A new name for a new raison d'etre

​Dear readers, the last blog post sent me spinning off into a flurry of creative reflection. What is the point of this blog? - that was the question. Well, after participating in the gradual evolution of The Flawed Mind, I am pleased to share my answer. I am happy to announce the blog’s coming of age, and I think you will find much to like here in the future. For those of you who have followed my writing up to this date, I thank you, and ask that you please indulge a slight diversion into the realms of the introspective; we won’t stay there very long, and I promise we will come out the other side with a spring in our step.

I believe that blogs are most powerful when they have a simple reason for existing - a ‘spine’, a structure to hang things off. To be successful, I believe that a blog has to occupy common ground, a space shared between writer and reader. Over the last few years I have occasionally done this, I hope - but often I have not. To be frank, the blog and I have both rambled, touching on a myriad of topics, the only common denominator for which seemed to be my itinerant curiosity. 

While the ramble itself has been diverting, even occasionally illuminating, it has also been a little directionless. Hence my questioning of the overall direction of this particular blog as a creative vehicle, wondering how it all hangs together. Part of the problem was the name - “The Flawed Mind” is inescapably self-referential, and really all about me, a topic of limited interest to the world at large! The time came to resolve this. So, the challenge I set myself was to look back at the tapestry of  several years of regular writing, and find the common thread or threads that weave through the work. 

I have completed my review, and I am pleased to say that I have reached a happy conclusion: It’s time for a change.

Without getting lost in the navel-gazing, and sparing you much of my typically meandering analysis, it struck me that the common denominator is not really the subject matter as such, but the desire to explore subjects through writing. And to be even more specific, my chosen modus operandi (modus operandus?) for writing, the thing I love to do most dearly, is to ensconce myself in one of Melbourne’s many cafés in order to chase the dragon through cup after cup of good, bad or indifferent coffee. All this time I thought I had been merely writing: in fact, I had been writing in my favourite Melbourne cafés - a subtle but important distinction in a town which prides itself on both its coffee and literary culture.

This was an insight so obvious in retrospect that it nearly bowled me over. 

Nearly every past entry in this blog was written in a coffee house, and the café is my preferred habitat for socialising and thinking through life’s challenges, as well as for writing. This blog post was written in a café; come to think of it, goddammit - the best things I have ever written were written in a café. Certainly all of my freelance journalism has emerged from the coffee house. To crown it all, my idea of freedom is to be able to go to a quiet establishment somewhere, watch the crowds come and go and write, write and write some more. (And eat and drink coffee, of course - one has to pay one’s way. More on the question of etiquette soon.)

This is what it comes down to, the thread I choose to tie everything together: me, Melbourne, writing, coffee, dogs and cats; trains, planes, automobiles, and the kitchen sink - from this post onwards, the blog will be written in celebration of the culture and practice of writing in cafés in Melbourne, as experienced first hand.

The point is not to limit the scope of the writing unnecessarily. The point is to use it as a structuring device, a new raison d’etre that encapsulates so much of what I love. Of course, we will still take many happy diversions into obscure territory, so for those who enjoy my rambling habits, do not despair! Apart from anything else, this new focus will allow me to indulge my fetish for technology and gadgets; fountain pens, pencils and other writing instruments; fine paper, journals and stationery; and of course good coffee and even better food. Naturally I will continue to write about creativity and writing itself. What’s not to like?

So it is with great pleasure that I announce the timely demise of The Flawed Mind (may it rest in peace and cache files for all eternity), and the arrival of The Ink Shot: A blog of café writing culture. I hope you like the new name and the new direction.

Our shiny new web address, which is up and running now thanks to the speed and efficiency of tech support in the US (we are a global operation), is www.theinkshot.com, or just theinkshot.com to its friends. The old address will still work for the foreseeable future, so don’t worry if you forget. My new twitter name is @theinkshot, but I will keep the logo - it’s a cross between a coffee bean and a brain, so it’s all good!

Ignoring everybody

I have just finished reading the short but punchy ‘Ignore Everybody’ by Hugh MacLeod, who is a cartoonist, creativity pundit and internet whisperer who first published the manuscript as a download on his blog. The book presents 40 ideas about creativity, or more accurately, 40 perspectives on the creative life. It is full of practical commentary about the pitfalls and opportunities that emerge at various points along the way to creative fulfillment. It also offers a lightning-bolt jolt of reality to the romantic notions of making it big and being ‘discovered’, and what that might mean.

I find myself agreeing with much of what he has to say, and I recognise the pattern he advocates emerging in my own creative practice. In particular I like his ‘Sex/Money’ theory. The sex/money theory states that the creative life is destined to be cleaved down the middle, with some activities engaged in to keep the bills paid (money) and some things done because they are awesome and tap into your passion (sex). MacLeod goes so far as to say that the ideal creative life should remain split in this way, and that if this is your current situation, then get used to it as it is probably not going to change any time soon. More than this, he alludes to the idea that the tension between the sex and money side of things is creatively stirring, and as such desirable.

Of course, by keeping the sex side of your creative life completely, well, sexy - unencumbered by the need for it to pay the bills, pay the piper or otherwise satisfy the demands of interested third parties such as publishers or agents - all manner of benefits can flow. A high degree of autonomy is the chief among them, something that MacLeod calls ‘personal sovereignty’. In fact, by my reading MacLeod rates sovereignty as the highest goal of the creative life, the crown jewels that must be protected at all costs.

The title insight - ignore everybody - speaks of this sovereignty. It is a clarion call to follow your own muse and do precisely what you want to do, no matter how ridiculous, pointless or obscure it might seem at first. ‘Ignore everybody’ is advice based on the assumption that other people won’t have any more sense of the value of your idea/s than you do, and usually less. In fact, the chances are that they will have incentive to dislike or ‘not get’ your idea, for a host of reasons.

This of course led me to speculate as to what my idea actually is. What’s my thing? For MacLeod, it was (and is) cartooning on the back of business cards, an obscure and seemingly uncommercializable (is that a word?) speciality he has turned into a lucrative vocational gig. So what is it that I seek to build a bastion of personal sovereignty around? 

Right now the idea, if it is singular, is to write. However, that small phrase - to write - covers a multitude of possibilities, and it is necessary to be far more specific than that. After all, I am writing right now, but is this the point or merely a by-product of chasing the dragon? I am not sure, but this is an open question, for now. I have a strong sense that I have not found my genre or niche yet, but I am actively looking.

Another idea MacLeod puts forward is to blog, as a way of opening up possibilities around your ‘thing’ and building a community. Well, check - here we are. Although my community building efforts have been modest to date, as this blog comes more into focus this may improve. 

While we are talking about the focus of this blog: it used to be about thinking, design and the city. This was fine, but very general. With a little objective distance, I can now analyse the component parts, and understand how the focus of the blog has been narrowing in a constructive way. First, I realised that when I said ‘thinking’, what I was thinking about was writing and creativity. So writing and creativity are the point, not the thinking that leads to them. Secondly, there is the word ‘design’. The word ‘design’ was in there because I am a designer in my day job, and in some ways design thinking is a big part of what I do. But again, this blog isn’t really about design, not in any traditional sense. 

Finally, I used to say the blog was about ‘the city’, but what I really meant was ‘Melbourne city’, and specifically my perambulatory, café-hopping life therein. So I have been slowly narrowing the focus of the blog; now it is about ‘writing, creativity and life in Melbourne city.’ What I really mean to write about is my daily battle to lead a creatively fulfilling life as a writer while keeping the bills paid, here in downtown Melbourne. Can the focus tighten even more? Undoubtedly yes, but at some point it becomes reductive. This is where I will stop for now.  

So welcome to The Flawed Mind: writing and creativity in a café-hopping life in Melbourne city. Now all I have to do is ignore everybody, and see where it takes me.

Getting into flow

Hello gentle reader, today I am posting about writing. Slowly I am managing to get into the groove of what I call ‘free writing’, writing with a loose wrist and a pleasantly disengaged conscious mind, as inspired by the writings of Natalie Goldberg. I will borrow from the widely respected psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to refer to the process when it is going well as flow, and I am coming to recognise when I am in flow mostly by recognising when I am not. It’s a slow process of determination, the equivalent of getting to know what’s in a dark room by slowly backing in,  waving your arms behind you. It might be all arse-end about, but it’s reasonably effective, even if a few things do get knocked over in the process.

So Tuesday night at about 11pm I hit flow, probably because I knew that the gig was up, and I really needed to get to sleep in preparation for an early start. This seems to be an important part of the process -  writing in strange or inconvenient places (lying face down in bed) and at incovenient or ‘peripheral’ moments; for example, when I really should be doing other things. Important things. It is like I have to sneak up on the moment in order to trick my conscious mind into a state of comfortable distraction. 

So it’s a delicate balance, but when the mind is suitably distracted, and I am suitably settled, I can get in some serious pen-stroke miles. Of course, I don’t get it right most of the time. I get pretty anxious about it if I try to get into flow too directly, or confront the writing moment too, well, frontally. This is partly why I haven’t settled on a writing desk yet: my glass writing desk is covered in crap, and nothing at home seems to stay clear long enough for me to use it.

I also find that it can be a challenge to make my mind go quiet, in order to devote serious production time to writing, when I find reading or watching television superficially more relaxing after a busy (regular) work day. Writing is hard work for neurotics and non-neurotics alike, and then there is the nasty little question posed by my good friend Anna Johnson, the author of a series of excellent books about architecture and design (for example this): do I actually have anything to say?

I won’t try to answer that one here. Chances are you have already formed an opinion, and I wouldn’t want to plead my case. Don’t want to come off all needy, if you know what I mean.