November 9: Thoughts on collecting moments one by one

I had a very busy weekend. On Saturday, while Lauren was recuperating from her stagette, I went to a great professional development conference called Writing Matters, which is for students and alumni of the Print Futures writing and editing program at Douglas College. Since I’m an introvert, normally the thought of a networking event makes me feel like doing just about anything else, such as organizing my collection of pens or filing away seven years’ worth of bank receipts. But this conference was different. I knew people there.

When you’re an introvert, going to a networking event where you already know a few people is a lot easier than facing a room full of strangers. Plus, having the people you know to talk to helps when you’re meeting new people. I had several conversations on Saturday between the various seminars, and I always managed to find a friend to sit with.

The seminars themselves were amazing. I went with an agenda in mind: to learn a few tips on how to survive as a freelance writer and editor in today’s job market, where in-house editorial jobs are disappearing. And I was not disappointed. I came away with several notes. The most memorable speaker was Judi Piggott (blog: The View from Zero Gravity), who spoke with a great deal of humour about the realities of the current job landscape in communications.

The most intriguing concept she talked about was being an intrapreneur, or an entrepreneurial person who finds and creates work within an organization. She read a passage from Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie, who constantly found ways to be a creative person in a huge corporation that needs to be on the creative cutting edge: Hallmark Cards. At one point, MacKenzie relates in the book, he was transferred out of the comedy cards division to the main corporate building, where he was allowed to choose his own title. He chose the title of Creative Paradox. That alone makes me want to read this book.

On Sunday, I had lunch over at my friend Jeremy’s place. The lunch was a way of thanking me and others for helping him move a few weeks ago. I was late, but after scarfing down my soup and sandwich in an effort to catch up with all the people who’d arrived on time, I had a really nice, relaxing afternoon with some friends. Conversation abounded.

One of the conversations involved author Donald Miller, who wrote the 2003 New York Times-bestselling book, Blue Like Jazz, which I only recently discovered. That book is now being turned into a movie. But it was his ideas on story that he came up with while working on the movie adaptation that really caught my interest.

Here’s what his website has to say about his most recent book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, which he wrote while adapting Blue Like Jazz for film.

Years after writing a best-selling memoir, Donald Miller went into a funk and spent months sleeping in and avoiding his publisher. One story had ended, and Don was unsure how to start another.

But he gets rescued by two movie producers who want to make a movie based on his memoir. When they start fictionalizing Don’s life for film–changing a meandering memoir into a structured narrative–the real-life Don starts a journey to edit his actual life into a better story. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years details that journey and challenges readers to reconsider what they strive for in life. It shows how to get a second chance at life the first time around.

I like that idea. I like the idea that we write our own life stories, and most of us tend to write them very poorly. We spend our time numbing ourselves from the world around us, playing as voyeurs and watching Reality TV instead of making our own reality into something worth watching.

This made me think about the purpose of this blog. I’m meandering a bit here, but that’s only because I’m still thinking this through. Our life is a story, and it’s up to us whether we make it an interesting one or a boring one. Puddle Splashers is about collecting moments one by one, but more often than not, Lauren and I simply aren’t putting in the legwork to collect those moments. We shouldn’t be doing things in order to write about them on the blog. That’s backwards. We should be doing interesting things that we want to do but that we have let apathy or fear stop us from doing. Then the material for a blog on moment-collecting will come along on its own.

My life story is really boring right now; even I’m not that interested in it. As the author, it’s up to me to throw in a plot twist. I hope to be back soon with more to say on the subject. Perhaps by then I’ll have ordered my thoughts a bit better.

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