120 Influences—An Introduction

In the next 13 posts and over the next two-and-a-half months on WORDS ON THE LINE, I will discuss major influences on my thinking throughout my life. I will group ten of each in the following categories:

• Part 1: Essayists



• Part 2: Novelists



• Part 3: Poets



• Part 4: Dramatists



• Part 5: Screenwriters



• Part 6: Film Directors



• Part 7: Orators



• Part 8: Philosophers



• Part 9: Educators



• Part 10: Artists



• Part 11: Composers



• Part 12: Musicians

I had to consider some issues in creating these lists. These 12 categories indicate the disciplines that most interest and influence me. I do not include numerous categories, such as politicians, psychologists, scientists, sociologists, and theologians, even though these categories have also had a great effect on my thinking. But some people from these disciplines appear under other categories. As examples, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, scientist Albert Einstein, and sociologist Edward T. Hall appear as essayists, and politician Barack H. Obama and theologian Martin Luther King, Jr. appear as orators. Also, I would likely place into two categories some influences, such as Duke Ellington (composer and musician), Harold Pinter (playwright and screenwriter), Robert Penn Warren (essayist and poet), and Allan Watts (essayist and philosopher); however, I limit these influences to the one discipline in which they had the greatest impact on me.

Books by Philip Vassallo

• How to Write Fast Under Pressure



• The Art of E-mail Writing



• The Art of On-the-Job Writing



• The Inwardness of the Outward Gaze: Learning and Teaching Through Philosophy



• Like the Day I Was Born: 40 Poems, 40 Places, 40 Days (e-book)

Staying Creative, Part 7: Read

On this blog many times before, I have encouraged voracious reading for finding inspiration, improving style, honing subject-matter expertise, and keeping a creative edge when dealing with writer’s block. Then why should I end this series on staying creative any differently?

I have heard people say that reading is a passive activity. Maybe for passive types, but not for engaged readers and definitely not for writers, who find reading to be entertaining, educational, and, above all, a starting point for many of their creative works. Without having read Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard would not have written Shakespeare in Love, for which they won an Academy Award for best original screenplay. If there were no Virginia Woolf writing Mrs. Dalloway in 1925, there would not have been Michael Cunningham’s The Hours in 2002.

Let’s extend this point to business. Without having good proposals as reading references, the proposal writer would have a far more difficult time crafting a persuasive message to her upper management. By reading high-quality trip and conference reports, the writer would not have a standard to emulate when reporting on a seminar he attended.

You get it? Read. It’s a gift that never stops giving, whether you’re reading the newspaper, a magazine, or a book. It's a great way for a writer to stay creative.

Books by Philip Vassallo

• How to Write Fast Under Pressure



• The Art of E-mail Writing



• The Art of On-the-Job Writing



• The Inwardness of the Outward Gaze: Learning and Teaching Through Philosophy



• Like the Day I Was Born: 40 Poems, 40 Places, 40 Days (e-book)

Staying Creative, Part 6: Change Your Ways

You’ve heard of the who, what, when, where, why, and how (5W&H) of reporting, but I like to think of these six keys as my approaches to the writing process—ways that can soon become stale even though I am a creature of habit. I use the 5W&H as gauges for how fresh I’m being as a writer. Each word generates a different question to answer:

1. Who are my interviewees for articles, the characters of my plays, or the subjects of my poems? If they are always the same, I’m not expanding as a writer. To overcome this creative ennui, I'll try using any of the techniques I mentioned in the previous five posts.


2. What are my genres, topics, and themes? If I write only nonfiction for long stretches, I feel stifled. While nearly all the income I generate as a writer is from nonfiction, shifting to drama for a short play or poetry for a verse or two occasionally brings me back to nonfiction with a fresh outlook, approach, and style.


3. When do I write? I need to be as productive as possible at the time that I write, so I periodically must assess the best time of day for to work. Typically, I like the morning hours, but my consulting practice takes up most of my daylight time. In a busy week, I will schedule an early or late evening hour to write.


4. Where do I write? My business office can be stifling with its clutter, so a change of scene can generate a burst of creative ideas. I’ll move to another room or to a library or to a coffee shop. When I'm on business trips, hotel rooms are great places for uninterrupted writing.


5. Why do I write? Sometimes I write to explore creativity, or reveal a truth underlying an issue, or reflect on my own beliefs, or examine the consequences of an action by a person or group of people, among many other reasons. If I am repeating myself too much, then it’s time for a change. I'll often find the means for a change by reading, but more about that in the next post.


6. How do I write? As I write almost exclusively on a computer these days, I notice a benefit from breaking away briefly for my old-fashioned notebook, where I sketch characters, layout scenes, and structure books, chapters, essays, or arguments. I might see something on the page that was hiding right under my nose on the screen.

Try using the 5W&H to stay creative—and be open to changing your ways.

Staying Creative, Part 5: Prompt Yourself

You can compare writing prompts for writers like an automatic pilot light for a gas stove. Some of us prefer a wood burning stove for our heat. But we have to chop down the tree, split the wood, stack the bundles near the house, stuff the logs in the oven, light a match to them, stoke the fire, and keep feeding more logs as fire dissipates. So most of us prefer the ease of flipping a switch, turning a knob, or igniting the pilot light, and presto—here comes the heat for as long as we need it. We writers are the wood-burning-stove types. We have to get the idea, muster the inspiration, draft laboriously, revise paragraphs, edit sentences, change words, correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling, and probably somewhere down the line rewrite the whole darn thing.

Writing prompts might ease the pain. If you do a web search on “writing prompts,” you’ll find a seemingly endless list of topics you can use as springboards for getting started in the writing process. They range from single words to paragraphs, from nonsense to insights.

You can get started clicking on the weblinks below. Some are for schoolchildren, but even they’re helpful for adults:

Can-Teach Writing Prompts

Creative Writing Prompts

Jefferson County Tennessee Schools Prompt Generator

Writer’s Digest Writing Prompts

Writing-Lesson-of-the-Month Prompts

Staying Creative, Part 4: Get Away from Words

To have a way with words, you sometimes have to stay away from words. Walking away from words to your music player may soon bring you right back to the writing, refreshed and simmering with ideas. I would compare this momentary departure to going on a vacation from work and returning raring to go.

Music is a great stimulator of creativity. American novelist Edmund White once noted, “I’ve never willingly written a word without listening to music of some sort.” Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian, would delight in the music of Mozart as he composed his magnum opus, the 13-volume, 8,300-page, 6 million-word Church Dogmatics. Many writers these days write with their headphones literally shooting music into both sides of their brain. I used to need silence myself, but I now find that listening to non-vocal music, especially my favorites—classical and jazz—while writing inspires energy and generates ideas.

The next time you are struggling through a tough writing assignment, try listening to your favorite instrumental music and see if it helps move you along. But be sure that you’re not distracting others or blasting out your eardrums.

Staying Creative, Part 3: Link the Unlinkable

A lot of research says that creative people see connections among things that most other people do not. Put together post-war Italy, the movie business, the Catholic Church, male friendship, and the last bond of a life mentor, and you have Giuseppe Tornatore’s masterpiece film Cinema Paradiso. Connect the Eric Whitacre unique choral work Lux Aurumque with 185 voices from around the world in a virtual environment, and out comes a lush performance that has become an Internet sensation. Combine our a New York poet in the late twentieth century dying of AIDS and the English writer Virginia Woolf at the turn of twentieth century, and voilà: Michael Cunningham’s inventive novel The Hours. Weave together close-up photography and abstract painting, and the result is Chuck Close’s stunning color portraits. No doubt about it: Great works of film, music, literature, and art have in common the creator’s talent for linking the unlinkable.

This practice also applies to business. Consider what former AT&T CEO Michael Armstrong said in an interview with Charlie Rose that was aired on November 18, 1998:

“(The company that can) globally have a common, seamless architecture … of features and functions and services that can go around this globe … and can offer that service the best, the first, is going to win.”

At that time, the BlackBerry had not yet entered the market. The iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad were a few years down the road. Yet Armstrong already knew that his developers imagined the possibility of connecting nearly every data delivery and storage system imaginable into a palm-sized device that could allow the owner to wirelessly, quickly, and globally make phone calls, e-mail, instant message, chat, and browse; make and view videos and photos, play games, schedule appointments; use as an alarm clock, calendar, compass, flashlight, and stopwatch; manage applications usually reserved for desktop computers; and store vast amounts of data. The hard-to-imagine is for the consumer; the make-it-happen is for the producer.

What does this idea mean to writers at work, whether they’re composing short stories or client proposals? Engage yourself and your readers by seeing connections among disparate points. Join any two people, places, events, or objects in the same place at the same time or, for that matter, in the same place at different times or different places at the same time. Something interesting is bound to happen.

Staying Creative, Part 2: Associate Freely

As a college student, I heard from a writing instructor this tip: “Just write about anything without stopping; this kind of free association will lead to something.” I was skeptical. Until that moment, I had learned that my job as a writer was to compose a perfect first draft from a specific prompt in a given time, usually 15 to 30 minutes. Who had time for such nonsense? How can writing about anything possibly lead to something?

It turned out that this piece of advice was one of the best tips that I have ever heard—and one of the best tips that I can give to developing writers.

What I was taught before that lesson was to stick around until some authority imposed on me a writing topic and to respond on demand with an unrevised, unedited draft before the class was over. That procedure might work well in a classroom to sort the fast writers from the slow ones, but it does not necessarily sort the exceptional writers from the unexceptional ones.

Good writing takes time. You can read interviews of hundreds of successful, famous writers who will say that they spend a good amount of time researching, sketching ideas, and rewriting—none of which fall in to the drafting step of the writing process.

When in a writing bottleneck, try free association, an easy and fun technique that has worked for me and countless others numerous times. It can be revealing for business and technical writers in a funk or for fiction writers at an impasse in a story line or character development. Just as important, this extra step will not waste time but save it. It sure beats staring blankly at the computer, playing video games, or walking away from the computer when struggling with writer’s block as a writing task is due. Before trying free association, or writing about anything to lead to something, you might want to follow these guidelines:

1. Lower your standards. You might be your own worst critic, so you’ll want to expand your tolerance for nonsense. Accept irrelevant ideas, inaccurate information, poor organization, illogical transitions, dreadful style, grammatical mistakes, and poor spelling. You will catch all these issues during the rewrite.

2. Broaden your vision. This does not mean that you should look far and wide for ideas to write about; it means that you should broaden your perspective of what is acceptable to write about. If a proposal for buying a smartphone is your topic and you’re stuck with only memories of your last trip to the Canadian Rockies (as I once was), then write about that hike up a mountain trail past that glacial lake. All roads lead to your topic.

3. Enjoy the game. Free association is truly about play. Allow yourself the luxury of having fun. No one is writing for you, nor is anyone watching you write, and for now you are writing to no one but yourself. So what do you have to lose? Delight in the ideas that pop into your head and follow them with your fingers as you document all that you imagine.

Here is a brief excerpt of a free association exercise I did on a smartphone proposal, which did include a passage about the Canadian Rockies!

Three weeks in the Canadian Rockies. Awesome. Seven national parks in twenty days: Jasper, Yoho, Mount Revelstoke, Glacier, Kootenay, Waterton Lakes, and Banff. Not quite a thousand miles of driving and far more than a hundred miles of hiking. Up dense forests leading to clearings at the edge of mile-high mountains overlooking pristine lakes radiating from glacial flour. No one in sight. Amazed that I was able to receive a phone call half-way up from Lake Louise from a client, the US Navy. The signal didn’t work at ground level near some populated areas, but here I am talking to a Navy SEAL based in Virginia Beach some 2,500 miles away. Crazy. I can’t even get someone in Manhattan from my mobile phone when I’m riding a New York City Transit subway, but I’m on subways for only a few minutes at a time. That’s why I need a smartphone, so I can communicate by voice or text from remote areas with clients whenever and wherever they need me.

The last sentence was the beginning of my proposal. The stuff before it, which made for nice memories, was for my scrapbook. Those 144 words before the last sentence took me just three minutes to write, but it got me going.