The Box is a Lie

I’m sure that many of you are familiar with the phrase “think outside the box”.  The intended meaning, as far as I know, is that you come up with a new idea that is in some way unconventional.  The point is that you do not limit yourself to “the box” of convention.

The problem I have with this phrase is this:  by limiting yourself to non-conventional ideas, you have given yourself a limit.  When you don’t allow yourself to use what’s “inside the box,” you create a sort of inverted box, so to speak, where you must only think outside these certain lines.

I think that true innovation comes from combining something from convention with something that is completely unconventional.  In writing, this is where speculative fiction blossoms.  Yes, there are dragons and magic and what have you, but these characters and forces still follow the same conventional means of storytelling – there’s a protagonist with one goal and an antagonist with an opposing goal and they fight it out until somebody achieves something (whether what they achieve is the goal they started with or not is another matter).

So, I would like to propose a new phrase:  “The box is a lie.”  Demolish the lines between conventional and unconventional.  Allow yourself to play with all of the ideas that are out there, no matter where they came from or where they’re going.  There is no box.

We Can’t All Remember

A lot of people took some time today to remember where they were ten years ago.  Whether we were standing on a street in NYC or glued to a TV set, we all tried to understand what was happening and why it was happening and how it had been allowed to happen at all.  Today, many of us have taken at least a little time to remember something – whether it was loss, heroism, or both.  Whatever it was, we remember.

However, there are children living in the United States today, aged ten and under who can’t remember.  They weren’t there.  They didn’t live through it.  They don’t remember what it was like before that day.  The only world they know is the one that came after.  Ten years from now, these children will be adults, in college or the workforce, maybe even starting families of their own, and then there will be a second generation of children who only know the world after that day.

In the same way, many people in the United States don’t remember the world before Pearl Harbor, or what it was like before a president was assassinated riding in an open-top car down a city street.  There are a lot of things we can’t all remember, but that’s why it’s so important for those of us who do remember to share what we remember with those who don’t.  That way, it won’t be forgotten.

On September 11, 2001, there was an attack on the soil of the United States.  Four airplanes were hijacked.  Two crashed into the World Trade Towers, and the Towers collapsed.  One crashed into the Pentagon, directly into a section that was already under construction.  The last one, which was meant for another important building (possibly the Capitol Building, the White House, or Camp David), went down in a field in Pennsylvania, because the passengers on that plane weren’t going to sit down and let them hurt anyone else.  On that day, there were countless acts of heroism, and there were too many lives lost.

When it happened, I was in my high school auditorium, at a class council meeting.  I found out when I got to my next class and the teacher already had the TV turned on and set to the news.  I spent the rest of the school day watching the news in my classes until they sent us home early.

What do you remember?

Give Yourself Permission to Fail

We live in a world where everyone strives to be perfect, flawless, infallible.  No one wants to make a mistake, and if you do, the world suddenly seems to look down on you.

I think this is a bad idea.  Perfection is hard.  Flawless is impossible.  Infallible is wishful thinking.  Also, if we didn’t make mistakes, we wouldn’t have things like cheese, sandwiches, or potato chips.  Look it up if you don’t believe me.

The problem is that when we fail at something there’s this automatic negative reaction that makes it hard to see that mistake as the opportunity it really is.  This is especially true when it comes to writing.

I cannot count how many times I’ve started out writing one thing only to end up writing something else.  Yeah, I wrote the final product by accident, but that accident turned out to be way more awesome than the thing I started out with.  This blog post, for example, was going to be an essay on a randomly generated word (“strip”).  I worked at it for a while, but I just couldn’t come up with anything worth sharing with the internet.  At first, I started to feel like a failure, since I couldn’t get the essay “perfect,” and that was when I realized that I needed to give myself permission to fail.

If we can give ourselves permission to fail, then we can also give ourselves permission to try again, and maybe this time get it right.