As you’ve probably guessed from recent posts, I’ve gotten drawn into the Matthew Dicks universe lately, and he’s opened my eyes to a few things.
Not just how much time I waste day-to-day noodling on the phone or otherwise not being as productive as I could be — he’s laser-focused on being as productive as he can be with using seconds and minutes of the day most of us will fritter away, thereby incrementally adding up to a lot of work done in the little tidbits of time most of us let fall through the cracks — but also about the methods he uses for mining his own life for stories.
I went into Someday Is Today with the hope of picking up some advice on how to make more practical, productive use of my free time. Even beyond the routine search for work and household chores, there were of course minutes, maybe even hours, of time that I had that I knew I could be using more effectively. Dicks has a full-time job, runs multiple businesses, has a family he loves to spend time with (much of the impetus to his originally seeking out how to get through what he must do effectively but in the shortest time possible), plus travels the country entering competitions for The Moth (five minute real stories told by people with no notes), which he’s won dozens of times including their GrandSLAM competitions. So he seemed like someone who I could learn a thing or to from with regard to making good, productive use of my time.
What I didn’t expect from that book was the angle of approach to be largely about writing non-fiction stories, and how even that would effect me in a good, entirely unexpected way.
For those not familiar with my writing… I mean, first of all, why not? I’ve got some samples right here for your reading enjoyment… but suffice to say I lean way more toward fiction than anything else. Whereas Dicks, in large part because of his now very close connection to The Moth, is all about telling personal, real stories. He goes much farther into that process with his previous book, Storyworthy, which I’m currently reading.
He talks about how his love of sharing stories pushed him to find new stories to tell, so that he wasn’t just rehashing ones he’d already told, especially for competitions. One of the ways he accomplishes that is by taking just five minutes every evening and writing a couple of quick sentences about what he would talk about if he had to make a five-minute story about something that happened that day.
He has thousands of these daily entries now, and he maintains (correctly, I think) that this not only lets him retain memories in a way that he wouldn’t remember himself — looking back at an entry from months or years ago brings him back to that moment that would otherwise have been lost in his busy daily life — but it soon let him develop a storyteller’s lens that he sees his life through now. He no longer just gets through his days unconsidered, he’s much more present all the time because he’s always watching for things that happen that may be the story of the day, or for material that could be used in other stories later. It has slowed his days down, he says, letting him not just live the seconds and minutes and hours of the day, but weigh and consider them in ways almost no one else would, I would say, outside perhaps some practicing Buddhist self-reflection and introspection.
The daily writing of story fodder also lets him look back and find patterns that he would’ve otherwise missed, like realizing from two occasions that while he and his wife don’t fight, he does “fight” by sometimes balking at her requests for some physical job or other that has to happen around the house and his objecting to it in the moment but then finally just doing it, but loudly grumbling about it and making more noise than is necessary. It’s not an endearing thing about himself, he admitted, but it’s something he does that he never noticed before, would maybe never have seen, and could collectively add up to… you guess it: A story about himself.
He also says that in capturing the best moments of the day, he’s sometimes springboarded back to even earlier memories. One of his favourite stories is about getting caught away from the house in nothing but boxers and slippers when his dog’s late night pee turned into a late night walk that wouldn’t have been super noteworthy until the skies opened up and soaked both of them in a torrential downpour. His knowing this would be his story moment of the day turned it from a miserable experience into what he happily knew would be a great story some day. But he also realized that in that moment, looking down at his soaked but very happy dog, he flashed back to two other memories from earlier in his life: His childhood dog, and that canine connection to his absentee father, and being eighteen and having sex on a golf green when the automatic sprinklers came on and drenched them both. Looking at just one moment as a story he wanted to share opened him up to two other memories that were stories unto themselves that he had forgotten and may have stayed forgotten had this one event — and his looking at it through a positive, productive lens — not happened.
When I read about his daily five-minute routine of writing down aspects of the most story-worthy parts of the day, I worked toward and finally started doing the same thing. My memory is terrible anyway, so the idea of having something to retain the best, or at least biggest, parts of my day from weeks and months and eventually years later holds no small amount of appeal.
Dicks also started doing a daily 10-minute sprint of stream-of-consciousness writing that he calls Crash and Burn. No topics are off the table, don’t worry about punctuation, zero judging of anything that comes out, just ten minutes of keeping your hand moving (writing it out longhand works better for him than typing, he says, but typing it is better than nothing if that’s all you can swing in the moment) and tracking what thoughts spring to mind the moment they happen, even if one thought interrupts another that’s left unfinished as a result.
At the 10-minute mark he stops and looks at what he’s written with more of an editor’s eye, now trying to glean what he can from it for potential insight or anecdotes or maybe even full (brief) story potential. He often doesn’t know how his brain makes the connection from one thing to another, but a ten-minute writing sprint like that will usually bring up memories that he had forgotten about and may, again, turn into more stories. He has other things he does routinely as well to keep shaking his brain lose of memories of events he had forgotten about.
So listen. None of this is to say I’m giving up on fiction writing at all. There are enough story idea bits bouncing around in my head at all times, and more getting added to them, that I’ll never not do that.
But what I am saying is that I may also open myself up to doing a bit more introspection for some personal stories, as well. In fact without trying his Crash and Burn exercise even once yet, I was struck yesterday by two long-forgotten memories from my childhood. One of which I wrote out last night as a quick story. I’m not sure where any writing I get from doing this stuff may end up. But stories have already cropped up. So don’t be totally surprised if at some point soon I start a new category here website called Stories, where I start sharing some.
And who knows? Maybe some day I’ll look into trying out for The Moth events here in Toronto. That would be a story in and of itself.