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Photo credit: guy.p

I have discovered the secret to getting yourself in the mood to write, and, surprisingly, it has absolutely nothing to do with magic mushrooms.

I want to make the distinction right away that what we’re discussing here is not writer’s block; we’re discussing how to get motivated to write. If you are already raring to go, but find yourself unable to put words down, I suggest you read my previous post: Captain Trips and the Permanent Cure for Writer’s Block.

OK, let’s get started.

Some of my regular readers may have noticed that I haven’t stuck to my regular schedule of posting at least once per week. For some reason, I just couldn’t get in the mood to write. I’m not exactly sure what my problem was, but my lack of motivation got so bad that I panicked and ordered a book from Amazon called, Write Is a Verb: Sit Down, Start Writing, No Excuses.

The book is written by a fellow named, Bill O’Hanlon, a psychotherapist turned writing coach that, in the book, not only examines the reasons writers put off writing, but also, as indicated on the back cover, helps you to discover “what uniquely motivates you to write.”

The book is filled with information that would help a lot of unmotivated writers, but seriously, as long as your problem is a lack of motivation and not writer’s block, I believe I’ve found the real secret, and you won’t have to buy the book to learn it.

The last time I had a serious bout with “lack of interest in writing” I applied the secret and didn’t even know it. I had signed on to participate in last May’s Bloggers Unite for Human Rights, a joint effort by Bloggers Unite and Amnesty International which encouraged the entire blogosphere to take a day, May 15th, and write a post involving human rights. When I had made the commitment a month-and-a-half earlier, I was full-on motivated to participate in such a worthy cause.

Flash-forward to May 14th, 8:30 pm on the night before the big day: I hadn’t even started writing. In fact, I didn’t even know what I was going to write about. Besides, I’m a humor blogger, how am I supposed to write about the atrocities of human rights violations and make it funny? I considered giving up on it all together.

But, when I commit to do something, I do my best to keep my word. So, I sat down and forced myself to write. By 10:00 pm I was finished and posted the human rights article to my blog. In my opinion it was not my best work–I would’ve liked to have spent more time on it–but at least I fulfilled my commitment and felt good that I contributed to the project.

It turns out that if I had given up on that particular post it would’ve been one of the biggest mistakes of my life. The next morning, I turned on CNN and saw Dead Rooster and my hastily written blog post featured in their story about the Bloggers Unite project. I got some of the best exposure you can get from a post that I almost didn’t write because I couldn’t get in the writing mood.

So, how did I finally get motivated?

The secret, in my opinion, can be summed up in the short quote by Joyce Carol Oats on page 37 of Write is a Verb:

“One must be pitiless about this matter of ‘mood.’ In a sense, the writing will create the mood. …I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing seemed worth enduring for another five minutes…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”

Writing creates the mood.

The next time you don’t feel motivated to write, sit down and begin writing anyway. Get your fingers moving and watch what happens. It is almost magical the way it works. In my Bloggers Unite example above, it was the deadline that forced me to start typing; but, it’s not a deadline that gets you in the mood, it’s the activity of writing.

No one ever said it better than Ray Bradbury, “Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.”

“Thar be no pyrates in these waters, but I warn ye, beware the sea lions, for they’re mischievous critters with a taste for blood…human blood…”

Having seen over eight-billion horror movies, I’m often asked what I think is the scariest movie ever made. My answer is always the same and always immediate—no need to mull it over—I know without-a-doubt that the scariest movie ever made is Jaws.

For those of you that haven’t seen the film, it’s about an extremely large, often excitable fish with the unpopular habit of converting frolicking, splash-happy teenagers into random chunks of floating sirloin.

Back in the summer of 1975 when the movie was new, it was considered quite intense. I was fifteen and my cousin Steve, who saw the movie with me, was fourteen. We saw it together on a hot Friday night in June, and then—with genius equaling that of a package of frozen hot dogs—we did the direct opposite of what you’d expect someone to do after witnessing vicious ocean-related carnage on the big screen: we got up at 4:30 a.m. the following morning and went surfing…in the ocean…where sharks live.

We got to the beach before daybreak. The moon was out giving off an eerie glow not unlike that of the opening scene of Jaws. The sea was unusually calm with waves almost too small to bother with, but every so often a decent sized swell would break making it surfable, but just barely.

As we waxed up our surfboards the sun began to bleed above the horizon and it became evident we were the only two people there aside from a lone Vietnamese woman, pants rolled up to her knees, walking along the shoreline. Normally, there is at least a handful of other surfers, but probably due to the small waves, no one else showed up. I’m not very easily spooked, but I can tell you there are very few times in my life as creepy as the moment we began wading out into the water that morning.

That morning the ocean floor had developed what’s called a “sandbar.” What this means is that the ocean was much more shallow than usual and even though you were out past the waves, you could still stand on the sea bottom with the water level only reaching about chest high. This made it a lot easier because you didn’t have to paddle against the current and could simply walk out pushing your surfboard along the surface.

Once we got out there, we had to wait for a wave that was big enough to ride on. Finally, after about a half-hour, a moderately sized wave came along and Steve rode it all the way in to the beach, then he walked away from the water, stabbed the tail of his surfboard into the sand, and sat. He wasn’t coming back. The waves were just too small.

So, now I am way out there all alone in chest-high water, arms resting on my surfboard, waiting for a wave and thinking about Jaws. Fifteen minutes roll by, then something big—something alive and slippery—brushed up against my leg.

Believe it or not, my first thought was not that it was a shark, but that it was Steve who returned to play a cruel joke on me. I looked back to the shore and could see him lying on a beach towel next to his surfboard. This led to my second thought:

SHARK!

Shark experts in southern California are constantly telling us, “If you encounter a shark, do not panic! The worst thing you can do is freak-out and start splashing around like a wounded harp seal.” But, since there weren’t any shark experts around, I decided that “freaking-out” was the perfect solution.

The first thing I tried to do was get up out of the water and onto my surfboard.

Here’s an important, yet little known, fact about modern surfboards: if you are not skimming along the water, such as when hydroplaning along the face of a wave, a surfboard will not completely support your weight above water—in other words, it sinks.

I can see a dark form circling me and it’s big. Much bigger than anything I’ve ever encountered in my many years of surfing. I’ve seen sharks out there before, but usually they are maybe three-feet long; this thing is easily six-or-seven-feet long and swimming at high speed.

So there I am trying to keep all of my body parts out of the water by balancing on a sinking surfboard and I lose sight of the creature—I don’t know where it is and that’s almost as frightening as watching it circle me.

I hear a tremendous splash behind me, I turn to look and come face to face with it:

A sea lion.

I begin to relax, because, well, sea lions don’t generally eat humans. Besides, the way he’s looking at me reminds me of a large, but playful dog with long frisky whiskers and tiny ears.

Then, it sort of, “honked” at me.

The honk projected outward in a tremendous blast; it was a cross between a 146-decibel dog bark, an old-fashioned bicycle horn, and Captain Quint scraping his fingernails on the chalkboard in the Amity Island town hall.

The sound startled me so much that I lost my balance on the surfboard which caused it to pop out of the water and smack me in the face. Then the sea lion leaned toward me and honked again! Even louder!

It wants to bite me!

I jumped out of the water so fast that my shorts came off. Lucky for me, they got hung-up on my “leash”—a five-foot length of bungee cord that attaches at the ankle and to the surfboard so it won’t get away from you if you fall off—otherwise, I would’ve been stranded without swim trunks.

I paddled away faster than a jet-ski at full-throttle—no pants; no shame. I did not look back; I just kept paddling until I was scooping sand.

When I finally reached the shore, I stood up with my surfboard—shorts around one ankle—and walked herky/jerky Frankenstein style, completely naked, with my bathing suit flopping in the sand. The Vietnamese woman, who saw the entire event, was standing right in front of me laughing hysterically and pointing at a part of my anatomy that, due to the cold water and furious terror, had shriveled up to the size of a Spanish peanut.

After frantically navigating my swimsuit back on, I quickly ran up to Steve and found him lying on his towel, snoring. I woke him up and told him the whole story, to which he stared at me in blank-faced silence for a long moment, then finally replied, “We should go see Jaws again…”

Photo credit: gwen

For those of you planning to pull pranks on the ice cream truck driver this summer, here’s a tip: If one of your pranks involves climbing a tree with a well-crafted dummy and hurling it in front of the approaching ice cream truck, it is usually a mistake to set it on fire first.

When I was a kid, my neighborhood had a high turnover rate for ice cream truck drivers. The reason, of course, was that my cousin Steve and I, who lived just one street apart back then, were constantly planning crueler and crueler pranks to play on them. Each new ice cream man quickly learned that when he got close to Steve’s house, he needed to step on the accelerator and speed by as fast as possible thus shortening his time in the “Hot Zone.”

Like most twelve-year-old-boys, we started out with the classic water balloons and dirt clods, and then advanced to more elaborate, sophisticated pranks such as those requiring various types of illegal fireworks.

But, then we got the dummy idea.

There are two proper methods to throwing a dummy out of a tree and into the path of a moving ice cream truck: a.) Face-up-horizontal as if some knucklehead accidentally fell out of the tree to die a horrible screaming death beneath the truck, or b.) Face-down-horizontal as if someone purposely catapulted out of the tree to commit an ice cream truck related fantasy suicide.

We went with “suicide.”

But, first, we had to build the perfect dummy. We started off with old clothes, which we stuffed with other old clothes; then we used one of those white, Styrofoam wig-stands for the head and used sticky double-back tape to attach a Freddy-from-Scooby-Doo Halloween mask for the face. Gloves and shoes completed the form.

One of us, I think it was Steve, thought it would greatly enhance the effect if we saturated Freddy’s upper torso and head with Raging Rocket High-Octane Barbeque Starter Fluid then light it off just before we tossed the dummy out of the tree.

It’s funny how it never occurred to us that this was a bad idea until the exact moment the dummy erupted into flames.

We were sitting in the lower branches of the tree which hung about four-feet above where the roof of the ice cream truck would eventually pass. As the ice cream truck approached, Steve let go of the flaming upper torso leaving me holding the knees pressed against a limb and causing the dummy to swing down to stare directly at the ice cream truck driver.

The plan was for both of us to let go of the dummy at the same time so it would fall just in front of the truck, but I momentarily froze in the wake of the tall flames—hesitating just long enough for the truck to get underneath before I snapped-out-of-it and dropped my half.

I can only imagine what this looked like to the ice cream truck driver: He’s slowly driving along, minding his own business blasting Pop-Goes-the-Weasel from his loud speaker, when the flaming upper torso of a body swings out of a tree upside-down; the friendly smile of Freddy quickly melting and distorting into a rictus grin shouting fire like a blowtorch.

As it turned out, the dummy landed square on top of the ice cream truck, lying on its back with its arms spread out, blazing away. We watched as the truck made its way down the street, turned the corner, and continued on its regular route to deliver treats. The flaming body, now appearing as if the driver placed it up there on purpose, sent a confusing message to those wanting ice cream. I doubt he sold many ice cream bars that day.

We never found out if the burning dummy did any damage to the truck, nor did we ever play another prank on that guy. In fact, if we heard Pop-Goes-the-Weasel, we just went in the house.