I found this in my six-year-old’s (abandoned) diary.
If you’re reading this, the sun has not died yet.
And that’s not nothing!
It’s not inside you trying to get out, it’s outside you trying to get in
There’s a joke I like to tell during Q&As:
People often come up to me and they say, “I feel like I have a book in me!”
And I say, “That sounds painful. You should see a doctor!”
I never feel like I have a book in me. I always feel like there’s a book around me. It’s like I’m a planet and there’s all this space junk orbiting me, and all the junk starts smashing together and forming book chapters. My job is to grab that stuff around me and shape it into something.
Today in The Red Hand Files, Nick Cave had this advice for a “blocked” songwriter:
My advice to you is to change your basic relationship to songwriting. You are not the ‘Great Creator’ of your songs, you are simply their servant, and the songs will come to you when you have adequately prepared yourself to receive them. They are not inside you, unable to get out; rather, they are outside of you, unable to get in. Songs, in my experience, are attracted to an open, playful and motivated mind. Throw my song away – it isn’t that good anyway – sit down, prepare yourself and write your own damn song. You are a songwriter. You have the entire world to save and very little time to do it. The song will find its way to you. If you don’t write it, someone else will. Is that what you want? If not, get to it.
This reminded me of Elizabeth Gilbert’s terrific 2002 GQ profile of Tom Waits:
“Children make up the best songs, anyway,” he says. “Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.” This openness is what every artist needs. Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. He believes that if a song “really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.” “Some songs,” he has learned, “don’t want to be recorded.” You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes “is trying to trap birds.” Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like “digging potatoes out of the ground.” Others are sticky and weird, like “gum found under an old table.” Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful “to cut up as bait and use ’em to catch other songs.”
Gilbert writes more about Waits’ process in her book, Big Magic:
If a song is serious about being born, he trusts that it will come to him in the right manner, at the right time. If not, he will send it along its way, with no hard feelings.
“Go bother someone else,” he’ll tell the annoying song-that-doesn’t want to be a song. “Go bother Leonard Cohen.”
I love how both Nick Cave and Tom Waits seem to believe that songs are out there for the taking, and if you don’t grab them, somebody else will.
“You don’t understand,” Michael Jackson once said, “if I’m not there to receive these ideas, God might give them to Prince.”
What if you stopped thinking about your ideas as things you need to let out of you, but things you need to let in to you? Things you need to be ready to receive?
If you start to think about creative work this way, Gilbert says, “it starts to change everything.” You can stop being afraid and daunted and just “do your job. Continue to show up.”
Thoreau: “A man receives what he’s ready to receive.”
A four-year-old will get you unstuck
I learned so much about art from watching a kid draw. I taught at the grade-school level. Kids don’t call it art when they’re throwing things around, drawing—they’re just doing stuff.
—John Baldessari
When I talk to artists who are “stuck” I often think they should be prescribed a session with some four-year-olds. (Borrow a kid!) Four-year-olds are the most “unstuck” creatures around. To watch a four-year-old draw is to watch some kind of magic happen, magic that, even in two or three years, will not come naturally, but will need to be conjured, somehow.
Lynda Barry does this at the University of Wisconsin:
“When I came to the university… one thing that struck me was how miserable the grad students were. I thought, I wonder if I could pair them up with four-year-olds?” She started a program called Draw Bridge that did just that. “What I hoped would happen was my students would learn to borrow the kids’ state of mind and learn to approach problems in a way that was less tight and focused, a way that was happier and set the conditions for discovery.”
If you follow Lynda on Instagram, she often posts her collaborations with four-year-olds:
https://www.instagram.com/p/ByGER_QgzuS
Here’s one about drawing Batman:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxyh16rl1Ke/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
And here are some 4-year-olds doing a copying exercise:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BxeFX6KDKEf/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
I’m lucky right now because I live with a four-year-old and I get to spend a lot of time with him, watching him draw. (Although, I’m telling you: it’s a lot easier to just borrow one and hand them back!) If you came to one of the Keep Going tour dates, you saw this slide of Jules drawing when he was three:
(I write more about his drawing in the “Your Work is Play” section of the book.)
This is my second time around living with a four-year-old. This one is a little more introverted than the first one. I did a lot more collaborating with the first. I remember transcribing some of his wild monologues:
He was basically an ecstatic poet!
I have two daughters that could both draw like Albrecht Durer when they were about seven years old, before the teachers got ahold of them.
—Kurt Vonnegut
I’m also reminded now of illustrator Mica Angela Hendricks and her collaborations with her 4-year-old daughter, which started out when her daughter saw her sketchbook and asked if she could draw, too. She eventually started draw unfinished heads at night so her daughter could finish them in the morning. “Do you have any heads for me today?” her daughter would ask.
Hanging out with his four-year-old niece led animator Don Hertzfeldt to some of the best parts of his absolutely incredible short, World of Tomorrow. Here’s how it went:
My niece, Winona, contributes the voice of little Emily. She was 4 when I recorded her. You can’t direct a 4-year-old, I learned that really fast. I couldn’t even get her to repeat lines for me. So I just recorded audio as we drew pictures together, played with stuff, talked about the world. I was pretty aware that if the recordings produced nothing, the film would have been dead before it even began. She lives in Scotland and I am in Austin, so I usually only get to see her about once a year. After a weeklong visit, recording five minutes here and there, I had about an hour or so of total recorded time with her. So the first step was finding all of her best reactions and questions, and I began to figure out what her character could be talking about here, or looking at there.
“You can’t direct a 4-year-old…” Truer words never spoken! All you can do is set them up and hit record. And hang on for the ride…
I’ll send you a postcard
Postcards I sent the boys from the Keep Going tour. (I missed several cities.)
Trimming the Wick
John Wick ran 101 minutes.
John Wick 2 ran 122 minutes.
John Wick 3 ran 131 minutes.
I am no film critic, but here is advice to the filmmakers for John Wick 4, which I will undoubtedly see, stolen from a website about candles:
Trimming the Wick will keep the candle burning without any black soot and it will give your candle a longer burn time. Here is what happens when you do not trim the Wick properly: When a Wick gets too long it cannot draw wax all the way up to the top of the wick. Therefore, the Wick itself will start to burn.
(I looked, and Destination Wedding ran only 86 minutes.)
- ← Newer posts
- 1
- …
- 216
- 217
- 218
- 219
- 220
- …
- 627
- Older posts→