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.
15% completed
One of my favorite little Twitter bots is @year_progress, which tweets every 3.65 days when 1% of the year goes by:
I have my own analog version on the edges of my page-a-day logbook. One of the first things I do at the beginning of the year is make a little index system for the months. I like having another visual of how the year is progressing. (Here’s the notebook I use, and a similar index system.)
See also: How much of the year is left?
The creative learning spiral
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
“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.
The tools matter and the tools don’t matter
Though you might not think it from the comic, I’m actually sympathetic to questions about tools and process, as I myself am a kind of process junky. I love hearing about how other writers work.
I’m also not someone who dismisses questions about tools with the line “the tools don’t matter.” In fact, I think tools matter so much that if you don’t talk about them correctly you can do some damage.
In On Becoming A Novelist, John Gardner wrote:
In my experience the single question most often asked during question-and-answer periods in university auditoriums and classrooms is: “Do you write with a pen, a typewriter, or what?” I suspect the question is more important than it seems on the surface. It brings up magical considerations—the kinds of things compulsive gamblers are said to worry about: When one plays roulette, should one wear a hat or not, and if one should, should one cock it to the left or to the right? What color hat is luckiest? The question about writing equipment also implies questions about that ancient daemon Writer’s Block, about vision and revision, and at its deepest level, asks whether there is really, for the young writer, any hope.
Of the question, “pen, pencil, or typewriter,” Gardner said that there “is of course no right answer… nor is the question worth answering except insofar as it reveals something about the creative process.” Gardner then writes beautifully about the “dreaming” part of writing vs. the “mechanics,” and how bad penmanship or poor typing skills can get in the young writer’s way:
The trouble is that having started up the dream and written some of it down, [the writer’s] become suddenly self-conscious, self-doubting. The dreaming part is angel-like: it is the writer’s eternal, childlike spirit, the daydreaming being who exists (or seems to) outside time. But the part of the writer that handles the mechanics, typing or writing with pencil or pen, choosing one word instead of another, is human, fallible, vulnerable to anxiety or shame.
It’s for exactly this reason that when Lynda Barry was suffering from writer’s block, she decided to write the first draft of her novel Cruddy by hand:
She said, of the first draft:
My goal was to not think about things at all. To dream it out instead, trying very hard not to edit at all as I went. The first draft really took shape when I found that I needed to slow way down and distract myself at the same time so I used a paintbrush and Tuscan red watercolor and painted the manuscript on legal paper, trying to concentrate on the calligraphic aspect of writing rather than trying to craft beautiful sentences. I figured as long as the sentences looked beautiful, the rest would take care of itself.
What I love about Gardner and Barry is that they believe that the tools you use do matter, but the point, for them, is finding the proper tools that get you to a certain way of working in which you can get your conscious, mechanical mind out of the way so that your dreaming can go on, undeterred.
You have to find the right tools to help your voice sing.
For Lynda, it was the paintbrush that allowed her to get to the point where she could basically take dictation—“to dream it out” without editing—but it could’ve been anything, really. (I should note that Lynda happily details the exact sumi-e brush and ink she used to make One! Hundred! Demons! in the back of the book.) While I don’t myself use a brush and legal paper to draft my work, I keep a page from the manuscript hanging in my bedroom to remind me of the importance of handwriting and slowing down.
As for non-fiction writing, my friend Clive Thompson took the “pencil vs. typewriter” thing literally and researched when you should write with a pencil and when you should type on the keyboard.
What he discovered was that handwriting is great for coming up with ideas, for note-taking and big picture thinking. So, when you’re at lectures or in meetings or brainstorming ideas, it’s a good idea to scribble or doodle in your notebook. So always carry a pencil. (Clive got me into Palamino Blackwings.)
Typing, on the other hand, is great for producing writing for other people, say, writing an article. The faster you type, Clive said, the better your ideas will be. There’s a thing called “transcription fluency,” which boils down to: “when your fingers can’t move as fast as your thoughts, your ideas suffer.” If you help people increase their typing speed, their thoughts improve. (Learn to type faster!)
So, yes, the tools matter, but again, it’s all about what you are trying to achieve. So a question like, “What brand of pen do you use?” is not as good as “How do you get that thick line quality?” or “How do you dodge Writer’s Block?”
On my Instagram, a follower was very upset with the above cartoon, saying it was “mean” and “hurtful” and not smart and ungrateful to my fans, and that I should try to “remember what it was like to be a beginner.” I’m gonna quote her at length, because I actually don’t disagree with a lot of what she says (although, I would argue that wrestling with your materials can lead you down interesting paths):
I would politely argue that sometimes the tools DO matter, especially at the beginning. Instead of fighting your materials you can focus on the work. We all have to start somewhere; what better way to get started then to try the tools of a creative person whose work you admire? […] When I see people asking about pens and notebooks I think to myself they must be at the very start of their creative journeys, and they’re looking for guidance, maybe even encouragement; for a place to start.
I try, I think, my best to be helpful to my young fans. (What else is this blog and my books but attempts to be helpful?) But I would also push back a bit here: Sometimes when we talk about artists and writers there’s this expectation that they should always defer to the needs of the young fan. Very rarely do we cut writers and artists a break for maybe being a little tired of a constant barrage of the same question over and over or for not necessarily wanting to take on the role of a teacher, a job which, in my opinion, is a very serious responsibility.
It’s the artist’s job not to be a total dick but it’s also the fan’s job to not overstep. If you want to be someone’s apprentice, but they haven’t agreed to be your teacher, you have to stay silent, watch and learn.
There is a Zen parable in John Cage’s Silence that changed my life:
The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget once said, “Every time you teach a child something you forever rob them of the chance to learn it for themselves.”
There are actually very good reasons for not wanting to teach young artists. There are good reasons for not answering a question like, “What brand of pen do you use?” or questions about process at all.
If you are just starting off and I tell you exactly how I work, right down to the brand of pen and notebook, I am, in a some small sense, robbing you of the experience of finding your own materials and your own way of working.
Trying to approximate someone else’s work with your own tools can lead to wonderful discoveries. For example, the guitarist Adrian Belew is self-educated: he taught himself to play the guitar by listening to records. Because he was unaware of all the studio trickery involved in many of his favorite recordings, he found a way to reproduce the sounds on his records without any effects pedals or fancy gear. And from those experiments, he “was left with an urge to make the guitar sound like things it shouldn’t be able to sound like.”
In other words: Belew would not necessarily be Belew if he could tweet at Jeff Beck or Jimi Hendrix and ask them what brand of pedals they’re using.
Just something to think about.
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