Retooling
Thursday, February 28th, 2008 @ 4:22 pm
March arrives on Saturday, and with it arrives the beginning of Stage Two of my 3×5 Project. What’s that? You didn’t know this thing would be split up into discrete stages? You thought it was going to be one big continuous year-long project? Yeah, well, so did I. I was wrong.
This is the thing: During the process of working through the first month of the project, my brain underwent some shifts as a result of the project itself. One of those shifts involved the realization that I didn’t want to draw 365 consecutive cards. I want to draw some — and the process of doing so during the month of January honestly helped me figure out both some technical bits and some bits about my relationship with art in general — but I just don’t want to do it every day. What I do want to do every day, however, is something creative and/or educational.
To that end, I’m doing some tooling around with the concept of my little 3×5 Project. I want to try to split these things out into one-month projects, usually centered on a common form or theme. They won’t all be art-related, either; I think what I did with the project in January was good for my brain, and I want to expand that good-for-my-brain-ness into new directions. The first couple of ideas I’ve had — and I’m not yet sure which one I want to do for March — include:
- Using the 3×5 cards to develop a screenplay. Not to actually write the screenplay, mind you, as I sincerely doubt agents or studio readers would be inclined to read a screenplay hand-written on a batch of index cards. But I can develop character sketches, scene ideas, bits of dialogue, ideas, outlines… if I can do 31 days worth of index cards dedicated to one particular screenplay idea, I’d be a long way toward actually being able to put a draft together at the end of the process. One of my biggest problems with creative endeavors is a somewhat serious case of ADD (see: the fact that I started changing project parameters before January was even up), but I’m pretty sure I can put somewhere between fifteen minutes and an hour per day into a project for one month. And even effort that little would put me in much better shape than I’ve ever been in regards to actually getting a screenplay written. (This same technique could obviously be applied to any other form of writing, I think, but for now, it’s just post-Oscars and I want to think about a screenplay.)
- Using the 3×5 cards to learn a foreign language. I clearly couldn’t get the same level of language learnin’ I could in other ways, but I think I could get a good functional foundation laid this way. Using the cards to conjugate verbs, to record vocabulary, to take notes on grammatical rules and concepts, to practice constructing sentences — I do believe I could either get a good start going on a language I don’t yet know but want to learn (French or German, f’r instance) or to enhance and expand my knowledge and understanding of a language I already feel fairly comfortable with (Spanish, most likely). I think this would be more effective with a language I already have some facility with as hearing the words wouldn’t be as necessary, but I think it could work to some degree regardless, especially if I can find a way to supplement the cards.
- Using the 3×5 cards to “storyboard” a comics story. These cards would be almost perfect for doing small-level sketches of pages for some sort of comic project, with notes about what I’m thinking on the other side.
I like this month-by-month project idea for several reasons, one of the biggest being that it’s working with my particular bland of short-attention-span flakiness rather than flying in the face of it. Knowing that at the beginning of the next month I can move on to a different project (even if it’s a variation on the same project) should help keep me focused. I also like that these projects could easily build on each other — I could work on, say, learning basic French one month, take a month or two on something else, and then come back for some intermediate-level French (with my stack of cards from the first time to use as refresher notes if necessary). Or I could do nothing but work on characters for a potential novel or comic series or screenplay, work on something else, then come back a month or two later and focus on plot. I like the fact that for creative works, choosing to work on a particular project for a month removes one of my biggest obstacles: the “what to write” hangup. I’ll know what I need to work on every day, at least in the macro sense.
Most of all I like the fact that it’s a way to move forward on something, to prod and poke my brain into working on the stuff I keep saying I want to work on but never do. If I can’t manage fifteen minutes or half an hour a day to work on one of these creative endeavors, to write some notes on an index card, I must not really want to work on it all that much, huh?
I’m open to suggestions, too, for other projects in the same vein. And as always, anyone who wants to appropriate this thing and try it for themselves, please do! I’d love to hear what some of you guys come up with, and I’d love even more to heard how it worked out for you after trying it.
Waiting for Rain
Thursday, March 29th, 2007 @ 10:06 am
The evening was warm for late March, but we knew it wouldn’t last much longer; the weather was due to take a turn for the much worse that night. We sat outside on the patio on the plastic furniture we’d borrowed for our daughter’s birthday party, and we talked about the kids and my career and where we saw ourselves in five years, where we thought we’d be once we’d made it past the financial disaster we were facing thanks to the implosion of the real estate market. Both of us sat with our backs to the house, facing west and our large, empty backyard and the copse of trees and the large pond beyond. The muted oranges and reds of the sunset in the western sky bled into a purplish-gray bruise of thick cloud cover rolling in to the north. As we talked, the wind started to pick up and we felt that first sharp, sudden drop in temperature that signaled the leading edge of the storm.
We gathered up the plastic furniture and laid it down so that the wind wouldn’t take it, and we picked up those few items in the yard we might not expect to see again if the winds came through as roughly as we knew they could. (Shortly after moving into the house, the winds which tear violently through the piedmont in which we live actually blew over our grill. We don’t take chances anymore.) We stood on the small concrete slab of patio for a few moments, my arm around her waist, and we watched the sun set and felt the breeze pick up a little more.
I feel like King Lear, I told her, except that I only have two daughters and I’m pretty sure they both love me.
She went inside then to get the kids ready for bed. I told her I’d be just a few minutes. I walked out to the middle of the yard, planted my feet (I wasn’t wearing shoes, only socks) and faced due north.
And I waited for the storm to come.
I stood there for quite awhile just being, a somewhat unusual condition for me: I’m not a nature person by nature. I’m more air conditioning and Internet than tent and campfire. But for now, I simply stood and let the elements play across me. The occasional strong gust of wind would whip through the yard, blowing my long hair and pressing my shirt and jeans tight against my body. I watched the lightning off to the north, sometimes quick flashbulbs and other times floodlights illuminating every detail of the soft gray clouds hovering over the neighborhood.
I’m going to stand right here, I thought, until it starts to rain.
A train roared past to the west, the thunder of its wheels rolling along the track commingling with the thunder in the sky to create a baritone rumble I could almost feel as well as hear, a rumble which soon gave way to the shriek of wind whipping across the wide, flat expanse of yard running behind the houses on my street.
I quickly discovered that the expectation of rain carried its own surprising emotional weight. As the wind continued to gain strength and the air continued to cool, I began to feel an intimate connection with the weather, each increasing gust further ratcheting up the tension within me — much the same way each of a lover’s touches aren’t disconnected experiences, but rather each builds on all of the touches which have come before it. And like the stroke of a lover’s fingers, particularly strong blasts of wind would touch me just so, wrap around me just right, would make my jaw drop open just a little and let a small sigh escape.
After half an hour of my standing alone in the dark of my backyard, she came out to check on me just as the wind swirled tightly around me. I felt both a little embarrassed and a little violated, as if she’d found me in bed with someone else. When I tried to speak, my voice came out as a croak.
It’s time to put the kids to bed, she said.
Just a few more minutes, baby.
But I didn’t know how long I would be, not really. I wanted the rain. I wanted my moment of poetry.
Nature owes you nothing, you know. Nature could care less whether you want it to rain, need it to rain or pray to god it doesn’t rain. It’ll get here when it gets here.
I wanted it, though. I wanted to feel whatever I was going to feel when those first drops of cold rain hit my face. The storm would reach my yard, it would lash me and soak me and hold me and rattle my teeth with the rage of its thunder…but I would face it down and I would stand solid and I would come through the other side of the storm in one piece. Slightly worse for the experience, perhaps…but perhaps slightly better.
But then I turned toward the house and I saw her, now in the living room in the warm blue bathrobe which perfectly matches the color of her beautiful blue eyes. She carried our younger daughter, who had two fingers in her mouth in her reflexive who-me-tired? gesture, towards the stairs. Our older daughter bounced after her.
And then the realization came: I could stand out here in the dark by myself and wait for the coming storm to drench my clothes and crack my cheeks — or I could go inside and put my children to bed, read them a story and kiss them goodnight. I could wait for the storm, or I could live my life and know that I had prepared as best I could for the storm’s arrival.
I closed my eyes one last time and felt the air brush past my face, and I went inside.
Looking Back, Going Forth
Friday, August 11th, 2006 @ 4:23 pm
Because I just realized that I’ve never made the official announcement here on Do or Do Not, I’ll go ahead and do so:
Do or Do Not World Headquarters is relocating to beautiful Greensboro, North Carolina. Like, next week.
The impending move has been the single biggest reason behind the paucity of posting here over the last couple of weeks. Remember in my last post when I said I didn’t have the brainpower to actually put much in the way of coherent thoughts together? That’s why. I’ve had things to say yet neither the time nor the focus to say them. So sorry — I hope to find that condition rectified after we’re settled into the new digs. Things should be a little closer to normal around here come September.
I’m excited to be returning to my roots, in a sense, moving back to the South after our three-year sojourn to New England. The winters here have never sat well with me, and the cost of living has sat even less well. I’ll once again be in a cultural environment which, while incredibly problematic for me as a left-winger, feels comfortable in the way, say, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off does: I can see the problems and the inadequacies, but I’m still able to enjoy it anyway.
Still, the slow dismantling of the life Terry and I have built here over the last three years saddens me. More than I was expecting it to.
I know that we have much ahead to look forward to and much to be excited about, but while we’re in the middle of cutting ties (well, perhaps “loosening” ties would be a better way to put it) and divesting ourselves of extraneous crap, I can’t quite get to that excited-for-the-future place. Right now I’m just a little depressed, noting every time, for instance, I walk into a building I know I’ll likely never walk into again. I even felt a little twinge when I drove past Gilette Stadium this morning, and I’ve never ever seen a game there — but it’s part of the landscape of my life here, even if a small one, and I’ll miss it.
Two weeks from now we’ll be well and truly into our new lives, our new house, in North Carolina and we’ll have time to stop, to relax, to breathe, to enjoy the bright future we’re both so confident lies ahead. But for now, all we are is tired and stressed and already missing the people and the places that have come to mean so much to us.
The Anxiety of Influence
Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 @ 9:47 pm
For too many years, I wanted to be Jim Lee.
I fell passionately in love with Lee’s amazingly detailed and dynamic artwork and design sense while he was the artist on Uncanny X-Men in the late 80’s and early 90’s, right before he and five other über-popular artists left Marvel to found Image Comics. I’d been drawing comics-style artwork for most of my life, but Lee quickly became my number-one influence [1]: I used Lee’s artwork as reference material, as inspiration — and ultimately as the yardstick I measured my own work against.
And I’m wondering just how much damage I might have done to my artistic sensibilities over the last fifteen years by doing so.
Somewhere over the years I lost much of my desire to draw, and I think that a lot of that was because I was unfairly judging the quality of my work against unrealistic standards. My expectations for myself were so high that I couldn’t possibly achieve them — if I couldn’t draw something that was somewhere at least approaching the the ballpark of Jim Lee quality, then the drawing was shit.
Thing is, there’s only a handful of artists out there that I think are in that ballpark, so expecting myself to be able to pull that off and berating my skills when I couldn’t… well, that wasn’t being very generous to myself. I think I judged myself so harshly that I found myself not wanting to draw at all. It’s not fair, of course — I’m not Jim Lee, and I never will be.
But when I say “I’m not Jim Lee,” I mean more than just that he’s a better artist than I am, though I think that fact goes without saying (not knocking myself there, just being honest). I also mean that my natural art style, the style that tends to come through when I’m not forcing a particular look on it, doesn’t resemeble his work at all — my “voice” differs from his considerably. I tend toward more open shapes, toward thicker and more angular lines, toward less rendering and cross-hatching. For years, though, I defined “professional” in my head as “Jim Lee-like” and tried to make my stuff look more like his. It’s like I was trying on a series of suits, each of which might have looked fantastic on someone else but none of which were flattering on me — but if I just kept trying them, dammit, I’d find one that fit perfectly.
Problem is, I never found that perfect suit and quit looking altogether.
Now, though, I want to get back into drawing again. I miss it. Not drawing has never felt right, but every time I’ve tried getting back into it, I’ve run face-first into that same wall of anxiety over and over again — I feel like I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t know how to draw in any style other than this one that doesn’t feel natural to me, and I hate it.
But no more. I’m reclaiming my “visual voice,” I’m no longer looking to Jim Lee as an influence, or at least not as a major one. I’m rejecting that overly-rendered style as Just Not Me; there are plenty of artists I can learn from and gain inspiration from whose work more closely mirrors my natural style. I want to try to separate myself from the frustration and self-flagellation of the last ten years and try something all-new, all-different. I want to enjoy drawing again, both the process and the results.
I don’t need to be Jim Lee. What I need to be is the best me I can be.
________________________________________
[1] Funny thing: Even as I took him on as my primary influence, it seemed obvious to me that we were both influenced by the same artists when we were starting out (mainly George Perez, John Byrne and Arthur Adams). He just has way, way, way more talent than I do and was able to synthesize those influences into something new and exciting while I… didn’t.
Out Of My Head
Saturday, May 20th, 2006 @ 10:26 am
I’ve never been good at role-playing games. Scratch that — I’ve never had much interest in role-playing games. Wait, scratch that, too — I’ve had interest in role-playing games, but not so much with the role playing itself.
Sure, like many introverted, awkward, socially inept teenagers in the 1980s, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons. I know lots of people of that sort who played RPGs as a method of getting some healthy and fun social interaction with people who didn’t want to torture and ridicule them for being introverted, awkward and socially inept, but for me… well, it wasn’t all that “social” since it was just me and my friend Mitch. We’d take turns being the Dungeon Master. Neither one of us played D&D for the game’s role-playing aspects; for us, it was just the combat and advancing our characters so they could kick more ass in combat.
(Mitch decided he’d had it with playing D&D with me when, at the very outset of an adventure, I ambushed his character he’d been playing for a few weeks and killed him…with a band of pixies. (No, not “the band The Pixies” — that would actually have been less embarrassing, I think. Getting whacked by a murderous Black Francis would have a certain angsty poetry to it.))
Anyway, my point was that even when I played role-playing games, I didn’t really role play. I was always too self-conscious to really get into that part of the game — even when it’s the friggin’ point of said game. Even the last time I tried, just a few years ago, in a game populated completely by people I trusted (including my wife), I still couldn’t let myself go enough to pretend to be someone else.
Every time I play a computer RPG where I get to design my character’s appearance, I always end up just making myself, trying to come as close as I can to putting myself into the game. Even in these games where The Real Me is completely hidden to the other players online, I still stick with being a pixelated version of me.
When I first started playing The Sims 2, I enthusiastially constructed my entire family, including the kids…and then horrified Terry when Sims Social Services came to take the girls away because I wasn’t feeding them. (The baby seat was sitting right in between the kitchen table and the refrigerator, situated just so my Sims couldn’t pull the baby chair out far enough to put the kids in. For all their bitching about hungry kids, “Allen” and “Terry” couldn’t tell me why they wouldn’t/couldn’t feed them. I’d have hoped that these simluated versions of me and my wife would be smart enough to move the friggin’ chair, but no. Of course, I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out until after my children had been placed in foster care, so maybe the game’s more realistic than I might think…?)
I usually tell myself that the reason I couldn’t get into role-playing was because I was just too happy being myself to want to be someone else. And while it’s true that I am damn glad to be me, it’s obvious that excuse is pure horse manure. What it is exactly, I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s quite fear in this case; I have a feeling, though, that it’s connected at some fundamental level to my traditional lack of Deep Thoughts about the world around me. The term Terry likes to use for me is “solipsistic,” or self-referential — I get so wrapped up in my own head that I Am All There Is.
The funny thing, though, is that I feel like I can get into other people’s heads pretty well, both when trying to suss out people’s motivations for what they’re doing — or when writing fiction. So I know my solipsism isn’t for a lack of ability to understand or inhabit other roles or personas, but rather from a lack of desire or need to do so. And I think that’s something else that needs to change in my head. I think know that I need to expand my metaphorical wardrobe, to try some different outfits on, because I think know that doing so will help make me a better writer…and a better person.
I know that some many of you reading this post are veteran RPGers or otherwise into Being Someone Else, so clue me in: what do you get out of it? What do you put into it? Does Being Someone Else for awhile have any effect on Being Yourself?
Do The Things You Cannot Do
Tuesday, May 9th, 2006 @ 5:18 pm
One of those Messages from the Universe I’d talked about on Sunday arrived in my mental inbox a few minutes ago, and this time it was pretty easy to decypher the message’s meaning. In the last twenty minutes, I’ve read two articles (including this one by Kathy at Creating Passionate Users) that both boiled down to the same basic premise, one which resonates pretty strongly with me: Sometimes you’ve got to do the scary, you’ve got to push yourself farther than you think you’re capable, you’ve got to do that thing you think you cannot do.
I admit that I tend to get a bit too comfortable with most things. I find myself happy with a situation — or, at the very least, not unhappy — and don’t want to change it. Change and I aren’t the most bosom of buddies: I order the lasagna from every Italian restaurant I go to because I’m pretty damn sure I’ll like the lasagna. I’m a big proponent of safety and security and familiarity, and while those qualities have their merits, they close me off to so much of what the world has to offer. (I suppose I should say I close myself offto so much of what the world has to offer.)
I know that I tend to talk myself out of doing a lot of things I want to do but just don’t think I can — either I’m down on my own abilities or I think the topic under consideration just isn’t feasible. And basically what that comes down to in all cases is, unsurprisingly, fear. I’m so afraid even to try $thing that I quit the race before I’ve even laced up my sneakers.
And I’m not even just talking being afraid of The Big Things — I’m afraid of doing Little Things, even ones that might advance my goals or enrich my life if I’d just not be quite such a coward and do them. One online buddy of mine recently jumped out of a friggin’ plane to raise money for a good cause, and I have trouble sacking up the courage to make a phone call? (What kills me is that I’m afraid of stupid little things like phone calls and meeting new people, but big decisions like getting married, buying a house, having kids? No problem.)
Kathy touches on a point which hits painfully close to home when she says that, just like anything else, doing scary things takes practice. One of the biggest reasons (though far from the only reason) why I don’t do more boundary pushing is because I’m not used to doing it. There’s a particular feeling that I get when I know I’m doing something new to me: my hands start shaking, my skin feels cold, my brain ratchets up into hyper-sensitive mode (though I have trouble speaking clearly). And honestly, I don’t much like those sensations. Those new-thing feelings tend to be so intense that they leave me shaken for awhile afterwards. Even when the experience or the results have been worth it — which they almost always have been — I don’t like that feeling, and it makes me not want to do it again. (”It” in this case is “trying new things,” not the thing that now isn’t new; having done that thing, I’m usually less reticent to do it the next time.)
Obviously, some people get off on whatever sensations new experiences bring on for them, and I’m curious as to why that is. I don’t know if other people get an entirely different set of physiological responses than I do… or if they just intrepret similar responses in an entirely different manner. I’m sure that Kathy’s point about practice feeds in here: the more you try new things, the more practice you get at managing your responses to said new things, which should, in theory, make doing new things less scary in the future.
And I want things to be less scary. This fear is as baffling as it is crippling, and I’m tired of feeling crippled by my own insecurities. I’m obviously one of the primary role models for my children, and this certainly isn’t a trait I want to pass on to them; I don’t want fear to control their lives the way it’s controlled so much of mine. I want them to be strong and capable and confident and to face the world with their chins held high and just a touch of an “I can do anything” glint in their beautiful blue eyes. And if I truly want that for them… why wouldn’t I want the same for me?
So how about you? Is there anything you’ve always wanted to try but think is too far beyond your reach even to give it a shot? What is it you think you can’t do?
And what’s really stopping you?
When the Universe Speaks, I Listen.
Sunday, May 7th, 2006 @ 10:05 pm
The rational part of my brain by far dwarves that part of my brain which is open to things-not-easily-explained. I’m far more Scully than Mulder: my first reaction to hearing stories about phenomena which fall outside of the realm of the basic laws of the universe as laid down in high-school science textbooks is to scoff dismissvely at whatever out-there bit of New Age hooey is under discussion. I reailze that this isn’t the most open-minded attitude I could have (I attribute said attitude to my apparently very sheltered upbringing), and I’m working on being more open to that which isn’t considered part of “normal” science, especially since so many of my friends — incredibly intelligent people I admire and respect quite a bit — believe so strongly in some of this stuff. If these folks believe in $x, I say to myself, then there’s got to be something to it.
I’m saying all of that as a way into this: I’m not sure how much I believe in coincidence, and I’m trying to notice when it feels like the universe is attempting to tell me something… even if I can’t immediately suss out just what.
Case in point:
Friday night, Terry and I were watching a program on the Travel Channel about (coincidentally enough) places which are supposedly hotspots for mystical or paranormal energy. One of the mystically intense locales featured on the show was Sedona, Arizona, and there among the footage of Sedona was a very interesting-looking church, one that I believe had been built into the rocks in the mountains. (It was only mentioned and shown in passing, so I didn’t get the full story.) That church itself isn’t important to my story except in that it sparked some neurons in my brain: “Hmmm,” the thought generated by the firing of those neurons said, “your dad told you a story about some church out in the Southwest that had a spiral staircase that had some funky properties to it. I wonder if that’s it?”
And that was all I thought of the matter.
Until a few mintues ago, when I was listening to an Internet radio station I’d never listened to before.
Instead of listening to my usual MP3s while writing, I decided to listen to the radio instead, and pulled a station at random out of iTunes: iChannel, which plays all indie and unsigned bands, so I knew I’d hear some new stuff. Well, after the third song I heard, a DJ (female voice, cute and just slightly less-than-professional-sounding) came on to introduce the next song, which had been specially requested by Sarah from Santa Fe.
“Have you ever been to Santa Fe?” asks the DJ. “They’ve got this church there, and it’s got this spiral staircase in it that’s made without any nails at all. It’s just boards. Pretty cool… you should check it out if you’re ever in Santa Fe. Anyway, here’s the request for Sarah…”
That was the church and the staircase my dad had told me about.
Coinicdence that I should see a TV show about mystical energies and unexplainable pheomena that makes me think about something I hadn’t thought of in years, something about which I couldn’t quite remember the details, and then have those details filled in 48 hours later by a DJ on a radio station I’d never even heard of before? Most likely, yeah… but it also feeds into something else which had been on my mind since Thursday: opening my mind to these sorts of connections and letting either the universe or my subconcious, take your pick, send me messages or information it thinks I need.
(What message am I supposed to be taking from the story of the Loretto Chapel? I’m honestly not sure. Since I’m not a religious person, I’m going to ignore the “miraculous” apsects of the staircase’s construction. I’m thinking I should be getting a message about design or building, or perhaps about seeing a project through to completion. Possibly that I should become a nun, though that seems unlikely.)
These sorts of coincidences have happened to me many times in my life. I have no idea if they’re a more or less common occurrence for me than for other people, or even if I’m more of less aware of them. I know that as impressive as this most recent coincidence feels, it’s far from the biggest that’s ever popped up; sometime soon I’ll tell you about my friend Steve and how I knew he was supposed to be part of my life.
So what about all of you? I’d love to hear about any similar experiences you might have had and what, if any, meaning you ascribed to them.
Happy Birthday, Me!
Friday, February 10th, 2006 @ 5:04 pm
So I’m 35 today. I have to say that so far, 35 doesn’t feel all that different from 34, but then again, it really doesn’t feel all that much different from 27.
Thirty-five seems like a good time to do some stock-taking, being that whole midpoint-of-the-decade thing. For me, unsurprisingly, this comes down to evaluating my career and creative pursuits — I mean, I’m extraordinarily happy; I’m pretty healthy (the diabetes is under control); I have a fantastic family and wonderful friends, both local and spread throughout the country; I have a job that I like well enough for now and has potential to make me even happier. There’s truly no point in my life previous to this that I would trade for right now.
So yeah, the future directions of the career and the writing are really the big things dominating my mid-decade thoughts. I’m not sure exactly where either is going, but I think I’ve finally made some peace with the fact that it’s doubtful I’ll be supporting myself with writing anytime soon — and honestly, I’m not sure I even want to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not at all saying that I don’t want to write anymore — in fact, I think I want to do it more than ever — but I’m releasing myself from the constricting notion that I had to A Writer. I’m okay with thinking of writing the same way I do drawing and photography and playing guitar and piano: it’s something I really enjoy doing and something I want to get better at, but it doesn’t have to be This Big Thing. Writing’s still sitting a few steps higher than those other pursuits (it certainly does have much more income and prestige potential than any of the others), but I’m just trying to take the pressure off — longtime readers and friends probably know I’ve always tended to put unreasonable expectations on myself with regards to the writing thing.
None of that is to say I’m not taking the writing seriously, or that I don’t want to publish. It’s just an acknowledgement that for the time being, it has to take second place to The Work What Pays and will do so for several more years. And that’s 100% OK.
I’ve realized that I’m pretty lucky: I have a current job and career that I like, one I’d like to pursue more seriously. I enjoy doing what I do and it pays pretty well (with the potential to pay really well if I get better and better at it). It takes care of my family and allows Terry to stay home with the kids. And it allows me to work on my writing and get a bi-weekly paycheck without feeling like my soul is being char-grilled. I’ve known (or know of) too many people for whom it’s an either-or situation.
Furthermore (and this might be the topic of future posts) — there’s potential there for me to combine the writing and the current career. More on that later, perhaps.
Anyway, that’s some of what’s going on in my head. I’m sorry I haven’t been posting more often lately — things have just been a little bit nutty, both at work and at home. (I’ve actually been — gasp — working while I’m at work. Well, not so much today, but hey, it’s my birthday.) Do you people know that I actually feel guilt when I go too long without posting? I do, I swear.
Effortless
Thursday, December 15th, 2005 @ 3:37 pm
Though John Scalzi’s list of fifteen observations about his relationship to his writing features a number of points that had me nodding my head in recognition, one in particular stuck a bit of a familiar chord with me:
…I do have to say that one of my great challenges as a writer is making sure that my writing is more than merely facile.
Putting words together is easy for me. [1] Always has been. And I think it’s perhaps always been a little bit too much so: because putting words together in an effective, competent way has always come easily, I’ve been able to rely on that fact alone and haven’t really put as much thought into what I’m trying to say. Because the how comes without needing much brainpower, the what gets slighted. You might think that since the how is easy, the what would acutally get more attention, but, well, that doesn’t seem to be the way my brain works. I’ve never thought of myself as mentally lazy, but evidence seems to suggest that might very well be the case.
When I’m faced with something that simply requires a substantial amount of work, something that won’t let me just glide through–like, f’r instance, designing the plot of a story–I get frustrated when it doesn’t come as effortlessly as the wordcraft…and I give up. This problem of certain things being too easy and my consequently not working hard enough on the more difficult aspects of said thing has actually been something of a recurrent theme for me in my life, affecting everything from my schoolwork to my artwork, but that’s likely the subject of another post.
The nature of this whole blogging thing doesn’t help the lack of effort much of the time; in a push to get something done and published, I don’t put as much polish on some bits as perhaps I should and end up disappointed with the results [2]. “It’s just a blog,” I hear you say; “what does it really matter? It’s not expected to be particularly exceptional, is it?” Well, perhaps, but given that blogging is the bulk of the writing I’ve been doing lately, I think I really should try harder. [3] And the ol’ Do or Do Not is something of my public writing face, so I really should put my best words forward, so to speak.
Anyways, all of this is to say I’m going to try to engage my brain (and, if I can manage it, yours) and put some more effort into what shows up here from now on. Posts of Hugely Enormous Quality coming your way soon!
[2] One recent post in particular could’ve used some more mental elbow grease and it might’ve been something really good. As it stands, it just feels like a missed opporutunity for something really good.
[3] Also, honestly, I’d like not to embarass myself overmuch in front of all of those aforementioned excellent writer friends.
Coming Into Focus
Monday, November 7th, 2005 @ 6:06 pm
It was never my dream to be a novelist.
I think that it’s pretty obvious at this point to anyone who’s paid a shred of attention to my progress bar on the side of the page that my heart’s not in writing the novel I was (am?) working on. The bar hasn’t budged in two months. For a while, that fact was bothering me; yesterday, I stopped letting it.
Writing a novel has always been on my “something I’d like to do someday” list. But, as I said, it’s never really been my dream. When I think of my life as a writer in the not-too-distant future, I don’t honestly see myself writing novels (or not predominantly, anyway). I’d say that writing novels doesn’t feel like the way I’m going to get my writing goals met–except that the fact is I haven’t had any firm writing goals.
The novel gave me something to do. I’d had a story idea rattling around in my head for a year or more, and that seemed like a good way to start working out the details of that particular story. What I worked out more than anything else, as noted in this space previously, was that I don’t do the dive-in-without-planning thing very well. And while I do have an overall much more clear idea of the story and where it’s going, I’m not sure that story’s future is in novel form.
| Tips What Spoke to Me. |
What, you might ask, spurred this particular bit of self-examination? Well, I rediscovered a link yesterday to a site from which I’ve gotten one of the previous sidebar quotes for Do or Do Not. Hugh MacLeod, author of Gaping Void, writes an awful lot about creativity–how to be more creative, how to succeed at whatever your creative vision might be, how to follow your own instincts and tell everyone else to piss off, how to get through the inevitable down times. I’d read Hugh’s article several months ago, early in the infancy of this site, and it helped me restructure some things in my head; unfortunately, over time I seem to have lost all of the valuable insights I’d gained from the article.
But when I re-read it yesterday, it helped bring into focus how out-of-focus my creative energies have been recently.
I haven’t had a lot of time for writing overall lately, between a hectic work schedule, time spent with family and having some semblance of a social life, and what little time I have had I haven’t been putting to good use. Some of the stuff I’ve written for this site has been worthwhile, or at the very least fun to write, but overall I just haven’t been very productive. But as I was thinking about these issues and thinking about some of the issues raised in MacLeod’s article, I realized that even when I had been getting the words out, most of them weren’t in service to the things I’ve always really wanted to do. I think I was writing a novel because it seemed more like the kind of thing I should be doing rather than what I know in my heart I really want to be doing. I was writing just to say I was writing.
So I think that from now on (or, well, for the near future), I’m going to work on those things that will get me closer to my actual goal: writing comic books. I’m going to work on developing my craft, regardless of whether I think the projects I’m using to develop that craft are going to sell–I’ve got plenty of shitty stories to work through before I get to the good ones, so I might as well get those out of the way now. I’m going to work on things for me, not on things I think the world expects from me; when I’m ready, when the work is ready, the world will know it.
Thanks, Hugh.
