Art in a Vacuum

A few years ago, when I was completing my final semester of college, I got the opportunity to visit the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts.  This was not only the site of the world's largest crane (since dismantled), it was also where part of The Departed was filmed and probably one of the most exciting places I've ever been.  Even though we weren't allowed, a few of us snuck off to explore and take pictures over our lunch break.  The photos from that day -- though taken quickly with a point and shoot digital camera and without a thought to framing, composition, subject matter, or general good technique -- later became part of one of my favorite creative projects.

After returning from my trip, I took those pictures to my photography professor and lamented the fact that I hadn't gotten a chance to do any "real" photography there, hadn't had time or equipment to produce "real art."  She told me I had a lot of absolute gems on that roll and I should keep going, find more locations to photograph, apply for a grant to make gigantic prints of my shipyard photos.

In the end I got the grant, took more photos, and produced a handmade artist's book to display my work.  I may be more proud of that final product than anything else I did that year.

I've often said I miss existing in a community of artists.  In college, creative people tend to flock together.  I remember fine arts, graphic design, music, theatre majors all having their own exclusive cliques.  Outside their academic work, their style of dress and social activities and parties set them apart from everyone else.  They lived and breathed their craft.

Many of us don't retain that after college.  I feel like those of us with BFAs are especially prone to end up in interesting places that don't quite line up with what's on our diploma.  We didn't go to school to be actuaries or rocket scientists or high school French teachers.  Our university's career center didn't know quite what to do with us, so if we didn't move to New York City or apply for teaching positions or start an MFA program, we made our own path in life.

I'm actually pleased with my day job, where I do a lot of writing and solve challenging problems and keep some pretty great company.  But I am definitely out of that creative element much of the time.  People are actually impressed to learn I have several six foot tall paintings in my basement that I painted myself.  They told me I was crazy to try to write 50,000 words toward a novel in one month.  At one time, either of these things might have been considered commonplace and even expected by my peers.

So as I work on editing and rewriting this novel, I have to remember what my painting professor said so many times it became cliche: you don't create art in a vacuum.  Without that creative community, I never would have pursued my Reclamation project.  I would have taken some neat pictures at an abandoned shipyard and left it at that, and people would have been impressed.  But I had a mentor who saw potential in the project and challenged me to keep going with it, flesh it out into a mature project.

My next step is to take advantage of the little creative community I have within my friends and lay out the fast, sketchy work I've done so far.  Lot's of people might say I wrote my plot beginning to end, so I wrote a novel.  I didn't.  Not yet.  I took the first hasty roll of film.  Now I have to think about why I was attracted to those scenes, take some notes, and plan my next shoot.  And to do that, I need to bring it to someone who's never seen it before and say "hey, look what I did, do you think it will go anywhere?"  Because talking about our art is a key part of understanding it, processing it, finding deeper meaning and new directions with it.  And having people working alongside us and helping critique our work in progress is a luxury we shouldn't give up once we're past taking classes.

Characters

Though I haven't gone into it in depth in this blog, I define myself by the breadth of my creative experiences. I enjoy spending time with creative people of all breeds and have explored a lot of artistic avenues on my own. Sometimes this makes me fear trying to do everything and never really getting good at anything, but it also gives me plenty of room for comparison when I need a new perspective.

A day or two after I intended but still more or less on target, I've started to tackle this manuscript. At first I felt so resistant to reading it at all. I found any excuse not to break open the thick folder, didn't even want to look at my 291-page manuscript.

But eventually I settled in and devoted a bit of my Saturday to it, burning a sweet-smelling candle and listening to Tim Buckley with my cat and papers on the couch. Eventually notes started to come out like I was giving stage directions, telling my characters to spit words out like they were too bitter to keep in their mouths anymore. I hope that means the characters will eventually feel more three-dimensional, like I can feel them in the room with me as I tell them how I want them to be.

This is going to be a long process though. They're only on their first read-through of the script, the set is still being built, there definitely aren't any real props yet. The characters are still sort of a mystery. Months from now, they will feel like real people existing in a little world inside our own.

Incidentally, after I'd finished finding the copy engaging and quick to read, after I'd marked up a good 40 pages before the end of my CD, I found myself hating everything about it. The flat characters and the plot that was unbelievable, immature at best. Then the worry started sneaking in, the suspicion that it was really just unsalvageable.

Going back, though, why can't this feel like I'm preparing for a play or a concert? Why can't my plot and characters be revealed in layers over the course of months? Why should I be embarrassed to show my friends a draft and ask for suggestions when I know everyone knows it's undeveloped? It's like showing my brown underpainting, my storyboard, my initial sketches. Certainly no masterpiece yet, and no way to know where it will end up when it's done.

Taking a cue from NaNoWriMo itself, when I was motivated by the fact that I'd told so many people I was writing 50,000 words in a month, I've set another deadline. I've told some friends I'll give this thing to them by Christmas, and I intend to do just that. No matter how much editing I have done. Because you can't start working on your character before you've read the script, and you can't prepare for the concert without attending your first rehearsal. At some point, everyone's work looks like a vague sketch or a bad sightread, right?

Oh, AND.

I meant to point out in that last post that I won despite only making the daily goal for 11 out of the 30 days. At the same time, my highest daily word count was 4820, so I didn't exactly have to cram either. For me it was all about perseverance and keeping a rhythm even when I knew I hadn't met the previous day's quota -- something I learned from my daily writing practice long before November.

Here's a chart showing how I did (note how it predicted I'd fall 5,000 words short according to my pace). You can also view it on the NaNoWriMo site for more info on what all the columns mean.

After NaNoWriMo...

I thought I'd have a lot to say after NaNoWriMo was over, but I find myself at a bit of a loss. I crossed the finish line at 50,020 words with about five hours to spare in the month of November. Like most things I do, I consider that pretty much adequate. No lofty 100,000 words, but I sure didn't fall short either. I even wrote out my whole story, so there's no serious slogging left to do. All I have now is 291 pages of manuscript, which I sneakily printed out at work today (double sided -- don't worry), and a drawer full of pens. Hopefully I'll be able to move through the draft and get the first rewrite done by Christmas.

One thing is sure, though: after a month-long vacation, my perfectionist streak has returned with a vengeance. Despite banishing it from my sight for a few days to cleanse my palate, I keep thinking about my story -- descriptions, timelines, what the ground feels like beneath my characters' feet. I feel like after telling everyone about my novel and then spending all this time on it I have something weighty to prove. I have to prove myself able to write a novel that's better than anything you've ever read.

While I do think perfectionism is the mother of quality work, in large doses it can be crippling. It can be a reason never to finish my novel or show it to anyone. So I think I'm just going to do what editing I can by Christmas, then -- eeeek! Horror of horrors! -- show it to my most trusted writer friends for feedback no matter what. Of course they'll know it's bad. But it's a draft, so in theory of course they'll know it's supposed to be bad. No one writes a masterpiece in the first draft. It needs to be written and rewritten until it's just right. This is just the bones. Just the bones. And if I don't start showing works in progress to people, if I don't start seeing my work for what it is and appreciating it in all stages of the process, I'm never going to kill that voice inside saying I should be embarrassed by everything I create. Every song I sing, every picture I take, every story I write.

In the end, I think that's the biggest lesson I've learned by writing 50,000 words in 30 days. No one can accomplish that while expecting perfection of themselves. I don't know if anyone can write the first draft of a novel at all while expecting perfection of themselves. And for a month, I suspended my need for everything to be well-considered and perfect and just wrote. Not in my journal, either, but in a document I want to reach the public eye someday. Doing that was a new experience for me, and one I hope to continue. I also hope to have some better reflections on the experience at some point, but for now I'm just quietly basking in my own sense of self-satisfaction.