. Sometimes I am just noting a title and a finish date. Other times, I will write a few sentences about why something hit me the way it did, or did not. But even that little gesture of recording it gives the experience a kind of permanence. It says: This mattered.

Measuring What Cannot Be Measured

Of course, there is a danger in turning reading into a performance. If you are not careful, tracking can become tallying, and tallying can become competing, even if it is just with yourself. You start chasing totals. You feel guilty about long books, or books you abandon halfway through. You start comparing your reading pace to strangers on the internet who seem to inhale five books between breakfast and lunch and then ten more before dinner.

But here's the trick: the numbers are not the point. They are just scaffolding.

What I really want to measure is not how many books I read, but how deeply they reached me.

What I really want to measure is not how many books I read, but how deeply they reached me. How much they asked of me. How much they changed me.

A spreadsheet cannot quite quantify that. But it can create the conditions for reflection. It can slow me down enough to ask: Why this book? Why now? What did it stir within me?

The Habits of Attention

I've stated this a million times, but I teach fifth grade science and literature, which means I spend my days trying to help ten-year-olds pay attention to the right things. Not just to facts and dates, but to ideas. To structure. To character. To detail. To beauty.

And one of the most important things I've learned is that attention is a muscle. It has to be trained. Reading helps with that.

But so does tracking.

When I keep a record of what I'm reading, I find that I read more deliberately. I notice patterns. I realize I've read five books in a row by men and none by women. I realize I've been stuck in the same genre rut for three months. I realize I keep saying I want to read more poetry, and then not doing it. My tracker keeps me honest. It makes me a better reader, not because it tells me what to do, but because it helps me see what I'm actually doing.

And from there, I can adjust. With intention.

Sharing the Journey

There is another reason I track my reading: I want to share it. Not to signal virtue or aesthetic superiority, but to connect.

Books are the most generous kind of conversation. But that conversation deepens when you bring someone else into it, whether that's a student who's reading Harry Potter for the first time, a friend who just finished the same book you did, or a stranger who stumbles across your YouTube channel and decides, on your recommendation, to give Cryptonomicon a try.

By logging my books, I create a kind of trail of breadcrumbs. A path others can follow, question, deviate from, or deepen. It is a small act of curation. A signal: Here is what I've loved. Maybe you will, too.

When I Do Not Track

With all this being said, not every reading experience makes it into the spreadsheet. Sometimes I pick up a book, read twenty pages, and set it down with no intention of returning. Sometimes I'm reading aloud to my students or thumbing through a reference work I've owned for years. Those moments do not always get cataloged, and I think that's OK.

The point of tracking, for me, is not to build a flawless archive. It is to stay attentive. To keep reading as an active, reflective, relational practice. To remember that books are not just something I consume, but something I commune with.

And if that communion sometimes requires an Excel sheet with color-coded tabs? So be it.

Final Thoughts

Whether you track your reading obsessively or prefer to let books wash over you unrecorded, the important thing is this: read with presence. Read with curiosity. Read with the knowledge that every book, even the odd ones, the disappointing ones, the ones you forget almost immediately, is part of the longer story you are writing with your life.

And if you happen to write it down along the way, all the better.

I tell my students that every book talks to you before you open it.

Sometimes it whispers. Sometimes it shouts. Sometimes it beckons mysteriously from across the bookstore with a glint of foil or an odd texture. But one way or another, it speaks, and you decide, in a fraction of a second, whether you are going to answer.

That is the power of a book cover.

We do not always acknowledge it. We are trained to say things like "do not judge a book by its cover," as though the cover were some sort of lie, or a distraction. But that old phrase is wrong on two fronts: first, we do inevitably judge books by their covers, and constantly; and second, book covers are not lies. They are arguments. Visual, compressed, sometimes poetic arguments about genre, tone, identity, and intent. And learning to understand those arguments is part of what we call visual literacy.

As a designer, I have spent hours tweaking the space between a serif and a swirl, adjusting kerning until a word feels right. As a teacher, I have watched students gravitate toward books on our classroom shelves not because of the summary on the back cover, but because of the way the front cover spoke to them. And as a reader, I know the quiet thrill of recognizing a pattern across covers, a particular style of illustration or layout, and knowing, instinctively, that this book belongs in the same conversation as others I have loved.

Visual literacy is, simply put, the ability to read images. To analyze, interpret, and make meaning from what we see, not just in art, but in design, photography, film, advertising, social media, you name it. And like verbal literacy, it is not innate. It is learned. It is practiced. It is taught.

Covers Are Codes

When you look at the cover of a book, whether it is minimalist and typographic or lush and illustrated, you are not just looking at decoration. You are looking at a set of semiotic signals. A language of form.

Consider the modern sci-fi novel. Angular sans-serif fonts. Lots of black. Metallic accents. Some abstract pattern that hints at technology or stars or time dilation. That is not accidental. That is a code, a shorthand telling you, "This is speculative. This is sleek. This might bend your brain a little."

Compare that to a quiet literary novel with a soft-focus landscape or some sort of abstract backdrop. Or a thriller with jagged text and stark contrast. Or a romance with looping script and soft pinks. These are all visual choices made not just to reflect the content but to shape the expectation of the reader.

Design is always in conversation with genre. But the best covers do not just mimic the market. They subvert it. They play with our expectations while still working within a shared visual vocabulary.

Teaching the Image

I teach fifth grade, and even at that level, especially at that level, students respond to visual cues with a kind of raw immediacy. They might not have the vocabulary to explain why one book looks "serious" and another looks "fun," but you know what? They know. And part of my job is helping them articulate that knowing.

When we talk about book covers in class, we ask questions like:

• What colors are used, and what mood do they create?
• What might the typography tell you about the tone of the story?
• What is pictured? What is not? Why do you think that choice was made?
• If you had to guess the genre from the cover alone, what would you say?

Sometimes we even redesign covers, taking a book we have read and asking students to create their own visual interpretation of it. Not just to draw a scene, but to capture the feeling. To consider how their image might speak to someone else. It is an exercise in empathy, in aesthetics, and in attention.

Visual literacy is not really about being "artsy," per se. It is about being attuned to how design shapes understanding. And in a media-saturated world, that is not optional. It is essential.

Book covers are not lies. They are arguments.

The Ethics of Attraction

Of course, covers are not neutral. They reflect trends, but they also reinforce them. When every YA fantasy novel features a similar pale girl in a crown, we have to ask: what kinds of stories are being signaled as "worthy"? Who gets to be on the cover? Who gets erased? The visual landscape of publishing tells a story about power, about what sells, and who decides what sells.

Part of becoming visually literate is learning to see those patterns, as well as to question them.

We teach students to recognize bias in texts. We should also teach them to recognize bias in images. What gets represented and how? What stereotypes are repeated across genres? What assumptions are embedded in style?

This is one of the places where design meets critical thinking.

What Covers Cannot Do (and Why That Matters)

And yet, for all their power, covers are also fragile things. Misleading. Market-driven. Occasionally betrayed by their contents. Some of my favorite books have had baffling covers, either too vague, too loud, or just wildly off the mark.

Which is part of what makes reading so delightful: the dissonance. The act of stepping past the surface and discovering something messier, deeper, stranger.

It is a reminder that even the best cover is only a doorway. It opens. It invites.

But the real story begins inside.

Final Thoughts

Book covers are both marketing tools as well as visual texts. And like any text, they can be read, misread, deconstructed, admired, and critiqued. The more fluent we become in visual language, the more deeply we engage with the world around us, not just as passive consumers, but as curious, creative participants.

So the next time you pick up a book, pause for a moment. Look closely. Ask what it is saying before you ever read a word of it.

Every so often, someone asks me how I find time to read.

The tone varies. Sometimes it is admiring. Sometimes it is accusatory. Often it is said with a kind of mild despair, like I must have access to some secret reservoir of hours that the rest of the world was not issued.

But I do not.

I teach fifth grade science and literature, which means I am perpetually grading, planning, emailing parents, responding to parent emails, and gently reminding students when their homework is due. I also write, make videos, make music, coach soccer, and play guitar in my church's worship team. My time is certainly no less limited than anyone else's.

Here is the thing: I have never thought of reading as just a hobby. It is not a luxury I squeeze in at the edges of real life. Reading is the life. It is how I think. How I rest. How I stay connected to something larger than the noise of to-do lists and classroom chaos.

Reading is the slowest magic there is. It asks nothing but time. And in return, it offers everything.

Reading is the slowest magic there is. It asks nothing but time. Not talent. Not money. Just time. And in return, it offers everything: new voices, new ways of seeing, new ways of being. Books do not care if you are tired or behind or feeling inadequate. They wait.

And when you come back to them, when you choose, again and again, to open a book instead of turning on the TV or launching into a video game, you start to feel time stretch a little. Just a little. Long enough to slip into a sentence and find yourself somewhere else entirely. This is not to say that a great TV show or video game does not have value. They absolutely do, though, I would argue, in moderation.

I try to teach my students this. That reading is not an assignment to get through, but a portal. That a book is a way of slowing down time. That the act of sitting still with words is a kind of resistance in a world built to keep you endlessly and mindlessly scrolling.

They do not always get it. Honestly, I did not always get it at their age, either. But every once in a while, a kid gets their mind blown by a book, looks up with eyes wide, and says, "That was really good!"

And I cannot help but be thrilled by this. Because I know it was not just entertainment. It was transformation, tiny, maybe, and mostly invisible, but undeniably real.

So if you have been too busy to read lately, that is OK. The books will wait. But when you are ready, carve out ten minutes. Just ten. Not to "be productive," not to hit a goal. Just to read. To practice the slow magic again.

And let time open up around you.

I teach fifth grade science and literature. Which means, on any given day, I might go from explaining the phases of the moon to asking a room full of ten-year-olds what they think The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is really about. I am always straddling the line between fact and fiction, data and dreams, the concrete and the speculative. And I have come to believe that creativity lives exactly there: in the space between knowing and wondering.

Teaching is often framed as the transmission of knowledge, and sure, there is definitely some of that. I have vocabulary words to cover and standards to hit and a pacing guide that insists students need to understand a plethora of scientific concepts by April. But the best moments in the classroom happen not when something is known, but when something is almost known. When a student squints at the board and says, "Wait ... does that mean what I think it means?"

That is where the magic is.

It is not so different from reading, really. My favorite books, the ones that haunt me long after I have shelved them, rarely hand me perfect answers. Instead, they reverberate with implication. They circle around truth like a hawk. Books like Roadside Picnic, The Left Hand of Darkness, Maxwell's Demon, or Infinite Jest make their meaning in the tension between clarity and mystery. They trust me to do some of the work. They trust me to wonder.

Creativity lives in the space between knowing and wondering.

When I write, I try to honor that same space. I do not want to outline every single beat, though a roadmap can certainly be handy. I do not always know what a piece is "about" until I am fairly deep into the process. Sometimes, I write a scene or a paragraph or a line just because it feels right, because it contains something unresolved. And then I try to follow that thread wherever it leads, even if it pulls me somewhere uncomfortable.

I think this is what creativity really is, not some lightning bolt of inspiration, but a sustained willingness to sit with the half-formed, the ambiguous, the not-yet-finished thought. To be okay with the in-between. To teach, to read, to write, to make art, all of it requires us to hover in that liminal space and say: "Let's see what happens if..."

And that is why I love doing what I do. Whether I am in the classroom or staring at a blinking cursor, I get to spend my days dwelling in wonder.

So here is to the space between knowing and wondering. May we never fully leave it.

The first thing to understand is that the ideas are not yours. Not really.

You are not a well or a spring or even a clever little idea-machine. You are more like a resonant cavity. A hallway with good acoustics. A frequency that, if tuned just right, might just hum. Might just vibrate with something strange and startling.

You are, in short, a host. A cracked-open door. And the creative process is not so much a journey of invention as it is a long and difficult apprenticeship in receptivity.

It is also, paradoxically, a discipline.

This is the first paradox of creativity: that in order to generate the seemingly effortless, spontaneous, lightning-strike originality we call a "great idea," you must show up at the same time every day. You must punch the clock. Sweep the floors. Boil the water. You must clean and re-clean the altar so that, if the gods ever do decide to visit, they will not trip over your laundry.

But how do you keep having ideas? Not just once, when you are young and ravenous, but over years? Across novels? From project to project? In seasons when the well goes dry and all the air seems to have been vacuumed out of the room?

I will not pretend I have a magic formula. But I have learned a few things. Or maybe I have just failed in enough interesting ways that I have started to notice the patterns.

Think Weird, Read Weird, Live Weird

Great ideas often come from collisions: friction between disciplines, between categories, between voices that were never meant to be in the same room. If you only ever read space opera, your brain will start to pattern itself like a space opera. If you only ever talk to other indie authors on Discord who are writing the same three stories in a different flavor, you will unconsciously become a remix.

And remixes are OK, and they have their place, but to have unique ideas, you need to introduce contamination.

Read Proust and then read a NASA white paper. Read Octavia Butler on interdependence and then read a handbook on urban wastewater management. Watch a YouTube video on medieval siege weapons, then interview your grandmother about her youth. Play Disco Elysium, then go to a soccer match.

Diversify your cognitive portfolio.

What you are doing here is stockpiling flint. Later, when you are exhausted or stuck or desperate to come up with the Next Thing, your brain will strike two of these weird rocks together, and if you are lucky, and you have been faithful to the process, and the gods are not entirely indifferent that day, you will get a spark.

Let Boredom In

We are terrifyingly good at avoiding boredom now. There is a device in your pocket, perhaps even in your hand right now, that is capable of flooding your brain with novelty at a frequency no pre-digital human ever experienced. Infinite scroll. Infinite noise.

But the creative mind needs boredom. It needs a space in which nothing is happening so it can begin to hallucinate.

When was the last time you stared at a wall?

Not a Pinterest wall or a vision board or a spreadsheet. I mean a blank wall. A dull one. One that does nothing for you. When was the last time you stood in the grocery line and did not check your phone? Sat in traffic without a podcast? Took a walk without tracking your steps?

If you want more ideas, you must allow more nothing. You must resist the anesthetic of the endlessly curated feed.

Let silence creep in. Let the inner monologue get weird. Trust that, given enough space, your brain will start filling in the gaps. That it wants to play, to imagine, to make. You just have not been letting it.

Obsess Over Questions, Not Answers

I think this is the main thing. The people who keep generating extraordinary, original work are not people who have found something; they are people who are haunted by something.

They are infected with a question.

What is identity if memory can be altered? What does it mean to be human in a post-biological era? What happens to love in the face of entropy?

These are not answerable questions. That is the point. A good question gnaws at you. You chase it down across projects, across mediums. You revisit it in a short story, then in a novel, then in a video essay, then in the form of a sculpture you are ashamed to talk about.

The creativity does not come from the pursuit of originality; it comes from the pursuit of understanding.

The more obsessed you are with the question, the more variations your mind will find. New angles. Fresh metaphors. The creativity does not come from the pursuit of originality; it comes from the pursuit of understanding.

Which is really just to say: find the questions that break you open. And keep asking them in stranger and stranger ways.

Stay Moving

This is maybe the most practical advice I have.

Get up. Go for a walk. Take a shower. Clean something. Do the dishes. Get on your bike and go for a ride.

Something about locomotion, rhythmic, repetitive motion, gets the gears unstuck. It short-circuits the overthinking. It engages some parallel processing loop. Some of my best ideas, and I suspect yours too, arrive somewhere between miles one and two of a Zone 2 jog.

You do not have to be an athlete. You just have to be in motion.

Give Yourself More Constraints

This one feels counterintuitive, but it is important.

When you are stuck, do not try to "open up" the idea. Try narrowing it. Give yourself fewer tools. Fewer options. Smaller boxes.

Write a story in 500 words. Write a song with only three chords. Build a narrative that only uses second-person present tense and occurs within a single elevator ride. Draw the scene using only circles.

Creativity thrives in limitation. It needs friction. Resistance. Something to push against. Infinite possibility is not fertile ground; it is a blank canvas so blinding it paralyzes the hand.

Make It Ugly First

This is the one I struggle with most. You probably do too.

But perfection is a creativity killer. If you want more ideas, more breakthroughs, more genuine newness in your work, you must be willing to create garbage.

The first draft is a swamp. It should be a swamp. You are wading through it with a headlamp and a notebook, trying to figure out what lives here. You are not building the cathedral yet; you are spelunking. Surveying. Taking notes in the dark.

So allow the mess. Invite the ugly. The act of making something, anything, is what keeps the idea channels open. You do not wait until you have a great idea to start working. You start working, and the great idea stumbles in around hour four, confused but intrigued.

Here is the thing they do not tell you in school: the great idea is not the goal. It is a side effect.

The real goal is to remain in process, to live, daily, in that trembling space between mystery and articulation. To become a faithful observer of the strange, the beautiful, and the broken. To listen. To follow. To show up.

The rest will come, but only if your door is open.

And the altar is swept.

My father's voice was steady, matter-of-fact, the way people speak when they have been preparing for something for a long time. "She passed away this evening," he said.

I sat at the kitchen table. The house was quiet. My wife was getting ready for bed. I could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator, the occasional creak of the dog's crate. I thought about writing something, but I did not know what to write.

I had known this was coming. She was 95. She had been declining for months, ever since we lost Grandpa, really. But knowing something intellectually and feeling it in your body are different things entirely.

I opened my laptop and began typing the obituary. It came easily, surprisingly so. The facts of her life arranged themselves into neat paragraphs. Born 1929. Married Gus. Two sons. Seven grandchildren. Ten great-grandchildren. The fishing. The roller skating: I made sure to include that. How they took it up in their sixties, gliding hand in hand around the rink like teenagers. That detail felt important, though I could not say exactly why.

When I finished, I sent it to my father and my uncle. Then I sat there, staring at the screen.

The thought came unbidden: Her funeral will probably be the last time the entire Mathison family will be gathered together in one place.

I typed it into my document. Not the obituary: my private notes. The place where I keep the things I am thinking but have not figured out yet.

It was true, wasn't it? With my brothers and cousins scattered across the country, what occasion would bring us all back? What force could emulate the gravitational pull of the last grandparent?

I thought about the last family reunion, two years ago: Grandpa's funeral. Grandma sitting in her chair by the casket, smiling but quiet, her hearing aids turned up but still struggling to follow the conversations swirling around her. She had seemed so small then, diminished. But also somehow more present than any of us, as if she knew something we did not about the fleeting nature of these gatherings.

What force could emulate the gravitational pull of the last grandparent?

The roller skating kept coming back to me. I tried to imagine them: Grandma and Grandpa, both in their sixties, lacing up skates. What made them do it? What impulse toward joy, toward movement, toward each other? They could have settled into armchairs, into the slow decline of age. Instead they chose motion. They chose each other's hands.

Now she would be with him again. That is what people say, and I wrote it in the obituary because it brought comfort. "She is now whole again, reunited with Gus." In my best moments I truly believe this; in my worst moments, I have some very human doubts. But I know that when I think of them, I see them on that rink, circling endlessly, holding hands, never falling.

I closed the laptop. Megan and I had recently begun discussing the idea of trying to have children soon. They would grow up with no memory of their great grandparents. They would have only photographs and stories.

This is how it happens, I thought. This is how families disperse. Not all at once, but gradually, one funeral at a time, until the center that held everyone together is just a memory, and then not even that.

I finally went to bed. My wife was asleep. I lay there in the dark, thinking about roller rinks and fishing trips and the way my grandmother used to say my name when I was small. I thought about the last gathering that would be a gathering, and all the gatherings after that would be smaller, more scattered, until finally there would be no one left who remembered when our once-large family was whole.

But there would be new centers of gravity. My children would create them. Their children after that. The family would not end: it would transform, the way everything transforms. The way Grandma transformed from a girl in Indianapolis to a mother to a grandmother to a great-grandmother to, finally, a memory of two people holding hands on a roller rink, choosing joy when they could have chosen stillness.

I fell asleep thinking about that choice. In the morning, we would make plans to travel to Indiana for the funeral. I would gather with my family one last time, all of us together. But right then, in that moment before sleep, I let myself imagine them skating, circling forever, hand in hand, never letting go.