Tag Archives: art

Sweating the small stuff:

But I like making stuff! — CC image “Chevy Worked Hard Building His Own Snowman” courtesy of Chevysmom on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Going to the library should not have been a big deal.

It’s pretty small stuff. Question: where will I do my writing today? Answer: the library.

Done.

It’s like the dilemma about changing the channel on the TV when you can’t find the remote. Truly, not worth thinking about for more than 2 seconds. Library: quiet, air conditioned, no distractions.^[1] A good place to do thoughtful work.

Except I questioned that should take that step, and almost got zero writing done that day as a result.

The easy way out of creativity

Have you ever known you needed to do something, but were looking for the easy way out?

Like most creative people, I’m fairly bruised from falling off and jumping back on the wagon of disciplined work. On a recent foray into more structured creative behavior, I came across this article from the Huffington Post outlining five bad habits that freelancers fall into. Number 5: Working From Your Bedroom caught my eye particularly.

“Working in your bedroom is only one step away from doing the laundry, two steps away from taking a nap, and three steps away from cooking in the kitchen,” #5 says. “Studies also show that working from your bedroom can cause you to have problems sleeping and resting when you’re not working.”

Hmm.

I’ve written before about the benefits of literally taking a new perspective — sitting in a new seat in your room or office when you work, for example. So I responded to the common-sense nature of Voakes’ advice right away. Great, I thought. Today I’ll go to the library!

Then I thought, If only it wasn’t 90 degrees outside…

Artists’ no. 1 excuse: If only…

Beware this phrase. Have you ever caught yourself using it? “If only” is the number one way our Inner Procrastinator brainwashes us. “If only [XYZ condition were met], I’d have this all taken care of…”

Which really translates into, “I’m letting myself off the hook by choosing a precondition that I know won’t be met. Sorry, art!”

Who cares if it’s 90 degrees outside? The library is air conditioned! Staying at home, faffing on the computer, would have been just as absurd as refusing to change the TV channel because I don’t want to get up out of my chair and the batteries are dead in the remote.

I had a goal to do creative writing work. I had decided to take both my own good advice on changing my physical perspective, and the accepted wisdom of freelancers everywhere that sometimes, we really do need to get out of the house to get things done. Going to the library would accomplish both goals.

Except getting there meant walking for nearly half an hour in the heat, getting even more hot and sweaty than I already was.

Now, I ask you, is that really a bad thing?

Work should make you sweat

Michael Phelps didn’t become an Olympic swimmer by sitting on his hands. Charles Dickens didn’t publish more than 30 books (but who’s counting?) by fretting about the temperature. And neither will you or I ever get where we want to be, creatively, if we’re afraid of a little sweat.

Which is why I think sweating the small stuff is a great strategy for getting creative work done. Working at the library versus working at home? Not a big deal, really…

Getting zero words on paper versus three hours of focused, dedicated writing and nearly two completed drafts?

Definitely worth the sweat.

===

What did you sweat creatively this week?

1. Unless you count books, of course. Those distract me all the time, but ironically, the otherwise siren call of literature becomes a soothing hum when I’m doing my own work surrounded by hundreds of tomes.
Back to the text

Will you play Social Media Mad Libs® with me?

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CC image courtesy of Aaron & Alli on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

I have a confession to make.

When I first started on Twitter, I kind of overdid it with the retweeting. I searched for output on writing and inspirational quotes, and fell into a perfect vortex of quotables (how’s this for a QWERTY slip: on my first pass at the foregoing sentence, I typed “vortext” — a vortex of text, yar!).

I have another confession: as a child, I was a Mad Libs junkie. Yes, that Mad Libs. The game of ignorant word substitution, where one person knows the story and the other one supplies words to fill in the blanks. My friend T and I would play for hours, laughing ever more insanely as time went by. We quoted each other our literary outputs for weeks afterwards.

Now I have a mad plan to bring these two dormant fascinations together. But I want help. Will you be my enablers?

Quotations are cool, but they have their limits

As I said, I love quotes.

I’m talking about all kinds of quoted language: brainy quotes from magazine articles, insightful quotes from speeches, inspirational quotes from Zen books and Hallmark cards, cool language displayed in literature or by the literati, snarky quotes from pop culture, TV and movies, quotes about writing, quotes about seizing the moment, quotes about puns and wordplay, quotes about the metaphoric uses of coffee.

Written quotes. Spoken quotes. Scripted quotes and improvised quotes, quotes set to music and quotes a capella.

Before I knew it, most of my time on Twitter was spent obsessively chasing down, favoriting, and retweeting quotes of every description. I feasted on quotes the way other people feast on candy or chocolate or coffee or beer.

Somehow, I got a hold of myself. I pulled myself out of the narcotic haze of brilliant language written by other people, and I asked myself the hard question. Was anyone interested in listening to me quote?

Hm.

Why was I retweeting the posts of other users which were themselves quotations by some third or fourth party — What was even remotely useful about this behavior?

We laugh better together

Mad Libs is not a game for the solitary. Its genius lies in the knowing collaboration between two people where one has information and the other knows their words will be twisted out of all proportion.

I had a stack of Mad Libs books. T and I re-used them so often, the pages where we filled in the words were divided into columns. Eventually we had to add looseleaf pages with additional columns. Sometimes we were innocuous: chair, clean, surprisingly, jumped. Often we went for the ridiculous, because we knew where this was all heading: toadstools, mutated, unbearably, exploded.

After the list was complete, we read the story results aloud to each other. The ensuing literature was without exception hilarious. (Really.)

Send me your quotes!

What I would like to propose is libbing on a grand scale, using the internet, and plugging into the great human propensity to hurl quotes at each other.

I am going to compose an entire story made up of unrelated quotations. And you’re going to help me. Our roles look like this:

You: send me quotations
Me: rearrange and string together.
Post it here.

What better use of quotations, digital media, and native human wackiness?

Here’s how you submit your quotes:

Post your quotes here, in the comments
Email [link] them using the contact form
Tweet to me @aocwrites using #DigitalMadLibs

Quotation submission cutoff will be the end of July, 2013.

Quotation guidelines:

Quotes will be up to 20 words in length. No longer.
No porn!
No drugs!
No gratuitous foul language! I’ll accept the occasional *$#@! when used for emphasis, and I reserve the right to determine what “occasional” and “emphasis” is.
Topics and sources may include but are not limited to: famous sayings by famous people, inspirational, literary, business, movies, TV, sports, travel, stand-up, food, zombies, and music. Still don’t have any ideas? I’m sorry.
Be as earnest or as silly as you like. The more we have of both category, the better.
Include the source, if you have it. Just because I’m a nerd, and I’d like to have that information.

Maybe some of you will want to make your own Mad Libs stories? I’d love to see those!

Let the quote-libbing begin!

Muse Hunting

An easy trick to help you think outside of the box

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Perspective.

Looking up through opaque floor at feet walking

The world looks different from down here… CC image “Perspective” courtesy of denzlenz. Some rights reserved.

We all think we have it, but often we’ve been gazing at the view from the same perch for so long, we think that’s the only way the world looks.

We do this with big things — like family relationships, geopolitical opinions, and music. We think about perspective metaphorically (unless we are a visual artist such as a photographer or a painter). But like many metaphorical turns of language, “perspective” started out as a literal condition, first. And sometimes a literal interpretation is the most effective way to achieve results.

My goal with this blog — as conservative as it might be — is to have a new article published every 2 weeks. I try to find a mental place where I am drafting at least one idea for future development, every week. I’m trying to stay ahead of the curve, because I don’t want to find myself up against a deadline with nothing to deliver. Some weeks I am more successful than others. I simmer with ideas and connections for days in a row. During these windows of inspiration my folder of scribbled notes swells awkwardly with all different sizes of paper. Post-it notes, the corners of notepad pages, the backs of leaflets, slips strewn with arrows and adorned with marginalia. I’ll save countless drafts and outlines to my online folders. Looking at what I’m producing, I’ll feel like I have more material than I need for the next six months.

But not all the time. Other weeks, I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel. Nothing is there. I can blame this on not doing what Julia Cameron calls filling the well or what I’ve called composting. This would be part of the truth. But if I’m being honest, a lot of the time my lack of creativity stems from laziness. And strangely, if I’m not writing, then I’m not writing anything insightful or brilliant, either.

I like to deal with my un-creative funk by shaking my habits until pieces come loose. For example, by changing where my body is.

Perspective.

This week, I spent a morning writing from the cozy nest of my bed. Yes, in my PJs. I got up at the appropriate time, and had breakfast. I even brushed my teeth and combed my hair. And then — because I work from home and have this much control over my schedule — I took off my shoes and climbed back into bed. It was snowing and sleeting outside, the perfect weather to be a hibernating bear. Yet while the bear would have only slept, I brought my laptop into the den with me. And began to write.

We’ve all developed daily routines. What we like to eat for breakfast, where we put our toothbrush, how often we check our email. I know I have a favorite place to sit at the table, and I bet you do, too. Also, your desk probably faces the same way every day. Am I right?

I tend to sit in the same work space most days. Until I notice that I’m sinking in gurgling mud, unable to extricate myself. Occasionally, I pack up, take my work to the library, or to a coffee shop. When the weather is nice (not this week), I sometimes go to a public park.

Not always, though. Sometimes I literally get up, walk around the table, and sit across from my habitual spot.

That’s it.

The new seat feels really weird at first. I notice absurd details, like the speck on the wall, or the dumpster-diver out in the alley with a bicycle trailer piled high with rubbish. The light is different. My body feels different in space.

That can be all I need. With no conscious effort, I am thinking off the beat, and my work is an altered creature.

One of my favorite nerd-destinations online is the Etymological Dictionary. Etymonline describes the history of “perspective” as follows:

perspective shot of tarnished copper doorhandles

… and beautiful in places we may have never cared to look. CC image “Perspective” courtesy of V_I_M_A_L. Some rights reserved.

“(n.) late 14c., ‘science of optics,’ from Old French perspective and directly from Medieval Latin; from Latin past participle of perspicere ‘inspect, look through, look closely at.’ Sense of ‘art of drawing objects so as to give appearance of distance or depth’ is first found 1590s, influenced by Italian prospettiva, an artists’ term. The figurative meaning ‘mental outlook over time” is first recorded 1762.’ [emphasis added]”

Perspective is, at root, seeing with our eyes. Looking through. Everything else is literary decoration.

The next time you feel like you’re in a rut, try shaking things up by physically exploring the world from another angle. You could discover galaxies… and all you had to do was move your chair.

What do you do when you’re stuck in a rut?

How not reading (and drawing, instead) helped my writing

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wall of art supplies and colored pastels

Add color to your life.
“Jacksons Drawing Supplies” CC image courtesy of Smallest Forest on Flickr.

You know what’s helped me do a lot more writing in recent weeks?

Drawing.

You know what else?

Not reading.

Also: going to the art supply store, visiting a photography exhibit, planning a DIY project to fix two of my chairs, and signing up for a voice and speech class.

Without planning it, I’ve begun bashing out 1,000 words or more a day — and without restricting myself to which piece I add the 1,000 words, I’ve watched at least three different projects grow. I’ve jotted a ton of creative riffs in my notebook and even… shocker… started keeping a journal again.

But this doesn’t make sense! I was contraverting one of the Golden Rules of Writing, which is: read! You can’t be a Good Writer without it, so the maxim goes. But sometimes, reading can get in the way.

It can be a crutch. We can use it as a distraction.

At least, I did.

So for a week, at the suggestion of the amazing book, The Artist’s Way, I didn’t do it. I didn’t read.

It was frustrating as all hell. I curtailed my emailing and my tweeting, and I didn’t allow myself to listen to podcasts or music when I got annoyed about something that I couldn’t read. I didn’t watch Hulu.

But what really floored me was the drawing thing.

Now, to quote Dickens: “Marley was dead as a doornail. This must be understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am about to relate.”

And my inner artist was dead as a doornail.

When I was a little kid, it’s true, I loved to draw, and I was always trying to get better. I wasn’t good at it, you see; I could tell that what I was drawing didn’t match the vision in my head. Still, that didn’t stop me, for years, from making daily pilgrimages to the back of my parents’ backyard every spring, to check on the progress of the crocuses coming up… and to sketch their daily progress.

What I really wanted was to catch them at the magical moment the buds appeared… or when the petals began to open. But somehow, I always missed that moment.

I haven’t drawn for twenty years: from the point I decided I should stop wasting my time and money taking art classes, because I would never be any good.

Before I did my reading deprivation week, I went to an art supply store. It was an idea I resisted. Going felt presumptuous and scary. I went because The Artist’s Way said so, and I was desperate. I hadn’t been to an art supply store in years. Those are for artists. What would I be doing there?

Yet I found myself in front of an array of sketchbooks, itching to get one.

Within a few weeks, I was at a park… with the 14” by 17” sketchbook I had bought (classic cream), a mechanical pencil and an eraser.

I, the non-artist, the one who couldn’t draw, was drawing a landscape.

I was there for over an hour. I think. I lost track of the time. It was windy, and cloudy, and my hands were going numb by the time I left. I had to clutch the edges of the notebook in a death grip so that the pages wouldn’t go flying all over the place. (Note to self: acquire large art clip(s).) I had my hood up so my hair wouldn’t block my view. I did a LOT of erasing. The page got smudged with charcoal, creased by wind. I gnarfed at each new gust with animal obstinacy.

I couldn’t wait to go home and write about it. After I did a little more drawing, of course.

When I came up for air and looked at the image, whole, I caught myself thinking: Hey, that’s pretty good!

This was revolutionary. I’d been telling myself for at least two decades how much I sucked as an artist. Now, I was plotting to get out and sketch a few days a week?

Yes, I absolutely had to get home and write about that.

== ==

Have any of you ever tried reading deprivation? What types of non-writing activities have inspired you to write?

Make | Believe

we make our stories as we make ourselves

Tag Archives: art

Sweating the small stuff:

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Will you play Social Media Mad Libs® with me?

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Muse Hunting

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An easy trick to help you think outside of the box

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How not reading (and drawing, instead) helped my writing

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