Halfway Serious Articles

An Interview with Jocko                       The storyteller gives the one and only interview of his life.

An Interview with Jocko 

Q: How do you manage to come up with all of those wacky story ideas year after year?

A: Actually, I think I've only had one or two good story ideas in my life. I've just kept recycling the same ones in various forms now for forty-seven years.

 Q: How do you create oddball characters such as Mr. Wheeze and Ms. Marge?

A: I say to myself, 'Here's a blank page. Now let's go have some fun with it.' 

Q: Why do you spend hundreds of hours writing stories, and then give them away? 

A: I don't give them away. I allow anyone to read them for free. The truth is, I have no concept of money. My wife and my banker will both attest to that. 

Q: Do you ever get 'writer's block'?

A: Over the years of 'writing down' stories here in the gazette, except maybe for the time I had a cold and a bad toothache in the same week, I can't recall experiencing what you call 'writer's block'. I've been told it's because I have an odd-shaped left hemispherical brain lobe. Eat 'yer heart out, normal people!

Q: Why haven't you had your work published?

A: If you read it here on the Internet, then it's already published. I think what you're asking is 'Why don't I become a paid professional writer?' 

 First off, paid professional writers must aim to please publishers, editors, and audiences. As an amateur writer I can take shots at everything, but aim at nothing. 

Second off, what I write here is exactly what you get when you read my stories. Therein, I think, lies the beauty of the Internet. There's no in-between people here to act as word and idea filtering agents. 

Q: Your humor is pretty eclectic. Do most of your readers get it?

A: My audience, however small, finds me whether I like it or not. If only 10% of the people who visit my website understand what they're reading and a few of them tell me they enjoy it, then I've done my job. 

Frankly, I've neither the time nor the inclination to explain what it is I meant by this or that remark to people who probably shouldn't even be reading my stuff in the first place.  

I consider myself a humorist and storyteller, not a comedian or teller of jokes. There's a more than subtle difference. If beauty is found in the eye of the beholder, then humor is found in the ear.

As anyone who has ever had his or her work in front of an audience will tell you, humor is the hardest kind of writing imaginable. That's because it's so subjective. At times, it seems as though it's impossible to get more than two people to laugh at the same thing, or at the same time.

I don't get upset when people email me just to say they thought my stories were stupid, or inane. Although I don't vocalize it in the same way, I often feel the same way about network TV shows I know have been purposefully scripted, or in the case of so-called reality shows non-scripted, to appeal to a lowest common denominator audience. 

 In most cases this amounts to a person with an eighth-grade education, or mentality. There's nothing wrong with this kind of show. It's just not the kind of entertainment that appeals to my sensibilities.

 Yes. It would also be fun to be published and have a larger audience, but having fun with my writing is far more important to me than making big money. 

Q: Can you give your visitors some advice on how to get started in writing and storytelling?

A: That covers a lot of territory. The basics of oral storytelling are not much different from other forms of prose writing, and no more difficult to learn than playing a harmonica. You breathe in, and then breathe out. 

You think of something strange and quirky, or erudite and serious, and then you write it down.

When I first begin a story I try never to stop to worry about who will read it, where the story is going, word phrasing, sentence structure, doing research, or any of those things until after the story has taken some definitive shape.  For me, that all comes much later in the process. 

 The important thing for me is to first get my ideas from brain to non-brain storage, where I can get at and attack them from various angles to see what works, and what doesn't work. Sometimes the initial story idea falls flat, or runs out of gas, and at other times the rest of the story writes itself. For the most part though, it's a trial-and-error process.

 Q: How do you come up with the subject matter for your stories and books?

A: I try to select material I know and understand. Doing so doesn't always guarantee a good story, but it makes the story appear more believable to the reader. Even a wild and crazy tale must have a concrete foundation. I find it virtually impossible to write about something I know little or nothing about, and come away with something that works.

 I try to think outside the box, but write from inside the box. Mostly, I write stories about what's happening in my life at the moment. When I was a young man I wrote about being a young man. At middle age I wrote about my work. Now that I'm retired, I write about being retired. 

Q: As a writer, what group of readers are your audience?

A: When it comes to a target audience, I don't have one. I also don't buy the 'age relativity' argument that some writers worry about. Just because teenagers prefer to read primarily about rock bands and fad movies doesn't mean they don't also like to read other things, given the chance. The same goes for older people.

  Magazine and book publishers insist upon seeing material that  cuts a wide non-offensive swathe across their readership demographics, mainly for the sake of selling advertising space. It may surprise some people to learn that the $24.95 they pay for a book is equivalent to a $3.95 magazine that's loaded with advertising. You've simply paid the publisher in advance for the pleasure of not having to see advertising in your reading material.

 If you've got a well-written piece in your hand for people to read, intelligent readers will eventually find you. Who cares about the rest of 'em, anyway?

Q: How do you match a character with a story?

A: I try never to make up characters out of thin air, because it doesn't work well for me. The characters in my stories almost always represent someone I know, or have known, in real life. I do sometimes embellish a character's personality traits to make them appear more interesting, though. 

 I try to think of something off-beat and quirky for the main character to do, rather than say. I've a raft of personal material to draw upon here, mainly because I've always been absent-minded and have, also as long as I can remember, had  quirky personal habits. I sometimes use my own personal foibles to create outlandish situations for my story characters. In real life I've got what you'd call a 'salty tongue', so I try to work a touch of that into my stories, too.

 However, what a character physically does is generally far more important than what a character says.

Q: Why do most of your stories involve a telephone?

A: I try to use dialog to create interest, along with the character's story voice. For example, newspaper writers seldom use dialog in their stories because people read newspapers mainly to be informed about something. Oral stories, on the other hand, are constructed mostly of dialog because people read them to be entertained. 

 Yes. My favorite stories take place on the telephone. That's because it's a great vehicle around which you can create outlandish situations, especially when only one part of the conversation can be heard. The very best example I know of this technique is in the BBC sitcom, 'Keeping up Appearances', where Hyacinth Bucket uses the telephone to create marvelous comedy in a hundred different wacky ways.

Q: What do you mean by a 'story voice'? 

A: Most oral stories are told by people to other people, and most people I know have at least one or two quirks about them that make their speech memorable. You can use these quirks to make a story interesting. 

Personally, I think there's nothing worse than an otherwise good story that's clouded by an inconsistent story voice, or by no story voice at all. I once knew a fellow who, when he spoke, would add the words 'and things' to the end of each sentence:

"How's it going and things, Wolfskill". 

 and

"You know you shouldn't do that, and things?"

It drove me nuts!

  Then there was this guy from Vermont whose name, I swear, was Randolph 'Swampy' Gills, and to whom the TV character Archie Bunker couldn't hold a candle when it came to abstract talk, not to mention the body blows this man would deliver to the English language each time he opened his mouth: 

 "Ah 'ya Jaaahn. Got-ta' go up 'ta doc Will-yums and get soma that pen-'ic-i-lan for this prob-e-lum 'fore I think it gets some right worse, eh!"

    Most of my stories that involve characters from the American south are told in the story voice of a Navy shipmate I remember from some years back. His name was Buford I. Higgs Jr., from South Carolina. The 'I' stood for Ignacious. He was skinny as a garter snake, stood about 6-feet 2-inches tall, chewed tobacco, had only a few remaining good front teeth, and spoke in a halting mono-syllable drawl. 

Almost everything in the world was a euphemism to this young man. When he was excited he'd say:

"Well shit fire and save matches!"

If he noticed that I had a cold, along with a runny nose, he'd offer an opinion:

"Woolfskeeel. Y'all feets smell, and y'all nose runs. Y'all are built ass backwards, boy!"

 If I needed to slide by him in our tight working space, and asked him to, "Excuse me, please", he'd inevitably come back with, "Ain't no damn excuse for 'ya!"

Q: Do you have a favorite story writing trick you can share with us?

A: Obfuscation comes to mind. It's a sometimes useful story tool I learned by accident. The trick is to 'clearly confuse' the reader with long sentences that border on gibberish, yet make perfect sense when the reader takes the time to slow down and read them carefully.

  I was bored one day and decided I would try to fill an entire story page, about 600 words, with one long twisting sentence. My only criteria was that the sentence had to make sense. I almost succeeded. Here's a fair-to-middling example of this technique from a story:

  To keep things from going bad around here I've got to peck fast on the keyboard sometimes so you'll have new things to read when you come back here the next time, and I only have these two stumpy little fingers that work right on all of the keys to write things down with, so with that all pretty much said, it's probably best if you don't come back here to visit too often or there won't be any new things leftover that you haven't looked at since the last time you were here looking for the things you haven't read. 

  Have you got that? Obviously, you can use this trick only once per story. The second time around readers may decide to chase after you with a meat cleaver. Remember what they say on TV: 'Tricks are for kids!'

Q: How do you determine the language mechanics for your stories. Is it always better to write in the first person?

A: I try to find the ideal 'person-tense-voice' combination for a given story, and then keep it consistent as I write. This has more to do, I think, with basic English composition than basic creative writing. It doesn't matter if you tell a story in the first, second, or third person as long as you don't go tense-hopping, and you use active instead of passive voice to tell the story. 

My favorite combination of these so-called 'rules' are:

First person-present tense-active voice: 

"Shit fire and save matches!"      

instead of:

"He shitted fire, and saved matches!"

or

"He had always been shitting fire, and was saving matches!"

Some words just work better than others. As a rule, I prefer to use action words (verbs) instead of bad old stale (adjectives), or flowery puffy temptingly really actually boring (adverbs). Rules are made to occasionally be broken, though.

Q: Overall, what do you consider the most important thing you've learned about writing and storytelling? 

A: Personally, that would be simple: Writing --> is Editing 

 For me, a typical story or article that contains about 2,000 words requires about 15 hours of work. That works out to only about two words-per-minute. 

 I've found that writing should be slow and tedious work. You can't just dash off a story, go have a beer, and then call it done. The more you go back and edit your work, the better it will eventually become.

 It's almost that simple. 

I Hear it Tastes Like Chicken

Unsolicited advice on how not to fowl up one of the most important parts of your life

  R-E-T-I-R-E-D

 Yes, it's the dreaded R word. That touchy subject virtually no one wants to discuss until it's too late. Here is the underlying problem. Through the magic of our dreams, by the time we reach retirement age most of us have already fixed in our minds exactly how our golden years are going to unfold. No, sir. We don’t need help from anyone, thank you.

 What’s there to discuss about retirement, anyway?  All you need is continued good health, and enough money in the bank to guarantee yourself a comfortable lifestyle.

 Up until now the subject of retirement has been a nebulous thing, centered mostly on saving money or buying insurance. You pay your premiums, deposit a few dollars in the 401K each week and go on with your life.

 Now, like a spitting cobra, the prospect of trading your life’s work for one of leisure stares you squarely in the face. The time has come to shift from dreams to reality. 

Will you be prepared?

  For openers, there are some good reasons to prepare yourself mentally for retirement. A 1999 study by National Council On the Aging (NCOA) Gerontologists revealed that on average, retirees with a poor mental attitude die some 5-7 years before those who go into retirement thinking they'll be happy. 

This gaunt fact alone seems to place retirement right up there with smoking and heart disease as a good way to shorten one’s lifespan.

   While it never hurts to be a millionaire on gold watch day, it is equally important to be mentally prepared. 

To use a faddish phrase, retirement is a true paradigm shift in lifestyle. In many ways the transition can be so abrupt that you’ll need to act fast to set a counterbalance, or risk losing control of your life.

 A field study of older North Americans by David Counts, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at McMaster University (Ontario, Canada)  points us in that general direction.  Mr. Counts states, 'Through our fieldwork, we have determined there are three keys to living a successful retirement. You need to have:

 To help you get started in retirement on a sound footing, the following tips may help with your transition to a new way of life:  

Socialization

 What about my friends at work? Will I lose them?

 The work environment fosters a form of forced socialization, where some people interact with you in a positive way not necessarily because they consider you as a friend, but because they know you're going to be sitting in that chair again tomorrow.

 For some people it's a lot easier to pretend to be a friend than to be noticeably rude, which could get them fired.

 In other cases it may be that your work friends don't dislike you personally, but have taken the golden opportunity of your retirement to sever social bonds for other reasons (perhaps not all of the noises you make in the lunchroom are actual eating noises).

 At any rate, be prepared for some co-workers you thought were good friends to almost instantly forget that you exist. It happens.

  This phenomenon also appears in earlier stages of life such as marriage, high school and college; and so shouldn't be something new. Although the situation can at first appear traumatic, the solution is simple. 

Get out there in your new state of mind and make other friends. 

Since your new and improved replacement friends will not have been acquired under the onerous forced socialization rule, you'll have a much better shot at finding friendship happiness.

Social Maintenance

 Grampy is grouchy much of the time because he has become dissatisfied with the way his long anticipated retirement has unfolded.

  It hasn’t exactly turned out according to his dreams. Grampy, a lifelong fisherman, has a problem. Last month state workers drained the big lake that fronts his expensive new retirement home. The lake had become polluted with industrial waste. 

To make matters worse, most of his new neighbors are much younger than Grampy. He says they’re snooty and arrogant. He doesn’t like them very much.

 Grampy no longer has a life because he is now missing two of the three basic ingredients that are absolutely necessary for survival in retirement:

 Unlike Grampy, you should be prepared to handle this situation on the fly. Be ready at all times to adjust your lifestyle, mental attitude and even your place of residence to maintain your retirement ship on an even keel.  

 Practically speaking, there’s not much time to waste in being negative and stubborn about your mistakes. Unlike a committee-driven work life, you must always keep in mind:

 The First Law of Diminishing Returns 

Nothing is going to get better until you do something to make it better.  

 Domestic Tranquility 

  Bill’s largest single retirement battle skirmish was fought on the home front. Besides suddenly finding himself with tons of free time in which to cram nothing, he also had to cope with a high-energy working spouse.

 His wife Marsha, who is a year younger than himself, has no plans for retirement. She enjoys working and thrives on her work.

 So the first few months of Bill’s cherished leisure were spent trying frantically to keep pace with someone who works like a maniac. 

 A massive honey-do list materialized on the whiteboard next to the kitchen telephone. 

 He repaired, painted, stained, remodeled, scrubbed, shampooed, landscaped and reupholstered everything that did not move. He purchased a chainsaw to accomplish item #78:

  78. Make backyard bigger

  While household maintenance is a practical money saving endeavor, retirement should not (and must not) be an endless succession of chores.

 In most cases, you are simply trading your previous boring job for several new boring jobs. It usually doesn't work.    

Rice Bowl Alert

  Retirement is not the time to spend an inordinate amount of your waking hours protecting financial investments from harm. Retirement is all about enjoying the fruits of one's life of labor.

  If you find it necessary to spend more than a few minutes each week managing your retirement fund, you're not retired. 

 At this point in your life you should not enter into any form of high-risk investment that requires constant management.  

Enjoy what you have.  Better still, write a few checks.   

 Greener Pastures

 Mercy! Those first few weeks of retirement were heady and exhilarating. Mary no longer had to force herself to get up at 4 AM and stumble over the cat to dress in the dark, or face a kamikaze run to the office only to be intimidated by folks who seemed only to care about protecting their careers. 

  As Mary looked at it then while the matter was fresh in her mind, she vowed not to consider turning back for any reason. Yet, she knew that in reality every major decision one makes in life somehow relates to money.

 We need the money. We'll do anything for the money. 

 On second thought she said, "To heck with money! Even though I'm not prepared for this, I'm going to give it a shot. I can always eat cat food. I hear it tastes like chicken. Have you heard that, too?”

 So the question remains: How much money do you really need to live a comfortable retirement lifestyle? The obvious answer is as much as possible.

 Unfortunately, many retirees tend to underestimate the true cost of retirement. Other folks simply have never had the opportunity to save enough money to adequately fund their leisure years. If you’re in this situation, you’ve two basic choices: 

 Seriously, you have but one choice. You’ll have to go back to work. However, depending on your age, there is a tidy solution for this problem that works for some people.

 Why not enjoy retirement for about 18-24 months? That's long enough to experience the benefits (travel, volunteering, etc), and enough time to promote a general feeling that you're living a worthy life. After the initial 18-24 month period, casually look for a full-time job.

 When you find a position that suits you (it may take several months) work at it for exactly one year. No more and no less.

 During that time you’ll need to stash away every dollar you can lay your hands on.  After your tour of duty is over, you're ready to re-retire.

 Remember that no matter what the federal laws mandate, you’re now over the age of fifty. If you want to find a fulltime job fast, don’t expect (or demand) high-paying work.

 The obvious advantage in this scheme is that you won’t need to struggle with a permanent part time job that can put a hitch in your retirement git-a-long, and effectively erase all opportunities to travel and have fun.

 Of course, there's always the pain of struggling back and forth through the dreaded shift between  work and retirement. 

However, it beats eating you know what.

 Time Management

 Probably the last phrase a new retiree wants to hear is one that contains the words time management. After all, isn’t that the main reason you retire in the first place, so you don't have to constantly manage your time?

 A strange thing about the human body is that it has a built-in internal clock that always wants to keep you on a precise schedule, no matter what.

 Your body doesn’t know or care that you are retired. Because there’s no longer a compelling reason to go to bed and wake at regular hours, the new retiree may tend to stay up late to watch TV, or indulge a favorite hobby. 

The result is called timeslipping.

 Typically, the phenomenon starts out gradually. You go to bed a few minutes later each night for one reason or another.

 Over a period of weeks and months you find yourself with a growing problem on your hands: It’s 4:15 AM and you’re sitting in front of the tube watching a real estate infomercial as you fall asleep.

 Eight hours later, you wake up feeling much like the proverbial drunk in church, and you’ve missed the entire morning.

 As If that were not bad enough, it gets worse. Another side effect of living in leisure world is that one no longer has a rigid time structure (the Monday-Friday work week) on which to set their external timekeeping system.  

 For example, some time ago Fred went grocery shopping at the local supermarket. As he approached the clerk in the express lane he bade the young lady a cheery good morning:

”Not bad weather for a Friday, huh?”

The clerk looked at him in puzzled amazement. They both stared at the checkout computer screen:

Welcome to Stop and Shop – Monday - July 4, 2005

 If you’re not careful, this will happen to you at some point in your retirement. Don’t worry about it, though.

 Everyone present when this gaffe occurs will get that knowing look on their face, and then quietly attribute the problem to a senior moment.

Entertain-itis

  In this new information age it is important for you to at first go light on all forms of media and entertainment, at least until you think you can handle it in larger doses without throwing things at the media delivery device.

 This includes all forms of entertainment such as television, Internet, radio and newspapers. A good book is a recommended exception. You'll find lots of them sitting on the dusty shelves of your local free public library. 

 Warning: The slow-crawling retirement media addiction worm will creep up where you sit, and bite you where it hurts. Do not attempt to indulge more than an hour or two of media each day.

 Media addiction, while less of a problem for women, can be especially frustrating for male retirees.

 Tom usually rises each morning after everyone has left the house. With an hour or so of total silence under his belt, he is now bored stiff.  Where the heck is the remote control? 

He locates his eyeglasses, and then gropes under the sofa seat cushions for the device:  

Poor Tom settles for Good Morning America and the talking robots again, and makes a mental note to tune in for Blue's Clues at 10 AM..

 In case you've been on an extended vacation to Ursa Major and haven't yet had time to notice, daytime television is not designed for the 50-74 year old male. 

With few notable exceptions, the folks that present you with 500 digital TV channels could care less if you are a live or dead male senior citizen.

 Actually, you may as well get used to this attitude in almost everything you do that concerns the mass media. Remember that you are no longer a vital part of our economic strategy. You’re now a marketing has been. 

 Magazine editors and Internet websites, too, are concerned primarily with attracting young people (18-49), because these are the primary viewers and readers that pay their bills.

 As far as network TV programmers are concerned, you don't exist.

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They Know You're at Home

  You may not be aware of it yet, but that wonderful instrument that hangs on your kitchen wall – the communication lifeline that keeps you in contact with the world - is about to become your mortal enemy.

 Most telemarketing companies are run by sociopaths of the first order, very smart people who do their homework every night. 

As soon as their hired minions manage to ferret out two of the most important facts they need to know about you (your age and sex), you 're in big trouble. You can't escape and you can't hide because they know you're at home.

 And, unfortunately, your Caller ID box only works some of the time to block the calls. When you lived in the working world you had the pleasure of the telemarketer’s company only at dinnertime. 

 As a retiree, you'll have the same pleasure several times a day.

 Fortunately, there’s help on the horizon for this very real and annoying problem.  

As of October 1, 2003,  the date the new Federal Do-Not Call Telemarketing List (http://www.donotcall.gov) becomes effective,  telemarketers will pay up to $11,000 in fines for each violation of your privacy. The list is not a telemarketing cure-all (some businesses and non-profit corporations are exempt), but it’s a big step in the right direction.

 Let Freedom Ring

  What is the single most important piece of advice you can give to someone who is about to retire?

  At any price (and at any cost) you should strive to maintain a sense of personal freedom. 

One major advantage the retiree has over his working counterpart is the relative freedom to do and say what he pleases, when he pleases to do and say it.

 Here are a few do's and don'ts that may help you to enhance and protect your sense of personal freedom in retirement:   

 Do allow yourself to be different.  On occasion do something crazy such as mow the lawn in your pajamas. The result of this exercise may seem silly.  However, soon you'll begin to realize that you are in control of your life. It's a wonderful feeling that everyone should experience on a regular basis. In a nutshell, this is what retirement is all about.

 Do try to remember that you will not (and cannot) live forever. Don’t get so wrapped up in trying to stay healthy that you forget to have a life.  

Do get fired up about something once in awhile. Speak your mind on a pet subject, or write a letter to your favorite Congressman. It’s good for the soul.  

Don’t allow guilt to ruin your life.  Remember that guilt is a powerful influence that marketers and other manipulative people use to influence control over you. While the world of work is all about power and influence, the world of retirement is not. Unless you live in a commune, there is no longer a major social penalty for many types of non-conforming behavior (smoking, eating, wearing a silly hat).  Remember that nobody is watching, and virtually no one cares.  

 Don't just do something. Stand there.  If you've nothing to do, then so be it. It’s easy to remain a prisoner of old habits. We are conditioned through years of work to equate busy-ness with business. Got to go. Got to look busy. Got to say the right thing. It’s now time to throw those notions out of the nearest window.

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