I think you really have to see the days to know what you can do with them.
I cut up one of my calendars and taped what’s left of April to May and June and, voila, it made 10 whole weeks. I like seeing them all there, without the month headings. Makes what I’m doing seem more doable, somehow.
“When I’m finished and the work is off the loom, it sits there and ruminates. Then it starts having a name in spite of myself.”
—Sheila Hicks
“Part of the impetus to name things is that if you don’t they get called Untitled, and that just gets to be a drag to have a thing referred to as ‘untitled.’”
—John McCracken
I’m one of those writers who likes to come up with the title for the piece first and then write the thing. That’s how my last two books worked, but now I’m working on this new book, and nobody can agree on any of the titles I’ve come up with so far.
In My Life in France, Julia Child writes about what a pain in the ass it was to come up with the title for Mastering The Art of French Cooking. She and her husband Paul debated “the merits of poetic titles versus descriptive titles.” They made lists and lists of titles, trying to come up with the right “combination of words and associations” that would work.
Editor Judith Jones (who got the original manuscript with the title “French Recipes for American Cooks”) finally came up with the title after “playing with a set of words like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to get them to fit together.” (Dramatized in the movie, Julie & Julia.) This seems to me like a totally sensible approach, so I’m stealing it: I’m writing words I like on index cards, and shuffling them around.
Still, even if you come up with a great title, there will be Unbelievers. Alfred Knopf, when he heard Jones’ title, supposedly shook his head and said, “I’ll eat my hat if anyone buys a book with that title!”
Above: pages from Every Day a Word Surprises Me and quotes from Art is the Highest Form of Hope.
Q: “Who has time for that?”
A: “People who make time for that.”
Above: art-making advice from our 40-year-old ovens.
Yesterday designer Jessica Hische tweeted, “I have it in my head that I should pursue an MFA in creative writing to be a better writer and find more space for writing in my life. Really, I should find a way to carve out time to focus on writing without paying tens of thousands of dollars to do so.”
Unsolicited, but here’s my advice for visual thinkers (and others) who want to be better writers:
1) Get Lynda Barry’s What It Is and do the exercises every day in a private notebook.
2) Start a blog and write something there every day.
3) Find or start a writer’s group. (I don’t have one, but I’m married to a fantastic writer and editor.)
4) Become a better reader. Read way more than you write.
5) I believe that the creative process translates across disciplines, so the real challenge to a visual artist who wants to write is learning to operate with words the way you do with pictures. (For example, my blackout poems started out as my attempt to write like a collage artist.)
6) Here’s cartoonist James Kochalka talking about creativity, and how if you can draw, you might be able to write, if you can write, you might be able to make music, etc.:
7) I don’t think most academic programs are set up to help creative workers make these kinds of cross-disciplinary transitions. (Some do or did exist: Carnegie Mellon, for example, used to have an information design program that helped designers learn to write and writers learn to design.)
8) One of the reasons I started the list with Lynda Barry is that she speaks of “The Image” (learned from her teacher Marilyn Frasca) — the thing that is alive in the work. If you can learn to work with The Image, it translates to any art form.
9) I should add that I went to an explicitly “interdisciplinary” college, so I was actually exposed to these ideas in an academic setting. (Lynda went to one too, Evergreen, and she is now a “Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity” at the University of Wisconsin)
10) Cartoonists, because their work demands work from two disciplines (writing/art, poetry/design, words/pictures), are highly instructive when it comes to visual people learning to write, writers learning to make art, etc. (Check out Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics for more.)
11) Read a lot. Write a lot. Repeat.
On March 24, 1857, Thoreau journaled about memory, and how the passing of time serves as a filter for what is good or interesting:
If you are describing any occurrence, or a man, make two or more distinct reports at different times. Though you may think you have said all, you will to-morrow remember a whole new class of facts which perhaps interested most of all at the time, but did not present themselves to be reported.
On March 27, three days later, true to the topic, he polished his thoughts on the subject:
I would fain make two reports in my Journal, first the incidents and observations of to-day; and by to-morrow I review the same and record what was omitted before, which will often be the most significant and poetic part. I do not know at first what it is that charms me. The men and things of to-day are wont to lie fairer and truer in to-morrow’s memory.
Above: Thoreau’s drawing of geese in formation, March 28, 1859
Productive procrastination for writers who draw: Going through my notebook, I found this clipping from a piece by Edward Carey (author of The Iremonger Trilogy) about how he works.
A few weeks ago I gave a new talk at Bond in San Francisco. It’s a list of 10 things that have helped me stay creative in such chaotic times:
I really loved giving this talk. (And, as I’ve hinted, it is a preview of my next book.) If you’ve been struggling too, hopefully you’ll find something helpful in it. Please share it with anybody you think could use it. The full video is below.
(Special thanks to Andy McMillan for inviting me and Paul Searle for the great video.)
Just finished another draft of a book proposal. 5 thoughts, none of them really new:
1) Time is really the magic ingredient for self-editing. Put it in the drawer and walk out the door. Come back later and look with fresh eyes.
2) Print out each draft and edit it by hand.
3) Wait until a new draft to make any structural changes, otherwise you’ll just spend all your time shuffling things around and not writing. (I learned this from The Clockwork Muse.)
4) When I need to make big changes to a draft (less than 10,000 words, anyways), it’s better if I just start with a blank document and just retype everything from the paper copy of the last draft. Cut & paste makes me lazy, and I don’t think about whether things are flowing or not.
5) I knew the score at the age of twelve: “Writing is easy, but it takes a lot of time.” So much time.
Above: a page from Show Your Work!
In Wim Wenders’ Room 666, he films a monologue by his friend Werner Herzog at the top of Tokyo Tower:
There are few images to be found. One has to dig for them like an archaeologist. One has to search through this ravaged landscape to find anything at all… I see so few people today who dare to address our lack of adequate images. We absolutely need images in tune with our civilization, images that resonate with what is deepest within us…
I’ve thought about Herzog’s words a lot in the past year. I’m always searching for images for my work, but also for my life. Looking for portraits of life outside of a default setting.
To have an imagination is simply to have the ability to make images that are not directly in front of you. When I hear people describe depression, it often sounds like the imagination shuts down— the brain just can’t make a picture of tomorrow that’s worth living for. That’s certainly what my own mild bouts of melancholy feel like: There’s just no image to hang on to, no picture I can make in my head of how life could be better.
Of course, the imagination needs to be fed. To make better images, you need to see better images.
Ursula K. Le Guin spoke beautifully of this need in her 2014 acceptance speech:
I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality…. Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.
Images matter. The images we hold in our mind are often the images that come true for us. When some warmongering asshole gets put in a position of power and people (even jokingly) tweet things like “we’re all going to die” (well, duh, that’s alwyas been true) we’re making bad images. So if we are to survive, we need to create and capture and share better images.
My friend Dave, a few months ago, he asked me, “So what are you excited about right now?” And I couldn’t give him a good answer. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.”
I relayed the question to my friend Curt, and he shrugged it off, and said, “That just means you’re looking.”
A few weeks later, I found it. I found the thing to get excited about. The thing to work on.
I was so incredibly excited about the thing I was working on, because it felt completely, 100% my own, coming to me fast, as if it already existed. As if it had always existed. I had an energy, a borderline mania, working on it. All of my parts were in alignment. It felt like I had something that I needed years ago that I think other people need, too. I worked for a solid month, and I came up with the thing, and I delivered the first version of it, and it worked. It was right. It did exactly what I wanted it to do.
And then… I let myself be talked out of working on my vision of the thing into working on something else that seemed only slightly different, but wrong. It was as if, overnight, all my energy, all of my excitement, had been sucked out of me. And I struggled for a week, trying to see the thing that I was supposed to work on. And I couldn’t see it.
This morning I walked past the bomb site and something in me snapped. What the hell am I doing? I asked my wife. She said, “You’ve let yourself be talked out of working on what you know you’re supposed to be working on.”
Now I’m back. And I can see it. And I can see a way of working on it, of making it exist, and putting it out into the world.
And nobody’s going to talk me out of it.
This post was a tantrum. (We all have them sometimes. Forgive me.)