Battling Over-Confidence

I've been thinking about the term "over-confident" lately. I believe it protects people from reality. It allows them to believe they are on the right track, when there is every indication of what they are doing being completely wrong. Psychosis is something that people are fascinated with, but few see it introspectively.

You can convince yourself of anything if you think about it long enough. If you say it enough. If you attempt every conversation which focuses on how you are correct in your belief in something. That explains the Christian Rock phenomena. Where they cannot be Christians, believe in God, and play rock n roll without invoking Jesus, love or crucifixion in their lyrics. That may be harsh, but think about it? Is it the only way that someone who wants to believe they are doing "God's work" while playing the "devil's music?"

I'm a dime store psychologist. Too many people attempt to showcase their skill for talking a lot, saying nothing, but somehow issuing the belief that because they've read a few books on psychology makes them an expert. In fact, without proper schooling where you are challenged with books that assault your point of view, I have the believe that you are an amateur at any field.

Being challenged does not mean only schooling. But also in the industry. I wouldn't expect a taxidermist to be a person who hasn't taken classes in zoology. Maybe that happens, but knowing the internal functions of an animal should be something that a good taxidermist would want to strive for. At least, that's my hope.

Comedy calls it stage-time. You get up with about five minutes of material and you use it on stage. No matter how many times you practice, nothing compares to stage time. You can say it throughout, repeat, repeat, repeat and it is not at all similar to what it appears like on stage.

You either write, or you don't. And if you get up in front of the lights and you don't have your material down pat, it doesn't matter how many times you practiced it. Things don't always go according to Hoyle.

So, let's get back to the matter at hand. Over-confidence. It tends to blind people to the reality of what they are experiencing. Because they believe in their truths no matter what the facts are.

This can be as little as who ate the last piece of pizza to who shot Kennedy. Which Kennedy, right? Seriously, how is it that Ted Kennedy was the only one of the three brothers not to die mysteriously? Although his girlfriends should have taken swimming lessons (rim shot, please).

This type of over-confidence leads to "isms" which harm our thoughts, poison our points of view.

Some people that believe that by standing still, they are moving ahead. That if you move too fast, you harm your ability to grow.

I believe the exact opposition.

What if you standing still, wait, and that opportunity to go forward never comes. Too many people have watched others breeze by out of fear. You've heard the warnings before. You'll flop or do something which won't allow you to succeed.

A friend told me that if you want to be a doctor, you listen to doctors. Med students don't know what the hell they are talking about.

Good advice for blog readers.

That's why I wrote it down.

Rewriting, boring people, and blog entries

I have the followup to Crunk basically done. But why it is taking so long to get that final draft in before I submit to my readers (then my editor), before I can publish?

These things haunt writers. I am sure I am not the first. It is not about story-line or character development at this point. Maybe I've read, written and developed the story so much that I am convinced it is done, but I still have to do that final re-write in order to truly convinced.

I do my re-writing different than a lot of people. I've heard that some people go through and add words to already existing sentences. Dean Koontz rewrites a sentence before he moves on with the next one about three or four times. He doesn't go through the story, etc and then rewrite it.

My brain doesn't work that way. I do full rewrites every single time. I just vomit out anything that comes to mind, change the story up about draft 3 or 4 to enhance things or take things about (after the follow-up to Crunk is complete, I will talk about how The Repo Blues short story came about).

Everything is luck of the draw. Especially in the world of arts. There are no coaches, no ability to get better with a boot camp. Most of the writing conventions want to teach you how to write their way, not the way that you find most comfortable. Which is fine, if you want to pay $500-$1000 to hear what works for someone else. I'm not saying that those things don't have merit, but I don't believe that they work for everyone.

I tend to write without touching a keyboard. I was talking to a boring person last night at a hotel bar that I frequent. This was the first time that I had seen him, but he started talking. About himself, as most boring people do. And without any interesting things to say about himself, which is the worst kind of boring. Not only is the subject boring, but the person telling it has no ability to make it sound interested, even to them. I guess it is what you expect to get when you talk to someone who knows they are boring. But I wonder if that guy knows he's the most boring person I've met today. Maybe.

I tend to find interesting things about people. Usually, they hold more significance to me than others. But that is the details of someone's life which are interesting. This fella did not really have a lot of interesting components to him. Even his stories were second-hand. He had spent twenty-seven years at his job which dealt in some capacity with fraud.

I expected to hear some interesting criminal activity. Some characters that he met along the way. It is only after hearing about forty-five minutes of this stuff that I wonder if he wandered through life until retirement, then didn't know what to do with himself. He admitted he sat at a desk, answered the phones, and "managed" people because that what was needed to be done. I cannot imagine never taking an interest in what you are doing beyond merely doing it.

The guy yammered on for about an hour and a half, criticizing the fact that I would rather write on my IPad2 than listen to him. But that got me thinking. Is he so uninteresting that he even bores himself? Now, in a way, that could be funny. I haven't thought of a way to utilize that in a character yet, but it maybe a keeper. Either that or he wasted a good section of night where I could have been writing, creating, because I was too polite to tell him to buzz off.

Thus far, I've covered a lot of things in this blog. I enjoy doing it. The blog doesn't feel like work, plus it gets me going sometimes. When I don't know what I am going to write about concerning a story or something, I just call up the IPad2, start typing in Pages, and crank out a blog post. It sits for a little while until I feel I've given a "post-worthy" segment to the blog. I don't want it to be "hi, I've got nothing today," but thanks for coming by and giving me a few more web hits.