“This is how women artists are erased.”—Susan Neville.
Notes on Creativity
9:54
AM: My son lets me know that he’s just spilled an entire bottle of
Gatorade in the back seat. “Don’t worry,” he hastens to add. “I cleaned
it up with your jacket.”
Then he gets out and slams the door
hard enough to knock my phone off the console and onto the floor, where
it disappears under my seat.
You’re killing me, Smalls. Killing me.
Saturday in Madison, Indiana.
http://writerunboxed.com/2017/06/05/is-writers-block-a-form-of-self-protection/
http://writerunboxed.com/2017/06/05/is-writers-block-a-form-of-self-protection/
Here’s the most eye-opening part of this essay from Julianna Baggott:
“When the inner critic tells the writer that the work isn’t good enough so don’t even try, the critic is trying to protect the vulnerable part of the writer from being activated by a fear of failure. The writer needs to thank that voice for its concern and then reassure the critic that the warning, though well-intentioned, is unnecessary. The writer needs to make it clear that he can write and will survive.”
From THE ZERO, by Jess Walter
Rules & Creative Disobedience
Form your thesis. Make an outline. Keep your audience in
mind. When your teacher taught you these rules, she meant to help you with
writing—but what if these rules are actually jamming you up?
Composition scholar Mike Rose compared people who got stuck in
their writing with people who got their writing done. He found that the stuck
group tried their best to follow rules like the ones at the top of this post.
When they struggled, they stopped. The people who got their writing done also
struggled, but they didn’t stop. They abandoned the rules—Well, I guess I’ll just have to do it wrong—and got their writing
done.
I’m not suggesting that you should never follow rules or
organize your writing. I’m saying that for many (most?) of us, planning your
writing and keeping a bunch of rules in mind is not at all helpful. In fact, it
gets in the way of discovery, of risk-taking, of any pleasure you might find in
writing. As Mike Rose’s research suggests, it gets in the way of writing, period.
Maybe this doesn’t match your experience. Maybe you’re big
into predetermination and planning, and you get your writing done without
feeling miserable about it. If so, play on.
But if the rules and plans are getting in your way, rebel.
Do it wrong. You can always bring an outline into play in a second draft, but
it’s awful hard to organize a blank page.
An Open Letter to High School Teachers
Dear Furuness,
As a high school English teacher, I want to make sure my students
are prepared for college classes, especially their first-year writing course.
You teach a lot of those courses, right? So maybe you can tell me what college
professors expect incoming students to know or be to able to do?
Clangers by Lettuce | Flickr Creative Commons
First of all, let me say
thank you. Thank you for working so hard and so well. I teach four courses a
semester, all of them writing-intensive, and at least once a month I feel so
overwhelmed that I want to crawl to the nearest dark corner and have a good
cry.
Meanwhile, you are teaching
something like six classes. I work with seventy-some students; you have more
like a hundred and twenty. Forget grading their essays; how do you even learn
that many names? Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the joys of classroom
management and dealing with parents and all the high school drama—
I’ll stop there. I don’t
want make you crawl to your corner. I’ll just say this: Every time I hear a
college professor say, What are they
teaching them in high school? I want to say, You try it, asswipe. You
wouldn’t make it to the end of the first day.
So it is with the utmost
respect and admiration that I must tell you: I think you’re asking the wrong
question.
Because there is no answer.
College professors can’t
form a consensus about … well, anything. Ask three professors a question,
and you’ll get four opinions. And that’s if the professors all teach at the
same institution. Looking for a coherent set of expectations for student writing
that will hold true across colleges is like hunting for a unicorn drinking
butterbeer from the Holy Grail.
But wait: I have a suggestion.
Instead of looking to
colleges to inform your practice, look to the “real world.” Teach your students
to write in forms that exist in the wild: Op/Eds, advice columns, fundraising
pitches, book reviews, etc. Through rhetorical analysis, your students can
discover the conventions and expectations of a given form. If they practice writing
to the expectations of different forms, they’ll engage in linguistic
cross-training, working all their writing muscles.
Then they can use those muscles to kill the
five-paragraph essay.
I’m not the first person to
say, Write in real-world forms! Smart
teachers have been talking about it forever. And yet, year after year, my
first-year students tell me that their high school is still all about the five-paragraph
essay. A form that does not exist in the real world. Because no one wants to
read it. Have you ever once, in your life, thought: I can’t wait to curl up in front of the fire with a nice five-paragraph
essay!
Me, neither.
If we all use forms that
exist in the real world, the five-paragraph essay will wither and die, and
there will be great rejoicing through the land. But mainly, students may come
to see writing as real and relevant—and for that, their college professors will
rejoice.
Quote
I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
Play from the Heart: 5 Notes on Creativity
(initially appeared in Punchnel’s. Thanks, Punchnels.)
(sparkler | david mertl | flickr creative commons)
So you’re a writer. Or a rapper. Or a lady who carves the likeness of famous poets into gourds. Or a guy who is making the World’s Largest Map Entirely Out of Sparklers. Whatever. My point is this: you make things. And making any thing—from a rap anthem to Alfred Gourd Tennyson— is a creative act. Therefore, you are a creator.
If you’re anything like me—and for the first four notes, I’m going to pretend that you are—this act brings you both joy and consternation. You’d like to increase the joy-to-consternation ratio, and you’d like to make better things.
Yes?
Here’s how:
- Stop playing it safe.
Society is designed to grind down your rough edges. It wants to make you smaller, safer, less…problematic. And, hey, let me be the first to say Thank God. I have no urge to live in the Thunderdome.
So go ahead and be careful and considerate in real life, but when you go to the page, or the canvas, or the pumpkin patch with your scrimshaw kit, you have to Get Big. Open your head. Make the thing you’re afraid to make. Err on the side of awesome.
Oh, but Bryan, I’m worried that my family/co-workers will think I’m a freak.
They are not even thinking about you, dude. Those people have their own problems, and frankly, you’re not that important. Unless you fire up your sparkler-map on their front lawn, they probably won’t even notice what you’ve made.
But the weird stuff that’s in my head—who would want it? It’s not like other stuff that’s in the world already.
Do you have any idea how much I read, praying for some spark of originality? Some new way of seeing the world, some new way of playing with language? I’m not the only one. Billions of people are looking for that spark. If you’ve got it, get out of the way. Get out of your own way.
- Work at the Intersection of Joy and Urgency.
All the time I have conversations with writers who are hemming and hawing about what to work on. “I should work on X,” they’ll say, and follow this statement with five or six rational, strategic reasons. X is hot right now. X is what the market wants. My agent wants me to do more X.
But when I ask them what they really want to work on, the answer is almost never X.
The rational mind is great at making business decisions, but it’s a shitty crucible for art.
You can push through the project, but by the time you finish, the trend for X will have probably passed. Or you’ll have made a bloodless clone. And even if your X is good and still trendy, making it probably felt like drudge work. Your joy/consternation ratio was totally upside down.
Fuck trends. Fuck the market, because it will surely fuck you if it gets half a chance. What do you feel compelled to make? What thing, while making it, causes you to think, If anyone sees this now, they’ll think I lost my mind? What would you make if you knew no one was ever going to see it?
Make that.
- Make a hole.
This all sounds great, Bryan. I’ll write/rap/decoupage when I have time. Someday.
You will never have time. You will always need to make time. Make a hole in your life. I’m talking about a regular time when you do nothing but make your things, and a place where you show up to make those things. Schedule it, commit to it, and defend it against all usurpers.
Here is the belief about art that I cleave to when all other beliefs have fallen away: If I keep showing up and putting in the time, something good will eventually come out of me.
- Don’t be precious about your hole.
Some people (read: me) get fussy if the hole isn’t quite right. If they don’t get in their full allotment of time. If they don’t have the “right” notebook. If someone is sitting in “their” seat at the coffeeshop.
These people do a great job of getting in their own way. Mostly what they end up making are excuses.
Remember: The routine serves you; you don’t serve the routine.
If the conditions aren’t ideal, adapt. Can’t write for an hour on Monday like normal? Sneak fifteen minutes in the office bathroom. A little is better than nothing. A little is still progress.
Can’t do anything at all? Just let your mind be fallow for the day. It’ll be okay. Maybe even better in the long run, because you’ll come back to your hole all fresh and charged up.
- Make your own Notes on Creativity
So you’ve probably figured out that I’m really talking to myself. These commandments are my Notes to Self, reminders about what works for me. One or two of them might work for you—I hope they do!—but the real value won’t come from following someone else’s path; it will come when you discover what works for you. Make your own Notes.
Then get back to your hole. That lawn isn’t going to cover itself in sparklers.