Notes on writing and drawing

A fresh banker’s box

Monday, March 5, 2018

Whenever I start a new book, I get out a fresh banker’s box. This is something I stole from Twyla Tharp’s classic, The Creative Habit.

Tharp starts every new dance with a box. She writes the name of the project on the box, and fills it up with all kinds of stuff as she goes. She writes:

There are separate boxes for everything I’ve ever done. If you want a glimpse into how I think and work, you could do worse than to start with my boxes.

The box makes me feel organized, that I have my act together even when I don’t know where I’m going yet.

It also represents a commitment. The simple act of writing a project name on the box means I’ve started work.

The box makes me feel connected to a project. It is my soil. I feel this even when I’ve back-burnered a project: I may have put the box away on a shelf, but I know it’s there. The project name on the box in bold black lettering is a constant reminder that I had an idea once and may come back to it very soon.

Hopefully I won’t have to put this box up on the shelf until there’s a new book to put on the shelf, too.

I have been working like a maniac lately, cranking out words. I expect a crash soon, but for right now, I’m trying not to lose momentum. When I’m working like this, I feel like my brain is on fire, and I remember why so many writers are alcoholics: when you’re thinking so intensely all day, sometimes booze is the only thing that will calm you down.

Something else I’ve noticed in this frenzied state: my creative energies aren’t really sapped if I switch over to other projects. My son will ask me to draw a new page in the book we’re writing together, or I’ll need to write a blog post for the day, and it just doesn’t faze me. I finished a first draft of something this morning, and I was up and looking around for something else to do, Hulk-ed out, like, “WHAT NOW? COME AT ME!!”

I’m also internalizing, finally, what Annie Dillard wrote in The Writing Life:

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.

Creative energy is a renewable energy. Right now, I’m all charged up. I know that soon I’ll need to recharge again, but for now, baby, I’m burning, burning, burning.

An attempt at exhausting a material

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

One of my favorite things about discovering a new material — like the security patterns on the inside of envelopes — is then attempting to exhaust the material. Seeing how many different ways I can use it. Trying to use every scrap of it. (Below: a bookmark for Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses.) A great inspiration to me has been watching what Kelli Anderson does with paper.

The creative learning spiral

Monday, February 26, 2018

This is a diagram I copied out of Mitchel Resnick’s book, Lifelong Kindergarten. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how essential it is to stop thinking of our creative lives in terms of linear progress and think of them instead as cyclical, seasonal, and non-linear.

It’s an idea that’s been essential to my own practice, and one I’ve fiddled with in various visual representations. Here’s a page from Show Your Work!:

And here’s a blackout:

Here’s another doodle from my diary, where I’ve mapped some of the concepts from Resnick’s book onto the various parts of the spiral. (You’ll note my extra steal/share annotations.)

By now you might have noticed that the spiral is similar to the feedback loop of the Scientific Method or Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey.” What’s essential is that the spiral doesn’t have an end — it is a lifelong spiral.

This morning I watched a livestream of Resnick presenting in Reggio Emilia, the Italian birthplace of the famous educational approach. Resnick talked about how it was a visit to Reggio 20 years ago + a (fantastic) book by Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten, that brought him to the idea that the ways we learn in kindergarten should be “spread through a lifetime.” (I just got done reading The Art of Tinkering, a book from Resnick’s bibliography, which seems to me a catalog of artists who have retained a lifelong kindergarten-like sense of play.)

Thinking more and more about the spiral, I remembered a drawing I drew for someone who asked me a question about how I balanced creating and consuming:

Another endless learning spiral…

Hard at play

Sunday, February 25, 2018

“There is work that is play / There is play that is work.”
—Cass McCombs, “The Executioner’s Song”

“I can’t help it if I’m lucky.”
—Bob Dylan, “Idiot Wind”

In our culture, when something is easy, you refer to it as “child’s play,” even though play is the work of children, and it requires enormous focus and effort. (Anybody who thinks a child’s play is always easy and fun should witness the passion and epic fits of frustration my sons manage to throw themselves into.)

Our neighbors are remodeling their bathroom, so there have been a few mornings when I’m outside with the kids, supervising with a cup of tea or drawing in chalk in the driveway, and I’ll say hello to the contractors when they’re having a smoke break.

Child care, like writing, is work that might include play but is often mistaken wholly for play. (Look up the average salary of a preschool teacher to see how much we value it.) It can feel weird being out in the world with the kids when most everybody else your age is off at a job, and it’s doubly weird when you’re out spending time with your family in front of workers who are visibly laboring.

There was one morning when I was up on the porch shuffling index cards around while the contractors were unloading large pieces of lumber out of the back of their truck. Even though writing is hard like any job can be, I know how lucky I am. (Tony Fitzpatrick once said, “Writing is hard fucking work, but it’s not labor.”) A neighbor down the street told my wife her husband saw me out one day and said, “I want his job.”

When I finally went out to the garage to get some real heads-down fingers-to-keys Writing done, I thought I was going to be annoyed by the din of the drills and the saw blades, but instead, I’ve found the buzz of the power tools to be encouraging. The contractors are practicing their trade and I am practicing mine. Who will finish first?

My favorite compliment is when somebody tells me they keep my books on top of the commode. When the contractors’ work is done, the neighbors can sit on the john and admire their work. When my work is done, maybe somebody will sit on their john and admire mine.