Between Pen and Paper: Flaneuring Through a Writer’s Mind – Writing at the Speed of a Melting Popsicle

By Andi Kopek

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A popsicle.

A little girl is holding a popsicle in her hand. The color is red.

It’s so hot—so steaming hot—that the popsicle is dripping on her fingers, but she doesn’t mind. She doesn’t even notice it. She licks it innocently. The popsicle drips through one finger, then the next, down her little pinky, onto her clothes, and finally, the ground. She doesn’t mind.

Why are popsicles called popsicles? Pop-sicle. From icicle? But why POP-sicle? Why not sun- sicle? Or sweet-sickle? Or slash-sickle?

When I was a little boy, I didn’t eat popsicles. Maybe ice cream on a stick—but I didn’t like them. They dripped too quickly. Dripping again. It was unpleasant. Nasty. I don’t like mess.

When I was a child I liked eating brine cucumbers instead—from a big barrel with herbs. From a local store with vegetables. Zielona Budka it was called. The Green Hut. I forgot the name of the herb. The name of the herb. The herb. But the smell was so distinct. Summers weren’t this hot or humid then. Definitely not this humid. They were bearable.

But I couldn’t step into the stream that flowed near our house. A sign nailed to a small pine tree said “Do Not Enter.” There was always this thin black line on the banks—pollution. So strange, isn’t it? That rivers are polluted? Dill. It was dill.

Same with the Baltic Sea. You’d walk along the shore and see a thin line of oil—leaking from tankers, maybe. How much oil needs to spill to leave a line like that? Shorelines stretch endlessly. So it must be a massive amount. And yet it’s just… normal. There was no way to talk about it. No one raised it as a question. No one wanted to listen.

It seemed hopeless to raise this issue. Hopelessness was everywhere. And it’s what made me move. Made me search for something else—some place where hope exists.

Because a hopeless man can’t make a difference. That’s unbearable. And passion? You couldn’t express passion. If you had feelings, you had to bury them. And you’d be dead. Had no feelings? How can you live without feelings? Also dead. Either way—passion or apathy—you were dead. So I looked for a place where you might feel alive. Really alive. And I moved.

And when I found it—disappointment. Because people are the same. Buildings are, pretty much, the same. At least similar. Some things differ, but at the core, no real changes. It was rather surprising. And disappointing.

No matter where you live, this side of the pond, or the other, this continent or that—people behave the same. Systems differ, sure. Maybe there’s more of one thing here, less of another there. But manipulation is the same. The desire to control others, the masses? The same.

Maybe there once were tribes, cultures, societies driven by different values. Not just different beliefs—different internal forces. Not focused on profit, progress, goals. But they’re gone.

Crushed. At least, they’re no longer the dominant force.

Put a peaceful person in a room with someone okay with killing… Guess who survives? The second one doesn’t blink and pulls the trigger. No hesitation. And no guilt afterward. No guilt afterward is terrifying. Can give me nightmares. That’s how people with high morality die.

That’s how reflective people disappear. That’s how good people don’t survive. Because the ones willing to negotiate, to coexist, to cooperate… by definition, they are always at a disadvantage. The ones who don’t care about destroying them? They win.

That’s how the world is skewed. And that balance? It will never be restored. Never existed. The imbalance repeats itself. One generation to the next. Until the skew becomes so extreme that people go mad and destroy each other. And justify it, of course. And then the remaining few start the cycle again.

That’s the story of human life on this planet. It’s so short. And so cyclic. We pride ourselves on our “progress.” We love talking about how our societies have “evolved.” But if you study history carefully, you’ll see, nothing is new.

We just forgot. We forget. We forget. We forget and repeat. Amnesia is built into the system. Everything from the past returns—distorted. A ghost, shifting form, always changing. We think we know it. But we don’t. We think we learn from history. But we don’t. And even if we do—it means nothing. We can’t or don’t want to act on it. Well, the ones who want, usually don’t have enough power. And if they make a change, it is rather short lived. Because of the nature of man.

So how do you enjoy life, knowing this? Knowing that we don’t learn? Knowing that goodness is always at a disadvantage? How do you live like that?

Maybe…

Maybe we just start with a popsicle. On a hot, humid, sunny August day.

At a brewery where kids run around and play…

Author’s Note

This piece was created using a stream-of-consciousness technique, beginning with a real observation of a child holding a melting popsicle at a local brewery during this summer’s extreme heat. Because my writing speed lags substantially behind the pace of my thoughts, I decided to record them instead—capturing this internal monologue as it unfolded. It was recorded on an iPhone 13Pro Max using the Voice Memos app, transcribed via Otter.ai, and lightly edited for readability.

As both a neuroscientist and writer, I’m fascinated by stream-of-consciousness as a way of capturing thought in its raw, unfiltered form—before logic and language shape it. Writers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Clarice Lispector explored this terrain, but the tone and emotional cadence of this piece are perhaps closest to the style of Thomas Bernhard. The process felt amazing, like creating in a fascinating, improvisational way, as if the thoughts were composing themselves in real time.

Final thought: One of my previous columns explored writer’s block. The stream-of- consciousness approach can be a powerful antidote for the block, allowing creativity to freeflow.

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Andi Kopek is a multidisciplinary artist based in Nashville, TN. With a background in medicine, molecular neuroscience, and behavioral change, he has recently devoted himself entirely to the creative arts. His debut poetry collection, Shmehara, has garnered accolades in both literary and independent film circles for its innovative storytelling.

When you’re in Nashville, you can join Andi at his monthly poetry workshop, participate in the Libri Prohibiti book club (both held monthly at the Spine bookstore, Smyrna, TN), or catch one of his live performances. When not engaging with the community, he's hard at work on his next creative project or preparing for his monthly art-focused podcast, The Samovar(t) Lounge: Steeping Conversations with Creative Minds, where in a relaxed space, invited artists share tea and the never-told intricacies of their creative journeys.

Five Writing Tips No One Has Ever Told You

By Philip Cioffari

A bold assertion, I know, but there are things one learns over a lifetime of writing that seem to contradict what we’ve been taught and even, at times, to defy both logic and rationality. What follows is a short list of—insights might be too strong a word—items that I’ve learned the hard way.

ONE. You don’t need an idea to get started. Waiting for inspiration or for a “good idea” can be frustrating and time-consuming. Another way of saying that is you’re wasting precious time. Ideas are curious entities and they form in many different ways and for many different reasons. Most often, I’ve found they develop in stages; rarely do they appear fully formed. In lieu of that fully dressed idea, a writer can begin with an image, a single sentence, a character performing a simple action, a particular setting, or even a single word. Anything can serve as a starting point.

Take for example the case of Tennessee Williams. He has stated that his play, A Streetcar Named Desire, began with a single image: a woman in white sitting on a porch. That image eventually became the character Blanche du Bois: the tragic heroine of arguably one of the greatest American plays of the 20th century. When I began my first novel, I had only this notion: a group of boys playing in one of New York City’s urban swamplands. I had no sense of what I wanted to write—or that it would indeed turn out to be a novel—beyond that small detail. Some 10 years later—I know, I know, a hell of a long time, but it was my first—and my novel, Catholic Boys, emerged.

My point is, you can begin anywhere, with the barest scrap of material. Who knows where it will lead? The journey toward the idea is half the fun. One word on the page leads to a second, one sentence to a second sentence. It’s as basic as that.

TWO. Plot is another name for character development. One doesn’t have to agonize over outlining a plot or whether a plot is interesting enough. You don’t need a plot to begin. If the characters are interesting, the plot will be too, because the most genuine, credible plots are an extension of a character’s desires. If you know what a character wants, what the obstacles are, and what he or she will do to overcome those obstacles, then the plot, as if by wizardry, takes form. Simply follow your character’s struggle to reach an objective. And you will have your plot.

THREE. Tension should exist in every sentence. Much can be said about the ways to create narrative tension, but a simple rule I strive for is to have some kind of tension in every sentence of my books. That tension can be of varying kinds, it can be explicit or implicit, but it needs to be there. And I’m not talking about obvious explicit tension—a stabbing or a fist fight or an argument between people. That speaks for itself. I’m referring to the more subtle variations of implicit tension: something is unfinished or unresolved, something is left unsaid, something needs fixing, something is missing that a character needs or wants, and so forth.

Take for example a typical poem of the Romantic era. On the surface, the poem is praising the beauty of a particular flower, but the tension beneath the surface is that as beautiful as this flower is, it’s going to wither and die. So ultimately the poem is about, and the tension comes from, our sense of transience, loss, and grief.

FOUR. Finding your way when you get lost. Nothing is worse for me than losing my emotional connection to my work in the midst of creating it. Where did it go–that connection to the material, that passion that got me started on the work in the first place? Personally, I try to never abandon a work I’ve begun. Something stimulated my initial interest, impulse, or passion. For some reason the material or characters reached out and grabbed hold of me. There’s a story there that needs telling, so I try to forget what I’ve written so far and go back in search of that original impulse. Maybe that means revisiting a place or making contact again with a person or people connected to the incident I’m writing about. Often it’s a matter of feeling my way back to the source: those feelings that first got me engaged in the piece. I might listen to songs or look through photos from a particular period. Essentially, though, I’m trying to pinpoint the source of the impulse that made me want to begin writing the piece in the first place. If I can reconnect to it, I can usually reconnect to the story I’m telling. (This may mean eliminating some or even most of what I’ve written. It may mean going back to that point in the story where I went offtrack and picking up from there.)

FIVE. Revisions take time and distance. One can, and should, do some revisions at the conclusion of completing a piece. What I’ve found is that vital revisions require some kind of separation from that initial effort. What has served me best is to set the work aside and begin a new writing project. When I’ve completed a draft of the new project, then I go back and rework the previous piece. There’s something about immersing oneself in a new writing project that brings with it a sense of objectivity and awareness that’s necessary in the final polishing of a manuscript. Resist the temptation to rush it off for publication. A piece of writing needs time to mature. And we, as writers, are well-served to mature along with it.

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Philip Cioffari grew up in the Bronx and received his B.A. from St. John's University and his Ph.D. from New York University. He teaches in the writing program at William Paterson University. His novels and story collections include: If Anyone Asks, Say I Died From The Heartbreaking Blues; The Bronx Kill; Catholic Boys; Dark Road, Dead End; Jesusville; and A History Of Things Lost Or Broken.