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.

Missing Writing Marathons

NaNoWriMo is getting both harder and easier: too much thinking, too little writing, too much doubt, but then realizing I only have 12,400 words left as I write this. Compared to how far I've come, that's really nothing. Plus, tonight's 2,000 words came easily, which is always encouraging.

The thing is, a person can't accomplish something like this alone. As someone who once believed (and still sometimes believes) all my strength and potential came from within, I feel like this is a valuable lesson. Not only have I learned I can actually do anything I put my mind to (although I secretly knew that already), I've learned I need conversation, inspiration, encouragement.

Not all encouraging words are the same with seven days left in the challenge, either. The time has passed for "we'll be proud of you no matter what." At this point I need someone to kick my ass a little bit, tell me "hey, you set a goal and you are totally capable of achieving it. You've come too far for me to watch you fall short now."

Or, best of all, "let's sit down and write together." What I wouldn't give for a writing marathon with my best friend before this is all over. Throwing words down on the page recklessly. Reading aloud every 15 minutes and impressing each other, ourselves. I feel like that's the relationship I need right now. I miss the communal creativity, discovering pieces of each other, spouting off topics and running with them, looking back satisfied at how many pages we'd filled. It's been years since I did something like this, either because I wasn't writing enough or because I didn't have anyone nearby to write with.

So this month I learned (again) how important it is to reach out in times of creative need. I need to reach out now, somehow, if only just a little bit during this holiday weekend. I need to maintain my creative momentum, and that's not always something we can do alone.

We'll see how these last few days go. Either way, I'm looking forward to posting the final verdict on December 1. It should be an exciting race to the finish line!

NaNoWriMo: Crossing the Halfway Point

So here I am, more than halfway through the month and -- miracle of miracles -- also more than halfway to 50,000 words. There is a chance I might just do this. I've told my friends and family about it, I've even put celebrating the end right up there with celebrating my birthday (actually, it's the same party).

Week Two was hard. I mean it, it was a serious challenge. Just shy of 20,000 words I hit a point where I realized my characters were just rough conglomerations of different traits. They needed to become real, live people in the story. I needed to learn more about them. So I forced myself to keep writing, 1,000 words at a time, to figure out what made these folks tick.

I think I'm getting it. Crossing the 25K mark was a huge milestone not just in terms of being more than halfway there, but in terms of being able to sit down and write and see 1,000 words go down on the page with hardly any trouble at all.

I also took a little vacation from my story: saw friends, played games, etc. On Saturday I realized I'd sort of abandoned my real life. Not good. So we'll see how living in two worlds works out for me. On Monday when I was getting ready for work I actually noticed dark circles under my eyes, a clear sign of age or sleeplessness or both. Consistently skimping on sleep just isn't as easy as it used to be. I can remember staying up until all hours working on school projects or spending time with friends. Now that tired feeling during the day just doesn't seem worth it. Either that or I end up falling asleep on the floor at 11:00 on a Friday night. Not my proudest moment, but it's all leading up to one of my proudest moments for sure: crossing the NaNoWriMo finish line.

While I may not be able to stay awake past 11:00 on a Friday night, I do possess a certain "failure is not an option," do-or-die streak that keeps me going on projects like this. Sleepiness or no, server upgrades and fundraising season at the office or no, this novel's going to get written. It'll get written in the car on the way to/from Thanksgiving in PA (yes, I have a power inverter to plug into the cigarette lighter). It'll get it written at 8:00 on a Saturday morning after I've only just been roused from my friends' floor at 2:00 a.m.

It'll get written in the time before work that I used to reserve for showering and making my hair look presentable (i.e. not slept on). Don't ask about that one. Really.

At any rate, I'm still plugging away at this thing and I'm still on track to succeed, if only just barely. So here's to the rest of November!

NaNoWriMo at one week

It hasn't always been easy, but I've managed to stay in the game thus far. I am proud to say I wrapped up NaNoWriMo week 1 with 14,110 words (more than my goal of 13,000 by the end of the weekend).

So, a little recap:

Before it all began, I felt good. I sat down with a close friend and talked over the practical points of my plot with him. I watched Across the Universe. I dug into the first day with all the "fun" parts. I figured out immediately that writing a plot about a character usually means writing it out of order, gradually fitting the pieces together. I took the Myers-Briggs test for my main character and wrote about her flaws.

During the first few days I feel behind on my word count. Perfectionism and overthinking slowed me down until Wednesday or Thursday, when I broke into a place where I could write freely, like I do for my daily writing practice. During this time I also wondered how to keep up my daily practice while writing my novel. I feel like the novel suffers when it becomes everything I'm thinking and writing about. After all, the little observations make it real. The funny experience I had in a cab last week makes it real.

I've promised myself I'll start a new zine project when my current notebook is full down to the last page, and this has kept me going with my daily writing. This weekend I discovered a new NaNo incentive in this: at the end of 30 days, I will really have something. I'll have the bare bones of a real live novel, something I can sink my editing teeth into. And that's when the real writing starts. I love editing far more than writing from scratch much of the time, love watching my mind work through problems and produce a final draft I never could have imagined from the outset.

Thinking about that -- the final product and what it means for me -- provides a light at the end of the tunnel. Writing 1700 words of fiction per day has gotten easier. Hell, I wrote over 7000 words this weekend. But sustaining that pace will require more than nimble wrists and kernels of plot ideas. It's going to take some big-time perseverance. But I've told my family and friends I will do this, can do this, and I've promised myself a draft of a novel by the end of the month. So I'm really just going to do it.

Here's to literary abandon! I'll try to keep up at least weekly updates here, and I'm currently chatting about my progress on Twitter (check the mini-blog in the sidebar).

Today =

1. Moroccan lentil-bean stew with rosemary, fennel, turmeric, cumin, & etc.
2. Plentiful leaf raking and novel writing, but also a balance of book reading and WoW playing.
3. A somewhat confounding (but bountiful) harvest of green tomatoes...what do we do with these?
4. Scalding hot shower at the end of the day.
5. 10,000 words!
6. French press coffee in my writing room with morning sunlight streaming in the windows.
7. Upgrading (finally) to Ubuntu 9.10 and loving the freebie desktop backgrounds.
8. Balancing productivity with relaxation.
   

Coming Back

So, over the past two months I've managed to break the template for this blog (hence its current bare-bones appearance) while posting no updates and going through an astoundingly busy and stressful time in my life. Most of the busy part has evaporated (I hope) with last night's culmination of a major project at the office: our organization's 40th anniversary celebration. Having seen my first major fundraising event come and go, I finally have a spare moment to breathe.

Normally, today I would be attempting to get back on track, jump-start a creative project, figure out where I can go from here. But I'm not. Why? Because even though I didn't keep my blog up to date or work on any big creative projects, I managed to keep up my daily writing practice. Since my last post here I have nearly filled a looseleaf notebook and used my writing to keep tabs on myself, even when I felt I didn't have enough time to think and feel an appropriate amount, didn't have energy to process some major shifts happening in my life.

So while I've been absent from the internet, I've kept working. And I'm ready to jump into National Novel Writing Month next week. I'm ready to start work on the projects I've been cooking over the past couple months. And that's a major victory. I sacrificed a lot when the going got tough, but I didn't give up my creative practice -- that hasn't always been true for me, and I'm sure there are many more of us creative folk in the same boat. For that, I'm willing to give myself a pat on the back.

Discipline

Today I talked to a friend about writing for a little while, and at some point he casually mentioned that he dislikes working on deadlines because they interfere with his creative process. This took me by surprise and made me realize just how many of my processes -- creative and otherwise -- are shaped by my ADD. I haven't worked with deadlines for my creative work at all since college, and I responded to my friend's comment by wondering to myself, what must that be like?

Deadlines fuel my productivity almost exclusively, since the adrenaline, stress, and/or fear induced by an impending deadline stimulate production of the brain chemicals ADD people run short on. Without knowing others expect something from me on a specific timeline, I usually spin my wheels. Surprisingly to some, I don't discriminate between tedious projects and those I truly want to do for my own benefit and fulfillment. That is the essence of the ADD mind, though: prioritization and productivity independent of outside stress/stimulus is often virtually unheard of.

I'm glad to have had this conversation, though, because just last night I sat down to rework some old, old writing I thought I could make into something useful. After giving it some thought, I felt energized and eager to get working. That is, I felt that way until I actually set out to work. The blinking cursor taunted me, daring me to fill even one page, and I couldn't bring myself to get started.

The reality of my working style and needs add another dimension of challenges to my creative process. I struggle to apply myself, even (maybe especially) in arenas where skills come easily and naturally to me.

Knowing it's useless to fight an intrinsic part of who I am, I need to find a way to accept and work with it. I need to discover and use external motivators and get started on a major project I feel I can see through to completion. For starters, I really want to participate in National Novel Writing Month this year. Maybe I can even gather some friends to do it with me. But the concept of NaNoWriMo is nothing new to me. My dear friend Oli and I used to have "writing marathons" together in grade school, tearing through hours of timed writing and reading aloud. We just wrote and wrote, not stopping to edit or tear down our work, just creating and worrying about the finer details later. That's what I need to do now. I need to ask for support, find a few friends I can count on to share my struggles and triumphs and keep me honest about my commitments to myself.

No matter what, the way I work will not change. I will never, ever be able to say "I'd rather work without a deadline hanging over my head. I produce better final pieces that way." I just isn't true. My mind doesn't work that way. I need to figure out how I work best and what structure I can put in place to make sure I do right by myself and my craft.

Writing Down the Bones

Lately, for not much reason at all, I have begun to consider grad school again. I suppose I could pick reasons out of an imaginary hat: after two years in AmeriCorps, I have nearly $10,000 in education money waiting for me to take advantage of it; my husband and a few friends are going back to school; I feel others expect it of me; I feel myself getting older, I can extrapolate to see my wandering, self-absorbed years coming to an end.

Society holds an overriding sentiment that grad school should be functional, tied to promotions and salary renegotiations. I just want to delve into a practice or a field, devour it down to the rind and come out a more well-rounded person.

Lately (read: over the past few days) I have wondered about a program at University of Baltimore called Creative Writing & Publishing Arts. Lately I have renewed my love of writing, my desire to write outside of what I do at work every day.

Yesterday I got out an old book, one that Oli and I read in early high school, if not middle school. It's called Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, and I still feel like it speaks to the kind of writing practice I value.

I feel this could apply to far more than just writing -- it certainly has for my life:

There was no great answer outside ourselves that would get us an A in school anymore. It was the very beginning of learning to trust my own mind.

Or:

To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life.

I also appreciate any artist willing to lay out their struggles with practice and motivation. Here, Goldberg compares writing to running:

Like running, the more you [write] , the better you get at it. Some days you don't want to run and you resist every step of the three miles, but you do it anyway. You practice whether you want to or not. You don't wait around for inspiration and a deep desire to run. It'll never happen, especially if you are out of shape and have been avoiding it. But if you run regularly, you train your mind to cut through or ignore your resistance. You just do it. And in the middle of the run, you love it. When you come to the end, you never want to stop. And you stop, hungry for the next time.

Yesterday I went out and bought a new big notebook and filled the first page, even though I hate the first page and I didn't know what to write.

Ebb and flow.

Seeing art spaces, taking in art and music, and generally challenging myself in a community of other artists inspires me to no end. Give me an artist's studio, an empty stage, a karaoke bar, a darkroom...I just want to CREATE.

The problem is, sometimes everyday life doesn't inspire at quite that level. I can easily put off a trip to the BMA, buying tickets to a show, entering my work in a juried exhibition, or setting up a date to play piano and sing with a friend. And by easily, I mean it's easier than challenging myself -- even though I love to challenge myself. And inspiration can be so fleeting, it can slip away so fast that by the time I get home and decide to sit down an act on it...it's gone. Playing World of Warcraft after a long day at work seems SO much easier than looking up exhibitions or putting choir practice on my calendar.

It's so tough to strike that balance, to know when to push and when to sit back and cut myself a break. Because after all, as creative people we feel all the time like we should be divinely inspired, that we should never have to force or cajole ourselves into creating. It's just WHAT WE DO. But it's not. Creating art is a habit, and just like any good habit, it takes some maintenance.

My trouble is, when life gets too busy and stressful, how can I maintain my creativity when it's tough just to get dinner on the table? And if I didn't have any stress or busybusy in my life, would I still find excuses to slack off?

What's next?

Now that my summer voice class is over, I feel a need to keep the creative momentum going, find a new challenge right away. What's next? always seems to be the most difficult hump for me to get over, since having a schedule and/or telling people about my creative work tends to keep me pretty accountable.

A few weeks ago I visited the Load of Fun space on North Avenue for work (lucky me!) and found it totally inspiring. Its graffiti alley out back, black box theater downstairs, and warehouse full of studio spaces crystallized a thought in my mind that we really can do anything with our lives. Photographers' studios made me jealous of all their equipment, giant paintings stirred a little urge to create on canvas again, improv theatre groups' spaces made me want to audition for a musical. There was just SO MUCH, it almost brought tears to my eyes.

Okay, I'm telling this story with a disclaimer that I get a little dramatic sometimes.

But really, experiencing many different art forms (or even just art spaces) keeps my blood flowing. I used to love standing on empty stages before or after rehearsals and just imagining all the performances I'd give in my life. Sometimes the reality -- that I'm not doing those things now -- makes me yearn for a time when I could picture myself as anything I wanted. Truthfully, though, I don't think the best parts of the creative world are out of our reach even if we do have day jobs, bills, and adult responsibilities. It's just a matter of answering the question firmly:

What's next?

So this is the new blog (and I don't feel any different)

So it's true I wrote a blog religiously on a schedule for over a year. I called it Words + Images and talked about creative living, the art-making process, visual culture, and photography. Great. Fantastic.

I read articles on the internet about drawing traffic to a blog and nurturing a commenting community. I envied blogs like Strobist that seemed to have it all right. All in all, my website traffic did not go up significantly. Many people gave positive feedback on the blog, but I rarely, if ever, got comments. Despite everyone's best intentions (including my own) I didn't feel I had succeeded. I did, however, feel like I had invested a large chunk of time and energy into something that wasn't what I wanted. Again. Guess who also felt this way upon graduating college?

This summer I entered a fairly stressful time in my life, one where I was transitioning from over two years of AmeriCorps service to regular civilian employment, which is scarce these days (if you haven't noticed). Other stuff was happening too, I'm sure. At any rate, my dissatistfaction with the blog came to a head when I just didn't have the energy to come up with ideas, keep up with a long list of photography blogs so I stayed "in the know," and sit down to write every Monday and Thursay evening. So the blog went on an unexpected hiatus.

I realize now that I just live a creative life. I sing, write, play musical instruments, take photographs, and might someday pick up a paintbrush again. I occasionally get inspired by live theatre performances. Given an opportunity, I love to talk about how much I miss being onstage (except for the lights). I don't think visually, I think in words and sounds, hence the weight words and music have in this paragraph.

Getting a degree in painting and/or keeping a blog just about photography isn't quite true to myself. It leaves out some of the most moving art forms in my life. I don't know why I keep forgetting this. I'm no expert in anything, but I know I need to embrace my passion for writing and music, not just the visual arts.

I feel like I still need to write a blog about art-making, and there are probably several people who would agree with me, but I refuse to misrepresent my true inspiration, which comes from everywhere. This blog is going to be colloquial, it's going to be truthful and multifaceted and moody and overjoyed. But it won't be an expert opinion. It won't be refined. It will be for the rest of us, those who think it's okay to keep more than one obsession. I also don't know if this is the right decision. I never do.

I hope you like it.