Seeing, Believing, and Singing a Little Song

Whenever I'm using my sick time I always feel like it should be a special gift, some paid time to just do my thing. Too bad needing time off from work generally means, well...I'm not well enough to work.

As it turns out, recovering from surgery takes a lot out of you.  Noted.  But I've had this entry brewing in Evernote for a week now and I feel like it's time to get back into the swing of things just a little.

While vacationing in Disney World with friends and husband, I decided to audition for the American Idol Experience attraction.  This was one of those spur of the moment decisions that left me too little time for adequate preparation, but I knew deep down I'd be disappointed if I didn't go for it.

The rundown: with no prep time I had to make a safe choice, so the song didn't show off much besides my ability to pick a song I could sing.  Oh well.  More importantly, it was the first legitimate audition room I'd set foot in in at least seven or eight years.  Secretly, I don't think I audition well.  I do well at acting nonchalant all the way until the first note.  Then I have trouble seeing it as just another performance and get a little (or a lot) nervous.

Anyhow, that 30 second spot in front of the casting agent was way important for me.  Sure, she gave me good feedback after -- that my instrumental music background gives me great breath control and a decent ear, but I don't have quite the depth and breadth of vocal experience they're looking for -- but I'd already proven all I needed to.  In that moment, I made myself believe.  I proved I could do it.


Since then I've felt different, better, more inspired to keep at it.  More comfortable with the idea of singing with my friends, making mistakes, starting one of those ridiculous YouTube-based bands that seem to be all the rage.


This is something I've been watching very closely on the real American Idol, too.  I think it could decide who wins the competition.  Conviction and a genuine belief in oneself is perhaps the most important ingredient when you're talking about being an artist -- and probably a successful person, too.  Once you know, accept, and like who you are, once you feel good about putting that out there and being bold, others can't help but believe right along with you.

Review, Reflect...Reject?

Over the past few weeks I've written a bit less and read a lot.  I tend to operate in phases with my creative work, listening to music nonstop for a couple weeks and then rededicating myself to playing or singing every day, devouring novels one after another before taking out a writing project again, mulling over photography exhibits and waiting for an idea to surface.


Upon coming back from a week-long vacation, the first thing I wanted to do was get my current manuscript out and read over the last half of it with fresh eyes and a good cup of coffee.  This I did, and I discovered exactly what point of the creative process I had entered.


I found myself experiencing considerable distaste for every paragraph.  Had I really created this haphazard story, these preachy chapters full of flat characters?


I always seem to encounter this hump when working on a big project: the no man's land between finishing the foundation work and beginning to see a well-developed product can be brutal.  After spending too much time on something to reasonably turn back, I realize I've brought something utterly mediocre into the world.

This likely happens to every artist, with perfectionists like me experiencing an intensified version thanks to our desire to make everything top-notch material fit to win an award on the first draft.  I know I've felt it looking at half-completed paintings, first batches of photographs, and most recently this manuscript that's taken up weeks (months) of my life.  Suddenly, I'm struck by the question: was this even worth my time?

I suppose what defines the experience -- and the artist -- is the decision to say yeah, it was, and keep moving.  Take the awful last half of that manuscript and make it something to be proud of.  Figure out how to make my characters dynamic and believable people the reader feels invested in.  Plenty of people stop at this point and let that self-doubt get the best of them, let it convince them that they'll never create something amazing.  But some of us don't, and no matter what I think we've got a great accomplishment to look forward to.  Nothing great comes out of an easy task -- otherwise there'd be no reason to feel we'd done anything.

Quelling my self-criticism and deciding to keep developing a project past the tough halfway-point is, to me, one of the most important pieces of the artistic process.  Overcoming frustration and/or disappointment, refusing to feel embarrassed at the quality of a work in progress, and stubbornly coming out with something I'm excited to put on display gives me perhaps the biggest sense of achievement.  It's what -- in my mind -- sets me apart as a professional artist.

Bad Poetry

Over the holidays a friend gave me a little cardboard box full of pretty little notebooks.  This sounds like a gift, but really it was just part of the reward I reaped for keeping him company while he cleaned out 10 years' worth of papers stuffed into his desk.  Occasionally he'd find something he hadn't used in several years and offer it to me.

The notebooks are unlined and pretty small -- about 1/4 of a standard sheet of paper -- so my first thought was, these are perfect for poetry!  Now, poetry always came naturally to me when I was younger, but it hasn't for at least 10 years or so.  I'm certain this event coincides with the point when I realized all the poetry I was writing was terrible.

Who knows if I still write bad poetry now, though, because I just stopped doing it.  Just about every other form of writing comes easily and reads well, so I figured I should just give up on writing poetry and lyrics.  However, receiving that box of little notebooks got me thinking: just like I give myself permission to write just about anything in my daily writing practice, maybe I should give myself permission to write bad poetry, too.  So that's what I'm doing: writing bad poetry in these little notebooks.  So far I've written about unrequited desires and fleeting fantasies and musings on the land of my birth, since most bad poetry tends to be about these things.

The thing is, a lot of good poetry is about that, too.  And if I never let myself write poetry because it's not coming out sounding perfect or right or even tolerable, I'll never come out on the other side.  Scrawling out a novel rather haphazardly seems to have been pretty well-received, so I'm going to try writing down some vaguely poetic lines in hopes of finding something good eventually.

And, to honor that sentiment, I'm putting something below the cut that I wrote in the car on the way up to Vermont the other day.  Leave something in the comments if you've ever hesitated to do something because you thought it wouldn't be good.