NaNoWriMo or No?

I've been chugging away at my September goals, and I feel pretty good about where I'll end up at the end of the month. Well, except for one goal that's giving me a little trouble: National Novel Writing Month.

Last year, I registered for NaNoWriMo in September or so, deciding on a whim to give myself a run for my money with a lofty goal. This year I know I can do it. I have a fine manuscript to prove it. But I'm a little hung up on plot and process.

I don't have a Great Idea yet, and November promises to be busy with school and holidays and the like. Actually, I do have a Great Idea, but it's for a collaborative project and I don't see any likely collaborators on the horizon.

This all amounts to a lot of hesitation about doing NaNoWriMo this year. I'd love to make it an annual tradition, but I'm torn between ambition and needing to have everything planned out. Part of me wants to spend all that time editing my current manuscript. Part of me wants to have the second draft finished by November so I can give it to my second beta reader. I want to be reasonable, but I also know I tend to make a lot of excuses. I can rationalize my way into (or out of) any situation. This is just a matter of direction—and which is the right one to rationalize.

Separating Me

"He was expert in knowing the thoughts and actions of living beings"

– Vimalakirtinirdesha Sutra 2

"Jesus knew all people and needed no one to testify about anyone; for he himself knew what was in everyone."

– John 2:24-25

From Jesus and Buddha: the Parallel Sayings

I don't hang with organized religion too much, but I do believe that if we quit with our own fears, agendas, and wants, our greatest spiritual thinkers have a lot to teach us about life strategy.

Lately I've felt out of touch with myself. For a long time I thought it was because I wasn't writing on a regular enough schedule, but that's not quite it.

Talking to a friend today, I might have found a piece of the problem: I'm constantly reacting to the world. Rarely do I step back from a situation and just watch and listen. I'm always feeling something.

This isn't just about feeling like my life is a loosely controlled whirlwind of emotion. Writers are always writing, every second of every day. That means we're also always observing. And if I'm mostly reacting, mostly just seeing my own feelings and actions, then what does that say about the characters I write?

Being Found Out

I feel like I've talked a lot about this writing book I've been reading: Writing Alone, Writing Together: A Guide for Writers and Writing Groups. No matter, I feel like saying something more.

The author is unafraid to acknowledge—regularly, even—that creative people are insecure. I appreciate that. We are insecure. We deal with rejection all the time (if we're doing our jobs), we have on-again, off-again relationships with the work that sustains us. We bare our hearts to the world and hope they stand up to critique. That's why a passage like this really speaks to me:

Even as much as we want to be part of a writing group, many of us suffer anxiety about joining one. We're afraid of making the commitment, afraid that maybe we're not good enough. We don't want to look foolish or be found out (that we can't write, that we're fakes, that our writing is mediocre or worse).

Reading it in plain text makes it seem okay. Well, if other artists feel this way, even established, successful, and/or respected artists, then it must be acceptable for me to struggle once in a while, too.

Accepting Rust

So a lot of exciting things are going on!  As a brief summary, I checked another item off my list of things I absolutely have to do in 2010 by seeing CRUMBLE (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake) at Single Carrot Theatre on Thursday.  I liked the play and thought it was well-executed on all fronts, so nothing but good news there.

In other good news, Piano Day is almost upon us!  I'm fulfilling a lifelong dream on Wednesday, when I'm expecting an antique piano to arrive in my dining room.  There will be a post about the piano's history, plus photos of its arrival.  Yay!

However, before I get into all that (there will be time enough midweek), I've been thinking lately about perfectionism, aptitude, and attitude when it comes to creative work.  I've said it before and I'll probably say it many more times: I struggle with perfectionism as an impediment to my work.

Despite all I've said about it, though, I've never mentioned the one case where aptitude won out against perfectionism in my life.  When I was nine years old, I decided to learn to play the flute.  It wasn't my first instrument or my last, but it was by far my best.  For many years, I planned on playing my flute as a career, getting a BFA in music performance and signing on with a major symphony orchestra.

The flute was/is the one art I have ever felt, deep in my heart, set me apart from the crowd in a big way.  Yes, I gave poor auditions and yes, I played obvious wrong notes sometimes.  But I never felt I had met my match among my peers.  This was something I felt unequivocally great at--when I tried to be the best, I was.

However, by virtue of self-doubt (as always, I wondered if I had the focus) and/or listening to other people, I didn't get that music degree.  To this day, I gravitate toward people with performing arts degrees because I feel I relate to them on some basic level, but if I chime in too much I end up feeling like an outsider.  A fake.  A wannabe.  After all, anyone can be a big fish in a small pond.  Every teenager wants to take the stage for thousands of people.  But I never really showed the world what I had.

At the same time, I know few people with performing arts degrees who have made it their primary career.  In fact, if I look at my two closest friends with BFAs in performance, both are working for non-profit organizations, just like me.  It's possible--maybe even likely--that I would have ended up in the very same place with or without the music degree I always wanted.

These days, I spend a lot of time singing and playing the piano, mostly because it's a great solo combination. I don't need to rely on a group of fellow performers to give me context.  But I can't help but wonder if falling in love with being a mediocre singer is, in some sense, an easy way out.  Not that I don't enjoy or shouldn't do those things, but no one is ever going to watch me sing and approach me afterward to say "that was incredible.  Really incredible."

And by the same token, it hurts a lot to know that at this point, no one's going to say that after seeing me perform on anything.  Not playing for four years while I went to college really set me back, and it's hard to get out my flute without focusing more on what's not there than what is.

I'd like to touch on this again, and more: the knowledge that I'm free to do anything I want, but I'm often impeded by the feeling that I've turned my back on something fundamentally important in my life.  I really need to own the spot I'm in and make it what I want, but that's hard work indeed for a self-critical perfectionist like me.  I'm interested to know if this is a common struggle for people who devote a lot of energy to a creative art in their younger years, only to be set back by a demanding degree program, a lack of a piano or fellow musicians, or a pure and simple lapse.  Everything comes back eventually, but it's hard to face the reality at first.  It's hard to realize you've let a great tool get rusty.

Bouncing Back

Yesterday I heard some words that hurt a little bit.  No, no one was picking on me.  I'm talking about those people in my life who I can depend on to give the honest (and sometimes obvious) advice I'm not quite ready to hear.

So the truth? If I really, really wanted to be actively productive right now, I probably would be. I'd be stubbornly perfecting the left-hand part on some new songs.  I'd be typing one-handed, wearing out my wrist on my manuscript every day.  Instead, I've been reading and watching movies and eating animal crackers.

As an ADD person, this can be a big sensitive spot when said the wrong way.  After all, we hear a lot of hurtful (read: ignorant) words labeling us lazy, unmotivated, inconsiderate, unconcerned.
        
The truth is, that has nothing to do with it.  This is just where I am right now.  Maybe I just need to, well, recuperate.  Despite having only one arm, there's not a whole lot I can't do...just some things I shouldn't.  Examples include: hunching over a piano or computer, going on too many long car rides, and dancing around and acting silly.  

Since these things aren't impossible, it's easy to overdo it.  Really, I should be sitting still and watching movies.  Even more, it's okay to let myself want that.  Maybe I feel like that's a wrong thing and I want my old self back, but this takes time.  I've never had a bounce-back period this long before.  More than likely, I need to stop moping, stop sneaking in two-handed typing, and just accept the fact that I want to take some time off.  Because that's the natural -- and most healthy -- way to recover from surgery.


And hey, at least I'll be able to say I watched five seasons of Weeds and all the 2010 Oscar winners when it's all said and done.

Disability & Disorientation

There have been plenty of times when I've said that I generally lack ambition.   In art school my professors talked about a drive to create, an insatiable need to keep working.  They even used it as a cautionary note about choosing a partner who would understand and give us the necessary intangible room for art-making.  I always thought that that was something that applied to other people, not me.  After all, I had never created anything great. But times like this, more than anything else, show me what that need to create really means.  


Most of my friends keep telling me I'm lucky.  I'm lucky to have so much time to sit and watch movies, reruns of Weeds, to read a book or just not to do anything.  And isn't that really enviable?  Don't we all want extra leeway at work, plenty of down time, guilt-free television watching, an excuse not to accomplish anything for a while?

And maybe we do, generally speaking.  Maybe I do.  But when it comes down to it, I just can't enjoy it. I can't.  


Do we call that an unfortunate excess of ambition that I'm suffering from? Maybe.  All I know is when I wake up in the morning and realize I have all of these songs, all these words running through
my head and I'm not able to get them out in the way I'm used to, it's hard to get up and get going. I feel extra needy of support from my friends.  When I'm by myself, I start feeling like life means less,
somehow. This is really unusual for me. Usually, alone time is full of creative energy.    


This is all to say that being prohibited -- physically or otherwise -- from creating in the way we are used to can be very traumatizing for an artist.  It removes part of our sense of belonging in the world. I'm not sure how to get around this.  I guess the only choice is to find ways of creating anyway, ways of doing what I do anyway, despite physical limitations. 


So far I've a few things that work.  Among them:

• Voice memos.  Unable to write as quickly with my left hand, I've spent more and more time hiding in far corners of the house whispering voice journals, secrets, letters I'll never send.  This amounts to my daily writing exercises, and even though speaking is hard to acclimate to, it's something.
• Talking about my work.  Some of these Evernote voice notes are about my manuscript, and I'm seriously hoping for a chance to talk some things over with a writing buddy sometime soon.  At least then I'll be able to create a list of work to do when I can really type again.
• Karajan!  I may not be able to practice my usual stack of songs on the piano, but plunking out things by ear should be fine, right?  Playing by ear has always been my weakest point, so I shelled out 15 bucks for this iPhone/iPod Touch app and wow, was it worth it.  I've spent the past few days drilling on intervals and recognizing augmented, diminished, and suspended chords.  This is what it's going to take for me to realize this is just another skill, and not a terribly hard one for me to learn.  I want to write out a piano version of "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod" by the end of the week.

Other than that, I'm just left to wait it out, watch those movies, and hope my best friends are able to make a little special time for me while I wander around like a lost lamb.

Singing With Your Headphones On

Despite having heard some advice to the contrary, I enjoy singing with headphones on.  More accurately, I tend to sing with one earbud in, one earbud out.  I think it's pretty effective as an accompaniment, especially for songs I have no hope of ever being able to play on the piano.

During Hollywood Week on this season of American Idol I caught a glimpse of Mary Powers doing the same thing in rehearsal -- complete with holding the iPod like a microphone -- and I thought, hey, it's catching on!  So naturally I was pretty impressed when I watched a video about the audition process for Disney's American Idol Experience (I'll be in Disney World next week and have half a mind to check it out) and saw they'd done us one better.  They rigged iPods to display the lyrics while the song is playing, kind of like your own personal karaoke.  This is what they give you for rehearsal if you make it through to the performance rounds.

Maybe it follows naturally, maybe it doesn't, but my next question was, I wonder what this looks like when I do it?  Also knowing recording yourself is an effective practice tool, I whipped out my video camera, pressed the YouTube button, and ran through an entire song.

It was...awful.  I watched the entire thing to see if it got better toward the middle (or end), but it just stayed dreadful.  I felt like I was watching one of the American Idol auditions where the judges ask, "has anyone actually ever heard you sing before today?"

Ouch.  So that left me wondering, is it the headphones thing?  I feel like I can hear myself sing.  Or is it that at a certain age, you just can't just decide you want to start singing?  Well, really?  20 is too old?  What if I should have listened to my fellow instrumental musicians when they said "there's a reason we play instruments and don't sing?"  What about the people who have complimented me in the past, the juries who have given me passing grades?  Does this really need to be an existential crisis, or can I just note the flaws and work them out?

The thing is, this is something find really, really fun.  So fun that if I had my druthers I'd put on my carefree and fun-loving face and audition for the Idol Experience while we're in Disney.  And who knows, that might end up being the moral of the story: just because you have a discouraging experience doesn't mean you need to give up entirely.  And I probably will keep on going like I've been forever, though not without a lot of harumphing along the way.  After all, I eventually got over what was arguably my most frustrating performance moment ever: blowing an audition by messing up a scale.  I missed the cut by one slot, but still scored at the top of every other category (sightreading and a prepared piece, as I remember).  Ugh.

The thing is, no matter what the circumstances I expect all this to come naturally.  If it doesn't, I'm just "bad at it."  But of course, I'm sure my manuscript has shaky passages I'll need to rework.  I play bad notes on the piano all the time.  I sat through some brutal critiques on the path to my BFA in Studio Art.  It all requires work, even when that work involves watching a torturous video that's nothing like what I saw from my own point of view.

Maybe I just need to spend more time walking around the house with one earbud in my ear.

Catharsis

A few years ago, I knew someone who was Chinese and played the violin.  She was really passionate about music – playing, sharing with others, everything – and I knew this because it was so clear in her eyes every time I saw her.  When someone close to her died, she stopped playing for a little while.  This she explained, was because her culture dictates that one shouldn’t engage in anything cathartic during a period of grieving.

I remembered this at an odd time, just sitting on the bus on the way to work today.  It gave me pause because throughout my life, I’ve used music as a cathartic vehicle that way: an escape from grief and struggle.  I always thought it was a good thing, a way to stay grounded, and I think it’s fascinating to consider a cultural viewpoint completely opposite.

If anyone else out there has used art – be it performance, visual, craft, or anything else – as a sort of cathartic outlet during a difficult time, I’d like to know your thoughts on this.  Does it allow us to escape, experience a lesser magnitude of grief?  Is this a bad thing?  Cultural traditions surrounding grief and loss are really interesting to me – for example, the Jewish tradition of covering all the mirrors in a house where someone has died so mourners needn’t be self-conscious about showing their feelings.  Again, this seems to encourage a sentiment of embracing emotion, letting it carry you for a time, and letting it go.

For me, I’ve often said music is the one thing that carried me safely through some really rough (read: angsty) patches in my life.  I don’t want to think about how I would have felt without it.  I don’t view that as escapism, I view it as self-medication in the best way, like exercising to increase your endorphins.  I view it as taking care of myself.  But I can also see how someone might argue it’s an act of running away from the full impact of my emotions.

Thoughts?

Perfectionism -- and Letting Go of It

As artists (and I use the term generally here), we often want to create something great.  Even from a young age, when our lives are filled with praise for our talents, expectation tends to accompany it: "you're such a good actor, let me know when your first big movie is coming out," "invite me to all your gallery openings in New York," "you'll autograph a copy of your first CD for me, right?"

These fantasies are a lot of fun as a kid, imagining our great successes later in life.  And indeed, it's this aspiration to greatness that keeps us going through good times and bad.  I attribute a lot of my successes to being born and bred a perfectionist, and a stubborn one at that.

At the same time, when we get to art school we spend a lot of time debating whether there's anything new under the sun.  Are we constrained or liberated by the fact that "new ideas" really don't exist anymore?

And when I find myself feeling no more than average, when I start mourning the fact that I'm not a good friend, that I'm bad at my job, that I'll never be a great writer, and/or I haven't ever done anything truly commendable (none of which are true), I start to wonder: when should I start focusing my energy on tempering this craziness rather than praising it?  I'm always wondering, will letting some of my self-criticism and perfectionism go make me complacent?  Will it lower my aptitude?  Will it hold me back from doing great things?

The truth is, I don't think so.  As someone who often thinks if the bar isn't out of reach it's not set high enough, I've been wondering lately if asking too much of oneself can be constraining in its own right.  For example, musicians are trained to relax our bodies completely.  This is the only way for our fingers to conquer the fastest notes, the only way for our voices to acquire a pleasing tone.  How often have we seen a great performance and heard someone say "she makes it look so easy?"  In fact, musicians can suffer a whole range of serious injuries as a result of poor technique, keeping tension in wrists and vocal cords.

More and more, I feel like this training can be applied to everything we do in life: only when we are entirely at ease and sure of ourselves, only when we release our tension and stop anticipating difficult passages with trepidation in our hearts, can we sail right on through the rough patches and come out on the other side unscathed and wickedly impressed with ourselves.  In this model, worry and perfectionism don't have a place.  Sure, sometimes we have to concentrate a little harder to make sure things turn out the way we want them, but unrealistic expectations don't really get us anywhere.  It's all just work, and eventually it all comes together into something great anyway -- isn't that why we do it in the first place?