Category Archives: creativity

A Quarter Machine Capsule Interlude

26 Saturday May 2012

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I had a migraine today, so I’m not exactly up to a proper entry. Instead, I will post a couple of photos I took a while ago, after I found where they’d hid the quarter machines at my local grocery store.

(you might actually have spotted this one in my header on WordPress once or twice; I added it to the random assortment of header images some time back)

I still have all those empty capsules, actually; I keep trying to think of something I could make and stick in them, to leave somewhere random in my neighborhood. I’ve done the same thing before with bookmarks and origami stars, quarter machine capsules seem like the logical next step. Any brilliant ideas, O many-splendored readers?

Worries about Wikis (are actually different worries in cunning disguises)

17 Tuesday Jan 2012

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MCA Hogarth’s post about her new wiki got me thinking again about the story-related info I have scattered all over the place. I’ve attempted to collect some of it in my private wiki, but that’s not exactly been a great success because, well, college. And I’m not very good at wiki design, especially not when it’s just for myself and I can obsess over organizational hierarchies to the exclusion of adding new info. I’ve thought about getting back to the wiki when I graduate (you know, along with the five million other things I’m going to somehow find time for when I graduate).

But wiki thoughts raise for me the question of publicity, which ties to larger questions. Most of my info is for stories that are either unwritten, partially-written, or written but unreleased into the wild (and mostly no longer in fit shape for release, ahem). That, to me, is a major complicating factor. Would putting so much story info together in a public wiki diminish reader interest in the stories themselves? I have this same concern about my blog archives, actually, which is what makes it an urgent question at all. Periodically I feel the urge to purge, because the weight of all that info I blithely revealed in image descriptions troubles me. Partly because maybe I’ve given too much away, maybe no one is interested in the stories now (although then again, my experience has been that people are not very careful readers of my posts and tend not to remember all the plot stuff I blathered two years ago). Partly also I feel trapped by a lot of stuff I’ve committed to “in public” that has turned out not to work.

Or is this another iteration of my continual desire to wipe out my Internet traces in the unrealistic hope of somehow “starting fresh” and THIS time I’ll know what I’m doing and do it right? This is all too likely. I’ve left a trail of deleted blogs and emptied archives in my wake over the years, and I am an ace at editing my past without any clear sense of what good the exercise actually does.

I don’t know.

Maybe I need to get some (non-Marigold Woman*) stories into shape and get them out into the wild (a whole ‘nother can of worms) before I’m ready to answer this question.

I’d appreciate your thoughts, readers and fellow writers and general peoples. In fact, that’s precisely why I’m sharing these worries, because I don’t know which end is up and I’d appreciate other perspectives.

* Meaning that the Marigold Woman is less of an issue because I feel no need to give any information about that, even though maybe I should. But it started as a prose experiment to which plot was secondary, and I like keeping it on that footing even if it has grown a plot by accident.

Some Thoughts on Pain

29 Saturday Oct 2011

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Hmm. Recently, as a form of procrastination (theesiiiiiss, why are you so haaaaaaard), I reorganized some of my art files, and in doing so ended up going through a bunch of my drawings from years past. It’s fascinating how a few years of distance gives you a new perspective on things. In the midst of drawing all these things, I didn’t have any special plan or purpose–but looking back at it, I can see how the things going on in my life gave shape and coherence to all the disparate ideas and sketches. And it got me thinking. Mostly, it got me thinking about the whole issue of pain and art.

Not to be melodramatic or anything, but looking at my art I could identify a few stages where I was having hard times–as happens in life–and without particularly trying to I poured my distress into my art and writing. I can see it in the ideas and my treatment of them. Whether or not anyone else can is not my point. My point is that I was hurting, and that hurt informed what I did creatively.

Which led me to the question: so what about this whole “suffering artist” trope? Is there any truth in it? Here’s what I observed:

  1. In some cases, my unhappiness brought forth some of my strongest work. There are a few stories, in particular, that came directly out of my search for answers to some tough questions. They are, relative to my body of work so far, strong stories–not perfect stories, but the vividness of my own anxiety gave them urgency and honesty. I have high hopes for these stories. I found some drawings like that, too. My unhappiness drove the production of art that was stronger for the hurt in it.
  2. In other cases, my hurt and unhappiness either caused me to shut down, creatively, or marred what should have been a kindly and cheerful project. Because all I could REALLY think about were my troubles, these pictures and stories turned into overwrought melodramas, gobs of misery warring with frank silliness and wrecking the whole show. Being troubled made my art demonstrably worse.

So… yeah, I don’t really have an answer to this. Do hard times choke creativity, or sharpen it? My experience seems to be that it depends… on what, I’m not sure. Your thoughts?

Not an excuse, maybe, but comforting

05 Wednesday Jan 2011

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Something to think about, at least for me right now:

“I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day—half the length of the selection I read you earlier from Heart of Darkness—for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.”

–William Deresiewicz, “Solitude and Leadership“

(I should note that not only am I not familiar with this site, but also I don’t entirely agree with the rest of the piece. But this, I thought, was food for thought.)

Philosophical Travelogue: the Celebrity Model

12 Monday Jul 2010

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(note: I realize that blogs are used for two main purposes–public expression and social networking. I’m focusing on blogs as public expression. If you blog purely to keep your friends updated on your doings, as friends do, then this post probably isn’t of much use to you as a blogger. You may still find it interesting, though, if you read more expression-oriented blogs)

We love celebrities. Whether it’s a Big Name Celebrity, or just a popular Favourite Blogger, we gravitate naturally towards people who put themselves in the limelight. We admire them for their talents, accomplishments, looks, and coolness–and the details of their lives fascinate us (the Big Name Celebrity industry runs on this kind of fascination, to the point that we complain halfheartedly that some celebrities seem to be famous primarily for being famous). Whatever our motivations, we love knowing all about celebs. This extends to the realm of the Internet, too–since the culture is more diffuse, it’s hard to have Big Name Celebrities online, but almost every blogger-with-a-following ends up a kind of tiny celebrity. Many of us bloggers semi-secretly aspire to that kind of celebritydom.

I can’t generalize, but for this creative blogger the biggest draw for the celebrity model was the number of ears it generated. People listen to celebrities. You can tell because they give Favourite Blogger lots of attention, recommendations, praise, even money. Obviously the way to get ears, then, is to do what Favourite Bloggers do–share their fascinating lives with people, use various clever tools to keep people interested, update frequently so people don’t forget about them. That seemed like the way to be popular–and personal popularity, whatever my instinctive shyness had to say, was the best way to get these terrible stories of mine out.

But is it? Is it really? I thought so for a good four or five years, but lately I’ve had some questions about that.

1. Is it anyone’s business, what Favourite Blogger does? It seems harmless, neighborly, to be peering into Favourite Blogger’s life. Because we’re interested in them, and because they don’t mind, we figure that it’s perfectly okay to be consuming their daily details as–what? Entertainment? Social interaction? Without denying that some bloggers can take mundane events and use them as the subject matter for work that explores the human condition and says things that edify us, I’d like to wonder for a moment just what the majority of us are getting from the grocery lists and burrito-eating accounts of our hypothetical Favourite Blogger.

If Favourite Blogger’s life is our entertainment… that seems a odd. For one thing, it’s not just entertainment–it’s her life. Consuming the details of her life, however willingly provided, seems voyeuristic or at least gossipy. It’s a fine line I’m treading here, I think, but I also think we really do need to be more critical of how we entertain ourselves. Do Favourite Bloggers daily outfits and trips to the grocery store edify us in any way? Entertainment in itself isn’t bad, but I’m concerned that we spend so many hours being entertained by a succession of identical grocery trips and burrito dinners. Even if we also consume more substantial media… it still worries me.

If, on the other hand, we’re trying to engage in social interaction with Favourite Blogger… well, is that really what’s happening? Remember, Favourite Blogger isn’t telling us, personally, about her life. She’s broadcasting it to the unspecified mob. We aren’t her friends (of course, a few of us will be, but we’re defined that way because of additional interactions we have with her, not because we read her blog). She probably isn’t that interested in our lives, which means that the investment is largely one-way. This is hard to accept, but from my experience as a blogger I have to tell you that it’s just the way it is. You can’t be pals with everyone, and a lot of the people who think that they’re your pal… really aren’t.

Some bloggers describe a more communal model–a give-and-take of ideas, a relationship based on post and feedback. That’s a helpful way to think about blogging, but does it explain why Favourite Blogger’s self, rather than her ideas, are the fodder for the conversation? Why is her life our business? I still can’t find a good answer to this question.

2. Is Favourite Blogger really even getting ears? This is an even stickier pickle, if it’s true, because when I started I was sharing the details of my life in order to generate interest, get ears. What if I’m not even doing that? Favourite Blogger’s witty anecdotes about her life may be the only thing that readers care about. But wait, you ask, how is that a bad thing? Well, what did Favourite Blogger want those ears for in the first place? So that she could tell everyone about what she wore today? I think I’ve already hinted at a few problems with that goal. If she had other aspirations, if she wanted those ears in order to fill them with words she thought were worth hearing–well, then she’s completely sabotaged herself! She’s sold her persona in the hopes of piggybacking her ideas on top of it, but that’s not working.

Maybe it’s possible to do the piggybacking, to make it work. I’ve got some Favourite Bloggers of my own who’ve made a pretty good stab at it. But we’re already used to consuming lives as entertainment; the entire Big Name Celebrity industry runs on that. So, while it might be possible to sell the persona and sneak in the content, is it really advisable? Maybe, if it’s the only model–but is it really? If we could start another game, one that doesn’t cater to the ruts everyone’s used to running down, one that focuses on what we wanted to communicate in the first place, wouldn’t that be something? I know I’d be pretty excited about that.

There are some other problems with the celebrity model, too, but I want to save those for a place where they tie into some things I want to say about how we approach the arts. What I’m saying here, in my own hazy way, is that I think the celebrity model is too focused on trivialities of persona, rather than real content, on entertainment rather than ideas, and we ape that model at our own risk. At a small scale it may appear neighborly and communitarian, but the underlying rules are those of the celebrity world. We can’t go around assuming that people are going to react other than how they react to Big Name Celebrities.

Maybe it’s time to look for another way of blogging.

Philosophical Travelogue: Preface

21 Monday Jun 2010

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While I was out wandering swamps and wading creeks and traveling backroads, I saw a great many things. Some of them–the sensory observations, mostly–have been filed away in my memory, where they’ll wait until I need them for the stringing together of some story or other. Others I found lurking down rabbit-trails where strange ideas live, in the intersection between a long drive and a furious thinking. After all, one of the reasons I took my sabbatical was in order to get my head straight. The process of getting my head straight turned up a lot of interesting stuff.

What I’m getting at is that I’ve uncovered a whole swamp’s worth of ideas, linked together into a big raggedy intellectual framework. Its main topics are the nature of truth and the nature of creativity, with reflections on blogging and religion. Some of the conclusions I reached are–well, unusual for the Internet, in a way I think is exciting. So if you don’t mind paging through the scrapbook of my journey, I’d like to spend the next weeks (months?) on a philosophical travelogue. Maybe weekly, maybe more frequently (and sometimes less) I’ll post an installment in the journey, in the form of a series of meditations I wrote as I tried to sort my head out.

A note before we dive in: one of the things that drove me to sabbatical in the first place was the dissonance between what I believe religiously and what I practice online, so much of the discussion comes from an unabashedly Christian perspective. I don’t think you have to be a Christian to think about these ideas, but I am and that’s not going to be a secret as we go forward. I do examine critically some of the foundations for my faith, but it’s not intended as a thorough apologetic by any means.

Why am I sharing this journey with you? Not simply because the conclusions are strange and intriguing. Anecdotal evidence has long led me to suspect that most of us don’t think through the big, hard questions of life–and some recent scholarly reading I’ve done has confirmed that suspicion. Which, well, seems like a problem to me. So, truism or not, be the change you want to see. I’ve decided not only to hack through the intellectual thickets I encounter, but to share the results in the hope that folks will be inspired to start hacking for themselves. I don’t pretend that I’ve got all the answers, or even that my conclusions are mostly right. But I’m trying to do the legwork.

There are a multitude of metaphorical rabbits worth chasing through every twist and turn of shrubbery in the vast swamp of modern thought. It’s a fascinating swamp, beautiful in some places and disturbing in others.

I look forward to exploring it with you.

And this, I promise, is the last thing I will say about his death

31 Sunday Jan 2010

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I thought about writing something about J.D. Salinger.

I can’t do it. There’s really nothing to say about Salinger that he seems likely to’ve wanted to have said, and the bald facts of my own connection to his works are not ones I particularly want to share. So (and I think this is perhaps more appropriate), I will simply give you, far too dogmatically, the thing that’s been gnawing at me for years. To wit: any contemporary American writer who doesn’t at least aspire to one or two of Salinger’s major career choices ought to feel just a little bit shamefaced.

More important than What I Did Last Week

23 Sunday Aug 2009

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I spent a week working on this startlingly skimpy post. I knew I had a big idea here, but I kept wondering how to present it. I’ve tried all sorts of narrative lead-ups, but there doesn’t seem to be a smooth one.

Let me just come out at say it:

My stories are first and foremost prayers. The deeply personal bits I don’t want to explain to anyone aren’t for my benefit, but rather my attempt to say to God the things He already knows, but which I must try to express.

This explains to me some things about my writing, some questions I’ve had about its value and about the odd things I do with it. I share it in the hope that it may help others, especially other Christian writers, think productively about how they write whatever they write. I wish I could elaborate on this, but it’s been a week and still all I have is this bare revelation, wet and bright in my hands and still burning with newness.

The nearest I have to a purpose statement

01 Saturday Aug 2009

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I’ll give you all I’ve got to give if you say you love me too
I may not have a lot to give, but what I’ve got I’ll give to you

…

bink

My perspective, my perspective is all wrong. Why am I focusing on me? I know better than that. It’s not about me, it never was. Oh, I don’t think there’s any harm in trying to get fiction published traditionally–I’m still looking for answers and courage… but…

It’s not about what I want. Money, attention, validation… no. No no no no. What am I? I’m a two-bit Jeremiah in Chuck Taylors on a kamikaze crusade for uncomfortable truth. I’m a bondservant of Christ Jesus. I’m young and punch-drunk and wild-eyed. I have been given that I may give, and all I have to give are words, pictures, confections of dreamery. Let me give it all. Let me leave no avenue untried, but not for me, not for money or validation, rather in search of more people to whom I may give these crazy gifts. I have a white-hot terrible truth that I got from an ancient book, and I must and shall bestow it.

Divest, divest, divest.

So simple, so impossible. But if I can’t play for God and generosity now, I never will.

(I’ll calm down and figure out what this means, practically speaking, in time. Right now I am full of the thrill of knowing, and I want to give you that excitement)

This is only one slice of my ideas about writing for kids, don’t take it as a Theory of Everything

24 Wednesday Jun 2009

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How ’bout I ramble a bit about creative stuff?

I’ll probably have a crack at more revision, later. I want to go back and take another look at Chs. 4, 6, and 8, because I basically rewrote them ground-up. I want to darken at least Ch. 6 just a little. It’s tough finding a balance between “I want this to have the uncertain feel of a fairy-tale” and not going totally overboard. Admittedly, today I’m in a slightly bloodthirsty mood because I was looking at real fairy-tales last night. You guys, stories for children are almost always somewhat horrific. Have you read the original Cinderella? Have you read the Goose Girl? Bluebeard? The Singing Bone? Have you read Squirrel Nutkin? Have you read the Alice books? Kids’ lit is best when it’s a bit creepy, is all I’m saying.

There’s a reason for that. I think kids already know that the world is a terrifying place. They want to know more about that. I remember this in my own childhood. The named, the known, was still scary–but there was a limit to its badness. It had boundaries. The unknown, though, man–the unknown could be anything. My imagination was the limit–and let me tell you, my imagination was capable of some pretty awful stuff. I was a sissy because I could so easily picture worst-case scenarios in excruciating detail.

I’m not a huge fan of scaring kids just to scare them. I never enjoyed horror as a child. But I think most of us learn fear pretty early, and I think it’s good to give the fear a name. If it’s a wicked stepmother, it can be killed. If it’s a curse, it can be broken. If it’s a vampire, you can stake it and cut its head off and bury it at a crossroads. I needed to know that as a child. You gotta be safe, you gotta be prepared. You gotta know what the risks are and how to handle them, so when you’re sitting up at night and the house is dead–but dead, man–and the dark has become palpable, you know what’s out there. It’s vampires. And you’ve got a plan.

Eventually you grow up, and you learn that it’s not vampires, it’s crime, and there’s no doubt that it exists. But by then you’ve cut your teeth on vampires, and you know how to handle the moments when you wake up at night and the house is dead.

Possibly this is an overly grim view of childhood. But my experience leads me to believe that childhood is a lot grittier than we sometimes like to remember. I’m not saying it’s not also magical and less-complicated and even twee. But that twee comes equipped with vampire-kickin’ boots.

Because we all need more memes

24 Sunday May 2009

Posted by in creativity, worldbuilding

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Okay, nicking a meme from ozymandiusjones. Ask anything about any idea [..] and I shall attempt to answer it. A complete list of characters. Dialect. history. what form of currency a setting uses. ALMOST ANYTHING!

Like deadvole, I do not have a comprehensive list of my projects (I have such a list on my hard drive, but am still irrationally unwilling to share it).

I’ll take character-related questions and worldbuilding questions, but prefer worldbuilding. Be prepared for tl;dr. I may hedge a question if the answer is too spoilery.

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