Overcoming Writer’s Block

Recently I discovered that one of my favorite authors put out a book on writing, called Weinberg on Writing: the Field Stone Method.

Well, on a lark, I decided to purchase the book from Amazon, and I have to say, not only have I not been able to put the book down, but it has truly inspired me about writing in ways that no English book ever could.

Basically, Weinberg draws parallels of building a wall with field stones (no mortar) to that of writing. He starts by stating that how we read, sequentially, is not necessarily how we write. Additionally, when we see today’s electronic medium, full of indexes and hyperlinks, this is merely presentation, and, again, has no bearing on the writing process.

Instead, he points back to a time in his life when he became addicted to morphine from some nasty surgeries and broke the addiction. He explains that addition is a very clever and evil process. It requires that you do something in the short term that makes you feel better, but with the side effect that it actually makes you feel worse in the long term. So, you do the activity again, and you feel better, but then after it passes, you feel even worse. Quickly you run into a terrible spiral.

However, smart and creative people can break that cycle. How so? By finding something else that makes them happy. Instead, they don’t end up with feeling worse; they simply build upon repeated successes.

He then discusses how when he’s faced with a project that’s not going well, or a deadline, or even writer’s block, that he’d distract himself (“to unblock himself”) by going for a walk, drinking a beer, having sex, watching television, cleaning out the garage, whatever. Only the problem was, when the break was over, he’d be in even a worse pickle, and have even less time. …sounds an awful lot like addition, doesn’t it?

So, he started looking for a smart and creative way to break the cycle, and he now claims he never gets writer’s block. Writers block comes from three things: not having enough ideas, having too any ideas, or having just the right amount. If there’s not enough, he goes “looking for flag stones”. If there’s too much, he organizes them. If things are just right, he polishes and shapes them. Volia, writer’s block is gone.

But what is this “looking for flagstones” he’s talking about? Turns out when you’re building a wall, like a retaining wall out of stone, the quick “city” way is to purchase a ton of rocks. However, in the country, you go out into fields, looking for stones that are the right size, shape, and color. You collect them, and after a number of years, you have your wall.

Problem is, if you just flat out collect for the wall, you run into two problems. One is that as time presses on, it gets harder and harder to find wall-specific stones. You can’t just say “I’m going to find five today.” That doesn’t work. Second, sometimes you come across other stones that have practical value or some emotional connection, but you have no immediate use for them. He says to collect those and start different piles. And with this advice, he points out with modern day cheap storage, it’s possible to collect a lot of ideas and then organize them later. Also, he spends considerable time telling how to capture ideas that might get lost such as when you’re dreaming or in a social context where it doesn’t seem appropriate at first.

Weinberg points out that a “good stone” is an idea that moves you strongly emotionally. When a passage stands out, when a well worded sentence is found, when a thought sticks out, when someone says something, when you get a flash of insight or perspective on the world, and so forth, these are good stones. Weinberg has made a career out of collecting ideas, and with it, he’s never out of material or inspiration for writing. He encourages the reader to do the same, through a series of simple observational exercises he applies in his writing classes, and I have to say… it works. My own set of blogs have been stepping up in the number of entries; I’m seeing far more reader email and comments than ever before.

Weinberg pointed out that upon a friend of his giving a review to another author’s book, praise was given that it was a gold mine. And when Wienberg asked his close friend why he never got that kind of praise. Weinberg’s friend thought and said a gold mind is something where you have to move a lot of earth, and if you’re lucky, you get a nugget. Then he proceeded to say that Weinberg’s books were more like coal mines. Continuing, that every shovel full is valuable.

And, I’d have to agree.

Weinberg draws on tons of deep and clever concepts, thoughts, and expressions, weaving them into folds of comedy and information, conveying his points effortlessly and concisely. He illustrates how the “Fieldstone Method” works for fiction, non-fiction, and technical material. And, it really does.

This simple blog entry represents my personal synopsis of the first five chapters in a twenty chapter book. I strongly encourage you to get your hands on it and read it. It will take you no time what-so-ever, as it’s less than 200 pages and quite thin. In no way does it discuss grammar, technicalities of the English language, or pseudo-science positive thinking crap.

Wienberg in the course of 40 years has produced 40 well known books and over ten times that in articles. His students are cranking out books and articles. His methodology is quite an eye opener, especially if you want to become more prolific.

Apparently, I Like My Women Dressed

This morning as I was leaving the house to go to work, I gave the wife a hug and a kiss goodbye. And let me tell you, she smelled awesome.

So, I stuck around an extra minute.

“You smell fantastic! What are you wearing?” I asked, plowing my nose behind her ear.

She thought, “Uh, nothing. Maybe it’s the laundry?”

I smelled the fabric of her soft shirt. Instantly the scent of wild flowers, babbling brooks, and summer breezes sent me reeling into fond memories.

Without thinking, I replied “Yup. That’s it. You should wear clothes more often!”

She went red.

Apparently I like my women dressed. I didn’t know that about myself.

Hibernate: Duplicate Mapping and Imports

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I ran into a very frustrating problem this evening, causing me to stay much later than I had intended, and to miss out on some fun socializing event that I was looking forward to. Unfortunately, there was little to no useful information on the Internet as Google was coming up with few and useless results.

I hope this post saves some poor soul from the same fate.

The Problem


I’m using the Hibernate library for persistence with a JBoss EJB using JPA. My code is sprinkled with annotations, my hibernate.cfg.xml file is clean, and I have no *.hbm.xml files. My code compiles. And it runs.

However.

When I try to access something that uses the Hibernate library, I get an odd message about “Duplicate Collection Role Mapping“.

The class in question contained a Set interface and a HashSet implementation for a member.

So, I commented out this container and tried again, hoping to simplify the problem.

This time I was greeted with a “[Mappings] duplicate import” and a “DuplicateMappingException: Duplicate class/entity mapping” set of error messages.

The only related web pages was a handful of archive with people asking similar questions in various online forums.

Almost always these fell into one of three responses:

  1. You’ve got a problem with the mapping element in your hibernate config file.
  2. You’ve got annotations and and class.hbm.xml file doing something wrong.
  3. This is an old bug in JBoss.

None of the symptoms existed in my case.

Here’s How I Solved It


Turns out that Hibernate makes the recommendation that you build a HibernateUtil helper class. Inside it, you’re supposed to make a singleton of the SessionFactory (and in the case of JBoss, you should use JNDI).

A co-worker had refactored the AnnotationConfiguration() to store a single copy, however, the routine that returned it happened to call .configure() on it before returning it each time. An honest mistake, which got integrated silently into my code when I pulled the latest version from version control.

Because .configure() was being called twice, to Hibernate it did look as if I had duplicate mapping directives in my hibernate config file.

Correcting the HibernateUtil method, which handled setting up and returning the AnnotationConfiguration solved the problem.

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