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NO MORE SECONDHAND ART If there’s one over-riding theme, it’s a plea for passion. London says that technique is fine, but: “Unless a courageous stance to life is coupled with these ingredients, tedious and shallow things will be made. Unless a capacity to dream and fantasize is there, derivative things will be made. Without an unflinching sense of self, the work will ring hollow and will remain unconvincing. Unless one wanders into territory that is perplexing, mysterious, overwhelming, the work will be pedestrian and predictable, and so will we.” London’s view of what our lives could be is inspirational: “Suppose life IS a journey, an endless, surprising odyssey in which we may move from naivete to wisdom, from self-consciousness and awkwardness to grace, and from superficial knowledge to profound wonder. The infinite menu of possibilities that life continuously displays before us may be viewed as an invitation to embark on this adventure through varied and unpredictable terrain.” He also suggests that what we do when we are discouraged is crucial: “There comes a time in the forging of imagery when we run out of ideas, run thin on the courage necessary to push beyond the known and ordinary. Most often at this point of having exhausted our known complement of resources, we give up the task and retreat to surer ground. But for those who stay in the creative arena during this anxious period, who do not fall back, there sometimes comes a sudden infusion of energy and clarity.” The process of making art (or life as art) is not instant. London suggests, “Do you want to draw like Rembrandt or Degas? Simple! Just draw ten hours a day, six days a week for forty years.” How can we loose the hold ordinary living has upon us so that we may begin to open up to the possibility of a larger, a new, an unknown universe? I’ll finish with a few of London’s suggestions: Stop looking. Stop working so hard to force it out. E.g., time between being awake and asleep. Relax. You do know how to relax yourself. What you need to do is to give yourself the time, space, and permission to do it. Play. Lighten up. Change your pace. Get lost. From time to time, let's permit ourselves to approach the gate we have so arduously constructed to separate what we know and value from what we don't know and don't value, and experience what it is like to be at the very frontier of our personal boundaries. So if we are to fully enjoy the show we must keep changing our seat. We must look underneath things, look closely at things, look very slowly, gobble up lots of things, stay with one thing all day, try impossible things. Sometimes we have to squint, at other times we need to stop speaking for a day. We have to close our eyes and listen to the world. If we don't change the angle of our vision, we won't see the whole show.” That’s a little taste of what Peter London offers you in “No More Second-Hand Art.” For the full meal, buy the book!
THE RENAISSANCE SOUL Are you somebody who lacks focus? Somebody who is sometimes too scattered to accomplish your goals? Me, too, but the good news is that actually we are Renaissance Souls! Sounds much better, doesn’t it? If any of these describe you, you probably are a Renaissance Soul: 1. The ability to become excited by many things at once, often accompanied by difficulty choosing. 2. A love of new challenges: once challenges are mastered, easily bored. 3. A fear of being trapped in the same career or activity for life. 4. A pattern of quick, sometimes unsatisfying flings with many hobbies. 5. A successful career that has left you bored or restless. In the past, educated people were expected to have a variety of interests and skills. It’s only since the Industrial Revolution that specialization became such a virtue. Since then, we have been told that it’s a bad thing to be a jack-of-all-trades. But times have changed again, and now it is the person who is capable of life-long learning and maximum flexibility who has the best prospects. Lobenstine cites the following advantages of being a Renaissance Soul: The author suggests choosing no more than four Focal Points, four interests or projects to pursue at any one time. For each one, it’s vital to consider what she calls the PRISM points: Price: What will it cost you to get to your Focal Point? Include time, emotional stress, and sacrifices from your loved ones. Reality: What will the day-to-day, nitty-gritty of engaging in this Focal Point really involve? Integrity: Why you find this Focal Point potentially worthwhile and consistency with your values. Specificity: Only when you have a specific statement will you be able to know when you are being successful in pursuit of this Focal Point. Sometimes success rests not in the product but in the process, so ask yourself what’s really important. Measurability: Include a date and other relevant numbers. One element of the book I particularly like is the author’s approach to time management. She points out that Renaissance Souls don’t like to be held to doing specific things at set times; they prefer to go with whatever their energy flow is at the time. At one point, we might feel inspired to write, at other times we might feel more like making phone calls. Her suggestion for dealing with this: “I suggest you mark your calendar with what I call Focal Point calendar blocks. These are chunks of time that are roped off for the pursuit of your chosen interests—but they do NOT require you to decide in advance which items on your worksheet you’ll address during these times. Some of your calendar blocks each week should take up long stretches of time; others should be shorter.” In other words, when I got to a Focal Point calendar block devoted to getting my novel written and published, I could decide at that point whether to write another chapter, or do research on likely publishers, or make a related phone call. She suggests keeping track of what you’re doing when, in order to make sure that you’re not neglecting any of your Focal Points: “Another way to make sure you aren’t spending all your time on one Focal Point and neglecting others is to color-code each focus area and use a matching highlighting pen to indicate on your calendar which Focal Point you’ve pursued on any given day.” Only if you consistently find yourself avoiding certain key tasks do you need to adjust what you’re doing. Lobenstine has some good suggestions for what to do when you get stuck, too: By the way, this approach is totally compatible with the systems and techniques I advocate in my e-book, “Time Management for Writers”, which is available for download from this site. If you are one of those people who has been criticized (and maybe you’ve been self-critical) for not wanting to stick with just one activity or one career area, this book will help you to appreciate the benefits of your approach. Maybe the strongest benefit of the book is not even any specific strategy or technique, as much as this validation: “We have the right to pursue the variety and combinations of activities we feel enthusiastic about.”
IF YOU WANT TO WRITE This book was originally published in 1938, but it’s as fresh today as the day it first came out. It’s not about the technical aspects of writing; instead, it’s about how to have the courage to be creative when others doubt you or, even worse, you doubt yourself. In my fairly large library of writing books, this and “The Courage to Create” by Rollo May are the ones I re-read at least once a year. Reading Brenda Euland’s book is like a booster shot, inoculating you against fear and doubt. Below I’ve featured some of my favorite lines from the book, but really you have to get your own copy! From the book: Everybody is talented, original, and has something important to say. Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his true self and not from the self he thinks he should be. ...self-trust is one of the very most important things in writing. But this joyful, imaginative, impassioned energy [that children display] dies out of us very young. Why? Because we do not see that it is great and important. Because we let dry obligation take its place. ...you must practice not perfunctorily, but with all your intelligence and love... Work freely and rollickingly as though they were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters. Creative power... How could be keep it alive? By using it, by letting it out, by giving some time to it. ... Men spend their lives adding and subtracting and dictating letters when they secretly long to write sonnets and play the violin and burst into tears at the sunset. Blake used to say, when his energies were diverted from his drawing or writing, "that he was being devoured by jackals and hyenas." And what we so often call "reason" and think is so fine, is not intelligence or understanding at all, but just this: it is arguing from our memory and the sensations of our body and the warnings of other people, that if we do thus and such a thing we will be uncomfortable. "It won't pay." "People will think it is silly." "No one else does it." "It is immoral." But the only way you can grow in understanding and discover whether a thing is good or bad, Blake says, is to do it. "Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." I want to assure you with all earnestness, that no writing is a waste of time--no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good. Van Gogh...during his life he made only $109 in all on his paintings...He had a terribly hard life--loneliness, poverty and starvation that led to insanity. And yet it was one ofthe greatest lives that was ever lived--the happiest, the most burningly incandescent. And see, a few words he has written in his letters, these many years after his death, have changed my whole life! One great inhibition and obstacle to me was the thought: will it make money? But you find that if you are thinking of that all the time, either you don't make money because the work is empty, dry, calculated, and without life in it. Or you do make money and you are ashamed of your work. We are always doing something--talking, reading, listening to the radio, planning what next. The mind is kept naggingly busy on some easy, unimportant, external thing all day. But we northerners have become too much driven by the idea that in twenty years we will live, not now: because by that time our savings and the accrued interest will make it possible. I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months. The thing to say to such people is: "See how bad a story you can write. See how dull you can be. Go ahead, That would be fun and interesting. I will give you ten dollars if you can write something thoroughly dull from beginning to end." And of course no one can. Now to have things alive and interesting it must be personal, it must come from the "I": what I know and feel For that is the only great and interesting thing. That is the only truth you know, that nobody else does. The more you wish to describe a Universal the more minutely and truthfully you must describe a Particular. In ordinary fiction, movies, etc. everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word of it. Someone asked Ibsen how he happened to name the heroine of "A Doll's House" Nora, and he said: "Well, her real name was Eleanora but they got to calling her Nora as a little girl." You see, he knew her whole life, everything about her, from earliest childhood, though in the play only a few hours of her life are shown. Tolstoi once said there is nothing in the world that should not be expressed in such a way that an affectionate seven-year-old boy can see and understand it. Then in a famous essay called, "What is Art?" he said something like this: Art is infection. The artist has a feeling and he expresses it and at once this feeling infects other people and they have it too. And the infection must be immediate or it isn't art. If you have to puzzle timidly over a picture or book, and try, try to like it and read many erudite critics on the subject...then it is not Art. And so from now on, if you want to write, for example, about a man who is suffering from boredom, just quietly describe what your own feelings are when you been bored. This is all you have to say. Don't say the boredom was "agonizing, excruciating," unless your own boredom was, which is doubtful. The secret of being interesting is to move along as fast as the mind of the reader (or listener) can take it in. Both must march along at the same tempo. That is why it is good to read your writing aloud to yourself. As soon as your voice drags, cross that part out. It is just as when you listen to a politician making a speech: "Yes, yes"! you say to yourself impatiently as his voice pounds on. "'Democracy.' I know it. I get it. I see the point you are going to make fifteen minutes from now: you are going to say--'Democracy is a fine thing!'" And so you stop listening to the hammering voice... But when you are interested in a speech or something written, there is a pull-along every second. You wait for each phrase, each quick, new idea, gratefully and eagerly, as it comes. And know this: whenever you find yourself writing a single word or phrase or page dutifully and with boredom, then leave it out. Something is wrong. And so try this yourself when you write an article. Do not worry about the whole. Write what is next, the idea that comes now at the moment. Don't be afraid. For there will be more coherence and arrangement in you thoughts than you think. (In rewriting) do not try to think of better words, more gripping words. Try to see the people better. It is not yet deeply enough imagined. Write what comes to you now. More will come later. The river will begin to flow through you. It took me years to learn this. Until recently I would have followed what they all advised and planned it, writing out a concise, logical outline... You write, and plan it afterwards. You write it first because every word must come out with freedom, and with meaning because you think it is so and want to tell it. The only unfortunate people are the glib ones, immediately satisfied with their work. To them the ocean is only knee-deep. Don't be afraid of yourself when you write. Don't check-rein yourself. If you are afraid of being sentimental, say, for heaven's sake be as sentimental as you can or feel like being! Then you will probably pas through to the other side and slough off sentimentality because you understand it at last and really don't care about it. And so now I have established reasons why you should work from now on until you die, with real love and imagination and intelligence, at your writing or whatever work it is that you care about. If you do that, out of the mountains that you write some mole hills will be published. Or you may make a fortune and win the Nobel Prize. But if nothing is ever published at all and you never make a cent, just the same it will be good that you have worked.
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