Young artists are always being told to “find your voice.”
Whatever that means!
I’ve never heard anyone explain it better than Billy Collins at a White House poetry workshop. I couldn’t find the text anywhere, so I transcribed it below. (If you’ve read Steal Like An Artist, this might sound really familiar…)
Lots of writers — myself included — have stressed the importance of subtraction, or knowing what to leave out.
Mark Twain: “A successful book is not made of what is in it, but of what is left out of it.”
Dizzy Gillespie: “You spend a lifetime playing music to learn what not to play.”
Elmore Leonard: “Try to leave out all the parts readers skip.”
But what if you leave out the wrong stuff? How do you know what to leave in?
Here’s David Mamet, in Three Uses Of The Knife:
I used to say that a good writer throws out the stuff that everybody else keeps. But an even better test occurs to me: perhaps a good writer keeps the stuff everybody else throws out.
Peter Turchi told me when he’s teaching writing workshops, he’s careful not to try to “fix” a student’s story too quickly:
[W]e have to recognize that the thing that looks most flawed, might, in fact, be the most interesting thing in the work. So we’re not looking for the thing that functions best, because to do that is to only reward the most conventional and most familiar moves the work makes. But to try to recognize the thing that excites us the most, or intrigues us the most, which may be something the writer doesn’t even understand.
“Life is selection,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “The work of the gardener is simply to destroy this weed, or that shrub, or that tree, & leave this other to grow.”
But which weed? Which shrub? Which tree?
Exactly. That’s the art.
One of my favorite pages in The Steal Like An Artist Journal was inspired by Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, a collection of assorted texts that the emperor wrote to himself as he was trying to figure things out and keep his life straight.
Book One is titled “Debts and Lessons.” It’s a list of people in Aurelius’s life and what he learned from them:
It’s interesting how a picture of Aurelius’s upbringing forms just from reading this simple list.
I encourage you to make your own list and give thanks to the people who have taught you something.
Happy Thanksgiving.
“Creative work is very hard,” wrote Sidney Lumet in Making Movies. “Some sort of self-deception is necessary simply in order to start.”
In the beginning, you have to trick yourself into believing you have something worth saying.
So when you’re first starting out, you surround yourself with people who will provide you with helpful criticism, but who will also be cheerleaders — people who will root for you and tell you to keep going, even if you’re not any good yet.
BUT! If you achieve success, it’s CRUCIAL that you have people in your life who will be real editors, keep you grounded, and push you. People who will support you, sure, but will also be honest with you about the quality of the work you’re doing.
It’s also crucial to be honest with yourself. No matter how far along you are, maintaining a certain amount of impostor syndrome can be a healthy thing.
“I think most of us feel like fakes,” wrote Lumet. “At some point ‘they’ will get onto us and expose us for what we are: know-nothings, hustlers, and charlatans. It’s not a totally destructive feeling. It tends to keep us honest.”
You probably don’t deserve what you have. So keep moving and earn it.
Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb. They want the job title without the work.
“Forget about being a Writer,” says novelist Ann Packer. “Follow the impulse to write.”
Let go of the thing that you’re trying to be (the noun), and focus on the actual work you need to be doing (the verb).
Doing the verb will take you someplace further and far more interesting than just wanting the noun.
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