All details about it are on my game’s home page:
gregboettcher.com/mazes

Even if you don’t have time to play the game, you probably have time to watch this three-minute trailer video for it:

I am writing this to people who are googling the term “Fasciola minuta.” There is no reason for anyone to do so today. However, conceivably, people of the future may do so, after the publication of my current fictional work-in-progress, tentatively entitled “Children of the Umber Soil.”

I started that story on December 24, and I declared on Twitter that January is my own personal NovellaWriMo, where the novella in question, which I want to keep working on every day this month, and hope to finish this month, is the aforementioned story.

As I was completing my research phase of the story and beginning the writing phase, I contacted a scientist, Michael Sukhdeo, who specializes in—well, the type of species that the story is about about. He delegated my task to a capable grad student, named Seth Bromagen, who informed me that, for various reasons I’m not going to describe here, Fasciola hepatica is not going to work for my purposes. Seth and I discussed numerous alternatives by email, but none of them quite worked in my opinion. This discussion happened mostly yesterday. Then, when I woke up this morning, I realized that I can solve the problem by inventing a fictitious species.

And so Fasciola minuta is a fictitious species, invented for the sake of my work-in-progress. But it is in a real-life genus, and it is meant to be just like Fasciola hepatica, except a whole lot smaller.

If you are reading this in the first half of 2019, I would not suggest googling Fasciola hepatica unless you really want to be surprised how far I am going to write stories that cover the diversity of the animal kingdom. Doing so would also be a spoiler for my story, kind of.

That is all. I am writing this blog post on the very day that I invented a fictitious species.

The whole purpose of this blog is to bring people with me on a journey as I write a short story collection called Animal Stories—a collection in which the first story will be narrated by a single-celled organism, and the last story narrated by a human being.

I began the collection way back in 1995, but drifted away from it around 1999, and then resumed work on it again until earlier this year. And when I resumed that work, I did so by writing the first story for the collection. That’s right, this year I wrote a short story narrated by a single-celled organism.

The story is called “The Second Proliferation,” and I will soon be giving it a final revision and then seeking publishers for it.

In this blog post, I will describe the writing of that story.

First thoughts about the story

My intention to write a story narrated by a single-celled organism goes all the way back to 1995, when I wrote the first of the stories for my Animal Stories collection. That first story was about ravens (inspired by a 1995 article about ravens by naturalists Bernd Heinrich and John Marzluff). And that led me to the idea of writing a collection that covers the diversity of animal life. And that, in turn, led me to the idea that my first story for the collection should be narrated by a single-celled organism.

But how to write a story about a single-celled organism? At first, I struggled to come up with ideas.

In thinking about what single-celled organism I wanted to write about, my first idea was to write about an amoeba. Among the main “protozoa” classifications I learned about in high school (amoebas, flagellates, and ciliates), I had always found amoebas to be evocative and weirdly charismatic. And though I can’t say why I thought this, I don’t think I was the only one. For example, Gary Larson’s Far Side includes plenty of amoeba cartoons, like the one where an amoeba in a cowboy hat says, “Adios, amoebas.”

And so, way back in the late 1990s, I tried doing some preliminary research for a story about an amoeba. Some books I found cited the 1904 book Behavior of the Lower Organisms, by Herbert Spencer Jennings. Since my research demands that I read things that engage my imagination about these kinds of organisms, and doesn’t demand that my reading materials be recently published, I found a copy of the 1904 book and read about how the author tried to cut an amoeba into two parts using a glass rod, and how a second amoeba then came came along and engulfed one of the parts. I thought about how something like this might be turned into a story, but the idea didn’t go anywhere, and I didn’t write the story. With hindsight, that was probably a good thing.

A story about the evolution of sponges

About twenty years went by, as I described above. For most of those years, I drifted away from the idea of writing the book, but nevertheless, during those years some part of that idea still kept hold of my imagination. One of my thoughts was that if that first story wasn’t narrated by a single-celled organism, it would have to be narrated by a sponge, the simplest kind of animal. Then, eventually, I came to the idea that it could be a story about both—about how single-celled organisms evolved to create the world’s first sponge.

It wasn’t a straightforward idea. The problem with writing about evolution is, it happens on such an inhumanly long time scale that during it into a comprehensible story isn’t easy, to say the least.

(Douglas Adams might make a joke about organisms with “unstable chromosomes,” so that they “quite frequently evolve several times over lunch,” and that might work as a joke, but it wouldn’t work very well for a short story that has any kind of mooring in reality.)

Nevertheless, “not easy” doesn’t mean “impossible,” and the idea kept pressing on my mind. Although it’s a little weird for me to think about it now, I actually did some half-hearted research into this during the period when I didn’t think I was going to write the story or the book. I found out that there is a type of living protozoa that scientists have identified as by far the closest living relative of sponges and all other animals. Scientists refer to these protozoa as choanoflagellates. Interestingly, not only in genetic makeup, but also in physical appearance, these choanoflagellates bear a surprising resemblance to certain sponge cells called choanocytes.

A story about the development of human civilization

But it wasn’t enough just to write a story about how certain flagellates evolved into sponges. There had to be a point to the story, a reason for telling it.

Eventually, the idea came to me: the evolution of single-celled organisms into sponges might be seen as analogous to the way human tribes came together to build the first cities and civilizations.

And by June 2018, that was where I was at. I had conceived of all the ideas above, but that didn’t give me enough to begin writing the story. I knew I wanted to model the evolution of single-celled organisms into sponges after the development of human civilization, but knowing didn’t give me a clear enough picture of how human civilization developed. What I needed was a book or something to provide a simple explanatory framework for how civilization itself began. Piece of cake, right?

A few books have attempted this. One of the more famous examples of the last few decades was Guns, Germs, and Steel, which I’d read before, but didn’t quite help me enough. In looking for other examples, I found Why the West Rules—For Now, by Ian Morris, which provided a theoretical framework to explain human history, but just didn’t quite do what I needed. What I needed was to have the end of the stone age and the beginning of civilization boiled down into one or two simple ideas.

Then, in August 2018, I got a lucky break. I ran across an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, one in which they interviewed social psychologist Azim Shariff as he described his studies of ancient civilizations. Shariff said that, among all the civilizations of the ancient period, the ones that succeeded the best were often the ones believed in a powerful god(s) that took an interest in punishing people who steal, cheat, or otherwise step out of line with the needs of larger societies. Shariff pointed out that, for the vast majority of the human race, people lived in groups of no more than about 150 people, in small tribes where no organized mechanism of law enforcement is needed, because everyone knows everyone else. Later, however, when it became advantageous for people to build large cities, those cities needed some kind of glue to hold society together. Shariff claimed that religion provided that glue, encouraging people to cooperate, and in so doing serving the incredibly important pro-social function of allowing people to live in large cities for the first time.

I found this a plausible idea. It painted a picture that was clear, and offered storytelling possibilities. I decided to go with it.

Learning the science

This cleared away my biggest hurdle, but I wasn’t ready to get started quite yet. It was all well and good to say that my story intended to talk on a figurative level about the development of human civilization, but if it didn’t first succeed on a literal level, nobody was going to care. My next step, then, was to learn about the unicellular organisms I was going to be writing about.

In fact, I had started this process at least as early as June 27, 2018, when I posted a question on biology.stackexchange.com: “What did the evolution of multicellular animals look like?” I asked for transitional forms that would help me understand the process. As I look at my question now, it seems hopelessly naive, but that is the nature of attempting to figure these things without a college-level training in biology. I am highly appreciative of Ben Bolker, Karl Kjer, and Martin Klvana for their responses.

With their help, I found a 2010 article by Stephen M. Miller that tells of a single group of green algae—Volvox and its relatives—a group that contains both unicellular and multicellular forms, and a group that is as close-knit as a family, believe it or not. The article also describes the simple form of multicellularity in Volvox, which really contains only two types of cells. (To be more specific, the multicellular genus Volvox and the unicellular genus Chlamydomonas are in either the same family (Volvocaceae), or else at least the same order (Chlorophyceae), depending on which source you follow.)

The cool thing about scientific papers is that they contain references to other scientific papers. Following the references from the Miller article, I found a 2004 article by Nicole King that turned out to be my most useful source, introducing me to a few new ideas for the first time, such as the idea that becoming multicellular might have served as a defense mechanism of sorts, allowing small organisms to become bigger and thereby to become harder for predators to ingest. Nicole King continues to run the King Lab at Berkeley (and the lab’s Twitter feed is well worth following if this subject interests you).

Another source that helped me was the revised and expanded edition of The Ancestor’s Tale, by Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong, a book that includes not one but multiple relevant chapters on choanoflagellates and sponges. In addition to many valuable bits of information, it also includes an artist’s depiction of a possible transitional form between choanoflagellates and sponges—a depiction that stuck with me and influenced one of the segments of my story.

Finally, near the end of my research process, I found the BBC documentary First Life, which introduced me to the possibility that there may have been a major ice age prior to the period when animals first evolved, and that that ice age may have influenced the timing of the evolutionary process. (When I tried to corroborate the documentary’s claims, I found it difficult to get the geological/evolutionary timeframes to line up, but I decided to roll with the ice age hypothesis anyway. As an author of a work of historical fiction, I have that liberty.)

By the time I found all these sources, I was well on my way. They, plus Wikipedia and an untold myriad of other web sites, gave me just enough information to complete my story.

The actual writing of the story

That takes me through just about everything I wanted to get to, except the actual writing of the story, which went as follows.

As of June 2018, I knew I wanted to resume work on my short story collection after about 19 years of letting it go. I had heard of a mastermind group (an online discussion group with many videos of encouragement from the mastermind’s organizer) and signed up for it. The mastermind began July 1, and I spent July working on an unrelated project, but by early August, I was ready to begin work.

On August 6, I began a final ten-day period when research on the story was the most important priority in my life, and I completed the research at the end of those ten days. For those days, I filled in the final gaps of my understanding of sponge physiology, the sequence of geologic and evolutionary events during the Proterozoic, and so on. It was also during those days that I luckily landed on the Hidden Brain podcast and the BBC documentary mentioned above.

On August 16 (my 42nd birthday), I began the first draft of my story.

By August 29, I had completed a first draft of what ultimately turned out to be Part 1 of 3 of my short story. Instead of continuing on and completing the first draft, I decided to start by doing a second draft of that first part, so that I could submit that part as a writing sample as part of an application to a workshop I wanted to attend at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. I completed my second draft of that first part on September 3 and submitted the writing sample on that day.

Although at that point I had completed what I now know as the first third of my story, that wasn’t what I thought at the time. I thought I had completed the first two-thirds—! Finding out I was wrong about that, and that my story would have to be longer than I thought, was the most unexpected aspect of writing the story.

For me to go into this, I have to describe that first segment of the story (the part that I then thought of as the first two-thirds, but which I now know as the first one-third). This segment quickly introduces the reader to flagellate organisms, and to the story’s two main characters, a couple of flagellates named Calcareon and Porfirio. (The names are both taken from various scientific sponge names.) The segment describes the way these flagellates had to change their way of life due to changes in their environment, particularly by the way their predators (amoebas) kept getting bigger and stronger. And it describes how, in the course of doing this, they stumbled across a strategy of building colonies on the ocean floor. There was strength in numbers, and they were usually able to be safe from predators that way.

And after I had written all of that, I figured all I had to do was the comparatively simple job of describing how these flagellate colonies grew from very small (probably just a little too small to see without a microscope) to rather large (a foot or more tall). How hard could that be?

It turned out that the remaining portion of the story was not just harder than expected, but very hard indeed, because that was where all the drama and conflict really was. The story’s narrator wants to keep things simple and peaceful, while other character wants to keep on building their colonies to be as big as possible, at whatever cost. To flesh out this conflict and resolve it took four times more space than I’d originally expected, but by the time I was done, the story was quite satisfying to me, and I’ve received good feedback on it.

To complete the latter two-thirds of the story in first draft took me until September 24. To complete a second draft of it took me until November 9. I think the story may need another quick revision or two, but it is mostly done now. Soon I’ll submit it for publication.

The future of the story

As described immediately above, I haven’t yet submitted the story for publication. This story, about single-celled organisms called choanoflagellate that will one day evolve into sponges, is called “The Second Proliferation.”

I’ve gotten a good response on it from those who have read it, including the other students in my workshop class, as well as my instructor. And I’m pleased to say I feel I fulfilled my own high expectations for the story; it’s my best work to date, I think.

I am writing this to come to grips with the difficulty I have when people disparage “mere entertainment” as a motivator for creative writing.

The wide disparagement of entertainment

Perhaps you’ve heard someone disparage the act of reading merely for entertainment. They might say that people who do this are reading only to escape, and that there are better, more laudable reasons to read, and that those reasons would lead one to read better books.

Throughout my life, I’ve been left cold by this account of entertainment as “mere entertainment.” As I think about why, I think there are two reasons:

1. I dispute that there is anything trivial about entertainment.
2. When asked what the alternative purpose of art should be, people usually seem to give extremely unsatisfactory answers.

I’ll take these in reverse order, because my rebuttal to #2 is the main point of this article. I’ll leave #1 until the very last section.

If not entertainment, then what?

When people are asked to describe what books or films should be doing, if not merely entertaining, I find they always seem to be saying that such works should be exploring significant ideas.

For example, I recently watched a video from someone who proposed that “making people think about their identity” is a worthy impulse to create art. That probably is a worthy impulse, but it’s no guarantee of aesthetic success. A personality inventory could make you think about your identity, and yet no one would say that it succeeds on an aesthetic level.

And “thinking about one’s identity” is not the only idea that might be proposed as a satisfactory subject for good art. But before we start exploring which ideas make for good art, let’s investigate whether ideas are what make for good art.

Narrative art and non-narrative art

In literature, film, and other narrative forms of art, there are ideas, to be sure, and yes, those ideas often do contribute to the value of the novel, the film, or whatever it may be.

But when we think of our most treasured works of literature or film, don’t we want to say that they succeed on an aesthetic level? And does that not mean that, when they succeed, they succeed in the same manner as other, non-narrative forms of art?

For example, when has anyone ever tried to say that a painting’s value can always be reduced to its ideas? Or, in the realm of music, if one symphony profoundly moves you, while another symphony leaves you feeling flat, but clearly contains a lot of meaning and symbolism, does anyone say you need to prefer the second one?

Is it not, therefore, true to say that music and visual art succeed to the extent that they move us? And if that’s true of music and visual art, should we not also say that the point of successful literature is also to move us?

Yes, works of literature may mean things; yes, they may explore ideas; yes, they may succeed on any number of intellectual levels. But if they do all of this, to the exclusion of moving us, does anyone say they succeed as works of art?

An aesthetic appraisal of meaning and ideas

I want to briefly state that we should not fetishize meaning. A stop sign has meaning. The word “triangle” has meaning. These things have meaning, without necessarily having a great deal of aesthetic interest.

Likewise, if a work contains many thought-provoking ideas, it may nevertheless fail as art. If you disagree, try reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics from cover to cover.

Therefore, I assert that, if you can discuss the meaning or ideas of a work of literature, then by all means do so. If you can show that meaning and ideas often contribute to the way art moves us, then by all means do so. But I advise against reducing art to meaning and ideas, because I think that misses the point.

Am I defending mere entertainment?

When I try to articulate why I write fiction, I seldom say that I am trying to entertain people. Nevertheless, I see no dividing line between the experience of being entertained and the experience of being moved by the highest works of literature.

I see the artist’s impulse primarily to entertain as no worse than many other impulses—no worse, for example, than the impulse to express ideas. It may sometimes be better.

One way to think about successful art

No branch of philosophy is more slippery than aesthetics, and generalizations about art usually fail. Still, here is a thought that may help.

As far as I can tell, the best way of thinking about successful art—whether literature, music, or visual art—is in terms of how it will be remembered. If it is remembered well in six months, six years, or six centuries, then it has to be considered successful on some level, and I think this fairly well corresponds to what artists generally hope for.

Sometimes artists have trouble communicating about their art, and it is my humble suggestion that they start by thinking in terms of how they’d like their audience to remember their work a few months after seeing it, not necessarily by looking for ideas within it.

A final thought

As you think about books or movies that you remember vividly several months or years later, you may think of some that have affected you for reasons you’re not able to identify.

For example, suppose you were in an awful mode, depressed and full of dread at the thought of going through one more day. But suppose you were persuaded by a friend to see a movie. Suppose you expected to find the movie stupid and to be put into an even worse mood. But suppose the movie really connected with you, surprised you, and made you experience feelings you hadn’t expected. And suppose you walked out of the theater feeling entirely better. Such an effect might be achieved by any number of well-executed films, whether they be dramas, comedies, or any number of others.

Or suppose you weren’t depressed at all. Suppose you’re simply the type of person who struggles to enjoy the average movie that a friend drags you to. Perhaps you’ve taken one too many filmmaking classes, and you’re constantly bothered by seeing the technical flaws that most films have. But on this occasion, a friend dragged you to a film that, for some reason, disarmed you and brought you to a rare state of pure enjoyment.

If such films “merely entertained” you, I am at a loss to find anything trivial about that.

In this article, I want to talk about my journey as a writer specifically. There’ll be future articles in which I talk about the book I’m writing, but for now I want to talk about the authors who set me on my current path.

Growing up and reading books

I was lucky enough to have parents who did their best to give my brother and me a stimulating environment, including trips to the library every week. One thing they didn’t usually do was push me towards particular kinds of books, and that was probably a good thing. My dad read mostly business books, and my mom read mostly romances and thrillers. I don’t think they would have predicted that my favorite books would end up being works of fabulist literary fiction by international authors. But that is where I was headed, and the way I got there was a little unusual.

John Gardner: My introduction to contemporary literature

In fact, it was a chance event that started me down that path. At the end of a my senior year of high school, I was walking through my local public library when I stumbled across The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, by John Gardner. I wasn’t looking for books on writing instruction, but this one jumped out at me on account of the fact that I’d read John Gardner’s Grendel a few months ago in my high school English class. I’d always that I might become a writer, so I picked it up.

(Speaking of which, I really have to thank my high school English teacher, Mrs. Froehle, for the fact that she introduced us to Grendel; such an unusual choice of book, and it made a difference to my life!)

As I read the book, it was like stepping into a new world. There were references to familiar authors like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but also all-new authors I’d never heard of, such as Donald Barthelme, William Gass, and Joyce Carol Oates—the literary authors of the 1970s, John Gardner’s generation.

The book was also my first exposure to Franz Kafka, with the result that soon I was reading “The Metamorphosis,” “The Hunger Artist,” and eventually The Trial and The Castle. In reading these works, I was taken up gothic streets to imposing hilltop fortresses that promised answers, but cruelly withheld them until you’d waited an infinite number of lifetimes. I haven’t been the same since.

The book also introduced me to Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, regarding both of whom whom I’ll have more to say in a bit.

After reading The Art of Fiction, I also read his other book for young writers, On Becoming a Novelist, and finally found my way to his most infamous book, On Moral Fiction, a vituperative excoriation of a great many writers of his generation. The book left some readers angry, back in the day, but it mainly left me curious, wanting to know more about the authors he’d so sharply criticized.

John Barth: My introduction to metafiction

There was no writer more criticized in that book than John Barth, and possibly as a consequence of that, I spent several months reading a lot of his writing, from The Floating Opera to The End of the Road to The Sot-Weed Factor to LETTERS. But if anything, it may have been his short story “Lost in the Funhouse” that spoke to me most, showing me what a metafictional short story can be—how it starts out about life, until, through narrative twists, it transforms, as in a funhouse mirror, until it is about itself.

I also read Barth’s nonfiction, of which his most famous essay was surely 1967’s “The Literature of Exhaustion,” a work that celebrated of the possibilities of metafiction in general, as well as the stories of Jorge Luis Borges in particular.

I also read another essay that Barth had written twelve years later as a follow-up, entitled “The Literature of Replenishment,” a work which sought to clarify the earlier essay, to discuss postmodernist fiction, and to praise two outstanding examples thereof in the work of Italo Calvino and Gabriel García Márquez.

Kafka, Borges, Calvino, and García Márquez: The world’s most vivid dreams

And so Gardner and Barth together introduced me to Kafka, Borges, Calvino, and García Márquez.

Regarding Kafka, I described above the lasting impression he made on me. Read “The Metamorphosis.”

Regarding Borges, he imbibed deeply Kafka’s tales of the infinite, and wrote tales that if anything were even more infinite, sometimes blurring the line between the completely incomprehensible and the completely mundane in a way that leaves the reader more than a little disturbed. Read “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

Regarding Calvino, I was taken by his capacity to write with whimsicality and grace—with “lightness,” as he would say—on the most unlikely of topics, from the big bang to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Read his collection Cosmicomics.

And regarding García Márquez, I was blown away by his tour de force of magical realism, crafting perhaps an even more captivating mixture of the mundane and the transcendent than Borges or Calvino. Read One Hundred Years of Solitude. No one who picks it up regrets it.

1994-1995: The year I was baptized into literature

These, then, were the books I read during the year 1994-1995, and how I discovered them. When I began that year, I was relatively ignorant of literary fiction, and so uncertain what I wanted to do with my life that, rather than enroll in college without knowing why, I took a year off.

By the end of that year, I had read a significant chunk of twentieth century literature, including some of its very best authors, the ones who, to this day, continue to blow me away with their transcendent visions. And by the end of that year, I had begun my studies as a creative writing major.

And, as future blog posts will reveal, the above authors continue to inspire me in my fiction, which I have recently begun to write again.

I assert that the 80/20 rule argues for perfectionism in my case, as I write a fictional short story about single-celled organisms. What? Yep, that’s what I’m working on.

I also assert the 80/20 rule argues the same for most works of art.

My first story in 19 years, and my uphill quest to perfect it

In August, I began writing my first short story in 19 years. It was a story I’d first thought of at least 20 years ago, but the idea of writing it had always intimidated me. Why? Partly because it was about a bunch of single-celled organisms, and partly for other reasons. Nevertheless, I’d joined a writers’ group, and with their encouragement, I was ready to take on the challenge.

It wasn’t easy. To start off with, I had to spend a week and a half doing research, including reading two or three scientific papers. Then, when I got to writing, I had to bend my brain to imagine how certain improbable events in evolutionary history might have happened, since that’s what the story was about. Nevertheless, I did it.

But the biggest curve ball came when I started writing what I thought would be the final third of my story. It turned out to be so much more involved than I expected that it ballooned to four times the intended length; instead of becoming my story’s final third, it became its final two-thirds.

Yet in spite of all this, I completed a first draft of my story by the end of September, which was when the writers’ group wrapped up.

Cause for celebration, right? Yes! But with a major qualification.

I’m now in another writers’ group, and it would feel great to say I’m done with my aforementioned story, so that I can move on and prove my ability to write new stories.

But the thing is, I’m not done with it. I’ve revised the first half of the story multiple times, so that the first half is at or near publishable quality. But the latter half is much rougher.

Should I give in to the temptation to call my story good enough, and move on?

Enter the 80/20 principle.

The 80/20 principle, à la Richard Koch

Like many people, I first became aware of the 80/20 principle due to the book by that name by Richard Koch. The book came out in 1997. I didn’t read it at the time, but its title stuck with me, and at some point later I read about the principle somewhere.

Koch’s book says, “The 80/20 Principle asserts that a minority of causes, inputs, or effort usually lead to a majority of the results, outputs, or rewards.” The observation was supposedly first made in 1906 by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, and hence it is sometimes known as the “Pareto principle.”

Koch proceeds to give a few examples:

• “80 percent of what you achieve in your job comes from 20 percent of the time spent.”
• “Twenty percent of products usually account for about 80 percent of dollar sales value; so do 20 percent of customers.”
• And so on.

It’s a fine observation as far as it goes. I do wonder about the numbers. Some have noted that there seem to be cases that call for more of a 95/5 rule. Other cases seem to have a far more even distribution. Nevertheless, the contention of Koch and Pareto is that 80/20 is the norm. Fine.

The real question is, how useful is the idea? I watched the top YouTube video on the subject, in which Koch says:

Was the value that Bill Gates put into the world a function of the hours that he put in? . . . What [people like Gates did] was spend time creatively on a few essentials, and little or no time on the mass of trivia that engulfs all of us most of the time. . . . Save yourself for the one or two things each week that are really important in terms of getting results. Spend time deciding what those things are.

Is that useful? Maybe. There’s something to be said for deliberately doing more with less. But for myself, I feel that, without examples that are specific to a given field of endeavor, it’s kind of a sterile idea. I guess it depends on whether the sheer mathematics of the 80/20 rule inspires you to spend your time wisely. It doesn’t really inspire me, and as I picked up Koch’s book to write this blog post, I found that it didn’t contain what I was looking for.

A less charitable reviewer of Koch said, “95% of the points of this book come from 5% of its words.”

The 80/20 principle, à la Alan Lakein

The reason I wanted to write about the 80/20 principle was not because of any of the ideas mentioned above, but for a take on this principle that I didn’t find anywhere in Richard Koch. Nor did I find it anywhere on the web, no matter how hard I searched.

How did I find it? In a state of exasperation, I told my wife what I was searching for, and amazingly, she found it. Not because she’s better at searching the web for me (although she does say she’s better at that), but because she’d read the same book as me and remembered it better. Amazing!

Here’s the passage that I’d been trying to find. Note that it makes two contrasting points about two different kinds of scenarios.

Point 1:

The 80/20 rule suggests that 80 percent of the value is often gained during the first 20 percent of your work time on a certain task. Being a perfectionist may mean that you’re working much too hard to get only minimum value.

But Point 2:

Perfectionism is worth approaching when 80 percent of the value comes from the last 20 percent of the effort. For example: the construction of a dam, bringing home the family’s favorite groceries, unstopping a plugged-up sink, remembering your wedding anniversary every year.

These two passages come from How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, by Alan Lakein, first published in 1973.

I found Lakein’s distinction quite useful, whereas I found that Koch’s book didn’t really help me.

Conclusion

What does the 80/20 principle say? It depends on what you’re applying it to.

If you’re working on something where 80% of the value is going to come from the first 20% of the effort, then okay, stop at 20% and go with the result that’s 80% likely to be good enough. Perfectionism doesn’t always get you a pat on the back, and it may get you criticized for wasting time.

But for some things, including most fine art, I assert that 80% the value comes from the last 20%. And that’s when you shouldn’t settle for less. (So says even Alan Lakein, who likes to cut corners on following the news by skimming headlines as he walks past the newsstand!)

Are there exceptions in the realm of fine art? Probably. I can imagine a watercolor painter going through a period of completing many paintings per day, either as an student to work the muscles of his technique, or as a practiced artisan completing a lot of work for a show. You never know if the work you slave over is the work people will respond to.

But for my short story, I feel strongly that it will benefit from my not settling for less. And I think I’ll feel that way even more strongly in a couple of weeks, when I expect to be done polishing it up and ready to send it out to magazines for publication. When it comes to this story, I won’t settle for less.

Here’s to you and the most important work in your life. Here’s to you not settling for less.

First, here’s where I’m at

I studied creative writing back in the nineties, graduating with a B.A. in 1999. During the years that followed, I fell away from writing. Why is a long story, but for our purposes here, I’ll boil it down to two reasons:

(1) Throughout my twenties, I gave in to social anxiety, isolated myself, and consequently had no one encouraging me to write, and no role models showing me how to get published. Not a good thing, but see #1 below.
(2) Around age 30, I had persuaded myself that a practical job that paid the mortgage was necessary, and that by going for such a job, I was crossing a Rubicon that meant permanently turning my back on being a writer. This was an even worse thing, but see #2 below.

Both of those were unfortunate, but the point is that I’ve turned the corner on both of them in the last two years. How is a long story. It’s a story I could see myself sharing, but not in this post. For this post, I’ll boil it down to two things:

(1) At age 41, my social anxiety reached a tipping point that made my life unmanageable. I found a support group that helped a lot, and I saw a therapist. I’m still not an extrovert, but I don’t lay down to anxiety, and I don’t compound my problems with extra negative thoughts the way I once did.
(2) As part of the same process, I resolved to get back to writing.

Therefore, I also did the following:

(3) A year ago, I started a blog, began to write in my journal every day. I wasn’t ready to get back to writing fiction, but I started doing some miscellaneous creative projects, including some paintings and some work on developing a computer game.
(4) Back in July, I joined a mastermind group for people who are writing and doing other creative work.
(5) With the encouragement of that group, I took the plunge back into fiction writing, writing my first short story in nineteen years.
(6) I signed up for a workshop class to give me feedback on my story. The class instructor told us about a literary reading that he and another writer were giving, as well as an upcoming book festival. I decided to go to both events.

Now, here are the events I went to

As a result, on Friday and Saturday, October 12 and 13, 2018, I went to two events in two days.

Friday

And so, last Friday night, I attended a literary reading for what I guess was the first time in nineteen years.

As I type these words, I need to step back and figure out what this means. To state the obvious, for those nineteen years, I’d given up on being a writer, so to some extent or another I’d also given up on being a reader — at least a reader of literary fiction. In fact, it goes beyond that. I’d also given up on the very notion of my life having any purpose. There’s a lot more I could say on this topic, but I’m going to leave it at that.

And so when I attended the literary reading on Friday, it was a celebration not only of the fact that I am once again embracing my creative self, but also of the fact that I now feel able to escape from my shell socially and share such experiences with other people. Again, I’m not a social butterfly, but I’m not a basket case, either.

The Friday night reading had very few people in attendance, only about eight or nine, but this made the event all the more intimate and meaningful to me, as it gave me a chance to talk to both of the speakers.

I spent a fair amount of time talking to the first of the two speakers, Bernard James, a short story writer and poet. He, like me, works an IT day job, and writes on the side, but unlike me, he has been writing consistently for many years and has a good number of publication credits. He is working on what sounds like a strong short story collection with a compelling theme that spans from 1865 to the present day. He read a short story, as well as a few poems.

The other speaker on Friday was A. Rafael Johnson, who teaches the writing workshop I attend at The Loft Literary Center. Since I enjoy his workshop, I was especially predisposed to enjoy the passages he read from his recently published novel The Through — passages that displayed his capacity to write with a strong voice.

Getting a chance to talk to these writers was great. I got Andy (as A. Rafael Johnson is known) to sign my copy of his book, and I talked to James (James Bernard Short is the real name of Bernard James, which is a pen name; I don’t think that’s much of a secret) about the process of developing the craft of writing short stories and poems.

James, if you read this, I need to boost my skills at offering feedback that doesn’t fall flat and sound lame. I’m going to read your story in The Blood Orange Review.

Andy, I’ve put The Through on my reading list, too.

Saturday

The following day, I went to one of Minnesota’s biggest literary events of the year, the Twin Cities Book Festival, which reportedly about 6000 people visit each year.

There were a number of high points of the day, of which probably the top ones were:

• I met Colleen Waterston, a fellow writer whom I knew through the mastermind group, but had never met in person before!
• I had a really nice conversation with the guy who runs Red Dragonfly Press, which has published a number of poetry collections by Minnesota poets, including Philip Dacey’s last collection before he died in 2016. This was my first time hearing that he’d passed away.

Between the Friday and Saturday night events, the intimate reading on Friday night was, if anything, even more meaningful to me than the biggest book festival in the state. I am going to have to see if I can’t find some more readings of that sort, where I can make a connection with other writers.

Thanks, Andy and James. That Friday night event went some way toward making me feel a little more like a real writer again. Maybe not as real as you two, but you know what I mean.

[With this blog post, I’m attempting to kick off a version 2.0 of this blog. Wish me luck!] ]]> https://gregboettcher.com/blog/heres-what-im-working-on/ Sun, 08 Jul 2018 00:51:21 +0000 https://gregboettcher.com/?p=318 Continue reading Here’s what I’m working on]]> In case anybody I talked to at CONvergence 2018 finds their way here, this is a perfect time for me to briefly say what I’m working on.

Computer game

I am 90% done with a computer game called Nothing but Mazes. It is an interactive fiction (text adventure) game, like Zork, but with multimedia assets like illustrations and interactive maps. To be released later this year.

Also to be released will be a video trailer for the game, which will contain some illustrations I recently completed.

Fabulist short story collection

Just this month I am resuming work on a short story collection that I worked on from 1995 to 1998. It will be called Animal Stories, and each story in the collection will be narrated by a different species of animal. First story by a unicellular organism, last story by a human being.

If you are interested in getting updates on these things, the best thing you can do at this point is to follow me on Twitter or Facebook, or keep coming back here.

The image below is from my circa-1999 web site that I created for the collection. Collage is by Dan Wahl.

Here’s the tenth one completed, followed by the other nine:

While averaging two paintings a month might not be ideal, I never said that being a painter was my calling. It’s been a fun few months with this as my main creative activity, but I am glad to be nearing the end of it so that I can get back to the work that lies ahead. More on that later.

And in the process, I’ll be getting back to this blog!

In my previous post, I mentioned how, when I was in college, I wrote some short stories and did a few other creative endeavors.

As college graduation approached, I gave some thought to what I should do with my life. One thought I had was to get a job in book publishing.

To that end, I did an internship at Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis. This was in the summer of 1999.

After graduation, though, when push came to shove, I didn’t put as much energy into landing a job as an assistant editor as I might have. I felt I would have had to look pretty hard, maybe around the Midwest or around the country. I just wasn’t passionate enough to make it happen.

I got a job at a bookstore, but you know what? Over the long haul, I didn’t care to keep this job, either. I quit after a year.

Why? Good question.

The truth was, I wasn’t feeling that great a lot of time. For years I had been dealing with depression. Maybe not as bad as some people. But I did feel down a lot of the time. And I did feel hard-pressed to enjoy any moment of the day anywhere near so much as the moment I fell asleep.

This is a self-portrait I drew once when I was feeling depressed.

As my twenties went by, I isolated myself more and more.

Maybe the worst period was one winter when I lived in an office that I rented for $110 a month. That was also the period when I tried to make a living donating plasma. Even with the low rent, it didn’t quite work.

Eventually I fell upon second-shift janitorial work as I job I didn’t mind so much. It was a job where I didn’t have to talk to people.

So yeah, I isolated myself.

I didn’t write much during this period, and I didn’t do many other creative activities. What did I do? Well, I read some. And watched movies. And I also played computer games.

Does that sound insignificant, computer games? Well, it was, in a way. And yet it wasn’t. It became quite significant, actually.

I joined an online community for those who like to play interactive fiction, or text adventure games. If you’ve ever played games like Zork, with its text input and text output, you know what I’m talking about.

This gaming community contributed to my story in no fewer than three important ways:

1.
I learned to develop computer games using object-oriented programming languages that I found elegant, powerful, and easy to learn. My imagination exploded and I started programming.

Soon I had nearly completed a game called Nothing but Mazes, a game which has still not been released in its final form, but more on that later.

2.
I met Daphne Brinkerhoff, who also belonged to the same gaming community. The two of us struck up an online friendship. Before long she moved out to Wisconsin, where I was living at the time. And then, in 2007, we got married.

3.
And I went back to school for computer science so I could get a job as a software developer. And that, believe it or not, leads to the most interesting part of my story.

But before you go on to that next part, be warned — my story does not get to its destination in a straight line.

This has been part 2 of 4 of my story.

Part 1 covered 1976 – 1999.

Part 2 covered 1999 – 2008.

Part 3 will cover 2008 – 2017.

Part 4 (if I decide to create it) will cover the future: November 2017 and beyond.

My name is Greg. I’m 41 years old.

I’ve always been interested in writing for as long as I can remember, and I’ve tried my hand at songwriting, drawing, and painting.

When I was in third grade, I wrote a choose-your-own-adventure story that I shared with my classmates. I typed it up on my mom’s typewriter and turned it into a booklet.

Thirty years later, I can’t find that booklet and don’t remember the name of it. It might be lost forever, which, now that I think about it, makes me a little sad. But I guess that happens sometimes, after thirty years.

There were other things I tried. As an example, when I was in high school I wrote a jazz piece, arranged it for big band, and got it played and recorded by a jazz band at the local college.

All this happened in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where I grew up.

I also wrote some songs and recorded a demo, but didn’t do anything further with it. Well, I suppose I did perform the songs at college at a performance I did a few years later, once, but that was it.

From an early age I also had an interest in drawing . . .

. . . and painting.

But writing was always my first love. When I went to college, I majored in creative writing.

I wrote for the college newspaper. I ended up writing about 12 columns and over 30 articles. (I remember those numbers because I counted them up once when I was preparing my résumé.)

I was also the editor of the college literary magazine one year.

All of this was at Southwest State University, now known as Southwest Minnesota State University.

Naturally, when I was taking creative writing classes there, I wrote some poems and a few stories.

I’m going to have to go back and think about how many of my poems are publishable and deserve homes in literary journals. I tried to get some of them published, but not as hard as I could have.

I did get one of my poems accepted for publication by the journal Amelia, but unfortunately the editor passed away before he could publish it.

I also got a prose poem accepted for publication by the journal Thema, and that one actually did get published.

Of all the creative work I’ve done, what I’m most proud of is a collection of animal stories I began to write, one in which each story is narrated by a different animal.

I had planned for my animal stories collection to grow to include about 25-30 stories. It was going to cover the entire animal kingdom, with the first story being narrated by an amoeba and the last one by a human being, with stories set all across the world.

During my college days, I only wrote five animal stories at most. Maybe less, since one of those five isn’t finished, at least one other deserves a rewrite, and still one other isn’t really of publishable quality.

In the fifteen years or so that followed, I got away from writing. I got away from pretty much all my other creative endeavors, too. There’s a whole story about that, and it’s covered in parts 2 and 3. But for now my point is that I’m now starting to get back into all that stuff again now. And this blog will chronicle that effort.

This has been part 1 of my story, covering 1976 – 1999.

Part 2 will cover 2000 – 2007.

Part 3 will cover 2008 – 2017.

Part 4 (if I decide to create it) will cover the future: November 2017 and beyond.

In the course of doing so, I dismantled the office I had in the downstairs family room. I had previously set up the office so that it took up the whole family room, using the same U shape. This meant our desks were directly in front of the electric fireplace, posing a fire hazard. So I dismantled this setup. Here is the family room immediately after I did so.

Then, during just the past two days, I set up another office downstairs, this one taking up the wall to the right of the fireplace and a little beyond that. It no longer takes up the entire room, but also no longer poses a fire hazard, and still lets us have have an alternate work environment downstairs. Plus, we can put a sofa on the opposite wall, set up a TV, and use the room as an actual family room.

Immdiately after I did so, I started using the extra space to start unpacking some boxes that I haven’t unpacked for three years. More on that in a future post. But for now, I just want to say that I really do feel that this supports my efforts to turn not only my house, but also my life, from something that is “good enough” to something that is much closer to being pretty near as good as I can make it.

I’ve been seeing a therapist since September. He’s been doing the difficult task of helping me break the habits of isolation that come from a lifetime of social phobia. He’s good at what he does. He often has concrete suggestions, both for social challenges I face every day at work, as well as unexpected stumbling blocks that crop up as I begin to get more engaged in my community. I could say a lot about this, and I guess I probably will in a future blog post. But this post isn’t about that. It’s about the impact he’s had on this blog, and a conversation I had with him on Wednesday.

The biggest way my therapist helped with this blog is that, a month ago, on October 18, 2017, he suggested I begin writing again every day. It was a long overdue suggestion, and the next day I started writing the daily journal that turned into this blog. From the first day I wrote that journal, I knew I wanted to start this blog, but also knew there had to be a distinction between the journal and the blog. I knew there would be times when I needed to get something off my chest that might not be of interest to else. But I also believed that some of my private thoughts would be of value to other people, just as other people’s writings about self-improvement have been so valuable to me. Now that I’m entering into a phase of conscious self-improvement in so many ways, I find I have a lot to say. So I started this blog a couple of weeks after I started the journal.

2.

I’ve already written about the synergistic nature of some of the things I’ve been working on. I’ve written about how the desire to begin writing again has fueled my aim to complete a very-long-in-progress computer game, a video trailer for it, a bunch of paintings, and thorough cleaning of part of my house.

Now the synergy I see is this: in writing this blog, I get not just one thing, but two.

The first thing I’m getting is an opportunity to tell people about the countless ways in which I’ve been trying to improving myself over the past two or three months. It’s a story I want to share.

Meanwhile, as I’ve looked down the road to what my plans should be for the coming years, I’ve been thinking about the book I want to write, and I’ve started reading that today’s book publishers are hesitant to publish a book from an author who doesn’t have a blog or a social media presence. It’s not exactly an encouraging thing to hear, but on the other hand, I get it. Book publishers can only do so much when it comes to promoting an author. If, in getting the word out about a new author, they not only have to compete with a lot of other messages in our media-drenched landscape, but also have to do so without any Internet presence or helpful personal connections on the part of that author, that’s got be discouraging from their point of view.

And if it’s true that this blog might be of use to such a future publisher, I wanted to find out how. It’s lucky, therefore, that I was recently in contact with a book coach who was kind enough to recommend some links to get me pointed in the right direction, and one thing she recommended was the book Be the Gateway by Dan Blank. It’s not a book about marketing in any usual sense of the word. Instead, it encourages people who do creative work to engage more passionately with their work and the way it connects with their audience, and then share with that audience the process of creating that work. I found this to be good advice, and it encouraged me, because it’s what I want to do anyway with this blog.

Long story short, therefore, the second thing I may get from this blog is — well, I don’t know. Dan Blank says that if I am public, open, engaging in the way that I already want to share my story, then I’m going to get readers, and those readers will help when the time comes to publish a book. That’s a simplification, but I find it encouraging, so I’m going to go with it.

3.

These are the things I told to my therapist on Wednesday. He didn’t get it. He thought that, because I was thinking about positive long-term outcomes of way I want to share my story, therefore I’m going to do a bad job of sharing my story. I disagree with him, and I’ll tell him so soon.

And yet, on the other hand, I’ve made an observation that I can’t ignore. The observation is — well, let me explain.

I often spend more time listening to podcasts than I do reading. Up until a week ago I was listening to a podcast that really inspires me — it’s called The One You Feed, and it’s all about how you can improve the quality of your life by making the right choices on a day-to-day, minute-to-minute basis. I’ve been binge-listening through the back catalog, and it’s been fueling me as I work on getting back into the practice of writing, engaging with my community, and living better.

Then, for a few days, I started listening to Dan Blank’s podcast, Dabblers vs. Doers. I found it filled with a lot of valuable information, but I also found it a bit discouraging to be listening to authors who were way more active and successful than me. Even if the whole point of the episode was to take me through the process of how they got to be successful, the mere fact that the authors used a lot of publishing jargon to describe the process made me feel alienated.

During the days that followed, I didn’t get any writing done. Mostly I was just being lazy, but I suppose it’s possible that some of it is because I’d let my attention drift away from what I find inspiring and replenishing.

So my observation is, I need to keep myself fueled with things that fire my passion for my creative work. And it’s that that’s most important.

In fact, even if you looked at it from the narrowly interested perspective of the book publisher who might be interested in publishing my future book, even then those things that inspire me would still be what’s most important to that end.

And incidentally, none of that is remotely contradictory to Dan Blank’s book. On the contrary, I think he’d be agreeing with me. I’ll keep listening to his podcast and reading his book.

In the meantime, I’ll also keep listening to and reading things that fuel my creativity in a more direct way.

But most of all, I’ll stop being lazy and get back to writing.

For example, the idea goes, if your goal is to get into physical shape, going to the gym just five minutes a day can make a huge difference, not because you burn so many calories in those five minutes, but because of the invaluable habit it gradually starts to create.

And so, when my therapist suggested I start writing again every day, I immediately recognized that it was a good idea. In fact, it’s something I should have started a while ago. I’ve been doing it for three weeks now.

For the last three weeks, I’ve skipped writing only six times, so that’s a consistent five days a week. Not bad, I guess, but I’m going to try to get still more consistent.

It’s been easy because I’ve been giving myself permission to write just a little every day. Just five minutes is the rule, enough to produce one coherent paragraph, and then if I want to, I can either stop or keep going. And the writing doesn’t need to be good enough for publication, either in print or on the blog. That makes it easy.

There’s a problem, though. Now that I have a blog, I can already feel this changing. In addition to writing something, anything, every day, I now feel the need to come up with a blog post worth reading at least “often enough.” The problem is, my wife (a long-time blog reader) seems to think that the gold standard for “often enough” is once a day. And that pace could threaten to demolish the enjoyment I’ve gotten out of the comfortable pace of my daily writing.

One thing I’m not going to to is just let my “write whatever you want for five minutes or more every day” goal unintentionally morph into a goal of “always write a blog post every day” without my deciding that that is the best course of action. The former goal is therapeutic and meditative; the latter goal turns it into a challenge. And make no mistake, a challenge could be a good thing, especially if working on a blog were to be my main creative endeavor, but that is not what it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be a constant in my life that is easy to keep going while I work on my main creative endeavors. I want blogging to be easy, not a source of anxiety.

Something’s going to have to give. I need to scale down on the “blog post per day” idea, or widen the scope of the blog to make it easier for me to find things to share every day, or rethink my thoughts about “what is worth posting,” at least if those thoughts are wrong. Or . . . who knows. I’ll think about it.

So what creative work should I do next? Well, there is this blog. But I want this blog to become a constant, something I do every day, regardless of whatever my main creative effort is at any given time.

For my main creative effort, the likeliest candidate is a computer game. That’s right, a computer game, one that I began working on a full eleven years ago and nearly finished that year, until life got in the way and several years went by. It’s an ambitious game that I’m proud of, and since it’s so close to done, it makes sense for me to do that next.

In fact, it’s a game I worked on a bit last year. And when I was working on it, I had a thought. I couldn’t help thinking about how to grab people’s attention and attract them to the game. So I decided to create a movie-like trailer to promote the game, and this project soon took on a life of its own. Before long I had hired voice talent and learned how to use Adobe Premiere in order to do the necessary video editing. I got through about half the effort needed to release it, resulting in at best a very partial rough cut. But then I drifted away from it last spring, with the result that this trailer is now yet another unfinished project I intend to complete.

So before I work on my short story collection, I want to complete my computer game, and if I’m going to do that, I also want to complete a video trailer for it. Adding another layer, in order to complete the trailer as I intended, I’m going to need eight to twelve custom-painted illustrations.

And with that being the case, I’m now convinced I need to paint a dozen paintings, so that I can create a movie trailer, so that I can release a computer game, so that I can work on a collection of short stories. Does this plan sound a little — convoluted? Almost like a Rube Goldberg machine? Well, maybe. But right now, I can’t think of anything that makes more sense.

And yet it becomes even more convoluted. In order to complete the paintings for the video trailer, I recently decided it would help a lot for me to clear out an area in my house where I can do the painting. As I thought about how to do this, I thought about the empty spare bedroom of my house, and how I’ve been meaning to turn it into the office where I do my writing. If I did that, I could use essentially the entire basement as an art studio.

And so, before I knew it, I started dusting and sweeping the corners of my living room, so that the few remaining items from the spare bedroom could be put there, so that I could clean the spare bedroom, so that I could go to the hardware store to buy the lumber I need, so that I could cut the lumber, so that I could build my new office, so that I could move my computers upstairs, so that I could set up a place to paint downstairs, so that I could paint the paintings to put in my trailer to promote my the game that will prepare the way for my completing my short story collection.

And you know what? That doesn’t sound crazy to me at all. I’ve needed to clean my house for a long time now. I should feel lucky that it now seems like such a meaningful activity.

I seem to recall reading a book about people who were comparatively indifferent to normal stimuli. For these people, good was no better than bad. Or maybe good was better, maybe they knew this on a cognitive level, but the difference felt so slight that no effort to achieve good ever seemed worth it. I thought I read an anecdote about such a person being slow to run from a burning building. They didn’t feel that running was so much better than staying put.

(I thought I read this in Peter Kramer’s Listening to Prozac, and that book does have a section on anhedonia, but nothing that quite matches this.)

When I read about such people, I didn’t think, “That’s me,” not exactly. But I could relate to them.

When I took a high school drawing class, we went outside to look for things to sketch. A lot of people were drawing trees and flowers, but I was drawing a crumpled Coke cup lying in the gutter. When I found out my perspective was different from other people’s, I was proud. Or glad, anyway. I didn’t want to be like everyone else. Why should I?

The one time I skipped high school, it was to drive to a library to finish a jazz arrangement I was working on. I was proud of how I spent my time that day. But I was also content to spend many another day playing computer games, some of which were immersive but ultimately sterile time-sinks such as Civilization II.

I did all these things without making distinctions. Why make distinctions? One thing was as good as another to me. Whatever could hold my attention, that was the thing I wanted to pursue.

I spent four and a half years getting a degree in creative writing, but then I spent the next eight and a half years drifting through a series of random jobs, all the while not writing. Why? Fair question. But at the time, apparently my question was, why not?

I then spent two and a half years studying to get a job in software development, but after I got the job, I found myself collapsing under the weight of things I thought I had buried, lowering my head to the floor, and developing a drinking problem that turned into a daily habit.

I’ve done all of these things. I’ve gone where the breeze blew me and called it my choice. And in the end, the destination was so painful that I had to reverse my course and turn back.

This is my turning back.