On The Take

WHY CAN'T I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart?

Hank Williams knew what he was talking about. But of course, sometimes the coldness isn't a lack of romantic ardour. Sometimes it's a deadness caused by too little exercising of the muscle. We all verge toward our comfort zones. It's human nature. But it's also the nature that can seriously muck up a writer. And that cold, cold heart gets colder sometimes, simply by virtue of where you're sitting.

One of the things that I truly feel is the responsibility of any writer is to get the heck out of their comfort zone and go do something. You don't have to die scaling K2, but for pity's sake, get out of your garret and go talk to some different faces now and again.

I live in a place that makes that inordinately difficult. Toronto is a famously cold city, and I'm not talking temperature. Toronto is one of the only places I've ever been where you can go out with a group of four reasonably gregarious people and find that at the end of the night, you've only talked to those people. Attempts to rectify this are rebuffed. There's a standoffishness that prevails, a pass down from the city's disapproving Orange roots. It says, "keep to yourself, don't challenge, don't engage, let everyone be." That's a way to get along, to be sure. But it's no way to create, or to set yourself an atmosphere in which to create.
The worst thing about this, though, is that daily routine conspires to make this seem normal. You forget that other places, other cities aren't like this. The coldness gets inside. After a while you forget that once upon in a time your doubtful mind wanted to melt something. What was that again? Hmm?

Though Toronto's my city (for now) and I've lived here many years, it's one of this burg's least attractive qualities.

Of course, the only problem with that analogy is that the city that could engage in a little foot-stomping glee over that, Vancouver, is actually a thousand times worse.

Please don't write me paeans to either city pointing out how wrong I am, how I've only been talking to the wrong people, etc, etc, I realize that I'm making a massive generalization here. And it doesn't mean that either city isn't lovely. They are. But my generalization here is borne out with much experience of both cities, and a lot of discussion of same with former and current residents.

The thing is, where you're from and what you experience has a lot of influence over your 'take.' And when you're a writer, your take is the most valuable thing you have. If you're from a place where new ideas are suspect and everyone acts or demands to be regarded in some orthodox way, that shrinks your take. It's why most artistic people find the need to leave their small towns and travel to somewhere where they feel they can fully express themselves.

But you can fool yourself by going to the big city, too -- if the city doesn't have a warm spirit, an openness, an energy that encourages mixing rather than many solitudes, you miss it. It dulls your take. And it causes you to think provincially.

Montreal has a lot going for it in this regard. People do talk. You can't walk anywhere in the summer without hitting some sort of street festival. But there's that language barrier that makes it not quite perfect. Spending time in Montreal always makes me curse the fact that my French isn't better. I feel like I'm missing the most interesting conversations.

Because, um...I probably am.

When Canadians venture to New York or London and get drunk on the feeling and excitement there, I think that's what they're feeling -- not the city's size. Toronto has a few festivals each year -- Pride, Caribana, Doors Open and Nuit Blanche, where part of the visceral excitement seems to be that the invisible barriers between people come down, and you can smile at a stranger or engage them in conversation without getting an alarmed "You're clearly a serial killer and I'm reaching for my whistle" expression in return.

I just got back from another city like that. For the last few days I've had laughs with strangers, explored a vision of optimism and wonder and seen stuff that made me vibrate with the joy of being alive, and the joy of living in a beautiful teeming city. I'm hoping to carry that forward with me for a few days, to not succumb to the Toronto shrink as quickly as I can. We'll see how it goes.

Lest you think I'm just engaging in a bit o' Canada bashing here (because Lord knows, that defensive muscle doesn't need a lot of pressure to be exercised) one of the most provincial places I think I've ever been is Los Angeles... L.A. is a town where the solitudes don't mix, ever. As an industry town, you may find yourself cheek to jowl with exactly the calibre of people you want to be in business with, but all they want to do is talk about the business. And I think you see that in the creative that comes out, certainly over the last little while. There's a great number of people who once upon a time might have had a truly different, truly original take who've been seduced by the easy living or the comforts of the like-minded. L.A. is a bubble, and a bubble is never a place that lets you hone your take.

Changing location is one way to burst that bubble, but it isn't the only way.

A few weeks ago I was at a local watering hole with a group of writers, and one particularly, perennially dyspeptic friend of mine demanded that we not talk shop, for once. And we didn't.

And the conversation that ensued was glorious and different and odd and touching... surprise, surprise ... get together with a group of smart articulate people and if you mine it a bit, turns out they have all sorts of things to say that could really rock your world.

I've had girlfriends and other civilians suffer through tablefuls of writer shop talk with rolled eyes and pinched faces -- blowing past this very simple truth. And yeah, I know, everyone talks shop. But office workers who get together and never seem to get much past the topic of how much of a dick the boss is aren't in the business of trying to create worlds and characters, and interesting daily situation. And that's why, for writers there's an extra burden of not falling back into that comfortable, shopworn view of the world. You must remember an essential truth:

Sometimes changing the mind's landscape is all it takes to refresh your take.

But every once in a wild, when you've built up too much crap, the sharp corrective of the landscape change does the job nicely. Kind of like changing the oil. Or descaling. Or... well, you get the idea. All I'm saying here is that if you're a Toronto guy or an L.A. girl or a Vancouver...TG...sorry, I went there... you have to remember that -- like people who live near the highway or down the street from the nuke plant -- you're at a heightened risk of dulling your take.

If you're a writer and you haven't been challenging your bubble lately -- if you've grown comfortable in your routine and don't engineer some kind of upending now and then, it's time to book a flight or drive your car or hitch to somewhere different. See who you are there.

Remember that every story we craft is all about a protagonist who suddenly has their world upset in some way. How can we do that if we blithely cruise along in our own little bubbles of smug self-satisfaction, or rectitude, or religious ecstacy, or liberal pride, or smug marriedom, gay camp, punk nihilism or hipster chic?

Refresh your take.

And if you do, I highly recommend taking in a Cubs game.