The primary difference between humans and our cousins in the animal kingdom is not the orientations of our thumbs or our (alleged) moral capabilities but, I believe, our peculiar tendencies as humans to lie to ourselves about who we are and what we like to do.
I don’t mean lying in general—that runs rampant throughout the animal world: “Me?! I didn’t dig those 12 new holes in your back yard; the cat did it.” “‘Look at me swimming around, I am so male, c’mon over, ladies!’ Wait. Everybody here is a male. ‘Look at me swimming around, I am so female, who wants to fertilize my eggs?’ ”
I mean the lying we do to ourselves, all the time. What’s your favorite TV show? Ken Burn’s history of jazz? Uh-huh. Sure it is. It isn’t “Two and Half Men.” Nah, you only watch “Two and a Half Men” because the tube happened to be on and you happened to be in the room.
Myself, I tell people that I like to write, and I tell them I like to run. But the truth is, I like to watch “House” (and “Two and a Half Men”), and I like to play with my cats. I run to keep the endorphins going, and I write if somebody gives me a deadline.
But when I am doing these things I profess to like—writing, running—I really do have fun. So I suppose technically I’m not lying to myself when I say I like these things. But why must I trick myself into doing them? I’ve never seen a cat look into the space where she might have leaped, and then walk away. No: She just leaps.
Here are ways I avoid writing. Perhaps they will be useful to you.
Writing exercises. These are great because you can pretend you’re writing when really you are avoiding the hard part of writing. But they aren’t immoral, illegal, or fattening—and sometimes they come in handy when you need something to fill out a word count. Sometimes they do sort of teach you something about yourself. Then you can move on and lie to yourself about something else.
My favorite writing exercise is this one: Take the story or play you’re working on and list the characters. Now remove one out of every three characters. Will the piece work now? If it will, it might be better.
Here is another that a teacher I once had a crush on had us do. I really liked my results but he gave me a bad grade on my exercise. Goodbye, crush. Take two characters. One of them wants the other to do something. Each one cannot say more than one word in each exchange of dialogue.
You can find other ideas and more information on writing and playwriting here, here, or here.
My favorite way to avoid running but get in the miles is this: I’m just going to walk today. I won’t even go far. I’ll just walk around the block. But just for fun, I’ll put on my running clothes. I’ll just jog this first bit to the corner to get my heart going. I’ll just go to that tree. I’ll just go to that bridge. If I go to that car I’ll have run a half mile and then coming back would be a mile. … and so on. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes it does.
I also like to look up running stuff on the web and pretend I’m researching. Then I feel like I’m an imposter if I don’t actually use them. You can find nice places to run in Wichita. If you live in the Twin Cities, lucky you! You could run here, or here. In L.A. you are even luckier, and you are unlucky. You are lucky because you can run in one hundred trillion beautiful places. You are unlucky because there is rarely a way to get to them on foot that isn’t horridly smelly, noisy, and dangerous from traffic, and it’s no fair driving to a place to run.
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