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The Cult of Craft

November 4, 2015 · by Oliver Gray

Bryan’s conversation about “Craft Beer Evangelists” hit a nerve.

Mainly because, for the past few years, I was a member of a cult. A group of single-minded missionaries, of fanboy zealots, of plaid-clad revolutionaries, riding out from California on their own modern crusade.

I didn’t even really know I was a member, but I still played my part. I parroted the virtues of our leaders to anyone who would listen (and many who were only pretending to listen), meanwhile demonizing the unforgivable sins of our “enemies.” To me it all made sense, it made me feel good, and gave me a sense of identity. The group felt like home, a warm and cozy fireside gathering where the other people in the room just “got” me.

I didn’t question or challenge the narrative. I was perpetuation manifest. I was a member of the Cult of Craft Beer.

Ha! Beer as a cult! Sounds ridiculous, right? Perhaps Oliver has been dipping into the rum stash too much, and came out the other side a wee bit hyperbolic?

Perhaps. But perhaps not.

Let’s look at some of the defining characteristics of cult-like behavior (my emphasis added):

The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its belief system, ideology
Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished
The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel
The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s) and members
The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society
The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members
The group is preoccupied with making money
Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members
The most loyal members feel there can be no life outside the context of the group

Sound familiar? Trade organizations setting definitions so we know what to drink? People on social media treating honest criticism as inflammatory nonsense? These behaviors rear their heads often, as new people enter the fold, or diehards do their best to keep the group-think thriving. The “Us-versus-Them” mentality is particularly strong, and has a become a defining aspect of “craft,” even though the “devious” Big Beer Companies still produce and sell 80%+ of all beer in the country.

The cult is alive and Tweeting. Don’t believe me? Here’s a recent conversation I got into with @BrewStuds:

@OliverJGray @beerbecue7 a good chunk of the country is still fighting to have the same freedoms that we enjoy in the more reformed states

— Brew Studs ♥ Beer (@BrewStuds) October 29, 2015

Rhetorically, this is dangerous territory. It puts beer in the same category as emancipation from slavery, civil rights, women’s suffrage. It sounds like we are fighting for some righteous cause, like we’ll go to war if we must for our “rights” (even if those rights only apply to what fermented drinks we can buy). It’s absurd when viewed from the outside, but totally reasonable to someone on the inside.

I challenged BrewStuds and said their thinking was potentially militaristic. Their response: “Militaristic? Passionate maybe.” This argument comes up a lot in conversations about beer, the idea that passion is justification for pretty much any behavior, and the real reason for brewing beer. Not money or economics or science, just “passion.” It tends to trump anything else; in the eyes of the cult, there’s no way craft brewers are anything but open and altruistic, because of their “passion” means they’re making great beer for us to enjoy with no ulteriors whatsoever.

This psychological magnetism to beer isn’t really a surprise, though. It was going to be something, and beer’s timing was impeccable.

With the economy still sluggish and a large chunk of Millennials out of work or underpaid, America is ripe for cultural makeover. Much like Tyler Durden’s “Project Mayhem” in Fight Club, those joining the craft movement do so of their own free will after meeting others who’ve joined the proverbial fold, seeking some kind of freedom from the status quo, something they can wrap their identity around to feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. Beer might seem an odd vehicle for cultural readjustment, but history plus availability plus the clever story of authenticity woven by small brewers has made it a perfect catalyst for social chemical reaction. Plus, humanity has always had a penchant for intoxication.

The first rule about beer club is that you ALWAYS talk about beer club.

Now that I’ve managed to step aside (either through disillusionment), I can see just how powerful the pull is. Many Americans (especially young Americans) are lacking financial and vocational independence, and it makes sense that they’d seek identity through some cultural movement. It makes sense that they’d come together to form a group, and beer, breweries, and bars offer an ideal set of circumstances (regionalism, nationalism, egalitarianism) on which to build a like-minded community.

But all perceived sense aside, a one-sided narrative, especially one fueled by a business-minded trade organization, is not an ideal way to live one’s life. Cults, typically, are not good things. They promote polar thinking and mindless subservience, even if the original goal was something much, much more humanistic and kind.

But cults are also not often an intentional creation, they just happen when one’s message reaches enough people who agree with it.

So is craft a cult? By literal definition, definitely a solid maybe.

Note: I want to make it very clear that I am not against the Brewer’s Association, no more than I’m against ABInBev. I’m a writer, trying to stay impartial. I actually support the BA and what they’ve done for over all US beer. But it’s important to look at all sides, as objectively as possible, without letting your personal prejudice (either way!) color the debate.

Dunbar’s Brewery – How Many Beers Can You Fit Into Your Brain?

August 6, 2015 · by Oliver Gray

Quick: do you know the full name of the person who delivers your mail? How about that dude at Dunkin Donuts who makes your greasy sausage and croissant heart-stoppers? What about your neighbor, four houses down?

No? Don’t feel bad. It’s not your fault.

As postulated by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, our brains literally cannot hold onto so many relationships at once. Turns out we’re socially crippled by anatomy. After much research on primates, primitive social groups, and modern culture, Dunbar came to the conclusion that the size of our neocortex limits how many concurrent relationships we can maintain.

The maximum number of relationships is called “Dunbar’s Number,” and the average clocks in right around 150.

That’s right, even with 1000 Facebook friends and 2000 Twitter followers, you really only have about 150 meaningful, reciprocating relationships in your entire life. The Dunbar Number quantifies your varying levels of caring, and explains why we think more of our mother than some other random woman, even if they’re both good human beings.

David Wong (of Cracked.com fame) dug deeper, dubbing your ~150 relationships your “monkeysphere;” an invisible domain of other monkey-brains you keep close, who mean more to you, who you interact and associate with regularly. The inner most sphere is made up of your direct family, the next layer your close friends, the next your coworkers and neighbors, etc. As you move towards the edge of the sphere, the less you know about the people, and the weaker the relationships become.

Outside the sphere reside those we cognitively acknowledge are living on our planet, but can’t, because of sheer number, take the time to get to know. Of course we know these people exist, but they’re on the periphery of reality for us, in that shadowy realm of “people” made up of passersby and citizens of far off countries that, given their proximity to our daily lives, might as well be other planets.

Some extraordinary folk might be able to stretch how many people they can know, but generally, we’re doomed to a finite, insular core of relationships due to our basic biology.

“What the hell does this have to do with beer?” You might ask.

“Everything.” I might answer

The popular conversation surrounding the growth of craft beer (we were at 3418 breweries in the US in 2014 in case you hadn’t heard that stat in the past 10 minutes) focuses on economics and sustainability, questioning bubbles and boundaries, examining whether demand will continue to stay ahead of supply, and if so, for how long.

This is a great conversation, and it should be had long into the night over many pints. But I worry that it won’t matter if the average consumer cannot hold the concept of so many breweries (and beers) in her head in any meaningful way.

Thus the truth revealed by applying Dunbar’s Number to contemporary beer: the rampant growth of the brewing industry is outpacing our brain’s ability to create relationships with beer.

Even as a beer nerd, I’ve reached the point where I skim over the announcement of a new brewery, not because I’m inherently jaded, but because I’ve reached near-critical mass for how many breweries I can care about. I want to love the next new startup, but at some point, my connection to and understanding of said brewery is going to be cursory, if even that, unless I sacrifice some other relationship to build a new one.

For example: In my area, a decent, but hardly ridiculous beer scene (I’m looking at you, both Portlands), I have Heavy Seas, Evolution, Oliver Ales, Jailbreak, DuClaw, Union Brewing, Brewer’s Art, Flying Dog, Port City, Full Tilt, Ellicott City Brewing, DC Brau, BlueJacket, and several more. If we’re being conservative and saying each of these breweries has 5 flagship beers and 5 more seasonal/limited releases, that’s thirteen breweries and one hundred and thirty beers (130!) at my libatious disposal just within the confines of my own geographic comfort zone.

That’s not including nationally distributed brands like Lagunitas, Stone, Anchor, Sierra Nevada, and Sam Adams, and doesn’t even mention the suffocating ubiquity of macro beers or a growing selection of imports. If you add those in, and drop them all in a store with enough room to flaunt them (hello, Total Wine) you’re looking at three hundred plus beers available to me at any give time.

Because of their overwhelming numbers, most beers are relegated to an area outside of the sphere where we can form relationships; bottle shops promote craft promiscuity, encouraging drinkers to have one-night stands with single, sexy bottles. Our brains can recall about ~1500 human faces (and probably a similar amount of beer labels), but recall doesn’t involve anything beyond a simple connection to a tiny fragment of longterm memory. We’re tasting like ships passing in the night, twelve ounces slipping by lips without sign or context, isolated, clinical experiences measured in acronyms and percentages.

Modern drinkers often aren’t taking the time to get to know the beer, to court the beer, to woo the beer.

And can we blame them?

If I took the time to experience every beer in my area, I’d be (using averages) plus 19,500 calories and minus $258.70.

Every beer in the country? I’d be dangerously diabetic and in student-loan levels of debt.

We’ve developed tools to help us track the sprawl, databases to bring order to the chaos, let us think we have control over what my basic math says are ~35,000 beers being actively* brewed across the US. But tools only help catalog data for dissection, doing next to nothing to help us establish and maintain relationships with breweries. A goal, I’d surmise, nearly every member of the Brewers Association holds dear.

Drink local because your brain says you have to

Enter the concept of the beer monkeysphere, or the “beerosphere,” if you will: a geographic and sociologic area that you associate with “your” beer either by physical location in relation to your home or some kind of shared history.

Much argument about the “local” aspect of craft beer grows from hipster roots; feel good warm and fuzzies about supporting local economies and being a good member of the community. It has some merit, but I argue it’s much less deliberate, much more primal.

We associate with local breweries because they are the nearest and most comfortable; the inner circle of family in our inebriated appropriation of Dunbar’s Number. It makes sense that we can more easily form relationships with the breweries and brewers we can actually visit, making “drink local” a function of cognitive effluence more than an active sociological trend.

We drink local because distant breweries, even the great ones, exist outside of our beerosphere. We cannot care about all the breweries at once, so we default to those we’re proximate to, those with who we can tangibly interact, and most importantly, form a real, significant relationship with. A distant brewery is like the garbage man; we know he’s there and does an important thing, but we just can’t find the room to care about him personally.

It may seem extreme to think of consumers creating social (or even romantic) relationships with breweries or beers, but it’s the crux of all marketing and dollar decision making. There’s a reason you buy Cinnamon Toast Crunch over the store brand or another cereal entirely, and it has very little to do with quality. At some point you developed a connection with the “taste that you can see,” and now you’re partial because fundamentally you care about the cereal.

The same goes for beer. You’re being guided by your brain to find meaning in all of your choices, which means piling layers of experiences together to make a delicious relational sandwich. We won’t be psychologically satisfied with anything less.

Continued growth means geographically distant breweries have to find a way to become and remain relevant in a remote beer drinker’s life. For a while, the quality and execution of the beer was enough, but now, with your hometown brewery offering both good beer and good psychological validation, their job is much harder.

Some breweries, like Oskar Blues, New Belgium, and Sierra Nevada are opening secondary facilities. This is obviously a smart logistics move, but also a powerful marketing gambit, too; when the brewery is actually closer, drinkers can more easily lump it into their personal beerosphere, and start to consider it within their select, familial circle.

Ultimately, once quality and consistency become status quo, the war for consumer dollar might be fought over who can develop the best and longest lasting relationship with its drinkers. The onus could shift from brewing to storytelling, from quality assurance to marketing messaging, as breweries fight as hard for brain space as they do for shelf space.

*I say actively, because I know there are thousands upon thousands of legacy beers. A note from Greg Avola on the Untappd message boards in 2012 said that they have 175,000 beers in the database, a number that has surely grown since (but does include one-offs and homebrews, too).

Additional reading that also act as crude citations:

Humans use Compression Heuristics to Improve the Recall of Social Networks – Matthew E. Brashears: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3604710/
What is the Monkeysphere – David Wong: http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere_p1.html
Don’t Believe Facebook; You Only Have 150 Friends – NPR Staff: http://www.npr.org/2011/06/04/136723316/dont-believe-facebook-you-only-have-150-friends
The Dunbar Number, From the Guru of Social Networks – Drake Bennet :http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-01-10/the-dunbar-number-from-the-guru-of-social-networks

Craft and Draft: Zen and the Art of Homebrewing

June 20, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Watching the frothy white wort churn, rising high, almost spilling over the edge of the stainless steel kettle, then dropping back down to a calmer roil, I pretend I’m an alchemist trying to transmute grain into gold, tossing in hops like they are little green cones packed with raw natural magic. I like to sit and watch the science happen, equal parts actively and passively involved in the swirling primordial creation of something great.

There’s something peaceful in the rhythmic dance of that malted water, the smell of wet grain on the summer air, the sticky sugar on the end of a big stirring spoon. When I brew, I’m not concerned with what reports are due at work, who I’m supposed to email, what time I need to be somewhere and if I need to put on nicer pants. Brewing is an activity where my mind can solely focus, find flow, reconnect to some more primal, innate elements of my emotional self that are often lost in a sea of tweets or overgrown fields of HTML.

When we’re out there, it’s just me and the pre-beer – mano-a-malto – with no concerns beyond getting the temperatures right and timings down.

The entire process of making beer demands devoted method and time. Scooping grains into bags, measuring them to match your recipe. Cleaning your buckets and mash tuns in the never ending battle against infection. Mashing at precise heat to make sure those amylase alphas and betas get a well-balanced, nutritious meal.

And then the waiting. The definitely not opening the primary fermentation bucket to check out the krausen. The definitely not sticking an eye dropper in there to taste your progress. The patient weeks of listening to bubbles as the CO2 floats its way to freedom. All necessary. Nothing rushed. In a world where people expect instant responses, the beer in stark, stalwart opposition, demands the opposite. It asks to be kindly left alone, so it can ruminate and flocculate.

This forced slow-down is important for a person like me, the frenetic type who can and will do anything and everything (to the point of it being too much) just because he can. The beer looks me straight in the eye – with little to no bullshit – and says, “No, Oliver, you can’t rush this. Do it right.” And, because I love the beer, appreciate its magic, I listen. Because I rushed a few early batches, and got decidedly meh beer as a result, I fight my instincts and take my time. I slow the hell down. I measure twice and brew once.

And as odd at the connection might seem, this ability to slow down, to take your time, to commit to quality and perfection, is directly applicable to writing. The excited rush to get that presumably delicious beer into a keg so you can drink it is the same as that excited rush to finish a first draft to get a story told. The theoretical beer always tastes delicious on the made up taste-buds of your mind, just like the story always works out perfectly, with no flaws, in your head. You even plan a beer recipe like you outline a story, selecting the correct grains (characters), hops (telling details), and yeast (conflicts), always making sure the water (author’s voice) is of balanced pH and doesn’t contain anything that might give the beer (story) any off flavors (inconsistencies in tone).

In practice, a poorly planned, rushed beer, with the wrong hops or yeast, where fermentation never really finished, just won’t taste very good. A story that wasn’t really thought out, that wasn’t edited objectively, that never really resolved some major plot point, likely won’t be a very enjoyable read. Great literature requires proper fermentation time. No amazing novel was finished, and no whiskey-barrel aged stout is ready to drink, in a week or two or even three. The same amount of slow, purposeful development that goes into creating a world class brew goes into creating an award winning story.

Quality takes time. It takes patience. It takes slowing down from the “I’m definitely going to get hurt if I keep going this fast” pace of our daily lives. It takes knowing when to tell your brain that an investment in the development of a product will yield a vastly superior result. It takes discipline. It takes practice.

But in that slow down, that moment of focus on a single luxurious task, you may find some peace you thought you’d lost. As the wort swirls on its throne of steel and flame, and as a plot forms ranks around a few thousand serifed soldiers, you’ll find a moment of clarity – possibly even of zen – where there is nothing but you and your brain. And in that space, you’ll find your best stuff: the freshest ideas, the tastiest beers.

So take your time. Relish rolling around in the decadence and wonder of your own imagination. Don’t try to push it aside, or run past it. Embrace it, spend time with it. When you’re brewing up a batch of story ideas, give them the time they want. Give them the time they deserve.

“Slow down and everything you are chasing will come around and catch you.”
–John De Paola

Craft and Draft: Plotting Progression

May 20, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Do you remember the exact moment your pet turned from kitten into cat, or from puppy into dog, or from tiny goldfish to slightly less tiny goldfish? If you’re a normal human, probably not. Our brains tend not to notice small, incremental changes that happen over a long period because we’re only fed little pieces of information each day, and struggle to put all the puzzle pieces together to create a single image of the change. The only way we really notice the complete evolution is by comparing the present to the past using photographs or some other artifact, so we can make a direct comparison between mewling kitten and meowing cat.

Your progress in writing follows the same rules. You improve slowly over the course of many sentences and paragraphs written over many hours and many days, and you rarely notice any improvement as it is happening, even if it is relatively drastic. This is partly because of the natural functions of your brain, and partly based on how we’re told progress is supposed to work.

We are taught, through school and the visible success of public figures, that progress is a linear thing, a perpetually chugging and climbing train that always moves upward and forward, upward as we scramble up the Aggro Crag of our craft and forward as we hurdle over the obstacles of life and art, American Gladiator style. It makes logical sense that every word we write, every short story and essay we finish, moves us closer to our goal of becoming excellent writers. Every hour we put towards getting better actually makes us better. Practice, in theory, has a one-to-one progress pay off.

If we graphed the idealized form of progress, the purest, sweetest form of achievementitude, it would look something like this:

Pretty simple: as time stomps ever-forward, our skill inevitably improves.

But obviously nothing in life is idealized, not even our fantasies and dreams. Writing is a roiling, boiling witches brew of different techniques and skills, all of which need to come together to create a strong, compelling narrative potion. It requires a close eye on the cauldron and balance of the various ingredients – for these purposes grammar, imagery, dialogue, creativity, and structure – to brew up a tincture that readers will pick out from the other bottles on the shelf and actually want to imbibe.

And because these skills are not perfectly synonymous with each other, because they require different, often disconnected parts of your brain, because they may come naturally or not come at all, progress is never going to be perfectly linear. We’d like to think that each thing we write is still moving us forward though, so roadblocks in certain areas are just plateaus, times when we circle the wagons to weather the dust storm until we can sally-forth once again, all pen-and-paper manifest destiny like.

If we graphed a more realistic representation of progress, it would look something like this:

A little more complicated, but still manageable: time still trudges down his path and we still get better, but we have to take some detours and hang out in some places until it’s safe (or smart) to move on.

But naivety; I know you too well. How quaint to think we’d always be improving, never slowing or staggering or falling behind! For a long time this idea, the notion that progress could never be stopped, clouded my mind like a heavy early morning fog that had yet to be burned off by the heat of the afternoon sun. I wanted – expected – everything I wrote to improve upon the last thing I wrote. I lived under the impression that every essay had to out-do the last, every short story needed to be more and more nuanced and literary, that every metaphor had to transcend mere humanity and do a fly-by buzz of the god’s palatial manor up on Olympus.

But that is as improbable as it is impossible. We are hard-wired to want to always improve, but if you obsess over what is in practice an unachievable goal, you’ll never actually write anything, stuck the underworld on the quest for unending improvement. You will write stuff that just isn’t very good. You’ll backslide, your words will fail you, you’ll have some pieces that instead of ringing out into the world with the flair and revelry of a triumphant trumpet, will slither out and drop onto the ground with an unsatisfying and sort of disgusting plop.

You’ll find that the train of climbing progress is actually a roller coaster, and at any moment the bottom might drop out, sending you screaming down the rails into a valley of meh. Sometimes you’ll write a thousand words and the only improvement is a single adjective clause tucked away in some otherwise uninspired paragraph. Sometimes you’ll have a fresh, invigorating idea that ends up ruined by your poor execution. Progress isn’t always upwards, but that’s OK. You can learn just as much from your not-so-good writing as you can from your really good writing. The point is, you’re still writing.

If we graphed the ups and downs, the cheers and jeers, the flourish and the plops of how we really grow, it would look something like this:

Now it’s looking more like a true writing process: when your dialogue is near perfect, your imagery is like, something grey or something? When your creativity is soaring, your grammar might be guttural Cro-magnon pseudo-speak and your structure might be reminiscent of a 3rd grader’s finger painting. You’re still technically improving, but sometimes only in one area, sometimes moving downwards before upwards, but still forward, as each new lesson, good or bad, teaches you something new.

This all dances around the idea that we are humans (not robots who can eat and survive on graphs alone) and our moods and wants and emotions all play into how we create. All of these skills are completely dependent on how we employ them, how we glue them down on the construction paper and arrange the colorful shapes, which is in turn dependent on our confidence.

Confidence, even using bold and headstrong people as examples, is nigh unplottable. The data for such a thing isn’t made up of numbers that can be understood by anyone in any real way. It’s like a taco made of paperback books or a cupcake baked with broccoli inside and frosted with hummus. It’s outside of our normal brain bubbles. It’s all very non-Euclidean.

But, since I’ve got this graph theme going, I tried anyway. If you added human confidence to this whole progress thing, it would look something like this:

Regardless of your actual progress, you’re constantly fighting the growth and maturity (or lack thereof) of your confidence. Each success boosts and sends the orange line twirling skyward, like a model rocket at full blast, bumped slightly off it’s trajectory. Each rejection and stream of mean comments causes the rocket (and orange line) to smash into the ground (or X-axis) at full force, trying to burrow into the ground to hide from the negativity. Confidence in your art is the one ingredient that can make or break the literary meal, as it effects every single aspect, down to how you cook it and present it to your diners.

Progress can be so intangible, so caught in the fishing nets of practice and skills and self-doubt, that we can’t even see it as it creeps into our brain. It is important to take some time to track your progress, either with spreadsheets or a notepad or an abacus or something, so that at intervals you can take a break and actually look at what you’ve accomplished and how much you’ve improved.

Progress is slow going and often painfully roundabout, and yet we’re taught to think it’s a straight arrow-shot to fame and fortune. We’re conditioned to think that achievement is positive and should be celebrated, while failure is negative and should be shunned. But that’s just silly. No one could possibly live up to the expectations of winning or succeeding at everything they do, every time they do it. And if they somehow could, via a pact with some ancient evil or a old, bored Djinn, I’d say they were actually missing out on the lessons that can be taken away from doing something wrong.

Don’t be upset if your progress slows or stop or goes backwards, or even if you can’t even see any progress for a while; that is completely natural. The only thing that will actually hurt your ultimate progression is to quit completely. If you stop writing, you stop learning – from the wins and the losses – and soon enough, your graph will be blank.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have a ton of squiggly, messed up lines that show I’ve tried, than no lines at all.

Craft and Draft: Thinking versus Knowing

October 16, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

The late-October NaNoWriMo runway is littered with the corpses of tens of thousands of would-be novels. Lots of these stories were cleared to fly, passed all the safety checks, but at the last minute, without warning, exploded into an awesome burst of words and pages. If we could recover the black boxes from this mangled writing-wreckage, it’d would be pretty easy to prove that the pilot (read: author) was responsible for the crash.

In my little online social circles, this time of year is made up of three definitive stances:

1) The battle criers: Those people who are feverishly looking forward to NaNo. Those people who already have their pens laid out in a perfectly perpendicular manner. Those people who can and will take time off work to make word count.

2) The wafflers: Those people who just aren’t sure. Those who think it could be fun, but don’t want to commit. Those who have a good idea that could be a great idea if it was given the chance.

3) The defeatists: Those who can’t imagine being able to write a novel in a month. Those with every excuse you’ve ever heard, and then 10 more. Those who treat writing as a novelty, not as a necessity.

I don’t need to talk to the battle criers; y’all will do your thing regardless. It’s not the defeatists I want to talk to either, most of them won’t even make the attempt, making my cheerleading nothing more than words wasted.

It’s you wafflers. You know who you are. You love to write – and are probably pretty good at it – but you haven’t given your work the time or credit it deserves. You don’t take the time to focus on your craft because you feel like it is a waste of time, in a world where you don’t really have any time to waste.

I know the feeling; you’ve got a lot of other stuff to do. Job. Kids. House. Video games. Expensive drug habit. I get it, I really do.

But if you love to write (and I mean “love” in the dirty, visceral, would-stab-a-dude to get to your keyboard, kind of way) then you are only hurting yourself. The longer you go dismissing your own passions and skill, the weaker that skill will become, until it is a shriveled up domovoi who does nothing more than languish around your psyche like an unwanted, unwashed house guest.

I’d be naive to think one little poorly proofread blog post could magically change your mind, but I still want to pass along the one little thing that helped me turn the corner with my writing and let me embrace it as something that I can and should and will do:

Don’t think that you want to write, know that you want to write. Don’t think you are a good writer, know you are.

Thinking you can do something opens a door in your mind, an hidden back entrance that allows doubt to park his U-Haul and move in permanently. Thinking you can do something sets up parameters in your mind where defeat or failure is an acceptable outcome. Thinking is for philosophers and politicians.

But knowing you can do something? Oh man. When you know what you are capable of, there is no room for doubt. He can knock at your door all he wants, but your confidence just calls the cops and has him arrested for stalking.

The great part about knowing something is that it doesn’t even have to be true at this very moment. You can know that you have the potential to write a novel that will be popular and sell, and it will set you on the course to do just that. It’s an affirmation and a reassurance all rolled up into one cozy feel good blanket of self-imposed awesomeness.

So, don’t make excuses for yourself if you really want to do NaNoWriMo.

Know you can do it, don’t just think so.

[Saying or text appropriate for a motivational poster goes here]

Flowing with the Go

September 18, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

I only wear one piece of jewelry; a sterling silver pendant in the shape of a backwards number “1.”

It’s not a backwards number “1” though, because that would just be silly. I’m also not egoistical enough to wear the “top place” symbol all day and the individual digit itself has no special meaning in my life.

The necklace is actually a tiny version of the laguz rune; a Norse character of the Elder Futhark that roughly translates to “water.” I wear it to remind myself of the impermanence, flexibility, and tenacious qualities the ubiquitous liquid. Not only does it instantly reshape itself to fit any container, it can be difficult to contain to begin with. It will seep and soak and pour itself into any gap, only stopping when it has reached an obstacle that is, quite literally, impermeable. Humans have been trying to master and control water since Neandertals mastered the doggy-paddle, with relatively little success.

I try to apply these philosophical abstracts to my personal life. If I can flow and adapt like water, nothing but the most dense situations can contain me, and none but the driest and least pore-laden of of people can hold me back. After some practice, it makes the worst events seem like brief obstacles in the river of your life. You’re never stuck dwelling on or seething over something, as you’ve floated on long since.

These are ideas that I also apply to my craft; a set of principles that has helped me make progress as I wind my little writing stream closer and closer to the ocean of published professionalism.

When I write, I do my best to let my mind flow. I move with my ideas, letting them carve huge meandering curves into my story, sometimes resulting in oxbow lakes of sub-plots and minor characters as the words loop back onto themselves. I let my creativity spill from the goblet of my brain, watching closely to see where the droplets fall, seeing what pools where, what soaks into what, and if any streams run off in a direction previously unexplored.

It’s an incredibly free-form style, but hey, that’s water.

It reminds me of another concept I use when I write, the appropriately named phenomenon of flow. First articulated by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (yea, I can’t pronounce that either), flow is the idea that when you satisfy a specific set of psychological criteria, your mind enters a phase where you are intensely focused on your art, time passes incredibly quickly without you noticing, and you are blissfully engaged at peak efficiency.

Flow can happen to anyone, anywhere, but is often tied to task-oriented activities like gaming, painting, sculpting, sewing, playing instruments, golf, martial arts, meditation – and you guessed it – writing. It aids in unleashing imagination lightning bolts and satisfying your primal urges to create. It also helps ward off depression and increase overall life satisfaction, if case studies are to be believed.

So the next time you’re slamming your head against your keyboard because the ideas just won’t come, or when they do come they suck, stop.

Think.

Are you a rock? Too sedentary, unwilling to move or change much, staying in the same place you’ve been for a very long time?

Or are you a gust of wind? Fleeting to a fault, not taking the time for ideas to mature, moving on to topic after topic but never really settling on anything for more than a moment?

Maybe you’re a dancing flame? Passionate but uncontrollable, letting your desires and emotions guide you, second guessing yourself, burning your words to ash in a fit of rage or destruction?

Maybe you should be more like water. Flow a little, it’s good for you.

(As I was walking to work, past the bridge, I noticed this, carved perfectly into the concrete as if it were as natural as the leaves on an oak tree.)

Along the way to close my eyes,
I lost where I was going,
the more it will spin,
the more that I try,
to stop my mind flowing away, away.

Review: Troegs Pale Ale

June 8, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

It finally happened. I drank so much pale ale that the subtle flavors of different pale ales all started to blend into one homogeneous river of hoppy, bitter liquid.

It’s sort of like that odd linguistic phenomenon that happens when you say one word over and over and over again until it loses all meaning.

Chair. Chair. Chair. Chair. Chair.

Wait, what was I talking about?

Oh yea! Apparently the aforementioned phenomenon has a name! Semantic satiation. We’ve all been there, saying something banal like “rope” 50 times until you stop and say to yourself, “What the hell is a rope? Why did someone name it ‘rope’? Rope. Rope, rope, rope. Roooooope. Ropey ropey rope.”

According to this theory, your brain eventually stops recognizing the individual word and instead interprets the series of words as a pattern, changing the way you process the sounds. It only works with things your brain has to process externally; you can think of a word as many times as you want, and it won’t lose meaning.

It happens with pictures too. Imagine looking at a group of 4 different colored dots. Then imagine looking at a whole page of the same dots, repeated over and over again. You look at and take them in quite differently, whether you mean to or not. Eventually, all of the colors and details blur, until your mind no longer can (or no longer cares to) differentiate defining details. You can’t even tell what colors things should be or what elements might be out of place, because your mind has gone all stoner on you.

You can feeeeel the colors, man.

Until just now, I didn’t think the principle applied to taste. I should have, because I often find myself mildly disgusted with even the idea of a food that I’ve eaten way too much of over the course of a few days. I recently picked all of the cashews out of it huge can of mixed nuts until the point where I wished no one had ever figured out that cashews were edible. And normally I really love cashews! I’m just on cashew overload at this point. Wait, what is a cashew?

Pale ale is by far my favorite, but I have to learn to randomize my choices. Variety is the spice of life, right? I want to appreciate this beer for all of its hoppy, in-your-face flavor glory, but I feel like my tongue is just confused. He knows it is good, but he doesn’t know why it is good. My nose recognizes the heavy bouquet of flowery citrus, but he doesn’t know if it belongs to this beer, or Dogfish Head Shelter Pale, Smuttynose Shoals Pale, or some other, undefinable delicious alcoholic tincture.

OK tongue, fine. Shut up, nose, I get it. We’ll leave pale ales alone for a while so you two can recover. Since it’s summer, maybe I’ll switch to something a little lighter. Maybe. Maaaaaybe. May, be. May-bee.

8.75 out of 10.

Diffusion of flavors does not mean diffusion of deliciousness.

Next up: Gordon Biersch Czech Style Pilsner!

Books have feelings, too.

July 21, 2011 · by Oliver Gray

I am appalled that there are people in this country and on this planet who claim that they don’t read. When asked who their favorite author is, they respond by saying “Transformers”. Ask what kind of genres they enjoy, and they respond with “MTV”. These people are bold and brazen and oddly proud of their willful ignorance. I find people claiming that reading is “lame” or dismissing it with some other, equally unqualified and clearly misguided explanation. My brain cannot process the scope of why someone would willingly avoid, and even actively dislike, something as rewarding as reading.

I didn’t always love to read, mainly because of the forced nature of traditional, American public school English classes. There were hundreds if not thousands of books I wanted to read as a child, but I was pushed outside of personal preference and down the dark, scary alleyway of contemporary pedagogy. Works like Sinclair’s “The Jungle” and Dicken’s “Great Expectations” are wasted on a bored, confused 7^th Grader. Even after years of study and shifting my perspective on literary appreciation, I find some of the canon classics we were coaxed to consume, partially digest, and regurgitate, outside of the realm I consider “good”.

But now I am free of noncompulsory schooling, and can chase down the turns-of-phrase and elegant wording I choose, free from oppression. I can dabble in weird fiction or explore the worlds of extremist nonfiction if my mind is so left to wander. I can love every single thing I read, which makes me loves any single thing I read; I’ve even gotten to the point where I must know the ingredients of products around my house, as to document, sort, and correlate them with other information in my mind.

When I stumble upon a new idea, psychological theory, or fringe philosophy, my mind is afire with possibility. The multi-colored Lego blocks that make up my brain shift and shudder as new pieces materialize, filling in the gaps in the walls of the intellectual castle I’ve been building since I discovered object permanence. This joy of learning is what keeps me reading, and what confuses me so deeply about people who do not read.

I will be the first to admit that I don’t allocate nearly enough traditional, paper-and-spine reading in my day, but that doesn’t limit my actual reading. As being fully employed doesn’t yield many opportunities to read books throughout the day, I find myself instead reading every juicy word of websites I visit. If I ever get an idle moment, my time is spent hitting the “Random Article” link on Wikipedia; the tropes-y nature of the site and its embedded links leading me to hidden nuggets of educational joy where I had never even thought to look.

As I read article after article, my brain transcends the human realm and information begins to directly bombard my unconscious mind. Bypassing all of my cynicism and normal filters, this information is downloaded directly into my mental databases as I jump from page to page in a semi-conscious trance. It’s as close to Csíkszentmihályi’s “Flow” as my mind has ever come. I think this is why I can recall so many random pieces of trivia that are unrelated – and often un-correlatable – to my current situation or conversation. Jeopardy try-outs, here I come.

Do other people not feel this? Do the words written down by their fellow humans not resonate on so visceral a level that they cannot help but stop and feel them? Even some of the worst attempts at writing I have ever read at least elicit anger, pity, and annoyance, which speaks strongly in defense of the whole field of writing. Reading and writing are, to me, so natural a phenomenon I would place them alongside eating and breathing in a hierarchy of necessity.

So, people of the world: Why you no read? Is it an actual inability to pull ideas and motifs from written English? Is it a lack of skill that due to mental struggles diminishes the returns from reading an intricate story? Is it a misunderstanding of who is allowed to read, based on some mystical, loosely defined social expectations and roles? Is it some deep, dark conspiracy perpetuated by a corrupt and amoral government to spawn an entire generation of mindless sycophants unable to challenge the socially destructive status quo due to a lack of education and free-thinking!? Whatever it is, I would champion a cause to remedy this awful, humanly antithetical plague.

Perhaps a not-for-profit or a charity organization that involves striking a nonreader until their brain reboots and functions correctly is called for. “Headshots for Hardcovers”, “Body blows for Books”, or “Lashes for Literacy” could all work. I’m not normally one to condone violence, but the proceeds of such a charity could go towards fostering a love for reading in children, all so that they don’t grow up to be adults who constantly fear assault from surprise literature-loving ninj as.

(This book has feelings.)