They say that each of us have about 2,798,107,200 heartbeats per life.
I truly believe I have a word quota per week before I exhaust the capacity to think in syllables, letters and phrases.
Between completely rewriting The Essay, a business plan, several proposals, and email (last priority), I'm plain "worded out." My email the last few days were reduced to unintelligible grunts. And I know something is wrong when I can't conceive of blogging.
I feel I'm ready to get back to my prolific self here. I have a backlog of posts in my mind and I'd love to talk more about art not being just for a select chosen few. I'd like to extend the artisan journalism theme into marketing too - how can we not only create customer evangelists, but invite customer artisans to flourish? (My new linkblog will be renamed Artisan Media & Marketing. Thanks Stowe for the new term!)
Things I've noticed about the writing process in last week or two:
1. "When I'm writing something, I'm not really thinking about the fact that people are going to read it. I'd never be able to write if I thought about that." - Augusten Burroughs, author of the excrutiatingly honest memoirs Dry and Running With Scissors (from Personal Writing, June 2005).
(BTW, Burroughs used to be an advertising copywriter: "Sometimes when you work in advertising you'll get a product that's really garbage and you have to make it seem fantastic, something that is essential to the continued quality of life." He he.)
Anyway, that's excellent advice.
And it helps immensely not to pre-judge or judge the audience you're writing for...that's eons worse than thinking about the fact that people are going to read it.
2. I don't do well writing "under pressure." I pulled an all-nighter Monday (or is that technically Tuesday morning) revising a 17,000 word manuscript. Judging by its quality, I tend to agree with this op-ed New York Times writer:
Over at the Flux Factory, an artists' collective in Long Island City, three fiction writers have agreed to isolate themselves in small writing cells for a project called "Novel: A Living Installation." Each has promised to finish a novel by June 4. That is 25 days away. Odds are that these will either be teeny-tiny novels or very bad ones. - "Writing Inside the Box", New York Times, May 10, 2005 (sorry, this URL isn't blog link generator-able)
And strongly disagree with one of the project's premises:
But, just as writing is solitary, it is also a performance. The writer, sitting alone, is always conscious of an audience, whoever that may be.
3. That said discipline is something I keep hearing over and over and over again from artists, especially writers. And so I'm looking into how can discipline fit into my process. Below are snippets from a great article in this past Sunday's New York Times (ah, their link generator system suffered a hard drive crash; URL and cash donations sought) on artist Philip Olifi's daily ritual of painting watercolor head portraits for nearly the last ten years:
Twyla Tharp wakes up every day at 5:30 and takes a cab to the gym. Chopin played Bach. Beethoven strolled around Vienna with a sketch pad first thing in the morning. Giorgio Morandi spent decades painting the same dusty bunch of small bottles, bowls and biscuit tins. Chuck Close paints and draws and makes prints of nearly identical dots or marks, which, depending on how they're arranged, turn into different faces. "Having a routine, knowing what to do," he has said, "gives me a sense of freedom and keeps me from going crazy. It's calming." He calls his method Zenlike, "like raking gravel in a monastery."
There are routines and there are routines. On Kawara, the Japanese-born artist, paints the date. Since the 1960's, he has made thousands of "Today" paintings. His routine entails at least four or five coats of the same brand of paint, the letters white and hand-drawn, always in roughly the same proportion to the size of the canvas.
Out of routine comes inspiration. That's the idea, anyway. To grasp what's exceptional, you first have to know what's routine. I once spent several months watching the American realist painter Philip Pearlstein paint a picture of two nudes. He has followed the same routine for years. One of the models, Desirée Alvarez, who is also an artist, said that the value of watching someone else's studio routine was "in terms of discipline and day-to-dayness and commitment to work even when it isn't going well."
"I know Philip is interested in Zen monks," she continued. "They have their routines, because they think that within routine, and only within routine, enlightenment comes."
Mr. Ofili said, "That's exactly it," when we spoke the other day about his daily routine. He arrives in his studio at 9 or 10 in the morning, he explained. He sets aside a corner for watercolors and drawings "away from center stage," meaning where he paints his big, collaged oil paintings. "I consider that corner of the studio to be my comfort zone," he said. First, he tears a large sheet of paper, always the same size, into eight pieces, all about 6 by 9 inches. Then he loosens up with some pencil marks, "nothing statements, which have no function."
"They're not a guide," he went on, "they're just a way to say something and nothing with a physical mark that is nothing except a start."
Watercolor goes on top. He estimated that each head takes 5 to 15 minutes. Occasionally he'll paint while on the phone. He may finish one watercolor or 10 in the course of a day...
Philip Guston is another example. He had his own routine. He was heavily into political subject matter, into issues in his own life, but he was looking to get beyond those issues, to find the zone. He talked about the process of painting as an emptying out: he said everyone was in the studio with him when he started and gradually they all left until finally he left, too, and then there was only the work."...
"In the end, it doesn't really matter what you paint," Mr. Ofili concluded. "It's all just a routine to connect yourself finally with other people. Someone else's routine would seem restrictive to me. But rules and limits are something to push against. It's like doing your morning exercise. Things don't kick in until you push at your limits." - "Wake Up. Wash Face. Do Routine. Now Paint", New York Times, May 8, 2005
UPDATE: Talk about "worded out." The three novelists esconed in their "habitat" are also blogging the Novel: A Living Installation excerpts! I doubt they have the extra wordbeats to also blog the experience and process this minute. Blogs here, here and here.
Well, you know what the cure for too much typing is, Evelyn: guitar picking!
Of course, a little sketchbook is far more portable for the on-the-go gal like yourself. Or maybe one of those handy-dandy, pocket-sized digital cameras.
I want to see YOUR Flickr page!
Posted by: Colleen | May 13, 2005 at 01:51 PM
Great post. It's hard for me to have much of a routine nowadays with a toddler in the house, but I do try to blog something substantial every day both in my professional (http://www.aboutweblogs.com/genetics) and personal blogs. It's a mental discipline that is sadly lacking in my life as a stay-at-home mom right now. :P
Posted by: Cottontimer | May 13, 2005 at 11:45 PM