Bring Out Your Inner Marie Kondo
Daniel Stallings, East Sierra Branch
Have you heard of master organizer Marie Kondo and her show on Netflix? The main takeaway most of the Internet grabbed hold of was the concept of things bring you enjoy. Marie Kondo’s advice for your clutter is if you hold the item and it brings you joy, you could keep it. Does it make you happy? Do you feel joy when you hold this object and remember clearly when you got it and why you have it? At this time for all of us, joy is something we all want to hold onto. I want all of us wordsmiths and word-devourers to recapture our joy after a year of hardship.
Finding the passion, the drive, and the pure joy to pick up your pen and write that favorite genre or pick up a book to read about a difficult subject, even if you love it, can be difficult after over a year filled with fear and uncertainty. I know, for me, it’s been difficult to read mysteries, because of the general subject matter. I don’t want to read about dying at this moment in time. And I don’t really want to write about it. However, I still write mysteries. I have always maintained that a mystery, at its core, is an unsolved puzzle or an unanswered question. While publishing rules ask for adult mysteries to prominently feature a major crime, I don’t always subscribe to that theory. For Weird Weekend 2019, we produced Monica Dwyer’s Close Encounters of the Hairy Kind, a play whose primary mystery focused on non-violent pranks. Over lockdown, I produced Regions Beyond, a paranormal series more about figuring out magic tricks, and Mum’s the Word, a production made for a middle school which focused on a disappearing student from a boarding school. And the first live show post-lockdown is a madcap campy comedy caper dealing with bumbling thieves at a costume party. There are still puzzles to solve, but violence isn’t the focus. And that keeps the joy for me right now. The joy is in the puzzle crafting itself. That’s why I write in my genre.
So I want all of us to rekindle that baseline joy for what we write and read. Is the act of writing the difficulty right now? Maybe try dictation, recording your words for later. Do you love travel writing but are cautious about traveling right now? Try looking closer to home and writing about places and experiences in your city. Ask yourself what you love about what you read and write, be inventive about how you can twist this to meet your current needs, and start working. Recapture that joy.
This essay first appeared as the President’s Message
in the newsletter of the East Sierra Branch.