As Jon Klassen put it, “Ruth Krauss just giving it away” in a page from How To Make an Earthquake (1954). Drawings by her husband, Crockett Johnson.
Signs of compost
Keeping in mind Ann Patchett’s “I am a compost heap,” every time I pass the local community garden, I feel like the signs on the compost heap could stand in for various stages of the book-writing process.
A solution to writer’s block: Transcribe yourself
Stewart Brand once said to Brian Eno: “Why don’t you assume you’ve written your book already — and all you have to do now is find it?”
In a similar vein, I enjoyed this story of how KC Davis, author of the brilliantly-titled How To Keep House While Drowning, wrote their book:
I had long stared at blank word documents, unable to get my thoughts on the page. I’m actually not a great writer — but I am a pretty good speaker. So I went back through my social channels and transcribed every short form video I had ever done on this topic and that left me with all these disjointed paragraphs. I spent another two months trying to decide how to connect these little vignettes into a “real” book and finally realized that my choices were to publish an imperfect book or not publish the perfect book. So I decided to make each section its own chapter — some only a page long.
I’m reminded of this advice from Matt Zoller Seitz:
Here is a technique I suggest to fellow writers who are blocked for whatever reason: just talk about the piece with a friend, record it, then play it back and write down the good stuff. This method also works with Gchat & similar programs. Go straight to document after.
And how Nicholson Baker wrote his brilliant book The Anthologist by filming himself with a camcorder:
He set up a camcorder and recorded himself presenting in various parts of his house. “I would try to rehearse what it would be like to explain something complicated, like iambic pentameter, in a familiar way,” says Baker, who also found himself singing poetry in his own barn, in Maine. “How would you explain it if you’d been thinking about it for twenty years? So I came up with 40 hours of tape and transcribed the audio.”
I suppose one could skip the transcription step by talking directly into the computer’s speech-to-text?
I know a lot of songwriters do this with song ideas: they record a bunch of voice memos on their phone, but then they make time to listen to what they’ve recorded, often on shuffle.
Regardless of the tech you use, the method is: record yourself thinking out loud, and once you’ve transcribed that into a draft: edit yourself by reading out loud.
The past 100 days
“I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound.”
—Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing
100 days ago, I announced I was easing up on blogging and fun daily projects like my blind contour drawings, mini zines, and collage houses, to star work in earnest on a new book.
The first 30 days went pretty well. I spent a lot of time with my index cards and worked on “The Unschooled Artists” piece that ran in the NYTimes.
50 days in, I had a pretty great book proposal worked up that just needed a table of contents to be ready to pitch.
64 days in, I decided to stuff the whole book proposal in the drawer and postpone it indefinitely. (Oops!)
72 days in, I finished up the #perfect31 project, and remembered how good it was to blog every day.
Then I recorded the audiobook trilogy.
And for the past 4 weeks, I’ve been keeping busy with reading and writing and taking care of a bunch of behind-the-scenes business stuff.
So where am I now? I don’t know! Not sure I even care.
In the past 200 days, I feel like I haven’t learned a single surprising thing about myself or changed my mind about much of anything.
If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that it probably isn’t going to teach me anything that I didn’t already know before the pandemic began.
Everything that was true before seems even truer now, and here is what was true before the pandemic:
- Summer is a season for doing as little as possible. If I get any more of them, I plan to get through them by swimming and reading and generally practicing as much extreme idleness as I can get away with.
- You receive what you’re ready to receive.
- I have built systems in my life for producing work, and whenever I abandon those systems in the hopes of “getting serious” about something, the results are far, far less than spectacular.
Anyways, there went those 100 days. I’ll make a note to check in on January 7th and see how these next 100 went…
Aggravation is my muse
I laughed out loud in self-identification when I read this description of Regis Philbin in his NYTimes obituary:
“Aggravation is an art form in his hands,” wrote Bill Zehme, the co-author of two Philbin memoirs. “Annoyance stokes him, sends him forth, gives him purpose. Ruffled, he becomes electric, full of play and possibility. There is magnificence in his every irritation.”
“It me,” as they say. I have to be agitated to really get down to work. Stirred up. A little angry.
I’ve decided it’s better to work with it than to wish it away, so, when I am beginning a new project, I often ask myself, “What’s something you despise in the culture that you wish were otherwise?” and I go from there.
How Jan Steward wrote Learning By Heart
Today we honor Jan Steward, who passed away on July 1. Jan was a friend and student of Corita, as well as the co-author of "Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit."
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Photograph by @pixtakerirfan for the @latimes. pic.twitter.com/GAfBVODTLD— Corita Art Center (@coritaartcenter) July 22, 2020
Just a few weeks after I shot this video about how Corita Kent has impacted my work, I found out that her former student Jan Steward died. Steward was an artist and photographer in LA, but she’s also responsible for Learning By Heart, the book of Corita Kent’s teachings that sort of fizzled when it came out in 1992, but has now become a kind of cult classic for folks like me.
In the 2008 foreword to the book, she wrote:
It was in 1979 on a trip to Little Tokyo in Los Angeles when Corita asked me to write this book. We would work together. It would be quick and easy. It was neither. She lived in Boston and I in Los Angeles. We worked by letter and phone and progress was painfully slow. We worked for hours on content and every few meetings the concept would change—sometimes radically.
They went back and forth about titles. Corita insisted it be in black and white so it was affordable. She didn’t want any of her own work in the book. (Imagine!) Corita died in 1986, with the book unfinished.
In a great 2009 interview with the LA Times, Steward went into more detail about how she wrote the book. She said she wanted the book to feel like being in one of Corita’s classes. (True to her name, she was a steward of Corita’s teachings.)
“Corita was loath to formalize things,” noted another one of Corita’s students. “She thought something would become calcified the moment it was written down.”
So Steward had to come up with the right approach:
She scribbled her teacher’s thoughts on pieces of paper, found copies of her lessons and collected stories from other former students. Then, she threw each into a cardboard box that most closely matched a particular part of Corita’s curriculum. The contents of each box turned into chapters such as “Looking,” “Sources,” “Structure” and “Connect and Create.”
(I’m reminded of Twyla Tharp’s banker boxes.)
Steward wrote of the book,
The process I want to describe is living and squirming and very difficult to pin down. The process is one of teaching, learning, growing, and doing things to make the world a better place. Whether that world is within you or as great as infinity.
RIP.