An Artist in Motion Tends to Stay in Motion

Newton’s law of motion – you guys know this one.  An object at rest stays at rest, unless an external force affects it.  An object in motion stays in motion, unless something impedes it or changes its direction.  Okay, that’s not a direct quote and I’m not actually that great with scientific theory, but that’s the gist of it.

This is one of those things I’ve known for a long time, just on experience.  I know that the more creative I’m allowed to be, the more I feel like being creative.  Those people who “wait” for the muse are kidding themselves.  The muse won’t come to you unless you’re likely to do her bidding.  She’s kind of a realist that way.

True story about writing – it keeps going, long after you’ve closed down your computer.  Any writer will tell you this.  The story line is playing out in our head when we carry out mundane conversations, do our taxes, or wash the dishes.  When we’re out with normal people in the middle of a social gathering, there’s a voice in our head writing a scene.  We tune it out when something important is going on around us… but not always.

I think it takes a special brand of person to put up with us.  Whatever characteristics you’re born with, it still appears that you’re not paying attention to the people in your real world on a fairly regular basis.  Sometimes we’re not.  Often we’re multitasking.  Real world people might think, “What’s more important?  Me or the stories in your head that aren’t even real?”  If we’re honest, they might not like the answer every time.

I have the pleasure of watching the creative psychosis manifest itself in my daughter these days.  It’s funny.  I know these things about myself, and other creative types that I’ve known.  But to see my daughter have the same leanings kind of brings it home.  It’s not something you can get around – maybe it’s not something to be overcome. 

With my daughter, it’s a lot of things – but her main creative focus is music.  She went to a concert with friends – a local band someone’s sister was in.  When she came home, she gushed about how great the musicians were, showed me a tee shirt and cd she bought, and then spent the next 5 consecutive hours playing… first piano, then guitar, then bass, back to piano, her keyboard… then bass again.  It was a weekend, so I didn’t bug her about it… I think she called it around 3 in the morning.

She had a concert at school last week.  It went well and she had a short solo… did she come home ready to be done with it?  Nope.  I had to make her stop playing at midnight.  That time she was composing.  “Mom… just two more measures… I can’t stop here.”

And I get it.  Playing doesn’t quench the urge to play.  It stokes the fire.  Writing doesn’t fulfill your desire to paint your story… it propels you further.

When your muses have all abandoned you, write something.  Read something.  Surround yourself with those who are creating.  Creativity begets creativity.  And the motion starts with you.

Community Notebook

I started carrying a notebook when I was about 15.  Not for any particular class or reason, it was just kind of a spare that I doodled in, wrote bits and scraps of stories, and mindlessly penned song lyrics in.  That notebook would eventually become what I referred to as, “My Journal” - the first edition, anyway.  There were many editions – I called all of them, “My Journal”.

I always had one – loose leaf, spiral bound, whatever color suited my fancy when the last page of my previous journal was filled.  Of course, this was before you had phones that were basically little computers.  Back when handwriting was what you did to get the idea down somewhere until you could get to your computer.

On each of these editions I scrawled, “My Journal” – it was written in permanent marker or scratched so deep into the laminated colorful exterior of the notebook in ballpoint pen as to make it permanent.  The outside of the journal would get decorated over the course of its use in a myriad of ways.  Phone numbers would be jotted down on the fly, little doodles of characters or scenery peaked from this tattered corner or that.  I remember one journal specifically having a sticker on the front that read, “Hot and Spicy Italian”.  It was from a package of sausage, but I thought it was amusing.  Yes, I’ve always been easily amused.

I carried it with me everywhere.  No, literally, everywhere.  When I started driving, it was with me – I might leave it in the car, but only when I was somewhere that the journal might be compromised (read as beer soaked or otherwise degraded).   There was a box, and each edition would be placed on top of its predecessors as it was retired.  And a bright sparkly new journal would take its place in my every day.

My first novel was penned in notebooks.  Three of them.  The entire rough draft was hand written.  The first revision was the one that I keyed in to my computer.  That’s the only time I’ve handwritten a long piece.  It was crap.  But the process was slightly cathartic.  Even when I was writing that novel, I had a “Journal” – separate from the novel notebooks, all its own.

See, that’s what the journal is for me.  It’s not a place to write out long fiction.  It’s a place to play.  To write rough ideas of whatever it is I’m working on – outlines, character sketches, sometimes just bits of dialogue that pop into my head and I don’t know where to put them… but they’re too cool to just chalk up to nothing.  To noodle ideas, draft silliness, and otherwise spark my mind into action – most especially when it’s sluggish and unwilling to stop procrastinating.

My journals in the last few years never seem to get finished.  I still have one.  My current edition is blue.  The outside cover does not proclaim that it is “MY JOURNAL”.  It’s a run of the mill notebook in every conceivable way – except that it’s mine.  There are bits of query letters.  Notes from resumes I’ve written freelance (a mark of the economy, I suppose).  Notes of markets to check and checklists of tasks that are writing and home related in a hodgepodge that I may or may not get back to… but the act of writing it down somehow cements it in my head.  Because that’s how I am – I’m a words person.  I think in words, not pictures.  I kind of miss the stickers and doodles, though… the bits proclaiming to the outside world that it’s mine, and I’m weird… and raspberries to you if you don’t get me.

Last week, I went to grab my notebook off the dining room table before leaving for work.  I do that, still.  Grab it and keep it in the car, so that I can jot things down if I have time on my lunch break.  Only, my notebook was gone.  Of course, I could have found another notebook to use, but I didn’t want another one.  I wanted mine.  Because it’s mine.  Funny the things you’re hard pressed to relinquish.  I almost made myself late for work looking for it, and came up empty handed.

Two more days passed and I still couldn’t find it.  And then, I walked into my daughter’s room to put her laundry on her bed and noticed a notebook open on her pillow.  The top two pages were handwritten – what looked like song lyrics but I didn’t read them, because they weren’t mine.  The notebook, however was mine.  I tore the pages out and left them on her bed.  When she came home, I mentioned it to her:

Me:  Hey, I left your work on your bed.  But that notebook is mine.

Gracie Girl:  Huh? You didn’t read it, did you?

Me:  No.  That’s yours.  The notebook’s mine.

Gracie Girl:  Well, don’t read it.  It’s a song and it’s not done.  And I didn’t know it was YOUR notebook.  It just looked like a notebook.  And I needed one.

Me:  You’ve got a ton of notebooks.

Gracie Girl:  Those are school notebooks.  Or music notebooks.  I needed a different notebook.

Okay, that sounded familiar.  When I went out to the store that night, I grabbed a little something extra.  I knocked on Gracie’s door when I got home.

Gracie Girl:  Yeah.

Me:  (opening the door)  Here, I got this for you.

I held up a brand new shiny notebook.  Plain, college ruled loose leaf, spiral bound.

Gracie Girl:  *Jumping off the bed*  Yay!  For me?  Yay!

She literally hugged it.  She’s had it with her every day.  When she goes to sleep, it’s next to her pillow.  When she leaves for school, it’s in her arm, not in her bookbag with the boring, old school notebooks.  Apparently that “My Journal” thing is hereditary.  

So, I've Been Away For A While...

And what did I learn in my year of bloggy abstinence?  A little of this and a little of that.  One of the things about blogging that bothered me a bit was that I felt like it was a hindrance to the actual writing.  I put time and energy into posts that could well have been paid articles or essays, and I knew it.  You can feel the difference between good writing and “meh” and I was putting a lot of good writing into my posts, and not a heck of a lot of “meh”…

One of my favorite blogging writer friends, the awesome Erica Orloff, used to refer to blogging as priming the pump.  It was part of her routine to get the juices flowing.  Of course, she’s also one of the most prolific writers you’ll ever meet.  But I think there was a point to that.  Not that the writing of the posts got my juices flowing so much as the interaction with other writers. 

In one of the Rocky movies (yes, I’m just greaseball enough to quote this), Rocky was not having any luck finding a job and wanted to go back to fighting.  So he went and talked to Mickey (for those of you who never saw the movies because a rock fell on you or something – Mickey was his trainer), who told him there was no way he should go back to boxing.  His eyes were too bad from getting hit.  So Rocky asked for a job sweeping up around the gym, and the old trainer looked at him with his eyes full of pity and tried to talk him out of it.  Saying, “You’re like royalty around there…” and asking how he could walk around with spit buckets for guys who looked up to him like that.  And Rocky said, “I just have to be around it.”

And I think, in a way, that’s what blogging does for me.  It keeps me connected with other writers, which keeps me excited about writing… or at least eases a bit of the black hole you get when no one around you really gets what you’re doing.

So I think it’s time to begin again.  The blog is going through some transformations… because I’ve been through a few and I guess it’s reflective of where my head’s at.  What I’ve been doing is a little different than where I was back when I started this.  The kids are older.  I work full time and still write freelance on the side.  Am I still writing fiction?  I haven’t been as prolific as I want to be.  And that’s one of the things I’m aiming to change.  The difference between now and a year ago is that I realize that blogging was never one of the things holding me back.

We’ll see where it goes from here.  Hopefully, I’ll find some of my blogging circle still active – I know many have found other venues for their online time.  And maybe I’ll meet a few new writers to capture my attention and get me thinking.

If you’re new to these parts, pull up a chair…and a martini… and a sense of humor, because you’ll need one to peruse any of my meanderings.  If you’ve been here before, welcome back.  Happy to take the next leg of the journey with you.

Wasting Time and Self-Imposed Boundaries

Nathan Bransford’s recent blog asked the question, “Can anyone be a good writer?”

For me, the answer is simple. But the commenters’ answers were more fascinating than my own take, because most of them were so adamant.

A few years ago, I volunteered to run an art appreciation program at my kids’ school. I designed classes around famous artworks and spent a good portion of the time discussing the artist and time period, and then modified projects so that the kids could use an array of mediums throughout the school year that were age appropriate – depending on the grade. I worked with every grade from pre-k through sixth and wound up teaching a lot of classes instead of just my own children’s classes.

Now, I helped other moms design their projects, found volunteers, even put together the art show at the end of the year, and worked with the program for I think two years... but the most vivid memory I have of the entire experience is this:

I set up a still life in the middle of the fourth grade classroom. I don’t even remember who the artist we studied for this one was, but the fun part was letting each of the kids find things in their desk or around the room that they thought were interesting and decide where to set them on the table in the middle. So there was this great big hodgepodge of STUFF. And I had them all sit in a circle around the table and then I told them to draw it... oy, the looks on their faces! Like a deer caught in the headlights. I wasn’t thinking.

When you tell someone to draw, someone who hasn’t already studied how to see things in that way – with an artist’s eye, well, they need something specific. You can’t give them too much. They don’t know where to look.

So I slowed them down a bit. Told them to breathe and told them each to pick a spot out of the still life that most appealed to them; I even let them move around the room to find what they found most interesting. They could draw it as large or as small as they wanted, include as many things as they wanted... it was all about their own perspective.

As I was walking around, a boy raised his hand, his page was still blank and the pencil was in his hand... and he looked at me and said, “But, most of us won’t be good drawers, right? I mean, like, some people are good drawers and then the rest of us will never really be good at it, right?”

So I told him the truth. “No, that’s not right. Anyone can learn to draw. Any person who wants to spend the time and put in their best effort can learn to draw and draw well. It’s a skill, and there are techniques, and to get really good takes a lot of practice, but there is no special ‘thing’ you either have or don’t that says you can draw. It’s all about working on it.”

See, there was another kid in this class who was talented. She had that X factor and had the ‘artist’ title in the class... so that’s probably where the question came from, but I wasn’t about to be the person that gave this kid a boundary and told him he’d never have the capacity to cross it.

And you know what – he crossed it. His drawing was good, and detailed, he picked small little skeleton erasers and some portion of a weaved basket thing... you could see every bone.

Now I’m pretty familiar with the whole, talent vs. work debate. And I do personally think there is a little kernel of something, that intangible we call talent, in great artists, writers, or really anything... I mean, there’s probably some intangible in surgeons and mathematicians, too, we just don’t generally call it talent, we call it intelligence instead... but it’s the same thing really. Some people have a natural ability in certain areas. That’s talent. It comes easier or there’s a spark there, and you’ll often hear other writers or artists talk about how you could see it as far back as grade school.

I had it. I got all that attention for being talented and creative... in drawing, not writing. If teachers from grade school saw me today, they’d probably wonder if I was doing anything with visual arts, because that was what I was known for then, what seemed to come easy for me. No one noticed anything interesting in my writing until late in high school... in fact, I was in one of the lower reading groups in grammar school.

And, getting back to the talent thing – I don’t actually have that spark in the visual arts. I figured that out on my own, and I think that’s how everyone should come to their own limitations or lack thereof. Just because my early dispositions leaned toward drawing doesn’t mean I was talented, it means I was interested. Interested in saying something. That’s what it was about. I’m still interested in the same thing, telling a story, but I’ve found I like doing it in words, scenes, through characters... or sometimes through blog rants.

So I don’t know – can anyone be a great writer? A great artist? Well, I guess it depends on your definition of great, and that’s subjective at best. What’s more interesting though, is why you come up with your answer to that question, and who you’re drawing boundaries for... because really, all of the years I spent drawing and painting... they weren’t wasted. I’ve taken the techniques and way of looking at things into every other area of study – no time you spend learning anything is ever really wasted, the skills always translate to other areas if you’re just open to it...

What’s your answer? Can ANYONE be a great writer? If your answer is no, who do you think needs to stay behind the line your boundaries draw? And how did you make it across, or did you?

Writing the Children's Book... a point of pride

I recently found the blog, Editorial Anonymous, written by a children’s book editor. It’s a great blog, as you’ll note it’s suddenly appeared on my blogroll for editors and agents, and I’ve been having some fun reading through past entries that I missed.

I submit to you a link that the YA and children’s writers among us will find hysterical, or disturbing, or both... I have to give credit to Editor Anonymous, because I found the link on one of her blogs on how not to get published.

Strong Bad Writes a Children’s Book

While the little video is pretty amusing, I have to say it’s not altogether off of what *some* people, writer and otherwise, think it is to write children’s fiction... On another blog I made mention of the fact that so many of us start out with the statement, “I never intended to write children’s fiction. I always thought I’d write (insert more impressive genre here).”

I’ve actually said this, typed this, thought this... and yes, I am hanging my head in shame, but I’m not the only one who should. The more I read and studied children’s writing and publishing, the more I realized how truly asinine these statements were. And now that I’m here, a little way up the road on my writing learning curve, I realize exactly why it is that my novel, the one that most spoke to me, the one that most needed telling... the one whose characters invaded my head until I got them down on the page – and haven’t left yet, the filthy little buggers... This novel is the one I had to tell for a reason, and my audience is more important to me than the literary elite could be – they are kids, jaded and wide eyed and all stops in between. They are future readers and current dreamers. They are important, more so than any other audience might be to me at this point in my life – not because the writing is easier, let me tell you, it’s not... but because the idea that a ten or eleven year old will pick up my book and feel something, turn pages, take the story with them when the reading is done, and, hopefully, pick up another book shortly thereafter... well, that’s a thrilling thought. That ten year old might write a book report about my novel, and it’ll never appear in The New York Times, but it might be hung in a grammar school hallway with sticky tape, and that would be pretty good, too.

Point, point, oh, yeah, my point:

Middle grade might be my permanent writing calling. I wouldn’t have said so a year ago. I was chomping at the bit to get this one out of my system and get back to adult fiction... with my simmering plot that’s been waiting in my journal since before the journey of Raskin’s Wings even began... and then something changed. In me, around me, or maybe I just heard my muse a little clearer... because suddenly this thing became THE book, not the one to get out of the way, but the one to savor and hone and bring to the best form possible so that at the end of the day, when submissions go out, I know it’s a book I’d want to watch my kids enjoy... and then the ideas, the plots the characters that readily drop into my mind to work on in the future... they changed, too... two series grew out of nothing for, of all things, early chapter books... because they did... maybe it’s because I’m engrossed in my kids’ reading, and notice what I find lacking or what they would enjoy more of... maybe it’s because I skipped children’s literature as a child, and I’m so enjoying it now... maybe it’s just the type of writing that really does suit me. I don’t really know... I know what the next novel is, though... middle grade historical.... how the heck did that happen?

That’s my journey from there to here. I didn’t set out to write children’s because I thought it would be easier... I can’t believe people actually do this, but they apparently do... that’s a whole other ball of wax, too... I don’t know why anyone would want to write a book that was looking for something easy to do.... you guys are mostly writers that stop in here, do you find this terribly easy?

Will I always write middle grade or various age ranges in children’s... the truth is, I don’t know. Maybe I will get that backburner plot out eventually... Maybe I won’t... But if I do get back to adult fiction at some point, it will not be because I want to be a real writer... I’m pretty impressed by children’s authors – right now I’m just hoping to build a career among them.