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What are you doing with the Minutes you have left?

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This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time. – Narrator from Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

I’ve seen Fight Club over a dozen times, read the book twice and still I never thought, really thought about the above quote.

This changed recently, mostly because my focus has switched from doing nothing, to writing a lot more. I’ve changed my daily schedule, rearranged things to get more writing time.

As I was figuring out my new schedule this quote came up on Social Media.

After reading it a few times I realized what the quote meant to me, because quotes are meant to be analyzed for personal use, yeah…okay.

If our lives are ending one minute at a time, what are we doing with the minutes we have left?

If there were a clock in your mind of how long you have left, would you try harder, do something worth being remembered for or would you just keep doing what you’re doing?

Life does have an expiration date, each of us are dying. Eventually we’ll be gone, leaving whatever we’ve done in this life for humanity to digest.

Why don’t we do something that makes our life worth talking about. Make the minutes left on the clock, only that?

If we’re going to live our life the way we want, why do we let others run our lives. Tell us what we can do and even tell us what we can eat, read, watch or the places we can visit.

There’s a clock ticking away the minutes of our lives and most of us are resigned to go through life not caring whether we’re doing something with our lives.

Our clock is ticking, some of the minutes go by fast, others more slowly, but living those minutes we have left to the fullest of our abilities is what we should be doing.

Living for the sake of enjoying our lives is why we should be doing it.

There’s nothing more important than being who we want to be, doing what we want  and following our own path.

Our clock is ticking. Our life is ending one minute at a time and we have to discover what we want from it.

Discovery will make us stronger, weaker and oftentimes will make us crazy, but finding what we’re meant to do with our lives will give us purpose, a goal to live for and help us through the rough times.

We control how our lives end, but it will end. The clock will strike midnight, the ball will be over and we move on. It’s what we do with the minutes we have left that matters.

What are you doing with minutes you have left? Answer in the comments.

The Importance of what you do.

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A few days ago my daughter lost her favorite stuffed animal, well, I guess it was more me not noticing it had left her hand than her losing it.

We found the dog later, but that dog has been the most important thing to her since she could walk. She takes it everywhere. People ask his name and wonder where she got him, but he’s the most important part of who she is. Without her dog she’s lost, sad and not my same little girl.

Watching her emotions move from extreme sadness at losing her dog for only a few hours, then getting him back and being exceedingly jubilant holding him in her arms made me think:

“Is there anything that important to who I am?”

My only thought was, “How many people go through life wondering this?”

It goes back to what the narrator in Fight Club says, ““If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?”

The importance of your life isn’t one that you should take lightly. Every life is important, but not every life means what you believe it to.

Discovering your purpose through writing, art or anything creative can be trying, but doing it can be more rewarding than anything you’ll ever do.

Through being creative you can write a story that could bring people together, or paint a picture that will give a person hope in their worst times.

It’s only through being a creative that the importance of who you are, what you are and the direction of where you’re going doesn’t matter, it only matters that you create.

Creating is the lifeblood of society.

Creatives are the backbone of anything a society does. Where would the world be without the person who invented the steam engine or the person who wrote that one book that inspires a generation.

The creatives fuel economies, without them there would be no scientists, astronomers, or inventors and without each of those there wouldn’t be societies.

What you’re doing with your life is important, but what you create for those who follow you is more important.

Are you creating that which is most important to you? Answer in the comments.

Having Greater Life Expectations

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In modern time we see our life as a series of pictures our birth: birthdays, school, college, marriage, kids and we see the way its gone.

What about the expectations we had for our life when we started?

Where have the things gone we wanted to do, the life we wanted to live, the books we wanted to write?

Having expectations for our life is something which makes us who we are. We have dreams, goals and desires.

Each expectation is a bigger deal than the last.

We’re expected to do what our parents want us to do with our lives, but what if we want to do other things, what if we want to be a creative, be a writer, artist or actor?

Where does being a creative fit into the grand scheme of what society wants for us, regardless of our wants?

I hated college, I went only because it was my way out of a bad situation and in hindsight, I wish I wouldn’t have gone to college, I’d rather have spent my time, and my dad’s money writing, but I’m not sure he and my step-mother would have gone along with that idea.

I’ve always wanted more for myself than I felt my parents did.

I didn’t want to go to college, I wanted to be a Marine, when that fell through, I had nothing to fall back on.

I thought about traveling the world, working jobs to keep myself alive, there are times I wish I would have lived up to my own great expectations of who I wanted to be, but I lived life safely. I didn’t want to upset the relationships I’d built with my parents, I wish I’d been more like the person I am now, more willing to adventure than to do what I was told.

Now I’m more willing to take chances and risks. I’ve always felt I wasn’t allowed to be who I wanted; that there were restrictions, that I couldn’t be this that or the other. One of the things I felt my dad looked down on was creativity. Which, sorry to say, has always been my strong suit.

Twenty years ago I was afraid to be myself, afraid to take what I wanted to do and turn it into something else, something more like the life I wanted for myself.

I don’t regret my life or the choices I’ve made. Those choices are what led me to be a dad, husband and the experiences have made me a better writer.

We each have great expectations of what we want our lives to be.

Is your life what you wanted it to be when you were a kid, teenager or in your twenties?

Answer in the comments.

 

Thankful for this Writing Life.

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When I was 18, I knew what I wanted to be–a Marine–what I wanted to do and I had a plan for how to get there..

It’s been nearly 20 years since I left boot camp without graduating and I still think about it.

I know there’s a reason I’ve been on this path the last twenty years, but I’m not sure what it is yet, but I think I’m getting closer.

Like being a Marine, I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a teenager.

I loved creating something from nothing and discovering new worlds.Writing for me was a power trip, especially growing up when I didn’t have any power.

I started writing again ten years ago when a friend said, “You read a lot Brian, you should write something. You’re a smart guy, you should write.”

I wrote a few short stories after that and in 2004, just before my son was born I started writing a novel, it was my first and I learned a lot from the process.

Last year I finished me second novel, and have written a lot of short stories since then.

This year hasn’t been as strong as last year, but I’ve learned a lot from writing short stories.

For twenty years I’ve been on this path, but since I started writing again I’ve begun to feel more like the kid from Wyoming who wanted to be a Marine.

I’m finding that writing is fun, life is a pain in the ass and that I have an amazing wife who’ll support me no matter what I want to be. Along with our kids I’m sure I’ll find my way.

My path doesn’t include dress blues or the Marine Corps hymn like I wanted it to twenty years ago, but I’m enjoying the writer’s path and spending time with the wife I have, our kids and I”m thankful for being where I am and finally discovering who I am.

A Fiction Writer should be their own Platform

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Stress can kill you, take away what you believe in and recently for me, make you sick as hell.

The stress came about because of my worries for my NaNoWriMo project, a project which, like last year, fell on its face and hasn’t begun to start moving, even though I’ve prodded it.

The biggest reason for its flop is Platform.

That word is such a buzz word in blogging and writing right now. It’s very hard to get away from it.

The biggest problem I see with that word is another word, fiction.

Fiction writer’s create worlds. Sometimes we don’t know where the story is going, even with an outline, and because of that we can’t truly set up a Platform.

A Platform is supposed to be a guide for a project. 

If you’re a fiction writer, that’s more difficult because you may not know where the story is going from one chapter to the next.

Those who write self-help books can use Platforms really well, while the rest of us are left wondering why it doesn’t work when we try it.

Here are reasons why I believe Platforms don’t work for Fiction Writers:

  1. Most fiction writers don’t write for an audience, and those who do already have there established group of readers.
  2. Platforms don’t allow for movement. If things change in your life, you have this Tribe that knows you as one person, but if you go through a spiritual awakening that is different than the one your Tribe knows you as, you have to start over.
  3. Change. Life is filled with change, some of it under your control, most of it not. If your writing changes or you choose to write in another genre it may alienate your tribe.

You may want to create a Platform, but in creating a Platform you may not be taking into account your life changes, your writing changes and the biggest of all, You Change.

The change you go through personally may alienate your tribe or may create divisions in your life.

Creating a Platform shouldn’t be something difficult, for fiction writers maybe it shouldn’t be something at all.

Writers create stories, some of them have similarities that when put together as a collection ofr work show those similarities, but as we write we may not understand the similarities and may become annoyed by those telling us to write another book like our past book.

For me who’s never published, though I’ve written two novels, I just want to get a book on the shelf.

Looking for a Platform for my writing caused me so much stress in the last few weeks I became ill and with that I swore I’d never do what people expect me to write.

My Platform is I’m a writer of different genres, mostly Science Fiction or Fantasy based, but I’ll never limit myself to those two.

I choose that Platform because trying to pigeon hole myself made me sick.

Your Platform should be what makes you the person you’ve lived with for your life, never limit yourself to who you are, or your Platform.

Be your Platform!

I’d rather be my Platform than do something I wouldn’t be proud of.