creativity – Page 2

Useful Typos, and the Voice of the Muse

December 21, 2010 by John 4 Comments

[Video: the “Red Room” scene from the last episode of Twin Peaks. I’ve adjusted the starting point to begin at what’s relevant to this post; if you don’t want to watch the whole thing, you can stop it at about 2:04.]

I have zero training as a typist, but type pretty fast anyhow just from, well, practice. No doubt someone with real experience would look over my shoulder and wonder why I use my pinkies (or whatever) so seldom, why I make my fingers reeeeeach so much, and so on. It all works out pretty good for the most part… except when I’m sort of flying along, tappy-tappy-tappy, and looking at some source material rather than at the screen, and one or more fingers drift just a littttttle bit to one side. What results looks vaguely like English, and if I check the keyboard I can trace it back to see, Oh yes, the left hand got out of sync there, or just the index finger or thumb.

I had one of those moments earlier today. The word I was typing in a comment box: manuscripts. What actually came out: nabyscruots.

Which, oddly, fit the context. That’s exactly what the damn things are sometimes. It’s not quite right, this nabyscruot. Maybe if I poke at it a little it’ll turn into a real manuscript.

It occurs to me now that this is actually the voice in which The Muse speaks: she doesn’t speak to artists and writers in our native languages, but in a sort of nasal, distended voice which sounds almost like gibberish unless we listen really, really hard*. Which would explain why it’s so difficult to answer the seemingly obvious question, “Where do you get your ideas?”… and so frustrating to try. If we answered honestly, our listener — many times, at least — would have to strain to “get it.” It’s so much easier to speak in metaphors and plainspoken shortcuts, the equivalent of the subtitles in the above video.

People ask me where I came up with the idea for the book I’m working on now. I tell them, “truthfully”:

I’d just finished writing a mystery. While working on that book, I’d read mysteries almost exclusively.
The first non-mystery I read afterward was Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils.
Visiting a Borders store in New Jersey — the first Borders I ever went into (and it’s now one of the ones about to close, sigh) — I decided I wanted to follow The Old Devils with a classic which I’d never read.
Thinking, as I wandered into the back left corner of the store: Huh. There’s one. How come I never read Le Morte d’Arthur? Wonder if it’s at all like all the other King Arthur stuff I’ve ever seen? Wonder if it’s at all like that movie the Pythons did?
…
“The [first-draft] End”!

But that’s pretty misleading. In fact, I have no idea how I connected all the pieces (including not only The Old Devils and Le Morte d’Arthur, but ales, motor homes, archery, and the rest of it). I just listened, really, really hard.

But we can’t just say that, can we?

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* Or think of the old Lassie TV show. The dog’s barking frantically, almost apoplectically, jumping up and down and falling over, and all the thickheaded human can say is, “What is it, girl? Did Timmy fall down the well? No? You hungry? You wanna go for a walk?”

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P.S. Here’s the backwards-talking little man from that Twin Peaks episode, explaining how to talk backwards — before, of course, the sound and video editing crews step in to play your backwards-talking voice backwards. (Got that?)

Ingredients of Revelation

December 10, 2010 by John 9 Comments

From whiskey river:

Shinto

When misfortune confounds us
in an instant we are saved
by the humblest actions
of memory or attention:
the taste of fruit, the taste of water,
that face returned to us in dream,
the first jasmine flowers of November,
the infinite yearning of the compass,
a book we thought forever lost,
the pulsing of a hexameter,
the little key that opens a house,
the smell of sandalwood or library,
the ancient name of a street,
the colourations of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date that we were searching for,
counting the twelve dark bell-strokes,
a sudden physical pain.

Eight million the deities of Shinto
who travel the earth, secretly.
Those modest divinities touch us,
touch us, and pass on by.

(Jorge Luis Borges [source])

…and:

To make art is to sing with the human voice. To do this you must first learn that the only voice you need is the voice you already have. Art work is ordinary work, but it takes courage to embrace that work, and wisdom to mediate the interplay of art and fear. Sometimes to see your work’s rightful place you have to walk to the edge of the precipice and search the deep chasms. You have to see that the universe is not formless and dark throughout, but awaits simply the revealing light of your own mind. Your art does not arrive miraculously from the darkness, but is made uneventfully in the light.

What veteran artists know about each other is that they have engaged the issues that matter to them. What veteran artists share in common is that they have learned how to get on with their work. Simply put, artists learn how to proceed, or they don’t. The individual recipe any artist finds for proceeding belongs to that artist alone — it’s non-transferable and of little use to others.

(David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear [source])

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Bon Mot for the Week*

October 4, 2010 by John 9 Comments

From poet David Kirby, who will be participating in a cross-disciplinary conference on creativity around these parts later this week:

I tell my own students that art is the deliberate transformed by the accidental, that you pursue your plan doggedly while staying open to the startling revelations that can kick your work up to a new level.

“The deliberate transformed by the accidental”: I like it.

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* Post title shamelessly cribbed from Froog. For simplicity and directness, it just can’t be improved upon (although I don’t plan to steal it for good!).

Thought Music

November 26, 2008 by John 7 Comments

What’s the deal with music, anyway?

Why does listening to music feel so much different from listening to anything else? Why does certain music make it easier to work — and certain music make it so much harder?

I’m not talking about coarse basics like volume, or instrumental-versus-vocal music. Apply enough volume, after all, and ANY music becomes mere (or not so mere) noise. No, I’m wondering about subtleties: rhythm, pace, melody, “feel.”

For the rest of this post, if you’d like, feel free to select one of the following three audio streams as your soundtrack. (Or leave them playing in this browser window or tab while you use another to go on doing something else.) They’re all instrumental. And there’s one for each of three genres: classical, jazz, and “post-rock,” a genre I myself wouldn’t have named (which probably just proves that I know nothing consequential about music).

Note: I also tacked on a bonus track; in the course of building this post, I couldn’t stop thinking of this number. It’s much longer than the others, though — 20+ minutes instead of only around six.

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The Business of Publishing Is…

July 11, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

From '...Loveley Money!' - c. 2008 by Richard Stiles (stilesr1 at sxc.hu) …surprise — it’s business!

In a blog post the other day, literary agent Nathan Bransford unleashed a torrent by asking nascent and/or, umm, under-published writers two questions:

Question #1: Let’s say there was a seer who could tell you definitively whether or not you have the talent to be a published writer. Absolute 100% accuracy. But. If the seer person said no, that’s that. Final answer. Would you want to know?

Question #2: If the seer person said no, you don’t have the talent to be a published writer, would you still write?

Now, granted, there are some traps there for the unwary reader. What does “published” mean — does self-publishing count? What’s “talent”?

But there were also a couple traps there for the blogging agent himself. First, of course, maybe 50-60% of commenters began by implicitly re-writing the first question to suit themselves, a la “Nothing is ever 100% certain. Therefore I’m going to assume that the seer may be wrong — certainly in my case!”

(I wanted to say, C’mon, people, make a choice. One shudders to imagine this sort of “decision-making” when facing truly black-and-white life choices — as sometimes, however painfully, life choices are. Re-imagine Sophie’s Choice, say: Sure — take them both! Sheesh.)

The post drew almost 200 comments. But that wasn’t the other trap awaiting Bransford. The other trap was in summing up his responses to all the comments.

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